Anything else. Not this, not this.
If he released the crow from the colander and took it outside, would it flop and flutter along the ground on its broken wings, all the way up the sloped backyard, making a nightmarish pilgrimage into the shadows of the higher woods?
Did he dare follow it into that heart of darkness? No. No, if there was to be an ultimate confrontation, it had to happen here on his own territory, not in whatever strange nest the traveler had made for itself.
Eduardo was stricken by the blood-freezing suspicion that the traveler was alien to such an extreme degree that it didn't share humanity's perception of life and death, didn't draw the line between the two in the same place at all. Perhaps its kind never died. Or they died in a true biological sense yet were reborn in a different form out of their own rotting remains-and expected the same to be true of creatures on this world. In fact, the nature of their species-especially its relationship with death-might be unimaginably more bizarre, perverse, and repellent than anything his imagination could conceive.
In an infinite universe, the potential number of intelligent life-forms was also infinite-as he had discovered from the books he'd been.reading lately.
Theoretically, anything that could be imagined must exist in an infinite realm.
When referring to extraterrestrial life-forms, alien meant alien, maximum strange, one weirdness wrapped in another, beyond easy understanding and possibly beyond all hope of comprehension. He had brooded about this issue before, but only now did he fully grasp that he had about as much chance of understanding this traveler, really understanding it, as a mouse had of understanding the intricacies of the human experience, the workings of the human mind.
The dead crow shuddered, twitched its broken legs. From its twisted throat came a wet cawing sound that was a grotesque parody of the cry of a living crow.
A spiritual darkness filled Eduardo, because he could no longer deny, to any extent whatsoever, the identity of the intruder who had left a vile trail through the house on the night of June tenth. He had known all along what he was repressing.
Even as he had drunk himself into oblivion, he had known. Even as he had pretended not to know, he had known. And he knew now. He knew.
Dear sweet Jesus, he knew.
Eduardo had not been afraid to die. He'd almost welcomed death. Now he was again afraid to die. Beyond fright. Physically ill with terror. Trembling, sweating.
Though the traveler had shown no signs of being able to control the body of a living human being, what would happen when he was dead?
He picked up the shotgun from the table, snatched the keys to the Cherokee off the pegboard, went to the connecting door between the kitchen and the garage. He had to leave at once, no time to waste, get out and far away. To hell with learning more about the traveler. To hell with forcing a confrontation. He should just get in the Cherokee, jam the accelerator to the floorboards, run down anything that got in his way, and put a lot of distance between himself and whatever had come out of the black doorway into the Montana night.
He jerked the door open but halted on the threshold between the kitchen and the garage. He had nowhere to go. No family left. No friends.
He was too old to begin another life. And no matter where he went, the traveler would still be here, learning its way in this world, performing its perverse experiments, befouling what was sacred, committing unspeakable outrages against everything that Eduardo had ever cherished.
He could not run from this. He had never run from anything in his life, however, it was not pride that stopped him before he had taken one full step into the garage. The only thing preventing him from leaving was his sense of what was right and wrong, the basic values that had gotten him through a long life… If he turned his back on those values and ran like a gutless wonder, he wouldn't be able to look at himself in a mirror any more. He was old and alone, which was bad enough. To be old, alone, and eaten by self-loathing would be intolerable.
He wanted desperately to run from this, but that option was not open to him. He stepped back from the threshold, closed the door to the garage, and returned the shotgun to the table. He knew a bleakness of the soul that perhaps no one outside of hell had ever known before him.
The dead crow thrashed, trying to tear loose of the colander. Eduardo had used heavy thread and tied secure knots, and the bird's muscles and bones were too badly damaged for it to exert enough force to break free. His plan seemed foolish now. An act of meaningless bravado-and insanity. He proceeded with it, anyway, preferring to act rather than wait meekly for the end.
On the back porch, he held the colander against the outside of the kitchen door.
The imprisoned crow scratched and thumped. With a pencil, Eduardo marked the wood where the openings in the handles met it. He hammered two standard nails into those marks and hung the colander on them. The crow, still struggling weakly, was visible through the wire mesh, trapped against the door. But the colander could be too easily lifted off the nails. Using two U-shaped nails on each side, he fixed both handles securely to the solid oak door. The hammering carried up the long slope of the yard and echoed back to him from the pine walls of the western forest.
To remove the colander and get at the crow, the traveler or its surrogate would have to pry loose the U-shaped nails to free at least one of the handles. The only alternative was to cut the mesh with heavy shears and pull out the feathered prize. Either way, the dead bird could not be snatched up quickly or silently. Eduardo would have plenty of warning that something was after the contents of the colander-especially as he intended to spend the entire night in the kitchen if necessary.
He could not be sure the traveler would covet the dead crow. Perhaps he was wrong, and it had no interest in the failed surrogate. However, the bird had lasted longer than the squirrels, which had lasted longer than the raccoons, and the puppetmaster might find it instructive to examine the carcass to help it discover why. It wouldn't be working through a squirrel this time. Or even a clever raccoon. Greater strength and dexterity were required for the task as Eduardo had arranged it. He prayed that the traveler itself would rise to the challenge and put in its first appearance.
Come on.
However, if it sent the other thing, the unspeakable thing, the lost Lenore, that terror could be faced. Amazing, what a human being could endure. Amazing, the strength of a man even in the shadow of oppressive terror, even in the grip of horror, even filled with.bleakest despair.
The crow was motionless once more. Silent. Stone dead. Eduardo turned to look at the high woods. Come on. Come on, you bastard.
Show me your face, show me your stinking ugly face. Come on, crawl out where I can see you. Don't be so gutless, you fucking freak.
Eduardo went inside. He shut the door but didn't lock it. After closing the blinds at the windows, so nothing could look in at him without his knowledge, he sat at the kitchen table to bring his diary up-to-date. Filling three more pages with his neat script, he concluded what he supposed might be his final entry.
In case something happened to him, he wanted the yellow tablet to be found- but not too easily. He inserted it in a large Ziplock plastic bag, sealed it against moisture, and put it in the freezer half of the refrigerator, among packages of frozen foods.
Twilight had arrived. The time of truth was fast approaching. He had not expected the entity in the woods to put in an appearance in daylight. He sensed it was a creature of nocturnal habits and preferences, spawned in darkness. He got a beer from the refrigerator.
What the hell. It was his first in several hours. Although he wanted to be sober for the confrontation to come, he didn't want to be entirely clearheaded. Some things could be faced and dealt with better by a man whose sensibilities had been mildly numbed.