Invasion

10

We had to get help. We had to let someone in the outside world know what was happening at Timber-lake Farm.

Until now I had thought that we would be most well off if we remained as calm as we possibly could and stayed right where we were and waited out the storm. In time the telephone service would be restored, and we could call the sheriff in Barley to ask for help. But now I saw that, with the second snowstorm coming so fast on the heels of the first one, the phone might be out of order for three, four, or five days, even longer. By the time the lines were finally repaired, we would all have gone the way of Blueberry and Kate… When the telephone next rang there would not be anyone alive to answer it.

The ideal solution was evident if impractical: we would all get dressed in our warmest clothes, put on our snowshoes, and walk out of here when dawn came a few hours from now. Just walk off, bold as you please. Just stroll out through the open fields, over the hills, on through another stretch of woods but not the same woods in which the aliens had landed, straightaway to the Johnsons' farm where we could call the sheriff on their telephone (which was an altogether different line from ours) and get help… It was a pleasant fantasy-but it was a long way from reality.

The Johnsons, our nearest neighbors, lived slightly more than two miles from

Timberlake Farm. Although Toby was very self-sufficient, he was still a child with a child's limited physical stamina. In this brutal weather he could never hike two miles on snowshoes, probably not even one mile. And neither Connie nor

I would come through alive if we had to take turns carrying him; the burden would sap us and leave us floundering weakly in deep drifts. As with everything else in this life, the ideal was unattainable and even laughable; therefore, I would have to seek help on my own and leave the two of them behind-leave them alone in the farmhouse.

Once we had made that decision-Connie and I sitting in easy chairs in the living room, Toby sleeping on the sofa in front of us-we had to choose between two courses of action. I could try to get help in Barley. Or I could hike to the Johnson farm and plead my case there.

First of all: Barley. I could walk due east, along our private lane, until I reached the county road that lay a bit less than two miles from here. The first time that a snowplow came along, I could flag it down and ride in to Barley. It appeared to be a simple plan, nearly fool-proof. But there might be complications. What if there were no snowplows working the county road-no traffic moving whatsoever? After all, it was not a main route. It served a handful of rural families who expected to be snowbound for weeks every winter and who would not ordinarily be bothered if the road remained closed for several days. In a blizzard of these dimensions, the county and state highway maintenance crews might concentrate their efforts in the towns and on the superhighways and primary state routes that were more heavily used. With the wind drifting shut highways they had plowed open hours earlier, they would be kept busy with the major thoroughfares-while I might stand beside the county road for hours, waiting in vain and gradually freezing to death. If no plows came by I would have to return to the farmhouse in defeat or walk yet another two miles to the nearest house that fronted on the county road, without any guarantee that when I got there I would find someone at home and/or a working telephone.

"If you went in that direction," Connie said thoughtfully, "I don't believe you'd find help in time. I don't think you'd make it through to Barley."

"Neither do I."

"Then we rule it out?"

"Yeah." Both of us had changed into dry clothes and had drunk mugs of steaming cocoa. I closed my eyes, wishing that I could hold on to the warmth of the house and not have to go outside again. "So I'll have to go to the Johnson farm."

"We always say it's two miles from here. But is that right?"

"That's what Ed told us."

"Two miles

But two miles as you walk-or two miles as the crow flies?"

That was a disturbing thought. I had never walked the full route any farther than to the top of

Pastor's Hill from which you could look out across a forest and see the Johnson farm perched on another hill in the distance. I opened my eyes and said, "If it's as the crow flies, it could be considerably more than two miles on foot.

Might be three or four miles. Might be too far for me."

She said nothing.

She stared at me with those incredibly beautiful eyes, bright gazelle eyes.

"But that has to be wrong," I said, trying hard to convince myself. "Look, when you tell someone that your nearest neighbor lives two miles away, you mean it's a two-mile walk or a two-mile drive-not a two-mile flight."

"Yeah, I guess that makes sense. But what if you get there and discover they aren't home?"

"They're homebodies. They'll be there."

"But just what if?"

"I'll break in and use their phone."

"And if the phone isn't working?"

"Then we're no better off than we were before I went-but we haven't lost anything by trying."

"You're right."

"And I'm positive they will be there."

"I remember… Ed has a gun case. Shotguns and rifles."

"Of course," I said, starting to feel better. "Every farmer around here goes hunting. So… Ed and I can arm ourselves… And even if the telephone lines are down at his place, we can come back here for you and Toby."

She sat up straighter, sat on the edge of her chair. "You know, I'm beginning to think maybe there's a chance."

"Sure. Sure, there's a chance. A good chance!"

"When will you leave?"

"At first light."

"That's only a few hours away. You'll need to get some sleep before you go," she said. "I'll sit up with Toby."

"You need to sleep too."

She grimaced. "We can't both sleep, that's for sure. Besides, I've already slept for an hour, before Toby tried to run out on us."

"You can't get through tomorrow on one hour of sleep."

"And you can't hike to the Johnson farm without any sleep at all," she said, getting to her feet.

Realizing that she was right and I was a fool to argue, I folded up my misguided chivalry and tucked it away in a mental closet where it wouldn't attract me again. I got up and stretched and said, "Okay. Better wake me around five."

