Realizing that she was right and I was a fool to argue, I folded up my misguided chivalry and tucked it away in a mental closet where it wouldn't attract me again. I got up and stretched and said, "Okay. Better wake me around five."
She came to me.
I put my arms around her.
She put her lips against my throat.
Warmth, a heartbeat, hope.
***
She switched off the lamp, plunging the living room into darkness, and came to the front door where I was waiting in my heavy coat, scarf, gloves, toboggan cap, boots, and snowshoes.
"When will you get there?" she asked.
"In this wind, on snowshoes
Four hours."
"With a couple of hours to rest at the other end, maybe you'll get back here by three or four in the afternoon."
"Sooner, I hope."
"I hope so too."
I wanted to be able to see her, to drift for a minute in the bright pools of her eyes.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you too," I echoed dumbly, meaning it with all my soul, wishing that there were some clever phrase that would say it better. "I love you."
Two patches of blacker black in the blackness of the room, we embraced, kissed, clung to each other for several seconds, clung like drowners to a raft.
"Better get moving," she said at last.
"Yeah." As I reached for the doorknob, I had a frightening thought. I froze and said, "If they take control of Toby again, you won't be able to restrain him. I was barely able to manage him. What'll hap pen?"
"It's all right," she said. "I've already thought of that. When I feed him breakfast, I'll powder one of my sleeping tablets in his hot chocolate."
"That won't hurt him, will it?"
"They're not that strong. He'll sleep like a baby most of tomorrow. That's all."
"And you think-so long as he's drugged, they can't make use of him?" I asked.
"What do you think?"
"I don't know."
"It'll work."
"I guess it will."
"Well," she said, "whether it'll work or not, it's really the only thing I can do."
After I'd looked at it from every angle, I had to agree with her. "But be extremely careful, Connie. Watch him as closely as you would if he weren't drugged. If they take control of him, they could make him attack you."
"I'll be careful."
I listened quietly, until I heard Toby breathing deeply and smoothly: he was still sound asleep on the living room sofa.
I said, "Keep the pistol with you."
She said, "I won't let it out of my sight."
"Don't let it out of your hand."
"Okay."
"I'm serious."
"Okay."
"And keep the safety off."
"I will."
"I shouldn't leave you alone."
"And I should make you take the gun in case they come after you along the way."
"They won't."
"They might."
I fumbled for her, hugged her. "You're in much worse danger than I am. I shouldn't leave."
"If we stay here together," she said, "we die here together." Softly:
"Better get moving before there's too much light out there."
I kissed her.
She opened the door for me.
Then: cold, snow, ice, wind.
11.
Dawn had come but only technically. The sun had risen behind the dense dark storm clouds, but night had not yet gone to bed. The sun lay on the cloud shrouded horizon, and there was nothing more than a vague glimmer of light in the world.
Cloaked in darkness, but with sufficient dawn glow to keep me from wandering off in the wrong direction, I struck out from the farmhouse. I headed due west toward Pastor's Hill which rose beyond the open fields comprising that flank of Timberlake Farm.
I floundered, getting accustomed to my snowshoes, and walked atop a hip-deep, cold dry sea of snow.
I didn't know if there were any aliens nearby or if they were watching me. I did know, from having listened to the radio, that this was no world-wide invasion, for there had been no news reports of strange yellow-eyed creatures. Thus far the aliens seemed to be concentrated in the woods behind the farmhouse-although they might well be on all sides of us.
If they were on all sides of us, if I were being watched right this minute, then there wasn't much of a chance of my ever reaching the Johnson farm.
But that was negative thinking, and it smacked of more than a little paranoia. Paranoia led to despair and a feeling of utter helplessness. That kind of attitude could end in paralysis, a condition that already had been half brought on by the wind and the snow. Determined to think positive, I used the darkness and the wavelike drifts to mask my stealthy progress toward the open fields toward Pastor's Hill.
If the aliens were out there keeping a vigil, they would never see me.
Never.
Not in a million years.
I had to believe that.
As I walked straight into the wind, shoulders hunched and head tucked down, I began to realize that what we were enduring would make the perfect subject matter for a book: my second book. The thought so surprised me that for a moment I stopped, stood quite still, oblivious of the wind and snow and of the possibility that some of the yellow-eyed creatures might be lurking in the drifts nearby.
Another book?
My first book had been published while I was a patient in a mental institution. It had not been a book so much as a diary, a war diary which I had kept from my first day of basic training until they brought me home from Asia as a mental basket case. Apparently, the diary helped satisfy the nation's need to see firsthand and fully grasp the horror of the last war, for it had placed high on all of the best seller lists across the country. It made a great deal of money for everyone concerned and was well reviewed. The sales were certainly not hurt by the fact that the author was a quasi-catatonic living in the equivalent of a padded cell. Indeed, that had probably helped sales more than all the publisher's advertising. Perhaps I was-in the eyes of my readers-a metaphor for the United States; perhaps they saw that the country had been driven as crazy as
I had been by the war. And perhaps they thought they could learn some lessons from my ordeal that would be useful in getting them-in getting the entire country-back on sound footing.
But there was no salvation in the diary. I'm certain that most of them were disappointed. How could they have looked to me for their salvation when I hadn't been able to save myself?
I learned two things in the war:
Death is real and final.
