Winter Moon

branches.
        All of it ordinary. Peaceful. Yet wrong.
        As he returned to the perimeter of the forest, with snow-covered fields visible between the trunks of the trees ahead, he was suddenly certain that he was not going to reach open ground, that something was rushing at him from behind, some creature as indefinable as the wrongness that.he sensed around him. He began to move faster. Fear swelled step by step. The hooting of the owl seemed to sour into a cry as alien as the shriek of a nemesis in a nightmare. He stumbled on an exposed root, his heart trip-hammered, and he spun around with a cry of terror to confront whatever demon was in pursuit of him.
        He was, of course, alone.
        Shadows and sunlight.
        The hoot of an owl. A soft and lonely sound. As ever.
        Cursing himself, he headed for the meadow again. Reached it. The trees were behind him. He was safe.
        Then, dear sweet Jesus, the fear again, worse than ever, the absolute dead certainty that it was coming- what?-that it was for sure gaining on him, that it would drag him down, that it was bent upon committing an act infinitely worse than murder, that it had an inhuman purpose and unknown uses for him so strange they were beyond both his understanding and conception.
        This time he was in the grip of a terror so black and profound, so mindless, that he could not summon the courage to turn and confront the empty day behind him-if, indeed, it proved to be empty this time. He raced toward the house, which appeared far more distant than a hundred yards, a citadel beyond his reach. He kicked through shallow snow, blundered into deeper drifts, ran and churned and staggered and flailed uphill, making wordless sounds of blind panic-"Uh, uh, uhhhhh, uh, uh"-all intellect repressed by instinct, until he found himself at the porch steps, up which he scrambled, at the top of which he turned, at last, to scream-"No!"-at the clear, crisp, blue Montana day.
        The pristine mantle of snow across the broad field was marred only by his own trail to and from the woods.
        He went inside.
        He bolted the door.
        In the big kitchen he stood for a long time in front of the brick fireplace, still dressed for the outdoors, basking in the heat that poured across the hearth-yet unable to get warm.
        Old. He was an old man. Seventy. An old man who had lived alone too long, who sorely missed his wife. If senility had crept up on him, who was around to notice? An old, lonely man with cabin fever, imagining things.
        "Bullshit," he said after a while.
        He was lonely, all right, but he wasn't senile.
        After stripping out of his hat, coat, gloves, and boots, he got the hunting rifles and shotguns out of the locked cabinet in the study. He loaded all of them..Mae Hong, who lived across the street, came over to take care of Toby.
        Her husband was a cop too, though not in the same division as Jack.
        Because the Hongs had no children of their own yet, Mae was free to stay as late as necessary, in the event Heather needed to put in a long vigil at the hospital.
        While Louie Silverman and Mae remained in the kitchen, Heather lowered the sound on the television and told Toby what had happened. She sat on the foot-stool, and after tossing the blankets aside, he perched on the edge of the chair. She held his small hands in hers.
        She didn't share the grimmest details with him, in part because she didn't know all of them herself but also because an eight-year-old could handle only so much. On the other hand, she couldn't gloss over the situation, either, because they were a police family.
        They lived with the repressed expectation of JUSt such a disaster as had struck that morning, and even a child had the need and the right to know when his father had been seriously wounded.
        "Can I go to the hospital with you?" Toby asked, holding more tightly to her hands than he probably realized.
        "It's best for you to stay here right now, honey."
        "I'm not sick any more."
        "Yes, you are."
        "I feel good."
        "You don't want to give your germs to your dad."
        "He'll be all right, won't he?"
        She could give him only one answer even if she couldn't be certain it would prove to be correct. "Yes, baby, he's going to be all right."
        His gaze was direct. He wanted the truth. Right at that moment he