The light came down behind the ridge just after full dark.
Kathleen saw it from the kitchen window—a bright point that dropped too fast and too straight, then vanished into the trees. No sound. The dogs in the yard went quiet at the same moment. She stood with the dish towel in her hands and watched the place where the light had gone. Nothing else moved. After a minute she called the boys in from the porch. They came, but they kept looking back at the ridge.
“Meteor,” she said.
The older boy shook his head. “It didn’t fall. It went in.”
They stayed inside. Kathleen locked the door and turned on the porch light. The dogs would not come up the steps. They sat at the edge of the yard with their heads low and their ears forward, all pointed at the same break in the trees. At 9:20 one of them growled, short and uncertain, then stopped. The others did not join in. Kathleen watched through the window. The porch light reached only to the first fence post. Beyond it the yard was black. Something tall stood just past the light. The shape was wrong for a man. The head sat inside a hood or a helmet that caught the porch light and held it in a flat red glow. The body was broad at the shoulders and narrow at the waist. It did not sway. It only faced the house.
She turned off the porch light. The red glow remained for three full seconds after the bulb died, then faded. When she looked again the yard was empty. The dogs had not moved. She kept the boys in the living room with the television low and every curtain closed. At 10:04 the older boy spoke without looking away from the screen.
“It’s in the side yard now.”
Kathleen parted the curtain an inch. The shape stood beside the propane tank. Closer. The red light inside the headpiece pulsed once, slow. One arm—long, jointed—lifted and set a hand on the tank. The metal made a soft sound. The hand stayed there. She let the curtain fall. The boys did not ask what she had seen. They already knew. She moved them to the hallway and sat on the floor with her back against the bedroom door. The dogs outside had gone silent again. She could hear the propane tank ticking as it cooled, and under that a lower sound, like fabric or something heavier sliding against the siding.
The younger boy whispered, “It smells like metal.”
He was right. The smell had come in under the door—sharp, clean, the way a new battery smells when you first tear the package. Kathleen pressed her sleeve over her nose. The sliding sound stopped. For a moment there was only the tick of the tank and their breathing. Then something tapped the bedroom window at the end of the hall. Three times. Evenly spaced. The glass did not break. The tapping simply stopped. She did not go look. She kept the boys against her and waited for the smell to thin.
It did not thin until almost midnight. When she finally stood and checked the side yard from the kitchen, the shape was gone. The propane tank sat where it always sat. On the white paint, just below the valve, was a single dark handprint. The fingers were too long. The palm was narrow. She did not wipe it off. She locked the door again and spent the rest of the night in the hallway with the lights on and the boys asleep against her legs.
In the morning the print was still there. The dogs would not go near the tank. Kathleen walked the fence line and found a place where the grass had been pressed flat in a wide circle. In the center of the circle the ground was warm. She crouched and touched it. The heat was already fading. From the trees on the ridge came a low, steady hum that rose and fell like something breathing through a machine. She stood up. The hum stopped. She looked at the ridge and saw, for one second, the same red glow inside the tree line, level with where a head would be if the thing were still watching the house. Then the glow blinked out. She walked back to the kitchen, locked the door, and did not tell the boys what she had found. She already knew it would be closer tonight, and that the next time the light came down behind the ridge it would not bother landing out of sight.
