Breathless

Sixty-four

A turning point in the history of science and of humanity, the passing of one great theory and eventually the devising of another: That was one thing, that was a major event, but the moment Puzzle spoke, major event became an inadequate description, and even the word singularity, used as scientists used it, would not suffice.

Cammy was no less shaken by what Puzzle said to her than by the fact that Puzzle spoke in the first place. The creature’s voice was mellifluous, the sweet voice of a child, and with her strange eyes, she seemed to see to the heart of Cammy, as a child sometimes can see a truth to which adults have willfully blinded themselves.

When Riddle spoke to Grady in the equally musical voice of a young boy—” Please don’t be afraid. We would never devour you in your sleep”—the clock began ticking and their course was set. No discussion was necessary between her, Grady, and Lamar; they knew in the instant that they could not allow Paul Jardine and Homeland Security to keep these creatures secret from the world.

This was not merely the event of the century. This was perhaps the most significant event of a millennium. The future of humanity, the paths that mankind followed and the choices it made, would be affected by this event in more ways than she could imagine. No one, no bureaucrat or king, no institution, no government, had the right to deny this news to the world.

They couldn’t hide the two anywhere here and hope to ride out the search, for the search would not end until Puzzle and Riddle were found. Jardine had considerable manpower at his disposal, and he had as well the laser polygraph.

“The scientific team’s at dinner in the mess tent,” Lamar said. “Then they’re scheduled to stay there for at least an hour to blue-sky this as a group. As long as the guard at the tent doesn’t glance inside and see the cage empty, we’ve got a couple hours before the alarm bells.”

“We can’t drive out, no way,” Grady said. “Two guards at every house on Cracker’s Drive, to see us going past. And then an entire contingent, a roadblock most likely, at the intersection with the state route. If we didn’t stop, if we tried to run it, I think they’d shoot the tires out, at least the tires. If we use four-wheel drive, go overland, they’ll hear us, even see us in this moon, and cut us off.”

No phones, no text-messaging devices, no computers with Internet access were available to get a message out. Besides, there was no way to describe Puzzle and Riddle that would convince and energize anyone who hadn’t seen them.

“Going overland in any direction, I mean on foot,” Cammy said, “where’s the nearest house? The MacDermotts’?”

Grady shook his head. “That’s over two miles through some rough territory, ravines and rockslides.”

Sitting prairie-dog style, Puzzle and Riddle flanked Merlin, each with an arm across his back. The three of them listened to the big furless folks, heads cocked one way and then the other.

Grady said, “The Carlyle place is a mile and a half, and that way is all deer paths through easy woods and a meadow or two, before you come to their open fields.”

“Jim and Nora Carlyle? I take care of their horses. They’re good people, and they’re smart. When they see Puzzle and Riddle, they’ll understand what’s at stake, they’ll let us use one of their vehicles. Then we drive out from there, and we’re past all the guards, the roadblocks.”

Lamar said, “I should stay here, do what I can to delay them from discovering you’ve gone, then confuse and misdirect them. Chaos is what I do.”

“No,” Grady said. “Jardine knows about me in the army, so he knows about me and Marcus, so he probably knows about the connection between you and me by now. You’ll grow old and die in the slammer. Your best hope is to stay with us all the way until we can present Puzzle and Riddle to the TV cameras, when and wherever we’re able to do that.”

“What about these shoes? Will I make it in these shoes, maybe slow you down?”

“Aren’t those Rockports? Sure, you’ll be fine. We aren’t rock climbing, just walking in the woods.”

“I’ve never been a walking-in-the-woods kind of guy, but I’ll do my best, I’ll keep up with you.”

“Will there be guards between us and the woods?”

“Yes,” said Lamar. “Definitely.”

“We’ll know,” Puzzle said. “We see everything in the dark, all the way to the bottom of the night.”

To Cammy, Grady said, “I’ll grab a jacket. Collar Merlin for me. We can use flashlights when we’re so far into the woods no one here can see them, but for some distance, when the branches are too thick to let the moonlight in, we might need Merlin on a leash to lead us. He knows the paths that way, it’s one of our favorite walks.”

