Invasion (6 page)

    For a moment I thought I felt something-like cold fingers-grasping at the back of my mind. I tried to recoil from the sensation, realized it was within me, and almost collapsed from sheer terror. Then, abruptly, the sensation passed: but the fear remained.

    As I looked out on the storm and over the snow-draped land, I was aware of an alien quality to all of it, something not unlike the eerie unreality that I had sensed while lying at the bottom of Hill #898 waiting for the battle to begin again. If I had not been out in that foul weather, I would have considered the notion that it was all a stage setting, carefully crafted of cardboard and paint and rice.

    There was too much snow, too much wind, too bitter cold for reality. This white world was the home of other entities, not of man. It tolerated man, nothing more.

    The irrational fear swelled in me again.

    I tried to choke it down; it almost choked me instead.

    This is Maine, I told myself as firmly as I could. And that thing out there is only an animal, not something supernatural or even supernormal. Just an animal. Probably native to this area-but, at worst, an animal that has escaped from a zoo. That's all.

    That's all.

    Connie murmured in her sleep. She twisted from side to side and mumbled in what sounded like a foreign language.

    Wind moaned at the glass in front of me.

    Connie sat straight up in bed and called my name. "Don! Don, don't let it near me! Don't let it have me!"

    I went to her, but even as I reached for her shoulders she collapsed back against her pillows. In an instant the dream had left her, and she was sleeping peacefully.

    I sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the gun from the nightstand. It was loaded; I had filled the magazine myself. Nevertheless, I checked it again to be sure before I leaned back against my pillows to wait for something to happen.

    

The Fear

    

    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!