Winter Moon

the pounding of colossal pistons, booming, booming, pistons in the perpetual engines that drove the universe itself, harder, harder, pressure escalating, his glass body vibrating, fragile as crystal, pressure, expanding, demanding, hammering, fire and thunder, fire and thunder, fire and thunder-Blackness.
        Silence.
        Cold.
        When he woke, he was lying at the perimeter of the forest, in the light of a quarter moon. Above him, the trees stood sentinel, dark and still.
        He was in possession of all his senses again. He smelled the ozone crispness of snow, dense masses of pines, his own sweat-and urine. He had lost control of his bladder. The taste in his mouth was unpleasant but familiar: blood. In his terror or when he'd fallen, he must have bitten his tongue.
        Evidently, the door in the night had not opened.

CHAPTER EIGHT.
        
        That same night, Eduardo removed the weapons from the cabinet in the study and reloaded them. He distributed them throughout the house, so one firearm or another would always be within reach.
        The following morning, April fourth, he drove into Eagle's Roost, but he didn't go to the sheriff's substation. He still had no evidence to back up his story.
        He went, instead, to Custer's Appliance. Custer's was housed in a yellow-brick building dating from about 1920, and the glittering.high-tech merchandise in its display windows was as anachronistic as tennis shoes on a Neanderthal.
        Eduardo purchased a videocassette recorder, a video camera, and half a dozen blank tapes.
        The salesman was a long-haired young man who looked like Mozart, in boots, jeans, a decoratively stitched cowboy shirt, and a string tie with a turquoise clasp. He kept up a continuous chatter about the multitude of features the equipment offered, using so much jargon that he seemed to be speaking a foreign language.
        Eduardo just wanted to record and play back. Nothing more. He didn't care if he could watch one show while taping another, or whether the damned gadgets could cook his dinner, make his bed, and give him a pedicure.
        The ranch already had a television capable of receiving a lot of channels, because shortly before his death, Mr. Quartermass had installed a satellite dish behind the stables. Eduardo seldom watched a program, maybe three or four times a year, but he knew the TV worked.
        From the appliance store he went to the library. He checked out a stack of novels by Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, plus collections of stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and M.
        R. James.
        He felt no less a fool than if he had selected lurid volumes of flapdoodle purporting to be nonfiction accounts of the Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster, the Lost Continent of Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, and the true story of Elvis Presley's faked death and sex-change operation. He fully expected the librarian to sneer at him or at least favor him with a pitying and patronizing smile, but she processed the books as if she found nothing frivolous about his taste in fiction.
        After stopping at the supermarket as well, he returned to the ranch and unpacked his purchases.
        He needed two full days and more beers than he would ordinarily have allowed himself in order to get the hang of the video system. The damned equipment had more buttons and switches and readouts than the cockpit of an airliner, and at times it seemed the manufacturers had complicated their products for no good reason, out of a sheer love of complication. The instruction books read as if they'd been written by someone for whom English was a second language-which was very likely the case, as both the VCR and the camcorder were made by the Japanese.
        "Either I'm getting feebleminded," he groused aloud in one fit of frustration, "or the world's going to hell in a hand-basket."
        Maybe both.
        Warmer weather arrived sooner than usual. April was often a winter month at that latitude and altitude, but this year the daytime.temperatures rose into the forties. The season-long accumulation of snow melted, and gurgling freshets filled every gully and declivity.
        The nights remained peaceful.
        Eduardo read most of the books he'd borrowed from the library.
        Blackwood and especially James wrote in a style that was far too mannered for his taste, heavy on atmosphere and light on