Invasion

1

The three-hundred-acre Timberlake Farm, which we were renting that year, was as isolated a refuge as you could possibly find in New England. Elsewhere highways had cut open regions once closed to man by dense pine forests and rocky landscapes; and the small towns, previously content with their unsophisticated ways, had begun to build industrial "parks" to lure manufacturers from the choked cities; and the suburbs continued to sprawl, gobbling up the open countryside, macadamizing and concretizing and tract housing the woodlands. Contemptuous of the noise and the grime of civilization, northern Maine shunned highways that went nowhere; and it did not welcome commuters who wanted to move into the snow country with their big cars and snowmobiles and aluminum-redwood houses. Some day, of course, when the population pressure reached an unbearable peak, even Timberlake Farm would be filled with lookalike, two-bed-room ranch houses and condominium apartment buildings; however, the year that we lived there the farmhouse was two miles from the nearest neighbor and eleven miles from the nearest town, Barley,

Maine.

Isolated.

Perhaps too isolated.

But that realization was not to come to us until December, after we had lived on the farm for more than six months. And then it was definitely too late for second thoughts.

The farmhouse was a two story flagstone manor with four large bedrooms, three baths, a drawing room, study, pine-panelled library, formal dining room, and modern kitchen. The luxury was greater than one might expect to find in a farmhouse in Maine-but Timberlake had been conceived as a gentleman's retreat and not as an enterprise that must support itself. The land had never been cultivated, and the barn had never contained any animals but riding horses.

Isolation:

The house had one telephone, the lines for which had been run in at no little expense by Creighton

Development, the company that owned and rented the property through Blackstone

Realty in Barley. It was completely furnished except for a television set-and we had early decided to do without that questionable luxury in favor of books and conversation.

Isolation:

Every two weeks the three of us drove in to Barley in our Volkswagen microbus. We might take in a movie at the Victory Theater, and we always had dinner at the Square Restaurant. We picked up new magazines and paperbacks at the cigar store across the street from the restaurant. That was the full extent-aside from rare telephone calls and the occasional letter we received in the weekly maildrop at the end of our lane-of our contact with the outside world.

Initially, that was all we required. But once the snows came and the trouble began, we damned our isolation a hundred times a day and wished fervently for contact with people outside our family, with anyone at all..

The first major blizzard of the year began on the twelfth day of December, late in the afternoon, when there was already eight inches of early-season snow on the ground. Toby and I were in the woods to the north of the house, tracking the foxes, snow rabbits, weasels, squirrels, and the few cats that kept active until the snow was so deep, even under the trees, that they were forced to remain in their caves, burrows, and nests. Toby's favorite pastime was tracking and spying upon our animal neighbors. I enjoyed the gentle sport as much as he did-perhaps because it was gentle, perhaps because I was proud that my son had never once suggested that we go up to the house and get a rifle and hunt down the animals. We were deep in the forest that afternoon, hot on the trail of a fox, when the snow began to sift heavily between the pine boughs, so heavily that we knew a bad storm must be sweeping across the open land, beyond the shelter of the woods. By the time we had followed our own trail back to the edge of the woods, a new inch of snow lay atop the old eight inches; and the farmhouse at the top of the rise three hundred yards away was all but invisible behind shifting curtains of flakes.

"Will it be deep?" Toby asked.

"I'm afraid so," I said.

"I like it deep."

"You would."

"Real deep."

"It'll be over your head," I told him. For a ten-year-old boy he was somewhat slender and a bit short; therefore, I wasn't exaggerating all that much when I held my hand over his head so that he could look up and see how far it would be to the surface if he should become buried in new snow.

"Great!" he said, as if the notion of being buried alive in a drift were too close to paradise to be borne. He ran off to the right and scooped up a handful of new snow and threw it at me. But it was too dry to pack into a ball, and it only flew apart and blew back on him when he tossed it.

"Come on, Toby. We better get back to the house before we're stranded down here." I held out my hand to him, hoping that he would take it. Ten-year old boys usually insist on proving their self-reliance; but thirty-year-old fathers would much rather have them dependent, just a little bit, just for a few more years, just enough to need a hand to negotiate a slippery hillside.

He grinned broadly and started back towards me — then stopped a dozen feet away and stared at the ground. From the way he was bent over, and from the intensity of his gaze, I knew that he had come across a set of tracks and was puzzling out the nature of the animal that had made them.

We had been tramping through the forest for more than three hours, and I was ready for a warm fireplace and a vodka martini and a pair of felt-lined slippers. The wind was sharp; snowflakes found their way under my coat collar and down by back. "There'll be hot chocolate up at the house," I told him.

He didn't say anything or look up at me.

"And a plate of doughnuts."

He said nothing.

"Doughnuts, Toby."

"This is something new," he said, pointing to the tracks in front of him.

"Marshmallows for the hot chocolate," I said, even though I knew I was losing the battle. No adult can achieve the single-minded determination of a child.

"Look at this,

Dad."

"A game of Monopoly while we eat. How about that?"

"Dad, look at this," he insisted.

So I went and looked.

"What is it?"

I went around behind him in order to see the tracks from his vantage point.

He frowned and said, "It's not a fox or a weasel or a squirrel. That's for sure. I can spot one of those right away.

