Invasion

feet.
        The mysterious pressure clinging around my head increased, slipped inside of me again, and began to work up the yellow-eyed image once more.. .
        Out!
        I ran. I had never run in the war; I had stood up to anything and everything. Even my mental illness, my catatonia, had not been the product of fear; I had been driven, then, by disillusionment and self-loathing. But now I ran, terrified.
        I tore off my cap, pulled at my hair as if I were a raving lunatic, tried to grab and throttle whatever invisible being was trying to get inside of me.
        I tripped over a log, went down, hard. But I got up, spitting blood and snow, and I climbed the side of a small hill.
        I found my voice somewhere along the way. A scream burst from me. It echoed back to me from the crowding trees and hillsides. It didn't sound like my voice, although it surely was. It didn't even sound human.
        For a long while-exactly how long, I really don't know, perhaps half an hour or perhaps twice that long-I weaved without direction through the forest. I remember running until my lungs were on fire, crawling like an animal, slithering on my belly, moaning and mumbling and gibbering senselessly. I had been driven temporarily insane by an unimaginably strong fear, a racial fear, an almost biological fear of the creature that had tried to contact me in that pine-circled clearing.
        At last I tripped and fell face-down in a drift of snow, and I was unable to regain my feet or to crawl or even to slither on my belly any farther. I lay there, waiting to have the flesh picked from my bones…
        As I regained my breath and as my heartbeat slowed, the biological fear subsided to be replaced by a more rational, much more manageable fear. My senses returned; my thoughts began to move once again, sluggishly at first, then like quick fishes. There was no longer anything trying to force its way inside of my head. I was alone in the quiet forest, watched over by nothing more sinister than the sentinel pines, lying on a soft bed of snow. I stared up at the darkening sky which issued fat, slowly twirling snowflakes, and I caught a few flakes on my tongue. For the moment, at least, I was safe.
        Safe from what?
        I had no answer for that one.
        Safe for how long?
        No answer.
        As a bizarre thought occurred to me, I closed my eyes for all of a minute and opened them again only to see the sky, trees, and snow. Incredibly, I had half-expected to see hospital walls. For one awful moment I had thought that the farm and the forest and the yellow-eyed animal were not real at all but were only figments of my imagination, fragments of a dream verging on a nightmare, and that I was still in a deep catatonic trance, lying in a hospital room, helpless.
        I shuddered. I had to get moving, or I was going to go all to pieces.
        Weak from all of the running I had done, I struggled to my feet and found that I was still holding tightly to the pistol. My hand had formed like a frozen claw around it. I hesitated for a moment, glanced at the woods that crowded in all around me, awaited for something to attack me, decided that there was nothing nearby, and then put the gun in my coat pocket.
        But I kept my hand on it.
        I took half a dozen steps, stopped, whirled, and looked back at the peaceful wildlands. Biting my, lip, forcing myself not to turn every time the wind moaned behind me, I started to find the way out of there.
        Ten minutes later
        I reached the perimeter of the woods and began to climb the hill toward the farmhouse. In the middle of the slope, I stopped and turned and looked back at the trees. The snow had begun to fall as heavily and as fast as it had done all last evening; and the trees were hazy, indistinct, even though they were only fifty or sixty yards away. Nevertheless, I could see well enough to be sure that there was nothing down there at the edge of the forest, nothing that might have followed me. And then, as if my thoughts had produced it, a brilliant purple light flashed far away in the forest, at least a mile away, but purpling the snow around me in spite of the distance, flashed three times in quick succession like the revolving beam of a lighthouse, only three times and nothing more.
        I  watched. Nothing? Imagination? No, I had seen it; I was not losing my mind.
        I  waited.
        Snow