Invasion Author:Aaron Wolfe Having just about concluded that it was nothing more than the wind and the storm that was upsetting the horses -- and now they were all leaping and snorting more furiously than ever, as if they were not three ordinary nags but a trio of high-strung thoroughbreds -- I turned toward the door and quite accidentally caught sight of the light which g... more »lowed eerily just beyond the only window in the entire building. There were two lights, actually, both a warm amber shade and of dim wattage. They appeared to pulse and to shimmer -- and then they were gone, as if they had never been: blink!
I hurried to the barn door, slid it open, and stepped into the snow-filled night. The arctic wind struck me like a mallet swung by a blacksmith who was angry with his wife, and it almost blew me back into the stable row. Switching on the nearly useless flashlight, I bent against the wind and pulled the door shut behind me. Laboriously, cautiously, I inched around the side of the barn in the direction of the window, peering anxiously at the ground ahead of me.
I stopped before I reached the window, for I found precisely what I had been afraid that I would find: those odd, eight-pointed tracks which Toby and I had seen on the slope earlier in the day. There were a great many of them, as if the animal had been standing there, moving back and forth as I searched for better vantage points, for a long while -- at least all of the time that I had been inside with the horses. It had been watching me.
This is the only novel by Dean Koontz published under the pseudonym Aaron Wolfe. Koontz later revised and expanded the novel and published it under his own name as Winter Moon.« less