Cammy slipped into her jacket, collared Merlin, and clipped the leash to the collar.

Standing at the door, ready to open it, Lamar Woolsey said, “Too bad I don’t have time to run a probability analysis on this plan of yours. I have a nasty feeling, there’s chaos brewing in it.”

Puzzle said, “What is leads to what will be, and all will be well if we do what is right.”

Lamar nodded. “If you say so.”

“She did,” Riddle told him. “She said so. And she’s right. Never fear the future. Whatever happens, the future is the only way back.”

The novelty of hearing them talk was probably years away from wearing off, and Cammy listened, rapt. “The only way back to what?”

“Back to where we belong forever,” said Riddle. “The future is the one path out of time into eternity.”

Grady returned with three flashlights. “Are we ready?”

“Absolutely,” Lamar said. “The coach just gave us a pep talk, and we’re in gear for action. I’ll scout the way.”

Lamar stepped onto the back porch, leaving the door open, and after a moment motioned for them to follow him.

Sixty-five

In Jim’s cramped study, Henry Rouvroy put down the hand grenade, looked over the books on the shelves, and removed the volume of his brother’s haiku.

The noise in the attic faded away. He took no comfort in the silence. He knew the rapping-out of meter on a ceiling beam would soon resume.

Or the torment would take another form. His tormentor had not finished with him yet; and would not be finished until he thrust in the knives, thrust again and again.

Restless, Henry walked the house, back and forth, around and around, carrying the hand grenade in one hand and the book in the other, reading haiku, thumbing pages.

He didn’t know why he felt compelled to read Jim’s haiku. But intuition told him that he might be rewarded for doing so.

When he found the harrier poem, his breath caught in his throat:

Henry’s keen intuition served him well, and his classes in logic at Harvard prepared him to reason his way quickly to the meaning of this discovery.

The poem left on the kitchen notepad was not a new composition. Jim had written it long before Henry’s arrival, not just hours ago.

Therefore, the poem could not possibly refer to the harriers in the sky moments before Henry murdered Jim. The poem had nothing to do with Jim’s murder and nothing to do with Henry’s, either.

Not that he had believed for a minute that Jim had returned from the dead to compose verse and threaten him with it. Henry was not a superstitious person, and even immersion in the primitive culture of these rural hills could not so quickly wash away the education and, indeed, enlightenment that he received in those hallowed halls in Cambridge. But at least finding the haiku in this book confirmed his certainty that his tormentor must be someone pretending to be Jim.

Or did it?

Jim didn’t need to copy a haiku out of a book. Having written it, he would remember it. Remembering, he would see how useful it could be in the current circumstances.

No. Jim was not alive and was not one of the living dead. Jim was, damn it, as dead as—

In the attic, someone rapped out a few lines of iambic pentameter, then a few lines of dactylic heptameter.

Sixty-six

After more than thirty-one years, Tom Bigger remembered the way home as clearly as though he had left it only a month before. The street canopied with alders that were old even when he’d been a boy, the cast-iron streetlamps with the beveled panes, the grand old houses behind deep lawns all stirred in him a time when he was a boy, preadolescence, before he became so angry, before he was made angry by ideologies that now seemed insane to him and alien.

Like some others, his parents’ house had not been restored so much as remade into a greater grandeur than it originally possessed. Nevertheless, he could recognize it, and the sight of it thrilled as much as it saddened him.

The time had arrived to say good-bye to Josef Yurashalmi, and Tom fumbled for words to adequately express his gratitude.

But as the old man parked in front of the house, he said, “You don’t know they still live there, Tom. All these years … And though it pains me to say it, the way you look, you won’t inspire the confidence of whoever might live there now. If maybe your folks have moved and if maybe the people here know where they’ve gone, you’ll be more likely to learn their whereabouts if I’m at your side when you ring the bell.”

“You’ve done too much already. You should be heading home to Hannah, she’s not—”

“Hush, Tom. I’m an old man trying to do a gemilut chesed, and if you care about my soul, you’ll stop arguing with me and let me get it done.”

