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.