I stood up and closed the stall door before Toby caught sight of the grisly corpse.
"We've got to find Blueberry," he said, closing the open door to her stall.
I took him by the shoulder and led him down the stable row toward the barn door. "You've got to get back to the house and work on your math and history lessons. I'll find
Blueberry."
He stopped and pulled away from me and said, "I want to go with you."
"You've got to study."
"I can't study."
"Toby-"
"I'll worry about
Blueberry."
"There's nothing to worry about," I said.
"Where will you look?"
"I'll search along the lane. And out on the north fields. And then down near the woods-and in the woods. I'll find her one place or the other."
"Why would she run away?"
"She was frightened by the wind. When I was in here last evening, the wind was rattling the window and moaning over the roof, whistling in the eaves The horses were frightened even then, and the storm got worse during the night."
"If she was frightened of the storm," he said, "she wouldn't run out into it."
"She might. Horses aren't really too bright."
"She didn't run away," he insisted.
"Well, she's gone."
"Someone took her."
"Stole her?"
"Yeah."
"Nonsense, Toby."
He was adamant.
"Why would he steal just one horse when there were three?"
"I don't know."
The window rattled in its frame.
Nothing: just the wind.
Startled, trying to cover my uneasiness, glancing at the empty window and remembering the twin amber discs that I had seen there last evening, I said, "Who would do a thing like that? Who would come here and steal your pony?"
He shrugged.
"Well, whatever the case, I'll find her," I promised him, wondering if I could keep the promise, fairly sure that I could not. "I'll find her."
* * *
Shortly after ten o'clock I left the farmhouse again. This time I had the loaded pistol in my right coat pocket.
The sky had grown subtly darker, more somber, a deeper shade of gunmetal blue-gray than it had been only an hour ago.
Or was it merely my outlook that had darkened?
From where I stood on the crown of the hill, there were three ways I could go, three general areas in which I could search for Blueberry: along the narrow private lane that connected with the county road two miles away, or in and around the open fields that lay to the west and south of the house, or in the forest which lay close at hand on the north and east of us. If Blueberry had run away of her own accord (somehow locking the barn door behind her) she would be out in the open fields. If a man had come to steal her, the place to look for clues would be along the lane, out in the direction of the highway. Therefore, not wanting to waste any time, I turned away from the lane and the fields and walked straight down the hill toward the waiting forest.
At the edge of the woods I took a deep breath. I listened and heard nothing and listened some more and finally let out the breath. Plumes of white vapor rose in front of my face.
I passed through them as if I were entering a room through a gauzy curtain.
I walked among the trees, crossed frozen puddles, stumbled through patches of snow-concealed briars and brambles and ground vines. I crossed gullies where powdery snow lay deep over a soft mulch of rotting autumn leaves. I climbed wooded hills and passed ice-draped bushes that glinted rainbowlike. I stomped across an iron-hard frozen stream, stepped unwittingly into deep drifts from which I fought to extricate myself, and went on
After a while I stopped, not sure at first why I stopped-and gradually realized that something was wrong here. My always-working subconscious mind sensed it first, but now I began to get a conscious hold on it. Something
I panted, trying to regain my breath and energy. I sniffed the air-and there it was, the wrongness, finally defined: ammonia, a vague but unmistakable and undeniable odor, ammonia and yet not ammonia, too sweet for ammonia, sweet ammonia, the same thing that I had smelled in the barn just two hours ago when Toby had first said that Blueberry was missing.
I took the pistol out of my coat pocket and flicked off the safety. My pigskin gloves were unlined, and they did not interfere with my grip or with my hold on the trigger.
Tense, my shoulders hunched, chin tucked down, heart thudding, I looked to my left, to my right, ahead, behind, and even above me.
Nothing. I was alone.
Proceeding with considerably more caution than I had shown thus far, I followed the crest of the wooded hill, followed the growing ammonia scent. I descended a gentle slope into a natural cathedral whose walls were ranks of pine tree trunks and whose vaulted ceiling was made of arching pine boughs.
The boughs were so thickly interlaced that only two or three inches of snow had sifted to the floor of the clearing. And what snow there was had been trampled by the animal. There were literally hundreds of the curious eight-hole prints in the clearing.
The only other thing in the clearing worth mentioning was Blueberry.
What was left of Blueberry.
Not much.
Bones.
I stood over the skeleton-which was certainly that of a small horse-staring down at it, unable to see how this was possible. The bones were stained yellow and brown-but not a single scrap of flesh or gristle adhered to them. They had been stripped clean.
And yet there was no blood or gore in the snow around them. It was as if
Blueberry had been dipped into a huge vat of sulphuric acid. But where was the vat? What had happened here? Had the yellow-eyed animal-God bless us-had the yellow-eyed animal eaten an entire young horse?
Impossible!
Insane!
I looked around at the purple-black shadows beneath the trees, and I held the pistol out in front of me.
The odor of ammonia was very strong. It was choking me. I felt dizzy, slightly disoriented.
