Fear Nothing

21

By the time Orson and I walked out of the dunes and reached the sandstone portion of the peninsula, thick clouds swaddled us. The fog bank was hundreds of feet deep, and though a pale dusting of moonlight sifted through the mist all the way to the ground, we were in a gray murk more blinding than a starless, moonless night would have been.

The lights of town were no longer visible.

The fog played tricks with sound. I could still hear the rough murmur of breaking surf, but it seemed to come from all four sides, as though I were on an island instead of a peninsula.

I wasn’t confident about being able to ride my bicycle in that cloying gloom. Visibility continuously shifted between zero and a maximum of six feet. Although no trees or other obstacles lay along the curved horn, I could easily become disoriented and ride off the edge of the beach scarp; the bike would pitch forward, and when the front tire plowed into the soft sand of the slope below the scarp, I would come to a sudden halt and take a header off the bike to the beach, possibly breaking a limb or even my neck.

Besides, to build speed and to keep my balance, I would have to steer the bike with two hands, which meant pocketing the pistol. After my conversation with Bobby, I was loath to let go of the Glock. In the fog, something could close to within a few feet of me before I became aware of it, which wouldn’t leave me time enough to tear the gun out of my jacket pocket and get off a shot.

I walked at a relatively brisk pace, wheeling the bicycle with my left hand, pretending I was carefree and confident, and Orson trotted slightly ahead of me. The dog was wary, no good at whistling in the graveyard either literally or figuratively. He turned his head ceaselessly from side to side.

The click of the wheel bearings and the tick of the drive chain betrayed my position. There was no way to quiet the bicycle short of picking it up and carrying it, which I could do with one arm but only for short distances.

The noise might not matter, anyway. The monkeys probably had acute animal senses that detected the most meager stimuli; in fact, they were no doubt able to track me by scent.

Orson would be able to smell them, too. In this nebulous night, his black form was barely visible, and I couldn’t see if his hackles were raised, which would be a sure sign that the monkeys were nearby.

As I walked, I wondered what it was about these creatures that made them different from an ordinary rhesus.

In appearance, at least, the beast in Angela’s kitchen had been a typical example of its species, even if it had been at the upper end of the size range for a rhesus. She’d said only that it had “awful dark-yellow eyes,” but as far as I knew, that was well within the spectrum of eye colors for this group of primates. Bobby hadn’t mentioned anything strange about the troop that was bedeviling him, other than their peculiar behavior and the unusual size of their shadowy leader: no misshapen craniums, no third eyes in their foreheads, no bolts in their necks to indicate that they had been stitched and stapled together in the secret laboratory of Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s megalomaniacal great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Heather Frankenstein.

The project leaders at Fort Wyvern had been worried that the monkey in Angela’s kitchen had either scratched or bitten her. Considering the scientists’ fear, it was logical to infer that the beast had carried an infectious disease transmitted by blood, saliva, or other bodily fluids. This inference was supported by the physical examination to which she’d been subjected. For four years, they had also taken monthly blood samples from her, which meant that the disease had a potentially long incubation period.

Biological warfare. The leaders of every country on Earth denied making preparations for such a hateful conflict. Evoking the name of God, warning of the judgment of history, they solemnly signed fat treaties guaranteeing never to engage in this monstrous research and development. Meanwhile, each nation was busily brewing anthrax cocktails, packaging bubonic-plague aerosols, and engineering such a splendiferous collection of exotic new viruses and bacteria that no line at any unemployment office anywhere on the planet would ever contain a single out-of-work mad scientist.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t understand why they would have forcibly subjected Angela to sterilization. No doubt certain diseases increase the chances that one’s offspring will suffer birth defects. Judging by what Angela had told me, however, I didn’t think that the people at Wyvern sterilized her out of a concern either for her or for any children that she might conceive. They appeared to have been motivated not by compassion but by fear swollen nearly to panic.

I had asked Angela if the monkey was carrying a disease. She had as much as denied it: I wish it were a disease. Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe I’d be cured by now. Or dead. Dead would be better than what’s coming.

But if not a disease, what?

Suddenly the loonlike cry that we had heard earlier now pierced the night and fog again, jolting me out of my ruminations.

Orson twitched to a full stop. I halted, too, and the click-tick of the bicycle fell silent.

The cry seemed to issue from the west and south, and after only a brief moment, an answering call came, as best I could tell, from the north and east. We were being stalked.

Because sound traveled so deceptively through the mist, I was not able to judge how far from us the cries arose. I would have bet one lung that they were close.

The rhythmic, heartlike pulse of the surf throbbed through the night. I wondered which Chris Isaak song Sasha was spinning across the airwaves at that moment.

Orson began to move again, and so did I, a little faster than before. We had nothing to gain by hesitating. We wouldn’t be safe until we were off the lonely peninsula and back in town — and perhaps not even then.

When we had gone no more than thirty or forty feet, that eerie ululant cry rose again. It was answered, as before.

This time we kept moving.

My heart was racing, and it didn’t slow when I reminded myself that these were only monkeys. Not predators. Eaters of fruits, berries, nuts. Members of a peaceable kingdom.

Suddenly, perversely, Angela’s dead face flashed onto my memory screen. I realized what I had misinterpreted, in my shock and anguish, when I’d first found her body. Her throat appeared to have been slashed repeatedly with a half-sharp knife, because the wound was ragged. In fact, it hadn’t been slashed: It had been bitten, torn, chewed. I could see the terrible wound more clearly now than I’d been willing to see it when standing on the threshold of the bathroom.

Furthermore, I half recalled other marks on her, wounds that I’d not had the stomach to consider at the time. Livid bite marks on her hands. Perhaps even one on her face.

Monkeys. But not ordinary monkeys.

The killers’ actions in Angela’s house — the business with the dolls, the game of hide-and-seek — had seemed like the play of demented children. More than one of these monkeys must have been in those rooms: small enough to hide in places where a man could not have been concealed, so inhumanly quick as to have seemed like ghosts.

Another cry arose in the murk and was answered by a low hooting from two other locations.

Orson and I kept moving briskly, but I resisted the urge to bolt. If I broke into a run, my haste might be interpreted — and rightly — as a sign of fear. To a predator, fear indicates weakness. If they perceived any weakness, they might attack.

I had the Glock, on which my grip was so tight that the weapon seemed to be welded to my hand. But I didn’t know how many of these creatures might be in this troop: perhaps only three or four, perhaps ten, maybe even more. Considering that I had never fired a gun before — except once, earlier this evening, entirely by accident — I was not going to be able to cut down all of these beasts before they overwhelmed me.

Although I didn’t want to give my fevered imagination such dark material with which to work, I couldn’t help wondering what a rhesus monkey’s teeth were like. All blunt bicuspids? No. Even herbivores — assuming that the rhesus was indeed herbivorous — needed to tear at the peel of a fruit, at husks, at shells. They were sure to have incisors, maybe even pointy eyeteeth, as did human beings. Although these particular specimens might have stalked Angela, the rhesus itself hadn’t evolved as a predator; therefore, they wouldn’t be equipped with fangs. Certain apes had fangs, though. Baboons had enormous, wicked teeth. Anyway, the biting power of the rhesus was moot, because regardless of the nature of their dental armaments, these particular specimens had been well enough equipped to kill Angela Ferryman savagely and quickly.

At first I heard or sensed, rather than saw, movement in the fog a few feet to my right. Then I glimpsed a dark, undefined shape close to the ground, coming at me swiftly and silently.

I twisted toward the movement. The creature brushed against my leg and vanished into the fog before I could see it clearly.

Orson growled but with restraint, as though to warn off something without quite challenging it to fight. He was facing the billowy wall of gray mist that scudded through the darkness on the other side of the bicycle, and I suspected that with light I would see not merely that his hackles were raised but that every hair on his back was standing stiffly on end.

I was looking low, toward the ground, half expecting to see the shining, dark-yellow gaze of which Angela had spoken. The shape that suddenly loomed in the fog was, instead, nearly as big as I am. Maybe bigger. Shadowy, amorphous, like a swooping angel of death hovering in a dream, it was more suggestion than substance, fearsome precisely because it remained mysterious. No baleful yellow eyes. No clear features. No distinct form. Man or ape, or neither: the leader of the troop, there and gone.

Orson and I had come to a halt again.

I turned my head slowly to survey the streaming murk around us, intent on picking up any helpful sound. But the troop moved as silently as the fog.

I felt as though I were a diver far beneath the sea, trapped in blinding currents rich with plankton and algae, having glimpsed a circling shark, waiting for it to reappear out of the gloom and bite me in half.

Something brushed against the back of my legs, plucked at my jeans, and it wasn’t Orson because it made a wicked hissing sound. I kicked at it but didn’t connect, and it vanished into the mist before I could get a look at it.

Orson yelped in surprise, as though he’d had an encounter of his own.

“Here, boy,” I said urgently, and he came at once to my side.

I let go of the bicycle, which clattered to the sand. Gripping the pistol in both hands, I began to turn in a full circle, searching for something to shoot at.

Shrill, angry chittering arose. These seemed recognizably to be the voices of monkeys. At least half a dozen of them.

If I killed one, the others might flee in fear. Or they might react as the tangerine-eating monkey had reacted to the broom that Angela had brandished in her kitchen: with furious aggressiveness.

In any event, visibility was virtually zero, and I couldn’t see their eyeshine or their shadows, so I dared not waste ammunition by firing blindly into the fog. When the Glock was empty, I would be easy prey.

As one, the chittering voices fell silent.

The dense, ceaselessly seething clouds now damped even the sound of the surf. I could hear Orson’s panting and my own too-rapid breathing, nothing else.

The great black form of the troop leader swelled again through the vaporous gray shrouds. It swooped as if it were winged, although this appearance of flight was surely illusory.

Orson snarled, and I juked back, triggering the laser-sighting mechanism. A red dot rippled across the morphing face of the fog. The troop leader, no more defined than a fleeting shadow on a frost-crusted window, was swallowed entirely by the mist before I could pin the laser to its mercurial shape.

I recalled the collection of skulls on the concrete stairs of the spillway in the storm culvert. Maybe the collector wasn’t some teenage sociopath in practice for his adult career. Maybe the skulls were trophies that had been gathered and arranged by the monkeys — which was a peculiar and disturbing notion.

An even more disturbing thought occurred to me: Maybe my skull and Orson’s — stripped of all flesh, hollow-eyed and gleaming — would be added to the display.

Orson howled as a screeching monkey burst through the veils of mist and leaped onto his back. The dog twisted his head, snapping his teeth, trying to bite his unwanted rider, simultaneously trying to thrash it off.

We were so close that even in the meager light and churning mist, I could see the yellow eyes. Radiant, cold, and fierce. Glaring up at me. I couldn’t squeeze off a shot at the attacker without hitting Orson.

The monkey had hardly landed on Orson’s back when it sprang off the dog. It slammed hard into me, twenty-five pounds of wiry muscle and bone, staggering me backward, clambering up my chest, using my leather jacket for purchase, and in the chaos I was unable to shoot it without a high risk of wounding myself.

For an instant, we were face-to-face, eye to murderous eye. The creature’s teeth were bared, and it was hissing ferociously, breath pungent and repulsive. It was a monkey yet not a monkey, and the profoundly alien quality of its bold stare was terrifying.

It snatched my cap off my head, and I swatted at it with the barrel of the Glock. Clutching the hat, the monkey dropped to the ground. I kicked, and the kick connected, knocking the cap out of its hand. Squealing, the rhesus tumbled-scampered into the fog, out of sight.

Orson started after the beast, barking, all his fear forgotten. When I called him back, he did not obey.

Then the larger form of the troop leader appeared again, more fleetingly than before, a sinuous shape billowing like a flung cape, gone almost as soon as it appeared but lingering long enough to make Orson reconsider the wisdom of pursuing the rhesus that had tried to steal my cap.

“Jesus,” I said explosively as the dog whined and backed away from the chase.

I snatched the cap off the ground but didn’t return it to my head. Instead, I folded it and jammed it into an inside pocket of my jacket.

Shakily, I assured myself that I was okay, that I hadn’t been bitten. If I’d been scratched, I didn’t feel the sting of it, not on my hands or face. No, I hadn’t been scratched. Thank God. If the monkey was carrying an infectious disease communicable only by contact with bodily fluids, I couldn’t have caught it.

On the other hand, I’d smelled its fetid breath when we were face-to-face, breathed the very air that it exhaled. If this was an airborne contagion, I was already in possession of a one-way ticket to the cold-holding room.

In response to a tinny clatter behind me, I swung around and discovered that my fallen bicycle was being dragged into the fog by something I couldn’t see. Flat on its side, combing sand with its spokes, the rear wheel was the only part of the bike still in sight, and it almost disappeared into the murk before I reached down with one hand and grabbed it.

The hidden bicycle thief and I engaged in a brief tug of war, which I handily won, suggesting that I was pitted against one or two rhesus monkeys and not against the much larger troop leader. I stood the bike on its wheels, leaned it against my body to keep it upright, and once more raised the Glock.

Orson returned to my side.

Nervously, he relieved himself again, shedding the last of his beer. I was half surprised that I hadn’t wet my pants.

For a while I gasped noisily for breath, shaking so badly that even a two-hand grip on the pistol couldn’t keep it from jigging up and down. Gradually I grew calmer. My heart worked less diligently to crack my ribs.

