Invasion by Dean Koontz Page A

fireplace with a statuette-bedecked man tel. A thick ceramic mug half-full of frozen coffee and a half-eaten breakfast roll were on the table beside one of the arm chairs, and there was an open magazine lying on the footstool before the chair. It looked as if someone had gotten up to answer the door and had never returned.
        The dining room was directly across the hall from the living room. It was also deserted. I even opened the closet: cardboard cartons sealed with masking tape, a few lightweight summer jackets, photograph albums shelved like books…
        There was a noise behind me.
        I turned as quickly as I could, too clumsy in the snowshoes.
        The room was as it had been.
        I sat down and took off my snowshoes.
        Another noise: a mechanical clicking…
        Or was I hearing things?
        Cautiously, I crept to the dining room doorway, hesitated on the brink of it like a paratrooper at the penultimate moment, and then leapt into the hall.
        Nothing.
        All was quiet.
        Had it been my imagination?
        The only other room downstairs was the den. The door was closed. I put my ear against it, but there wasn't anything for me to hear. Of course, I had made so much noise coming into the house that I would have alerted any of the aliens if they had been here. I raised the dagger high, gave the door a solid kick that threw it inward, and charged through, prepared to slash at anything that might be waiting for me.
        No one was there.
        No thing was there.
        I  kept the dagger raised, ready.
        I followed the main hallway to the front of the house, intending to go upstairs-and I found the front door lying on the floor of the foyer, the house open to the elements. Although the door was half-buried under a couple of feet of snow that had sifted inside, I could see that it had been broken into three or four large pieces, smashed apart and thrown into the foyer. Shuffling closer, I examined the hinges which were still attached to the frame. The steel had been bent out of shape. The hinge bolts had been snapped as if they were pencil lead.
        Stepping outside onto the front porch, I looked to the left, over at the barn. There was nothing out of place over there. The fields in front of the house were white and peaceful. The forest loomed near on the right, but there were no yellow-eyed creatures peering from between the trees.
        None that I could see.
        I went back into the foyer and stood there for at least five minutes, perhaps ten, listening, waiting to hear that clicking noise I'd heard in the dining room. But the silence was deep and unbroken. I seemed to be alone.
        Flexing my fingers around the hilt of the butcher's knife, I went upstairs.
        Five doors opened off the second-floor hall, and four of them were closed. The fifth had been smashed from its hinges and was lying half in the room and half in the corridor.
        "Who's there?" I called.
        My voice echoed against the icy walls.
        I looked down the steps. They were empty. The snow in the foyer bore no footprints except for my own. Nothing had tried to creep up behind me.
        Yet.
        Death does not just happen to other people.
        Death is not just for the movies.
        This is like the war, exactly.
        Death is not mutable.
        Death is not heroic.
        Death is final.
        Death is real.
        Get out fast.
        Get out!
        I took one step toward the broken door, then another and another and a fourth, stopping only when the floorboards creaked and startled me. I listened to the wind in the attic and thought of all those moldy H. P. Lovecraft stories that I'd read when
        I was a kid. An eternity later I managed to take another step, and an eternity after that I reached the ruined doorway to the master bedroom. There, I froze and waited for something to