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.