Like the hulls of ghost ships, gray walls of mist sailed past, an infinite flotilla, towing behind them an unnatural stillness. No chittering. No squeals or shrieks. No loonlike cries. No sigh of wind or sough of surf. I felt almost as though, without realizing it, I had been killed in the recent confrontation, as though I now stood in a chilly antechamber outside the corridor of life, waiting for a door to open into Judgment.

Finally it became apparent that the games were over for a while. Holding the Glock with only one hand, I began to walk the bicycle east along the horn. Orson padded at my side.

I was sure that the troop was still monitoring us, although from a greater distance than before. I saw no stalking shapes in the fog, but they were out there, all right.

Monkeys. But not monkeys. Apparently escaped from a laboratory at Wyvern.

The end of the world, Angela had said.

Not by fire.

Not by ice.

Something worse.

Monkeys. The end of the world by monkeys.

Apocalypse with primates.

Armageddon. The end, fini, omega, doomsday, close the door and turn out the lights forever.

This was totally, fully, way crazy. Every time I tried to get my mind around the facts and pull them into some intelligible order, I wiped out big time, got radically clamshelled by a huge wave of imponderables.

Bobby’s attitude, his relentless determination to distance himself from the insoluble troubles of the modern world and be a champion slacker, had always struck me as a legitimate lifestyle choice. Now it seemed to be not merely legitimate but reasoned, logical, and wise.

Because I was not expected to survive to adulthood, my parents raised me to play, to have fun, to indulge my sense of wonder, to live as much as possible without worry and without fear, to live in the moment with little concern for the future: in short, to trust in God and to believe that I, like everyone, am here for a purpose; to be as grateful for my limitations as for my talents and blessings, because both are part of a design beyond my comprehension. They recognized the need for me to learn self-discipline, of course, and respect for others. But, in fact, those things come naturally when you truly believe that your life has a spiritual dimension and that you are a carefully designed element in the mysterious mosaic of life. Although there had appeared to be little chance that I would outlive both parents, Mom and Dad prepared for this eventuality when I was first diagnosed: They purchased a large second-to-die life-insurance policy, which would now provide handsomely for me even if I never earned another cent from my books and articles. Born for play and fun and wonder, destined never to have to hold a job, destined never to be burdened by the responsibilities that weigh down most people, I could give up my writing and become such a total surf bum that Bobby Halloway, by comparison, would appear to be a compulsive workaholic with no more capacity for fun than a cabbage. Furthermore, I could embrace absolute slackerhood with no guilt whatsoever, with no qualms or doubts, because I was raised to be what all humanity might have been if we hadn’t violated the terms of the lease and been evicted from Eden. Like all who are born of man and woman, I live by the whims of fate: Because of my XP, I’m just more acutely aware of the machinations of fate than most people are, and this awareness is liberating.

Yet, as I walked my bicycle eastward along the peninsula, I persevered in my search for meaning in all that I’d seen and heard since sunset.

Before the troop had arrived to torment Orson and me, I’d been trying to pin down exactly what was different about these monkeys; now I returned to that riddle. Unlike ordinary rhesuses, these were bold rather than shy, brooding rather than lighthearted. The most obvious difference was that these monkeys were hot-tempered, vicious. Their potential for violence was not, however, the primary quality that separated them from other rhesuses; it was only a consequence of another, more profound difference that I recognized but that I was inexplicably reluctant to consider.

The curdled fog was as thick as ever, but gradually it began to brighten. Smears of blurry light appeared in the murk: buildings and streetlamps along the shore.

Orson whined with delight — or just relief — at these signs of civilization, but we weren’t any safer in town than out of it.

When we left the southern horn entirely and entered Embarcadero Way, I paused to take my cap from the jacket pocket in which I had tucked it. I put it on and gave the visor a tug. The Elephant Man adjusts his costume.

Orson peered up at me, cocked his head consideringly, and then chuffed as though in approval. He was the Elephant Man’s dog, after all, and as such, a measure of his own self-image was dependent upon the style and grace with which I comported myself.

Because of the streetlamps, visibility had increased to perhaps a hundred feet. Like the ghost tides of an ancient and long-dead sea, fog surged off the bay and into the streets; each fine drop of mist refracted the golden sodium-vapor light and translated it to the next drop.

If members of the troop still accompanied us, they would be forced to lurk at a greater distance here than they had on the barren peninsula, to avoid being seen. Like players in a recasting of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” they would have to confine their skulking to parks, unilluminated alleyways, balconies, high ledges, parapets, and rooftops.

At this late hour, no pedestrians or motorists were in sight. The town appeared to have been abandoned.

I was overcome by the disturbing notion that these silent and empty streets foreshadowed a real, frightening desolation that would befall Moonlight Bay in the not-too-distant future. Our little burg was preparing to be a ghost town.

I climbed onto my bike and headed north on Embarcadero Way. The man who had contacted me through Sasha, at the radio station, was waiting on his boat at the marina.

As I pedaled along the deserted avenue, my mind returned to the millennium monkeys. I was sure that I had identified the most fundamental difference between ordinary rhesuses and this extraordinary troop that secretly roamed the night, but I was reluctant to accept my own conclusion, inevitable though it seemed: These monkeys were smarter than ordinary monkeys.

Way smarter, radically smarter.

They had understood the purpose of Bobby’s camera, and they had stolen it. They filched his new camera, too.

They recognized my face among the faces of the thirty dolls in Angela’s workroom, and they used that one to taunt me. Later, they set a fire to conceal Angela’s murder.

The big brows at Fort Wyvern might have been engaged in secret bacteriological-warfare research, but that didn’t explain why their laboratory monkeys were markedly smarter than any monkeys that had previously walked the earth.

Just how smart was “markedly smarter”? Maybe not smart enough to win a bundle on Jeopardy! Maybe not smart enough to teach poetry at the university level or to successfully manage a radio station or to track the patterns of surf worldwide, maybe not even smart enough to write a New York Times bestseller — but perhaps smart enough to be the most dangerous, uncontrollable pest humanity had ever known. Imagine what damage rats could do, how rapidly their numbers would grow, if they were even half as smart as human beings and could learn how to avoid all traps and poisons.

Were these monkeys truly escapees from a laboratory, loose in the world and cleverly eluding capture? If so, how did they get to be so intelligent in the first place? What did they want? What was their agenda? Why hadn’t a massive effort been launched to track them down, round them up, and return them to better cages from which they could never break free?

Or were they tools being used by someone at Wyvern? The way the cops use trained police dogs. The way the Navy uses dolphins to search for enemy submarines and, in wartime — it is rumored — even to plant magnetic packages of explosives on the hulls of targeted boats.

A thousand other questions swarmed through my mind. All of them were equally crazy.

Depending on the answers, the ramifications of these monkeys’ heightened intelligence could be earth-shattering. The possible consequences to human civilization were especially alarming when you considered the viciousness of these animals and their apparently innate hostility.

Angela’s prediction of doom might not have been farfetched, might actually have been less pessimistic than my assessment of the situation would be when — if ever — I knew all the facts. Certainly, doom had come to Angela herself.

I also intuited that the monkeys were not the entire story. They were but one chapter of an epic. Other astonishments were awaiting discovery.

Compared to the project at Wyvern, Pandora’s fabled box, from which had been unleashed all the evils that plague humanity — wars, pestilence, diseases, famines, floods — might prove to have held only a collection of petty nuisances.

In my haste to get to the marina, I was cycling too fast to allow Orson to keep pace with me. He was sprinting full throttle, ears flapping, panting hard, but falling steadily behind.

In truth, I was cranking the bike to the max not because I was in a hurry to reach the marina but because, unconsciously, I wanted to outrace the tidal wave of terror sweeping toward us. There was no escaping it, however, and no matter how furiously I pedaled, I could outrun nothing but my dog.

Recalling Dad’s final words, I stopped pedaling and coasted until Orson was able to stay at my side without heroic effort.

Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life — and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.

Besides, the best way to deal with a rising sea of trouble is to catch the wave at the zero break and ride it out, slide along the face straight into the cathedral, get totally Ziplocked in the green room, walk the board all the way through the barrel, hooting, showing no fear. That’s not only cool: It’s classic.

22

With a gentle and even tender sound, like flesh on flesh in a honeymoon bed, low waves slipped between the pilings and slapped against the sea wall. The damp air offered a faint and pleasant aromatic mèlange of brine, fresh kelp, creosote, rusting iron, and other fragrances I couldn’t quite identify.

The marina, tucked into the sheltered northeast corner of the bay, offers docking for fewer than three hundred vessels, only six of which are full-time residences for their owners. Although social life in Moonlight Bay does not center around boating, there is a long waiting list for any slip that becomes available.

I walked my bike toward the west end of the main pier, which ran parallel to shore. The tires swished and bumped softly across the dew-wet, uneven planks. Only one boat in the marina had lights in its windows at that hour. Dock lamps, though dim, showed me the way through the fog.

Because the fishing fleet ties up farther out along the northern horn of the bay, the comparatively sheltered marina is reserved for pleasure craft. There are sloops and ketches and yawls ranging from modest to impressive — although more of the former than the latter — motor yachts mostly of manageable length and price, a few Boston Whalers, and even two houseboats. The largest sailing yacht — in fact, the largest boat — docked here is currently Sunset Dancer, a sixty-foot Windship cutter. Of the motor yachts, the largest is Nostromo, a fifty-six-foot Bluewater coastal cruiser; and it was to this boat that I was headed.

At the west end of the pier, I took a ninety-degree turn onto a subsidiary pier that featured docking slips on both sides. The Nostromo was in the last berth on the right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

That was the code Sasha had used to identify the man who had come to the radio station seeking me, who hadn’t wanted his name used on the phone, and who had been reluctant to come to Bobby’s house to talk with me. It was a line from a poem by Robert Frost, one that most eavesdroppers would be unlikely to recognize, and I had assumed that it referred to Roosevelt Frost, who owned the Nostromo.

As I leaned my bicycle against the dock railing near the gangway to Roosevelt’s slip, tidal action caused the boats to wallow in their berths. They creaked and groaned like arthritic old men murmuring feeble complaints in their sleep.

I had never bothered to chain my bike when I left it unattended, because until this night Moonlight Bay had been a refuge from the crime that infected the modern world. By the time this weekend passed, our picturesque town might lead the country in murders, mutilations, and priest beatings, per capita, but we probably didn’t have to worry about a dramatic increase in bicycle theft.

The gangway was steep because the tide was not high, and it was slippery with condensation. Orson descended as carefully as I did.

We were two-thirds of the way down to the port-side finger of the slip when a low voice, hardly more than a gruff whisper, seeming to originate magically from the fog directly over my head, demanded, “Who goes there?”

Startled, I almost fell, but I clutched the dripping gangway handrail and kept my feet under me.

The Bluewater 563 is a sleek, white, low-profile, double-deck cruiser with an upper helm station that is enclosed by a hard top and canvas walls. The only light aboard came from behind the curtained windows of the aft stateroom and the main cabin amidships, on the lower deck. The open upper deck and the helm station were dark and fog-wrapped, and I couldn’t see who had spoken.

“Who goes there?” the man whispered again, no louder but with a harder edge to his voice.

I recognized the voice now as that of Roosevelt Frost.

Taking my cue from him, I whispered: “It’s me, Chris Snow.”

“Shield your eyes, son.”

I made a visor of my hand and squinted as a flashlight blazed, pinning me where I stood on the gangway. It switched off almost at once, and Roosevelt said, still in a whisper, “Is that your dog with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And nothing else?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing else with you, no one else?”

“No, sir.”

“Come aboard, then.”

I could see him now, because he had moved closer to the railing on the open upper deck, aft of the helm station. I couldn’t identify him even from this relatively short distance, however, because he was screened by the pea-soup fog, the night, and his own darkness.

Urging Orson to precede me, I boarded the boat through the gap in the port railing, and we quickly climbed the open steps to the upper deck.

When we got to the top, I saw that Roosevelt Frost was holding a shotgun. Pretty soon the National Rifle Association would move its headquarters to Moonlight Bay. He wasn’t aiming the gun at me, but I was sure he’d been covering me with it until he had been able to identify me in the beam of the flashlight.

Even without the shotgun, he was a formidable figure. Six feet four. Neck like a dock piling. Shoulders as wide as a staysail boom. Deep chest. With a two-hand spread way bigger than the diameter of the average helm wheel. This was the guy who Ahab should have called to coldcock Moby Dick. He had been a football star in the sixties and early seventies, when sportswriters routinely referred to him as the Sledgehammer. Though he was now sixty-three, a successful businessman who owned a men’s clothing store, a minimall, and half-interest in the Moonlight Bay Inn and Country Club, he appeared capable of pulverizing any of the genetic-mutant, steroid-pumped behemoths who played some of the power positions on contemporary teams.

“Hello, dog,” he murmured.

Orson chuffed.

“Hold this, son,” Frost whispered, handing the shotgun to me.

A pair of curious-looking, high-tech binoculars hung on a strap around his neck. He brought them to his eyes and, from this top-deck vantage point overlooking surrounding craft, surveyed the pier along which I had recently approached the Nostromo.

“How can you see anything?” I wondered.

“Night-vision binoculars. They magnify available light eighteen thousand times.”

“But the fog…”

He pressed a button on the glasses, and as a mechanism purred inside them, he said, “They also have an infrared mode, shows you only heat sources.”

“Must be lots of heat sources around the marina.”

“Not with boat engines off. Besides, I’m interested only in heat sources on the move.”

“People.”

“Maybe.”

“Who?”

“Whoever might’ve been following you. Now hush, son.”

