Beside me,
Connie slept unaware of any struggling that I may have done in my effort to wake up.
I got quietly out of bed and went to the window to see if the storm had abated at all. It had not. If anything, the wind pressed against the house more fiercely than ever, and the snow was falling half again as hard as it had been when I went outside to start the auxiliary generator. More than twelve inches of new snow sheathed the world. The drifts had been whipped up to five and six feet in many places.
As I studied the night and the snow I realized, once again, how vulnerable was our position. The generator-which supplied the electricity to light the house and the stable, run our appliances, and keep the two oil furnaces going-was not particularly well protected from vandalism. One need only force the stable doors and take a wrench to the machinery. We would be forced to huddle around the fireplace, sleeping and eating within the radius of its warmth, until help arrived.
That might be several days from now-even a week.
And in that time anything could happen.
But I was being childish again. There was no- what? monster? monster, for god's sake? — monster out there in the snow. It was a dumb beast. It would have no conception of the purpose of the generator.
There was nothing to fear.
Then why was I afraid?
For a moment I thought I felt something-like cold fingers-grasping at the back of my mind. I tried to recoil from the sensation, realized it was within me, and almost collapsed from sheer terror. Then, abruptly, the sensation passed: but the fear remained.
As I looked out on the storm and over the snow-draped land, I was aware of an alien quality to all of it, something not unlike the eerie unreality that I had sensed while lying at the bottom of Hill #898 waiting for the battle to begin again. If I had not been out in that foul weather, I would have considered the notion that it was all a stage setting, carefully crafted of cardboard and paint and rice.
There was too much snow, too much wind, too bitter cold for reality. This white world was the home of other entities, not of man. It tolerated man, nothing more.
The irrational fear swelled in me again.
I tried to choke it down; it almost choked me instead.
This is Maine, I told myself as firmly as I could. And that thing out there is only an animal, not something supernatural or even supernormal. Just an animal. Probably native to this area-but, at worst, an animal that has escaped from a zoo. That's all.
That's all.
Connie murmured in her sleep. She twisted from side to side and mumbled in what sounded like a foreign language.
Wind moaned at the glass in front of me.
Connie sat straight up in bed and called my name. "Don! Don, don't let it near me! Don't let it have me!"
I went to her, but even as I reached for her shoulders she collapsed back against her pillows. In an instant the dream had left her, and she was sleeping peacefully.
I sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the gun from the nightstand. It was loaded; I had filled the magazine myself. Nevertheless, I checked it again to be sure before I leaned back against my pillows to wait for something to happen.
THURSDAY
The Fear
7
At nine o'clock the next morning, just after breakfast, I used the lawn mower-sized snow blower to clear a narrow path between the house and the barn. The machine sounded like a jet fighter entering a power dive. Numbing vibrations jolted along my arms and across my shoulders and back down my arms into the snow blower's handles from which they had come, like electricity flowing through a closed circuit. The snow shot up and out and away to my right in a dazzling, sparkling crescent.
Snow was falling only lightly now, and the wind had quieted considerably. Eighteen inches of new snow was on the ground, but that wasn't going to be the end of it. The sky was still low and leaden; and according to the radio reports out of Bangor-to which we had listened during breakfast-a second storm front, even worse than the first one which had not yet quite finished passing over us, had moved into the area. The snow and wind might have gentled for the time being, but they would be raging again by late this afternoon, no doubt about it.
In fifteen minutes I had opened the path, and I switched off the machine. The winter silence fell in over me like collapsing walls of cotton. For a moment I was too stunned to hear anything at all. Gradually I began to perceive the soft whistle of the wind and the rustling branches of the big Douglas fir which stood at the corner of the barn.
"Dad, isn't it great? Isn't it?"
Toby had run over from the house to join me the moment I shut off the snow blower. He was supposed to be in the kitchen studying his lessons right now. Connie was an elementary school teacher by trade and had been granted a limited state license to act as Toby's tutor so long as we lived on Timberlake Farm. She kept him to a fairly strict study schedule, administering one state-prepared exam a week in order to monitor his progress.
However, she had slept badly last night, and Toby had been able to con her into a brief postponement of this morning's session so that he could come with me while I watered, fed, and walked our horses.
Grinning out at the white world, barely able to see over the wall of snow I'd thrown up on the right side of the path, he said, "Did you ever see so much snow at one time?"
I stared down along the pale slope toward the pine forest that was dressed in snow and laces of ice.
It was a glittering, pain-bright scene. "No, Toby, I never did."
"Let's have a snowball fight," he said.
"Later, maybe. First there's work to do."
I went to the barn door and pulled back the ice-crusted bolt latch, slid open the door.
Toby ran past me into the dimly lighted barn.
I went inside and headed straight for the corner where I kept the grain bins and tools.
As I was taking a bucket down from the wall peg on which it hung, Toby said, "Dad?"
"Yeah?" I asked as I put the bucket under the water faucet that came out of the floor beside the grain bin.
"Where's Blueberry?"
"What?"
"Where's Blueberry?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Dad?"
I straightened up and looked at him. He was standing halfway down the stable row, directly in front of an open stall door,
Blueberry's stall. He was staring at me and frowning hard; and his lips were trembling.
He said, "Blueberry's gone."
"Gone?"
He looked into the empty stall.
Abruptly, I was aware of how wrong things were in the barn. The horses were inordinately quiet: deathly quiet and still. Kate was standing in the third stall on the left, her head hung low over the door, not watching me, not watching Toby, gazing blankly at the straw-strewn floor in the stable row. Betty was lying on her side in the next stall down the line; I could see her blunt black nose protruding from the gap under the stall's half-door. Furthermore, there was a peculiar odor in the air: ammonia, something like ammonia, but not unpleasant, vague and sweet, sweet ammonia
And Blueberry had vanished.
What in the hell is going on? I wondered.
Deep inside I knew. I just didn't want to admit it.
I walked over to Kate and quietly said her name. I expected her to rear back and whinny in alarm, but she had no energy for that sort of thing. She just slowly raised her head and stared at me, stared through me, looking very dull and stupid and empty.
I stroked her face and scratched her ears; and she snuffled miserably. All of the spirit had gone out of her; during the night something had happened which had utterly broken her, for good and for always.