“Gemilut chesed? What is that?”

“An act of loving kindness, which I guess you haven’t seen much of in your years of rambling. At this time in his life, any old Jew like me starts wondering if he’s done enough of them.”

Humbled, Tom said, “I don’t think I’ve done any.”

“You’re young, you have time. I’m sorry if my slippers might embarrass you, but let’s go see if your tata-mama are waiting for you.”

The street was quiet, but Tom’s heart was not. Walking with Josef toward the front door, he lost courage step by step. He had rejected them, had spoken of despising them and their values, and after all this time, they would be justified in despising him.

“You can do it,” Josef said. “You need to do it. I’ll stay as long as it takes for the three of you to be comfortable. But your folks are my age, Tom, so I probably know how they think better than you know. And how they’ll think about this — they’ll thank God you came back, and they’ll kiss you and cry and kiss you some more, and it’ll be like none of it ever happened.”

On the veranda, Tom took a deep breath and pressed the doorbell.

Sixty-seven

With Puzzle and Riddle looking into the very bottom of the night, they found ways around three guards at different stations. The escapees made their way boldly toward the line of mobile laboratories, between two of them, south and then west toward the end of the yard, into the meadow.

From there they had to double back toward the north to find the entrance to the woods and the path that Merlin knew as well as any dray horse, in older times, knew and could follow its route without its driver’s direction.

Under the interlaced branches of the trees, the moonlight flickered and eventually went out. The way before them became black and forbidding. But Cammy knew that Merlin saw well in darkness, and his two new friends apparently saw even more clearly than he did.

Halfway to the Carlyle house, Puzzle halted them with a single word, “Bear,” and they waited for a while in silence. Perhaps the bear had paused to listen to them, for after four or five minutes, Cammy heard it moving off, through the woods.

After the bear, they used flashlights, and progressed more quickly, with less stumbling and thrashing through the brush that here and there intruded on the trail.

When they left the forest and entered the fields farmed by the Carlyles, the lights of Jim and Nora’s house were a welcome sight.

At the front-porch steps, on the lawn, someone had parked a Land Rover that Cammy had never seen before. She was prepared to reveal Puzzle and Riddle to the Carlyles, but she wasn’t pleased about taking the risk of bringing someone unknown into the picture.

When her flashlight revealed Virginia license plates on the vehicle, her concern grew, and she whispered to Grady, “Better take them to the garage back of the barn. Jim’s Mountaineer is there, and I think he keeps the keys under the floor mat on the driver’s side. Load everybody and drift down here as quiet as you can.”

“Come with us,” Grady urged.

“Tell you what — I’ll wait on the porch until I see you coasting down this way. Then I’ll knock on the door. If I get Jim and Nora’s okay, we’ll be able to go legally, and that’s a lot better, nobody looking for a stolen Mountaineer. But if something’s wrong here, we’ll go any way we can.”

Sixty-eight

Earlier, in the late afternoon, Rudy Neems parked the rented SUV a block from Liddon Wallace’s house. In the cargo hold stood ten two-gallon cans that he bought at a Pep Boys and filled at a Mobil station. Because the cans featured safety vents, the interior of the vehicle smelled of gasoline, but there weren’t sufficient fumes to cause an explosion. When he had finished with Kirsten Wallace and the boy, he would return for the SUV, drive it into their garage, and prepare for the burning.

He approached the house openly, carrying a clipboard and a small toolbox that he also bought at Pep Boys, as bold as anyone would be who belonged there. He might have been a meter reader or a repairman of some kind.

No one saw him, no one crossed his path, and he used a key that the attorney had provided to let himself into the side garage door.

During the day, the alarm system was not engaged. When Kirsten Wallace switched on the system later, Rudy would already be inside and comfortable in his hidey-hole, contemplating his enjoyment of her.

Because two housekeepers were in the residence, one until six o’clock and the other until nine, Rudy was cautious when he entered from the garage and through the laundry room.

