Invasion

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.

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 skeleton. 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."

She didn't like that, but then neither did I. She turned her own coffee mug in circles on the table top. "But if you're right, or even only half right, and if this thing can take control of our minds-"

"It can't," I said, trying to sound utterly confident even while remembering how perilously close the thing had come to taking control of mine. "It tried that with me, but it didn't succeed. We can resist it."

"But what else might it be able to do?"

"I don't know. Nothing else. Anything else."

"It might have a ray gun," Toby said enthusiastically.

"Even that's possible," I said. "As I said before, we'll just have to wait and see."

"This is really exciting," Toby said, not disturbed in the least by our helplessness.

"Maybe we won't see anything more of it," I said.

"Maybe it will just go away."

But none of us believed that.

We talked about the situation for quite some time, examining all the possibilities, trying to prepare ourselves for any contingency, until there wasn't anything more to say that we hadn't already said a half a dozen times. Weary of the subject, we went on to more mundane affairs, as I washed the coffee and cocoa mugs while Connie began to prepare supper. It seemed odd, yet it was rather comforting, that we were able to deal with every-day affairs in the face of our most extraordinary circumstances. Only Toby was unable to get back to more practical matters; all he wanted to do was stand at the window, watch the forest, and wait for the

"monster" to appear.

We allowed him to do as he wished, perhaps because we knew that there was no chance of our getting him interested in anything else, especially not in his lessons. Or perhaps both Connie and I felt that it wasn't really such a bad idea to have a sentry on duty.

As I was drying and shelving the mugs, Connie said, "What are we going to do about old Kate?"

"I forgot all about her!" I said. "After I found Betty dead and Blueberry missing, I didn't take time to feed and water her."

"That's the least of her problems," Connie said. "Even well fed and watered, she's not going to be safe out there tonight."

I thought about that for a moment and then said, "I'll bring her in on the sun porch for the night."

"That'll be messy."

"Yes, but at least we can watch over her and see she doesn't come to any harm."

"There's no heat on the sun porch."

"I'll move a space heater in from the barn. Then I'll be able to switch off the heat in the barn and let the temperature drop below freezing out there. That'll keep the dead horse from decomposing and becoming a health hazard."

I bundled up in coat, scarf, gloves, and boots once more and went out into the howling storm which was, by now, every bit as fierce as the storm we had suffered the previous day. Wind-whipped snow stung my face, and I squinted like an octogenarian trying to read a newspaper without his bifocals. Slipping, stumbling, wind-milling my arms, I managed to stay on my feet for the length of the path which I had opened this morning but which had already drifted most of the way shut.

In the new snow around the barn door, I found fresh examples of the strange eight-holed prints.

I began to sweat in spite of the bitterly cold air.

My hands shaking uncontrollably, I slid back the bolt and threw open the door and staggered into the barn. I knew what I would find. But I could not simply turn away and run back to the house without being absolutely certain that

I was correct.

The barn was full of warm odors: hay, straw, manure, horse linament, the tang of well-used leather saddles, the dusty aroma of the grain in the feed bins-and most of all, ammonia, dammit, sweet ammonia, so thick that it gagged me.

Kate was gone.

Her stall door stood open.

I ran down the stable row to Betty's stall and opened the half-door. The dead horse was where it had been, staring with glassy eyes: the yellow-eyed animal was apparently only interested in fresh meat.

Now what?

Before the scouring wind and the heavily falling snow could erase the evidence, I went outside to study the tracks again. This time, on closer inspection, I saw that Kate had left the barn under her own power: her hoof prints led down toward the forest. But of course! If the alien-yes, even as awkward as that sounded, it was still the only proper word-if the alien could come so close to seizing control of a human mind, how simple for it to mesmerize a dumb animal. Denied will power, the horse had gone off with the alien.

When I looked closer and after I followed the trail for a few yards, I corrected myself and added an "s" to the noun: aliens. Clearly, there had been at least two of them, probably three.

Numbed, I went back into the barn and turned off the heaters in order to keep the dead horse from decomposing. When I left I locked the door, although that was a pointless gesture now.

I looked at the tracks for a long while. Nightmarish thoughts passed through my mind like a magician's swords passing through the lady in a magic cabinet: Blueberry hadn't been supper, but lunch. Kate was their supper. What would they want for breakfast?

Me? Connie? Toby? All three of us?

No.

Ridiculous.

Would the first encounter between man and alien be played out like some simple-minded movie, like a cheap melodrama, like a hack science fiction writer's inept plot: starman the gourmand, man the hapless meal?

