He took daily walks, as had been his habit all his life, but he stayed on the long driveway, which he plowed himself after each snow, or he crossed the open fields south of the house and stables. He avoided the.lower woods, which lay east and downhill from the house, but he also stayed away from those to the north and even the higher forests to the west.
His cowardice irritated him, not least of all because he was unable to understand it. He'd always been an advocate of reason and logic, always said there was too little of either in the world. He was scornful of people who operated more from emotion than from intellect.
But reason failed him now, and logic could not overcome the instinctual awareness of danger that caused him to avoid the trees and the perpetual twilight under their boughs.
By the end of March, he began to think that the phenomenon had been a singular occurrence without notable consequences. A rare but natural event. Perhaps an electromagnetic disturbance of some kind. No more threat to him than a summer thunderstorm.
On April first, he unloaded the two rifles and two shotguns. After cleaning them, he returned the guns to the cabinet in the study.
However, still slightly uneasy, he kept the.22 target pistol on his nightstand. It didn't pack a tremendous punch but, loaded with hollow-point cartridges, it could do some damage.
In the dark hours of the morning of April fourth, Eduardo was awakened by the low throbbing that swelled and faded, swelled and faded. As in early March, that pulsating sound was accompanied by an eerie electronic oscillation.
He sat straight up in bed, blinking at the window. During the three years since Margaret had died, he'd not slept in the master bedroom at the front of the house, which they had shared. Instead, he bunked down in one of two back bedrooms. Consequently, the window faced west, a hundred and eighty degrees around the compass from the eastern woods where he had seen the strange light.
The night sky was deep and black beyond the window.
The Stiffel lamp on the nightstand had a pull-chain instead of a thumb switch.
Just before he turned it on, he had the feeling that something was in the room with him, something he would be better off not seeing. He hesitated, fingers tightly pinching the metal beads of the pull.
Intently he searched the darkness, his heart pounding, as if he had wakened into a nightmare replete with a monster. When at last he tugged the chain, however, the light revealed that he was alone.
He picked up his wristwatch from the nightstand and checked the time.
Nineteen minutes past one o'clock.
He threw off the covers and got out of bed. He was in his long underwear. His blue jeans and a flannel shirt were close at hand,folded over the back of an armchair, beside which stood a pair of boots. He was already wearing socks, because his feet often got cold during the night if he slept without them.
The sound was louder than it had been a month before, and it pulsed through the house with noticeably greater effect than before. In March, Eduardo had experienced a sense of pressure along with the rhythmic pounding- which, like the sound, crested repeatedly in a series of waves. Now the pressure had increased dramatically. He didn't merely sense it but felt it, indescribably different from the pressure of turbulent air, more like the invisible tides of a cold sea washing across his body.
By the time he hurriedly dressed and snatched the loaded.22 pistol from the nightstand, the pull-chain was swinging wildly and clinking against the burnished brass body of the lamp. The windowpanes vibrated. The paintings rattled against the walls, askew on their wires.
He rushed downstairs into the foyer, where there was no need to switch on a light. In the front door, the beveled edges of the leaded panes in the oval window sparkled with reflections of the mysterious glow outside. It was far brighter than it had been the previous month. The bevels broke down the amber radiance into all the colors of the spectrum, projecting bright prismatic patterns of blue and green and yellow and red across the ceiling and walls, so it seemed as if he was in a church with stained-glass murals.
In the dark living room to his left, where no light penetrated from outside because the drapes were drawn, a collection of crystal paperweights and other bibelots rattled and clinked against the end tables on which they stood and against one another. Porcelains vibrated on the glass shelves of a display cabinet.
To his right, in the book-lined study, the marble-and-brass desk set bounced on the blotter, a pencil drawer popped open and banged shut in time with the pressure waves, and the executive chair behind the desk wobbled around enough to make its wheels creak.
As Eduardo opened the front door, most of the spots and spears of colored light flew away, vanished as if into another dimension, and the rest fled to the right-hand wall of the foyer, where they melted together in a vibrant mosaic.
The woods were luminous precisely where they had been luminous last month. The amber glow emanated from the same group of closely packed trees and from the ground beneath, as if the evergreen needles and cones and bark and dirt and stones and snow were the incandescent elements of a lamp, shining brightly without being consumed. This time the light was more dazzling than before, just as the throbbing was louder and the waves of pressure more forceful.
He found himself at the head of the steps but did not remember exiting the house or crossing the porch. He looked back and saw that he had closed the front door behind him.
Punishing waves of bass sound throbbed through the night at the rate of.perhaps thirty a minute, but his heart was beating six times faster.
He wanted to turn and run back into the house.
He looked down at the pistol in his hand. He wished the shotgun had been loaded and beside his bed.
When he raised his head and turned his eyes away from the gun, he was startled to see that the woods had moved closer to him. The glowing trees loomed.
Then he realized that he, not the woods, had moved. He glanced back again and saw the house thirty to forty feet behind him. He had descended the steps without being aware of it. His tracks marred the snow.
"No," he said shakily The swelling sound was like a surf with an undertow that pulled him relentlessly from the safety of the shore.
The ululant electronic wail seemed like a siren's song, penetrating him, speaking to him on a level so deep that he seemed to understand the message without hearing the words, a music in his blood, luring him toward the cold fire in the woods.
His thoughts grew fuzzy.
He peered up at the star-punctured sky, trying to clear his head. A delicate filigree of clouds shone against the black vault, rendered luminous by the silver light of the quarter moon.
He closed his eyes. Found the strength to resist the pull of each ebbing wave of sound.
But when he opened his eyes, he discovered his resistance was imaginary. He was even closer to the trees than before, only thirty feet from the perimeter of the forest, so close he had to squint against the blinding brightness emanating from the branches, the trunks, and the ground under the pines.
The moody amber light was now threaded with red, like blood in an egg yolk.
Eduardo was scared, miles past fear into sheer terror, fighting a looseness in his bowels and a weakness in his bladder, shaking so violently that he would not have been surprised to hear his bones rattling together-yet his heart was no longer racing. It had slowed drastically and now matched the steady thirty-beats-per-minute of the pulsating sound that seemed to issue from every radiant surface.
He couldn't possibly stay on his feet when his heartbeat was so slow, the blood supply to his brain so diminished. He ought to be either in severe shock or unconscious. His perceptions must be untrustworthy.