He was prepared to kill the housekeepers if he encountered them, even if he was not attracted to them, so much did he want Kirsten. But if Kirsten came home shortly before six, as per her schedule, she would know something was wrong when she found the housekeepers gone. Rudy would have lost the advantage of surprise, and he would have to take her the moment that she came through the door, before her suspicion was aroused.

Happily, he found the mechanical room across the hall from the laundry. Here were water heaters, one of the furnaces, the water softener, and other equipment.

According to Wallace, the two maids cleaned the mechanical room on the first Friday of the month and otherwise never entered it. Nevertheless, Rudy crawled into a space behind the furnace and sat there in the dark, where he would not be seen even if someone turned on a light and came in here for some reason.

In his mind, he rehearsed all the things he intended to do to Kirsten. The afternoon and early evening passed so quickly that he was surprised when the authoritative digital voice of the security system announced, “Alarmed to night mode,” so loud that he could hear it clearly through the closed door, from the speaker in the hallway.

Just before the second housekeeper left at nine, she brought dinner to the table. At that point the boy, Benny, was in bed and asleep, and Kirsten could enjoy her meal uninterrupted.

Except that Rudy Neems would interrupt her tonight as she had never in her life been interrupted.

He waited five minutes before easing open the hallway door, just to be sure she would be sitting at dinner in the dining room. Even dining alone, she preferred to eat there, where she could spread out her newspaper on the big table.

Rudy Neems intended to spread out her newspaper as she had never had it spread out in her life.

Between the butler’s pantry and the dining room, one of the two swinging doors stood open. Kirsten sat at the table, her back to him.

She wore her blond hair short. So elegant was her neck that it entranced him.

When he had done her as much as he wanted, then part of the way he would kill her would be by strangulation. That neck.

He watched her turn a page of the newspaper. Her hands were slender, long-fingered, beautifully shaped.

Before strangling her, he could break her fingers one by one.

As he crossed the threshold of the butler’s pantry, a floorboard creaked underfoot.

She turned her head, more gorgeous than her photos suggested, and she screamed.

Rudy rushed her as she came up from her chair. She had a fork in her hand, raising it like a dagger, but he didn’t care about that. She was fast, but Rudy was immeasurably faster. He seized her wrist and almost broke it, she cried out in pain, the fork fell, he pushed the chair out of the way, he shoved her back onto the table, onto her dinner, and—

He heard the window shattering an instant before the alarm went off. Startled, Rudy relented from his assault just enough to allow Kirsten to get her breath.

She screamed again, she threw a wineglass at his face, Rudy dodged it. As the glass shattered on the floor, this guy appeared in an archway on the right, this big strange guy coming in from the hall, his face a ruin, a guy so bizarre that Rudy was for a fatal moment paralyzed.

When he subdued a woman, Rudy liked to force her into submission with nothing more than his hands, his body. He didn’t use a gun, a knife, a sap. He was a solid block, and he liked to start their time together with a fun demonstration of his great strength and his delight in using it.

The sight of this charging fury, this Frankenstein thing, shocked Kirsten’s scream out of her. Gasping, she backed away from both of them.

Rudy snared her knife off the table, but it was not a steak knife, just a regular dinner knife, and he didn’t get to slash with it anyway, because this giant hand closed around his wrist the way his hand had closed around Kirsten’s wrist, the biggest damn hand in the universe. In the broken face were the most terrifying eyes Rudy had ever seen either in a horror movie or in a mirror, eyes full of wrath. Now the broken-faced man had Rudy in a two-hand grip, twisting Rudy’s wrist, bending his hand backward. Everything had happened so fast that maybe six seconds after this thing burst into the room, Rudy was screaming instead of Kirsten, and when his wrist snapped like the wrist of a little girl, the pain was a white flash, as sharp and bright as lightning behind his eyes, and the monster threw him down out of the blinding white light into blackness and silence.

Rudy Neems was unconscious only a couple of minutes. When he came around, his assailant loomed over him, stared down at him, and he didn’t want to meet those eyes. He looked away from those eyes for the same reason he would have looked away from the challenging stare of a rabid wolf.

