"They just had it on the news."

"For fifteen, twenty seconds. The real thing lasts longer, Dad."

What's she so bitter about? he thought in panic. He cleared his throat and said hopefully, "There'll be more about it on Fred Fingers, I bet. He's got that woman on tonight who wrote that new space book. I'm sure they'll be talking about the comet."

Jane looked away from him and said nothing. After a moment, it occurred to him that she was listening to something, and after a moment more, he heard it, too, a distant, fitful symphony of mournful yowling. Cats, he decided. No. Dogs. No. He trembled as an odd chill moved down the back of his neck. Cats and dogs.

"It's getting a bit cool all of a sudden, isn't it?" he said.

"I'm fine, Dad. It's nice and warm tonight." She plucked at the binding of her book with a fingernail. "They say it'll be prettiest just after the sun's gone down."

"You couldn't watch it from the house?"

She made as though to pick up the book, then spread the fingers of one hand across it and pressed it against her thigh. "The trees are in the way. It'll be low in the southwest tonight, right over the hills."

They were quiet for a time. The western sky cooled and darkened. The first star appeared. He listened as crickets tuned up for their night's music. They stopped, with startling abruptness, after only a few minutes, and then he noticed that the distant animal chorus had also ceased. On the slope behind him and Jane, the trees moved their limbs and groaned. He glanced about uneasily. His attention was arrested by the rhythmically expanding and contracting rectangle of bluish light beyond the fence. Watching the slow pulsations calmed him. He found himself thinking of Captain Steele on the altar of the brutish Femizons, about to be fed feet-first to their leathery monster-god.

Jane suddenly yelped, "There!" and scrambled up.

"Huh?"

"The comet!" She pointed to the sky in the southwest. "See it?"

He stood and looked where she pointed but saw nothing.

"Now do you see it?"

"'Fraid not, hon. You sure it's there?"

"Yes! It's a little smudge of light."

His eyes started to throb as he peered at the sky. A smudge. A blur. His gaze dropped and drifted toward the rectangle of bluish light, locked on it longingly. His eyes watered. He closed them and massaged them through the lids, and to Jane he said, "I think I saw it. Something, anyway. Are you positive that's your comet out there?"

"It's Abaddon, all right. It has to be."

Guiltily, desperately, he cast about for something more to say. "But I thought comets had tails and moved. Or is that meteorites?"

"It is moving. Tomorrow, you'll see it's shifted. And it'll be a little bigger tomorrow night, too. Bigger still the night after that, and the night after that, until in another week or so you can see it before dark. It'll pass so close it'll be bigger and brighter than the full moon. Its tail'll stretch all the way across the sky. Then the--"

Her voice quivered and died as she shuddered violently. He put his arm across her shoulders and said, "See? It is too getting chilly out here." The flesh above her shoulder blades was hot against the inner side of his forearm. "Let's go home."

"Just another minute or two. Please, Dad?"

He repressed a sigh of exasperation. "Just another minute."

"Thanks, Dad." She gave him a quick hug and stepped away.

I can't remember, he thought as he watched her stoop to pick up her book, the last time I put my arm around her. And I can't think when I've seen her so excited. He felt a strange pang and tried to think of something he could say that would keep her talking to him. He settled for, "What's that you're reading?"

"Mythology. I've been checking up on Abaddon. It's the name of an ancient destroying angel."

"Pretty grim name for a comet, isn't it?"

"Maybe the astronomer who saw it first thought it looked really eerie. Like a big blue skull out in space, with long scraggly red hair streaming behind it."

Something buzzed in his ear. He jerked his head away from the sound and swatted the air. "Let's go home, Jane. The mosquitoes are getting our range."

"Oh." Her shoulders dropped slightly. "Okay."

He looked up the dark wooded slope, toward the glimmer of house lights above. Blue lights among the trees. There were other lights, too, a boiling cloud of flickering green scintillae that rose and fell and moved and stayed in place. From afar came the undulating howl of an unhappy-sounding dog, and from another direction came a long rumbling bass note that could have been a jetliner or could have been thunder or could have been anything. He trembled again. That damn chill.

"We're not making that climb in the dark," he said.

Jane pointed down the grassy strip. "This'll bring us to the road not far from our own driveway."

The hard dry grass crunched underfoot as they walked. The unhappy-sounding dog continued to bay. The trees stirred the air with their branches and complained among themselves. When he and Jane had reached the end of the grassy strip and crossed a shallow ditch onto the shoulder of the road, he became aware of another sound, a faint metallic tinkling, and then of the click of many talons on pavement, the scuffing of many padded feet.

Up the road, beyond the short brick columns marking the mouth of his driveway, at the far edge of the pool of light beneath the street lamp, shadows moved within shadows. The saliva in his mouth turned to dust. After a few seconds, the lesser shadows resolved themselves into two German shepherds, a Great Dane, a huge gray dog of indeterminate breed, and half a dozen smaller dogs. They approached at an easy trot, in ragged formation. They did not break stride or deviate from their course or lower their heads or look at the man and the girl as they passed. They moved down the road and vanished around its lower curve.

"It's like they were going somewhere to meet someone," Jane said in a quiet voice.