With one hand over my eyes in the manner of an Indian scout in an old movie, I searched to the west for the Johnson farm which lay atop a bald hill beyond this arm of the forest. I could not see the house or the red barn or even the hill itself. The day had brightened considerably, but the snow was falling thick and fast, whipped relentlessly by the wind; and I could see no farther than a hundred yards.
I sucked on the winter air and began to move again. At the bottom of Pastor's
Hill, I crossed a narrow, frozen creek. My snowshoes rattled noisily on the ironlike surface.
On the far side of the creek I was stopped by another thought: without a compass I was sure to become disoriented and hopelessly lost in the forest maze. Up to this point, I had known the terrain fairly well, but from here on it would be all new to me. Somehow I had to maintain a westward heading, without deviation, if I were to reach the Johnson farm. At first I didn't see how I could be positive I was on a proper course. The sun was hidden by dense clouds, its light so diffused that I couldn't simply rely on keeping it behind my back to assure my westward progress. And then I realized that until the sun rose higher the western horizon would be the darkest of the four. This section of the woods- mostly maple, birch, elm, oak, and only a very few scattered evergreens-had been denuded by the cycle of the seasons; therefore, I could see the lowering gray clouds and mark my course by walking toward the gloomiest part of the sky. Soon the sun would rise high enough so that no distinction between dark and light horizons would be possible, but the system should see me most of the way through the forest if I hurried in advance of the dawn.
I lumbered forward. The bulky snowshoes were considerably less useful to me here than they had been out in the open fields, for they kept getting snagged in brush, briars, and brambles that poked through the snow. Nevertheless, persevering, I made fairly good time.
And I was not molested. Apparently, I had escaped the farmhouse without being seen.
At 9:30 in the morning I came out of the trees into a pasture below the Johnson farm. The land rose gently, like a woman's breast, with the farm perched prettily atop the hill. There was no movement in or around the house, nor were any lights burning. At least I was not able to see movement or light from where I stood, although I was too far away to be absolutely certain.
The hillside was a fantasy of scalloped drifts, some of them too soft to bear my weight even though the snowshoes distributed it over a large area. Time and again I sank to my hips in powdery snow and had to claw my way out, wasting precious energy and minutes. My greatest fear, just then, was of dropping into a drift that was higher than my head-in which case I might exhaust myself trying to escape, pass out and freeze to death there, entombed in the fresh snow.
I tried not to think about that and kept plodding upward. By 10:00 I gained the crest, having taken half an hour to make what would have been a three-minute walk on a snowless day. I crossed the lawn to the back porch, clambered up the steps and over the porch to the rear door of the house.
The door was standing open. Wide open. The un-lighted kitchen lay beyond.
I wanted to turn and go home.
That was impossible.
I knocked on the door frame.
Only the wind answered me.
"Hey!"
Nothing.
"Hey, Ed!"
The wind.
"Molly?"
Silence.
Then I noticed that the door had been open for so long that the snow had drifted through it and had piled up to a depth of eight or ten inches on the nearest kitchen tiles. Reluctantly, I went inside.
"Ed! Molly!"
Who was I kidding?
There was no one in the kitchen.
I went to the cellar door, opened it, and stared down into perfect velvety blackness. When I tried the light switch, there was no response. I closed the door, locked it, and listened for a moment to be sure that nothing stirred in the cellar.
Next, I went to the kitchen cabinets and searched through most of the drawers until I found a twelve-inch, razor-sharp butcher's knife. Holding it as if it were a dagger, raised and ready, I went from the kitchen into the downstairs hall.
The house was as cold as the winter world outside. My breath hung in clouds before me.
Just inside the hall archway
I stopped, peeled up the ear flaps on my hunting cap, and listened closely. But there was still nothing to hear.
The living room contained entirely too much furniture, but it was cozy: pine bookcases, three overstuffed easy chairs with white antimacassars, two footstools, two floorlamps, three other lamps, a magazine rack, a faded velveteen divan with carved mahogany arms, a rocking chair, a magnificent old grandfather clock which had run down and was no longer ticking, a television set and a radio on its own stand, occasional tables covered with knick-knacks, and a stone fireplace with a statuette-bedecked man tel. A thick ceramic mug half-full of frozen coffee and a half-eaten breakfast roll were on the table beside one of the arm chairs, and there was an open magazine lying on the footstool before the chair. It looked as if someone had gotten up to answer the door and had never returned.
The dining room was directly across the hall from the living room. It was also deserted. I even opened the closet: cardboard cartons sealed with masking tape, a few lightweight summer jackets, photograph albums shelved like books
There was a noise behind me.
I turned as quickly as I could, too clumsy in the snowshoes.
The room was as it had been.
I sat down and took off my snowshoes.
Another noise: a mechanical clicking
Or was I hearing things?
Cautiously, I crept to the dining room doorway, hesitated on the brink of it like a paratrooper at the penultimate moment, and then leapt into the hall.
Nothing.
All was quiet.
Had it been my imagination?
The only other room downstairs was the den. The door was closed. I put my ear against it, but there wasn't anything for me to hear. Of course, I had made so much noise coming into the house that I would have alerted any of the aliens if they had been here. I raised the dagger high, gave the door a solid kick that threw it inward, and charged through, prepared to slash at anything that might be waiting for me.
No one was there.
No thing was there.
I kept the dagger raised, ready.
I followed the main hallway to the front of the house, intending to go upstairs-and I found the front door lying on the floor of the foyer, the house open to the elements. Although the door was half-buried under a couple of feet of snow that had sifted inside, I could see that it had been broken into three or four large pieces, smashed apart and thrown into the foyer. Shuffling closer, I examined the hinges which were still attached to the frame. The steel had been bent out of shape. The hinge bolts had been snapped as if they were pencil lead.
