Winter Moon

animate.
        Eduardo desperately wanted to avoid thinking about that. But he couldn't turn his mind off. Couldn't avoid that dreaded line of inquiry any longer. If he had not taken the raccoons away at once to the vet, would they eventually have shuddered and pulled themselves to their feet again, cold but moving, dead but animated?
        In the colander, the crow's head wobbled loosely on its broken neck, and its beak opened and closed with a faint clicking. Perhaps nothing had carried the four dead squirrels out of the meadow, after all.
        Maybe those carcasses, stiff with rigor mortis, had responded to the insistent call of the puppetmaster on their own, cold muscles flexing and contracting awkwardly, rigid joints cracking and snapping as demands were put upon them. Even as their bodies had entered the early stages of decomposition, perhaps they twitched and lifted their heads, crawled and hitched and dragged themselves out of the meadow, into the woods, to the lair of the thing that commanded them.
        Don't think about it. Stop. Think about something else, for Christ's sake.
        Anything else. Not this, not this.
        If he released the crow from the colander and took it outside, would it flop and flutter along the ground on its broken wings, all the way up the sloped backyard, making a nightmarish pilgrimage into the shadows of the higher woods?
        Did he dare follow it into that heart of darkness? No. No, if there was to be an ultimate confrontation, it had to happen here on his own territory, not in whatever strange nest the traveler had made for itself.
        Eduardo was stricken by the blood-freezing suspicion that the traveler was alien to such an extreme degree that it didn't share humanity's perception of life and death, didn't draw the line between the two in the same place at all. Perhaps its kind never died. Or they died in a true biological sense yet were reborn in a different form out of their own rotting remains-and expected the same to be true of creatures on this world. In fact, the nature of their species-especially its relationship with death-might be unimaginably more bizarre, perverse, and repellent than anything his imagination could conceive.
        In an infinite universe, the potential number of intelligent life-forms was also infinite-as he had discovered from the books he'd been.reading lately.
        Theoretically, anything that could be imagined must exist in an infinite realm.
        When referring to extraterrestrial life-forms, alien meant alien, maximum strange, one weirdness wrapped in another, beyond easy understanding and possibly beyond all hope of comprehension. He had brooded about this issue before, but only now did he fully grasp that he had about as much chance of understanding this traveler, really understanding it, as a mouse had of understanding the intricacies of the human experience, the workings of the human mind.
        The dead crow shuddered, twitched its broken legs. From its twisted throat came a wet cawing sound that was a grotesque parody of the cry of a living crow.
        A spiritual darkness filled Eduardo, because he could no longer deny, to any extent whatsoever, the identity of the intruder who had left a vile trail through the house on the night of June tenth. He had known all along what he was repressing.
        Even as he had drunk himself into oblivion, he had known. Even as he had pretended not to know, he had known. And he knew now. He knew.
        Dear sweet Jesus, he knew.
        Eduardo had not been afraid to die. He'd almost welcomed death. Now he was again afraid to die. Beyond fright. Physically ill with terror. Trembling, sweating.
        Though the traveler had shown no signs of being able to control the body of a living human being, what would happen when he was dead?
        He picked up the shotgun from the table, snatched the keys to the Cherokee off the pegboard, went to the connecting door between the kitchen and the garage. He had to leave at once, no time to waste, get out and far away. To hell with learning more about the traveler. To hell with forcing a confrontation. He should just get in the Cherokee, jam the accelerator to the floorboards, run down anything that got in his way, and put a lot of distance between himself and whatever had come out of the black doorway into the Montana night.
        He jerked the door open but halted on the threshold between the kitchen