by Dean Koontz
Although the doorway had been enormous, that didn’t mean the traveler—or the vessel carrying it, if a vessel existed—was also large. Eduardo had once been to New York City and driven through the Holland Tunnel, which had been a lot bigger than any car that used it. Whatever had come out of that death-black portal might be no larger than a man, perhaps even smaller, and able to hide almost anywhere among those timbered vales and ridges.
The doorway indicated nothing about the traveler, in fact, except that it was undoubtedly intelligent. Sophisticated science and engineering lay behind the creation of that gate.
He had read enough Heinlein and Clarke—and selected others in their vein—to have exercised his imagination, and he had realized that the intruder might have a variety of origins. More likely than not, it was extraterrestrial. However, it might also be something from another dimension or from a parallel world. It might even be a human being, opening a passage into this age from the far future.
The numerous possibilities were dizzying, and he no longer felt like a fool when he speculated about them. He also had ceased being embarrassed about borrowing fantastical literature from the library—though the cover art was often trashy even when well drawn—and his appetite for it had become voracious.
Indeed, he found that he no longer had the patience to read the realist writers who had been his lifelong favorites. Their work simply wasn’t as realistic as it had seemed before. Hell, it wasn’t realistic at all to him any longer. Now, when he was just a few pages into a book or story by one of them, Eduardo got the distinct feeling that their point of view consisted of an extremely narrow slice of reality, as if they looked at life through the slit of a welder’s hood. They wrote well, certainly, but they were writing about only the tiniest sliver of the human experience in a big world and an infinite universe.
He now preferred writers who could look beyond this horizon, who knew that humanity would one day reach childhood’s end, who believed intellect could triumph over superstition and ignorance, and who dared to dream.
He was also thinking about buying a second Discman and giving Wormheart another try.
He finished a beer, put the bottle on the porch beside the rocker, and wished he could believe the thing that had come through the doorway was just a person from the distant future, or at least something benign. But it had gone into hiding for more than five weeks, and its secretiveness did not seem to indicate benevolent intentions. He was trying not to be xenophobic. But instinct told him that he’d had a brush with something not merely different from humanity but inherently hostile to it.
Although his attention was focused, more often than not, on the lower woods to the east, at the edge of which the doorway had opened, Eduardo wasn’t comfortable venturing near the northern and western woods, either, because the evergreen wilderness on three sides of the ranch house was contiguous, broken only by the fields to the south. Whatever had entered the lower woods could easily make its way under the cover of the trees into any arm of the forest.
He supposed it was possible that the traveler had not chosen to hide anywhere nearby but had circled into the pines on the western foothills and from there into the mountains. It might long ago have retreated into some high redoubt, secluded ravine, or cavern in the remote reaches of the Rocky Mountains, many miles from Quartermass Ranch.
But he didn’t think that was the case.
Sometimes, when he was walking near the forest, studying the shadows under the trees, looking for anything out of the ordinary, he was aware of…a presence. Simple as that. Inexplicable as that. A presence. On those occasions, though he neither saw nor heard anything unusual, he was aware that he was no longer alone.
So he waited.
Sooner or later something new would happen.
On those days when he grew impatient, he reminded himself of two things. First, he was well accustomed to waiting; since Margarite had died three years ago, he hadn’t been doing anything but waiting for the time to come when he could join her again. Second, when at last something did happen, when the traveler finally chose to reveal itself in some fashion, Eduardo more likely than not would wish that it had remained concealed and secretive.
Now he picked up the empty beer bottle, rose from the rocking chair, intending to get another brew—and saw the raccoon. It was standing in the yard, about eight or ten feet from the porch, staring at him. He hadn’t noticed it before because he’d been focused on the distant trees—the once-luminous trees—at the foot of the meadow.
The woods and fields were heavily populated with wildlife. The frequent appearance of squirrels, rabbits, foxes, possums, deer, bighorn sheep, and other animals was one of the charms of such a deeply rural life.
Raccoons, perhaps the most adventurous and interesting of all the creatures in the neighborhood, were highly intelligent and rated higher still on any scale of cuteness. However, their intelligence and aggressive scavenging made them a nuisance, and the dexterity of their almost handlike paws facilitated their mischief. In the days when horses had been kept in the stables, before Stanley Quartermass died, raccoons—although primarily carnivores—had been endlessly inventive in the raids they launched on apples and other equestrian supplies. Now, as then, trash cans had to be fitted with raccoon-proof lids, though these masked bandits still made an occasional assault on the containers, as if they’d been in their dens, brooding about the situation for weeks, and had devised a new technique they wanted to try out.
The specimen in the front yard was an adult, sleek and fat, with a shiny coat that was somewhat thinner than the thick fur of winter. It sat on its hindquarters, forepaws against its chest, head held high, watching Eduardo. Though raccoons were communal and usually roamed in pairs or groups, no others were visible either in the front yard or along the edge of the meadow.
They were also nocturnal. They were rarely seen in the open in broad daylight.