I hushed. As Roosevelt patiently scanned the marina, I passed the next minute wondering about this former football star and local businessman who was not, after all, quite what he seemed.

I wasn’t surprised, exactly. Since sundown, the people I’d encountered had revealed dimensions to their lives of which I had previously been unaware. Even Bobby had been keeping secrets: the shotgun in the broom closet, the troop of monkeys. When I considered Pia Klick’s conviction that she was the reincarnation of Kaha Huna, which Bobby had been keeping to himself, I better understood his bitter, disputatious response to any view that he felt smacked of New Age thinking, including my occasional innocent comments about my strange dog. At least Orson, if no one else, had remained in character throughout the night — although, considering the way things were going, I wouldn’t have been bowled over if suddenly he revealed an ability to stand on his hind paws and tap dance with mesmerizing showmanship.

“No one’s trailing after you,” said Roosevelt as he lowered the night glasses and took back his shotgun. “This way, son.”

I followed him aft across the sun deck to an open hatch on the starboard side.

Roosevelt paused and looked back, over the top of my head, to the port railing where Orson still lingered. “Here now. Come along, dog.”

The mutt hung behind, but not because he sensed anything lurking on the dock. As usual, he was curiously and uncharacteristically shy around Roosevelt.

Our host’s hobby was “animal communication”—a quintessential New Age concept that had been fodder for most daytime television talk shows, although Roosevelt was discreet about his talent and employed it only at the request of neighbors and friends. The mere mention of animal communication had been able to start Bobby foaming at the mouth even long before Pia Klick had decided that she was the goddess of surfing in search of her Kahuna. Roosevelt claimed to be able to discern the anxieties and desires of troubled pets that were brought to him. He didn’t charge for this service, but his lack of interest in money didn’t convince Bobby: Hell, Snow, I never said he was a charlatan trying to make a buck. He’s well-meaning. But he just ran headfirst into a goalpost once too often.

According to Roosevelt, the only animal with which he had never been able to communicate was my dog. He considered Orson a challenge, and he never missed an opportunity to try to chat him up. “Come here now, old pup.”

With apparent reluctance, Orson finally accepted the invitation. His claws clicked on the deck.

Carrying the shotgun, Roosevelt Frost went through the open hatch and down a set of molded fiberglass stairs lit only by a faint pearly glow at the bottom. He ducked his head, hunched his huge shoulders, pulled his arms against his sides to make himself smaller, but nevertheless appeared at risk of becoming wedged in the tight stairway.

Orson hesitated, tucked his tail between his legs, but finally descended behind Roosevelt, and I went last. The steps led to a porch-style afterdeck overhung by the cantilevered sun deck.

Orson was reluctant to go into the stateroom, which looked cozy and welcoming in the low light of a nightstand lamp. After Roosevelt and I stepped inside, however, Orson vigorously shook the condensed fog off his coat, spraying the entire afterdeck, and then followed us. I could almost believe that he’d hung back out of consideration, to avoid splattering us.

When Orson was inside, Roosevelt locked the door. He tested it to be sure it was secure. Then tested it again.

Beyond the aft stateroom, the main cabin included a galley with bleached-mahogany cabinets and matching faux-mahogany floor, a dining area, and a salon in one open and spacious floor plan. Out of respect for me, it was illuminated only by one downlight in a living-room display case full of football trophies and by two fat green candles standing in saucers on the dinette table.

The air was redolent of fresh-brewed coffee, and when Roosevelt offered a cup, I accepted.

“Sorry to hear about your dad,” he said.

“Well, at least it’s over.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Is it really?”

“I mean, for him.”

“But not for you. Not after what you’ve seen.”

I frowned. “How do you know what I’ve seen?”

“The word’s around,” he said cryptically.

“What do you—”

He held up one hubcap-size hand. “We’ll talk about it in a minute. That’s why I asked you to come here. But I’m still trying to think through what I need to tell you. Let me get around to it in my own way, son.”

Coffee served, the big man took off his nylon windbreaker, hung it on the back of one of the oversized chairs, and sat at the table. He indicated that I should sit catercorner to him, and with his foot, he pushed out another chair. “Here you go, dog,” he said, offering the third seat to Orson.

Although this was standard procedure when we visited Roosevelt, Orson pretended incomprehension. He settled onto the floor in front of the refrigerator.

“That is unacceptable,” Roosevelt quietly informed him.

Orson yawned.

With one foot, Roosevelt gently rattled the chair that he had pushed away from the table for the dog. “Be a good puppy.”

Orson yawned more elaborately than before. He was overplaying his disinterest.

“If I have to, pup, I’ll come over there, pick you up, and put you in this chair,” Roosevelt said, “which will be an embarrassment to your master, who would like you to be a courteous guest.”

He was smiling good-naturedly, and no slightest threatening tone darkened his voice. His broad face was that of a black Buddha, and his eyes were full of kindness and amusement.

“Be a good puppy,” Roosevelt repeated.

Orson swept the floor with his tail, caught himself, and stopped wagging. He shyly shifted his stare from Roosevelt to me and cocked his head.

I shrugged.

Once more Roosevelt lightly rattled the offered chair with his foot.

Although Orson got up from the floor, he didn’t immediately approach the table.

From a pocket of the nylon windbreaker that hung on his chair, Roosevelt extracted a dog biscuit shaped like a bone. He held it in the candlelight so that Orson could see it clearly. Between his big thumb and forefinger, the biscuit appeared to be almost as tiny as a trinket from a charm bracelet, but it was in fact a large treat. With ceremonial solemnity, Roosevelt placed it on the table in front of the seat that was reserved for the dog.

With wanting eyes, Orson followed the biscuit hand. He padded toward the table but stopped short of it. He was being more than usually standoffish.

From the windbreaker, Roosevelt extracted a second biscuit. He held it close to the candles, turning it as if it were an exquisite jewel shining in the flame, and then he put it on the table beside the first biscuit.

Although he whined with desire, Orson didn’t come to the chair. He ducked his head shyly and then looked up from under his brow at our host. This was the only man into whose eyes Orson was sometimes reluctant to stare.

Roosevelt took a third biscuit from the windbreaker pocket. Holding it under his broad and oft-broken nose, he inhaled deeply, lavishly, as if savoring the incomparable aroma of the bone-shaped treat.

Raising his head, Orson sniffed, too.

Roosevelt smiled slyly, winked at the dog — and then popped the biscuit into his mouth. He crunched it with enormous delight, rinsed it down with a swig of coffee, and let out a sigh of pleasure.

I was impressed. I had never seen him do this before. “What did that taste like?”

“Not bad. Sort of like shredded wheat. Want one?”

“No, sir. No, thank you,” I said, content to sip my coffee.

Orson’s ears were pricked; Roosevelt now had his undivided attention. If this towering, gentle-voiced, giant black human truly enjoyed the biscuits, there might be fewer for any canine who played too hard to get.

From the windbreaker draped on the back of his chair, Roosevelt withdrew another biscuit. He held this one under his nose, too, and inhaled so expansively that he was putting me in danger of oxygen deprivation. His eyelids drooped sensuously. A shiver of pretended pleasure swept him, almost swelled into a swoon, and he seemed about to fall into a biscuit-devouring frenzy.

Orson’s anxiety was palpable. He sprang off the floor, into the chair across the table from mine, where Roosevelt wanted him, sat on his hindquarters, and craned his neck forward until his snout was only two inches from Roosevelt’s nose. Together, they sniffed the endangered biscuit.

Instead of popping this one into his mouth, Roosevelt carefully placed it on the table beside the two that were already arranged in front of Orson’s seat. “Good old pup.”

I wasn’t sure that I believed in Roosevelt Frost’s supposed ability to communicate with animals, but in my opinion, he was indisputably a first-rate dog psychologist.

Orson sniffed the biscuits on the table.

“Ah, ah, ah,” Roosevelt warned.

The dog looked up at his host.

“You mustn’t eat them until I say you may,” Roosevelt told him.

The dog licked his chops.

“So help me, pup, if you eat them without my permission,” said Roosevelt, “there will never, ever, ever again be biscuits for you.”

Orson issued a thin, pleading whine.

“I mean it, dog,” Roosevelt said quietly but firmly. “I can’t make you talk to me if you don’t want to. But I can insist that you display a minimum of manners aboard my boat. You can’t just come in here and wolf down the canapes as if you were some wild beast.”

Orson gazed into Roosevelt’s eyes as though trying to judge his commitment to this no-wolfing rule.

Roosevelt didn’t blink.

Apparently convinced that this was no empty threat, the dog lowered his attention to the three biscuits. He gazed at them with such desperate longing that I thought I ought to try one of the damn things, after all.

“Good pup,” said Roosevelt.

He picked up a remote-control device from the table and jabbed one of the buttons on it, although the tip of his finger seemed too large to press fewer than three buttons at once. Behind Orson, motorized tambour doors rolled up and out of sight on the top half of a built-in hutch, revealing two stacks of tightly packed electronic gear gleaming with light-emitting diodes.

Orson was interested enough to turn his head for a moment before resuming worship of the forbidden biscuits.

In the hutch, a large video monitor clicked on. The quartered screen showed murky views of the fog-shrouded marina and the bay on all four sides of the Nostromo.

“What’s this?” I wondered.

“Security.” Roosevelt put down the remote control. “Motion detectors and infrared sensors will pick up anyone approaching the boat and alert us at once. Then a telescopic lens automatically isolates and zooms in on the intruder before he gets here, so we’ll know what we’re dealing with.”

“What are we dealing with?”

The man mountain took two slow, dainty sips of his coffee before he said, “You might already know too much about that.”

“What do you mean? Who are you?”

“I’m nobody but who I am,” he said. “Just old Rosie Frost. If you’re thinking that maybe I’m one of the people behind all this, you’re wrong.”

“What people? Behind what?”

Looking at the four security-camera views on the quartered video monitor, he said, “With any luck, they’re not even aware that I know about them.”

“Who? People at Wyvern?”

He turned to me again. “They’re not just at Wyvern anymore. Townspeople are in it now. I don’t know how many. Maybe a couple of hundred, maybe five hundred, but probably not more than that, at least not yet. No doubt it’s gradually spreading to others…and it’s already beyond Moonlight Bay.”

Frustrated, I said, “Are you trying to be inscrutable?”

“As much as I can, yes.”

He got up, fetched the coffeepot, and without further comment freshened our cups. Evidently he intended to make me wait for morsels of information in much the way that poor Orson was being made to wait patiently for his snack.

The dog licked the tabletop around the three biscuits, but his tongue never touched the treats.

When Roosevelt returned to his chair, I said, “If you’re not involved with these people, how do you know so much about them?”

“I don’t know all that much.”

“Apparently a lot more than I do.”

“I know only what the animals tell me.”

“What animals?”

“Well, not your dog, for sure.”

Orson looked up from the biscuits.

“He’s a regular sphinx,” Roosevelt said.

Although I hadn’t been aware of doing so, sometime soon after sunset, I had evidently walked through a magic looking-glass.

Deciding to play by the lunatic rules of this new kingdom, I said, “So…aside from my phlegmatic dog, what do these animals tell you?”

“You shouldn’t know all of it. Just enough so you realize it’s best that you forget what you saw in the hospital garage and up at the funeral home.”

I sat up straighter in my chair, as though pulled erect by my tightening scalp. “You are one of them.”

“No. Relax, son. You’re safe with me. How long have we been friends? More than two years now since you first came here with your dog. And I think you know you can trust me.”

In fact, I was at least half convinced that I could still trust Roosevelt Frost, even though I was no longer as sure of my character judgment as I had once been.

“But if you don’t forget what you saw,” he continued, “if you try to contact authorities outside town, you’ll endanger lives.”

As my chest tightened around my heart, I said, “You just told me I could trust you, and now you’re threatening me.”

He looked wounded. “I’m your friend, son. I wouldn’t threaten you. I’m only telling you—”

“Yeah. What the animals said.”

“It’s the people from Wyvern who want to keep a lid on this at any cost, not me. Anyway, you aren’t personally in any danger even if you try to go to outside authorities, at least not at first. They won’t touch you. Not you. You’re revered.”

This was one of the most baffling things that he had said yet, and I blinked in confusion. “Revered?”

“Yes. They’re in awe of you.”

I realized that Orson was staring at me intently, temporarily having forgotten the three promised biscuits.

Roosevelt’s statement was not merely baffling: It was downright wacky. “Why would anyone be in awe of me?” I demanded.

“Because of who you are.”

My mind looped and spun and tumbled like a capering seagull. “Who am I?”

Roosevelt frowned and pulled thoughtfully at his face with one hand before finally saying, “Damned if I know. I’m only repeating what I’ve been told.”

What the animals told you. The black Dr. Doolittle.

Some of Bobby’s scorn was creeping into me.

“The point is,” he said, “the Wyvern crowd won’t kill you unless you give them no choice, unless it’s absolutely the only way to shut you up.”

“When you talked to Sasha earlier tonight, you told her this was a matter of life and death.”

Roosevelt nodded solemnly. “And it is. For her and others. From what I hear, these bastards will try to control you by killing people you love until you agree to cease and desist, until you forget what you saw and just get on with your life.”

“People I love?”

“Sasha. Bobby. Even Orson.”

“They’ll kill my friends to shut me up?”

“Until you shut up. One by one, they’ll kill them one by one until you shut up to save those who are left.”

I was willing to risk my own life to find out what had happened to my mother and father — and why — but I couldn’t put the lives of my friends on the line. “This is monstrous. Killing innocent—”

“That’s who you’re dealing with.”

