Winter Moon

falling silent for a while, he pushed back the covers and got out of bed.
        In the ruddy glow of the night-light, his pale-yellow pajamas appeared to be streaked with blood. He stood beside the bed, swaying as if keeping time to music that only he could hear. "No," he whispered, not with alarm but in a flat voice devoid of emotion. "No… no… no …" Lapsing into silence again, he walked to the window and gazed into the night.
        At the top of the yard, nestled among the pines at the edge of the forest, the caretaker's house was no longer dark and deserted. Strange light, as purely blue as a gas flame, shot into the night from cracks around the edges of the plywood rectangles that covered the windows, from under the front door, and even from the top of the replace chimney. "Ah," Toby said. The light was not of constant intensity but sometimes flickered, sometimes throbbed. Periodically, even the narrowest of the escaping beams were so bright that staring at them was painful, although occasionally they grew so dim they seemed about to be extinguished.
        Even at its brightest, it was a cold light, giving no impression whatsoever of heat. Toby watched for a long time. Eventually the light faded. The caretaker's house became dark once more.
        The boy returned to the bed. The night passed.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
        
        Saturday morning began with sunshine. A cold breeze swept out of the northwest, and periodic flocks of dark birds wheeled across the sky from the forested Rockies toward the descending land in the east, as if fleeing a predator. The radio weatherman on a station in Butte-to which Heather and Jack listened as they showered and dressed-predicted.snow by nightfall. This was, he said, one of the earliest storms in years, and the total accumulation might reach ten inches. Judging by the tone of the report, a ten-inch snowfall was not regarded as a blizzard in these northern climes. There was no talk of anticipated road closures, no references to rural areas that might be snowbound. A second storm was rolling toward them in the wake of the first, though expected to arrive early Monday, it was apparently a weaker front than the one that would hit by evening.
        Sitting on the edge of the bed, bending forward to tie the laces of her Nikes, Heather said, "Hey, we've gotta get a couple of sleds." Jack was at his open closet, removing a red-and brown-checkered flannel shirt from a hanger.
        "You sound like a little kid."
        "Well, it is my first snow."
        "That's right. I forgot."
        In Los Angeles in the winter, when the smog cleared enough to expose them, white-capped mountains served s a distant backdrop to the city, and that was the closest she had ever gotten to snow. She wasn't a skier. She'd never been to Arrowhead or Big Bear except in the summer, and she was as excited as a kid about the oncoming storm.
        Finishing with her shoelaces, she said, "We've got to make an appointment with Parker's Garage to get that plow on the Explorer before the real winter gets here."
        "Already did," Jack said. "Ten o'clock Thursday morning."
        As he buttoned his shirt, he moved to the bedroom window to look out at the eastern woods and southern lowlands. "This view keeps hypnotizing me. I'm doing something, very busy, then I look up, catch a glimpse of it through a window, from the porch, and I just stand and stare."
        Heather moved behind him, put her arms around him, and looked past him at the striking panorama of woods and fields and wide blue sky. "Is it going to be good?" she asked after a while. "It's going to be great.
        This is where we belong. Don't you feel that way?" - "Yes," she said, with only the briefest hesitation.
        In daylight, the events of the previous night seemed immeasurably less threatening and more surely the work of an overactive imagination. She had seen nothing, after all, and didn't even know quite what she had expected to see.
        Lingering city jitters complicated by a nightmare. Nothing more.
        "This is where we belong." He turned, embraced her, and they kissed.
        She moved her hands in lazy circles on his back, gently massaging his muscles, which his exercise program had toned and rebuilt. He felt so good. Exhausted from traveling and from settling in, they had not made.love since the night before they'd left Los Angeles. As soon as they made the house their own in that