She put down her copy of Paris Match, and said, “I don’t know, child. Somewhere in the house, I should imagine. Why don’t you ask your father?”
“She’s not in the house,” the child insisted. “I wanted her to play Barbie-doll with me, and I looked everywhere.”
Desmond looked up from a briefcase full of flow charts and printouts and other tools of his arcane trade. “Hmmm?” he said. And when the problem was explained to him, “She ought to be back from the barn by now.” With a sigh, he switched off his calculator, set down his ballpoint pen, and stood. “Now where did I leave my coat?”
Iago bounded up eagerly when Desmond opened the door, and insisted on following him out into the snow. The door slammed, and Iago’s excited barking faded as they headed toward the old barn.
Five minutes later, Desmond returned, carrying Candy’s body.
Mrs. Kingsley saw him coming from the kitchen window and—with a smothered exclamation of horror—hurried to throw open the door for him. Together they hurried into the parlor and laid Candy down on a couch.
It was possible now to assess the damage that had been done the woman. Her features were unnaturally sunken, the cheeks collapsed in on themselves, drawing the lips back from the teeth, and her stomach was literally concave, looking as if someone had punched it in with his fist. An ugly purple flush was still spreading over her face as hundreds of ruptured capillaries lost blood.
“She was just lying there!” Desmond said helplessly. “Like she’d had a heart attack or something. Is the phone still out? We need a doctor. Maybe I can…I could hike out to the road and flag down a car.”
Alma Kingsley put a finger under the girl’s nostrils. She touched her wrists, forehead, chest. She pressed down a fingernail, looked at the color.
“Desmond,” she said, “it’s too late.”
She straightened, and her son-in-law did likewise, both involuntarily drawing away from the body, as if by so doing they could distance themselves from death. When she glanced away, Mrs. Kingsley saw that Jennifer was standing in the middle of the parlor rug, eyes wide and calm, staring at the corpse.
“Daddy,” she said, “is Candy dead?”
Her father got a sick expression on his face, as if he’d been called upon to explain sex and reproduction to the child right now, with no blushing and no preparation. But he answered, voice flat and superficially composed, “Yes.”
“Like on TV?”
Alma Kingsley regained control then, and gathered the two up. With a push here, a nudge there, she shooed father and daughter out of the parlor and into the kitchen. At her command, Iago followed. Then she closed the door.
To survive, it had to get into the farmhouse. It knew that now, with a kind of animal cunning that came before reason and intellect. There were sophonts within, and it was practically suicidal to attack a sophont within its own lair. But they were few in number, and they were isolated from their own kind. And while they were danger, they were also nourishment.
It hesitated at the doorway of the shed, baffled by the snow that had already drifted above the middle hinges. Then it flowed up the wall, climbing to the crack at the top of the doorway, and eased through. Halfway out it halted, stunned by how the world had been transformed. The falling snow formed complex, shifting patterns that disappeared the instant it got a fix on them. It was as if the world had been shredded and divided into component atoms, then instantly rearranged, again and again, a thousand times a second. All anew, it was struck by the sheer alienness of this world, where nothing was certain, where everything shifted and moved and changed. It wavered, flowed outward, flinched back again. Individual flakes of snow touched its surface, did not melt, slid off without sticking.
Had anyone been watching from the house, they would have seen it then, carelessly, dangerously exposed. But occupied as they were with their own troubles, no one was looking.
It advanced out onto the snow then, all in a rush, sudden and brave. Midway between barn and house, it halted. Nothing happened. It found it could partially filter out the flakes falling, though they disoriented and bewildered it still. Purposefully it set out for the farmhouse, a solid mass of potential shelter, unchanging, shot through with electrical fires and harboring at its heart the precious rumor of fire-of-life.
But the task it had set for itself was not an easy one; the house had been winterized with typical Yankee thoroughness. Caulk had been applied around every window and door frame, and a long, even bead had been drawn at the juncture where clapboarding met foundation. Cracks in the masonry had been plastered over, and every window was double-paned and covered over with storm windows, every door had weatherstripping.
It circled the house without finding entrance. The building was tight, invulnerable to it. There might be entrances up above—experience said it was likely to find chimney pots and furnace exhausts, gable vents, even the occasional hatchway—but it dared not climb the house side, up into the swirling, shifting snow, where matter and sky intermingled. It could not have been sure of maintaining its orientation, of knowing where the house left off and the air began. It was madness to even consider it.
Time and again it lashed silently around the house, skimming the surface of the snow, leaving behind it the very thinnest layer of ice, a trail that disappeared almost instantaneously under the new falling snow. It was perilously exposed, and this added to its confusion and desperation, to its determination to try anything, no matter how rash or foolhardy, that might help it to survive.
Even after Desmond had finally bowed to the inevitable and taken Candy’s corpse out to the El Dorado, where it could await the snowplows and the doctor and the coroner in the preserving cold, there was an eerie pall cast over the house. Jennifer had been put to bed early, and the adults had retired to the kitchen, to try to talk.
But there was nothing to say. There was no way Candy could have died, and speculation would not explain the inexplicable—only the autopsy could do that. And she was a stranger, so there could be no reminiscences about her, none that Alma Kingsley would care to have Desmond share, anyway. So, in the end, they simply fell silent. Mrs. Kingsley began going through her cookbooks, and Desmond fell to punching listlessly on the keys of his calculator.
“What is wrong with that dog?” Alma Kingsley grumbled in exasperation. Iago was pacing the kitchen floor, infinitely restless, his claws going click-click-click on the linoleum. Now he was at the door again, pushing at the crack between door and sill with his nose, digging at it hopelessly with his claws, scratching and whining.
“Sounds like he wants to be let out,” Desmond said without looking up.
“Well, maybe I should,” she said at last. Throwing a wrap over herself, she took hold of Iago’s collar, and led him to the door. Her intent was to shove his nose outside and give him a whiff of the cold, and then draw him back in again. That ought to have settled his restlessness. But when the door opened, he strained forward, barking furiously, even anxiously, and she saw something outlined on the snow in the rectangle of light cast by the open door. She squinted and said, “Desmond, come here. Take a look at this.”
The dog’s feet scrabbled wildly on the floor, but her grip was firm. “Look at what?” Desmond said. He ambled up, calculator in hand, and peered over her shoulder. “That’s just a patch of shadow.”