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.
FRIDAY
The Neighbors
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
