Insane!
I looked around at the purple-black shadows beneath the trees, and I held the pistol out in front of me.
The odor of ammonia was very strong. It was choking me. I felt dizzy, slightly disoriented.
What sort of creature could eat a horse, pick the bones bare, leave it like this? I wanted to know; more than anything else in the world I wanted to know. I stared into the trees, desperately searching for a clue, thinking: What is out there, what is this thing, what am I up against?
Suddenly I was sure that it was trying to answer me. I felt a curious pressure against my eyes and then against my entire skull. And then the pressure was not outside pressing in: it was in, moving inside my mind, whirling, electric. Patterns of light danced behind my eyes. An image began to form, an image of the yellow-eyed animal, shadowy and indistinct at first but clearing, clearing -and fear exploded in me like a hand grenade exploding in a trench, obliterating the image before it could finish forming. All of a sudden, I was unable to tolerate this ultimate invasion. It disturbed me on a subconscious unconscious level, deep down where I had no control over myself. Something was crawling around inside my skull, something that seemed hairy and damp, slithering over the wet surface of my brain, trying to find a place to dig in.
It was useless of me to try to convince myself that this was not the case, for I was responding viscerally now, like a primitive, like a wild beast. Something was in my skull, a many-legged thing. Unthinkable! Get it out! Now! Out! I fought back, thrust the force out of me, tried to keep it from seeping back into me. I threw punches at the air and screamed and twisted as if I were battling with a physical rather than a mental adversary.
Diamond-hard fear
nameless horror
irrational terror
my heart thundering, nearly rupturing with each colossal beat
the taste of bile
my breath trapped in my throat
a scream trapped in my throat
sweat streaming down my face
unable to cry out for help and no one to help even if I could cry out to them. .. a balloon swelling and swelling inside my chest, bigger, bigger, going to burst
I turned away from the skeleton, fell and cracked my chin, scrambled to my feet.
The mysterious pressure clinging around my head increased, slipped inside of me again, and began to work up the yellow-eyed image once more.. .
Out!
I ran. I had never run in the war; I had stood up to anything and everything. Even my mental illness, my catatonia, had not been the product of fear; I had been driven, then, by disillusionment and self-loathing. But now I ran, terrified.
I tore off my cap, pulled at my hair as if I were a raving lunatic, tried to grab and throttle whatever invisible being was trying to get inside of me.
I tripped over a log, went down, hard. But I got up, spitting blood and snow, and I climbed the side of a small hill.
I found my voice somewhere along the way. A scream burst from me. It echoed back to me from the crowding trees and hillsides. It didn't sound like my voice, although it surely was. It didn't even sound human.
For a long while-exactly how long, I really don't know, perhaps half an hour or perhaps twice that long-I weaved without direction through the forest. I remember running until my lungs were on fire, crawling like an animal, slithering on my belly, moaning and mumbling and gibbering senselessly. I had been driven temporarily insane by an unimaginably strong fear, a racial fear, an almost biological fear of the creature that had tried to contact me in that pine-circled clearing.
At last I tripped and fell face-down in a drift of snow, and I was unable to regain my feet or to crawl or even to slither on my belly any farther. I lay there, waiting to have the flesh picked from my bones
As I regained my breath and as my heartbeat slowed, the biological fear subsided to be replaced by a more rational, much more manageable fear. My senses returned; my thoughts began to move once again, sluggishly at first, then like quick fishes. There was no longer anything trying to force its way inside of my head. I was alone in the quiet forest, watched over by nothing more sinister than the sentinel pines, lying on a soft bed of snow. I stared up at the darkening sky which issued fat, slowly twirling snowflakes, and I caught a few flakes on my tongue. For the moment, at least, I was safe.
Safe from what?
I had no answer for that one.
Safe for how long?
No answer.
As a bizarre thought occurred to me, I closed my eyes for all of a minute and opened them again only to see the sky, trees, and snow. Incredibly, I had half-expected to see hospital walls. For one awful moment I had thought that the farm and the forest and the yellow-eyed animal were not real at all but were only figments of my imagination, fragments of a dream verging on a nightmare, and that I was still in a deep catatonic trance, lying in a hospital room, helpless.
I shuddered. I had to get moving, or I was going to go all to pieces.
Weak from all of the running I had done, I struggled to my feet and found that I was still holding tightly to the pistol. My hand had formed like a frozen claw around it. I hesitated for a moment, glanced at the woods that crowded in all around me, awaited for something to attack me, decided that there was nothing nearby, and then put the gun in my coat pocket.
But I kept my hand on it.
I took half a dozen steps, stopped, whirled, and looked back at the peaceful wildlands. Biting my, lip, forcing myself not to turn every time the wind moaned behind me, I started to find the way out of there.
Ten minutes later
I reached the perimeter of the woods and began to climb the hill toward the farmhouse. In the middle of the slope, I stopped and turned and looked back at the trees. The snow had begun to fall as heavily and as fast as it had done all last evening; and the trees were hazy, indistinct, even though they were only fifty or sixty yards away. Nevertheless, I could see well enough to be sure that there was nothing down there at the edge of the forest, nothing that might have followed me. And then, as if my thoughts had produced it, a brilliant purple light flashed far away in the forest, at least a mile away, but purpling the snow around me in spite of the distance, flashed three times in quick succession like the revolving beam of a lighthouse, only three times and nothing more.
I watched. Nothing? Imagination? No, I had seen it; I was not losing my mind.
I waited.
Snow fell.
The wind picked up.
I tucked my chin down deeper in my neck scarf.
Darkness lowered behind the clouds.
Nothing
At last I turned and walked up the hill to the house.
What the hell was happening here?
8.