My skull felt as though it would crack to relieve the pressure of my frustration: “Who am I dealing with? I need something more specific than just the people at Wyvern.”

Roosevelt sipped his coffee and didn’t answer.

Maybe he was my friend, and maybe the warning he’d given me would, if I heeded it, save Sasha’s life or Bobby’s, but I wanted to punch him. I might have done it, too, might have hammered him with a merciless series of blows if there had been any chance whatsoever that I wouldn’t have broken my hands.

Orson had put one paw on the table, not with the intention of sweeping his biscuits to the floor and absconding with them but to balance himself as he leaned sideways in his chair to look past me. Something in the salon, beyond the galley and dining area, had drawn his attention.

When I turned in my chair to follow Orson’s gaze, I saw a cat sitting on the arm of the sofa, backlit by the display case full of football trophies. It appeared to be pale gray. In the shadows that masked its face, its eyes glowed green and were flecked with gold.

It could have been the same cat that I had encountered in the hills behind Kirk’s Funeral Home earlier in the night.

23

Like an Egyptian sculpture in a pharaoh’s sepulcher, the cat sat motionless and seemed prepared to spend eternity on the arm of the sofa.

Although it was only a cat, I was uncomfortable with my back to the animal. I moved to the chair opposite Roosevelt Frost, from which I could see, to my right, the entire salon and the sofa at the far end of it.

“When did you get a cat?” I asked.

“It’s not mine,” Roosevelt said. “It’s just visiting.”

“I think I saw this cat earlier tonight.”

“Yes, you did.”

“That’s what it told you, huh?” I said with a touch of Bobby’s scorn.

“Mungojerrie and I had a talk, yes,” Roosevelt confirmed.

“Who?”

Roosevelt gestured toward the cat on the sofa. “Mungojerrie.” He spelled it for me.

The name was exotic yet curiously familiar. Being my father’s son in more than blood and name, I needed only a moment to recognize the source. “It’s one of the cats in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the T. S. Eliot collection.”

“Most of these cats like those names from Eliot’s book.”

“These cats?”

“These new cats like Mungojerrie here.”

“New cats?” I asked, struggling to follow him.

Rather than explain what he meant by that term, Roosevelt said, “They prefer those names. Couldn’t tell you why — or how they came by them. I know one named Rum Tum Tugger. Another is Rumpelteazer. Coricopat and Growltiger.”

“Prefer? You make it sound almost as if they choose their own names.”

“Almost,” Roosevelt said.

I shook my head. “This is radically bizarre.”

“After all these years of animal communication,” Roosevelt said, “I sometimes still find it bizarre myself.”

“Bobby Halloway thinks you were hit in the head once too often.”

Roosevelt smiled. “He’s not alone in that opinion. But I was a football player, you know, not a boxer. What do you think, Chris? Has half my brain turned to gristle?”

“No, sir,” I admitted. “You’re as sharp as anyone I’ve ever known.”

“On the other hand, intelligence and flakiness aren’t mutually exclusive, are they?”

“I’ve met too many of my parents’ fellow academics to argue that one with you.”

From the living room, Mungojerrie continued to watch us, and from his chair, Orson continued to monitor the cat not with typical canine antagonism but with considerable interest.

“I ever tell you how I got into this animal-communication thing?” Roosevelt wondered.

“No, sir. I never asked.” Calling attention to such an eccentricity had seemed as impolite as mentioning a physical deformity, so I had always pretended to accept this aspect of Roosevelt as though it were not in the least remarkable.

“Well,” he said, “about nine years ago I had this really great dog named Sloopy, black and tan, about half the size of your Orson. He was just a mutt, but he was special.”

Orson had shifted his attention from the cat to Roosevelt.

“Sloopy had a terrific disposition. He was always a playful, good-tempered dog, not one bad day in him. Then his mood changed. Suddenly he became withdrawn, nervous, even depressed. He was ten years old, not nearly a pup anymore, so I took him to a vet, afraid I was going to hear the worst kind of diagnosis. But the vet couldn’t find anything much wrong with him. Sloopy had a little arthritis, something an aging ex-linebacker with football knees can identify with, but he didn’t have it bad enough to inhibit him much, and that was the only thing wrong. Yet week after week, he wallowed in his funk.”

Mungojerrie was on the move. The cat had climbed from the arm to the back of the sofa and was stealthily approaching us.

“So one day,” Roosevelt continued, “I read this human-interest story in the paper about this woman in Los Angeles who called herself a pet communicator. Name was Gloria Chan. She’d been on a lot of TV talk shows, counseled a lot of movie people on their pets’ problems, and she’d written a book. The reporter’s tone was smart-ass, made Gloria sound like your typical Hollywood flake. For all I knew, he probably had her pegged. You remember, after the football career was over, I did a few movies. Met a lot of celebrities, actors and rock stars and comedians. Producers and directors, too. Some of them were nice folks and some were even smart, but frankly a lot of them and a lot of the people who hung out with them were so bugshit crazy you wouldn’t want to be around them unless you were carrying a major concealed weapon.”

After creeping the length of the sofa, the cat descended to the nearer arm. It shrank into a crouch, muscles taut, head lowered and thrust forward, ears flattened against its skull, as if it was going to spring at us across the six feet between the sofa and the table.

Orson was alert, focused again on Mungojerrie, both Roosevelt and the biscuits forgotten.

“I had some business in L.A.,” Roosevelt said, “so I took Sloopy with me. We went down by boat, cruised the coast. I didn’t have the Nostromo then. I was driving this really sweet sixty-foot Chris-Craft Roamer. I docked her at Marina Del Rey, rented a car, took care of business for two days. I got Gloria’s number through some friends in the film business, and she agreed to see me. She lived in the Palisades, and I drove out there with Sloopy late one morning.”

On the sofa arm, the cat was still crouched to spring. Its muscles were coiled even tighter than before. Little gray panther.

Orson was rigid, as still as the cat. He made a high-pitched, thin, anxious sound and then was silent again.

Roosevelt said, “Gloria was fourth-generation Chinese American. A petite, doll-like person. Beautiful, really beautiful. Delicate features, huge eyes. Like something a Chinese Michelangelo might have carved out of luminous amber jade. You expected her to have a little-girl voice, but she sounded like Lauren Bacall, this deep smoky voice coming from this tiny woman. Sloopy instantly liked her. Before I knew it, she’s sitting with him in her lap, face-to-face with him and talking to him, petting him, and telling me what he’s so moody about.”

Mungojerrie leaped off the sofa arm, not to the dinette but to the deck, and then instantly sprang from the deck to the seat of the chair that I had abandoned when I had moved one place around the table to keep an eye on him.

Simultaneously, as the spry cat landed on the chair, Orson and I twitched.

Mungojerrie stood with his hind paws on the chair, forepaws on the table, staring intently at my dog.

Orson issued that brief, thin, anxious sound again — and didn’t take his eyes off the cat.

Unconcerned about Mungojerrie, Roosevelt said, “Gloria told me that Sloopy was depressed mostly because I wasn’t spending any time with him anymore. ‘You’re always out with Helen,’ she said. ‘And Sloopy knows Helen doesn’t like him. He thinks you’re going to have to choose between him and Helen, and he knows you’ll have to choose her.’ Now, son, I’m stunned to be hearing all this, because I was, in fact, dating a woman named Helen here in Moonlight Bay, but no way could Gloria Chan have known about her. And I was obsessed with Helen, spending most of my free time with her, and she didn’t like dogs, which meant Sloopy always got left behind. I figured she would come around to liking Sloopy, ’cause even Hitler couldn’t have helped having a soft spot in his heart for that mutt. But as it turned out, Helen was already turning as sour on me as she was on dogs, though I didn’t know it yet.”

Staring intently at Orson, Mungojerrie bared his fangs.

Orson pulled back in his chair, as if afraid the cat was going to launch itself at him.

“Then Gloria tells me a few other things bothering Sloopy, one of which was this Ford pickup I’d bought. His arthritis was mild, but the poor dog couldn’t get in and out of the truck as easy as he could a car, and he was scared of breaking a bone.”

Still baring his fangs, the cat hissed.

Orson flinched, and a brief keening sound of anxiety escaped him, like a burst of steam whistling out of a teakettle.

Evidently oblivious to this feline-canine drama, Roosevelt said, “Gloria and I had lunch and spent the whole afternoon talking about her work as an animal communicator. She told me she didn’t have any special talent, that it wasn’t any paranormal psychic nonsense, just a sensitivity to other species that we all have but that we’ve repressed. She said anyone could do it, that I could do it myself if I learned the techniques and spent enough time at it, which sounded preposterous to me.”

Mungojerrie hissed again, somewhat more ferociously, and again Orson flinched, and then I swear the cat smiled or came as close to smiling as any cat can.

Stranger yet, Orson appeared to break into a wide grin — which requires no imagination to picture because all dogs are able to grin. He was panting happily, grinning at the smiling cat, as though their confrontation had been an amusing joke.

“I ask you, son, who wouldn’t want to learn such a thing?” said Roosevelt.

“Who indeed?” I replied numbly.

“So Gloria taught me, and it took a frustratingly long time, months and months, but I eventually got as good at it as she was. The first big hurdle is believing you can actually do it. Putting aside your doubt, your cynicism, all your preconceived notions about what’s possible and what isn’t. Most of all, hardest of all, you have to stop worrying about looking foolish, ’cause fear of being humiliated really limits you. Lots of folks could never get past all that, and I’m sort of surprised that I got past it myself.”

Shifting forward in his chair, Orson leaned over the table and bared his teeth at Mungojerrie.

The cat’s eyes widened with fear.

Silently but threateningly, Orson gnashed his teeth.

Wistfulness filled Roosevelt’s deep voice: “Sloopy died three years later. God, how I grieved for him. But what a fascinating and wonderful three years they were, being so in tune with him.”

Teeth still bared, Orson growled softly at Mungojerrie, and the cat whimpered. Orson growled again, the cat bawled a pitiful meow of purest fear — and then both grinned.

“What the hell is going on here?” I wondered.

Orson and Mungojerrie seemed to be perplexed by the nervous tremor in my voice.

“They’re just having fun,” Roosevelt said.

I blinked at him.

In the candlelight, his face shone like darkly stained and highly polished teak.

“Having fun mocking their stereotypes,” he explained.

I couldn’t believe I was hearing him correctly. Considering how completely I must be misperceiving his words, I was going to need a high-pressure hose and a plumber’s drain snake to clean out my ears. “Mocking their stereotypes?”

“Yes, that’s right.” He bobbed his head in confirmation. “Of course they wouldn’t put it in those terms, but that’s what they’re doing. Dogs and cats are supposed to be mindlessly hostile. These guys are having fun mocking that expectation.”

Now Roosevelt was grinning at me as stupidly as the dog and the cat were grinning at me. His lips were so dark red that they were virtually black, and his teeth were as big and white as sugar cubes.

“Sir,” I told him, “I take back what I said earlier. After careful reconsideration, I’ve decided you’re totally awesomely crazy, whacked-out to the max.”

He bobbed his head again, continuing to grin at me. Suddenly, like the darkling beams of a black moon, lunacy rose in his face. He said, “You wouldn’t have any damn trouble believing me if I were white,” and as he snarled the final word, he slammed one massive fist into the table so hard that our coffee cups rattled in their saucers and nearly tipped over.

If I could have reeled backward while in a chair, I would have done so, because his accusation stunned me. I had never heard either of my parents use an ethnic slur or make a racist statement; I’d been raised without prejudice. Indeed, if there was an ultimate outcast in this world, it was me. I was a minority all to myself, a minority of one: the Nightcrawler, as certain bullies had called me when I was a little kid, before I’d ever met Bobby and had someone who would stand beside me. Though not an albino, though my skin was pigmented, I was stranger, in many people’s eyes, than Bo Bo the DogFaced Boy. To some I was merely unclean, tainted, as if my genetic vulnerability to ultraviolet light could be passed to others with a sneeze, but some people feared and despised me more than they would fear or despise a three-eyed Toad Man in any carnival freak show from sea to shining sea, if only because I lived next door.

Half rising out of his chair, leaning across the table, shaking a fist as big as a cantaloupe, Roosevelt Frost spoke with a hatred that astonished and sickened me: “Racist! You mealy racist bastard!”

I could barely find my voice. “W-when did race ever matter to me? How could it ever matter to me?”

He looked as if he would reach across the table, tear me out of my chair, and strangle me until my tongue unraveled to my shoes. He bared his teeth and growled at me, growled like a dog, very much like a dog, suspiciously like a dog.

“What the hell is going on here?” I asked again, but this time I found myself asking the dog and cat.

Roosevelt growled at me again, and when I only gaped stupidly at him, he said, “Come on, son, if you can’t call me a name, at least give me a little growl. Give me a little growl. Come on, son, you can do it.”

Orson and Mungojerrie watched me expectantly.

Roosevelt growled once more, giving his snarl an interrogatory inflection at the end, and finally I growled back at him. He growled louder than before, and I growled louder, too.

Smiling broadly, he said, “Hostility. Dog and cat. Black and white. Just having a little fun mocking stereotypes.”

As Roosevelt settled into his chair again, my bewilderment began to give way to a tremulous sense of the miraculous. I was aware of a looming revelation that would rock my life forever, expose dimensions of the world that I could not now imagine; but although I strained to grasp it, this understanding remained elusive, tantalizingly just beyond the limits of my reach.

I looked at Orson. Those inky, liquid eyes.

I looked at Mungojerrie.

