"Great!" Toby said. He looked at us, misinterpreted our glum expressions, and corrected himself. "I mean-fabulous!"
"I better go see about the generator," I said.
"What about fuel?" Connie asked.
"There's plenty of oil in the ground tank. We could run the house on our own power for a week or ten days without any problem."
"Swiss Family Robinson," Toby said.
"Well," I told him, "we have a few technological advantages that weren't available to the
Swiss Family Robinson."
"You think it might be a week or ten days before the lines are restored?" Connie asked.
"No, no. I was on the phone with Sam when it happened. He'll know what's gone wrong. He'll call the telephone and the power companies. As soon as this blizzard lets up a bit, they'll start out to see about it."
Tony grabbed hold of my sleeve and tugged on it. "Hey, Dad! Can I go out to the generator with you?"
"No," Connie said.
"But why, Mom?"
"You just had a bath."
"What's that got to do with it?" Plaintively.
"A hot bath opens your pores," she told him, "and makes you susceptible to colds. You'll stay in here with me."
But we both knew that was not the real reason he would have to stay inside rather than go with me to the barn where the auxiliary generator was stored.
You're being irrational, I told myself.
The yellow-eyed animal had nothing to do with this.
Maybe
Why do you fear it so much? You haven't seen it. It hasn't tried to harm you. Instinct? That's not good enough. Well, it's as if the thing, whatever it is, emanates some sort of radiation that generates fear But that isn't good enough either; in fact, that's downright silly.
It's only an animal.
Nothing more.
Yes. Of course. But what if…
What if what?
I couldn't answer that one.
"I'll get your coat and boots,"
Connie said.
I picked up one of the candles. "I'm going to the den for a minute."
She turned around, silhouetted in the orange candlelight, her blue eyes touched with green. What-"
"To get the pistol. It's time to load it."
6
For the first time in weeks, I dreamed. It was a replay of the old, once familiar nightmare:
I was pinned down by enemy rifle fire, lying in a meager patch of scrub brush, forty yards from the base of the long slope that was referred to on ordnance maps as Hill #898. The flatland that we held was swampy; the rain fell hard and fast, impacting with an endless snap!snap!snap! on the vegetation and on my fatigues. When it struck my face, it stung as if it were a swarm of insects.
A bullet would feel the same as the droplets of rain felt: a brief and surprisingly sharp sting, a minute convulsion, nothing more. The only interesting difference would be in what took place afterwards. If it were a bullet instead of a raindrop, then perhaps nothing at all would take place afterwards, nothing whatsoever, only endless emptiness.
Through the flat, shiny leaves of the waist-high dwarf jungle, I had an excellent view of the crest of the hill where the Cong had dug in. Now and again something moved up there, soliciting a burst of fire from our own positions. Otherwise, it was like a gray-green skull, that hill, featureless and dead and unspeakably alien. The rain washed down over it; thick fingers of mist sometimes obscured the summit; yet it did not seem possible that it could be a natural piece of this landscape.
It looked, instead, as if it had come from some other world or time and had been dropped here on the whim of a celestial Power.
When the attack finally came the scene was even less real than it had been before: twisted, grotesque, shifting and changing like a face in a funhouse mirror.
There were thirty-seven of us in the thick tangle of rubbery plants, awaiting helicopter-borne reinforcements.
More than a hundred and fifty of the enemy held Hill #898, and they had made the decision that we had all been afraid they would make: it was best for them if they overran us, wiped us out, and then dealt with the helicopters when they tried to land.
They came.
Screaming
That was the worst of it. They came down that hill with no regard for our return fire, a wave of them, their front ranks armed with machine guns that were used most effectively, the men in the second and third ranks holding their rifles over their heads and screaming, screaming wordlessly. In seconds, before more than a score of them could be brought down, they had gained the brush: the situation had deteriorated into hand-to-hand combat.
The moment they had started down the hill, I had torn the sheet of thin, transparent plastic-like a dry cleaner's bag-from my rifle and let the rain hit it for the first time. But the screams so paralyzed me that I couldn't fire. Screams, distorted yellow faces, the mist, the torrential rain, the tooth of Hill #898, the rubbery plants If I fired at them, I would be admitting that the entire thing was real. I was not up to that just yet.
When they were upon us, I stumbled to my feet, jarred out of the dangerous trance by a sudden and awful awareness of my mortality. Four of the enemy seemed maniacally determined to destroy me, no one else, just me, me alone, as if I were some personal enemy of theirs and not just any American. I caught the first of them with a shot through the chest, blew off the face of the second one, opened the stomach of the third, and placed two shots in the chest of the last man. Two shots: the first did not stop him. It had been in the center of his chest, heart-center, yet he came forward as if he were an automaton. The second bullet jerked him to the left and slowed him down considerably, but it did not stop him either. A half-breath later, he slammed into me. The thin blade of his rifle bayonet ripped through my shoulder, bringing lightning with it, pain like lightning, sharp and bright. We both went down in the wet scrub brush-and I blacked out.
