Winter Moon

responded on the other side of the barrier. All feeling ended at the point at which that hellish blackness cut across his wrist.
        When he withdrew his hand from the doorway, it was as unchanged as the shotgun had been. He opened his fist, closed it, opened it.
        Everything worked as it should, and he had full feeling again.
        Eduardo looked around at the deep and peaceful May night. The forest.flanking the impossible circle of darkness. Meadow sloping upward, palely frosted by the glow of the quarter moon. The house at the higher end of the meadow. Some windows dark and others filled with light. Mountain peaks in the west, caps of snow phosphorescent against the post-midnight sky.
        The scene was too detailed to be a place in a dream or part of the hallucination-riddled world of senile dementia. He was not a demented old fool, after all. Old, yes. A fool, probably. But not demented.
        He returned his attention to the doorway again-and suddenly wondered what it looked like from the side. He imagined a long tube of perfectly nonreflective ebony leading straight off into the night more or less like an oil pipeline stretching across Alaskan tundra, boring through mountains in some cases and suspended in thin air when it crossed less lofty territories, until it reached the curve of the earth, where it continued straight and true, unbending, off into space, a tunnel to the stars.
        When he walked to one end of the thirty-foot-wide blot and looked at the side of it, he discovered something utterly different from-but quite as strange as- the pipeline image in his mind. The forest lay behind the enormous portal, unchanged as far as he could tell: the moon shone down, the trees rose as if responding to the caress of that silvery light, and an owl hooted far away. The doorway disappeared when viewed from the side. Its width, if it had any width at all, was as thin as a thread or as a well-stropped razor blade.
        He walked all the way around to the back of it.
        Viewed from a point a hundred and eighty degrees from his first position, the doorway was the same thirty-foot circle of featureless mystery. From that reverse perspective, it seemed to have swallowed not part of the forest but the meadow and the house at the top of the rise. It was like a great paper-thin black coin balanced on edge.
        He moved to take another look at the side of it. From that angle, he couldn't make out even the finest filament of supernatural blackness against the lesser darkness of the night. He felt for the edge with one hand, but he encountered only empty air.
        From the side, the doorway simply didn't exist- which was a concept that made him dizzy.
        He faced the invisible edge of the damned thing, then leaned to his left, looking around at what he thought of as the "front" of the doorway. He shoved his left hand into it as deeply as before.
        He was surprised at his boldness and knew he was being too quick to assume that the phenomenon was, after all, harmless. Curiosity, that old killer of cats-and not a few human beings-had him in its grip.
        Without withdrawing his left hand, he leaned to the right and looked at the "back" of the doorway. His fingers had not poked through the far side.
        He pushed his hand deeper into the front of the portal, but it still.did not appear out of the back. The doorway was as thin as a razor blade, yet he had fourteen to sixteen inches of hand and forearm thrust into it.
        Where had his hand gone?
        Shivering, he withdrew his hand from the enigma and returned to the meadow, once more facing the "front" of the portal.
        He wondered what would happen to him if he stepped through the doorway, both feet, all the way, with no tether to the world he knew. What would he discover beyond? Would he be able to get back if he didn't like what he found?
        He didn't have enough curiosity to take such a fateful step. He stood at the brink, wondering-and gradually he began to feel that something was coming.
        Before he could decide what to do, that pure essence of darkness seemed to pour out of the doorway, an ocean of night that sucked him down into a dry but drowning sea.
        When he regained consciousness, Eduardo was facedown in the dead and matted grass, head turned to his left, gazing up the long meadow toward the house.
        Dawn had not yet come, but time had passed. The moon had