Winter Moon

to hold it, he strapped on the hip holster with the.22 pistol. He retrieved the shotgun from under the bed, slung it over his shoulder by its field strap, grabbed the camcorder, and rushed downstairs, outside.
        The night was chilly.
        The quarter moon gleamed like a silver scimitar.
        The light emanating from the cluster of trees and the ground at the edge of the lower woods was already blood red, no amber in it whatsoever.
        Standing on the front porch, Eduardo taped the eerie luminosity from a distance. He panned back and forth to get it in perspective to the landscape.
        Then he plunged down the porch steps, hurried across the brown lawn, and raced into the field. He was afraid that the phenomenon was going to be of shorter duration than it had been a month before, just as that second occurrence had been noticeably shorter but more intense than the first.
        He stopped twice in the meadow to tape for a few seconds from different distances. By the time he halted warily within ten yards of the uncanny radiance, he wondered if the camcorder was getting anything or was overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of light.
        The heatless fire was fiercely bright, shining through from some other place or time or dimension.
        Pressure waves battered Eduardo. No longer like a crashing storm surf.
        Hard, punishing. Rocking him so forcefully he had to concentrate on keeping his balance.
        Again he was aware of something struggling to be free of constraint, break loose of confinement, and burst full-born into the world.
        The apocalyptic roar of Wormheart was the ideal accompaniment to the.moment, brutal as a sledgehammer yet thrilling, atonal yet compelling, anthems to animal need, shattering the frustrations of human limitations, liberating. It was the darkly gleeful music of doomsday.
        The throbbing and the electronic whine must have grown to match the brilliance of the light and the power of the escalating pressure waves.
        He began to hear them again and was aware of being seduced.
        He cranked up the volume on Wormheart.
        The sugar and ponderosa pines, previously as still as trees on a painted stage backdrop, suddenly began to thrash, though no wind had risen. The air was filled with whirling needles.
        The pressure waves grew so fierce that he was pushed backward, stumbled, fell on his ass. He stopped recording, dropped the video camera on the ground beside him.
        The Discman, clipped to his belt, began to vibrate against his left hip. A wail of Wormheart guitars escalated into a shrill electronic shriek that replaced the music and was as painful as jamming nails into his ears might have been.
        Screaming in agony, he stripped off the headphones. Against his hip, the vibrating Discman was smoking. He tore it loose, threw it to the ground, scorching his fingers on the hot metal case.
        The metronomic throbbing surrounded him, as if he were adrift inside the beating heart of a leviathan.
        Resisting the urge to walk into the light and become part of it forever, Eduardo struggled to his feet. Shrugged the shotgun off his shoulder, Blinding light forcing him to squint, serial shock waves knocking the breath out of him, evergreen boughs churning, a trembling in the earth, the electronic oscillation like the high-pitched squeal of a surgeon's bone saw, and the whole night throbbing, the sky and the earth throbbing as something pushed repeatedly and relentlessly at the fabric of reality, throbbing, throbbing-Whoooosh.
        The new sound was like-but enormously louder than-the gasp of a vacuum-packed can of coffee or peanuts being opened, air rushing to fill a void.
        Immediately after that single brief whoooosh, a pall of silence fell across the night and the unearthly light vanished in an instant. , Eduardo Fernandez stood in stunned disbelief under the crescent moon, staring at a perfect sphere of pure blackness that towered over him, like a gargantuan ball on a cosmic billiards table. It was so flawlessly black, it stood out against the ordinary darkness of the May night as prominently as the flare of a nuclear explosion would stand out against the backdrop of even the sunniest summer day. Huge.
        Thirty feet in diameter. It filled the space once occupied by the.radiant pine trees and earth.
        A ship.
        For a moment he thought that he was gazing up at a ship