It kind of looks like the mark a bird would leave, huh Dad? A bird's tracks-but funny."

These marks certainly were "funny." As I took in the pattern of a single print, I felt the skin on the back of my neck tremble, and the air seemed to be a bit colder than it had been only a moment ago. The print consisted of eight separate indentations. There were three evenly spaced holes in the snow — each of them four inches in front of the other- parallel to a second set of holes two feet to the right of the first line. The marks were all identical, as if they had been stamped in the snow by a man's walking cane. Equidistant from both sets of holes and better than a yard in front of them, there was a pair of similar indentations, although each of these was as large across as the bottom of a standard water glass. It looked like this:

Although I was rather well acquainted with the woods, I had never seen anything remotely like it before. If all of that were indeed a single print, the animal was quite large, certainly not a bird of any kind.

"What is it, Dad?" Toby asked. He squinted up at me, his eyelashes frosted with snowflakes, his nose like a berry, the bill of his red cap fringed with ice. He was certain that I would have the answer.

I said, "I don't really know."

For an instant his disappointment in me was all too evident then he quickly covered his feelings, changed his expression, broke into a tentative smile. That made me sad, for it was an indication that he understood

Dad was still on shaky psychological ground and needed all the love and affection he could get. Otherwise, Dad might end up in the hospital again, staring at the walls and not talking and not at all like Dad should be.

"Can we follow it?" Toby asked.

"We ought to be getting home."

"Ahh, heck."

"Your nose is as red as a stoplight."

"I'm tough," he said,

"I know you are. I wouldn't argue about that. But your mother is expecting us about now." I pointed to the rapidly vanishing set of prints. "Besides, the wind and snow will have these filled in within a few minutes. We couldn't track them very far."

He glanced back toward the trees, squinted his eyes as if he were trying to dispel the shadows under the pine boughs. "Then, whatever it was, it went by here just before we came out of the woods, huh Dad?"

That was true enough, although I hadn't thought about it. "When the storm's finished, maybe we can come out and look for new tracks," I said.

"On snowshoes?"

"Have to use snowshoes if the snow's over your head."

"Great!" he said, dismissing the mystery that suddenly.

If we could all remain small boys in at least one tiny corner of our minds, we would never end up in private, locked rooms in silent hospitals, staring at walls and refusing to speak

"At least we can follow this trail until it turns away from the house," I said.

He gave me his hand, and we bent our heads against the wind, keeping a close watch on the odd prints as we climbed the slope. The holes were repeated in exactly the same pattern until we were halfway up the hill to the house. At the mid-point of the slope, the prints stopped in a much trampled circle of snow. Toby found the place where they struck off once again toward another arm of the pine forest.

"It stood here," Toby said. "It stood right here and watched our house for a long time."

Indeed, the animal, whatever it might be, seemed to have come out of the woods solely to stare at the farmhouse and, once its curiosity was satisfied, had gone away again. But I didn't like to think that was the case. There was some indefinable alien quality about those prints-which were so unlike anything I had ever before encountered that made me at first uneasy and eventually somewhat frightened. That fear, as irrational as it might have been, only increased when I contemplated the thing standing here on this windblown slope, watching the farmhouse where Connie had spent the entire afternoon' alone.

But that was ridiculous.

Wasn't it?

Yes.

What was there to fear?

It was only an animal.

I was being childish.

"Maybe it was a bear," Toby said.

"No. A bear's paws wouldn't leave a trail like this."

"I can't wait to go looking for it on snowshoes."

Well, that's for another day," I said.

"Come on."

He wanted to look at the prints some more.

I kept hold of his hand and started toward the house again, setting a faster pace than we'd been keeping. "Remember that hot chocolate!" But I wasn't thinking about hot chocolate at all.

2

By the time we reached the sun porch at the rear of the house, the wind had the fury of a bomb blast. It followed us through the door, driving a cloud of snow onto the porch.

We did the traditional things people do when they come in from a cold day: we stamped our feet, slapped our arms against our sides, whooshed! out our breath, and commented on the clouds of steam. By the time we had stripped off our coats, gloves, and boots, Connie really did have cocoa ready for us in the kitchen.

"Great!" Toby said, climbing onto his chair and poking at the half-dissolved marshmallows with his spoon.

"Don't you know any other expletive besides 'Great'?" I asked.

"Expliv-what?" he asked.

"What you say when you're excited. When something really strikes you as good and wonderful, don't you have anything to say except great!"

He frowned into his chocolate, thinking about it for a second or two. Then: "Fabulous!"

"Well, it offers variety," I said.

Fifteen minutes later, fatigued by his long afternoon of stalking the native fauna, Toby nearly fell asleep in his mug of cocoa.

"I'll have to take the scout to bed for a nap," Connie said. She was smiling at him, and she was very pretty.

"I'll do it," I said.

"Sure?"

"Sure," I said. "I'd appreciate having something a bit stronger than hot chocolate once I get him tucked in. Do you think that could be arranged?"

"Possibly."

"Vodka martinis?"

"Just the right medicine for a cold day."

"Especially in large doses."

"I'll mix a pitcherful. I need some medicine myself."

"You were in a toasty warm house all afternoon."

She smiled. "Ah, but I empathize with your frostbite so well. I can feel how chilled you are."