The cat bared his teeth at me.

Orson bared his, too.

A faint cold fear thrilled through my veins, as the Bard of Avon would put it, not because I thought the dog and cat might bite me but because of what this amused baring of teeth implied. Not just fear shivered through me, either, but also a delicious chill of wonder and giddy excitement.

Although such an act would have been out of character for him, I actually wondered if Roosevelt Frost had spiked the coffee. Not with brandy. With hallucinogenics. I was simultaneously disoriented and clearer of mind than I’d ever been, as if I were in a heightened state of consciousness.

The cat hissed at me, and I hissed at the cat.

Orson growled at me, and I growled at him.

In the most astonishing moment of my life to this point, we sat around the dinette table, grinning men and beasts, and I was reminded of those cute but corny paintings that were popular for a few years: scenes of dogs playing poker. Only one of us was a dog, of course, and none of us had cards, so the painting in my mind’s eye didn’t seem to apply to this situation, and yet the longer I dwelled on it, the closer I came to revelation, to epiphany, to understanding all of the ramifications of what had happened at this table in the past few minutes—

— and then my train of thought was derailed by a beeping that arose from the electronic security equipment in the hutch beside the table.

As Roosevelt and I turned to look at the video monitor, the four views on the screen resolved into one. The automated system zoomed in on the intruder and revealed it in the eerie, enhanced light of a night-vision lens.

The visitor stood in the eddying fog at the aft end of the port finger of the boat slip in which the Nostromo was berthed. It looked as though it had stepped directly out of the Jurassic Period into our time: perhaps four feet tall, pterodactyl-like, with a long wicked beak.

My mind was so full of feverish speculations related to the cat and the dog — and I was so unnerved by the other events of the night — that I was prepared to see the uncanny in the ordinary, where it did not in fact exist. My heart raced. My mouth soured and went dry. If I hadn’t been frozen by shock, I would have bolted to my feet, knocking my chair over. Given another five seconds, I still might have managed to make a fool of myself, but I was saved from mortification by Roosevelt. He was either by nature more deliberative than I was or he had lived so long with the uncanny that he was quick to differentiate genuine eldritch from faux eldritch.

“Blue heron,” he said. “Doing a little night fishing.”

I was as familiar with the great blue heron as with any bird that thrived in and around Moonlight Bay. Now that Roosevelt had named our visitor, I recognized it for what it was.

Cancel the call to Mr. Spielberg. There is no movie here.

In my defense, I would note that for all its elegant physiology and its undeniable grace, this heron has a fierce predatory aura and a cold reptilian gaze that identify it as a survivor of the age of dinosaurs.

The bird was poised at the very edge of the slip finger, peering intently into the water. Suddenly it bent forward, its head darted down, its beak stabbed into the bay, it snatched up a small fish, and it threw its head back, swallowing the catch. Some die that others may live.

Considering how hastily I had ascribed preternatural qualities to this ordinary heron, I began to wonder if I was attributing more significance to the recent episode with the cat and the dog than it deserved. Certainty gave way to doubt. The onrushing, macking wave of epiphany abruptly receded without breaking, and a churly-churly tide of confusion slopped over me again.

Drawing my attention from the video display, Roosevelt said, “In the years since Gloria Chan taught me interspecies communication, which is basically just being a cosmically good listener, my life has been immeasurably enriched.”

“Cosmically good listener,” I repeated, wondering if Bobby would still be able to execute one of his wonderfully entertaining riffs on a nutball phrase like that. Maybe his experiences with the monkeys had left him with a permanent deficit of both sarcasm and skepticism. I hoped not. Although change might be a fundamental principle of the universe, some things were meant to be timeless, including Bobby’s insistence on a life that allowed only for things as basic as sand, surf, and sun.

“I’ve greatly enjoyed all the animals that have come to me over the years,” Roosevelt said as drily as if he were a veterinarian reminiscing about a career in animal medicine. He reached out to Mungojerrie and stroked his head, scratched behind his ears. The cat leaned into the big man’s hand and purred. “But these new cats I’ve been encountering the last two years or so…they open a far more exciting dimension of communication.” He turned to Orson: “And I’m sure that you are every bit as interesting as the cats.”

Panting, tongue lolling, Orson assumed an expression of perfect doggy vacuousness.

“Listen, dog, you have never fooled me,” Roosevelt assured him. “And after your little game with the cat a moment ago, you might as well give up the act.”

Ignoring Mungojerrie, Orson looked down at the three biscuits in front of him, on the table.

“You can pretend to be all dog appetite, pretend nothing’s more important to you than those tasty treats, but I know differently.”

Gaze locked on the biscuits, Orson whined longingly.

Roosevelt said, “It was you who brought Chris here the first time, old pup, so why did you come if not to talk?”

On Christmas Eve, more than two years ago, not a month before my mother died, Orson and I had been roaming the night, according to our usual habits. He had been only a year old then. As a puppy, he had been frisky and playful, but he had never been as hyper as most very young dogs. Nevertheless, at the age of one, he was not always able to control his curiosity and not always as well-behaved as he ultimately became. We were on the outdoor basketball court behind the high school, my dog and I, and I was shooting baskets. I was telling Orson that Michael Jordan should be damn glad that I’d been born with XP and was unable to compete under lights, when the mutt abruptly sprinted away from me. Repeatedly I called to him, but he only paused to glance back at me, then trotted away again. By the time I realized that he was not going to return, I didn’t even have time to snug the ball into the net bag that was tied to the handlebars of my bicycle. I pedaled after the fugitive fur ball, and he led me on a wild chase: street to alley to street, through Quester Park, down to the marina, and ultimately along the docks to the Nostromo. Although he rarely barked, that night Orson flew into a barking frenzy as he leaped off the dock directly onto the porch-like afterdeck of the cruiser, and by the time I braked to a skidding halt on the damp dock planks, Roosevelt had come out of the boat to cuddle and calm the dog.

“You want to talk,” Roosevelt told Orson now. “You originally came here wanting to talk, but I suspect you just don’t trust me.”

Orson kept his head down, his eyes on the biscuits.

“Even after two years, you half suspect maybe I’m hooked up with the people at Wyvern, and you’re not going to be anything but the most doggie of dogs until you’re sure of me.”

Sniffing the biscuits, once more licking the table around them, Orson seemed not even to be aware that anyone was speaking to him.

Turning his attention to me, Roosevelt said, “These new cats, they come from Wyvern. Some are first-generation, the original escapees, and some are second-generation who were born in freedom.”

“Lab animals?” I asked.

“The first generation were, yes. They and their offspring are different from other cats. Different in lots of ways.”

“Smarter,” I said, remembering the behavior of the monkeys.

“You know more than I thought.”

“It’s been a busy night. How smart are they?”

“I don’t know how to calibrate that,” he said, and I could see that he was being evasive. “But they’re smarter and different in other ways, too.”

“Why? What was done to them out there?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“How’d they get loose?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Why haven’t they been rounded up?”

“Beats me.”

“No offense, sir, but you’re a bad liar.”

“Always have been,” Roosevelt said with a smile. “Listen, son, I don’t know everything, either. Only what the animals tell me. But it’s not good for you to know even that much. The more you know, the more you’ll want to know — and you’ve got your dog and those friends to worry about.”

“Sounds like a threat,” I said without animosity.

When he shrugged his immense shoulders, there should have been a low thunder of displaced air. “If you think I’ve been co-opted by them at Wyvern, then it’s a threat. If you believe I’m your friend, then it’s advice.”

Although I wanted to trust Roosevelt, I shared Orson’s doubt. I found it hard to believe that this man was capable of treachery. But here on the weird side of the magical looking-glass, I had to assume that every face was a false face.

Edgy from the caffeine but with a craving for more, I took my cup to the coffeemaker and refilled it.

“What I can tell you,” Roosevelt said, “is there were supposed to be dogs out at Fort Wyvern as well as cats.”

“Orson didn’t come from Wyvern.”

“Where did he come from?”

I stood with my back against the refrigerator, sipping the hot coffee. “One of my mom’s colleagues gave him to us. Their dog had a lot of puppies, and they needed to find homes for them.”

“One of your mom’s colleagues at the university?”

“Yeah. A professor at Ashdon.”

Roosevelt Frost stared, unspeaking, and a terrible cloud of pity crossed his face.

“What?” I asked, and heard a quavery note in my voice that I did not like.

He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and kept his silence. Suddenly he seemed to want to avoid my eyes. Now both he and Orson were studying the damn dog biscuits.

The cat had no interest in the biscuits. Instead, he watched me.

If another cat made of pure gold with eyes of jewels, standing silent guard for millennia in the most sacred room of a pyramid far beneath a sea of sand, had suddenly come to life before my eyes, it would not have seemed more mysterious than this cat with his steady, somehow ancient gaze.

To Roosevelt, I said, “You don’t think that’s where Orson came from? Not Wyvern? Why would my mother’s colleague lie to her?”

He shook his head, as if he didn’t know, but he knew all right.

I was frustrated by the way he fluctuated between making disclosures and guarding his secrets. I didn’t understand his game, couldn’t grasp why he was alternately forthcoming and closemouthed.

Under the gray cat’s hieroglyphic gaze, in the draft-trembled candlelight, with the humid air thickened by mystery as manifest as incense, I said, “All you need to complete your act is a crystal ball, silver hoop earrings, a Gypsy headband, and a Romanian accent.”

I couldn’t get a rise out of him.

Returning to my chair at the table, I tried to use what little I knew to encourage him to believe that I knew even more. Maybe he would open up further if he thought some of his secrets weren’t so secret, after all. “There weren’t only cats and dogs in the labs at Wyvern. There were monkeys.”

Roosevelt didn’t reply, and he still avoided my eyes.

“You do know about the monkeys?” I asked.

“No,” he said, but he glanced from the biscuits to the security-camera monitor in the hutch.

“I suspect it’s because of the monkeys that you got a mooring outside the marina three months ago.”

Realizing that he had betrayed his knowledge by looking at the monitor when I mentioned the monkeys, he returned his attention to the dog biscuits.

Only a hundred moorings were available in the bay waters beyond the marina, and they were nearly as prized as the dock slips, though it was a necessary inconvenience to travel to and from your moored boat in another craft. Roosevelt had subleased a space from Dieter Gessel, a fisherman whose trawler was docked farther out along the northern horn with the rest of the fishing fleet but who had kept a junk dinghy at the mooring against the day when he retired and acquired a pleasure boat. Rumor was that Roosevelt was paying five times what the lease was costing Dieter.

I had never before asked him about it because it wasn’t any of my business unless he brought it up first.

Now I said, “Every night, you move the Nostromo from this slip out to the mooring, and you sleep there. Every night without fail — except tonight, while you’re waiting here for me. Folks thought you were going to buy a second boat, something smaller and fun, just to play with. When you didn’t, when you just went out there every night to bunk down, they figured—‘Well, okay, he’s a little eccentric anyway, old Roosevelt, talking to people’s pets and whatnot.’”

He remained silent.

He and Orson appeared to be so intensely and equally fascinated by those three dog biscuits that I could almost believe either of them might abruptly break discipline and gobble up the treats.

“After tonight,” I said, “I think I know why you go out there to sleep. You figure it’s safer. Because maybe monkeys don’t swim well — or at least they don’t enjoy it.”

As if he hadn’t heard me, he said, “Okay, dog, even if you won’t talk to me, you can have your nibbles.”

Orson risked eye-to-eye contact with his inquisitor, seeking confirmation.

“Go ahead,” Roosevelt urged.

Orson looked dubiously at me, as if asking whether I thought Roosevelt’s permission was a trick.

“He’s the host,” I said.

The dog snatched up the first biscuit and happily crunched it.

Finally turning his attention to me, with that unnerving pity still in his face and eyes, Roosevelt said, “The people behind the project at Wyvern…they might have had good intentions. Some of them, anyway. And I think some good things might’ve come from their work.” He reached out to pet the cat again, which relaxed under his hand, though he never shifted his piercing eyes from me. “But there was also a dark side to this business. A very dark side. From what I’ve been told, the monkeys are only one manifestation of it.”

“Only one?”

Roosevelt held my stare in silence for a long time, long enough for Orson to eat the second biscuit, and when at last he spoke, his voice was softer than ever: “There were more than just cats and dogs and monkeys in those labs.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but I said, “I suspect you aren’t talking about guinea pigs or white mice.”

His eyes shifted away from me, and he appeared to be staring at something far beyond the cabin of this boat. “Lot of change coming.”

“They say change is good.”

“Some is.”

As Orson ate the third biscuit, Roosevelt rose from his chair. Picking up the cat, holding him against his chest, stroking him, he seemed to be considering whether I needed to — or should — know more.

When he finally spoke, he slid once again from a revelatory mood into a secretive one. “I’m tired, son. I should have been in bed hours ago. I was asked to warn you that your friends are in danger if you don’t walk away from this, if you keep probing.”

“The cat asked you to warn me.”

“That’s right.”

As I got to my feet, I became more aware of the wallowing motion of the boat. For a moment I was stricken by a spell of vertigo, and I gripped the back of the chair to steady myself.

This physical symptom was matched by mental turmoil, as well, and my grip on reality seemed increasingly tenuous. I felt as if I were spinning along the upper rim of a whirlpool that would suck me down faster, faster, faster, until I went through the bottom of the funnel — my own version of Dorothy’s tornado — and found myself not in Oz but in Waimea Bay, Hawaii, solemnly discussing the fine points of reincarnation with Pia Klick.