With no horses in the stables and the trash cans well secured, Eduardo had long ago stopped chasing raccoons away—unless they got onto the roof at night. Engaged in raucous play or mouse chasing across the top of the house, they could make sleeping impossible.
He moved to the head of the porch steps, taking advantage of this uncommon opportunity to study one of the critters in bright sunlight at such close range.
The raccoon moved its head to follow him.
Nature had cursed the rascals with exceptionally beautiful fur, doing them the tragic disservice of making them valuable to the human species, which was ceaselessly engaged in a narcissistic search for materials with which to bedeck and ornament itself. This one had a particularly bushy tail, ringed with black, glossy and glorious.
“What’re you doing out and about on a sunny afternoon?” Eduardo asked.
The animal’s anthracite-black eyes regarded him with almost palpable curiosity.
“Must be having an identity crisis, think you’re a squirrel or something.”
With a flurry of paws, the raccoon busily combed its facial fur for maybe half a minute, then froze again and regarded Eduardo intently.
Wild animals—even species as aggressive as raccoons—seldom made such direct eye contact as this fellow. They usually tracked people furtively, with peripheral vision or quick glances. Some said this reluctance to meet a direct gaze for more than a few seconds was an acknowledgment of human superiority, the animal’s way of humbling itself as a commoner might do before a king, while others said it indicated that animals—innocent creatures of God—saw in men’s eyes the stain of sin and were ashamed for humanity. Eduardo had his own theory: animals recognized that people were the most vicious and unrelenting beasts of all, violent and unpredictable, and avoided direct eye contact out of fear and prudence.
Except for this raccoon. It seemed to have no fear whatsoever, to feel no humility in the presence of a human being.
“At least not this particular sorry old human being, huh?”
The raccoon just watched him.
Finally
the coon was less compelling than his thirst, and Eduardo went inside to get another beer. The hinge springs sang when he pulled open the screen door—which he’d hung for the season only two weeks before—and again when he eased it shut behind him.
He expected the strange sound to startle the coon and send it scurrying away, but when he looked back through the screen, he saw the critter had come a couple of feet closer to the porch steps and more directly in line with the door, keeping him in sight.
“Funny little bugger,” he said.
He walked to the kitchen, at the end of the hall, and, first thing, looked at the clock above the double ovens because he wasn’t wearing a watch. Twenty past three.
He had a pleasing buzz on, and he was in the mood to sustain it all the way to bedtime. However, he didn’t want to get downright sloppy. He decided to have dinner an hour early, at six instead of seven, get some food on his stomach. He might take a book to bed and turn in early as well.
This waiting for something to happen was getting on his nerves.
He took another Corona from the refrigerator. It had a twist-off cap, but he had a touch of arthritis in his hands. The bottle opener was on the cutting board by the sink.
As he popped the cap off the bottle, he happened to glance out the window above the sink—and saw the raccoon in the backyard. It was twelve or fourteen feet from the rear porch. Sitting on its hindquarters, forepaws against its chest, head held high. Because the yard rose toward the western woods, the coon was in a position to look over the porch railing, directly at the kitchen window.
It was watching him.
Eduardo went to the back door, unlocked and opened it.
The raccoon moved from its previous position to another from which it could continue to study him.
He pushed open the screen door, which made the same screaky sound as the one at the front of the house. He went onto the porch, hesitated, then descended the three back steps to the yard.
The animal’s dark eyes glittered.
When Eduardo closed half the distance between them, the raccoon dropped to all fours, turned, and scampered twenty feet farther up the slope. There it stopped, turned to face him again, sat erect on its hindquarters, and regarded him as before.
Until then he had thought it was the same raccoon that had been watching him from the front yard. Suddenly he wondered if, in fact, it was a different beast altogether.
He walked quickly around the north side of the house, cutting a wide enough berth to keep the raccoon at the back in sight. He came to a point, well to the north of the house, from which he could see the front and back yards—and two ring-tailed sentinels.
They were both staring at him.
He proceeded toward the raccoon in front of the house.
When he drew close, the coon put its tail to him and ran across the front yard. At what it evidently regarded as a safe distance, it stopped and sat watching him with its back against the higher, unmown grass of the meadow.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
He returned to the front porch and sat in the rocker.
The waiting was over. After more than five weeks, things were beginning to happen.
Eventually he realized he’d left his open beer by the kitchen sink. He went inside to retrieve it because, now more than ever, he needed it.
He had left the back door standing open, though the screen door had closed behind him when he’d gone outside. He locked up, got his beer, stood at the window watching the backyard raccoon for a moment, and then returned to the front porch.
The first raccoon had crept forward from the edge of the meadow and was again only ten feet from the porch.
Eduardo picked up the video camera and recorded the critter for a couple of minutes. It wasn’t anything amazing enough to convince skeptics that a doorway from beyond had opened in the early-morning hours of May third; however, it was peculiar for a nocturnal animal to pose so long in broad daylight, making such obviously direct eye contact with the operator of the camcorder, and it might prove to be the first small fragment in a mosaic of evidence.