When I came to, the world was utterly silent, without even the voice of the rain.
Something heavy bore down on me, and I felt curiously numb.
But I was alive. Wasn't I? That was something, anyway. That was really something. Wasn't it?
I opened my eyes and found that the dead soldier lay atop me. His head was on my left shoulder, his face turned towards me. His black eyes were open, as was his mouth. He looked as if he were still screaming.
I tried to push him off, cried out as an intense wave of pain gushed down the right side of my body, and collapsed back against the soggy earth.
Carefully I turned my head away from him and looked at my right shoulder where the bayonet had driven all the way through and into the earth beneath me. The dead man's hands had slipped down until they clenched the end of the barrel where the haft of the knife was affixed. I tried to reach across the body and pry those fingers loose. They were coiled so tightly around the weapon that I could not move them, not as weak and frightened as I was. Each tune I made another attempt to shake off the body or free the bayonet, the blood bubbled out of my wound and soaked the sleeve of my shirt. Already, I was drawing ants.
We lay there for eleven hours. The ants came and scouted my face and chose to let me go until I died. They crawled inside the yellow man's open mouth and clustered over his eyes. I didn't want to watch them, yet I found myself staring helplessly. Time stretched into weeks and months: minutes became hours, tune was distorted, appeared to slow down-yet I seemed to be careening at a frightening speed down a narrow tube of time, toward a round black exit into nothingness.
Screaming
This time it was me.
I remembered the other three men I had killed, and my mind filled with images of rotting corpses, although I could not see them from where I lay. Four men
So what? I had killed a dozen men on other missions.
Screaming
Now stop it, I told myself.
But I couldn't stop.
I might have killed a dozen men before this-but they had not seemed like men to me. T
he killing had been done from a distance, and I had been able to think of my targets as, simply, "the enemy".
That made it impersonal, acceptable. Euphemisms made it seem like little more than target practice. But now, lying here in the scrub, I could not avoid the truth, could not avoid the fact that these were men I had killed. I saw my own sin-and my own mortality-in vivid terms. I saw that these were men, saw the un deniable truth, because I was looking directly into one of their faces (and
Death looking back at me), looking into an open mouth full of bad teeth (and
Death grinning in the rictus), looking at an earlobe that had been pierced for a ring that wasn't there now (and Death holding the ring out to me in one bony hand), looking at chapped lips
When they found me eleven hours later, I asked them to please kill me.
The medic said, "Nonsense." The chattering heli copter blades made his words sound disjointed, mechanical. "You've been badly hurt, but you're well enough. You're incredibly lucky!"
And then the dream began all over again. I was lying in scrub brush at the bottom of Hill #898, waiting for the enemy to attack, my rifle wrapped in plastic
I woke, coated with perspiration, my hands full of twisted sheets and blankets.
In real life the battle for Hill #898 had happened only once, of course. But at night when I dreamed, it played over and over and over like a film loop in my mind. That was, however, the only important difference between the reality and the remembrance.
All the ingredients of a nightmare had been there in the genuine event; there was, therefore, no need for me to add anything to sharpen the horror.
Beside me,
Connie slept unaware of any struggling that I may have done in my effort to wake up.
I got quietly out of bed and went to the window to see if the storm had abated at all. It had not. If anything, the wind pressed against the house more fiercely than ever, and the snow was falling half again as hard as it had been when I went outside to start the auxiliary generator. More than twelve inches of new snow sheathed the world. The drifts had been whipped up to five and six feet in many places.
As I studied the night and the snow I realized, once again, how vulnerable was our position. The generator-which supplied the electricity to light the house and the stable, run our appliances, and keep the two oil furnaces going-was not particularly well protected from vandalism. One need only force the stable doors and take a wrench to the machinery. We would be forced to huddle around the fireplace, sleeping and eating within the radius of its warmth, until help arrived.
That might be several days from now-even a week.
And in that time anything could happen.
But I was being childish again. There was no- what? monster? monster, for god's sake? — monster out there in the snow. It was a dumb beast. It would have no conception of the purpose of the generator.
There was nothing to fear.
Then why was I afraid?
For a moment I thought I felt something-like cold fingers-grasping at the back of my mind. I tried to recoil from the sensation, realized it was within me, and almost collapsed from sheer terror. Then, abruptly, the sensation passed: but the fear remained.
As I looked out on the storm and over the snow-draped land, I was aware of an alien quality to all of it, something not unlike the eerie unreality that I had sensed while lying at the bottom of Hill #898 waiting for the battle to begin again. If I had not been out in that foul weather, I would have considered the notion that it was all a stage setting, carefully crafted of cardboard and paint and rice.
There was too much snow, too much wind, too bitter cold for reality. This white world was the home of other entities, not of man. It tolerated man, nothing more.
The irrational fear swelled in me again.
I tried to choke it down; it almost choked me instead.
This is Maine, I told myself as firmly as I could. And that thing out there is only an animal, not something supernatural or even supernormal. Just an animal. Probably native to this area-but, at worst, an animal that has escaped from a zoo. That's all.