Aware of the extreme flakiness of the question, I nevertheless asked, “And the cat, Mungojerrie…he isn’t in league with these people at Wyvern?”

“He escaped from them.”

Licking his chops to be sure that no precious biscuit crumbs adhered to his lips or to the fur around his muzzle, Orson got off the dinette chair and came to my side.

To Roosevelt, I said, “Earlier tonight, I heard the Wyvern project described in apocalyptic terms…the end of the world.”

“The world as we know it.”

“You actually believe that?”

“It could play out that way, yes. But maybe when it all shakes down, there’ll be more good changes than bad. The end of the world as we know it isn’t necessarily the same as the end of the world.”

“Tell that to the dinosaurs after the comet impact.”

“I have my jumpy moments,” he admitted.

“If you’re frightened enough to go to the mooring to sleep every night and if you really believe that what they were doing at Wyvern was so dangerous, why don’t you get out of Moonlight Bay?”

“I’ve considered it. But my businesses are here. My life’s here. Besides, I wouldn’t be escaping. I’d only be buying a little time. Ultimately, nowhere is safe.”

“That’s a bleak assessment.”

“I guess so.”

“Yet you don’t seem depressed.”

Carrying the cat, Roosevelt led us out of the main cabin and through the aft stateroom. “I’ve always been able to handle whatever the world threw at me, son, both the ups and the downs, as long as it was at least interesting. I’ve had the blessing of a full and varied life, and the only thing I really dread is boredom.” We stepped out of the boat onto the afterdeck, into the clammy embrace of the fog. “Things are liable to get downright hairy here in the Jewel of the Central Coast, but whichever way it goes, for damn sure it won’t be boring.”

Roosevelt had more in common with Bobby Halloway than 1 would have thought.

“Well, sir…thank you for the advice. I guess.” I sat on the coaming and swung off the boat to the dock a couple of feet below, and Orson leaped down to my side.

The big blue heron had departed earlier. The fog eddied around me, the black water purled under the boat slip, and all else was as still as a dream of death.

I had taken only two steps toward the gangway when Roosevelt said, “Son?”

I stopped and looked back.

“The safety of your friends really is at stake here. But your happiness is on the line, too. Believe me, you don’t want to know more about this. You’ve got enough problems…the way you have to live.”

“I don’t have any problems,” I assured him. “Just different advantages and disadvantages from most people.”

His skin was so black that he might have been a mirage in the fog, a trick of shadow. The cat, which he held, was invisible but for his eyes, which appeared to be disembodied, mysterious — bright green orbs floating in midair. “Just different advantages…do you really believe that?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said, although I wasn’t sure whether I believed it because it was, in fact, the truth or because I had spent most of my life convincing myself that it was true. A lot of the time, reality is what you make it.

“I’ll tell you one more thing,” he said. “One more thing because it might convince you to let this go and get on with life.”

I waited.

At last, with sorrow in his voice, he said, “The reason most of them don’t want to harm you, the reason they’d rather try to control you by killing your friends, the reason most of them revere you is because of who your mother was.”

Fear, as death-white and cold as a Jerusalem cricket, crawled up the small of my back, and for a moment my lungs constricted so that I couldn’t draw a breath — although I didn’t know why Roosevelt’s enigmatic statement should affect me so instantly and profoundly. Maybe I understood more than I thought I did. Maybe the truth was already waiting to be acknowledged in the canyons of the subconscious — or in the abyss of the heart.

When I could breathe, I said, “What do you mean?”

“If you think about it for a while,” he said, “really think about it, maybe you’ll realize that you have nothing to gain by pursuing this thing — and so much to lose. Knowledge seldom brings us peace, son. A hundred years ago, we didn’t know about atomic structure or DNA or black holes — but are we any happier and more fulfilled now than people were then?”

As he spoke that final word, fog filled the space where he had stood on the afterdeck. A cabin door closed softly; with a louder sound, a dead bolt was engaged.

24

Around the creaking Nostromo, the fog seethed in slow motion. Nightmare creatures appeared to form out of the mist, loom, and then dissolve.

Inspired by Roosevelt Frost’s final revelation, more fearful things than fog monsters took shape from the mists in my mind, but I was reluctant to concentrate on them and thereby impart to them a greater solidity. Maybe he was right. If I learned everything I wanted to know, I might wish I had remained ignorant of the truth.

Bobby says that truth is sweet but dangerous. He says people couldn’t bear to go on living if they faced every cold truth about themselves.

In that case, I tell him, he’ll never be suicidal.

As Orson preceded me up the gangway from the slip, I considered my options, trying to decide where to go and what to do next. There was a siren singing, and only I could hear her dangerous song; though I was afraid of wrecking on the rocks of truth, this hypnotic melody was one I couldn’t resist.

When we reached the top of the gangway, I said to my dog, “So…anytime you want to start explaining all this to me, I’m ready to listen.”

Even if Orson could have answered me, he didn’t seem to be in a communicative mood.

My bicycle was still leaning against the dock railing. The rubber handlebar grips were cold and slick, wet with condensation.

Behind us, the Nostromo’s engines turned over. When I glanced back, I saw the running lights of the boat diffused and ringed by halos in the fog.

I couldn’t make out Roosevelt at the upper helm station, but I knew he was there. Though only a few hours of darkness remained, he was moving his boat out to his mooring even in this low visibility.

As I walked my bike shoreward through the marina, among the gently rocking boats, I looked back a couple of times, to see if I could spot Mungojerrie in the dim wash of the dock lights. If he was following us, he was being discreet. I suspected that the cat was still aboard the Nostromo.

…the reason most of them revere you is because of who your mother was.

When we turned right onto the main dock pier and headed toward the entrance to the marina, a foul odor rose off the water. Evidently the tide had washed a dead squid or a man-of-war or a fish in among the pilings. The rotting corpse must have gotten caught above the water line on one of the jagged masses of barnacles that encrusted the concrete caissons. The stench became so ripe that the humid air seemed to be not merely scented but flavored with it, as repulsive as a broth from the devil’s dinner table. I held my breath and kept my mouth tightly closed against the disgusting taste that had been imparted to the fog.

The grumble of the Nostromo’s engines had faded as it cruised out to the mooring. Now the muffled rhythmic thumping that came across the water sounded not like engine noise at all but like the ominous beat of a leviathan’s heart, as though a monster of the deep might surface in the marina, sinking all the boats, battering apart the dock, and plunging us into a cold wet grave.

When we reached the midpoint of the main pier, I looked back and saw neither the cat nor a more fearsome pursuer.

Nevertheless, I said to Orson, “Damn, but it’s starting to feel like the end of the world.”

He chuffed in agreement as we left the stench of death behind us and walked toward the glow of the quaint ship lanterns that were mounted on massive teak pilasters at the main pier entrance.

Moving out of an almost liquid gloom beside the marina office, Lewis Stevenson, the chief of police, still in uniform as I had seen him earlier in the night, crossed into the light. He said, “I’m in a mood here.”

For an instant, as he stepped from the shadows, something about him was so peculiar that a chill bored like a corkscrew in my spine. Whatever I had seen — or thought I’d seen — passed in a blink, however, and I found myself shivering and keenly disturbed, overcome by an extraordinary perception of being in the presence of something unearthly and malevolent, without being able to identify the precise cause of this feeling.

Chief Stevenson was holding a formidable-looking pistol in his right hand. Although he was not in a shooting stance, his grip on the weapon wasn’t casual. The muzzle was trained on Orson, who was two steps ahead of me, standing in the outer arc of the lantern light, while I remained in shadows.

“You want to guess what mood I’m in?” Stevenson asked, stopping no more than ten feet from us.

“Not good,” I ventured.

“I’m in a mood not to be screwed with.”

The chief didn’t sound like himself. His voice was familiar, the timbre and the accent unchanged, but there was a hard note when before there had been quiet authority. Usually his speech flowed like a stream, and you found yourself almost floating on it, calm and warm and assured; but now the flow was fast and turbulent, cold and stinging.

“I don’t feel good,” he said. “I don’t feel good at all. In fact, I feel like shit, and I don’t have much patience for anything that makes me feel even worse. You understand me?”

Although I didn’t understand him entirely, I nodded and said, “Yes. Yes, sir, I understand.”

Orson was as still as cast iron, and his eyes never left the muzzle of the chief’s pistol.

I was acutely aware that the marina was a desolate place at this hour. The office and the fueling station were not staffed after six o’clock. Only five boat owners, other than Roosevelt Frost, lived aboard their vessels, and they were no doubt sound asleep. The docks were no less lonely than the granite rows of eternal berths in St. Bernadette’s cemetery.

The fog muffled our voices. No one was likely to hear our conversation and be drawn to it.

Keeping his attention on Orson but addressing me, Stevenson said, “I can’t get what I need, because I don’t even know what it is I need. Isn’t that a bitch?”

I sensed that this was a man at risk of coming apart, perilously holding himself together. He had lost his noble aspect. Even his handsomeness was sliding away as the planes of his face were pulled toward a new configuration by what seemed to be rage and an equally powerful anxiety.

“You ever feel this emptiness, Snow? You ever feel an emptiness so bad, you’ve got to fill it or you’ll die, but you don’t know where the emptiness is or what in the name of God you’re supposed to fill it with?”

Now I didn’t understand him at all, but I didn’t think that he was in a mood to explain himself, so I looked solemn and nodded sympathetically. “Yes, sir. I know the feeling.”

His brow and cheeks were moist but not from the clammy air; he glistened with greasy sweat. His face was so supernaturally white that the mist seemed to pour from him, boiling coldly off his skin, as though he were the father of all fog. “Comes on you bad at night,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Comes on you anytime, but worse at night.” His face twisted with what might have been disgust. “What kind of damn dog is this, anyway?”

His gun arm stiffened, and I thought I saw his finger tighten on the trigger.

Orson bared his teeth but neither moved nor made a sound.

I quickly said, “He’s just a Labrador mix. He’s a good dog, wouldn’t harm a cat.”

His anger swelling for no apparent reason, Stevenson said, “Just a Labrador mix, huh? The hell he is. Nothing’s just anything. Not here. Not now. Not anymore.”

I considered reaching for the Glock in my jacket. I was holding my bike with my left hand. My right hand was free, and the pistol was in my right-hand pocket.

Even as distraught as Stevenson was, however, he was nonetheless a cop, and he was sure to respond with deadly professionalism to any threatening move I made. I didn’t put much faith in Roosevelt’s strange assurance that I was revered. Even if I let the bicycle fall over to distract him, Stevenson would shoot me dead before the Glock cleared my pocket.

Besides, I wasn’t going to pull a gun on the chief of police unless I had no choice but to use it. And if I shot him, that would be the end of my life, a thwarting of the sun.

Abruptly Stevenson snapped his head up, looking away from Orson. He drew a deep breath, then several that were as quick and shallow as those of a hound following the spoor of its quarry. “What’s that?”

He had a keener sense of smell than I did, because I only now realized that an almost imperceptible breeze had brought us a faint hint of the stench from the decomposing sea creature back under the main pier.

Although Stevenson was already acting strangely enough to make my scalp crinkle into faux corduroy, he grew markedly stranger. He tensed, hunched his shoulders, stretched his neck, and raised his face to the fog, as though savoring the putrescent scent. His eyes were feverish in his pale face, and he spoke not with the measured inquisitiveness of a cop but with an eager, nervous curiosity that seemed perverse: “What is that? You smell that? Something dead, isn’t it?”

“Something back under the pier,” I confirmed. “Some kind of fish, I guess.”

“Dead. Dead and rotting. Something…It’s got an edge to it, doesn’t it?” He seemed about to lick his lips. “Yeah. Yeah. Sure does have an interesting edge to it.”

Either he heard the eerie current crackling through his voice or he sensed my alarm, because he glanced worriedly at me and struggled to compose himself. It was a struggle. He was teetering on a crumbling ledge of emotion.

Finally the chief found his normal voice — or something that approximated it. “I need to talk to you, reach an understanding. Now. Tonight. Why don’t you come with me, Snow.”

“Come where?”

“My patrol car’s out front.”

“But my bicycle—”

“I’m not arresting you. Just a quick chat. Let’s make sure we understand each other.”

The last thing I wanted to do was get in a patrol car with Stevenson. If I refused, however, he might make his invitation more formal by taking me into custody.

Then, if I tried to resist arrest, if I climbed on my bicycle and pumped the pedals hard enough to make the crank axle smoke — where would I go? With dawn only a few hours away, I had no time to flee as far as the next town on this lonely stretch of coast. Even if I had ample time, XP limited my world to the boundaries of Moonlight Bay, where I could return home by sunrise or find an understanding friend to take me in and give me darkness.

“I’m in a mood here,” Lewis Stevenson said again, through half-clenched teeth, the hardness returning to his voice. “I’m in a real mood. You coming with me?”

“Yes, sir. I’m cool with that.”

Motioning with his pistol, he indicated that Orson and I were to precede him.

I walked my bike toward the end of the entrance pier, loath to have the chief behind me with the gun. I didn’t need to be an animal communicator to know that Orson was nervous, too.

The pier planks ended in a concrete sidewalk flanked by flower beds full of ice plant, the blooms of which open wide in sunshine and close at night. In the low landscape lighting, snails were crossing the walkway, antennae glistening, leaving silvery trails of slime, some creeping from the right-hand bed of ice plant to the identical bed on the left, others laboriously making their way in the opposite direction, as if these humble mollusks shared humanity’s restlessness and dissatisfaction with the terms of existence.

