Invasion Read online

  Her best feature was her eyes which were enormous, round, and blue. They were the wide-open, innocent, curious eyes of a fawn. She always looked as if she had just been startled; she was not capable of that sultry, heavy-eyed look that most men found sexy. But that was fine with me. Her beauty was all the better because it was unique and approachable.

  I sat down on the couch beside her, put my arm around her, and accepted the drink she had poured for me. It was cold, bitter, very refreshing.

  "That's some son you've raised," I said.

  "You've raised him too."

  "I don't take credit where it isn't due," I said.

  After all, I had been in the army for two years, eighteen long months in Southeast Asia. And after that, for more than two years, there had been that gray-walled hospital room where Toby had been allowed to visit only twice, and after that I'd spent another eight months in a private sanitarium

  "Don't be so hard on yourself," she said. She leaned her head against my shoulder. Her pale hair spilled like a fan of golden feathers across my chest. I could feel the pulse throbbing in her temple.

  We stayed like that for a while: working at our drinks and watching the fire and not saying anything at all. When I first got out of the hospital, we didn't talk much because neither of us knew quite what to say.

  I felt terribly guilty about having withdrawn from them and from my responsibilities to them that I was embarrassed about suddenly moving in as an equal member of the family. She hadn't known what to say, for she had been desperately afraid of saying something, anything, that might send me back into my quasicatatonic trance. Hesitantly, fumblingly, we had eventually found our way back to each other. And then there was a time when we could say whatever we chose, a time in which we talked too much and made up for lost years-or perhaps we were afraid that if we didn't say it all now, share it now, immediately, we would have no chance to say it in the future. In the last two months we had settled into a third stage in which we were again sure of each other, as we had been before I went away to war and came back not myself. We didn't feel, as we had, that it was necessary for us to jabber at each other in order to stave off the silences. We were comfortable with long pauses, reveries So: the fire, the drinks, her hair, her quick heartbeat, her hand curling in mine.

  And then for no apparent reason-except, perhaps, that it was all too good; I was still frightened of things being too good and therefore having nowhere to go but down again-I thought of the odd tracks in the snow. I told her about them, but with detachment, as if I were talking about something I had read in a magazine.

  She said, "What do you think made them?"

  "I haven't any idea."

  "Maybe you could find it in one of those books in the den. A drawing or photograph just like what you saw."

  "I hadn't thought of that," I said. "I'll check it out after dinner." The den was furnished with a shelf of books on woodlore, hunting, rifle care and other "manly" subjects in addition to its studded leather furniture.

  "Whatever it is-could it be dangerous?"

  "No, no."

  "I don't mean dangerous for us-but maybe for a little guy like Toby."

  "I don't think so," I said. "It didn't seem to have claws-though it must be fairly large. Toby mentioned a bird. I can't imagine what kind of bird, but I guess it might be that."

  "The largest birds around here are pheasants," she said. "And those tracks sound too big for pheasants."

  "Much too big," I said.

  "Maybe we shouldn't let Toby go outside by himself until we know what we've got on our hands."

  I finished my drink and put the glass on the coffee table. "Well, if the books don't give me a clue, I'll call Sam Caldwell and see if he can put me on the right track. If Sam's never seen anything like them, then they're just figments of our imaginations."

  Sam was seventy years old, but he still operated his sporting goods store on the square in Barley. He hunted and fished through every legal season, for every breed of creature natural to New England. The way his face was weathered-cut across with a hundred lines and deeply tanned by sun and wind- he even looked like a piece of the forest.

  As happened often lately, our admiration for the crackling fire swiftly metamorphosed into admiration for each other, and we began some playful necking. The playfulness gave way to real interest: the kisses grew longer, the embraces firmer. Certain that Toby would be asleep for another hour or so, I had just begun to get really serious with her when she drew back a bit and cocked her head, listening.

  I said, "What is it?"

  "Ssshh!

  When my heartbeat subsided and my breathing was somewhat less stentorian than it had been, I could hear it too: the whinnying cries of the horses "Just the nags."

