He wondered if some child might be sitting on a distant porch or at a
window, staring across the rising plains at the headlights of the
Cherokee progressing westward through the June darkness. A young boy
or girl, full of plans and dreams, might wonder who was in the vehicle
behind those lights, where he was bound, and what his life was like.
The thought of such a child out there in the night gave Eduardo the
strangest sense of community, an utterly unexpected feeling that he was
part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of
humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan,
flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble and
admirable, with a common destiny that every member shared.
For him, that was an unusually optimistic and philosophically generous
view of his fellow men and women, uncomfortably close to
sentimentality. But he was warmed as well as astonished by it.
He was convinced that whatever had come through the doorway was
inimical to humankind, and his brush with it had reminded him that all
of nature was, in fact, hostile. It was a cold and uncaring universe,
either because God had made it that way as a test to determine good
souls from bad, or simply because that's the way it was. No man could
survive in civilized comfort without the struggles and hard-won
successes of all the people who had gone before him and who shared his
time on earth with him. If a new evil had entered the world, one to
dwarf the evil of which some men and women were capable, humanity would
need a sense of community more desperately than ever before in its long
and troubled journey.
The house came into view when he was a third of the way along the
half-mile driveway, and he continued uphill, approaching to within
sixty or eighty yards of it before realizing that something was
wrong.
He braked to a full stop.
Prior to leaving for Eagle's Roost, he had turned on lights in every
room. He clearly remembered all of the glowing windows as he had
driven away. He had been embarrassed by his childlike reluctance to
return to a dark house.
Well, it was dark now. As black as the inside of the devil's bowels.
Before he quite realized what he was doing, Eduardo pressed the master
lock switch, simultaneously securing all the doors on the station
wagon.
He sat for a while, just staring at the house. The front door was
closed, and all the windows he could see were unbroken. Nothing
appeared out of order.
Except that every light in every room had been turned off. By whom?
By what?
He supposed a power failure could have been responsible--but he didn't
believe it. Sometimes, a Montana thunderstorm could be a real
sternwinder, in the winter, blizzard winds and accumulated ice could
play havoc with electrical service. But there had been no bad weather
tonight and only the mildest breeze. He hadn't noticed any downed
power lines on the way home.
