Winter Moon

he could eat while still composing in the yellow legal tablet.
        By twilight, he had brought the story up to date. He finished with: I don't expect to see the doorway again because I suspect it has already served its purpose. Something has come through it. I wish I knew what that something was.
        Or perhaps I don't.

CHAPTER NINE.
        
        A sound woke Heather. A soft thunk, then a brief scraping, the source unidentifiable. She sat straight up in bed, instantly alert.
        The night was silent again.
        She looked at the clock. Ten minutes past two in the morning.
        A few months ago, she would have attributed her apprehension to some frightening an unremembered dream, and she would have rolled over and gone back to sleep.
        Not any more.
        She had fallen asleep atop the covers. Now she didn't have to disentangle herself from the blankets before getting out of bed.
        For weeks, she had been sleeping in sweat-suits instead of her usual T-shirt and panties. Even in pyjamas, she would have felt too vulnerable. Sweats were comfortable enough in bed, and she was dressed for trouble if something happened in the middle of the night.
        Like now.
        In spite of the continued silence, she picked up the gun from the nightstand.
        It was a Korth.38 revolver, 120 made in Germany by Waffenfabrik Korth and perhaps the finest handgun in the world, with tolerances unmatched by any other maker..The revolver was one of the weapons she had purchased since the day Jack had been shot, with the consultation of Alma Bryson. She'd spent hours with it on the police firing range. When she picked it up, it felt like a natural extension of her hand.
        The size of her arsenal now exceeded Alma's, which sometimes amazed her. More amazing still: she worried that she was not well enough armed for every eventuality.
        New laws were soon going into effect, making it more difficult to purchase firearms. She was going to have to weigh the wisdom of spending more of their limited income on defenses they might never need against the possibility that even her worst-case scenarios would prove to be too optimistic.
        Once, she would have regarded her current state of mind as a clear-cut case of paranoia. Times had changed. What once had been paranoia was now sober realism.
        She didn't like to think about that. It depressed her.
        When the night remained suspiciously quiet, she crossed the bedroom to the hall door. She didn't need to turn on any lights. During the past few months, she had spent so many nights restlessly walking through the house that she could now move from room to room in the darkness as swiftly and silently as a cat.
        On the wall just inside the bedroom, there was a panel for the alarm system she'd had installed a week after the events at Arkadian's service station. In luminous green letters, the lighted digital monitor strip informed her that all was secure.
        It was a perimeter alarm, involving magnetic contacts at every exterior door and window, so she could be confident the noise that awakened her hadn't been made by an intruder already in the premises. Otherwise, a siren would have sounded and a microchip recording of an authoritarian male voice would have announced: You have violated a protected dwelling. Police have been called.
        Leave at once.
        Barefoot, she stepped into the dark second-floor hallway and moved along to Toby's room. Every evening she made sure both his and her doors were open, so she would hear him if he called to her.
        For a few seconds she stood by her son's bed, listening to his soft snoring.
        The boy shape beneath the covers was barely visible in the weak ambient light that passed from the city night through the narrow slats of the Levolor blinds. He was dead to the world and couldn't have been the source of the sound that had interrupted her dreams.
        Heather returned to the hall. She crept to the stairs and went down to the first floor.
        In the cramped den and then in the living room, she eased from window.to window, checking outside for anything suspicious. The quiet street looked so peaceful that it might have been located in a small Midwestern town instead of Los Angeles. No one was up to foul play on the front lawn. No one skulking along the north side of the house, either.
        Heather began to think the suspicious sound had