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  Invasion

  Dean R. Koontz

  Having just about concluded that it was nothing more than the wind and the storm that was upsetting the horses — and now they were all leaping and snorting more furiously than ever, as if they were not three ordinary nags but a trio of high-strung thoroughbreds — I turned toward the door and quite accidentally caught sight of the light which glowed eerily just beyond the only window in the entire building. There were two lights, actually, both a warm amber shade and of dim wattage. They appeared to pulse and to shimmer — and then they were gone, as if they had never been: blink!

  I hurried to the barn door, slid it open, and stepped into the snow-filled night. The arctic wind struck me like a mallet swung by a blacksmith who was angry with his wife, and it almost blew me back into the stable row. Switching on the nearly useless flashlight, I bent against the wind and pulled the door shut behind me. Laboriously, cautiously, I inched around the side of the barn in the direction of the window, peering anxiously at the ground ahead of me.

  I stopped before I reached the window, for I found precisely what I had been afraid that I would find: those odd, eight-pointed tracks which Toby and I had seen on the slope earlier in the day. There were a great many of them, as if the animal had been standing there, moving back and forth as it searched for better vantage points, for a long while — at least all of the time that I had been inside with the horses.

  It had been watching me.

  In 1994 Koontz re-released the book under a new name — Winter Moon.

  Dean R. Koontz (as Aaron Wolfe)

  Husband

  INTRODUCTION

  by Barry Malzberg

  The world is a madhouse.

  Death is real and final.

  Somewhere between these two poles where the narrative of Aaron Wolfe's novel occurs something else happens: it becomes a vision.

  This is Aaron Wolfe's first novel. Thirty-four years old and successful in another artistic field he has asked for compelling personal reasons that his real identity not interfere with his fiction and therefore "Aaron Wolfe" is a pseudonym. He is thirty-four years old, married with one child and lives in the midwestern United States.

  Aaron Wolfe's work has appeared in Escapade, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and the Virginia Quarterly; fiction and poetry. He was the recipient of a North American Review writing fellowship in 1965 and one of his stories published that year appeared on the Martha Foley Roll of Honor of distinguished American short stories. INVASION, nonetheless, is his first novel and his first work of science-fiction.

  "I've always loved to read science-fiction," he says, confessing to owning a "large collection" of old pulp magazines and anthologies, "and even have a passion for it. I've been addicted since I was ten and when I sit down with a science-fiction novel I'm like a child again. Who could react otherwise to this marvelous stuff?"

  INVASION gives some indication of what a literary writer of the first rank can do when he essays fiction for a wider audience. It is simply one of the most remarkable first novels, in any field, that I have ever read.

  Other comments relevant to my role in the Laser Book series, how it came about and what I take my own role to be may be found in my introduction to K. W. Jeter's SEEKLIGHT, the first of this group of novels published recently, and I refer the reader, gratefully, to that.

  Barry Malzberg

  New Jersey.

  WEDNESDAY

  The Beginning

  1

  The three-hundred-acre Timberlake Farm, which we were renting that year, was as isolated a refuge as you could possibly find in New England. Elsewhere highways had cut open regions once closed to man by dense pine forests and rocky landscapes; and the small towns, previously content with their unsophisticated ways, had begun to build industrial "parks" to lure manufacturers from the choked cities; and the suburbs continued to sprawl, gobbling up the open countryside, macadamizing and concretizing and tract housing the woodlands. Contemptuous of the noise and the grime of civilization, northern Maine shunned highways that went nowhere; and it did not welcome commuters who wanted to move into the snow country with their big cars and snowmobiles and aluminum-redwood houses. Some day, of course, when the population pressure reached an unbearable peak, even Timberlake Farm would be filled with lookalike, two-bed-room ranch houses and condominium apartment buildings; however, the year that we lived there the farmhouse was two miles from the nearest neighbor and eleven miles from the nearest town, Barley,

  Maine.

  Isolated.

  Perhaps too isolated.

  But that realization was not to come to us until December, after we had lived on the farm for more than six months. And then it was definitely too late for second thoughts.

  The farmhouse was a two story flagstone manor with four large bedrooms, three baths, a drawing room, study, pine-panelled library, formal dining room, and modern kitchen. The luxury was greater than one might expect to find in a farmhouse in Maine-but Timberlake had been conceived as a gentleman's retreat and not as an enterprise that must support itself. The land had never been cultivated, and the barn had never contained any animals but riding horses.

  Isolation:

  The house had one telephone, the lines for which had been run in at no little expense by Creighton

  Development, the company that owned and rented the property through Blackstone

  Realty in Barley. It was completely furnished except for a television set-and we had early decided to do without that questionable luxury in favor of books and conversation.

  Isolation:

  Every two weeks the three of us drove in to Barley in our Volkswagen microbus. We might take in a movie at the Victory Theater, and we always had dinner at the Square Restaurant. We picked up new magazines and paperbacks at the cigar store across the street from the restaurant. That was the full extent-aside from rare telephone calls and the occasional letter we received in the weekly maildrop at the end of our lane-of our contact with the outside world.