He did not see Kirsten, but a white-haired old man in slippers was shuffling around, gathering up the debris from the struggle: the fork, the dinner knife, pieces of the broken wineglass. He returned the silverware to the table and dropped the shards of glass in a plastic trash bag.

“Good thing she hadn’t poured wine yet,” the old man said to the monster. “What a mess that would’ve been. Oh, no, look at that — some fava beans smashed in the carpet.” He clucked his tongue. “Now, Tom, I’m not sure an act that violent qualifies as a gemilut chesed, even if I think it was loving kindness that motivated you. But who am I to say, one way or the other, I’m just an old fart trying to run a business and do what’s right in a time when neither of those things pays.”

The pain in the shattered wrist was so bad and the old man was so blurred through his tears that Rudy wondered if he might be hallucinating.

Sirens rose in the distance.

Sixty-nine

Henry Rouvroy could do nothing to keep Jim out of the house, because the poet would come in through the attic if he wasn’t able to enter through a door, because next he would walk through a wall, with no regard for the opinions of the enlightened professors and elite power brokers who would dismiss the idea of ghosts with a sneer or a laugh. He was in control now, the dead brother, and there was nothing to be done about it.

Consequently, because a grenade would be useless against a man who was already dead, Henry put it in the refrigerator. The choice of the refrigerator puzzled him for a moment, but then he decided he must be reacting to a subconscious awareness that the hand grenade resembled a pineapple.

In a despairing mood of resignation, he removed all the bracing chairs from the doors and returned them to the dinette table. When he opened the cellar door, he stood at the head of the stairs, peering down into the lower room, where the lights had been on for more than twenty-four hours. He heard nothing down there, but he said, “Jim?” When he received no reply, he said, “I shouldn’t have killed you myself, not my own brother. I should have hired someone to kill you and then killed him.”

He went from window to window, opening the draperies and raising the blinds. He was finished hiding. He couldn’t endure another night of waiting for retribution.

At one of the front windows, he saw a woman on the porch. At first he assumed that she must be Nora, joining Jim for the next phase of the haunting, but when she became aware of him and turned, she proved to be a stranger. And an attractive one.

If an attractive woman came to him, rather than Henry having to go stalk and capture her, perhaps his fate wasn’t sealed, after all. Perhaps this was a sign that the Hour of Dead Jim was over, that the worst of the haunting lay behind him, that he had passed this initiation rite into the pagan reality of rural life, had won the approval of the earth spirits and fertility gods that ruled this world of farms and logging operations. If so, he could now establish his retreat and dig in to ride out the chaos that the senator and his friends were engineering.

He opened the door to her and smiled.

She frowned and said, “Jim?”

“I’ve tried to be,” he said.

“What did you say?”

“A little joke. It’s been a long day.” Evidently she knew the Carlyles, which encouraged him to step back from the threshold and say, “Nora and I were just going to start dinner. Can you join us?”

After a hesitation, she stepped inside. “I can’t, Jim. The most incredible wonderful thing has happened.”

Closing the door, he said, “I sure could use a wonderful thing. A day like this, I need a lift. Come tell me and Nora about it.”

“It’s going to be better to show than tell,” she said, following him toward the kitchen.

“Nora’s in the potato cellar. I’m supposed to go down and help her carry up some spuds.”

The door stood open. The light glowed below. He was pleased at how plausible the story sounded.

“The thing is, Jim, I really need to borrow your Mountaineer.”

“Sure. No problem. How about helping Nora bring up some baskets of potatoes, and I’ll get my car-insurance card for you just in case there might be an accident or something.”

“I don’t need the card,” she said.

“Oh, I know, I know. But the law does say you have to carry proof of insurance, and you know how I am, living by the law.”

In fact, Jim had written a poem titled “Living by the Law,” about the beauty of law, though it was about natural law, not the laws written by men.

The reference to the poem worked. The woman bought it and smiled. “All right, sure, get the insurance card. Straight-arrow Jim. I’ll help Nora.”

