down with tepid water.
In the bedroom again, she switched off the bedside lamp.
She wasn't afraid of the darkness.
What she feared was the damage people were capable of doing to one
another either in darkness or at high noon.
CHAPTER TEN.
The tenth of June was not a day in which to be cooped up inside. The
sky was delft blue, the temperature hovered around eighty degrees, and
the meadows were still a dazzling green because the heat of summer had
not yet seared the grass.
Eduardo spent most of the balmy afternoon in a bentwood hickory rocking
chair on the front porch. A new video camera, loaded with tape and
fully charged batteries, lay on the porch floor beside the rocker.
Next to the camera was a shotgun. He got up a couple of times to fetch
a fresh bottle of beer or to use the bathroom. And once he went for a
half-hour walk around the nearer fields, carrying the camera. For the
most part, however, he remained in the chair-waiting.
It was in the woods.
Eduardo knew in his bones that something had come through the black
doorway in the first hour of May third, over five weeks ago. Knew it,
felt it. He had no idea what it was or where it had begun its journey,
but he knew it had traveled from some strange world into that Montana
night.
Thereafter, it must have found a hiding place, into which it had
crawled. No other analysis of the situation made sense. Hiding. If
it had wanted its presence to be known, it would have revealed itself
to him that night or later. The woods, vast and dense, offered an
infinite number of places to go to ground.
Although the doorway had been enormous, that didn't mean the
traveler--or the vessel carrying it, if a vessel existed--was also
large. Eduardo had once been to New York City and driven through the
Holland Tunnel, which had been a lot bigger than any car that used
it.
Whatever had come out of that death-black portal might be no larger
than a man, perhaps even smaller, and able to hide almost anywhere
among those timbered vales and ridges.
The doorway indicated nothing about the traveler, in fact, except that
it was undoubtedly intelligent. Sophisticated science and engineering
lay behind the creation of that gate.
He had read enough Heinlein and Clarke--and selected others in their
vein--to have exercised his imagination, and he had realized that the
intruder might have a variety of origins. More likely than not, it was
extraterrestrial.
However, it might also be something from another dimension or from a
parallel world. It might even be a human being, opening a passage into
this age from the far future.
The numerous possibilities were dizzying, and he no longer felt like a
fool when he speculated about them. He also had ceased being
embarrassed about borrowing fantastical literature from the
library--though the cover art was often trashy even when well