"I think you're just a lush."

"That too."

I lifted Toby in my arms and carried him upstairs to his bedroom at the far end of the main hall. He was not much help undressing himself, for he kept nodding off. I finally got him under the covers and pulled the blankets up to his chin. In seconds his eyelids fluttered shut, and he was sound asleep.

The storm sky was so dark that there was no need for me to draw the drapes at the two large, mullioned windows. The wind moaned softly against the glass: an eerie but effective lullaby.

For a while I stood and watched him, and I thought how he would be after his nap: bouncy, energetic, full of ideas and projects and games. When he woke, he would be fascinated by the accumulation of new snow, as if he had not known a storm was in progress when he went to bed.

Before we could eat dinner, we would have to step outside in our boots and measure the snow with a yardstick. And that would bring full circle one of the routines that I enjoyed so much: put him to bed, wake him, take him out to marvel at the snow. In the summer, there had been other routines, but they had been just as good as this one.

Downstairs, Connie was sitting by the fireplace where she had put a match to some well-dried birch logs. The sight of her warmed me as the fire could never do. She was a slender but shapely blonde who had celebrated her thirtieth birthday the week before but who might have passed for a teenager without makeup. She was not really beautiful in any conventional sense. She did not resemble a fashion model or a movie star. She had too many freckles for that. Her mouth was much too wide and her nose a little too long for classic beauty. Yet every feature was in harmony with every other feature in her gentle face, and the overall effect was immensely sensuous and appealing.

Her best feature was her eyes which were enormous, round, and blue. They were the wide-open, innocent, curious eyes of a fawn. She always looked as if she had just been startled; she was not capable of that sultry, heavy-eyed look that most men found sexy. But that was fine with me. Her beauty was all the better because it was unique and approachable.

I sat down on the couch beside her, put my arm around her, and accepted the drink she had poured for me. It was cold, bitter, very refreshing.

"That's some son you've raised," I said.

"You've raised him too."

"I don't take credit where it isn't due," I said.

After all, I had been in the army for two years, eighteen long months in Southeast Asia. And after that, for more than two years, there had been that gray-walled hospital room where Toby had been allowed to visit only twice, and after that I'd spent another eight months in a private sanitarium

"Don't be so hard on yourself," she said. She leaned her head against my shoulder. Her pale hair spilled like a fan of golden feathers across my chest. I could feel the pulse throbbing in her temple.

We stayed like that for a while: working at our drinks and watching the fire and not saying anything at all. When I first got out of the hospital, we didn't talk much because neither of us knew quite what to say.

I felt terribly guilty about having withdrawn from them and from my responsibilities to them that I was embarrassed about suddenly moving in as an equal member of the family. She hadn't known what to say, for she had been desperately afraid of saying something, anything, that might send me back into my quasicatatonic trance. Hesitantly, fumblingly, we had eventually found our way back to each other. And then there was a time when we could say whatever we chose, a time in which we talked too much and made up for lost years-or perhaps we were afraid that if we didn't say it all now, share it now, immediately, we would have no chance to say it in the future. In the last two months we had settled into a third stage in which we were again sure of each other, as we had been before I went away to war and came back not myself. We didn't feel, as we had, that it was necessary for us to jabber at each other in order to stave off the silences. We were comfortable with long pauses, reveries… So: the fire, the drinks, her hair, her quick heartbeat, her hand curling in mine.

And then for no apparent reason-except, perhaps, that it was all too good; I was still frightened of things being too good and therefore having nowhere to go but down again-I thought of the odd tracks in the snow. I told her about them, but with detachment, as if I were talking about something I had read in a magazine.

She said, "What do you think made them?"

"I haven't any idea."

"Maybe you could find it in one of those books in the den. A drawing or photograph just like what you saw."

"I hadn't thought of that," I said. "I'll check it out after dinner." The den was furnished with a shelf of books on woodlore, hunting, rifle care and other "manly" subjects in addition to its studded leather furniture.

"Whatever it is-could it be dangerous?"

"No, no."

"I don't mean dangerous for us-but maybe for a little guy like Toby."

"I don't think so," I said. "It didn't seem to have claws-though it must be fairly large. Toby mentioned a bird. I can't imagine what kind of bird, but I guess it might be that."

"The largest birds around here are pheasants," she said. "And those tracks sound too big for pheasants."

"Much too big," I said.

"Maybe we shouldn't let Toby go outside by himself until we know what we've got on our hands."

I finished my drink and put the glass on the coffee table. "Well, if the books don't give me a clue, I'll call Sam Caldwell and see if he can put me on the right track. If Sam's never seen anything like them, then they're just figments of our imaginations."

Sam was seventy years old, but he still operated his sporting goods store on the square in Barley. He hunted and fished through every legal season, for every breed of creature natural to New England. The way his face was weathered-cut across with a hundred lines and deeply tanned by sun and wind- he even looked like a piece of the forest.

As happened often lately, our admiration for the crackling fire swiftly metamorphosed into admiration for each other, and we began some playful necking. The playfulness gave way to real interest: the kisses grew longer, the embraces firmer. Certain that Toby would be asleep for another hour or so, I had just begun to get really serious with her when she drew back a bit and cocked her head, listening.

