A thin crust of snow had frozen in my eyelashes, welding them into a pair of brittle plates. Every time I blinked it felt as if two heavy wooden shutters were crashing into place. Furthermore, my face was numb, and my lips felt as if they had cracked and were bleeding.
I took several uncertain steps through the soft drifts until I grasped that I was moving downhill rather than up-and thus away from the farmhouse. I searched for the house, for the light in the living room-and saw, instead, a dozen or more radiant eyes, amber eyes, glowing at me from thirty yards away, strange circles of warm light that pulsed like beacons through the blizzard. Crying out involuntarily, I whirled and ran uphill as fast as I could lift and put down my ice-caked legs.
Toby squirmed against me, stopped biting, tried to use his knees and elbows to injure me. But I was holding him too tightly for him to get any leverage.
A familiar pressure bloomed suddenly around my head, sought entrance, quickly found a way in to me, and danced over the surface of my brain
No!
I resisted the contact.
Bones.. think of bones
I picked up speed.
Fear welled up in me as the pressure increased inside my skull; and it was a hideously potent fear, that biological terror that had made a raging madman of me in the forest earlier in the day. But I couldn't afford to lose my wits now. If I began to run blindly in circles, shouting and throwing punches at the empty air, the aliens would capture Toby and me; and before long they would go into the house and get Connie as well. Now that they had attempted to steal Toby from us, I was prepared to give serious consideration to that melodramatic and trite science fiction concept which I previously had found, if not impossible, highly improbable: that they viewed us as nothing more than a rich and convenient source of protein. Our survival, therefore, might well depend upon two things: how successfully I could resist the insistent mental probes-and how successfully I could cope with the disabling fear, the shattering terror, which the probes sparked in me.
Toby continued to struggle.
Clutching him against my chest, I managed to keep going.
The alien tried to sink thought-fingers into my mind, but I pinched and jabbed and scratched at his mental front, resisted and resisted and resisted.
Mindless fear slammed at me like hurricane seas, like gigantic waves battering a seawall. I held against them.
I kept running.
Lights were switched on ahead of me.
I could see the house, the sun porch.
Fifty feet. Maybe less.
I was winning.
Then I fell.
Still holding Toby-who had quieted considerably over the last few seconds I sat up in the snow and looked down the hill toward the forest. The amber eyes were closer than they had been only half a minute ago, no more than thirty or thirty-five feet away from us now.
Images formed behind my eyes, fragments of light and brilliant colors, alien scenes
No! Stay out of me!
Fear crushing fear terror things in my head spiders in my skull, things eating away in my brain
I had to fight it and I did fight it and I was nonetheless sure that I was losing where I had been winning an instant ago.
I started to get up. My feet slipped out from under me. I fell again and saw that the amber eyes were even closer, twenty feet away and moving rapidly in on me, and I saw that I was not going to get away and I started to cry and -
— and then Connie appeared beside me, stepping like a stage actress through the snow curtain. She was carrying the pistol that I had left at the head of the stairs. She was wearing a coat over her night gown, and her long hair was matted with snow that was crystalizing into ice. Bracing herself against the wind, holding the pistol with both hands, she fired at the approaching creatures.
The wind swallowed most of the sound of the shot.
Although none of the aliens appeared to have been wounded, they seemed to realize that they were being fired upon, and they seemed to view the pistol as a very real danger. After she got off her second shot- again hitting nothing-they stopped where they were and stared at us with those huge, unblinking eyes. Apparently, there was at least one blessing for which we could be gratefuclass="underline" these things were evidently not all-powerful, not invincible and unstoppable, as years of horror movies had conditioned me to think they would be.
The pressure abruptly evaporated in my skull. The mental probes were discontinued.
Squinting, I tried to see what sort of beings lay behind the amber eyes-however, the darkness and the snow defeated me. For all that I could tell, they consisted only of eyes, great disembodied discs of light adrift on the wind.
