Invasion

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