I said, "What is it?"

"Ssshh!

When my heartbeat subsided and my breathing was somewhat less stentorian than it had been, I could hear it too: the whinnying cries of the horses "Just the nags."

"I wonder what's wrong with them?"

"They know that we're sitting in here getting lovey, and they're jealous. That's all it is. They think we ought to be out there grooming them."

"I'm serious."

I sighed. "Horses sometimes get spooked for no good reason at all." I tried to embrace her again.

She was still intent upon listening to the horses, and she shushed me and held me off.

I said, "I know I locked the barn doors-so it can't be that the wind is bothering them."

"What about the heaters?"

"They've been switched on since the last week of October," I said. "I never touch them."

"You're certain?"

"Of course."

"Well… Maybe the heaters have broken down, and the barn's gotten cold."

Reluctantly I let go of her and leaned away from her. "You want me to see about it?"

"Would you?"

"Right away," I said, punctuating it with a well delivered sigh of regret.

"I'm sorry, Don," she said, her gazelle eyes wide and blue and absolutely stunning. "But I can't be happy… I can't feel romantic if those poor horses are out there freezing."

I got up. "Neither can

I," I admitted. Their squeals were really pitiful. "Though I'd have given it a good try."

"I'll get your coat."

"And my scarf and gloves and stocking cap and frostbite medicine," I said.

She gave me one last smile to keep me warm in the snowstorm. It wasn't the sort of smile most men got from their wives: it was much too seductive for that, too smoky and sultry, not in the least bit domestic.

Five minutes later she huddled in the unheated, glass-enclosed sun porch while I pulled on my boots and zipped them up. As I was about to leave she grabbed me by one arm and pulled me down and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.

"When I come back from psychoanalyzing the horses," I warned her, "I'm going to chase you around and around the living room sofa until I catch you."

"In a fair race you won't catch me."

"Then I'll cheat."

"Toby will be waking up in half an hour or so," she said, using one slender hand to push her blond hair behind her right ear. "I'm afraid we've lost the opportunity."

"Oh yeah?"

She gave me a saucy look. "Yeah."

"Well, it's about time that kid learned the facts of life anyway, don't you think?"

"Not by watching Daddy chase Mommy around the sofa," she said.

"Then I'll tell you what."

She grinned.

"What?"

"While I'm out in the barn clubbing the horses unconscious so they can't interrupt us again, why don't you tie Toby in bed? Then, even if he woke up he couldn't interfere with us."

"How clever."

"Aren't I?"

She shook her head in mock exasperation, gave me another of those dazzling smiles, and pushed me through the sun porch door and into the blinding snowfall.

3

Darkness came early at that time of year, and the dense snow clouds had ushered it in half an hour ahead of schedule. I switched on the flashlight that

I had brought with me-and mumbled some very nasty things about the manufacturer who had foisted it upon an unsuspecting public. It cut through the darkness and a thick rush of snowflakes for all of two or three feet-which was like trying to put out a raging bonfire with a child's toy water pistol. Indeed, the sight of all those wildly jiggling and twisting snowflakes in the wan orange shaft of light made me so dizzy that I turned off the torch and made my way to the barn by sheer instinct; however, since the barn was only two hundred feet from the house, the journey was hardly one that would unduly strain my sense of direction, meager as it was.

Born and raised in upstate New York, I had seen my share of major winter storms, but I had never seen anything to compare with this one. The wind had to be cutting up the curve of the hill at more than forty miles an hour. There was a wicked edge to it like the frayed tip of a bullwhip tearing at bare skin; and it produced a chill factor that must have lowered the temperature to a subjective twenty degrees below zero, or worse. It felt like worse. The snow was falling so heavily now that it appeared to be a horizontal avalanche moving from west to east across the Maine countryside. Already, four inches of the dry, grainy pellets had piled up over the path that I had shoveled along the brow of the hill after the previous snow- and there was considerably more than four inches in those places where the wind had built drifts against some obstacle or other.

And the noise! In sequin-dotted Christmas card art and in quaint landscape paintings, snow scenes always look so pleasant, quiet and gentle and peaceful, a good place to curl up and go to sleep. In reality the worst storms are howling, shrieking beasts that can out-decibel any summer thunder shower in a contest of voices. Even with the flaps of my hat pulled down over my ears, I could hear the horrible keening and moaning of the wind. By the time I was twenty steps from the sun porch door, I had a nagging headache.

Snowflakes swept up my nostrils.

Snowflakes trickled down under my collar.

The wind tore tears from my eyes.

I needed four times as long as usual to reach the barn doors, and I stumbled into them with some shouting and much pain before I realized I had come that far. I fumbled at the lock and slid the bolt back, even though my fingers were so cold that they did not want to curl around the wrought-iron pull. Quickened by the elements, I stepped inside and slammed the door behind me, relieved to be out of the whip of the wind and away from those choruses of banshees that had been intent on blowing out both of my eardrums.

In the warm barn the snow on my eyebrows melted instantly and seeped down my face.

In the truest and strictest sense of the word, the building was not really a barn, for it lacked a loft and animal pens and the traditional machinery found in a barn. Only one story high, it ran straight along the crest of the hill: ten spacious horse stalls on the left and seven on the right, storage bins for grain and meal at the end of the right-hand side, saddles stored on the sawhorses in the corner, grooming instruments and blankets and water buckets racked on the wall just above the saddles.

