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