That's all.
Connie murmured in her sleep. She twisted from side to side and mumbled in what sounded like a foreign language.
Wind moaned at the glass in front of me.
Connie sat straight up in bed and called my name. "Don! Don, don't let it near me! Don't let it have me!"
I went to her, but even as I reached for her shoulders she collapsed back against her pillows. In an instant the dream had left her, and she was sleeping peacefully.
I sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the gun from the nightstand. It was loaded; I had filled the magazine myself. Nevertheless, I checked it again to be sure before I leaned back against my pillows to wait for something to happen.
THURSDAY
The Fear
7
At nine o'clock the next morning, just after breakfast, I used the lawn mower-sized snow blower to clear a narrow path between the house and the barn. The machine sounded like a jet fighter entering a power dive. Numbing vibrations jolted along my arms and across my shoulders and back down my arms into the snow blower's handles from which they had come, like electricity flowing through a closed circuit. The snow shot up and out and away to my right in a dazzling, sparkling crescent.
Snow was falling only lightly now, and the wind had quieted considerably. Eighteen inches of new snow was on the ground, but that wasn't going to be the end of it. The sky was still low and leaden; and according to the radio reports out of Bangor-to which we had listened during breakfast-a second storm front, even worse than the first one which had not yet quite finished passing over us, had moved into the area. The snow and wind might have gentled for the time being, but they would be raging again by late this afternoon, no doubt about it.
In fifteen minutes I had opened the path, and I switched off the machine. The winter silence fell in over me like collapsing walls of cotton. For a moment I was too stunned to hear anything at all. Gradually I began to perceive the soft whistle of the wind and the rustling branches of the big Douglas fir which stood at the corner of the barn.
"Dad, isn't it great? Isn't it?"
Toby had run over from the house to join me the moment I shut off the snow blower. He was supposed to be in the kitchen studying his lessons right now. Connie was an elementary school teacher by trade and had been granted a limited state license to act as Toby's tutor so long as we lived on Timberlake Farm. She kept him to a fairly strict study schedule, administering one state-prepared exam a week in order to monitor his progress.
However, she had slept badly last night, and Toby had been able to con her into a brief postponement of this morning's session so that he could come with me while I watered, fed, and walked our horses.
Grinning out at the white world, barely able to see over the wall of snow I'd thrown up on the right side of the path, he said, "Did you ever see so much snow at one time?"
I stared down along the pale slope toward the pine forest that was dressed in snow and laces of ice.
It was a glittering, pain-bright scene. "No, Toby, I never did."
"Let's have a snowball fight," he said.
"Later, maybe. First there's work to do."
I went to the barn door and pulled back the ice-crusted bolt latch, slid open the door.
Toby ran past me into the dimly lighted barn.
I went inside and headed straight for the corner where I kept the grain bins and tools.
As I was taking a bucket down from the wall peg on which it hung, Toby said, "Dad?"
"Yeah?" I asked as I put the bucket under the water faucet that came out of the floor beside the grain bin.
"Where's Blueberry?"
"What?"
"Where's Blueberry?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Dad?"
I straightened up and looked at him. He was standing halfway down the stable row, directly in front of an open stall door,
Blueberry's stall. He was staring at me and frowning hard; and his lips were trembling.
He said, "Blueberry's gone."
"Gone?"
He looked into the empty stall.
Abruptly, I was aware of how wrong things were in the barn. The horses were inordinately quiet: deathly quiet and still. Kate was standing in the third stall on the left, her head hung low over the door, not watching me, not watching Toby, gazing blankly at the straw-strewn floor in the stable row. Betty was lying on her side in the next stall down the line; I could see her blunt black nose protruding from the gap under the stall's half-door. Furthermore, there was a peculiar odor in the air: ammonia, something like ammonia, but not unpleasant, vague and sweet, sweet ammonia
And Blueberry had vanished.
What in the hell is going on? I wondered.
Deep inside I knew. I just didn't want to admit it.
I walked over to Kate and quietly said her name. I expected her to rear back and whinny in alarm, but she had no energy for that sort of thing. She just slowly raised her head and stared at me, stared through me, looking very dull and stupid and empty.
I stroked her face and scratched her ears; and she snuffled miserably. All of the spirit had gone out of her; during the night something had happened which had utterly broken her, for good and for always.
But what had it been? I asked myself.
You know exactly what it was, I answered.
The yellow-eyed animal?
Yes.
You think it stole
Blueberry?
Yes.
Couldn't Blueberry have escaped on her own?
If she did, then she was thoughtful enough to stop and latch the bolt behind her. The door was closed and locked.
There's some other explanation.
There's no other explanation.
I put an end to this tense but useless interior monologue as I opened the door to
Betty's stall and knelt beside her.
Betty was dead. I stroked her neck and found that it was cold and stiff. Dried sweat, in the form of a salt crust, streaked her once-sleek coat. The air in the stall was redolent of urine and manure. Her brown eyes bulged, as if about to pop loose of the sockets. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth. She looked as if she had died of fright.
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