What sort of creature could eat a horse, pick the bones bare, leave it like this? I wanted to know; more than anything else in the world I wanted to know. I stared into the trees, desperately searching for a clue, thinking: What is out there, what is this thing, what am I up against?
Suddenly I was sure that it was trying to answer me. I felt a curious pressure against my eyes and then against my entire skull. And then the pressure was not outside pressing in: it was in, moving inside my mind, whirling, electric. Patterns of light danced behind my eyes. An image began to form, an image of the yellow-eyed animal, shadowy and indistinct at first but clearing, clearing — and fear exploded in me like a hand grenade exploding in a trench, obliterating the image before it could finish forming. All of a sudden, I was unable to tolerate this ultimate invasion. It disturbed me on a subconscious unconscious level, deep down where I had no control over myself. Something was crawling around inside my skull, something that seemed hairy and damp, slithering over the wet surface of my brain, trying to find a place to dig in.
It was useless of me to try to convince myself that this was not the case, for I was responding viscerally now, like a primitive, like a wild beast. Something was in my skull, a many-legged thing. Unthinkable! Get it out! Now! Out! I fought back, thrust the force out of me, tried to keep it from seeping back into me. I threw punches at the air and screamed and twisted as if I were battling with a physical rather than a mental adversary.
Diamond-hard fear nameless horror irrational terror my heart thundering, nearly rupturing with each colossal beat the taste of bile my breath trapped in my throat
a scream trapped in my throat sweat streaming down my face unable to cry out for help and no one to help even if I could cry out to them.. a balloon swelling and swelling inside my chest, bigger, bigger, going to burst
I turned away from the skeleton, fell and cracked my chin, scrambled
to my feet.
The mysterious pressure clinging around my head increased, slipped inside of me again, and began to work up the yellow-eyed image once more..
Out!
I ran. I had never run in the war; I had stood up to anything and everything. Even my mental illness, my catatonia, had not been the product of fear; I had been driven, then, by disillusionment and self-loathing. But now I ran, terrified.
I tore off my cap, pulled at my hair as if I were a raving lunatic, tried to grab and throttle whatever invisible being was trying to get inside of me.
I tripped over a log, went down, hard. But I got up, spitting blood and snow, and I climbed the side of a small hill.
I found my voice somewhere along the way. A scream burst from me. It echoed back to me from the crowding trees and hillsides. It didn't sound like my voice, although it surely was. It didn't even sound human.
For a long while-exactly how long, I really don't know, perhaps half an hour or perhaps twice that long-I weaved without direction through the forest. I remember running until my lungs were on fire, crawling like an animal, slithering on my belly, moaning and mumbling and gibbering senselessly. I had been driven temporarily insane by an unimaginably strong fear, a racial fear, an almost biological fear of the creature that had tried to contact me in that pine-circled clearing.
At last I tripped and fell face-down in a drift of snow, and I was unable to regain my feet or to crawl or even to slither on my belly any farther. I lay there, waiting to have the flesh picked from my bones
As I regained my breath and as my heartbeat slowed, the biological fear subsided to be replaced by a more rational, much more manageable fear. My senses returned; my thoughts began to move once again, sluggishly at first, then like quick fishes. There was no longer anything trying to force its way inside of my head. I was alone in the quiet forest, watched over by nothing more sinister than the sentinel pines, lying on a soft bed of snow. I stared up at the darkening sky which issued fat, slowly twirling snowflakes, and I caught a few flakes on my tongue. For the moment, at least, I was safe.
Safe from what?
I had no answer for that one.
Safe for how long?
No answer.
As a bizarre thought occurred to me, I closed my eyes for all of a minute and opened them again only to see the sky, trees, and snow. Incredibly, I had half-expected to see hospital walls. For one awful moment I had thought that the farm and the forest and the yellow-eyed animal were not real at all but were only figments of my imagination, fragments of a dream verging on a nightmare, and that I was still in a deep catatonic trance, lying in a hospital room, helpless.
I shuddered. I had to get moving, or I was going to go all to pieces.
Weak from all of the running I had done, I struggled to my feet and found that I was still holding tightly to the pistol. My hand had formed like a frozen claw around it. I hesitated for a moment, glanced at the woods that crowded in all around me, awaited for something to attack me, decided that there was nothing nearby, and then put the gun in my coat pocket.
But I kept my hand on it.
I took half a dozen steps, stopped, whirled, and looked back at the peaceful wildlands. Biting my, lip, forcing myself not to turn every time the wind moaned behind me, I started to find the way out of there.
Ten minutes later
I reached the perimeter of the woods and began to climb the hill toward the farmhouse. In the middle of the slope, I stopped and turned and looked back at the trees. The snow had begun to fall as heavily and as fast as it had done all last evening; and the trees were hazy, indistinct, even though they were only fifty or sixty yards away. Nevertheless, I could see well enough to be sure that there was nothing down there at the edge of the forest, nothing that might have followed me. And then, as if my thoughts had produced it, a brilliant purple light flashed far away in the forest, at least a mile away, but purpling the snow around me in spite of the distance, flashed three times in quick succession like the revolving beam of a lighthouse, only three times and nothing more.
