“There never was a patch of shadow shaped like that there before,” Mrs. Kingsley said dubiously. A momentary twinge of arthritis hit her then, and her hold on Iago’s collar loosened.
All hell broke loose.
It lay watching, not knowing that it did not blend in against the snow, assuming that the sophonts’ awareness would be as dazzled by the downfalling flakes as was its own.
It had flattened against the snow’s surface the instant that the door opened with a great outrushing of warmth. The shifts of ionization and static charges in the air made the doorway a shimmering beacon, bright and inviting, and only the faint, almost undetectable flickers of fire-of-life within that wash of liquid warmth kept it from leaping forward at that very instant. Wary, it crouched, waiting.
Then the dog came flying through the air to attack it.
The beast was large and fierce, plowing through and scattering snow, howling and barking as it came. Terrified, the creature fled, but—cunning, desperate—it fled straight for the door, risking everything on a frontal attack, a savage, killing assault on whatever might lie in its path.
In the doorway, the black beast ravening and almost upon it, its perception cleared, and it found that only two enemies stood between it and shelter. The first fell aside, shrinking back against the wall as it charged forward, and it could ignore her, making for the second who was just beyond her, and who was bigger, with more fire-of-life in him.
Berserk, it sprang at the man, who stumbled back, involuntarily flinging up a hand to fend it off. There was an object in that hand, a glittering complex of resistance paths that held a shimmering, shifting structure of energies, a vastly simplified and purified version of what lay within living beings.
A concept came searing up from the shuttered and forbidden parts of its mind, breaking through the pain: WEAPON! WEAPON! WEAPON! and it turned in midair, reshaping its structure and seizing hold of a wall so that it slammed aside and away from the thing. The beast leaped up after it, and for an instant almost had it, and then it fled down the hall and away.
In terror and wild confusion it was driven through several rooms and up a stairway. It took the first opening off of the hall it could find, and discovered itself in a cul-de-sac, the air all abuzz with jittery white energy, and dominated by a large, painful glow in its center.
The beast halted, hackles rising. It was cornered, and the beast knew it.
“What was that?” Desmond gasped.
Alma Kingsley shook her head. Her breath was still short, her face felt pallid with shock, and she discovered that she was clutching at her heart. Disdainful of her own weakness, she forced the hand down. Then, looking up at where Iago’s frantic baying had come to an abrupt stop, she felt seized with terror and cried, “Jennifer!”
Desmond easily outdistanced her, but she arrived in the guest bedroom practically on his heels. To her unutterable relief, the child was unharmed, sitting up sleepily in her bed and looking at the frantic Iago with dull, unfocused interest. Her father swept her up in a hug, and backed away, into the hallway. Oddly enough, Alma Kingsley felt a pang of jealousy.
Iago had cornered the creature.
Whatever it was—and in the gloom it was all but invisible—it crouched in the shadows to the far side of the four-poster, alert and quivering, frightened and dangerous. It reared up and slowly dipped down as Iago darted forward, then back, then forward again, growling and making little feinting attacks. The combination of quick and mazy movements made the fight look like a confrontation between cobra and mongoose.
The creature was trapped in the aisle between bed and wall. To its rear was a closet, its door open on a thick-packed rank of summer dresses in their plastic dry-cleaning bags. Jennifer’s jumper hung by itself on a hook on the back of the door.
Mrs. Kingsley was just reaching—belatedly, she realized—for the light switch when Iago attacked. Snapping and foaming, he charged. The two went tumbling, one over the other. Shaking his head fiercely, Iago backed out of the narrow way, dragging the creature out between his jaws, struggling.
Iago snarled savagely as he tore at the creature, and then there was an ozone crackle in the air and he yelped, a high, heartbreaking cry. His stiffening body crashed over sideways, onto the floor, and did not move.
The creature disentangled itself instantly, feinted at Desmond, then turned again and—going carefully around rather than over the bed—rushed into the closet.
There was an access panel in the back of the closet. It had been installed early in the century, when the upstairs water closet was retrofitted, and opened into the wall and a few dusty pipes. The panel was ajar slightly, leaning loosely rather than snugly. Perhaps the child had been playing with it, looking for a secret passageway, or perhaps it had been left partly open for years or even decades without anyone ever bothering to get around to straightening it.
The creature squeezed through the crack, quick and impossibly fluid, and disappeared into the wall.
Slowly, awkwardly, Mrs. Kingsley squatted down, knees almost touching the floor. She laid a hand on her dog’s head. He was dead. “Oh, Iago,” she said. “My little bête noire.”
She began to cry.
The house was a maze of electric circuits and appliances. They dizzied and blinded it, dazzling and baffling its senses. The sophonts were somewhere within this maze, and it did not even know how many they were. It only knew that they had not followed it, and thus presumably could not. But the sophonts’ lair was a dangerous environment, naturally hostile to it, and it fled.
It fled deep, sinking downward by instinct, tracing a tortuous way between walls and floors, sometimes following water pipes, and always avoiding electrical wires. Carefully, fearfully, it threaded its way along a twisty path that led downward, ever downward.
Finally it emerged into warm, cavernous darkness, and knew that it had found refuge.
Iago was dead, but Jennifer was alive; there was comfort in that. The faithful old family retainer had given up his life in defense of home and child, and that was somehow fitting. It was the way things ought to be. His corpse was outside the kitchen door now, packed in snow because the frozen earth made burial impossible, but Alma Kingsley vowed that her great-grandchildren would know his name.
The snow had finally stopped, and the night was clear, and bitterly cold, the stars burning in it like chips of ice. The great glowing, shimmering, billowing curtains of the Northern Lights were out, shifting restlessly back and forth on the horizon, brighter than she had ever seen them, so bright that it almost seemed that she could burn her hand on them, if she held it out to the sky.
It had been quite a storm. It must have dumped at least four feet of snow on the region all told, snowing through the night and through the day and through most of the night again, and the driveway beyond the lee of the house was buried under huge drifts; you couldn’t even see the highway at its end. So much for her first thought, which was to bundle them all into Desmond’s car and make a run for it, abandoning the house to the creature until they could come back later with help. To get the hell out of here!
But with all that snow, nobody was going anywhere, life-or-death emergency or not, until the snowplow came by in the morning. It was physically impossible. And if they locked themselves in the car as a refuge—her second thought—they’d freeze to death before daybreak. And besides, who was to say that it couldn’t get into the car after them, the way it seemed to be able to squeeze itself through the smallest of cracks?