She came to me.

I put my arms around her.

She put her lips against my throat.

Warmth, a heartbeat, hope.

She switched off the lamp, plunging the living room into darkness, and came to the front door where I was waiting in my heavy coat, scarf, gloves, toboggan cap, boots, and snowshoes.

"When will you get there?" she asked.

"In this wind, on snowshoes… Four hours."

"With a couple of hours to rest at the other end, maybe you'll get back here by three or four in the afternoon."

"Sooner, I hope."

"I hope so too."

I wanted to be able to see her, to drift for a minute in the bright pools of her eyes.

"I love you," she said.

"I love you too," I echoed dumbly, meaning it with all my soul, wishing that there were some clever phrase that would say it better. "I love you."

Two patches of blacker black in the blackness of the room, we embraced, kissed, clung to each other for several seconds, clung like drowners to a raft.

"Better get moving," she said at last.

"Yeah." As I reached for the doorknob, I had a frightening thought. I froze and said, "If they take control of Toby again, you won't be able to restrain him. I was barely able to manage him. What'll hap pen?"

"It's all right," she said. "I've already thought of that. When I feed him breakfast, I'll powder one of my sleeping tablets in his hot chocolate."

"That won't hurt him, will it?"

"They're not that strong. He'll sleep like a baby most of tomorrow. That's all."

"And you think-so long as he's drugged, they can't make use of him?" I asked.

"What do you think?"

"I don't know."

"It'll work."

"I guess it will."

"Well," she said, "whether it'll work or not, it's really the only thing I can do."

After I'd looked at it from every angle, I had to agree with her. "But be extremely careful, Connie. Watch him as closely as you would if he weren't drugged. If they take control of him, they could make him attack you."

"I'll be careful."

I listened quietly, until I heard Toby breathing deeply and smoothly: he was still sound asleep on the living room sofa.

I said, "Keep the pistol with you."

She said, "I won't let it out of my sight."

"Don't let it out of your hand."

"Okay."

"I'm serious."

"Okay."

"And keep the safety off."

"I will."

"I shouldn't leave you alone."

"And I should make you take the gun in case they come after you along the way."

"They won't."

"They might."

I fumbled for her, hugged her. "You're in much worse danger than I am. I shouldn't leave."

"If we stay here together," she said, "we die here together." Softly:

"Better get moving before there's too much light out there."

I kissed her.

She opened the door for me.

Then: cold, snow, ice, wind.

11

Dawn had come but only technically. The sun had risen behind the dense dark storm clouds, but night had not yet gone to bed. The sun lay on the cloud shrouded horizon, and there was nothing more than a vague glimmer of light in the world.

Cloaked in darkness, but with sufficient dawn glow to keep me from wandering off in the wrong direction, I struck out from the farmhouse. I headed due west toward Pastor's Hill which rose beyond the open fields comprising that flank of Timberlake Farm.

I floundered, getting accustomed to my snowshoes, and walked atop a hip-deep, cold dry sea of snow.

I didn't know if there were any aliens nearby or if they were watching me. I did know, from having listened to the radio, that this was no world-wide invasion, for there had been no news reports of strange yellow-eyed creatures. Thus far the aliens seemed to be concentrated in the woods behind the farmhouse-although they might well be on all sides of us.

If they were on all sides of us, if I were being watched right this minute, then there wasn't much of a chance of my ever reaching the Johnson farm.

But that was negative thinking, and it smacked of more than a little paranoia. Paranoia led to despair and a feeling of utter helplessness. That kind of attitude could end in paralysis, a condition that already had been half brought on by the wind and the snow. Determined to think positive, I used the darkness and the wavelike drifts to mask my stealthy progress toward the open fields toward Pastor's Hill.

If the aliens were out there keeping a vigil, they would never see me.

Never.

Not in a million years.

I had to believe that.

As I walked straight into the wind, shoulders hunched and head tucked down, I began to realize that what we were enduring would make the perfect subject matter for a book: my second book. The thought so surprised me that for a moment I stopped, stood quite still, oblivious of the wind and snow and of the possibility that some of the yellow-eyed creatures might be lurking in the drifts nearby.

Another book?

My first book had been published while I was a patient in a mental institution. It had not been a book so much as a diary, a war diary which I had kept from my first day of basic training until they brought me home from Asia as a mental basket case. Apparently, the diary helped satisfy the nation's need to see firsthand and fully grasp the horror of the last war, for it had placed high on all of the best seller lists across the country. It made a great deal of money for everyone concerned and was well reviewed. The sales were certainly not hurt by the fact that the author was a quasi-catatonic living in the equivalent of a padded cell. Indeed, that had probably helped sales more than all the publisher's advertising. Perhaps I was-in the eyes of my readers-a metaphor for the United States; perhaps they saw that the country had been driven as crazy as

I had been by the war. And perhaps they thought they could learn some lessons from my ordeal that would be useful in getting them-in getting the entire country-back on sound footing.

But there was no salvation in the diary. I'm certain that most of them were disappointed. How could they have looked to me for their salvation when I hadn't been able to save myself?

I learned two things in the war:

Death is real and final.

The world is a madhouse.

