the sloped backyard, making a nightmarish pilgrimage into the shadows
of the higher woods?
Did he dare follow it into that heart of darkness? No. No, if there
was to be an ultimate confrontation, it had to happen here on his own
territory, not in whatever strange nest the traveler had made for
itself.
Eduardo was stricken by the blood-freezing suspicion that the traveler
was alien to such an extreme degree that it didn’t share humanity’s
perception of life and death, didn’t draw the line between the two in
the same place at all. Perhaps its kind never died. Or they died in a
true biological sense yet were reborn in a different form out of their
own rotting remains–and expected the same to be true of creatures on
this world. In fact, the nature of their species–especially its
relationship with death–might be unimaginably more bizarre, perverse,
and repellent than anything his imagination could conceive.
In an infinite universe, the potential number of intelligent life-forms
was also infinite–as he had discovered from the books he’d been
reading lately.
Theoretically, anything that could be imagined must exist in an
infinite realm.
When referring to extraterrestrial life-forms, alien meant alien,
maximum strange, one weirdness wrapped in another, beyond easy
understanding and possibly beyond all hope of comprehension. He had
brooded about this issue before, but only now did he fully grasp that
he had about as much chance of understanding this traveler, really
understanding it, as a mouse had of understanding the intricacies of
the human experience, the workings of the human mind.
The dead crow shuddered, twitched its broken legs. From its twisted
throat came a wet cawing sound that was a grotesque parody of the cry
of a living crow.
A spiritual darkness filled Eduardo, because he could no longer deny,
to any extent whatsoever, the identity of the intruder who had left a
vile trail through the house on the night of June tenth. He had known
all along what he was repressing.
Even as he had drunk himself into oblivion, he had known. Even as he
had pretended not to know, he had known. And he knew now. He knew.
Dear sweet Jesus, he knew.
Eduardo had not been afraid to die. He’d almost welcomed death. Now
he was again afraid to die. Beyond fright. Physically ill with
terror. Trembling, sweating.
Though the traveler had shown no signs of being able to control the
body of a living human being, what would happen when he was dead?
He picked up the shotgun from the table, snatched the keys to the
Cherokee off the pegboard, went to the connecting door between the
kitchen and the garage. He had to leave at once, no time to waste, get
out and far away. To hell with learning more about the traveler. To
hell with forcing a confrontation. He should just get in the Cherokee,
jam the accelerator to the floorboards, run down anything that got in
his way, and put a lot of distance between himself and whatever had
come out of the black doorway into the Montana night.
He jerked the door open but halted on the threshold between the kitchen
and the garage. He had nowhere to go. No family left. No friends.
He was too old to begin another life. And no matter where he went, the
traveler would still be here, learning its way in this world,
performing its perverse experiments, befouling what was sacred,
committing unspeakable outrages against everything that Eduardo had
ever cherished.
He could not run from this. He had never run from anything in his
life, however, it was not pride that stopped him before he had taken
one full step into the garage. The only thing preventing him from
leaving was his sense of what was right and wrong, the basic values
that had gotten him through a long life.
If he turned his back on those values and ran like a gutless wonder, he
wouldn’t be able to look at himself in a mirror any more. He was old
and alone, which was bad enough. To be old, alone, and eaten by
self-loathing would be intolerable.
He wanted desperately to run from this, but that option was not open to