'Sure.
You okay?'
'Fine.'
The darkness was absolute. I closed my eyes, squeezed them tight shut, opened them: still nothing.
'What next?' Toby said.
'We've got to get upstairs right away.' As I heard him getting turned around on the steps above me, I said, 'Be careful you don't trip and fall in the dark.'
Connie was in the kitchen. 'Don?'
'I'm here.'
'I can't see you.'
'I can't see you either.'
'Where's Toby?'
'I'm okay, Mom.'
I was feeling around with my hands, like a blind man.
Connie said, 'Did they do it?'
'I'm afraid so,'
'What's going to happen?'
'I don't know. Where are the guns?'
'The rifle's on a chair,' she said. 'The pistol's still on the table unless you have it.'
'I don't.'
'I've got the shotgun,' she said.
'Here's the rifle,' Toby said.
I stumbled toward him.
'Don't touch that!'
'I just have my hand on the butt,' he said. 'I won't pick it up, Dad.'
I found the table and then the pistol and then Toby. I picked up the loaded rifle.
'I'll find some candles,' Connie said.
I said, 'Maybe we should wait for them in the dark.'
'I can't,' she said. 'I can't see anything, not anything at all-and I keep thinking they're already in the house, already in this room. I have to have light.'
For an instant I expected to be touched by an inhuman hand-and then I realized that if the aliens were here with us in the kitchen, we would see their yellow eyes even in this pitch blackness. I said as much.
'I still have to have light,' Connie said.
She fumbled through several drawers, found the matches, and struck up a flame.
She lit a candle.
Then two more.
We were alone.
For the moment.
20
Outside:
With its mission accomplished, the lone alien walked away from the barn in which the dead buck (symbol of something) lay in a bloody heap. The creature's spindly but terribly strong legs poked deep into the snow and thrust forward, unhindered by the drifts. The thing joined its five companions where they stood just thirty yards from the back of the farmhouse.
Seemingly oblivious of the vicious wind and the blinding snow and the cutting sub-zero cold, the six yellow- eyed creatures lined up in a row. They looked quite like soldiers facing their enemy's position and readying their well planned assault.
Which, in fact, is precisely what they were and what they were doing.
(Throughout our ordeal from the earliest moment of it, from the very minute that Toby found those strange tracks in the snow, from the instant I laid eyes on them-I had understood the symbology — both natural and psychological-that was operating in this affair. I had seen the parallels between these events in northern Maine and certain things I had endured in Southeast Asia. Perhaps I haven't commented in enough detail on this aspect of the matter; perhaps I haven't made the war analogy as obvious to you as it was to me, the war analogy and the Asian analogy. It is even possible that I played down my observations because I thought that, by reading such complex and fundamentally crazy meanings into these events, I was stretching a point, belaboring a theory-or maybe even, well, maybe I thought that such observations, when committed to type, might be construed as evidence of some renewed madness in me. Whatever. But, first of all, I am quite sane. My mind is as clear as glacial ice. And as dead as glacial ice-or about to be, as I write this. How long until I die? Each word I type is one less minute of life left to me. But what I want to say is that I did understand the frame of reference, did see the symbology which a madhouse uni verse had thrust upon me, giggling as it rushed past. Oh, I surely saw it all, yes. Oh, yes. I am not a stupid man, you know, and in fact I was valedictorian of my graduating class at Penn State, before the war, like everything else that
I can think of in my life, before the war, before the stinking war? And yet.. Somehow I overlooked the most obvious and important link between these science fictional events and the war in Vietnam. How could I have missed it?
I've read all about Lieutenant Calley. I've read about My Lai and the massacres.
Culture shock. The lack of social interaction. Man's inability to understand his fellow man, especially when skin color, politics, religion, and history separate them. I knew all about that: I was educated: I was a liberal. And yet I missed the point of all I've thus far told to you. It was like the war! It was Vietnam.
It was, there in Maine, Vietnam all over again, the same pain, the same misunderstandings, the same mistakes, dammit!)
The yellow eyes glowed.
The aliens watched the house.
Were they frightened, so far away from home? Or were they, like arrogant American soldiers, sure of their right to dominate and destroy?
When ten minutes had passed, the creatures moved ten yards closer to the sun porch.
Then stopped.
And watched.
And waited.
And made ready.
21
Inside:
In spite of the eighteen-inch-thick stone walls and the solid
Revolutionary War construction which had been augmented by Twentieth Century fiberglas insulation, the farmhouse cooled rapidly once the heating system was knocked out of operation. There were six big fireplaces in the house, and the heat was sucked up and out of all of them while winter air rushed down the flues. Cold air rolled off all of the windows. Fifteen minutes after the lights went out, the air was decidedly chilly. Five minutes after that, the house was downright cold.
We dressed in woolen scarves, caps, gloves, and coats as soon as we realized that we should capture our body heat and hold on to as much of it as possible, before the house was like a refrigerator.
'Maybe we should build a fire,' Connie said.