Shouting in order to be heard above the storm, Connie said, "Are you all right?"
"Good enough!" I shouted back at her.
"Toby?"
"He's okay, I think."
I got up.
The aliens stayed where they were.
"Do you want the gun?" she asked.
"You keep it," I said. "Let's get moving. But don't turn your back on them."
I was half-frozen. My muscles felt as if they were on fire although the flames were icy, and my joints were arthritic from the fierce cold. Each step was a miracle and an agony.
As if we were playing a child's game, we backed slowly toward the farmhouse. We kept our eyes on the alien eyes, and we tested the treacherous ground behind us before committing ourselves to each step. Gradually, a gap opened between us and our otherworldly visitors. We stepped into the square of wan light that spilled out through the sun porch windows — and in no more than two minutes we were safely inside.
"Lock the door," I told her.
"Don't worry about that."
I carried Toby into the kitchen and put him on the table while she bolted the sun porch door as well as the door that connected the porch to the kitchen.
"Did they come after us?" I asked, wondering if they were now pressing against the sun porch's glass walls.
"I didn't see them. I don't think they did."
The house was warm, but we suddenly felt colder than we had when we'd been out in the storm. It was the contrast, I suppose. We began to shake, twitch, and shiver.
"We have to get Toby out of those pajamas," Connie said, hurrying out of the room. "I'll get a fresh pair for him-and some towels."
Toby appeared to be asleep. I touched his wrist and counted his pulse. The beat was steady, neither too fast nor too slow.
A moment later Connie returned with clean pajamas and a huge stack of towels. I dried my hair while she attended to Toby. As she wrestled him out of his soaked, frozen pajamas, she said, "He's bleeding."
"It's okay," I said, my voice quivering with a chill.
"There's blood around his mouth," she insisted.
"It's my blood, not his."
When she had him free of his pajamas and wrapped in two big bath towels, she wiped his face and saw that what I said was true. "Your blood?"
"They took control of his mind," I said, recalling the nightmare battle in the snow. "And they made him bite me when he was trying to get loose and go to them."
"My God!"
"They almost had him."
She swayed.
I went to her and took the towel out of her hand. "Get your coat off. Dry your hair. You'll catch pneumonia standing around like that." I began to dry Toby's hair. I was staying on my feet only by dogged determination. I tasted my own blood: my lips had split from the cold, and now they burned and itched.
She said, "Are you all right?"
"Just cold."
"The bite?"
"It's not much."
"Your lips-"
"That's not much either."
Staring down at Toby, putting one slender hand against his face, she said, "Is he just unconscious?"
"Get out of the coat and dry your hair," I told her again. "You'll catch your death."
"Is he just unconscious?"
"I don't know."
"He'll be all right, won't he?"
"I don't know."
She glared at me, her pretty jaw suddenly set as firm as if it had been cast in concrete. She was wild-eyed, her delicate nostrils flared. She raised her hands: they were curled into small fists. "But you must know!"
"Connie-"
"When they took control of him did they shatter his mind in the process?"
I finished drying his hair, tried not to look at her, tried not to think about what she had said, which was what I had been saying to myself for the last couple of minutes.
She was determined to get an answer out of me. "Is he just a vegetable now? Is that at all possible? Is that what they've done to him?"
As my hands warmed up they began to itch and go numb on me. The towel slipped out of my hands.
"Is it?" she demanded.
Toby said,
"Mom? Dad?"
She grabbed the edge of the table.
I helped him sit up.
Blinking like a man stepping out of a cellar into sunlight, Toby looked at me, looked at her, coughed gently, shook his head, smiled tentatively, and said, "What what the heck happened? I feel so awful cold. Can I have some hot chocolate?"
Connie embraced him and started to cry.
Feeling hot tears swelling up at the corners of my own eyes, I went across the room to the cupboards to find mugs, spoons, and the big tin of cocoa mix.