  Initially, that was all we required. But once the snows came and the trouble began, we damned our isolation a hundred times a day and wished fervently for contact with people outside our family, with anyone at all..

  The first major blizzard of the year began on the twelfth day of December, late in the afternoon, when there was already eight inches of early-season snow on the ground. Toby and I were in the woods to the north of the house, tracking the foxes, snow rabbits, weasels, squirrels, and the few cats that kept active until the snow was so deep, even under the trees, that they were forced to remain in their caves, burrows, and nests. Toby's favorite pastime was tracking and spying upon our animal neighbors. I enjoyed the gentle sport as much as he did-perhaps because it was gentle, perhaps because I was proud that my son had never once suggested that we go up to the house and get a rifle and hunt down the animals. We were deep in the forest that afternoon, hot on the trail of a fox, when the snow began to sift heavily between the pine boughs, so heavily that we knew a bad storm must be sweeping across the open land, beyond the shelter of the woods. By the time we had followed our own trail back to the edge of the woods, a new inch of snow lay atop the old eight inches; and the farmhouse at the top of the rise three hundred yards away was all but invisible behind shifting curtains of flakes.

  "Will it be deep?" Toby asked.

  "I'm afraid so," I said.

  "I like it deep."

  "You would."

  "Real deep."

  "It'll be over your head," I told him. For a ten-year-old boy he was somewhat slender and a bit short; therefore, I wasn't exaggerating all that much when I held my hand over his head so that he could look up and see how far it would be to the surface if he should become buried in new snow.

  "Great!" he sa
id, as if the notion of being buried alive in a drift were too close to paradise to be borne. He ran off to the right and scooped up a handful of new snow and threw it at me. But it was too dry to pack into a ball, and it only flew apart and blew back on him when he tossed it.

  "Come on, Toby. We better get back to the house before we're stranded down here." I held out my hand to him, hoping that he would take it. Ten-year old boys usually insist on proving their self-reliance; but thirty-year-old fathers would much rather have them dependent, just a little bit, just for a few more years, just enough to need a hand to negotiate a slippery hillside.

  He grinned broadly and started back towards me — then stopped a dozen feet away and stared at the ground. From the way he was bent over, and from the intensity of his gaze, I knew that he had come across a set of tracks and was puzzling out the nature of the animal that had made them.

  We had been tramping through the forest for more than three hours, and I was ready for a warm fireplace and a vodka martini and a pair of felt-lined slippers. The wind was sharp; snowflakes found their way under my coat collar and down by back. "There'll be hot chocolate up at the house," I told him.

  He didn't say anything or look up at me.

  "And a plate of doughnuts."

  He said nothing.

  "Doughnuts, Toby."

  "This is something new," he said, pointing to the tracks in front of him.

  "Marshmallows for the hot chocolate," I said, even though I knew I was losing the battle. No adult can achieve the single-minded determination of a child.

  "Look at this,

  Dad."

  "A game of Monopoly while we eat. How about that?"

  "Dad, look at this," he insisted.

  So I went and looked.

  "What is it?"

  I went around behind him in order to see the tracks from his vantage point.

  He frowned and said, "It's not a fox or a weasel or a squirrel. That's for sure. I can spot one of those right away.

  It kind of looks like the mark a bird would leave, huh Dad? A bird's tracks-but funny."

  These marks certainly were "funny." As I took in the pattern of a single print, I felt the skin on the back of my neck tremble, and the air seemed to be a bit colder than it had been only a moment ago. The print consisted of eight separate indentations. There were three evenly spaced holes in the snow — each of them four inches in front of the other- parallel to a second set of holes two feet to the right of the first line. The marks were all identical, as if they had been stamped in the snow by a man's walking cane. Equidistant from both sets of holes and better than a yard in front of them, there was a pair of similar indentations, although each of these was as large across as the bottom of a standard water glass. It looked like this:

  Although I was rather well acquainted with the woods, I had never seen anything remotely like it before. If all of that were indeed a single print, the animal was quite large, certainly not a bird of any kind.

  "What is it, Dad?" Toby asked. He squinted up at me, his eyelashes frosted with snowflakes, his nose like a berry, the bill of his red cap fringed with ice. He was certain that I would have the answer.

  I said, "I don't really know."

  For an instant his disappointment in me was all too evident then he quickly covered his feelings, changed his expression, broke into a tentative smile. That made me sad, for it was an indication that he understood

  Dad was still on shaky psychological ground and needed all the love and affection he could get. Otherwise, Dad might end up in the hospital again, staring at the walls and not talking and not at all like Dad should be.

  "Can we follow it?" Toby asked.

  "We ought to be getting home."

  "Ahh, heck."

  "Your nose is as red as a stoplight."

  "I'm tough," he said,

  "I know you are. I wouldn't argue about that. But your mother is expecting us about now." I pointed to the rapidly vanishing set of prints. "Besides, the wind and snow will have these filled in within a few minutes. We couldn't track them very far."