Perhaps that doesn't mean much to you.

But it broke me.

These two realizations, combined with my own deep sense of guilt and moral failure, drove me over the edge. And it was the eventual acceptance of these bitter lessons, finding a way to live with these two truths, which made it possible for me to regain a tolerable perspective and a semblance of sanity.

The key is that I went through that hell, and it was by the flames that my wounds were cauterized. My readers-as well meaning as they might have been- were merely arm chair sufferers. They were anxious to pass through the flames vicariously-and that will never be enough to cauterize their psychic wounds.

When I was released from the sanitarium-against all predictions, against all expectations-when it was clear I had a good chance of leading a relatively normal life (although the possibility of a relapse was never ruled out), I consented to be interviewed by a few reporters. I was asked this question more than any other: "Will you write another book?" And my reply was always the same: "No." I am not a writer. Oh, I suppose I have some facility with prose, but I'm surely no master of it. Now and again I have an original insight, a thing or two that I want to say. And I'm not excessively clumsy at characterization nor too free with flowery metaphors and overextended similes. I know my English grammar as well as the next college graduate. But I simply am not capable of the day-to-day, day-in-day-out, sustained effort of creation.

That takes more sensitivity than I have-and a greater madness as well. I say madness, for even the worst godawful hack must believe-even if he denies it to everyone and to himself-that what he does makes a difference, however minuscule, in the course of human events. It really does not. I'm sorry, but that's true.

The world is only a madhouse. And who can reason with madmen? Who can organize an asylum? To one degree or another, the majority of men (and women) are lunatics: religious fanatics, political fanatics, racial fanatics. You can't argue with them, for you can't educate them unless they want to be educated.

And, my friends, they don't want. And if you write, instead, as a challenge not to the masses but to the ages, if you feel that you are flinging the gauntlet in the face of Time, then you don't understand the second thing that I learned in the last war:

Death is real and final.

Death is not a release from suffering.

Death is not a blessing.

Death is not a mystery.

Death is not a solution.

Death is not a trip to heaven.

Or to hell.

Or to limbo.

Or to nirvana.

Or to (fill in your favorite paradise).

Death is not a oneness with

Nature.

Or with God.

Or with the universe.

Death is not reincarnation.

Death does not just happen to other people.

Death is not just what the villain deserves.

Death is not just a novelist's device.

Death is not heroic.

Death is not just for the movies.

Death is not just a stage we go through.

Death is not mutable.

Death is not beatable.

Death is not cheatable.

Death is not a joke.

Death. Is. Real. And. Final.

Final.

Forever.

And that's it.

So what else is there for a man to do but live while he can? What else makes sense but grabbing all the love and joy that you can, while you can, and to hell with trying to change the unchangeable? To hell with a writer's conscience, his morals, his vision, and his mission.

Yet here I was thinking about a second book. And I knew that, should we all survive (or even if I survived alone), the story would be told. I would do the telling. The agony of creation would be en dured.

But why?

Not to educate the masses, surely. You know where I stand on that issue.

And not to entertain. There are dozens of writers who are far more clever, much wittier, and much more entertaining than I could ever hope to be.

I'm no good at inventing thrills and chills, perhaps because the very worst in life has happened to me and pales the product of my imagination (although I still read thrillers and enjoy them).

Why, then, this book?

I suppose because, in the war, my diary became an important outlet for me. It was an unspeaking counselor, a silent psychiatrist, a priest to whom I could confess, wail, scream, whisper, vomit out the torment. And now, if we survived the ordeal at

Tim-berlake Farm, I could best cleanse my soul of the stain if I put the story down on paper.

And having written it, why not make a buck or two? More money would mean a better chance of enjoying life fully.

I am being dangerously frank.

Decry my attitude if you wish. Feel superior. Be my guest. I have nothing to lose.

But now that's been said, I must also say that there was another reason why I felt driven toward the writing of a second book. As I stood there in the snow, I sensed that this story had a unique aspect which demanded that it be told-not for the benefit of other men, not for the ages, but for something larger and greater than the fame-wealth-acceptance that most writers seek, something altogether indefinable.

Did the story have to be told for them-for the aliens?

But that made no sense. So far as I could see, they thought of us as animals, protein, mindless creatures, meat on the hoof. Even if my book were published and a copy placed before them, they most likely would not realize that writing and the making of books were signs of an intelligent species. To them a book might be as unremarkable an object as a stone or a clod of earth, for they might have evolved telepathy before language, thus making language unnecessary.

To them, written symbols might be inconceivable. After all, if our farmhouse-a four-walled geometric structure of some sophistication when compared to a rabbit warren or a bear's den-was no indication to them that we were specimens of an intelligent species with whom they ought to communicate, with whom they should make every effort to be understood rather than feared, then no book would catch their notice or be at all meaningful to them.

And yet I knew that I would write it. And knowing that much, having accepted it, I was able to get moving once more. I walked on toward Pastor's Hill, through wind and snow, feeling no better nor any worse for having made that decision. I was merely perplexed by it.

I crossed the open fields and climbed the wooded slope of Pastor's Hill without encountering a single living creature born of this world or any other. On the crown of the hill, buffeted by the wind that roared through the bare branches and between the stark trunks of the trees, I stopped to rest.