Stepping outside onto the front porch, I looked to the left, over at the barn. There was nothing out of place over there. The fields in front of the house were white and peaceful. The forest loomed near on the right, but there were no yellow-eyed creatures peering from between the trees.
None that I could see.
I went back into the foyer and stood there for at least five minutes, perhaps ten, listening, waiting to hear that clicking noise I'd heard in the dining room. But the silence was deep and unbroken. I seemed to be alone.
Flexing my fingers around the hilt of the butcher's knife, I went upstairs.
Five doors opened off the second-floor hall, and four of them were closed. The fifth had been smashed from its hinges and was lying half in the room and half in the corridor.
"Who's there?" I called.
My voice echoed against the icy walls.
I looked down the steps. They were empty. The snow in the foyer bore no footprints except for my own. Nothing had tried to creep up behind me.
Yet.
Death does not just happen to other people.
Death is not just for the movies.
This is like the war, exactly.
Death is not mutable.
Death is not heroic.
Death is final.
Death is real.
Get out fast.
Get out!
I took one step toward the broken door, then another and another and a fourth, stopping only when the floorboards creaked and startled me. I listened to the wind in the attic and thought of all those moldy H. P. Lovecraft stories that I'd read when
I was a kid. An eternity later I managed to take another step, and an eternity after that I reached the ruined doorway to the master bedroom. There, I froze and waited for something to happen.
But nothing happened.
"Hey!"
I felt as if this was Hallowe'en night and I was a child in a graveyard, timidly searching for ghosts that I didn't believe in but which I fully expected to find.
I stepped into the doorway and hesitated and then took one more step into the room.
Violence had been done here. A rocking chair was on its side, one arm smashed. The vanity bench lay in the corner by the dresser, splintered as if someone had taken an axe to it. The dresser mirror had been shattered; and shards of silvered glass were all over the floor. The bureau was on its side, drawers spilling from it and clothes foaming from the drawers.
I found the skeleton on the far side of the canopied bed. It was a human skeleton, sprawled gracelessly on the floor. It leered up at me. It held not even an ounce of flesh. Small, fine-boned, it was obviously a woman's skeleton. The remains of
Molly Johnson.
12.
The Johnson farm was as real as pain, and at the same time it was also a clairvoyant vision, a psychic-flash premonition of our own fate: a warning that there was no possible future but this one for Connie, Toby, and me. The gigantic face of Death lay beneath me, the obscene mouth opened wide; and I balanced precariously-in the style of bespectacled Harold Lloyd, but grimly, grimly-on the dark and rotting lips. I walked through the house, barn, and stable like a man moving, dazzled and amazed, through the jagged landscape of a demented, paranoid nightmare which was as solid and as undeniable as Fifth Avenue.
We were going to die.
All of us: Connie, Toby, me.
There was no escape.
I knew it. I felt it.
But I told myself that the future could be shaped by one's own thinking, and that I must abandon negative thinking and embrace all that was positive.
Nevertheless, struggling with a Peale imitation, I continued to sense a rapidly approaching disaster of truly terrifying proportions.
When I found nothing more of interest in the farmhouse (no new skeletons), I went downstairs and outside, across the porch, into the whirling snow. Without benefit of snowshoes, I went to the barn, bulling my way through knee-deep snow and walking around the more formidable drifts.
The winter world was a kaleidoscope of death: rotate the lens for countless disturbing images:
- the storm sky: waxy, mottled gray-black, as still as if it had been painted on a fine-gram canvas: the skin of a corpse;
- the wind: cold, crisp, enervating: the breath of the long-dead multitudes;
- the forest: deep, Stygian, mysterious: home of Goethe's terror, Der
Erlkonig;
- the unbiquitous snow: milk-pure, bride-white, hymeneal: the death shrouds, the smooth satin lining of a new casket, age-bleached bones
The barn doors slid open on well oiled runners.
I entered with the wickedly sharp butcher's knife held out in front of me, although I sensed that the weapon was now quite worthless. The enemy had come, had taken all that was wanted, and had gone away from this place a long, while ago. The barn no longer contained any danger that could be dispatched with a well honed knife.
I stepped out of the cold winter wind into motionless air that was even more chilling.
The barn was a mausoleum that contained the skeletons of sixteen fully grown milk cows. Fifteen of them were lying in railed milking bays, their heads toward the outside barn walls, fleshless haunches poking out into the hay-strewn central aisle down which I walked. They seemed to have died and been stripped of their flesh in an instant, much too swiftly for them to have become sufficiently agitated to snap their restraining ropes which were still intact, looped around skeletal necks.
The sixteenth set of bones was piled in the center of the aisle, the head having fallen more than a yard from the neck vertebrae, one keyboard of ribs smashed into hundreds upon hundreds of splinters; and the empty eye sockets spoke without voice but with an eerie eloquence.
As I walked the length of the barn, I tried to imagine how the cows had been dealt with so suddenly-and why it had been done. I was no longer absolutely certain that the aliens had killed for food; indeed, the longer I thought about it the more foolish and small-minded that explanation seemed; and instead, it occurred to me that these creatures might have been taking specimens of earth's fauna. And yet
If that were the case, why wouldn't they want the bones along with everything else? Why wouldn't they take the whole animal as it had been in life? Perhaps they had been seeking neither food nor specimens. They might well have reasons that only they could ever understand, motivations that I (or any other man) would find incomprehensible.