  He glanced back toward the trees, squinted his eyes as if he were trying to dispel the shadows under the pine boughs. "Then, whatever it was, it went by here just before we came out of the woods, huh Dad?"

  That was true enough, although I hadn't thought about it. "When the storm's finished, maybe we can come out and look for new tracks," I said.

  "On snowshoes?"

  "Have to use snowshoes if the snow's over your head."

  "Great!" he said, dismissing the mystery that suddenly.

  If we could all remain small boys in at least one tiny corner of our minds, we would never end up in private, locked rooms in silent hospitals, staring at walls and refusing to speak

  "At least we can follow this trail until it turns away from the house," I said.

  He gave me his hand, and we bent our heads against the wind, keeping a close watch on the odd prints as we climbed the slope. The holes were repeated in exactly the same pattern until we were halfway up the hill to the house. At the mid-point of the slope, the prints stopped in a much trampled circle of snow. Toby found the place where they struck off once again toward another arm of the pine forest.

  "It stood here," Toby said. "It stood right here and watched our house for a long time."

  Indeed, the animal, whatever it might be, seemed to have come out of the woods solely to stare at the farmhouse and, once its curiosity was satisfied, had gone away again. But I didn't like to think that was the case. There was some indefinable alien quality about those prints-which were so unlike anything I had ever before encountered that made me at first uneasy and eventually somewhat frightened. That fear, as irrational as it might have been, only increased when I contemplated the thing standing here on this windblown slope, watching the farmhouse where Connie had spent the entire afternoon' alone.

  But that was ridiculous.

  Wasn't it?

  Yes.

  What was there to fear?

  It was only an animal.

  I was being childish.

  "Maybe it was a bear," Toby said.

  "No. A bear's paws wouldn't leave a trail like this."

  "I can't wait to go looking for it on snowshoes."

  Well, that's for another day," I said.

  "Come on."

  He wanted to look at the prints some more.

  I kept hold of his hand and started toward the house again, setting a faster pace than we'd been keeping. "Remember that hot chocolate!" But I wasn't thinking about hot chocolate at all.

  2

  By the time we reached the sun porch at the rear of the house, the wind had the fury of a bomb blast. It followed us through the door, driving a cloud of snow onto the porch.

  We did the traditional things people do when they come in from a cold day: we stamped our feet, slapped our arms against our sides, whooshed! out our breath, and commented on the clouds of steam. By the time we had stripped off our coats, gloves, and boots, Connie really did have cocoa ready for us in the kitchen.

  "Great!" Toby said, climbing onto his chair and poking at the half-dissolved marshmallows with his spoon.

  "Don't you know any other expletive besides 'Great'?" I asked.

  "Expliv-what?" he asked.

  "What you say when you're excited. When something really strikes you as good and wonderful, don't you have anything to say except great!"

  He frowned into his chocolate, thinking about it for a second or two. Then: "Fabulous!"

  "Well, it offers variety," I said.

  Fifteen minutes later, fatigued by his long afternoon of stalking the native fauna, Toby nearly fell asleep in his mug of cocoa.

  "I'll have to take the scout to bed for a nap," Connie said. She was smiling at him, and she was very pretty.

  "I'll do it," I said.

  "Sure?"

  "Sure," I said. "I'd appreciate having something a bit stronger than hot chocolate once I get him tucked in. Do you think that c
ould be arranged?"

  "Possibly."

  "Vodka martinis?"

  "Just the right medicine for a cold day."

  "Especially in large doses."

  "I'll mix a pitcherful. I need some medicine myself."

  "You were in a toasty warm house all afternoon."

  She smiled. "Ah, but I empathize with your frostbite so well. I can feel how chilled you are."

  "I think you're just a lush."

  "That too."

  I lifted Toby in my arms and carried him upstairs to his bedroom at the far end of the main hall. He was not much help undressing himself, for he kept nodding off. I finally got him under the covers and pulled the blankets up to his chin. In seconds his eyelids fluttered shut, and he was sound asleep.

  The storm sky was so dark that there was no need for me to draw the drapes at the two large, mullioned windows. The wind moaned softly against the glass: an eerie but effective lullaby.

  For a while I stood and watched him, and I thought how he would be after his nap: bouncy, energetic, full of ideas and projects and games. When he woke, he would be fascinated by the accumulation of new snow, as if he had not known a storm was in progress when he went to bed.

  Before we could eat dinner, we would have to step outside in our boots and measure the snow with a yardstick. And that would bring full circle one of the routines that I enjoyed so much: put him to bed, wake him, take him out to marvel at the snow. In the summer, there had been other routines, but they had been just as good as this one.

  Downstairs, Connie was sitting by the fireplace where she had put a match to some well-dried birch logs. The sight of her warmed me as the fire could never do. She was a slender but shapely blonde who had celebrated her thirtieth birthday the week before but who might have passed for a teenager without makeup. She was not really beautiful in any conventional sense. She did not resemble a fashion model or a movie star. She had too many freckles for that. Her mouth was much too wide and her nose a little too long for classic beauty. Yet every feature was in harmony with every other feature in her gentle face, and the overall effect was immensely sensuous and appealing.