With one hand over my eyes in the manner of an Indian scout in an old movie, I searched to the west for the Johnson farm which lay atop a bald hill beyond this arm of the forest. I could not see the house or the red barn or even the hill itself. The day had brightened considerably, but the snow was falling thick and fast, whipped relentlessly by the wind; and I could see no farther than a hundred yards.

I sucked on the winter air and began to move again. At the bottom of Pastor's

Hill, I crossed a narrow, frozen creek. My snowshoes rattled noisily on the ironlike surface.

On the far side of the creek I was stopped by another thought: without a compass I was sure to become disoriented and hopelessly lost in the forest maze. Up to this point, I had known the terrain fairly well, but from here on it would be all new to me. Somehow I had to maintain a westward heading, without deviation, if I were to reach the Johnson farm. At first I didn't see how I could be positive I was on a proper course. The sun was hidden by dense clouds, its light so diffused that I couldn't simply rely on keeping it behind my back to assure my westward progress. And then I realized that until the sun rose higher the western horizon would be the darkest of the four. This section of the woods- mostly maple, birch, elm, oak, and only a very few scattered evergreens-had been denuded by the cycle of the seasons; therefore, I could see the lowering gray clouds and mark my course by walking toward the gloomiest part of the sky. Soon the sun would rise high enough so that no distinction between dark and light horizons would be possible, but the system should see me most of the way through the forest if I hurried in advance of the dawn.

I lumbered forward. The bulky snowshoes were considerably less useful to me here than they had been out in the open fields, for they kept getting snagged in brush, briars, and brambles that poked through the snow. Nevertheless, persevering, I made fairly good time.

And I was not molested. Apparently, I had escaped the farmhouse without being seen.

At 9:30 in the morning I came out of the trees into a pasture below the Johnson farm. The land rose gently, like a woman's breast, with the farm perched prettily atop the hill. There was no movement in or around the house, nor were any lights burning. At least I was not able to see movement or light from where I stood, although I was too far away to be absolutely certain.

The hillside was a fantasy of scalloped drifts, some of them too soft to bear my weight even though the snowshoes distributed it over a large area. Time and again I sank to my hips in powdery snow and had to claw my way out, wasting precious energy and minutes. My greatest fear, just then, was of dropping into a drift that was higher than my head-in which case I might exhaust myself trying to escape, pass out and freeze to death there, entombed in the fresh snow.

I tried not to think about that and kept plodding upward. By 10:00 I gained the crest, having taken half an hour to make what would have been a three-minute walk on a snowless day. I crossed the lawn to the back porch, clambered up the steps and over the porch to the rear door of the house.

The door was standing open. Wide open. The un-lighted kitchen lay beyond.

I wanted to turn and go home.

That was impossible.

I knocked on the door frame.

Only the wind answered me.

"Hey!"

Nothing.

"Hey, Ed!"

The wind.

"Molly?"

Silence.

Then I noticed that the door had been open for so long that the snow had drifted through it and had piled up to a depth of eight or ten inches on the nearest kitchen tiles. Reluctantly, I went inside.

"Ed! Molly!"

Who was I kidding?

There was no one in the kitchen.

I went to the cellar door, opened it, and stared down into perfect velvety blackness. When I tried the light switch, there was no response. I closed the door, locked it, and listened for a moment to be sure that nothing stirred in the cellar.

Next, I went to the kitchen cabinets and searched through most of the drawers until I found a twelve-inch, razor-sharp butcher's knife. Holding it as if it were a dagger, raised and ready, I went from the kitchen into the downstairs hall.

The house was as cold as the winter world outside. My breath hung in clouds before me.

Just inside the hall archway

I stopped, peeled up the ear flaps on my hunting cap, and listened closely. But there was still nothing to hear.

The living room contained entirely too much furniture, but it was cozy: pine bookcases, three overstuffed easy chairs with white antimacassars, two footstools, two floorlamps, three other lamps, a magazine rack, a faded velveteen divan with carved mahogany arms, a rocking chair, a magnificent old grandfather clock which had run down and was no longer ticking, a television set and a radio on its own stand, occasional tables covered with knick-knacks, and a stone fireplace with a statuette-bedecked man tel. A thick ceramic mug half-full of frozen coffee and a half-eaten breakfast roll were on the table beside one of the arm chairs, and there was an open magazine lying on the footstool before the chair. It looked as if someone had gotten up to answer the door and had never returned.

The dining room was directly across the hall from the living room. It was also deserted. I even opened the closet: cardboard cartons sealed with masking tape, a few lightweight summer jackets, photograph albums shelved like books

There was a noise behind me.

I turned as quickly as I could, too clumsy in the snowshoes.

The room was as it had been.

I sat down and took off my snowshoes.

Another noise: a mechanical clicking

Or was I hearing things?

Cautiously, I crept to the dining room doorway, hesitated on the brink of it like a paratrooper at the penultimate moment, and then leapt into the hall.

Nothing.

All was quiet.

Had it been my imagination?

