Winter Moon

set, and the night was dull and bleak without its silvery enhancement.
        He was initially confused, but his mind cleared. He remembered the doorway.
        He rolled onto his back, sat up, looked toward the woods. The razor-thin coin of blackness was gone. The forest stood where it had always stood, unchanged.
        He crawled to where the doorway had been, stupidly wondering if it had fallen over and was now flat on the ground, transformed from a doorway into a bottomless well. But it was just gone.
        Shaky and weak, wincing at a headache as intense as a hot wire through his brain, he got laboriously to his feet. He swayed like a drunkard sobering from a week-long binge.
        He staggered to where he remembered putting down the video camera.
        It wasn't there.
        He searched in circles, steadily widening the pattern from the point where the camcorder should have been, until he was certain that he was venturing into areas where he had not gone earlier. He couldn't find the camera.
        The shotgun was missing as well. And the discarded Discman with its headphones.
        Reluctantly he returned to the house. He made a pot of strong.coffee.
        Almost as bitter and black as espresso. With the first cup, he washed down two aspirin.
        He usually made a weak brew and limited himself to two or three cups.
        Too much caffeine could cause prostate problems. This morning he didn't care if his prostate swelled as big as a basketball. He needed coffee.
        He took off the holster, with the pistol still in it, and put it on the kitchen table. He pulled out a chair and sat within easy reach of the weapon.
        He repeatedly examined his left hand, which he had thrust through the doorway, as if he thought it might abruptly turn to dust. And why not?
        Was that any more fantastic than anything else that had happened?
        At first light, he strapped on the holster and returned to the meadow at the perimeter of the lower woods, where he conducted another search for the camera, the shotgun, and the Discman.
        Gone.
        He could do without the shotgun. It wasn't his only defense.
        The Discman had served its purpose. He didn't need it any more.
        Besides, he remembered how smoke had seeped from its innards and how hot the casing had been when he'd unclipped it from his belt. It was probably ruined.
        However, he badly wanted the camcorder, because without it, he had no proof of what he'd seen. Maybe that was why it had been taken.
        In the house again, he made a fresh pot of coffee. What the hell did he need a prostate for, anyway?
        From the desk in the study, he fetched a legal-size tablet of ruled yellow paper and a couple of ballpoint pens.
        He sat at the kitchen table, working on the second pot of coffee and filling up tablet pages with his neat, strong handwriting. On the first page, he began with: My name is Eduardo Fernandez, and I have witnessed a series of strange and unsettling events. I am not much of a diarist.
        Often, I've resolved to start a diary with the new year, but I have always lost interest before the end of January. However, I am sufficiently worried to put down here everything that I've seen and may yet see in the days to come, so there will be a record in the event that something happens to me.
        He strove to recount his peculiar story in simple terms, with a minimum.of adjectives and no sensationalism. He even avoided speculating about the nature of the phenomenon or the power behind the creation of the doorway. In fact, he hesitated to call it a doorway, but he finally used that term because he knew, on a deep level beyond language and logic, that a doorway was precisely what it had been. If he died-face it, if he was killed-before he could obtain proof of these bizarre goings-on, he hoped that whoever read his account would be impressed by its cool, calm style and would not disregard it as the ravings of a demented old man. He became so involved in his writing that he worked through the lunch hour and well into the afternoon before pausing to prepare a bite to eat. Because he'd skipped breakfast too, he had quite an appetite. He sliced a cold chicken breast left over from dinner the previous night, and he built a couple of tall sandwiches with cheese, tomato, lettuce, and mustard.
        Sandwiches and beer were the perfect meal because that was something