We had to make sure that it did not go like that. We had to establish a communications bridge between these creatures and ourselves, a bridge to understanding.

Unless they didn't want to understand, didn't want to bother, didn't want anything from us except the protein that we carried in our flesh and blood… I went back to the house, wondering if I were, indeed, out of my mind.

9

Connie and I agreed to take turns standing guard duty during the night.

She would sleep-or try to sleep-from ten o'clock until four the next morning, and then I would sleep-maybe-from around four until whatever time I woke up. We also agreed that we were basically a couple of real ninnies, that we were being overly cautious, that such an extreme safety measure as this was probably not necessary- yet neither of us suggested that we forget about the guard duty and just sleep together, unprotected, as we would have done any other night.

I helped her put Toby to bed shortly before ten, kissed her goodnight, and went to sit at the head of the stairs, in the precisely precribed circle of light from a tensor lamp. One table lamp was burning down in the living room, a warm yellow light that threw softly rounded shadows. The loaded pistol was at my side.

I was ready.

Outside, the storm wind fluted under the eaves and made the rafters creak.

I picked up a paperback novel and tried to get interested in a sympathetic professional thief who was masterminding a bank robbery in New

Orleans. It seemed to be an exciting, well told story; my eyes fled along the lines of print; the pages passed quickly; but I didn't retain more than five percent of what I read. Still, I stayed with it, for there was no better way to get through the next six hours.

The trouble came sooner than I had expected.

Twenty-three minutes past eleven o'clock. I knew the precise time because I had just looked at my wristwatch. I was no more than one-third of the way through the paperback novel, having absorbed little or nothing of it, and I was getting bored.

Gentle, all but inaudible footsteps sounded in the second-floor hallway behind me, and when I turned around Toby was there in his bare feet and fire engine-red pajamas.

"Can't you sleep?" I asked.

He said something: an incoherent gurgle, as if someone were strangling him.

"Toby?"

He came down onto the first step, as if he were going to sit beside me-but instead of that he slipped quickly past me and kept right on going.

"What's up?" I asked, thinking that he was headed for the refrigerator to get a late-night snack.

He didn't answer.

He didn't stop.

"Hey!"

He started to run down the last of the steps.

I stood up.

"Toby!"

At the bottom of the stairs he glanced up at me. And I realized that there was no expression whatsoever in his eyes. Just a watery emptiness, a vacant gaze, a lifeless stare. He seemed to be looking through me at the wall beyond, as if I were only a spirit drifting on the air.

One of the aliens had control of him.

Why had it never occurred to me that the aliens might find a child's mind much more accessible, much more controllable than the mind of an adult?

As Toby ran across the living room, I started down the stairs, taking them two at a time, risking a twisted ankle and a broken neck. As I ran I shouted at him, hoping that somehow my voice would snap him out of the trance.

He kept going.

Bones… bones… a horse's bones, a complete skeleton… bones in a forest clearing

I almost fell coming off the steps, avoided disaster by a slim margin, and plunged across the living room. I reached the kitchen in time to hear the outer sun porch door slam behind him: a flat, solid, final sound.

Bones in a forest clearing… white bones lying in white snow

I didn't stop for my gloves, boots, or coat.

A horse's bones, a skeleton… picked clean

I ran across the kitchen, striking a chair with my hip and knocking it over in my wake.

Toby's bones, Toby's skeleton… picked clean

I crossed the sun porch in three long strides, bounding like an antelope.

Picked clean

I tore open the door and went out into the black and snow-filled night.

Bones

"Toby!"

The cold slammed into me and rocked me badly, as if sharp icicles had been thrust deep into my joints, between muscle and sheath, through arteries and veins. That was the "one" of a one-two punch that Nature had for me. The "two" was the wind which was seething up the hill at better than fifty miles an hour: a mallet to drive the icicles deeper.

"Toby!"

No answer.

For four or five or six seconds, as I desperately searched the bleak night ahead, I couldn't see him. Then suddenly I got a glimpse of his bright red pajamas outlined against the snow and flapping like a flag in the wind.

"Toby, stop!"

He didn't obey, of course. And now he was nearly out of sight, for visibility was just about nil.

Bones

In the knee-deep snow-which was more likely hip-deep for him-I was able to make much better time than he did. Within a few seconds I reached him and caught him by the shoulder and pulled him around.

He struck me in the face with one small fist.

Surprised more than hurt by the blow, I tumbled backwards into a drift.

He pulled loose and turned and started down toward the woods once more.