After he finished with the camera, he sat in the rocker, sipping beer and watching the raccoon as it watched him, waiting to see what would happen next. Occasionally the ring-tailed sentinel smoothed its whiskers, combed its face fur, scratched behind its ears, or performed some other small act of grooming. Otherwise, there were no new developments.
At five-thirty he went inside to make dinner, taking his empty beer bottle, camcorder, and shotgun with him. He closed and locked the front door.
Through the oval, beveled-glass window, he saw the coon still on duty.
At the kitchen table, Eduardo enjoyed an early dinner of rigatoni and spicy sausage with thick slabs of heavily buttered Italian bread. He kept the yellow legal-size tablet beside his plate and, while he ate, wrote about the intriguing events of the afternoon.
He had almost brought the account up-to-date when a peculiar clicking noise distracted him. He glanced at the electric stove, then at each of the two windows to see if something was tapping on the glass.
When he turned in his chair, he saw that a raccoon was in the kitchen behind him. Sitting on its hindquarters. Staring at him.
He shoved his chair back from the table and got quickly to his feet.
Evidently the animal had entered the room from the hallway. How it had gotten inside the house in the first place, however, was a mystery.
The clicking he’d heard had been its claws on the pegged-oak floor. They rattled against the wood again, though it didn’t move.
Eduardo realized it was racked by severe shivers. At first he thought it was frightened of being in the house, feeling threatened and cornered.
He backed away a couple of steps, giving it space.
The raccoon made a thin mewling sound that was neither a threat nor an expression of fear, but the unmistakable voice of misery. It was in pain, injured or ill.
His first reaction was: Rabies.
The .22 pistol lay on the table, as he always kept a weapon close at hand these days. He picked it up, though he did not want to have to kill the raccoon in the house.
He saw now that the creature’s eyes were protruding unnaturally and that the fur under them was wet and matted with tears. The small paws clawed at the air, and the black-ringed tail swished back and forth furiously across the oak floor. Gagging, the coon dropped off its haunches, flopped on its side. It twitched convulsively, sides heaving as it struggled to breathe. Abruptly blood bubbled from its nostrils and trickled from its ears. After one final, spasm that rattled its claws against the floor again, it lay still, silent.
Dead.
“Dear Jesus,” Eduardo said, and put one trembling hand to his brow to blot away the sudden dew of perspiration that had sprung up along his hairline.
The dead raccoon didn’t seem as large as either of the sentinels he’d seen outside, and he didn’t think that it looked smaller merely because death had diminished it. He was pretty sure it was a third individual, perhaps younger than the other two; or maybe they were males, and this was a female.
He remembered leaving the kitchen door open when he’d walked around the house to see if the front and back sentries were the same animal. The screen door had been closed. But it was light, just a narrow pine frame and screen. The raccoon might have been able to pry it open wide enough to insinuate its snout, its head, and then its body, sneaking into the house before he’d returned to close the inner door.
Where had it hidden in the house when he’d been passing the late afternoon in the rocking chair? What had it been up to while he was cooking dinner?
He went to the window at the sink. Because he had eaten early and because the summer sunset was late, twilight had not yet arrived, so he could clearly see the masked observer. It was in the backyard, sitting on its hindquarters, dutifully watching the house.
Stepping carefully around the pitiful creature on the floor, Eduardo went down the hall, unlocke
d the front door, and stepped outside to see if the other sentry was still in place. It was not in the front yard, where he’d left it, but on the porch, a few feet from the door. It was lying on its side, blood pooled in the one ear that he could see, blood at its nostrils, eyes wide and glazed.
Eduardo raised his attention from the coon to the lower woods at the bottom of the meadow. The declining sun, balanced on the peaks of the mountains in the west, threw slanting orange beams between the trunks of those trees but was incapable of dispelling the stubborn shadows.
By the time he returned to the kitchen and looked out the window again, the backyard coon was running frantically in circles. When he went out onto the porch, he could hear it squealing in pain. Within seconds it fell, tumbled. It lay with its sides heaving for a moment, and then it was motionless.
He looked uphill, past the dead raccoon on the grass, to the woods that flanked the fieldstone house where he had lived when he’d been the caretaker. The darkness among those trees was deeper than in the lower forest because the westering sun illuminated only their highest boughs as it slid slowly behind the Rockies.
Something was in the woods.
Eduardo didn’t think the raccoons’ strange behavior resulted from rabies or, in fact, from an illness of any kind. Something was…controlling them. Maybe the means by which that control was exerted had proved so physically taxing to the animals that it had resulted in their sudden, spasmodic deaths.
Or maybe the entity in the woods had purposefully killed them to exhibit the extent of its control, to impress Eduardo with its power, and to suggest that it might be able to waste him as easily as it had destroyed the raccoons.
He felt he was being watched—and not just through the eyes of other raccoons.
The bare peaks of the highest mountains loomed like a tidal wave of granite. The orange sun slowly submerged into that sea of stone.
A steadily inkier darkness rose under the evergreen boughs, but Eduardo didn’t think that even the blackest condition in nature could match the darkness in the heart of the watcher in the woods—if, in fact, it had a heart at all.