Many years ago, if the people down at Blackstone Realty were to be believed, some wealthy gentleman farmer had bred several race horses here, mostly for his own amusement; now, however, there were only two sorry mares named Kate and Betty, both of them fat and accustomed to luxuries that they had never earned-plus a pony for Toby, name of Blueberry. All three of the animals were extremely agitated, rolling their eyes and snorting. They kicked at the back walls of their stalls. They slammed their shoulders into the wooden partitions that separated them. They raised their long and elegant necks and cried out, their black nostrils flaring and their brown eyes wide with terror.

"Whoa now, whoa now," I said gently, quietly, trying my best to reassure them. "Calm yourselves, ladies. Everything's all right. Whoa down now. Just you whoa down."

I couldn't see what had them so disturbed. The heating units were all functioning properly. The air in the barn was circulating at a pleasant sixty-nine degrees. I walked the length of the place and looked into the empty stalls. But no stray dog or fox had gotten in through some undiscovered chink in the clapboard walls; the horses were alone.

When I tried to calm Blueberry, she snapped at me and just missed taking a sizeable chunk out of my right hand. I had never seen her behave like this before. She peeled her black lips back from her teeth as if she thought she were a guard dog instead of a horse. We had bought her for Toby because she was so gentle and manageable. What had happened, what had changed her temperament so radically and so quickly?

"Whoa now. Whoa girl."

But she simply wasn't going to calm down. She snorted and whinnied and kicked at the back wall of her stall, kicked so hard that a board splintered with a crisp, dry sound.

Oddly enough

Kate and Betty were more amenable than Blueberry, even though they both had slight mean streaks. They stopped crying out and ceased kicking their stalls apart as I stroked their faces and rubbed behind their ears. But even they would not come completely under control. They whuffled like dogs and rolled their eyes from side to side.

I remembered that horses are especially sensitive to fire: the odor of sparking wood, the distant crackle of the first flames, the initial traces of smoke… Though I sniffed like a bloodhound, I could not sense anything but hay, straw, dust, sweat, and the peculiarly mellow odor of well used leather saddles and reins. I examined the small oil-fed furnace that warmed the stable. I felt the wall around the fuel tank. I studied the heaters a second time. But I could not find any sign of danger or any malfunction.

Yet Blueberry reared up and whinnied.

And the other two were becoming agitated once more.

Having just about concluded that it was nothing more than the wind and the storm that was upsetting them-and now they were all leaping and snorting more furiously than ever, as if they were not three ordinary nags but a trio of high strung thoroughbreds — I turned toward the door and quite accidentally caught sight of the light which glowed eerily just beyond the only window in the entire building. There were two lights, actually, both a warm amber shade and of dim wattage. They appeared to pulse and to shimmer-and then they were gone, as if they had never been: blink!

I hurried to the barn door, slid it open, and stepped into the snow-filled night. The arctic wind struck me like a mallet swung by a blacksmith who was angry with his wife, and it almost blew me back into the stable row. Switching on the nearly useless flashlight, I bent against the wind and pulled the door shut behind me. Laboriously, cautiously, I inched around the side of the barn in the direction of the window, peering anxiously at the ground ahead of me.

I stopped before I reached the window, for I found precisely what I had been afraid that I would find: those odd, eight-pointed tracks which Toby and I had seen on the slope earlier in the day. There were a great many of them, as if the animal had been standing there, moving back and forth as it searched for better vantage points, for a long while-at least all of the time that I had been inside with the horses.

It had been watching me.

Suddenly I felt as if I were back in Southeast Asia — in a jungle rather than in a snowstorm-where an enemy was relentlessly stalking me.

Ridiculous, of course.

It was only some animal.

A dumb animal.

I swept the flashlight beam around the hilltop and found where the prints continued a few feet away. Though

I didn't want to use the flashlight and alert my prey, I couldn't follow the trail without it. The December night was perfectly black and empty once you got away from the light that spilled from the house and from the single stable window. Holding the flashlight before me as if it were a sword, I walked westward, after the animal.

Wind.

Snow.

More wind.

More snow.

Two minutes later

I had lost the trail. The wind and snow had conspired to blot out the prints, scouring the land as clean and smooth as a new cotton sheet.

Yet that didn't seem possible. Certainly, the snow was falling very hard and fast. Equally as certain: the wind was ugly. But the creature could have had no more than a two minute head start on me. The storm couldn't have erased every trace of it so quickly. Unless… Unless it was not moving away from me at the same ponderous pace at which I moved. If, in the instant that it turned away from the stable window, it had run, and if it could run incredibly fast in spite of the bad weather, it might have gotten a five-minute head start and its tracks might easily have filled up and it might be a mile away by now.

But what sort of animal could move so easily and surely in wind like this, on a night when visibility was near zero?

Considering that, I had to consider one other thing which I had not wanted to think about just yet. I had seen two amber lights at the window, low lights very much like candle flames muffled by colored glass.

What kind of animal carried lamps with it.

A man.

A man could be a wild animal.

But why would he carry lamps or lanterns instead of a flashlight?

