Winter Moon

other way, and the door remained unopened. The latch bolt eased into its catch once more. The moment of revelation was delayed, perhaps slipping away forever as the visitor withdrew… With an anguished cry that surprised him, Eduardo seized the knob and yanked the door open in one convulsively violent movement, bringing himself face-to-face with his worst fear.
        The lost maiden, three years in the grave and now released: a wiry and tangled mass of gray hair matted with filth, eyeless sockets, flesh hideously corrupted and dark in spite of the preserving influence of.embalming fluid, glimpses of clean bone in the desiccated and reeking tissues, lips withered back from teeth to reveal a wide but humorless grin. The lost maiden stood in her ragged and worm-eaten burial dress, the blue-on-blue fabric grossly stained with the fluids of decomposition, risen and returned to him, reaching for him with one hand. The sight of her filled him not merely with terror and revulsion but with despair, oh God, he was sinking in a sea of cold black despair that Margaret should have come to this, reduced to the unspeakable fate of all living things- It's not Margaret, not this thing, unclean thing, Margarite's in a better place, heaven, sits with God, must be a God, Margaret deserves a God, not just this, not an ending like this, sits with God, sits with God, long gone from this body and sits with God. - and after the first instant of confrontation, he thought he was going to be all right, thought he was going to be able to hold on to his sanity and bring up the shotgun and blast the hateful thing backward off the porch, pump round after round into it until it no longer bore the vaguest resemblance to his Margaret, until it was nothing but a pile of bone fragments and organic ruins with no power to plunge him into despondency.
        Then he saw that he hadn't been visited only by this heinous surrogate but by the traveler itself, two confrontations in one. The alien was entwined with the corpse, hanging upon its back but also intruding within the cavities of it, riding on and in the dead woman. Its own body appeared to be soft and poorly designed for gravity as heavy as that it had encountered here, so perhaps it needed support to permit locomotion in these conditions. Black, it was, black and slick, irregularly stippled with red, and seemed to be constituted only of a mass of entwined and writhing appendages that one moment appeared as fluid and smooth as snakes but the next moment seemed as spiky and jointed as the legs of a crab. Not muscular like the coils of snakes or armored like crabs but oozing and jellid. He saw no head or orifice, no familiar feature that could help him tell the top of it from the bottom, but he had only a few seconds to absorb what he was seeing, merely the briefest glimpse.
        The sight of those shiny black tentacles slithering in and out of the cadaver's rib cage brought him to the realization that less flesh remained on the three-year-old corpse than he had at first believed and that the bulk of the apparition before him was the rider on the bones.
        Its tangled appendages bulged where her heart and lungs had once been, twined like vines around clavicles and scapulae, around humerus and radius and ulna, around femur and tibia, even filled the empty skull and churned frenziedly just behind the rims of the hollow sockets.
        This was more than he could tolerate and more than his books had prepared him for, beyond alien, an obscenity he couldn't bear. He heard himself screaming, heard it but was unable to stop, could not lift the gun because all his strength was in the scream. Although it seemed like an eternity, only five seconds elapsed from the moment he yanked open the door until his heart was wrenched by fatal spasms. In spite of the thing that loomed on the threshold of the kitchen, in spite of the thoughts and terrors that exploded through his mind in that sliver of time, Eduardo knew the number of seconds was precisely five because a part of him continued to be aware of the ticking of the.clock, the funereal cadence, five ticks, five seconds.
        Then a searing pain blazed through him, the mother of all pain, not from an assault by the traveler but arising from within, accompanied by white light as bright as the eye of a nuclear explosion might be, an all-obliterating whiteness that erased the traveler from his view and all the cares of the world from his