I watched. Nothing? Imagination? No, I had seen it; I was not losing my mind.
I waited.
Snow fell.
The wind picked up.
I tucked my chin down deeper in my neck scarf.
Darkness lowered behind the clouds.
Nothing
At last I turned and walked up the hill to the house.
What the hell was happening here?
8
At first I thought I would tell Toby that I hadn't been able to find a trace of Blueberry-reserving the full story for Connie. However, when I had a few minutes to think about it-as I stripped off my coat and boots, and as I thankfully clasped my hands around a mug of coffee laced with anisette-I decided not to shield him from the truth. After all he was a strong boy, accustomed to adversity, especially emotional adversity which was much more difficult to bear than any physical suffering; and I was confident that he could handle just about any situation better than other children his age. Besides, over the past several months I had worked at getting him to trust me, to have confidence in me, confidence deep down on a subconscious level where it really mattered; and now if I lied to him, I very well might shatter that confidence, shatter it so badly that it could never be rebuilt. Therefore, I told both him and Connie about
Blueberry's fleshless skeleton which I had found in that forest clearing.
Surprisingly, he seemed neither frightened nor particularly upset. He shook his head and looked smug and said, "This is what I already expected."
Connie said. "What do you mean?"
"The animal ate Blueberry," Toby said.
"Oh, now-"
"I think he's right," I said.
She stared at me.
"There's more to come, and worse," I said. "But I'm not crazy. Believe me, I've considered that possibility, considered it carefully. But there are several undeniable facts: those strange tracks in the snow, the yellow-eyed thing at the window,
Blueberry's disappearance, the bones in the clearing-none of that is the product of my imagination. Something-ate our pony. There is no other explanation, so far as I can see."
"Crazy as it may be," Connie said.
"Crazy as it may be."
Toby said, "Maybe there really is an old grizzly bear running around out there."
Connie reached out and took one of his hands away from his cup of cocoa.
"Hey, you don't seem too upset for having just lost your pony."
"Oh," he said, very soberly, "I knew when I first came back from the barn that the animal had eaten Blueberry. I went right upstairs and cried about it then. I got over that.
There's nothing I can do about it, so I got to live with it." His lips trembled a bit, but he didn't cry. As he had said, he was finished with that.
"You're something," I said.
He smiled at me, pleased. "I'm no crybaby."
"Just so you know it's not shameful to cry."
"Oh, I know," he said. "The only reason I did it in my room was because I didn't want anyone to kid me out of it until I was good and finished."
I looked at Connie. "Ten years old?"
"I truly believe he's a midget," she said, as pleased with him as I was.
Toby said, "Are we going to go out and track down that old grizzly bear, Dad?"
"Well," I said, "I don't think it is a grizzly bear."
"Some kind of bear."
"I don't think so."
"Mountain lion?" he asked.
"No. A bear or a mountain lion-or just about any other wild, carnivorous animal-would have killed the horse there in the barn and would have eaten it on the spot. We would have found blood in the barn, lots of it. A bear or a mountain lion wouldn't have killed Blueberry without leaving blood at the scene, wouldn't have carried her all the way down into the forest before it had supper."
"Then what is it?" Connie asked. "What is big enough to carry off a pony? And leave a whistle-clean s
keleton. Do you have any ideas, Don?"
I hesitated. Then: "I have one."
"Well?"
"You won't like it. I don't like it."
"Nevertheless, I have to hear it," she said.
I sipped my coffee, trying to get my thoughts arranged, and finally I told them all about the flashing purple light in the woods and, more importantly, about the force that had attempted to take control of my mind. I minimized my fear-reaction in the retelling and made it sound as if the takeover attempt had been relatively easy to resist. There was no need to dramatize it, for even when it was underplayed and told in a lifeless monotone, the story was quite frightening.
I had recounted these events with such force and so vividly that Connie knew I was telling the truth- at least, the truth as I saw it-and that I was entirely serious. She still had trouble accepting it. She shook her head slowly and said, "Don, do you realize exactly what you're saying?"
"Yes."
"That this animal, this yellow-eyed thing that can devour a pony, is-intelligent?"
"That seems to be the most logical conclusion-as illogical as it may seem."
"I can't get a hold on it," she said.
"Neither can I. Not a good one."
Toby looked back and forth, from Connie to me to Connie to me again, as if he were doing the old routine about a spectator at a tennis match. He said, "You mean it's a space monster?"
We were all quiet for a moment.
I took a sip of coffee.
Finally Connie said, "Is that what you mean?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'm not sure But it's a possibility we simply can't rule out."
More silence.
Then, Connie: "What are we going to do?"
"What can we do?" I asked. We're snowbound. The first big storm of the year-and one of the worst on record. We don't have a working telephone. We can't drive into town for help; even the microbus would get bogged down within a hundred yards of the house. So We just have to wait and see what happens next."
Invasion Page 5