He watched her descend the stairs, and when she reached the bottom, he called out, “I just had a senior moment way before my time.” He hurried down after her, adding, “Forgot the insurance card is right here in my wallet.”

As Henry reached the lower room, the woman arrived at the potato-cellar door, which stood ajar. The light was on in there.

A pang of terror pierced Henry, and for a moment, he did not know why — and then he knew.

The woman opened the door and stepped inside, and on the floor lay Nora, the first woman in his planned harem.

“I was being Jim, after all,” Henry said.

In his mind’s eye, he saw himself wearing Jim’s gloves, moving Nora from the barn in the wheelbarrow. After dinner the previous night. Being Jim. Really into the role. Well, he had taken some drama classes at Harvard.

His visitor, the nameless woman, turned to stare at him from the trap of the potato cellar, her eyes wide.

As he moved to the doorway, Henry said, “And Jim. Jim’s in the chicken house. Stripped and thrown in the chicken house. I didn’t have time to feed them. Let them peck the meat off his bones. A smaller grave to dig.”

“Jim, what’s the matter with you?”

He looked at his hands, at his clean nails, remembering the grime, the filth, the gummy blood under his fingernails from wearing the gloves and being Jim.

“Henry,” came the dreaded whisper, “Henry … Henry,” and he dared not look to see what stood behind him.

The woman, who could see what stood behind him, only said, “Who is Henry?”

“Henry,” Henry said, and knew chicken-pecked Jim did not stand behind him, after all.

“Jim,” the woman said, “back away from the door, I’m coming out of here, Jim.”

He had worn the gloves to copy the poem from the book, and then had to wash his hands again.

“I’m not quite sure of my exact condition,” he told the woman in the potato cellar. “I never had the time to take as many psychology courses as I wanted to.”

She came to the doorway, but he did not back off.

He said, “Do you hear that? Do you hear iambic pentameter? The rapping, rapping, rap-rap-rapping.”

“No,” she said.

“Oh, I do. I hear it all the time. This is so sad. You would have been such an exciting woman to keep in the potato cellar. Then I could have had it all. But look what this rustic world has made of me in just one day. This isn’t who I am or want to be, and clearly there can be no going back for me in any sense.”

“Move, Jim,” she said, and tried to push him backward.

“I’ve got to go upstairs now,” he said, “and get the hand grenade from the refrigerator.”

He went to the stairs. After ascending three, he glanced back at her. “Do you want to come with me to get the hand grenade?”

“No, Jim. I’ll wait here.”

“Okay. Thank you for waiting. I’ll bring a grenade for you, and we’ll pull the pins in the potato cellar.”

He continued up the stairs. He was sorry to hear the outside cellar door open, and the rain doors over the stairs. He really didn’t want to go out alone in the potato cellar. Oh, right. Not alone. There was Nora.

Seventy

The Mountaineer coasted through the moonlight. Not daring to look back, Cammy ran around the front of it as Grady pulled to a stop. She yanked open the passenger door, clambered into the SUV, and couldn’t find her voice.

Lamar was in the backseat. In the cargo area with Merlin, Puzzle and Riddle were giggling.

Cammy had never heard them giggle before. Under the circumstances, their sweet childlike voices sounded sinister.

Her cry at last broke free of her throat: “Move, move, move!”

Grady accelerated away from the house before he asked, “What? What’s wrong?”

“Hell if I know. Jim … he … I don’t know, I think he killed Nora, she’s dead in the potato cellar.”

This announcement put the damper on whatever fun the three pals were having, and left Grady gaping.

After a moment, she turned to Lamar and said, “You predicted chaos, and you were right. Was that it? What’s ahead of us?”

“Just the future,” Puzzle said from behind Lamar. “Just where we’re meant to be.”

Henry Rouvroy, alias Jim Carlyle, descended the cellar stairs, a grenade in each hand.

Nora remained on the floor, eyes open, in the potato cellar.

He sat on the floor beside his sister-in-law, his wife.

He pulled the ring from the first grenade but kept the safety lever depressed.