The only other room downstairs was the den. The door was closed. I put my ear against it, but there wasn't anything for me to hear. Of course, I had made so much noise coming into the house that I would have alerted any of the aliens if they had been here. I raised the dagger high, gave the door a solid kick that threw it inward, and charged through, prepared to slash at anything that might be waiting for me.

No one was there.

No thing was there.

I kept the dagger raised, ready.

I followed the main hallway to the front of the house, intending to go upstairs-and I found the front door lying on the floor of the foyer, the house open to the elements. Although the door was half-buried under a couple of feet of snow that had sifted inside, I could see that it had been broken into three or four large pieces, smashed apart and thrown into the foyer. Shuffling closer, I examined the hinges which were still attached to the frame. The steel had been bent out of shape. The hinge bolts had been snapped as if they were pencil lead.

Stepping outside onto the front porch, I looked to the left, over at the barn. There was nothing out of place over there. The fields in front of the house were white and peaceful. The forest loomed near on the right, but there were no yellow-eyed creatures peering from between the trees.

None that I could see.

I went back into the foyer and stood there for at least five minutes, perhaps ten, listening, waiting to hear that clicking noise I'd heard in the dining room. But the silence was deep and unbroken. I seemed to be alone.

Flexing my fingers around the hilt of the butcher's knife, I went upstairs.

Five doors opened off the second-floor hall, and four of them were closed. The fifth had been smashed from its hinges and was lying half in the room and half in the corridor.

"Who's there?" I called.

My voice echoed against the icy walls.

I looked down the steps. They were empty. The snow in the foyer bore no footprints except for my own. Nothing had tried to creep up behind me.

Yet.

Death does not just happen to other people.

Death is not just for the movies.

This is like the war, exactly.

Death is not mutable.

Death is not heroic.

Death is final.

Death is real.

Get out fast.

Get out!

I took one step toward the broken door, then another and another and a fourth, stopping only when the floorboards creaked and startled me. I listened to the wind in the attic and thought of all those moldy H. P. Lovecraft stories that I'd read when

I was a kid. An eternity later I managed to take another step, and an eternity after that I reached the ruined doorway to the master bedroom. There, I froze and waited for something to happen.

But nothing happened.

"Hey!"

I felt as if this was Hallowe'en night and I was a child in a graveyard, timidly searching for ghosts that I didn't believe in but which I fully expected to find.

I stepped into the doorway and hesitated and then took one more step into the room.

Violence had been done here. A rocking chair was on its side, one arm smashed. The vanity bench lay in the corner by the dresser, splintered as if someone had taken an axe to it. The dresser mirror had been shattered; and shards of silvered glass were all over the floor. The bureau was on its side, drawers spilling from it and clothes foaming from the drawers.

I found the skeleton on the far side of the canopied bed. It was a human skeleton, sprawled gracelessly on the floor. It leered up at me. It held not even an ounce of flesh. Small, fine-boned, it was obviously a woman's skeleton. The remains of Molly Johnson.

12

The Johnson farm was as real as pain, and at the same time it was also a clairvoyant vision, a psychic-flash premonition of our own fate: a warning that there was no possible future but this one for Connie, Toby, and me. The gigantic face of Death lay beneath me, the obscene mouth opened wide; and I balanced precariously-in the style of bespectacled Harold Lloyd, but grimly, grimly-on the dark and rotting lips. I walked through the house, barn, and stable like a man moving, dazzled and amazed, through the jagged landscape of a demented, paranoid nightmare which was as solid and as undeniable as Fifth Avenue.

We were going to die.

All of us: Connie, Toby, me.

There was no escape.

I knew it. I felt it.

But I told myself that the future could be shaped by one's own thinking, and that I must abandon negative thinking and embrace all that was positive.

Nevertheless, struggling with a Peale imitation, I continued to sense a rapidly approaching disaster of truly terrifying proportions.

When I found nothing more of interest in the farmhouse (no new skeletons), I went downstairs and outside, across the porch, into the whirling snow. Without benefit of snowshoes, I went to the barn, bulling my way through knee-deep snow and walking around the more formidable drifts.

The winter world was a kaleidoscope of death: rotate the lens for countless disturbing images:

— the storm sky: waxy, mottled gray-black, as still as if it had been painted on a fine-gram canvas: the skin of a corpse;

— the wind: cold, crisp, enervating: the breath of the long-dead multitudes;

— the forest: deep, Stygian, mysterious: home of Goethe's terror, Der

Erlkonig;

— the unbiquitous snow: milk-pure, bride-white, hymeneal: the death shrouds, the smooth satin lining of a new casket, age-bleached bones

The barn doors slid open on well oiled runners.

I entered with the wickedly sharp butcher's knife held out in front of me, although I sensed that the weapon was now quite worthless. The enemy had come, had taken all that was wanted, and had gone away from this place a long, while ago. The barn no longer contained any danger that could be dispatched with a well honed knife.

I stepped out of the cold winter wind into motionless air that was even more chilling.

The barn was a mausoleum that contained the skeletons of sixteen fully grown milk cows. Fifteen of them were lying in railed milking bays, their heads toward the outside barn walls, fleshless haunches poking out into the hay-strewn central aisle down which I walked. They seemed to have died and been stripped of their flesh in an instant, much too swiftly for them to have become sufficiently agitated to snap their restraining ropes which were still intact, looped around skeletal necks.