Hundreds of big bear traps began to go off all around me: snapsnapsnapsnapsnapsnapsnap! And then I realized that I was only hearing my teeth chattering. I was half-frozen although

I had spent no more than a minute in these sub-zero temperatures, lashed by this ferocious wind. Toby would have to be in even worse shape than I was, for his cotton pajamas offered less protection from the elements than did my jeans and thick flannel hunting shirt.

I pushed up and went after him, weaving like a drunkard in anxious pursuit of a rolling wine bottle. In a dozen steps I caught

Toby by the shoulder and stopped him and pulled him all the way around.

He swung at me a second time.

I ducked the blow.

As he pulled back to swing again, gazing through me with lifeless eyes, I threw both arms around him and lifted him off the ground.

He kicked me in the stomach.

The breath rushed out of me like air exploding from a pin-pricked balloon. I lost my balance, and we both collapsed in a heap.

He pulled loose and scrambled away.

I went after him on my hands and knees, which felt like four blocks of ice. I saw him, closed the gap, lunged, and brought him down with a tackle. I rolled with him, holding him close, holding him tightly so that he couldn't get hurt-and so he couldn't kick and punch.

He bit me.

Hard.

But that was all right with me because I pretty much had been expecting it and had steeled myself against both the pain and the surprise of it. As he chewed viciously at my shoulder, surely drawing blood but making no sound whatsoever, I clambered laboriously to my feet, still holding on to him.

A thin crust of snow had frozen in my eyelashes, welding them into a pair of brittle plates. Every time I blinked it felt as if two heavy wooden shutters were crashing into place. Furthermore, my face was numb, and my lips felt as if they had cracked and were bleeding.

I took several uncertain steps through the soft drifts until I grasped that I was moving downhill rather than up-and thus away from the farmhouse. I searched for the house, for the light in the living room-and saw, instead, a dozen or more radiant eyes, amber eyes, glowing at me from thirty yards away, strange circles of warm light that pulsed like beacons through the blizzard. Crying out involuntarily, I whirled and ran uphill as fast as I could lift and put down my ice-caked legs.

Toby squirmed against me, stopped biting, tried to use his knees and elbows to injure me. But I was holding him too tightly for him to get any leverage.

A familiar pressure bloomed suddenly around my head, sought entrance, quickly found a way in to me, and danced over the surface of my brain

No!

I resisted the contact.

Bones.. think of bones

I picked up speed.

Fear welled up in me as the pressure increased inside my skull; and it was a hideously potent fear, that biological terror that had made a raging madman of me in the forest earlier in the day. But I couldn't afford to lose my wits now. If I began to run blindly in circles, shouting and throwing punches at the empty air, the aliens would capture Toby and me; and before long they would go into the house and get Connie as well. Now that they had attempted to steal Toby from us, I was prepared to give serious consideration to that melodramatic and trite science fiction concept which I previously had found, if not impossible, highly improbable: that they viewed us as nothing more than a rich and convenient source of protein. Our survival, therefore, might well depend upon two things: how successfully I could resist the insistent mental probes-and how successfully I could cope with the disabling fear, the shattering terror, which the probes sparked in me.

Toby continued to struggle.

Clutching him against my chest, I managed to keep going.

The alien tried to sink thought-fingers into my mind, but I pinched and jabbed and scratched at his mental front, resisted and resisted and resisted.

Mindless fear slammed at me like hurricane seas, like gigantic waves battering a seawall. I held against them.

I kept running.

Lights were switched on ahead of me.

I could see the house, the sun porch.

Fifty feet. Maybe less.

I was winning.

Then I fell.

Still holding Toby-who had quieted considerably over the last few seconds I sat up in the snow and looked down the hill toward the forest. The amber eyes were closer than they had been only half a minute ago, no more than thirty or thirty-five feet away from us now.

Images formed behind my eyes, fragments of light and brilliant colors, alien scenes

No! Stay out of me!

Fear… crushing fear… terror… things in my head… spiders in my skull, things eating away in my brain

I had to fight it and I did fight it and I was nonetheless sure that I was losing where I had been winning an instant ago.

I started to get up. My feet slipped out from under me. I fell again and saw that the amber eyes were even closer, twenty feet away and moving rapidly in on me, and I saw that I was not going to get away and I started to cry and -

— and then Connie appeared beside me, stepping like a stage actress through the snow curtain. She was carrying the pistol that I had left at the head of the stairs. She was wearing a coat over her night gown, and her long hair was matted with snow that was crystalizing into ice. Bracing herself against the wind, holding the pistol with both hands, she fired at the approaching creatures.

The wind swallowed most of the sound of the shot.