At first I thought I would tell Toby that I hadn't been able to find a trace of Blueberry-reserving the full story for Connie. However, when I had a few minutes to think about it-as I stripped off my coat and boots, and as I thankfully clasped my hands around a mug of coffee laced with anisette-I decided not to shield him from the truth. After all he was a strong boy, accustomed to adversity, especially emotional adversity which was much more difficult to bear than any physical suffering; and I was confident that he could handle just about any situation better than other children his age. Besides, over the past several months I had worked at getting him to trust me, to have confidence in me, confidence deep down on a subconscious level where it really mattered; and now if I lied to him, I very well might shatter that confidence, shatter it so badly that it could never be rebuilt. Therefore, I told both him and Connie about
Blueberry's fleshless skeleton which I had found in that forest clearing.
Surprisingly, he seemed neither frightened nor particularly upset. He shook his head and looked smug and said, "This is what I already expected."
Connie said. "What do you mean?"
"The animal ate Blueberry," Toby said.
"Oh, now-"
"I think he's right," I said.
She stared at me.
"There's more to come, and worse," I said. "But I'm not crazy. Believe me, I've considered that possibility, considered it carefully. But there are several undeniable facts: those strange tracks in the snow, the yellow-eyed thing at the window,
Blueberry's disappearance, the bones in the clearing-none of that is the product of my imagination. Something-ate our pony. There is no other explanation, so far as I can see."
"Crazy as it may be," Connie said.
"Crazy as it may be."
Toby said, "Maybe there really is an old grizzly bear running around out there."
Connie reached out and took one of his hands away from his cup of cocoa.
"Hey, you don't seem too upset for having just lost your pony."
"Oh," he said, very soberly, "I knew when I first came back from the barn that the animal had eaten Blueberry. I went right upstairs and cried about it then. I got over that.
There's nothing I can do about it, so I got to live with it." His lips trembled a bit, but he didn't cry. As he had said, he was finished with that.
"You're something," I said.
He smiled at me, pleased. "I'm no crybaby."
"Just so you know it's not shameful to cry."
"Oh, I know," he said. "The only reason I did it in my room was because I didn't want anyone to kid me out of it until I was good and finished."
I looked at Connie. "Ten years old?"
"I truly believe he's a midget," she said, as pleased with him as I was.
Toby said, "Are we going to go out and track down that old grizzly bear, Dad?"
"Well," I said, "I don't think it is a grizzly bear."
"Some kind of bear."
"I don't think so."
"Mountain lion?" he asked.
"No. A bear or a mountain lion-or just about any other wild, carnivorous animal-would have killed the horse there in the barn and would have eaten it on the spot. We would have found blood in the barn, lots of it. A bear or a mountain lion wouldn't have killed Blueberry without leaving blood at the scene, wouldn't have carried her all the way down into the forest before it had supper."
"Then what is it?" Connie asked. "What is big enough to carry off a pony? And leave a whistle-clean skeleton. Do you have any ideas, Don?"
I hesitated. Then: "I have one."
"Well?"
"You won't like it. I don't like it."
"Nevertheless, I have to hear it," she said.
I sipped my coffee, trying to get my thoughts arranged, and finally I told them all about the flashing purple light in the woods and, more importantly, about the force that had attempted to take control of my mind. I minimized my fear-reaction in the retelling and made it sound as if the takeover attempt had been relatively easy to resist. There was no need to dramatize it, for even when it was underplayed and told in a lifeless monotone, the story was quite frightening.
I had recounted these events with such force and so vividly that Connie knew I was telling the truth- at least, the truth as I saw it-and that I was entirely serious. She still had trouble accepting it. She shook her head slowly and said, "Don, do you realize exactly what you're saying?"
"Yes."
"That this animal, this yellow-eyed thing that can devour a pony, is-intelligent?"
"That seems to be the most logical conclusion-as illogical as it may seem."
"I can't get a hold on it," she said.
"Neither can I. Not a good one."
Toby looked back and forth, from Connie to me to Connie to me again, as if he were doing the old routine about a spectator at a tennis match. He said, "You mean it's a space monster?"
We were all quiet for a moment.
I took a sip of coffee.
Finally Connie said, "Is that what you mean?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'm not sure
But it's a possibility we simply can't rule out."
More silence.
Then, Connie: "What are we going to do?"
"What can we do?" I asked. We're snowbound. The first big storm of the year-and one of the worst on record. We don't have a working telephone. We can't drive into town for help; even the microbus would get bogged down within a hundred yards of the house. So
We just have to wait and see what happens next."
She didn't like that, but then neither did I. She turned her own coffee mug in circles on the table top. "But if you're right, or even only half right, and if this thing can take control of our minds-"
"It can't," I said, trying to sound utterly confident even while remembering how perilously close the thing had come to taking control of mine. "It tried that with me, but it didn't succeed. We can resist it."
"But what else might it be able to do?"
"I don't know. Nothing else. Anything else."
"It might have a ray gun," Toby said enthusiastically.
"Even that's possible," I said. "As I said before, we'll just have to wait and see."
"This is really exciting," Toby said, not disturbed in the least by our helplessness.
"Maybe we won't see anything more of it," I said.
"Maybe it will just go away."
But none of us believed that.
We talked about the situation for quite some time, examining all the possibilities, trying to prepare ourselves for any contingency, until there wasn't anything more to say that we hadn't already said a half a dozen times. Weary of the subject, we went on to more mundane affairs, as I washed the coffee and cocoa mugs while Connie began to prepare supper. It seemed odd, yet it was rather comforting, that we were able to deal with every-day affairs in the face of our most extraordinary circumstances. Only Toby was unable to get back to more practical matters; all he wanted to do was stand at the window, watch the forest, and wait for the