But what had it been? I asked myself.
You know exactly what it was, I answered.
The yellow-eyed animal?
Yes.
You think it stole
Blueberry?
Yes.
Couldn't Blueberry have escaped on her own?
If she did, then she was thoughtful enough to stop and latch the bolt behind her. The door was closed and locked.
There's some other explanation.
There's no other explanation.
I put an end to this tense but useless interior monologue as I opened the door to
Betty's stall and knelt beside her.
Betty was dead. I stroked her neck and found that it was cold and stiff. Dried sweat, in the form of a salt crust, streaked her once-sleek coat. The air in the stall was redolent of urine and manure. Her brown eyes bulged, as if about to pop loose of the sockets. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth. She looked as if she had died of fright.
I stood up and closed the stall door before Toby caught sight of the grisly corpse.
"We've got to find Blueberry," he said, closing the open door to her stall.
I took him by the shoulder and led him down the stable row toward the barn door. "You've got to get back to the house and work on your math and history lessons. I'll find
Blueberry."
He stopped and pulled away from me and said, "I want to go with you."
"You've got to study."
"I can't study."
"Toby-"
"I'll worry about
Blueberry."
"There's nothing to worry about," I said.
"Where will you look?"
"I'll search along the lane. And out on the north fields. And then down near the woods-and in the woods. I'll find her one place or the other."
"Why would she run away?"
"She was frightened by the wind. When I was in here last evening, the wind was rattling the window and moaning over the roof, whistling in the eaves The horses were frightened even then, and the storm got worse during the night."
"If she was frightened of the storm," he said, "she wouldn't run out into it."
"She might. Horses aren't really too bright."
"She didn't run away," he insisted.
"Well, she's gone."
"Someone took her."
"Stole her?"
"Yeah."
"Nonsense, Toby."
He was adamant.
"Why would he steal just one horse when there were three?"
"I don't know."
The window rattled in its frame.
Nothing: just the wind.
Startled, trying to cover my uneasiness, glancing at the empty window and remembering the twin amber discs that I had seen there last evening, I said, "Who would do a thing like that? Who would come here and steal your pony?"
He shrugged.
"Well, whatever the case, I'll find her," I promised him, wondering if I could keep the promise, fairly sure that I could not. "I'll find her."
Shortly after ten o'clock I left the farmhouse again. This time I had the loaded pistol in my right coat pocket.
The sky had grown subtly darker, more somber, a deeper shade of gunmetal blue-gray than it had been only an hour ago.
Or was it merely my outlook that had darkened?
From where I stood on the crown of the hill, there were three ways I could go, three general areas in which I could search for Blueberry: along the narrow private lane that connected with the county road two miles away, or in and around the open fields that lay to the west and south of the house, or in the forest which lay close at hand on the north and east of us. If Blueberry had run away of her own accord (somehow locking the barn door behind her) she would be out in the open fields. If a man had come to steal her, the place to look for clues would be along the lane, out in the direction of the highway. Therefore, not wanting to waste any time, I turned away from the lane and the fields and walked straight down the hill toward the waiting forest.
At the edge of the woods I took a deep breath. I listened and heard nothing and listened some more and finally let out the breath. Plumes of white vapor rose in front of my face.
I passed through them as if I were entering a room through a gauzy curtain.
I walked among the trees, crossed frozen puddles, stumbled through patches of snow-concealed briars and brambles and ground vines. I crossed gullies where powdery snow lay deep over a soft mulch of rotting autumn leaves. I climbed wooded hills and passed ice-draped bushes that glinted rainbowlike. I stomped across an iron-hard frozen stream, stepped unwittingly into deep drifts from which I fought to extricate myself, and went on
After a while I stopped, not sure at first why I stopped-and gradually realized that something was wrong here. My always-working subconscious mind sensed it first, but now I began to get a conscious hold on it. Something
I panted, trying to regain my breath and energy. I sniffed the air-and there it was, the wrongness, finally defined: ammonia, a vague but unmistakable and undeniable odor, ammonia and yet not ammonia, too sweet for ammonia, sweet ammonia, the same thing that I had smelled in the barn just two hours ago when Toby had first said that Blueberry was missing.
I took the pistol out of my coat pocket and flicked off the safety. My pigskin gloves were unlined, and they did not interfere with my grip or with my hold on the trigger.
Tense, my shoulders hunched, chin tucked down, heart thudding, I looked to my left, to my right, ahead, behind, and even above me.
Nothing. I was alone.
Proceeding with considerably more caution than I had shown thus far, I followed the crest of the wooded hill, followed the growing ammonia scent. I descended a gentle slope into a natural cathedral whose walls were ranks of pine tree trunks and whose vaulted ceiling was made of arching pine boughs.
The boughs were so thickly interlaced that only two or three inches of snow had sifted to the floor of the clearing. And what snow there was had been trampled by the animal. There were literally hundreds of the curious eight-hole prints in the clearing.
The only other thing in the clearing worth mentioning was Blueberry.
What was left of Blueberry.
Not much.
Bones.
I stood over the skeleton-which was certainly that of a small horse-staring down at it, unable to see how this was possible. The bones were stained yellow and brown-but not a single scrap of flesh or gristle adhered to them. They had been stripped clean.
And yet there was no blood or gore in the snow around them. It was as if
Blueberry had been dipped into a huge vat of sulphuric acid. But where was the vat? What had happened here? Had the yellow-eyed animal-God bless us-had the yellow-eyed animal eaten an entire young horse?
Impossible!
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.