Nightfall had barely settled all the way into the west, and he had not finished that first beer, when he heard movement on the back porch. A soft thud and a scrape and a thud again. Definitely not the crow stirring. Heavier noises than that. It was a clumsy sound made by something awkwardly but determinedly climbing the three wooden steps from the lawn.
Eduardo got to his feet and picked up the shotgun. His palms were slick with sweat, but he could still handle the weapon. Another thud and a gritty scraping.
His heart was beating bird-fast, faster than the crow's had ever beaten when it had been alive. The visitor-whatever its world of origin, whatever its name, whether dead or alive-reached the top of the steps and moved across the porch toward the door. No thudding any longer.
All dragging and shuffling, sliding and scraping.
Because of the type of reading he had been doing these past few months, in but an instant Eduardo conjured image after image of different unearthly creatures that might produce such a sound instead of ordinary footsteps, each more malevolent in appearance than the one before it, until his mind swam with monsters.
One monster among them was not unearthly, belonged more to Poe than to Heinlein or Sturgeon or Bradbury, gothic rather than futuristic, not only from Earth but from the earth. It drew nearer the door, nearer.still, and finally it was at the door. The unlocked door. Silence.
Eduardo had only to take three steps, grab the doorknob, pull inward, and he would stand face-to-face with the visitor.
He could not move. He was as rooted to the floor as any tree was rooted to the hills that rose behind the house.
Though he had devised the plan that had precipitated the confrontation, though he had not run when he'd had the chance, though he had convinced himself that his sanity depended on facing this ultimate terror forthrightly and putting it behind him, he was paralyzed and suddenly not so sure that running would have been wrong.
The thing was silent. It was there but silent. Inches from the far side of the door. Doing what? Waiting for Eduardo to move first? Or studying the crow in the colander?
The porch was dark, and only a little kitchen light was emitted by the covered windows, so could it really see the crow? Yes. Oh, yes, it could see in the dark, bet on that, it could see in the dark better than any damned cat could see, because it was of the dark.
He could hear the kitchen clock ticking. Though it had been there all along, he hadn't heard it in years, it had become part of the background noise, but he heard it now, louder than it had ever been, like a softened stick striking a slow measured beat on a snare drum at a state funeral. come on lets do it.
This time he was urging the traveler to come out of hiding. He was goading himself. Come on, you bastard, you coward, you id Id ignorant fool, come on, come on, He moved to the door and stood slightly to one side of it, so he could open it past himself. To grasp the knob, he would have to let go of the with one hand, but he couldn't do that was knocking painfully against him. He could feel the pulse in his temples, pounding, pounding.
He smelled the thing through the closed door. A nauseating odor, sour and putrescent, beyond anything in his long lifetime of experience.
The doorknob in front of him, the knob that he could of bring himself to grasp, round a p and gleaming, began to turn. Scintillant light, a reflection of the kitchen fluorescents, trickled along the curve of the knoll as it slowly l The free-moving latch bolt eased notch in the striker plate with the faintest rasp of brass on brass. pounding in his temples, booming his chest so swollen and leaping that his lungs and made breathing difficult, painful And now the knob slipped back the other way, and the door remained unopened. The latch bolt eased into its catch once more. The moment of revelation was delayed, perhaps slipping away forever as the visitor withdrew With an anguished cry that surprised him, Eduardo seized the knob and yanked the door open in one convulsively violent movement, bringing himself face-to-face with his worst fear.
The lost maiden, three years in the grave and now released: a wiry and tangled mass of gray hair matted with filth, eyeless sockets, flesh hideously corrupted and dark in spite of the preserving influence of.embalming fluid, glimpses of clean bone in the desiccated and reeking tissues, lips withered back from teeth to reveal a wide but humorless grin. The lost maiden stood in her ragged and worm-eaten burial dress, the blue-on-blue fabric grossly stained with the fluids of decomposition, risen and returned to him, reaching for him with one hand. The sight of her filled him not merely with terror and revulsion but with despair, oh God, he was sinking in a sea of cold black despair that Margaret should have come to this, reduced to the unspeakable fate of all living things- It's not Margaret, not this thing, unclean thing, Margarite's in a better place, heaven, sits with God, must be a God, Margaret deserves a God, not just this, not an ending like this, sits with God, sits with God, long gone from this body and sits with God. - and after the first instant of confrontation, he thought he was going to be all right, thought he was going to be able to hold on to his sanity and bring up the shotgun and blast the hateful thing backward off the porch, pump round after round into it until it no longer bore the vaguest resemblance to his Margaret, until it was nothing but a pile of bone fragments and organic ruins with no power to plunge him into despondency.
Then he saw that he hadn't been visited only by this heinous surrogate but by the traveler itself, two confrontations in one. The alien was entwined with the corpse, hanging upon its back but also intruding within the cavities of it, riding on and in the dead woman. Its own body appeared to be soft and poorly designed for gravity as heavy as that it had encountered here, so perhaps it needed support to permit locomotion in these conditions. Black, it was, black and slick, irregularly stippled with red, and seemed to be constituted only of a mass of entwined and writhing appendages that one moment appeared as fluid and smooth as snakes but the next moment seemed as spiky and jointed as the legs of a crab. Not muscular like the coils of snakes or armored like crabs but oozing and jellid. He saw no head or orifice, no familiar feature that could help him tell the top of it from the bottom, but he had only a few seconds to absorb what he was seeing, merely the briefest glimpse.
The sight of those shiny black tentacles slithering in and out of the cadaver's rib cage brought him to the realization that less flesh remained on the three-year-old corpse than he had at first believed and that the bulk of the apparition before him was the rider on the bones.
Its tangled appendages bulged where her heart and lungs had once been, twined like vines around clavicles and scapulae, around humerus and radius and ulna, around femur and tibia, even filled the empty skull and churned frenziedly just behind the rims of the hollow sockets.
This was more than he could tolerate and more than his books had prepared him for, beyond alien, an obscenity he couldn't bear. He heard himself screaming, heard it but was unable to stop, could not lift the gun because all his strength was in the scream. Although it seemed like an eternity, only five seconds elapsed from the moment he yanked open the door until his heart was wrenched by fatal spasms. In spite of the thing that loomed on the threshold of the kitchen, in spite of the thoughts and terrors that exploded through his mind in that sliver of time, Eduardo knew the number of seconds was precisely five because a part of him continued to be aware of the ticking of the.clock, the funereal cadence, five ticks, five seconds.
Then a searing pain blazed through him, the mother of all pain, not from an assault by the traveler but arising from within, accompanied by white light as bright as the eye of a nuclear explosion might be, an all-obliterating whiteness that erased the traveler from his view and all the cares of the world from his consideration. Peace.