Invasion

woke, coated with perspiration, my hands full of twisted sheets and blankets.
        In real life the battle for Hill #898 had happened only once, of course. But at night when I dreamed, it played over and over and over like a film loop in my mind. That was, however, the only important difference between the reality and the remembrance.
        All the ingredients of a nightmare had been there in the genuine event; there was, therefore, no need for me to add anything to sharpen the horror.
        Beside me,
        Connie slept unaware of any struggling that I may have done in my effort to wake up.
        I got quietly out of bed and went to the window to see if the storm had abated at all. It had not. If anything, the wind pressed against the house more fiercely than ever, and the snow was falling half again as hard as it had been when I went outside to start the auxiliary generator. More than twelve inches of new snow sheathed the world. The drifts had been whipped up to five and six feet in many places.
        As I studied the night and the snow I realized, once again, how vulnerable was our position. The generator-which supplied the electricity to light the house and the stable, run our appliances, and keep the two oil furnaces going-was not particularly well protected from vandalism. One need only force the stable doors and take a wrench to the machinery. We would be forced to huddle around the fireplace, sleeping and eating within the radius of its warmth, until help arrived.
        That might be several days from now-even a week.
        And in that time anything could happen.
        But I was being childish again. There was no- what? monster? monster, for god's sake?-monster out there in the snow. It was a dumb beast. It would have no conception of the purpose of the generator.
        There was nothing to fear.
        Then why was I afraid?
        For a moment I thought I felt something-like cold fingers-grasping at the back of my mind. I tried to recoil from the sensation, realized it was within me, and almost collapsed from sheer terror. Then, abruptly, the sensation passed: but the fear remained.
        As I looked out on the storm and over the snow-draped land, I was aware of an alien quality to all of it, something not unlike the eerie unreality that I had sensed while lying at the bottom of Hill #898 waiting for the battle to begin again. If I had not been out in that foul weather, I would have considered the notion that it was all a stage setting, carefully crafted of cardboard and paint and rice.
        There was too much snow, too much wind, too bitter cold for reality. This white world was the home of other entities, not of man. It tolerated man, nothing more.
        The irrational fear swelled in me again.
        I tried to choke it down; it almost choked me instead.
        This is Maine, I told myself as firmly as I could. And that thing out there is only an animal, not something supernatural or even supernormal. Just an animal. Probably native to this area-but, at worst, an animal that has escaped from a zoo. That's all.
        That's all.
        Connie murmured in her sleep. She twisted from side to side and mumbled in what sounded like a foreign language.
        Wind moaned at the glass in front of me.
        Connie sat straight up in bed and called my name. "Don! Don, don't let it near me! Don't let it have me!"
        I went to her, but even as I reached for her shoulders she collapsed back against her pillows. In an instant the dream had left her, and she was sleeping peacefully.
        I sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the gun from the nightstand. It was loaded; I had filled the magazine myself. Nevertheless, I checked it again to be sure before I leaned back against my pillows to wait for something to happen.

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    THURSDAY
        
    The Fear

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    7.
        
        At nine o'clock the next morning, just after breakfast, I used the lawn mower-sized snow blower to clear a narrow path between the house and the barn. The machine sounded like a jet fighter entering a power dive. Numbing vibrations jolted along my arms and across my shoulders and back down my arms into the snow blower's handles from which they had come, like electricity flowing through a closed circuit. The snow shot up and out and away to my right in a dazzling, sparkling crescent.
        Snow was falling only lightly now, and the wind had quieted considerably.