  "I wonder what's wrong with them?"

  "They know that we're sitting in here getting lovey, and they're jealous. That's all it is. They think we ought to be out there grooming them."

  "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 u
nsuspecting 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?

  "Whoa now. Whoa girl."

  But she simply wasn't going to calm down. She snorted and whinnied and kicked at the back wall of her stall, kicked so hard that a board splintered with a crisp, dry sound.

  Oddly enough

  Kate and Betty were more amenable than Blueberry, even though they both had slight mean streaks. They stopped crying out and ceased kicking their stalls apart as I stroked their faces and rubbed behind their ears. But even they would not come completely under control. They whuffled like dogs and rolled their eyes from side to side.

  I remembered that horses are especially sensitive to fire: the odor of sparking wood, the distant crackle of the first flames, the initial traces of smoke Though I sniffed like a bloodhound, I could not sense anything but hay, straw, dust, sweat, and the peculiarly mellow odor of well used leather saddles and reins. I examined the small oil-fed furnace that warmed the stable. I felt the wall around the fuel tank. I studied the heaters a second time. But I could not find any sign of danger or any malfunction.

  Yet Blueberry reared up and whinnied.

  And the other two were becoming agitated once more.

  Having just about concluded that it was nothing more than the wind and the storm that was upsetting them-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.

  Suddenly I felt as if I were back in Southeast Asia — in a jungle rather than in a snowstorm-where an enemy was relentlessly stalking me.

  Ridiculous, of course.

  It was only some animal.

  A dumb animal.

  I swept the flashlight beam around the hilltop and found where the prints continued a few feet away. Though

  I didn't want to use the flashlight and alert my prey, I couldn't follow the trail without it. The December night was perfectly black and empty once you got away from the light that spilled from the house and from the single stable window. Holding the flashlight before me as if it were a sword, I walked westward, after the animal.

  Wind.

  Snow.

  More wind.

  More snow.

  Two minutes later

  I had lost the trail. The wind and snow had conspired to blot out the prints, scouring the land as clean and smooth as a new cotton sheet.

  Yet that didn't seem possible. Certainly, the snow was falling very hard and fast. Equally as cert
ain: the wind was ugly. But the creature could have had no more than a two minute head start on me. The storm couldn't have erased every trace of it so quickly. Unless Unless it was not moving away from me at the same ponderous pace at which I moved. If, in the instant that it turned away from the stable window, it had run, and if it could run incredibly fast in spite of the bad weather, it might have gotten a five-minute head start and its tracks might easily have filled up and it might be a mile away by now.

  But what sort of animal could move so easily and surely in wind like this, on a night when visibility was near zero?

  Considering that, I had to consider one other thing which I had not wanted to think about just yet. I had seen two amber lights at the window, low lights very much like candle flames muffled by colored glass.

  What kind of animal carried lamps with it.

  A man.

  A man could be a wild animal.

  But why would he carry lamps or lanterns instead of a flashlight?

  A madman?

  And even if it were a man who was playing some grotesque hoax, wearing shoes that made those strange prints, he would not have been able to move so fast and put so much distance between us.

  So where did that leave me?

  Nowhere.

  Standing at the end of the trail, staring out at the gray-white curtains of billowing flakes, I began to feel that the animal had circled behind me and now stood in my own footprints, watching me. The feeling grew so strong, so undeniable, that I whirled and cried out and stabbed my flashlight beam into the air behind me. But the night was all there was.

  "You're being ridiculous," I told myself.

  Having turned my back on the direction in which the animal had fled, uncomfortable because of that, I struggled through the ever-mounting drifts toward the rear of the farmhouse. I shone my flashlight ahead of me, even though I didn't need its light and would have been better off without it.

  Several times I thought I heard something out of place, a metallic snickering noise that I could not identify, nearby, above the ululation of the storm. But each time I probed the surrounding darkness with the flashlight, there was nothing to see but snow.