I can only describe the sensation I felt when tried to move as like pushing my arm through electrified tar. It took every ounce of attention I possessed to get any movement at all. I marshaled my will and brought my attention into the sharpest possible focus. Simply moving my arm did not work. I had to order the movement, to labor at it. All the while they stood there.

I struggled, bit by bit clawing closer and closer to that lamp. I turned my head, fighting a pressure that felt as if a sheath of lead had been draped over me, and saw the light switch in the dark. I watched my hand move slowly closer, and finally felt the switch under my finger.

I clicked it. Nothing. Tried again. Still nothing.

The electricity was off. The burglar alarm was still working because it had battery backup

— but apparently it meant little to them, as they had entered the house without tripping it.

When I turned my head back I confronted a sight so weird. I thought afterward that I did not know how to write about it. I still don't, so I am just going to plunge ahead.

Beside my bed, and perhaps two feet from my face, close enough to see it plainly without my glasses. was a version of the thin ones, the type I have called "her." It was not quite right, though. Its eyes were like big, black buttons, round rather than slanted. It appeared to be wearing an inept cardboard imitation of a blue double-breasted suit, complete with a white triangle of handkerchief sucking out of the pocket.

I was overcome at this point by terror so fierce and physical that it seemed more biological than psychological. My blood and bones and muscles were much more afraid than my mind. My skin began tingling, my hair felt like it was getting a static charge. he sense of their presence in the room was so unimaginably powerful, and so strange. I tried to wake up Anne but my mouth wouldn't open. The moment I thought of the kids a clear picture flashed in my head of the two of them sleeping peacefully.

The thing before me seemed like a sort of interrogatory. Why the suit? Did it mean that they were showing me a male? If this was a hive species, there might well be more than one sex, and they might be physically very different. Females, males, and stocky little drones?

Now what was I going to do, having called them — lie here and quake? I had wanted to communicate.

They were obviously waiting for me to do something. I saw their faces so clearly, their eyes dark, glittering pits in their dun skin. I could not help noticing that there was a sort of jollity about these beings. I'd thought before that they seemed happy. Perhaps whatever they were trying to do was going well.