Invasion

'I'm serious.'

I sighed. 'Horses sometimes get spooked for no good reason at all.' I tried to embrace her again.

She was still intent upon listening to the horses, and she shushed me and held me off.

I said, 'I know I locked the barn doors-so it can't be that the wind is bothering them.'

'What about the heaters?'

'They've been switched on since the last week of October,' I said. 'I never touch them.'

'You're certain?'

'Of course.'

'Well? Maybe the heaters have broken down, and the barn's gotten cold.'

Reluctantly I let go of her and leaned away from her. 'You want me to see about it?'

'Would you?'

'Right away,' I said, punctuating it with a well delivered sigh of regret.

'I'm sorry, Don,' she said, her gazelle eyes wide and blue and absolutely stunning. 'But I can't be happy? I can't feel romantic if those poor horses are out there freezing.'

I got up. 'Neither can

I,' I admitted. Their squeals were really pitiful. 'Though I'd have given it a good try.'

'I'll get your coat.'

'And my scarf and gloves and stocking cap and frostbite medicine,' I said.

She gave me one last smile to keep me warm in the snowstorm. It wasn't the sort of smile most men got from their wives: it was much too seductive for that, too smoky and sultry, not in the least bit domestic.

Five minutes later she huddled in the unheated, glass-enclosed sun porch while I pulled on my boots and zipped them up. As I was about to leave she grabbed me by one arm and pulled me down and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.

'When I come back from psychoanalyzing the horses,' I warned her, 'I'm going to chase you around and around the living room sofa until I catch you.'

'In a fair race you won't catch me.'

'Then I'll cheat.'

'Toby will be waking up in half an hour or so,' she said, using one slender hand to push her blond hair behind her right ear. 'I'm afraid we've lost the opportunity.'

'Oh yeah?'

She gave me a saucy look. 'Yeah.'

'Well, it's about time that kid learned the facts of life anyway, don't you think?'

'Not by watching Daddy chase Mommy around the sofa,' she said.

'Then I'll tell you what.'

She grinned.

'What?'

'While I'm out in the barn clubbing the horses unconscious so they can't interrupt us again, why don't you tie Toby in bed? Then, even if he woke up he couldn't interfere with us.'

'How clever.'

'Aren't I?'

She shook her head in mock exasperation, gave me another of those dazzling smiles, and pushed me through the sun porch door and into the blinding snowfall.

3

Darkness came early at that time of year, and the dense snow clouds had ushered it in half an hour ahead of schedule. I switched on the flashlight that

I had brought with me-and mumbled some very nasty things about the manufacturer who had foisted it upon an unsuspecting public. It cut through the darkness and a thick rush of snowflakes for all of two or three feet-which was like trying to put out a raging bonfire with a child's toy water pistol. Indeed, the sight of all those wildly jiggling and twisting snowflakes in the wan orange shaft of light made me so dizzy that I turned off the torch and made my way to the barn by sheer instinct; however, since the barn was only two hundred feet from the house, the journey was hardly one that would unduly strain my sense of direction, meager as it was.

Born and raised in upstate New York, I had seen my share of major winter storms, but I had never seen anything to compare with this one. The wind had to be cutting up the curve of the hill at more than forty miles an hour. There was a wicked edge to it like the frayed tip of a bullwhip tearing at bare skin; and it produced a chill factor that must have lowered the temperature to a subjective twenty degrees below zero, or worse. It felt like worse. The snow was falling so heavily now that it appeared to be a horizontal avalanche moving from west to east across the Maine countryside. Already, four inches of the dry, grainy pellets had piled up over the path that I had shoveled along the brow of the hill after the previous snow- and there was considerably more than four inches in those places where the wind had built drifts against some obstacle or other.

And the noise! In sequin-dotted Christmas card art and in quaint landscape paintings, snow scenes always look so pleasant, quiet and gentle and peaceful, a good place to curl up and go to sleep. In reality the worst storms are howling, shrieking beasts that can out-decibel any summer thunder shower in a contest of voices. Even with the flaps of my hat pulled down over my ears, I could hear the horrible keening and moaning of the wind. By the time I was twenty steps from the sun porch door, I had a nagging headache.

Snowflakes swept up my nostrils.

Snowflakes trickled down under my collar.

The wind tore tears from my eyes.

I needed four times as long as usual to reach the barn doors, and I stumbled into them with some shouting and much pain before I realized I had come that far. I fumbled at the lock and slid the bolt back, even though my fingers were so cold that they did not want to curl around the wrought-iron pull. Quickened by the elements, I stepped inside and slammed the door behind me, relieved to be out of the whip of the wind and away from those choruses of banshees that had been intent on blowing out both of my eardrums.

In the warm barn the snow on my eyebrows melted instantly and seeped down my face.

In the truest and strictest sense of the word, the building was not really a barn, for it lacked a loft and animal pens and the traditional machinery found in a barn. Only one story high, it ran straight along the crest of the hill: ten spacious horse stalls on the left and seven on the right, storage bins for grain and meal at the end of the right-hand side, saddles stored on the sawhorses in the corner, grooming instruments and blankets and water buckets racked on the wall just above the saddles.

Many years ago, if the people down at Blackstone Realty were to be believed, some wealthy gentleman farmer had bred several race horses here, mostly for his own amusement; now, however, there were only two sorry mares named Kate and Betty, both of them fat and accustomed to luxuries that they had never earned-plus a pony for Toby, name of Blueberry. All three of the animals were extremely agitated, rolling their eyes and snorting. They kicked at the back walls of their stalls. They slammed their shoulders into the wooden partitions that separated them. They raised their long and elegant necks and cried out, their black nostrils flaring and their brown eyes wide with terror.

'Whoa now, whoa now,' I said gently, quietly, trying my best to reassure them. 'Calm yourselves, ladies. Everything's all right. Whoa down now. Just you whoa down.'

I couldn't see what had them so disturbed. The heating units were all functioning properly. The air in the barn was circulating at a pleasant sixty-nine degrees. I walked the length of the place and looked into the empty stalls. But no stray dog or fox had gotten in through some undiscovered chink in the clapboard walls; the horses were alone.

When I tried to calm Blueberry, she snapped at me and just missed taking a sizeable chunk out of my right hand. I had never seen her behave like this before. She peeled her black lips back from her teeth as if she thought she were a guard dog instead of a horse. We had bought her for Toby because she was so gentle and manageable. What had happened, what had changed her temperament so radically and so quickly?