The sixteenth set of bones was piled in the center of the aisle, the head having fallen more than a yard from the neck vertebrae, one keyboard of ribs smashed into hundreds upon hundreds of splinters; and the empty eye sockets spoke without voice but with an eerie eloquence.

As I walked the length of the barn, I tried to imagine how the cows had been dealt with so suddenly-and why it had been done. I was no longer absolutely certain that the aliens had killed for food; indeed, the longer I thought about it the more foolish and small-minded that explanation seemed; and instead, it occurred to me that these creatures might have been taking specimens of earth's fauna. And yet… If that were the case, why wouldn't they want the bones along with everything else? Why wouldn't they take the whole animal as it had been in life? Perhaps they had been seeking neither food nor specimens. They might well have reasons that only they could ever understand, motivations that I (or any other man) would find incomprehensible.

It was craziness.

Of course: the world is a madhouse: most people are lunatics: the laws of the universe are irrational, insane: the other lesson from the last war.

I looked up at the lofts on both sides.

Nothing was looking back down at me.

At the other end of the barn, the big sliding door was all the way open. Snow and spicules of ice were sheeting inside. The bare skeleton of Garbo, Ed Johnson's German shepherd, made a graceless heap on the sill, lying both in and out of the building. The lupine skull had been shattered at the very top and then cracked into surprisingly even halves from brow to tip of snout, as if the dog had suffered a sudden, brutally sharp blow with a length of iron pipe directly between and above the eyes. Its yellow-white teeth, as pointed as needles, appeared to be bared in a hideous snarl, but that was nothing more than the naked rictus common to any skull, whether human or animal, when it was revealed without the adornment of flesh.

If the aliens finally got to me, I would look exactly like that: grinning/snarling at eternity.

That's how

Connie would look, too.

And Toby.

Premonitions

I stepped over Garbo and walked outside where I found what remained of Ed Johnson. Just his bones, of course. His battered pickup truck stood twenty feet away, facing the barn door.

A drift had built up all along the passenger's side, as high as the window and into the cargo bay. The driver's door was open, pressed back against the front fender by the steady wind; and a man's skeleton was crumpled in the snow beside the truck. Snow was drifted over parts of it and filled up the empty rib cage.

One macabre arm was raised from the elbow, and the fingers appeared to be grasping the winter air.

In the stable that stood behind the barn and beyond the abandoned pickup truck, there were three horses as well as a cat that had been named Abracadabra (for the way it had made mice disappear from the house and barn within a week after it had taken up residence with the Johnsons): now four skeletons. While it was no less horrifying than my first encounter with the aliens hideous litter (poor Blueberry's bones in that forest clearing yesterday afternoon, discarded as a human camper might thoughtlessly discard the remnants of a chicken dinner), this last scene had very little effect on me. I was sated with horror, bored with it, jaded.

The large shed in which Ed had kept all of his tools, his work bench, and emergency power generator was attached to the south wall of the stable, and it was there that I came across the most curious sight that the farm had to offer. A massive black bull — not merely the skeleton but the entire carcass, frozen, as hard as ice, its eyes opaque with frost- was slumped against the machinery. One of its horns had broken off and flipped onto a nearby window sill where it gleamed dully in the cloud-filtered December light. The animal had suffered other injuries. Its head, shoulders, and thick haunches were marked by deep cuts and abrasions and frozen blood as dark as grape juice. The generator was in no better condition than the bull. Thin sections of the housing had been punctured by the horns, and the thicker plates of steel were badly bent and dented. Wires and cables had been torn loose. The four big batteries had been toppled from their stands. Clearly, the animal had killed itself in a fierce, mindless battle with the machinery.

It was like Don

Quixote in reverse. A near-sighted bull out to prove his worth against a man but mistaking a machine for his real adversary.

Why?

Why not?

Be serious.

I am serious.

Then why?

Why not?

That's no answer!

As good as any.

Why did the bull do it? I insisted.

I reminded myself: the world is a madhouse, and don't you ever forget it. Don't let it upset you. Flow with it.

The bull's ice eyes glared at me from beneath blood-crusted brows and savaged flesh.

I thought: death is real and final.

Hey, you've got it now, I told myself.

Numbed by more than the cold air, I went out of the shed and closed the door.

Going around the barn in order to avoid the display of bovine biology within it, I started toward the farmhouse. But on the hill, halfway between the two structures, I wound down like a toy soldier, stepping slower and slower and slower and slower still until

I wasn't moving at all. Letting the wind slap my upraised face, I stared around at the silent farm and felt nervous shock finally give way to fear and then to terror.

The house was a crypt.

The barn was a mausoleum.

The stable was a charnal house.

The Johnson farm: a graveyard.

I had walked more than two miles through a raging blizzard, had fought the wind and the snow and the biting cold and the steep terrain all in order to find help for Connie, Toby, and me. But now it seemed that there was no help, no help anywhere near enough for it to matter.

I had come all this way to enlist our neighbors in a miniature war of the worlds that was nonetheless deadly for its limited scope. But now I knew that our only neighbor was Death-who would let me borrow a cup of eternity.