Although none of the aliens appeared to have been wounded, they seemed to realize that they were being fired upon, and they seemed to view the pistol as a very real danger. After she got off her second shot- again hitting nothing-they stopped where they were and stared at us with those huge, unblinking eyes. Apparently, there was at least one blessing for which we could be grateful: these things were evidently not all-powerful, not invincible and unstoppable, as years of horror movies had conditioned me to think they would be.

The pressure abruptly evaporated in my skull. The mental probes were discontinued.

Squinting, I tried to see what sort of beings lay behind the amber eyes-however, the darkness and the snow defeated me. For all that I could tell, they consisted only of eyes, great disembodied discs of light adrift on the wind.

Shouting in order to be heard above the storm, Connie said, "Are you all right?"

"Good enough!" I shouted back at her.

"Toby?"

"He's okay, I think."

I got up.

The aliens stayed where they were.

"Do you want the gun?" she asked.

"You keep it," I said. "Let's get moving. But don't turn your back on them."

I was half-frozen. My muscles felt as if they were on fire although the flames were icy, and my joints were arthritic from the fierce cold. Each step was a miracle and an agony.

As if we were playing a child's game, we backed slowly toward the farmhouse. We kept our eyes on the alien eyes, and we tested the treacherous ground behind us before committing ourselves to each step. Gradually, a gap opened between us and our otherworldly visitors. We stepped into the square of wan light that spilled out through the sun porch windows — and in no more than two minutes we were safely inside.

"Lock the door," I told her.

"Don't worry about that."

I carried Toby into the kitchen and put him on the table while she bolted the sun porch door as well as the door that connected the porch to the kitchen.

"Did they come after us?" I asked, wondering if they were now pressing against the sun porch's glass walls.

"I didn't see them. I don't think they did."

The house was warm, but we suddenly felt colder than we had when we'd been out in the storm. It was the contrast, I suppose. We began to shake, twitch, and shiver.

"We have to get Toby out of those pajamas," Connie said, hurrying out of the room. "I'll get a fresh pair for him-and some towels."

Toby appeared to be asleep. I touched his wrist and counted his pulse. The beat was steady, neither too fast nor too slow.

A moment later Connie returned with clean pajamas and a huge stack of towels. I dried my hair while she attended to Toby. As she wrestled him out of his soaked, frozen pajamas, she said, "He's bleeding."

"It's okay," I said, my voice quivering with a chill.

"There's blood around his mouth," she insisted.

"It's my blood, not his."

When she had him free of his pajamas and wrapped in two big bath towels, she wiped his face and saw that what I said was true. "Your blood?"

"They took control of his mind," I said, recalling the nightmare battle in the snow. "And they made him bite me when he was trying to get loose and go to them."

"My God!"

"They almost had him."

She swayed.

I went to her and took the towel out of her hand. "Get your coat off. Dry your hair. You'll catch pneumonia standing around like that." I began to dry Toby's hair. I was staying on my feet only by dogged determination. I tasted my own blood: my lips had split from the cold, and now they burned and itched.

She said, "Are you all right?"

"Just cold."

"The bite?"

"It's not much."

"Your lips-"

"That's not much either."

Staring down at Toby, putting one slender hand against his face, she said, "Is he just unconscious?"

"Get out of the coat and dry your hair," I told her again. "You'll catch your death."

"Is he just unconscious?"

"I don't know."

"He'll be all right, won't he?"

"I don't know."

She glared at me, her pretty jaw suddenly set as firm as if it had been cast in concrete. She was wild-eyed, her delicate nostrils flared. She raised her hands: they were curled into small fists. "But you must know!"

"Connie-"

"When they took control of him did they shatter his mind in the process?"

I finished drying his hair, tried not to look at her, tried not to think about what she had said, which was what I had been saying to myself for the last couple of minutes.

She was determined to get an answer out of me. "Is he just a vegetable now? Is that at all possible? Is that what they've done to him?"

As my hands warmed up they began to itch and go numb on me. The towel slipped out of my hands.

"Is it?" she demanded.

Toby said,

"Mom? Dad?"

She grabbed the edge of the table.

I helped him sit up.

Blinking like a man stepping out of a cellar into sunlight, Toby looked at me, looked at her, coughed gently, shook his head, smiled tentatively, and said, "What… what the heck happened? I feel so… awful cold. Can I have some hot chocolate?"

Connie embraced him and started to cry.

Feeling hot tears swelling up at the corners of my own eyes, I went across the room to the cupboards to find mugs, spoons, and the big tin of cocoa mix.