the cute little guys from a Spielberg movie. A decomposing body stood
with legs spread, swaying but in no danger of crumpling to the floor.
A singularly repulsive creature was draped across the cadaver's back,
bound to it by several greasy tentacles, intruded into its rotting
body, as though it had been trying to become one with the dead flesh.
It was quiescent but obviously alive: queer pulses were visible beneath
its wet-silk skin, and the tips of some appendages quivered.
The dead man with which the alien had combined was Jack's old friend
and partner Tommy Fernandez.
Heather realized, too late, that Jack had never actually seen one of
the 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.
WINTER MOON