I wanted to lie down. Go to sleep. Yes. Sleep… Slip down into a lovely darkness where there would be no yellow-eyed creatures from beyond the stars, where there would not be any trouble of any sort, where there would be nothing, nothing

As frightened of these negative thoughts as I was of the aliens, I bent and scooped up handfuls of snow and pushed them in my face. I gasped and coughed and spluttered, recovered enough to stagger toward the farmhouse once more.

But what next?

Toby

Connie

How could I save them?

Or were they already dead?

And as before I thought:

The Johnson farm was a real pain, and at the same time it was also a clairvoyant vision, a psychic-flash premonition of our own fate: a warning that there was no possible future but this one for

Connie, Toby, and me.

The gigantic face of Death lay beneath me, the obscene mouth opened wide; and I balanced precariously-in the style of bespectacled

Harold Lloyd, but grimly, grimly-on the dark and rotting lips.

And my feet were slipping.

13

In only five minutes I had a stack of logs burning in the big living room fireplace. They crackled, hissed, popped, and sent thin smoke up the stone flue. The flames were yellow-orange and danced wildly in the draft. Not surprisingly, the room looked about one thousand percent cheerier in the warm, flickering light.

Although I had no appetite, I went out to the kitchen to look for food. If I had to hike all the way back to Timberlake Farm after resting for only one hour, then I needed to eat something, pack in fuel to replace what I'd burned up getting here. Molly Johnson's pantry was well-stocked-however, most of the food had been ruined by the long deep freeze that had begun soon after the electric power had failed. Fruit, vegetables, and other goods that had been packaged in jars were now unedible, for they had frozen, expanded, and shattered the containers: shards of glass now prickled the frozen contents. Most of the cans were swollen and would have been the end of any can opener. I found a homemade chocolate cake in the bread box, however, and a half — gallon of vanilla ice cream in the refrigerator. I took the cake and the ice cream-both of which were like lumps of granite-to the fireplace to thaw them out a bit. Soon, the ice cream melted, and the cake grew soft. I managed to finish two respectable portions of each. Then I brought snow in from outside and melted it in a bowl. I drank the warm water which turned out to be the best part of the lunch and made me feel better than I had in hours.

(Why such a lengthy description of a meal that was something considerably less than a gastronomic delight? Because I don't want to get on with what remains of the story? Quit stalling, Hanlon. Put it down on paper, every last terrible twist and turn of it, down on paper and out of your system in the very best tradition of self-analysis. Then you can go quietly mad.)

In the den I examined all of the weapons in the gun case. I chose a rifle with telescopic sights and a double-barrel shotgun. I loaded both weapons and carried them to the living room along with two boxes of ammunition.

By this time I was extremely anxious to get going, for I did not like to think of Connie and Toby all alone at Timberlake Farm-especially not as the day rushed toward an early winter sunset. I also didn't like to think of trekking through the woods in the dark, easy prey for Nature and the aliens. Yet

I understood that if I were to make another long journey in the snow, I would have to stay here before the fire for an hour or until my bones as well as my clothes were warm and dry. And as impatient as I was to get moving, I sat there as long as it took for the fire to revive me. In the dancing flames I saw faces:

Connie, Toby, and a face composed solely of two enormous yellow eyes

At one o'clock in the afternoon, I left the Johnson farm by way of the same hill and pasture over which I'd come.

The rifle was strapped across my back.

I carried the shotgun in my right hand.

I was ready for anything.

At least I thought I was.

It was not easy going. And that's an understatement. The temperature had dropped fifteen or twenty degrees from where it had stood this morning and must now be hovering well below zero even without the wind chill factor figured into it. And the wind chill factor had to be considerable, for the wind was coming in from the west with the same forty-mile-an-hour punch that it had been throwing at us (except for occasional fifty-mile-an-hour gusts and sixty-mile-an-hour squalls) for nearly seventy-two hours. Furthermore, new drifts had built up everywhere, and many of them had not yet formed crusts thick enough to support my weight. I fell into them and struggled out and got to my feet and walked a few steps and fell again, pratfall after pratfall. It became monotonous. After what seemed like six or eight hours of grueling, Herculean effort, I came to a familiar limestone formation against which I had rested for a spell this morning when I had been traveling in the opposite direction. The limestone marked the halfway point through this arm of the forest, which meant that I was only one-quarter of the way back to Timberlake Farm. I allowed myself less than five minutes, then started out once more. I walked eastward, judging my direction by certain formations of land and trees and brush which I had carefully committed to memory on the way westward earlier in the day. The wind blew and the snow snowed and the cold chilled and the light gradually went out of the gray sky as if some celestial hand were slowly turning a rheostat switch up above the clouds.

I was lying on my back under a bare elm tree, resting. I had no idea how I had gotten there; I couldn't remember lying down. And I was lying on the rifle which was still strapped across my back… Odd. Distinctly odd… But much more comfortable than I would have thought. Oh yes. So comfortable. Just lovely. I felt warm and snug. I could look up through the interlacing black branches and watch the pretty little lacy snowflakes spiraling down to the earth. So very pretty and warm and soft and pretty and soft and warm, warm, warm, warm

Hanlon, don't be a fool, I told myself.