The world is a madhouse.
Perhaps that doesn't mean much to you.
But it broke me.
These two realizations, combined with my own deep sense of guilt and moral failure, drove me over the edge. And it was the eventual acceptance of these bitter lessons, finding a way to live with these two truths, which made it possible for me to regain a tolerable perspective and a semblance of sanity.
The key is that I went through that hell, and it was by the flames that my wounds were cauterized. My readers-as well meaning as they might have been- were merely arm chair sufferers. They were anxious to pass through the flames vicariously-and that will never be enough to cauterize their psychic wounds.
When I was released from the sanitarium-against all predictions, against all expectations-when it was clear I had a good chance of leading a relatively normal life (although the possibility of a relapse was never ruled out), I consented to be interviewed by a few reporters. I was asked this question more than any other: "Will you write another book?" And my reply was always the same: "No." I am not a writer. Oh, I suppose I have some facility with prose, but I'm surely no master of it. Now and again I have an original insight, a thing or two that I want to say. And I'm not excessively clumsy at characterization nor too free with flowery metaphors and overextended similes. I know my English grammar as well as the next college graduate. But I simply am not capable of the day-to-day, day-in-day-out, sustained effort of creation.
That takes more sensitivity than I have-and a greater madness as well. I say madness, for even the worst godawful hack must believe-even if he denies it to everyone and to himself-that what he does makes a difference, however minuscule, in the course of human events. It really does not. I'm sorry, but that's true.
The world is only a madhouse. And who can reason with madmen? Who can organize an asylum? To one degree or another, the majority of men (and women) are lunatics: religious fanatics, political fanatics, racial fanatics. You can't argue with them, for you can't educate them unless they want to be educated.
And, my friends, they don't want. And if you write, instead, as a challenge not to the masses but to the ages, if you feel that you are flinging the gauntlet in the face of Time, then you don't understand the second thing that I learned in the last war:
Death is real and final.
Death is not a release from suffering.
Death is not a blessing.
Death is not a mystery.
Death is not a solution.
Death is not a trip to heaven.
Or to hell.
Or to limbo.
Or to nirvana.
Or to (fill in your favorite paradise).
Death is not a oneness with
Nature.
Or with God.
Or with the universe.
Death is not reincarnation.
Death does not just happen to other people.
Death is not just what the villain deserves.
Death is not just a novelist's device.
Death is not heroic.
Death is not just for the movies.
Death is not just a stage we go through.
Death is not mutable.
Death is not beatable.
Death is not cheatable.
Death is not a joke.
Death. Is. Real. And. Final.
Final.
Forever.
And that's it.
So what else is there for a man to do but live while he can? What else makes sense but grabbing all the love and joy that you can, while you can, and to hell with trying to change the unchangeable? To hell with a writer's conscience, his morals, his vision, and his mission.
Yet here I was thinking about a second book. And I knew that, should we all survive (or even if I survived alone), the story would be told. I would do the telling. The agony of creation would be en dured.
But why?
Not to educate the masses, surely. You know where I stand on that issue.
And not to entertain. There are dozens of writers who are far more clever, much wittier, and much more entertaining than I could ever hope to be.
I'm no good at inventing thrills and chills, perhaps because the very worst in life has happened to me and pales the product of my imagination (although I still read thrillers and enjoy them).
Why, then, this book?
I suppose because, in the war, my diary became an important outlet for me. It was an unspeaking counselor, a silent psychiatrist, a priest to whom I could confess, wail, scream, whisper, vomit out the torment. And now, if we survived the ordeal at
Tim-berlake Farm, I could best cleanse my soul of the stain if I put the story down on paper.
And having written it, why not make a buck or two? More money would mean a better chance of enjoying life fully.
I am being dangerously frank.
Decry my attitude if you wish. Feel superior. Be my guest. I have nothing to lose.
But now that's been said, I must also say that there was another reason why I felt driven toward the writing of a second book. As I stood there in the snow, I sensed that this story had a unique aspect which demanded that it be told-not for the benefit of other men, not for the ages, but for something larger and greater than the fame-wealth-acceptance that most writers seek, something altogether indefinable.
Did the story have to be told for them-for the aliens?
But that made no sense. So far as I could see, they thought of us as animals, protein, mindless creatures, meat on the hoof. Even if my book were published and a copy placed before them, they most likely would not realize that writing and the making of books were signs of an intelligent species. To them a book might be as unremarkable an object as a stone or a clod of earth, for they might have evolved telepathy before language, thus making language unnecessary.
To them, written symbols might be inconceivable. After all, if our farmhouse-a four-walled geometric structure of some sophistication when compared to a rabbit warren or a bear's den-was no indication to them that we were specimens of an intelligent species with whom they ought to communicate, with whom they should make every effort to be understood rather than feared, then no book would catch their notice or be at all meaningful to them.
And yet I knew that I would write it. And knowing that much, having accepted it, I was able to get moving once more. I walked on toward Pastor's Hill, through wind and snow, feeling no better nor any worse for having made that decision. I was merely perplexed by it.
I crossed the open fields and climbed the wooded slope of Pastor's Hill without encountering a single living creature born of this world or any other. On the crown of the hill, buffeted by the wind that roared through the bare branches and between the stark trunks of the trees, I stopped to rest.