For reasons he could not imagine, in his mind’s eye he saw not Jim’s naked corpse in the chicken house, among the cackling hens, but instead the senator at a press conference, waving the photo of Marcus Pipp and demanding a court-martial. Henry had advised him on that strategy, but he’d done so based on misinformation, and it had not gone well.

The senator didn’t fire him because the senator thought the episode achieved exactly what he wanted it to achieve. The senator was an idiot.

Henry couldn’t get Marcus Pipp’s face out of his mind. He didn’t want to die while thinking about Marcus Pipp. That’s how he died, anyway.

Grady drove as fast as the winding road would allow, heading south out of the county, into a somewhat more settled area, where the dark hills were speckled with house lights. They were a long way still from a small city with its own TV station, but if their escape had not yet been noticed, the odds were in their favor.

They passed a roadhouse where the parking lot was packed with pickups and the marquee advertised a country band.

A quarter of a mile later, when they topped a hill and saw the roadblock at the intersection below, Grady braked and slid into a turn, and Cammy said, “The roadhouse. All those people. It’s some kind of chance.”

As he crested the hill he had topped from the other direction a moment earlier, Grady glanced at the rearview mirror and saw that the pursuit was already under way.

Bailing from the Mountaineer in the roadhouse parking lot, Cammy sprinted to the back, opened the tailgate. “Out, out, hurry!”

Merlin leaped from the vehicle, and the lantern-eyed duo sprang after him.

As the six of them ran toward the roadhouse entrance, Lamar said, “Where’s the music? Never heard a country crowd this quiet.”

Inside, the joint was packed, as the herd of pickups indicated that it ought to be, but the band played no music, no dancers danced, and people were gathered in peculiar configurations at the bar, at an area to the left of the stage, and in a separate raised lounge area near the rest rooms.

“Must be a hundred people here,” Cammy said. “Maybe a hundred fifty. Homeland Security can’t arrest them all, can’t shut up all these people. Come on. It’s time. Come on, Puzzle, Riddle, it’s time for your debut.”

“The stage,” Grady suggested. “The microphone.”

Behind them, Lamar said, “Oh, my God,” but Cammy didn’t look back, just kept on moving through the mostly abandoned tables, with the wolfhound and the two amazements rushing ahead of her.

She mounted the stage, took the microphone from the stand, and said, “Please, may I have your attention!”

Joining her, Grady said, “It’s not turned on.”

She fumbled for a switch, found one, and her voice boomed out—“Folks, everyone, hey, I’ve got an announcement!”—and as she spoke, the black-clad legions, carrying fully automatic carbines at the ready, burst through the front doors, an instant later through a back entrance.

The patrons turned toward her. But half the armed agents spread through the room, intimidating the crowd, while the other half came toward the stage.

Clambering onto the stage, one of them said, “You’re under arrest,” and she heard another one telling Grady that he had the right to remain silent, and she said, “But you have no right to make us be silent!”

In the chaos, she heard Lamar shouting at her from among the tables, and just as she was about to start clubbing one of the agents with the microphone, she understood what he was saying: “Cammy, Grady, look at the TVs!”

In the distant lounge was a big flat screen, a smaller screen behind the bar, another to one side of the stage. The music had stopped, the dancing, the drinking, because people had been drawn to something on television.

On the screens were Puzzle and Riddle.

Cammy stared uncomprehending.

Someone cranked up the sound on the flat screen as an anchorman appeared in place of Puzzle and Riddle. “We’ve got breaking news now, something big is happening out there tonight. Whatever this event in Michigan means, and the pair in western Pennsylvania, apparently they aren’t alone.” He spoke to someone off screen, off mike, and turned again to the camera. “I’m being told we’ve got a live report coming right now from an affiliate in Marietta, Georgia, and three more to follow, and I think somebody’s saying the same thing’s happening in Italy … France, I think I heard Italy and France. We’re going now to Marietta.”

In Georgia, a pair like Puzzle and Riddle were capering on a lawn around which forty or fifty people had gathered, for once not to be seen on camera but to see more directly what the camera saw.