A madman?

And even if it were a man who was playing some grotesque hoax, wearing shoes that made those strange prints, he would not have been able to move so fast and put so much distance between us.

So where did that leave me?

Nowhere.

Standing at the end of the trail, staring out at the gray-white curtains of billowing flakes, I began to feel that the animal had circled behind me and now stood in my own footprints, watching me. The feeling grew so strong, so undeniable, that I whirled and cried out and stabbed my flashlight beam into the air behind me. But the night was all there was.

"You're being ridiculous," I told myself.

Having turned my back on the direction in which the animal had fled, uncomfortable because of that, I struggled through the ever-mounting drifts toward the rear of the farmhouse. I shone my flashlight ahead of me, even though I didn't need its light and would have been better off without it.

Several times I thought I heard something out of place, a metallic snickering noise that I could not identify, nearby, above the ululation of the storm. But each time I probed the surrounding darkness with the flashlight, there was nothing to see but snow.

When I finally reached the house, brushed snow from my coat, and went into the sun porch, Connie was waiting for me. She said, "What was wrong?"

"I don't know."

She tilted her head to one side. "You found some thing. I can tell."

"I think it was that animal."

"The one whose tracks you found?"

"Yeah."

"Bothering the horses?"

"Yeah."

"Then you saw it?"

"No. But I found the tracks outside the stable window."

"Could you make anything of them this time?" she asked as she took my coat and hung it on the rack by the door.

The ice-crusted hem and collar began to drip. Beads of bright water splashed on the floor.

"No," I said wearily. "I still couldn't make heads nor tails of them."

She took my scarf and shook the snow from it. "Did you follow them?" she asked.

I sat down on a pine bench and unzipped my boots, pulled them off, massaged my chilled toes. "Yeah, I followed them. For a few yards. Then they just vanished."

She took the boots and stood them in the corner beside her own and Toby's boots. "Well maybe it is a bird, like you said earlier."

"How do you figure?"

"A bird could have just taken off; he could have flown away, and that would explain why the prints vanished."

I shook my head: no. "This wind would tear his wings off. I don't see how a bird, any kind of bird at all, could be stalking about on a night like this."

"Or any other animal."

"Or any other animal," I agreed.

"Are the horses calmed down?"

"I don't hear them any more," I said.

"Do you think it'll be back-whatever it is?"

"Maybe. I don't know."

We stared at each other. Her perpetually startled eyes seemed even wider than usual. My eyes were probably wide too. We were frightened, and we didn't know why. No one had been hurt-or even threatened. We had seen nothing frightening.

We had heard nothing frightening. It had done nothing more than scare the horses. But our fear was real, vague but indisputable: intuitive.

"Well," she said abruptly, "you were longer than I imagined you'd be. I'd better start dinner."

I drew her to me and hugged her. "Rotten horses."

"There's always later."

I kissed her.

She kissed back-and smiled when Toby called for us from the living room. "Later."

I released her, turned back to the sun porch door, and slid the bolt latch in place, although we usually left it unlocked. When we went through the kitchen door, I closed and locked that too.

4

After dinner I went into the den and took from the shelves all the volumes that might conceivably help me to identify our mysterious new neighbor.

Sitting behind the heavy, dark oak desk, a short brandy at hand, the empty gun cabinet at my back, I spent more than an hour paging through eight thick books, studying descriptions, drawings, and photographs of wildlife prints and spoors.

With those animals whose marks I found altogether unfamiliar, I turned the examples on their sides and upside down, hoping to come across the prints that I was looking for simply by viewing these at odd angles. In some four hundred samples, however, there was nothing vaguely similar to what I had seen in the snow, regardless of the view that I took of them.

I was putting the books back on the shelves when Connie came into the den.

She said, "Any luck?"

"None."

"Why don't you come keep us company? Toby's working with his tempra paints, and I'm reading. I've got a pretty good FM station with lots of gutsy Rimsky-Korsakov mixed in with Beethoven."

I caught her up in my arms and lifted her off the floor and kissed her, tasting the minty tang of the after-dinner liqueur she had been drinking. She was the kind of woman a man wants to hold a great deal: feminine and yet not soft in any way, sensual yet not forbidding. Her father and her father's father had been bricklayers, yet there was a certain undeniable nobility in her face; she had the presence and the grace of one born to high position. It was inconceivable to me, just then, as I held her, that I had ever retreated from this part of reality, from Connie.

"Don, Toby is in the next room-"

I shushed her. "Dr. Cohen who is a psychiatrist and who ought to know all about these things, says that we should kiss and cuddle in front of Toby so that he knows we really love each other and so he doesn't think that I was away all that time because I wanted to be away." I kissed her again. "Therefore, this is not merely a bit of hot necking-it's psychiatric therapy for our entire family.

Can you argue with that?"

She grinned. "I guess not."

Just then Toby knocked on the half-open den door and stepped cautiously across the threshold.

We broke apart, though not with haste, Connie's hand still on my arm. "Yes, Toby?"

He had been standing there, apparently, for long seconds, trying to decide how best to attract our attention without embarrassing us. He was strangely stiff, as if he were taking part in a good posture demonstration in school. His face was pale, his eyes very wide, and his mouth loose-lipped as if he were about to be ill.