I weaved with the bike to avoid the snails, and although Orson sniffed them in passing, he stepped over them.

From behind us rose the crunching of crushed shells, the squish of jellied bodies tramped underfoot. Stevenson was stepping on not only those snails directly in his path but on every hapless gastropod in sight. Some were dispatched with a quick snap, but he stomped on others, came down on them with such force that the slap of shoe sole against concrete rang like a hammer strike.

I didn’t turn to look.

I was afraid of seeing the cruel glee that I remembered too well from the faces of the young bullies who had tormented me throughout childhood, before I’d been wise enough and big enough to fight back. Although that expression was unnerving when a child wore it, the same look — the beady eyes that seemed perfectly reptilian even without elliptical pupils, the hate-reddened cheeks, the bloodless lips drawn back in a sneer from spittle-shined teeth — would be immeasurably more disturbing on the face of an adult, especially when the adult had a gun in his hand and wore a badge.

Stevenson’s black-and-white was parked at a red curb thirty feet to the left of the marina entrance, beyond the reach of the landscape lights, in deep night shade under the spreading limbs of an enormous Indian laurel.

I leaned my bike against the trunk of the tree, on which the fog hung like Spanish moss. At last I turned warily to the chief as he opened the back door on the passenger side of the patrol car.

Even in the murk, I recognized the expression on his face that I had dreaded seeing: the hatred, the irrational but unassuageable anger that makes some human beings more deadly than any other beast on the planet.

Never before had Stevenson disclosed this malevolent aspect of himself. He hadn’t seemed capable of unkindness, let alone senseless hatred. If suddenly he had revealed that he wasn’t the real Lewis Stevenson but an alien life-form mimicking the chief, I would have believed him.

Gesturing with the gun, Stevenson spoke to Orson: “Get in the car, fella.”

“He’ll be all right out here,” I said.

“Get in,” he urged the dog.

Orson peered suspiciously at the open car door and whined with distrust.

“He’ll wait here,” I said. “He never runs off.”

“I want him in the car,” Stevenson said icily. “There’s a leash law in this town, Snow. We never enforce it with you. We always turn our heads, pretend not to see, because of…because a dog is exempted if he belongs to a disabled person.”

I didn’t antagonize Stevenson by rejecting the term disabled. Anyway, I was interested less in that one word than in the six words I was sure he had almost said before catching himself: because of who your mother was.

“But this time,” he said, “I’m not going to sit here while the damn dog trots around loose, crapping on the sidewalk, flaunting that he isn’t on a leash.”

Although I could have noted the contradiction between the fact that the dog of a disabled person was exempt from the leash law and the assertion that Orson was flaunting his leashlessness, I remained silent. I couldn’t win any argument with Stevenson while he was in this hostile state.

“If he won’t get in the car when I tell him to,” Stevenson said, “you make him get in.”

I hesitated, searching for a credible alternative to meek cooperation. Second by second, our situation seemed more perilous. I’d felt safer than this when we had been in the blinding fog on the peninsula, stalked by the troop.

“Get the goddamn dog in the goddamn car now!” Stevenson ordered, and the venom in this command was so potent that he could have killed snails without stepping on them, sheerly with his voice.

Because his gun was in his hand, I remained at a disadvantage, but I took some thin comfort from the fact that he apparently didn’t know that I was armed. For the time being, I had no choice but to cooperate.

“In the car, pal,” I told Orson, trying not to sound fearful, trying not to let my hammering heart pound a tremor into my voice.

Reluctantly the dog obeyed.

Lewis Stevenson slammed the rear door and then opened the front. “Now you, Snow.”

I settled into the passenger seat while Stevenson walked around the black-and-white to the driver’s side and got in behind the wheel. He pulled his door shut and told me to close mine, which I had hoped to avoid doing.

Usually I don’t suffer from claustrophobia in tight spaces, but no coffin could have been more cramped than this patrol car. The fog pressing at the windows was as psychologically suffocating as a dream about premature burial.

The interior of the car seemed chillier and damper than the night outside. Stevenson started the engine in order to be able to switch on the heater.

The police radio crackled, and a dispatcher’s static-filled voice croaked like frog song. Stevenson clicked it off.

Orson stood on the floor in front of the backseat, forepaws on the steel grid that separated him from us, peering worriedly through that security barrier. When the chief pressed a console button with the barrel of his gun, the power locks on the rear doors engaged with a hard sound no less final than the thunk of a guillotine blade.

I had hoped that Stevenson would holster his pistol when he got into the car, but he kept a grip on it. He rested the weapon on his leg, the muzzle pointed at the dashboard. In the dim green light from the instrument panel, I thought I saw that his forefinger was now curled around the trigger guard rather than around the trigger itself, but this didn’t lessen his advantage to any appreciable degree.

For a moment he lowered his head and closed his eyes, as though praying or gathering his thoughts.

Fog condensed on the Indian laurel, and drops of water dripped from the points of the leaves, snapping with an unrhythmical ponk-pank-ping against the roof and hood of the car.

Casually, quietly, I tucked both hands into my jacket pockets. I closed my right hand around the Glock.

I told myself that, because of my overripe imagination, I was exaggerating the threat. Stevenson was in a foul mood, yes, and from what I had seen behind the police station, I knew that he was not the righteous arm of justice that he had long pretended to be. But this didn’t mean that he had any violent intentions. He might, indeed, want only to talk, and having said his piece, he might turn us loose unharmed.

When at last Stevenson raised his head, his eyes were servings of bitter brew in cups of bone. As his gaze flowed to me, I was again chilled by an impression of inhuman malevolence, as I had been when he’d first stepped out of the gloom beside the marina office, but this time I knew why my harp-string nerves thrummed with fear. Briefly, at a certain angle, his liquid stare rippled with a yellow luminance similar to the eyeshine that many animals exhibit at night, a cold and mysterious inner light like nothing I had ever seen before in the eyes of man or woman.

25

The electric and electrifying radiance passed through Chief Stevenson’s eyes so fleetingly, as he turned to face me, that on any night before this one, I might have dismissed the phenomenon as merely a queer reflection of the instrument-panel lights. But since sundown, I had seen monkeys that were not merely monkeys, a cat that was somehow more than a cat, and I had waded through mysteries that flowed like rivers along the streets of Moonlight Bay, and I had learned to expect significance in the seemingly insignificant.

His eyes were inky again, glimmerless. The anger in his voice was now an undertow, while the surface current was gray despair and grief. “It’s all changed now, all changed, and no going back.”

“What’s changed?”

“I’m not who I used to be. I can hardly remember what I used to be like, the kind of man I was. It’s lost.”

I felt he was talking as much to himself as to me, grieving aloud for this loss of self that he imagined.

“I don’t have anything to lose. Everything that matters has been taken from me. I’m a dead man walking, Snow. That’s all I am. Can you imagine how that feels?”

“No.”

“Because even you, with your shitty life, hiding from the day, coming out only at night like some slug crawling out from under a rock — even you have reasons to live.”

Although the chief of police was an elected official in our town, Lewis Stevenson didn’t seem to be concerned about winning my vote.

I wanted to tell him to go copulate with himself. But there is a difference between showing no fear and begging for a bullet in the head.

As he turned his face away from me to gaze at the white sludge of fog sliding thickly across the windshield, that cold fire throbbed in his eyes again, a briefer and fainter flicker than before yet more disturbing because it could no longer be dismissed as imaginary.

Lowering his voice as though afraid of being overheard, he said, “I have terrible nightmares, terrible, full of sex and blood.”

I had not known exactly what to expect from this conversation; but revelations of personal torment would not have been high on my list of probable subjects.

“They started well over a year ago,” he continued. “At first they came only once a week, but then with increasing frequency. And at the start, for a while, the women in the nightmares were no one I’d ever seen in life, just pure fantasy figures. They were like those dreams you have during puberty, silken girls so ripe and eager to surrender…except that in these dreams, I didn’t just have sex with them….”

His thoughts seemed to drift with the bilious fog into darker territory.

Only his profile was presented to me, dimly lit and glistening with sour sweat, yet I glimpsed a savagery that made me hope that he would not favor me with a full-face view.

Lowering his voice further still, he said, “In these dreams, I beat them, too, punch them in the face, punch and punch and punch them until there’s nothing left of their faces, choke them until their tongues swell out of their mouths….”

As he had begun to describe his nightmares, his voice had been marked by dread. Now, in addition to this fear, an unmistakable perverse excitement rose in him, evident not only in his husky voice but also in the new tension that gripped his body.

“…and when they cry out in pain, I love their screams, the agony on their faces, the sight of their blood. So delicious. So exciting. I wake shivering with pleasure, swollen with need. And sometimes…though I’m fifty-two, for God’s sake, I climax in my sleep or just as I’m waking.”

Orson dropped away from the security grille and retreated to the backseat.

I wished that I, too, could put more distance between myself and Lewis Stevenson. The cramped patrol car seemed to close around us, as though it were being squashed in one of those salvage-yard hydraulic crushers.

“Then Louisa, my wife, began to appear in the dreams…and my two…my two daughters. Janine. Kyra. They’re afraid of me in these dreams, and I give them every reason to be, because their terror excites me. I’m disgusted but…but also thrilled at what I’m doing with them, to them….”

The anger, the despair, and the perverse excitement were still to be detected in his voice, in his slow heavy breathing, in the hunch of his shoulders — and in the subtle but ghastly reconstruction of his face, obvious even in profile. But among those powerfully conflicted desires that were at war for control of his mind, there was also a desperate hope that he could avoid plunging into the abyss of madness and savagery on the brink of which he appeared to be so precariously balanced, and this hope was clearly expressed in the anguish that now became as evident in his voice and demeanor as were his anger, despair, and depraved need.

“The nightmares got so bad, the things I did in them so sick and filthy, so repulsive, that I was afraid to go to sleep. I’d stay awake until I was exhausted, until no amount of caffeine could keep me on my feet, until even an ice cube held against the back of my neck couldn’t stop my burning eyes from slipping shut. Then when I finally slept, my dreams would be more intense than ever, as though exhaustion drove me into sounder sleep, into a deeper darkness inside me where worse monsters lived. Rutting and slaughter, ceaseless and vivid, the first dreams I ever had in color, such intense colors, and sounds as well, their pleading voices and my pitiless replies, their screams and weeping, their convulsions and death rattles when I tore their throats out with my teeth even as I thrust into them.”

Lewis Stevenson seemed to see these hideous images where I could see only the lazily churning fog, as if the windshield before him were a screen on which his demented fantasies were projected.

“And after a while…I no longer fought sleep. For a time, I just endured it. Then somewhere along the way — I can’t remember the precise night — the dreams ceased to hold any terror for me and became purely enjoyable, when previously they inspired far more guilt than pleasure. Although at first I couldn’t admit it to myself, I began to look forward to bedtime. These women were so precious to me when I was awake, but when I slept…then…then I thrilled at the chance to debase them, humiliate them, torture them in the most imaginative ways. I no longer woke in fear from these nightmares…but in a strange bliss. And I’d lie in the dark, wondering how much better it might feel to commit these atrocities for real than just to dream of them. Merely thinking about acting out my dreams, I became aware of this awesome power flowing into me, and I felt so free, utterly free, as never before. In fact, it seemed as if I’d lived my life in huge iron manacles, wrapped in chains, weighted down by blocks of stone. It seemed that giving in to these desires wouldn’t be criminal, would have no moral dimension whatsoever. Neither right nor wrong. Neither good nor bad. But tremendously liberating.”

Either the air in the patrol car was growing increasingly stale or I was sickened by the thought of inhaling the same vapors that the chief exhaled: I’m not sure which. My mouth filled with a metallic taste, as if I had been sucking on a penny, my stomach cramped around a lump of something as cold as arctic rock, and my heart was sheathed in ice.

I couldn’t understand why Stevenson would lay bare his troubled soul to me, but I had a premonition that these confessions were only a prelude to a hateful revelation that I would wish I’d never heard. I wanted to silence him before he sprang that ultimate secret on me, but I could see he was powerfully compelled to relate these horrific fantasies — perhaps because I was the first to whom he had dared to unburden himself. There was no way to shut him up short of killing him.

“Lately,” he continued in a hungry whisper that would haunt my sleep for the rest of my life, “these dreams all focus on my granddaughter. Brandy. She’s ten. A pretty girl. A very pretty girl. So slim and pretty. The things I do to her in dreams. Ah, the things I do. You can’t imagine such merciless brutality. Such exquisitely vicious inventiveness. And when I wake up, I’m beyond exhilaration. Transcendent. In a rapture. I lie in bed, beside my wife, who sleeps on without guessing what strange thoughts obsess me, who can’t possibly ever know, and I thrum with power, with the awareness that absolute freedom is available to me any time I want to seize it. Any time. Next week. Tomorrow. Now.”

Overhead, the silent laurel spoke as, in quick succession, at least a double score of its pointed green tongues trembled with too great a weight of condensed fog. Each loosed its single watery note, and I twitched at the sudden rataplan of fat droplets beating on the car, half surprised that what streamed down the windshield and across the hood was not blood.

In my jacket pocket, I closed my right hand more tightly around the Glock. After what Stevenson had told me, I couldn’t imagine any circumstances in which he could allow me to leave this car alive. I shifted slightly in my seat, the first of several small moves that shouldn’t make him suspicious but would put me in a position to shoot him through my jacket, without having to draw the pistol from the pocket.