Well I like it here, I answered.

For eternity?

Five minutes will do.

Eternity.

Will you stop messing in my comfortable world?

Get up.

No.

Get up!

I rolled onto my side, sat up, clutched at the trunk of the tree, and got my numbed feet under me again. My sense of balance was functioning about as well as it would have done had I just now stepped off the biggest, fastest roller coaster in the world. The world circled around and around me… Nevertheless,

I got going once more, head down and thrust out in front of me, teeth clenched and jaws bulging, shotgun in one hand, the other hand fisted, looking and feeling mean as a treed raccoon.

A clump of powdery white stuff fell out of the laden pine boughs overhead and struck me in the face. I spluttered, coughed, cursed, groped around in the snow, found the shotgun just inches from my fingers, used it as a staff, and levered myself to my feet.

I thought smugly, How about that for stamina? Huh? Now that is what you call true grit.

But right away the pessimistic half of me leaped into the conversation with both mental feet. If that snow, I said sternly to myself, hadn't fallen smack in the middle of your ugly face, you know where you would still be? You would still be right there on the ground, under that tree; you'd be there until you finally froze to death.

Not true!

Sure is.

I was resting.

Resting?

Conserving strength.

Well, every minute you spend "conserving strength" is one more minute that Connie and Toby-remember them, Connie and

Toby, wife and son? — spend all alone in the farmhouse.

Hey, you really know how to spoil a good mood, don't you?

Yeah.

I guess I've rested enough.

You better believe it.

Determined to put an abrupt end to this interminable interior dialogue, I oriented myself, took a deep breath of air that seemed instantly to crystallize my lungs, and walked westward. Within a few minutes I came to a narrow frozen creek. I crossed it and went up the western slope of Pastor's

Hill.

On the crest I braced myself against the wind that pummeled my back, and I stared out at the open fields of Timberlake Farm. The house was concealed by billowing curtains of snow. But it was out there, just beyond my sight, and I would be home in an hour or so. Just one more mile to go, the last mile, the easiest mile by far, right across open land, no trees or hills or briars or brambles, easy, simple, sweet, a real Cakewalk.

Darkness.

Softness.

Warmth.

And I kept thinking:

Death is not beatable.

Death is not cheatable.

Death is not mutable.

Death is real and final.

"I'm not dead yet!" I croaked, staggering to my feet.

I walked perhaps ten yards before I realized that I no longer had the shotgun; and I turned right around and went back to look for it. I passed the place where I had collapsed, kept going.

Twenty or thirty feet farther on, I found the gun. The snow had nearly buried it. The black, ice-sheathed barrel poked up out of a drift just far enough to catch my eye. I pulled the weapon free, gripped it firmly in both trembling hands, and stomped off toward the house that was still shrouded in a shifting haze of snow.

Each step was agony. Pain shot up my legs, burned along my back.

Only my feet were free of pain, for they were numbed by the intense cold.

I had trouble getting my breath.

I cursed my weaknesses as I walked.

(I am expending too much time and too many words recounting this journey back from the Johnson farm. And I know why I'm doing that; I can see through myself so easily. There are two reasons. One: I don't want to have to write about what follows this standard scene of wilderness survival. I don't want to face up to the memory.

Two: I am trying with all my might to convince myself that I did everything I possibly could have done, everything any human being could have done. I walked for four miles through a furious storm, seeking help. Was it my fault that there was no help available at the other end? Stop stalling, Hanlon. Will you just get on with it?)

Darkness moved across the sky like spilled ink seeping through a carpet.

The temperature dropped.

Night came in full, squeezed tight around me, exciting claustrophobic fears.

I proceeded blindly, squinting at nothing, blinking away the tears that the cold wind had pressed from my eyes and which it now turned to ice on my cheeks. I kept moving, trusting to instinct to keep me headed for home, because I was terrified that the moment I stopped I would become confused, disoriented, and would wander helplessly in circles thereafter.

Snow: crusting in the eyelids, tickling in the nostrils, stinging the lips, melting on the tongue

Wind: behind like a pursuing demon, pushing, shoving, battering, whistling against muffled ears

I fell.

I got up.

I walked.

There was nothing else I could do.

How far to go?

Quarter of a mile.

How can you be sure?

Maybe half a mile.

I can't make half a mile.

Then it's an eighth of a mile.

I fell.

I didn't get up.

Darkness… warmth… softness like cotton blankets… a cup of warm cocoa… happiness

As the vision drew me in, fear suddenly exploded and blew the image to pieces. I got up, licking my lips. I started walking, wondered if I were still going eastward, kept going.

I fell again.

I got up as far as my hands and knees, my head hanging down-and I realized that I was kneeling in a circle of pale yellow light. A shudder passed through me as I pictured half a dozen yellow-eyed creatures closing in around me, casting an eerie luminous glow before them. But

I looked up and found that the light was coming from one of the farmhouse windows not more than ten feet away.

A minute later I fell against the front door, pounded on it, called for Connie, wept.

The door opened.

"Don!"

I stumbled inside, leaned against her when she offered a shoulder, and said, disbelievingly: "I'm home."