Connie saw his condition even as I did, and we hurried over to him. She put a hand on his forehead and evidently decided there was no temperature. "What's the matter, Toby?"

He looked at me and then at her and then back at me again.

Fat tears swelled at the corners of his eyes, but he made a valiant effort to keep from spilling them.

"Toby?" I said, kneeling beside him, caging him between

Connie and me, caging him in love.

He said, "I can't…" He spoke in a whisper, and his voice trailed away into confusion.

She said, "What? Can't what, darling?"

He bit his lip. He was trembling.

To Connie I said, "He's scared to death."

"Toby?"

"I can't tell," he said.

"Why not?" Connie asked, smoothing his dark hair back from his forehead.

"I don't want to-to upset Dad," he said.

("There will be times," Dr. Cohen had said, that last day in his office before I was turned loose from the sanitarium, "when people-even those you love and who love you-will say things both intentionally and unintentionally, but most often the latter, that will remind you of your illness. They will hurt you, hurt you very badly. You'll be guilt-stricken for having abandoned your family.

You'll want to crawl away somewhere and be by yourself, as if you're a wounded animal. However, being by yourself is unquestionably the worst medicine, Donald.

Stay there. Face it. Push ahead with it. Do your best to conceal your wounds and try to salvage the situation." The doctor had known his business, all right.)

"You won't upset me, Toby," I said. The words were difficult to form and even more difficult to speak. "I'm perfectly all right now. I don't get upset very easily any more."

He stared at me, unblinkingly, trying to assess the degree of truth in what I said. He had stopped trembling; he was utterly still.

"Go on," Connie said, holding him against her. He could no longer restrain the tears. They slid down his round cheeks, glistening brightly, dripping from the soft line of his chin. He began to shudder- just as he shuddered when he tried to eat something that he didn't like in order to impress us with his manly fortitude.

"Toby?"

"Come on, Toby. Tell us."

"At the window," he said. It came out of him in a rush now, the words running together, expelled in gasping breaths. "At the window, right at the window, in the other room, I saw it at the living room window and it had yellow eyes."

Frowning, Connie said,

"What had yellow eyes?"

"Big yellow eyes," he said, frightening himself even more as he recalled them. "It had big yellow eyes as big around as my whole hand, really big, looking straight at me." He held up his hand to show how big the eyes had been.

Connie looked at me, raised her eyebrows.

"I'm not lying,"

Toby said.

I said, "You both wait here."

"Don-" Connie began, reaching for me with her free hand.

I wasn't going to be restrained, for I remembered the pair of amber lights at the stable window. A child might have called them "yellow".

At the time I had wondered what sort of an animal carried lamps or lanterns around with it, had decided that the only thing that did was a man, and had not considered any other explanation for those dual circles of light. And now Toby had given it to me: eyes.

But… eyes? Well, the eyes of many animals seemed to glow in the dark. Cats' eyes were green. And some of them, like the mountain lions and wildcats, had yellow eyes, amber eyes-didn't they?

Sure they did.

Yellow eyes.

But yellow eyes as big as saucers…?

In the living room I looked quickly around at the three large windows but didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I went to each window then and stared through it at the brief view of snow-covered ground, darkness, and shifting, skipping snowflakes. Whatever

Toby had seen, whether eyes or lanterns, man or animal, it was now long gone.

I recalled how fast it had moved away from the barn when I had set out after it..

Behind me, Connie and Toby came into the living room. He clung to her with one hand and wiped tears out of his eyes with the other hand. In a moment he would stop crying; in two moments he would smile; in three he would be recovered altogether. He was a tough little man; he had had to learn to rely on himself early in life.

"Which window was it?" I asked him.

He let go of Connie's hand and walked over toward the window that lay immediately to the left of the front door.

When I went to check it again, I thought to look down at the drifted bank of snow which had built up on the floor of the front porch-and I saw the prints.

The same prints. Sharp, well defined holes in the snow. Eight holes in each grouping.

Connie sensed the new tension that blossomed inside of me. "What is it?"

I said, "Come and look."

She came; I showed her.

"Was it that animal again?" Toby asked. He crowded in between us, pressing his nose to the glass. He had stopped crying.

"I think it was," I said.

"Oh, that's all right then," he said.

"It is, huh?"

"Oh, sure. I thought it was something a whole lot worse than just some old animal." He was actually smiling now. Looking up at Connie, he said, "Can I have another piece of cake, Mom? My piece at supper wasn't very big."

She looked at him closely. "Are you feeling okay, Toby?"

"Just hungry," he said. The fear had dissipated like an electrical charge. He said, "It was only that animal. When the snow stops, tomorrow maybe, Dad and I are going to put on our snowshoes and track it down and find out what it is." When neither of us could think of a reply to that, Toby said, "Mom? The cake?"

"To be ten again," I said.

Connie laughed. She put one hand in Toby's mop of hair and messed it up, a show of affection he stolidly endured. "Come into the kitchen, me lad, where you can eat it without getting crumbs over everything."

I let them go. The whole time that Toby had his cake, I stood at the window and looked at those queer prints as the wind and the snow erased them.

5

Later, when Toby was upstairs taking a bedtime bath and we were sitting on the sofa before the fireplace, Connie said, "Do you think you should-load the gun?"