In confusion, the armed agents in the roadhouse backed off the stage. Cammy heard a squad leader on a cell phone nearby, but the TVs interested her more than Homeland Security.

The roadhouse crowd, however, appeared less drawn to the TVs now than to the two wonders here among them.

Cammy carried Puzzle, and Grady carried Riddle, down from the stage, into the room, to allow these citizens of Colorado to meet the new creations with which they now shared the world.

Puzzle whispered in her ear, “You’re so clear, you shine so bright, and there’s no sadness in you anymore.”

Seventy-one

Bald and hunched, his mustache white, the old man sat on a bench in the park across from the retirement home. He wore sunglasses on an overcast day. Hooked to the bench was a white cane.

Tom Bigger sat beside the blind man and said, “What do you think of all the news?”

“I’ve heard their voices. They sound like angels. The sound of them makes me happy. I wish I could see them. Are they beautiful?”

“They are. They’re the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

“The news last evening said seventy thousand pair counted so far, worldwide.”

“You hear the news this morning?” Tom asked.

“No. What now? Mirna, my wife, she says the next thing we’ll discover they can fly like birds. What do you think it means?”

“Another chance,” Tom said.

“That’s how it feels to me, too. You know what I think?”

“What do you think?” Tom asked.

“One of us ever kills one of them, then that’s the end for us, for all of us. That’s the end, right there.”

“You could be right,” Tom said. “On the news this morning, they say scientists have sequenced their genome. Know what they found?”

“Something amazing,” the blind man said. “That’s what I hope. I’ve been waiting all my life for something amazing.”

“First,” Tom said, “they don’t look anything like us. Not like us at all. But what the scientists say is their genome matches ours in every detail.”

The blind man laughed. He couldn’t stop laughing for a while. The character of his laughter was sheer delight, and Tom found it infectious.

When they had stopped laughing together, the old man said, “Have you seen one for real or just on TV?”

“I not only saw two for real, sir, but I saw them come through — from wherever they came.”

The blind man reached out, found his shoulder, pressed a hand to his arm. “Is this true? You were a witness?”

“On a bluff above the sea, farther down the coast from here. It changed my life, seeing it happen.”

“Tell me about it. Tell me all about it, please.”

“The first thing I need to tell you is, there were squirrels on the bluff, and a dozen birds, and they all became very still when it happened. But it wasn’t the appearance of the pair that transfixed them. It was something else. I sensed something was with us that I couldn’t see, something that maybe the birds and squirrels could see, something that brought the two animals or passed them through from wherever. I don’t know. I was very afraid, but at the same time … more alive inside than I had been for a long, long time. And … I was changed.”

The blind man considered this in silence for a while, and then he said, “Are you my Tom?”

“Yes, Dad. I’m your Tom.”

“Oh, I want to touch your face.”

“It’s not a good face, Dad. I’m afraid for Mom to see it.”

From behind the bench, a woman said, “I’ve seen it, my love. You passed me on the way to sit with your father. You didn’t know me, but I knew you.”

Tom allowed his father to touch his face, and his father wept, not only at his son’s suffering, but also with joy.

When Tom rose and turned to see his mother, she said, “You are so beautiful, Tom. No, look at me. You are beautiful. Your face is a face of transcendence.”

Seventy-two

Cammy watched them from the kitchen window as they frolicked in the new snow with Merlin. But for their black hands, black feet, and black noses, they might have been invisible.

The coffeemaker began to gurgle, and the sudden aroma of fresh Jamaica blend flooded the kitchen.

Grady said, “Already, I’m inadequate to homeschool them. Their minds leap ahead of mine. Think you could help?”

“I’d like nothing more. But they’ll probably leap ahead of me too, in no time.”

He joined her at the window, a hand on her shoulder. “Do you lie awake some nights, wondering where this is going — I mean the world now, with them in it and everything so changed?”

She shook her head. “No. Wherever they’re going, they’re taking the world with them, and I know beyond doubt that wherever they want us to be, that’s where we’ll belong.”