doorway to the master bedroom. There, I froze and waited for something to happen.
But nothing happened.
'Hey!'
I felt as if this was Hallowe'en night and I was a child in a graveyard, timidly searching for ghosts that I didn't believe in but which I fully expected to find.
I stepped into the doorway and hesitated and then took one more step into the room.
Violence had been done here. A rocking chair was on its side, one arm smashed. The vanity bench lay in the corner by the dresser, splintered as if someone had taken an axe to it. The dresser mirror had been shattered; and shards of silvered glass were all over the floor. The bureau was on its side, drawers spilling from it and clothes foaming from the drawers.
I found the skeleton on the far side of the canopied bed. It was a human skeleton, sprawled gracelessly on the floor. It leered up at me. It held not even an ounce of flesh. Small, fine-boned, it was obviously a woman's skeleton. The remains of Molly Johnson.
12
The Johnson farm was as real as pain, and at the same time it was also a clairvoyant vision, a psychic-flash premonition of our own fate: a warning that there was no possible future but this one for Connie, Toby, and me. The gigantic face of Death lay beneath me, the obscene mouth opened wide; and I balanced precariously-in the style of bespectacled Harold Lloyd, but grimly, grimly-on the dark and rotting lips. I walked through the house, barn, and stable like a man moving, dazzled and amazed, through the jagged landscape of a demented, paranoid nightmare which was as solid and as undeniable as Fifth Avenue.
We were going to die.
All of us: Connie, Toby, me.
There was no escape.
I knew it. I felt it.
But I told myself that the future could be shaped by one's own thinking, and that I must abandon negative thinking and embrace all that was positive.
Nevertheless, struggling with a Peale imitation, I continued to sense a rapidly approaching disaster of truly terrifying proportions.
When I found nothing more of interest in the farmhouse (no new skeletons), I went downstairs and outside, across the porch, into the whirling snow. Without benefit of snowshoes, I went to the barn, bulling my way through knee-deep snow and walking around the more formidable drifts.
The winter world was a kaleidoscope of death: rotate the lens for countless disturbing images:
— the storm sky: waxy, mottled gray-black, as still as if it had been painted on a fine-gram canvas: the skin of a corpse;
— the wind: cold, crisp, enervating: the breath of the long-dead multitudes;
— the forest: deep, Stygian, mysterious: home of Goethe's terror, Der
Erlkonig;
— the unbiquitous snow: milk-pure, bride-white, hymeneal: the death shrouds, the smooth satin lining of a new casket, age-bleached bones
The barn doors slid open on well oiled runners.
I entered with the wickedly sharp butcher's knife held out in front of me, although I sensed that the weapon was now quite worthless. The enemy had come, had taken all that was wanted, and had gone away from this place a long, while ago. The barn no longer contained any danger that could be dispatched with a well honed knife.
I stepped out of the cold winter wind into motionless air that was even more chilling.
The barn was a mausoleum that contained the skeletons of sixteen fully grown milk cows. Fifteen of them were lying in railed milking bays, their heads toward the outside barn walls, fleshless haunches poking out into the hay-strewn central aisle down which I walked. They seemed to have died and been stripped of their flesh in an instant, much too swiftly for them to have become sufficiently agitated to snap their restraining ropes which were still intact, looped around skeletal necks.
The sixteenth set of bones was piled in the center of the aisle, the head having fallen more than a yard from the neck vertebrae, one keyboard of ribs smashed into hundreds upon hundreds of splinters; and the empty eye sockets spoke without voice but with an eerie eloquence.
As I walked the length of the barn, I tried to imagine how the cows had been dealt with so suddenly-and why it had been done. I was no longer absolutely certain that the aliens had killed for food; indeed, the longer I thought about it the more foolish and small-minded that explanation seemed; and instead, it occurred to me that these creatures might have been taking specimens of earth's fauna. And yet? If that were the case, why wouldn't they want the bones along with everything else? Why wouldn't they take the whole animal as it had been in life? Perhaps they had been seeking neither food nor specimens. They might well have reasons that only they could ever understand, motivations that I (or any other man) would find incomprehensible.
It was craziness.
Of course: the world is a madhouse: most people are lunatics: the laws of the universe are irrational, insane: the other lesson from the last war.
I looked up at the lofts on both sides.
Nothing was looking back down at me.
At the other end of the barn, the big sliding door was all the way open. Snow and spicules of ice were sheeting inside. The bare skeleton of Garbo, Ed Johnson's German shepherd, made a graceless heap on the sill, lying both in and out of the building. The lupine skull had been shattered at the very top and then cracked into surprisingly even halves from brow to tip of snout, as if the dog had suffered a sudden, brutally sharp blow with a length of iron pipe directly between and above the eyes. Its yellow-white teeth, as pointed as needles, appeared to be bared in a hideous snarl, but that was nothing more than the naked rictus common to any skull, whether human or animal, when it was revealed without the adornment of flesh.
If the aliens finally got to me, I would look exactly like that: grinning/snarling at eternity.
That's how
Connie would look, too.
And Toby.
Premonitions
I stepped over Garbo and walked outside where I found what remained of Ed Johnson. Just his bones, of course. His battered pickup truck stood twenty feet away, facing the barn door.
A drift had built up all along the passenger's side, as high as the window and into the cargo bay. The driver's door was open, pressed back against the front fender by the steady wind; and a man's skeleton was crumpled in the snow beside the truck. Snow was drifted over parts of it and filled up the empty rib cage.
One macabre arm was raised from the elbow, and the fingers appeared to be grasping the winter air.
In the stable that stood behind the barn and beyond the abandoned pickup truck, there were three horses as well as a cat that had been named Abracadabra (for the way it had made mice disappear from the house and barn within a week after it had taken up residence with the Johnsons): now four skeletons. While it was no less horrifying than my first encounter with the aliens hideous litter (poor Blueberry's bones in that forest clearing yesterday afternoon, discarded as a human camper might thoughtlessly discard the remnants of a chicken dinner), this last scene had very little effect on me. I was sated with horror, bored with it, jaded.
The large shed in which Ed had kept all of his tools, his work bench, and emergency power generator was attached to the south wall of the stable, and it was there that I came across the most curious sight that the farm had to offer. A massive black bull — not merely the skeleton but the entire carcass, frozen, as hard as ice, its eyes opaque with frost- was slumped against the machinery. One of its horns had broken off and flipped onto a nearby window sill where it gleamed dully in the cloud-filtered December light. The animal had suffered other injuries. Its head, shoulders, and thick haunches were marked by deep cuts and abrasions and frozen blood as dark as grape juice. The generator was in no better condition than the bull. Thin sections of the housing had been punctured by