When I had been drafted into the Army, Connie had purchased a.38 automatic which she had kept in the house for protection against burglars. We still had the pistol and the box of ammunition. In the army I had learned how to handle a gun; therefore, we weren't exactly unprepared.

"Load it?" I said. "Well

… Not just yet."

"When?"

"Maybe it won't be necessary."

"But this animal might be dangerous."

"I don't think so," I said. "And even if it is dangerous, it can't get in the house all that easily."

"Well…"

"I don't like having a loaded gun lying around."

"I suppose you're right."

"It's not that I'm afraid to load the gun, Connie. If a time comes when I have to use it, I will. I'll be able to use it. I no longer feel that a gun, of itself, is evil. I've spent hundreds of hours with Dr. Cohen, you know. I can use a gun again without going to pieces."

"I know you can." She looked away from the crackling flames that enshrouded the birch logs. Her face was flushed and pretty.

"I think the first thing I should do is call Sam Caldwell and see if he can help me."

"Now?"

"It's as good a time as any."

"I'd better go up and see how Toby's getting along, make sure he brushes his teeth." When she reached the bottom of the stairs she looked back at me and said, "Don, you mustn't worry so much about what we think of you.

We love you. We always will. We love you and trust you to take good care of us."

I nodded, and she smiled at me. I watched her climb the steps until she was out of sight, and I wished that I could trust myself as much as she trusted me.

Would I, could I, load and use the pistol if the time came for that sort of action-or would the weapon remind me of the war, Southeast Asia, all of those things that I had fled into catatonia in order to forget? Would I be able to defend my family — or would I back off from the gun like a man backing off from a rattlesnake? I simply didn't know; and until I did know, I didn't deserve her smile.

In the den I dialed Sam Caldwell's number. It rang four times before he answered.

"Sam? Don Hanlon."

"You ready to be snowbound?" he asked.

"You think it'll come to that?"

"Sure do. Looks to me like we're in for the first big fall of the year."

"Well, I'm kind of looking forward to it."

"That's the proper attitude. Being snowbound is restful, peaceful."

I decided that was enough

Smalltalk. Neither of us cared much for long discussions about the weather, politics, or religion. Sam, especially, was scornful of wasted words; he was very much a taciturn, friendly, but totally self-sufficient and self-contained

New Englander.

He had come to the same conclusion a split second before I did.

"What did you call for?" he asked in that brisk, short, but not impolite manner of his.

"You hunt quite a lot."

"That's true."

"Do you know the spore of the animals most likely to be roaming through these woods?"

"Sure do."

"All of them?"

"I've hunted nearly all of them."

"Well, I've come across something pretty unusual. I never saw prints like these-and I can't seem to find them in any of the books I have out here."

"You can't learn a wildcraft from a book."

"That's precisely why I called you."

"Shoot, then."

I gave him a detailed description of the prints. I started to tell him about the amber eyes, about the creature that had been at the stable window and at our living room window-but I was cut off when the lights went out and the phone went dead at the same instant.

"Sam?" I said, although I knew that the connection had been broken.

The only response was silence.

"Don!" Connie shouted.

I put the receiver in the cradle and felt my way out of the den into the living room. The darkness seemed total at first and was only gradually mitigated by the phosphorescent glow of the snow fields which lay beyond the window and shone against the glass. "Are you all right?" I called to her.

"The lights are out," she said. Before I could respond to that she said, "Well, isn't that silly of me?" She laughed nervously.

"You know the lights are out."

I could tell that, like me, she had been frightened by the sudden darkness. And, also like me, she had connected initially and irrationally-the power failure with the yellow-eyed animal that had terrified the horses.

"The phone went dead too," I said.

"Did Sam have any idea what-"

"He didn't get a chance to say."

After a brief hesitation she said,

"I'm going to get Toby bundled up in a robe and bring him downstairs."

"Don't try to get down the steps without a light," I said. "I'll find the candles in the kitchen and bring one up to you."

That was considerably easier said than done. We had lived in the house only a little longer than half a year, and I was not so familiar with its layout that I could find my way easily in the dark.

Crossing the living room was not so bad; but the kitchen was a battleground, for it had only one window to let in the snow glare. I barked my shins on three of the four chairs that stood around the small breakfast table, cracked my hip on the heavy chrome handle of the oven door, and nearly fell over Toby's box of tempra paints which he had left on the floor in front of the cabinet where they were supposed to be kept. I tried four drawers before I finally found the candles and matches. I lit two candles, at the expense of a charred thumb, and went back to the stairs in the living room, feeling rather foolish.

When he saw me Toby called down from the second-floor landing: "Hey, we're roughing it."

"Until we get the house's generator going," I said, climbing up toward them. "Maybe half an hour."

"Great!"

I led them down the steps in the dancing candlelight, and we went back into the kitchen where Connie found two brass holders to relieve me of the candles which had begun to melt and drip hotly on my hands.

"What happened?" she asked.

She was not taking the inconvenience with

Toby's kind of high spirits.

Neither was I.

"The wind's just awful tonight," I said. "It probably brought down a tree somewhere along the line. Power and telephone cables are on the same poles- so one good-sized oak or maple or pine could do the whole job."

"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. The 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.