Winter Moon

walking dead with its puppetmaster in full saddle. That sight alone was sufficient to undermine a lot of his assumptions about the inherently benign-or at least neutral-character of the universe and the inevitability of justice. There was nothing benign or just about what had been done with Tommy Fernandez's remains-or about what the Giver would do to her, Jack, Toby, and the rest of humanity while they were still alive, if it had the opportunity.
        The revelation had more sting because these were Tommy's remains in this condition of profound violation, rather than those of a stranger.
        She turned her flashlight away from Tommy and was relieved when Jack lowered his own quickly, as well. It would not have been like him to dwell on such a horror. She liked to believe that, in spite of anything he might.466 DEAN KOONTZ have to endure, he would always hold fast to the optimism and love of life that made him special.
        "This thing has gotta die," Harlan said coldly. He had lost his natural ebullience. He was no longer Richard Dreyfuss excitedly chasing his close encounter of the third kind. The most ominous apocryphal fantasies of evil aliens that the cheap tabloids and science fiction movies had to offer were not merely proved foolish by the grotesquerie that stood in the caretaker's house, they were proved naive as well, because their portrayals of extraterrestrial malevolence were shabby fun-house spookery compared to the endlessly imaginative abominations and tortures that a dark, cold universe held in store.
        "Gotta die right now."
        Toby walked away from Tommy Fernandez's body, into the shadows.
        Heather followed him with her flashlight beam. "Honey?"
        "No time," he said.
        "Where are you going?"
        They followed him to the back of the lightless house, through the kitchen, into what might once have been a small laundry room but now was a vault of dust and cobwebs. The desiccated carcass of a rat lay in one corner, its slender tail curled in a question mark.
        Toby pointed to a blotchy yellow door that no doubt had once been white. "In the cellar," he said. "It's in the cellar."
        Before going down to whatever awaited them, they put Falstaff in the kitchen and closed the laundry-room door to keep him there.
        He didn't like that.
        As Jack opened the yellow door on perfect blackness, the frantic scratching of the dog's claws filled the room behind them.
        Following his dad down the swaybacked cellar stairs, Toby concentrated intensely on that little green boat in his mind, which was really well built, no leaks at all, unsinkable. Its decks were piled high with bags and bags of silvery Calming Dust, enough to keep the surface of the angry sea smooth and silent for a thousand years, no matter what it wanted, no matter how much it raged and stormed in its deepest canyons.
        He sailed on and on across the waveless ocean, scattering his magical powder, the sun above him, everything just the way he liked it, warm and safe. The ancient sea showed him its own pictures on its glossy black surface, images meant to scare him and make him forget to scatter the dust- his mother being eaten alive by rats, his father's head split down the middle and nothing inside it but cockroaches, his own body pierced by the tentacles of a Giver that was riding on his.back-but he looked away from them quickly, turned his face to the blue sky instead, and wouldn't let his fear make a coward of him.
        The cellar was one big room, with a broken-down furnace, a rusted water heater-and the real Giver from which the other, smaller Givers had detached.
        It filled the back half of the room, all the way to the ceiling, bigger than a couple of elephants.
        It scared him.
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        But don't run. Don't run.
        It was a lot like the smaller versions, tentacles everywhere, but with a hundred or more puckered mouths, no lips, just slits, and all of them working slowly in its current calm state. He knew what it was saying to him with those mouths. It wanted him. It wanted to rip him open, take out his guts, stuff itself into him.
        Toby started shaking, he tried very hard to make himself stop but couldn't.
        Little green boat. Plenty of Calming Dust. Putter along and scatter, putter along and scatter.
        As the beams of the flashlights moved over it, he could see