“Last week,” the chief whispered, “Kyra and Brandy came over for dinner with us, and I had trouble taking my eyes off the girl. When I looked at her, in my mind’s eye she was naked, as she is in the dreams. So slim. So fragile. Vulnerable. I became aroused by her vulnerability, by her tenderness, her weakness, and had to hide my condition from Kyra and Brandy. From Louisa. I wanted…wanted to…needed to…”

His sudden sobbing startled me: Waves of grief and despair swept through him once more, as they had washed through him when first he had begun to speak. His eerie needfulness, his obscene hunger, was drowned in this tide of misery and self-hatred.

“A part of me wants to kill myself,” Stevenson said, “but only the smaller part, the smaller and weaker part, the fragment that’s left of the man I used to be. This predator I’ve become will never kill himself. Never. He’s too alive.”

His left hand, clutched into a fist, rose to his open mouth, and he crammed it between his teeth, biting so fiercely on his clenched fingers that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had drawn his own blood; he was biting and choking back the most wretched sobs that I’d ever heard.

In this new person that Lewis Stevenson seemed to have become, there was none of the calm and steady bearing that had always made him such a credible figure of authority and justice. At least not tonight, not in this bleak mood that plagued him. Raw emotion appeared always to be flowing through him, one current or another, without any intervals of tranquil water, the tide always running, battering.

My fear of him subsided to make room for pity. I almost reached out to put a comforting hand on his shoulder, but I restrained myself because I sensed that the monster I’d been listening to a moment ago had not been vanquished or even chained.

Lowering his fist from his mouth, turning his head toward me, Stevenson revealed a face wrenched by such abysmal torment, by such agony of the heart and mind, that I had to look away.

He looked away, too, facing the windshield again, and as the laurel shed the scattershot distillate of fog, his sobs faded until he could speak. “Since last week, I’ve been making excuses to visit Kyra, to be around Brandy.” A tremor distorted his words at first, but it quickly faded, replaced by the hungry voice of the soulless troll. “And sometimes, late at night, when this damn mood hits me, when I get to feeling so cold and hollow inside that I want to scream and never stop screaming, I think the way to fill the emptiness, the only way to stop this awful gnawing in my gut…is to do what makes me happy in the dreams. And I’m going to do it, too. Sooner or later, I’m going to do it. Sooner than later.” The tide of emotion had now turned entirely from guilt and anguish to a quiet but demonic glee. “I’m going to do it and do it. I’ve been looking for girls Brandy’s age, just nine or ten years old, as slim as she is, as pretty as she is. It’ll be safer to start with someone who has no connection to me. Safer but no less satisfying. It’s going to feel good. It’s going to feel so good, the power, the destruction, throwing off all the shackles they make you live with, tearing down the walls, being totally free, totally free at last. I’m going to bite her, this girl, when I get her alone, I’m going to bite her and bite her. In the dreams I lick their skin, and it’s got a salty taste, and then I bite them, and I can feel their screams vibrating in my teeth.”

Even in the dim light, I could see the manic pulse throbbing in his temples. His jaw muscles bulged, and the corner of his mouth twitched with excitement. He seemed to be more animal than human — or something less than both.

My hand clutched the Glock so ferociously that my arm ached all the way to my shoulder. Abruptly I realized that my finger had tightened on the trigger and that I was in danger of unintentionally squeezing off a shot, though I had not yet fully adjusted my position to bring the muzzle toward Stevenson. With considerable effort, I managed to ease off the trigger.

“What made you like this?” I asked.

As he turned his head to me, the transient luminosity shimmered through his eyes again. His gaze, when the eyeshine passed, was dark and murderous. “A little delivery boy,” he said cryptically. “Just a little delivery boy that wouldn’t die.”

“Why tell me about these dreams, about what you’re going to do to some girl?”

“Because, you damn freak, I’ve got to give you an ultimatum, and I want you to understand how serious it is, how dangerous I am, how little I have to lose and how much I’ll enjoy gutting you if it comes to that. There’s others who won’t touch you—”

“Because of who my mother was.”

“So you know that much already?”

“But I don’t know what it means. Who was my mother in all this?”

Instead of answering, Stevenson said, “There’s others who won’t touch you and who don’t want me to touch you, either. But if I have to, I will. You keep pushing your nose into this, and I’ll smash your skull open, scoop your brain out, and toss it in the bay for fish food. Think I won’t?”

“I believe you,” I said sincerely.

“With the book you wrote being a best-seller, you can maybe get certain media types to listen to you. If you make any calls trying to stir up trouble, I’ll get my hands on that deejay bitch first. I’ll turn her inside out in more ways than one.”

His reference to Sasha infuriated me, but it also scared me so effectively that I held my silence.

Now it was clear that Roosevelt Frost’s warning had indeed been only advice. This was the threat that Roosevelt, claiming to speak for the cat, had warned me to expect.

The pallor was gone from Stevenson’s face, and he was flushed with color — as though, the moment that he had decided to surrender to his psychotic desires, the cold and empty spaces within him had been filled with fire.

He reached to the dashboard controls and he switched off the car heater.

Nothing was surer than that he would abduct a little girl before the next sunset.

I found the confidence to push for answers only because I had shifted sufficiently in my seat to bring the pocketed pistol to bear on him. “Where’s my father’s body?”

“At Fort Wyvern. There has to be an autopsy.”

“Why?”

“You don’t need to know. But to put an end to this stupid little crusade of yours, I’ll at least tell you it was cancer that killed him. Cancer of a kind. There’s no one for you to get even with, the way you were talking to Angela Ferryman.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because I could kill you as easily as give you an answer — so why would I lie?”

“What’s happening in Moonlight Bay?”

The chief cracked a grin the likes of which had seldom been seen beyond the walls of an asylum. As if the prospect of catastrophe were nourishment to him, he sat up straighter and appeared to fatten as he said, “This whole town’s on a roller coaster straight to Hell, and it’s going to be an incredible ride.”

“That’s no answer.”

“It’s all you’ll get.”

“Who killed my mother?”

“It was an accident.”

“I thought so until tonight.”

His wicked grin, thin as a razor slash, became a wider wound. “All right. One more thing if you insist. Your mother was killed, like you suspect.”

My heart rolled, as heavy as a stone wheel. “Who killed her?”

“She did. She killed herself. Suicide. Cranked that Saturn of hers all the way up to a hundred and ran it head-on into the bridge abutment. There wasn’t any mechanical failure. The accelerator didn’t stick. That was all a cover story we concocted.”

“You lying son of a bitch.”

Slowly, slowly, Stevenson licked his lips, as if he found his smile to be sweet. “No lie, Snow. And you know what? If I’d known two years ago what was going to happen to me, how much everything was going to change, I’d have killed your old lady myself. Killed her because of the part she played in this. I’d have taken her somewhere, cut her heart out, filled the hole in her chest with salt, burned her at a stake — whatever you do to make sure a witch is dead. Because what difference is there between what she did and a witch’s curse? Science or magic? What’s it matter when the result is the same? But I didn’t know what was coming then, and she did, so she saved me the trouble and took a high-speed header into eighteen-inch-thick concrete.”

Oily nausea welled in me, because I could hear the truth in his voice as clearly as I had ever heard it spoken. I understood only a fraction of what he was saying, yet I understood too much.

He said, “You’ve got nothing to avenge, freak. No one killed your folks. In fact, one way you look at it, your old lady did them both — herself and your old man.”

I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to look at him, not merely because he took pleasure in the fact of my mother’s death but because he clearly believed — with reason? — that there had been justice in it.

“Now what I want you to do is crawl back under your rock and stay there, live the rest of your days there. We won’t allow you to blow this wide open. If the world finds out what’s happened here, if the knowledge goes beyond those at Wyvern and us, outsiders will quarantine the whole county. They’ll seal it off, kill every last one of us, burn every building to the ground, poison every bird and every coyote and every house cat — and then probably nuke the place a few times for good measure. And that would all be for nothing, anyway, because the plague has already spread far beyond this place, to the other end of the continent and beyond. We’re the original source, and the effects are more obvious here and compounding faster, but now it’ll go on spreading without us. So none of us are ready to die just so the scum-sucking politicians can claim to have taken action.”

When I opened my eyes, I discovered that he’d raised his pistol and was covering me with it. The muzzle was less than two feet from my face. Now my only advantage was that he didn’t know I was armed, and it was a useful advantage only if I was the first to pull the trigger.

Although I knew it was fruitless, I tried to argue with him — perhaps because arguing was the only way that I could distract myself from what he had revealed about my mother. “Listen, for God’s sake, only a few minutes ago, you said you had nothing to live for, anyway. Whatever’s happened here, maybe if we get help—”

“I was in a mood,” he interrupted sharply. “Weren’t you listening to me, freak? I told you I was in a mood. A seriously ugly mood. But now I’m in a different mood. A better mood. I’m in the mood to be all that I can be, to embrace what I’m becoming instead of trying to resist it. Change, little buddy. That’s what it’s all about, you know. Change, glorious change, everything changing, always and forever, change. This new world coming — it’s going to be dazzling.”

“But we can’t—”

“If you did solve your mystery and tell the world, you’d just be signing your own death warrant. You’d be killing your sexy little deejay bitch and all your friends. Now get out of the car, get on your bike, and haul your skinny ass home. Bury whatever ashes Sandy Kirk chooses to give you. Then if you can’t live with not knowing more, if you maybe picked up too much curiosity from a cat bite, go down to the beach for a few days and catch some sun, work up a really bitchin’ tan.”

I couldn’t believe he was going to let me go.

Then he said, “The dog stays with me.”

“No.”

He gestured with his pistol. “Out.”

“He’s my dog.”

“He’s nobody’s dog. And this isn’t a debate.”

“What do you want with him?”

“An object lesson.”

“What?”

“Gonna take him down to the municipal garage. There’s a wood-chipping machine parked there, to grind up tree limbs.”

“No way.”

“I’ll put a bullet in the mutt’s head—”

“No.”

“—toss him in the chipper—”

“Let him out of the car now.”

“—bag the slush that comes out the other end, and drop it by your house as a reminder.”

Staring at Stevenson, I knew that he was not merely a changed man. He was not the same man at all. He was someone new. Someone who had been born out of the old Lewis Stevenson, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, except that this time the process was hideously reversed: the butterfly had gone into the chrysalis, and a worm had emerged. This nightmarish metamorphosis had been underway for some time but had culminated before my eyes. The last of the former chief was gone forever, and the person whom I now challenged eye to eye was driven entirely by need and desire, uninhibited by a conscience, no longer capable of sobbing as he had sobbed only minutes ago, and as deadly as anyone or anything on the face of the earth.

If he carried a laboratory-engineered infection that could induce such a change, would it pass now to me?

My heart fought itself, throwing hard punch after hard punch.

Although I had never imagined myself capable of killing another human being, I thought I was capable of wasting this man, because I’d be saving not only Orson but also untold girls and women whom he intended to welcome into his nightmare.

With more steel in my voice than I had expected, I said, “Let the dog out of the car now.”

Incredulous, his face splitting with that familiar rattlesnake smile, he said, “Are you forgetting who’s the cop? Huh, freak? You forgetting who’s got the gun?”

If I fired the Glock, I might not kill the bastard instantly, even at such close range. Even if the first round stopped his heart in an instant, he might reflexively squeeze off a round that, from a distance of less than two feet, couldn’t miss me.

He broke the impasse: “All right, okay, you want to watch while I do it?”

Incredibly, he half turned in his seat, thrust the barrel of his pistol through one of the inch-square gaps in the steel security grille, and fired at the dog.

The blast rocked the car, and Orson squealed.

“No!” I shouted.

As Stevenson jerked his gun out of the grille, I shot him. The slug punched a hole through my leather jacket and tore open his chest. He fired wildly into the ceiling. I shot him again, in the throat this time, and the window behind him shattered when the bullet passed out of the back of his neck.

26

I sat stunned, as if spellbound by a sorcerer, unable to move, unable even to blink, my heart hanging like an iron plumb bob in my chest, numb to emotion, unable to feel the pistol in my hand, unable to see anything whatsoever, not even the dead man whom I knew to be at the other end of the car seat, briefly blinded by shock, baffled and bound by blackness, temporarily deafened either by the gunfire or perhaps by a desperate desire not to hear even the inner voice of my conscience chattering about consequences.

The only sense that I still possessed was the sense of smell. The sulfurous-carbon stink of gunfire, the metallic aroma of blood, the acidic fumes of urine because Stevenson had fouled himself in his death throes, and the fragrance of my mother’s rose-scented shampoo whirled over me at once, a storm of odor and malodor. All were real except the attar of roses, which was long forgotten but now summoned from memory with all its delicate nuances. Extreme terror gives us back the gestures of our childhood, said Chazal. The smell of that shampoo was my way, in my terror, of reaching out to my lost mother with the hope that her hand would close reassuringly around mine.

In a rush, sight, sound, and all sensation returned to me, jolting me almost as hard as the pair of 9-millimeter bullets had jolted Lewis Stevenson. I cried out and gasped for breath.

Shaking uncontrollably, I pressed the console button that the chief had pressed earlier. The electric locks on the back doors clicked when they disengaged.

I shoved open the door at my side, clambered out of the patrol car, and yanked open the rear door, frantically calling Orson’s name, wondering how I could carry him to the veterinarian’s office in time to save him if he was wounded, wondering how I was going to cope if he was dead. He couldn’t be dead. He was no ordinary dog: He was Orson, my dog, strange and special, companion and friend, only with me for three years but now as essential a part of my dark world as was anyone else in it.

And he wasn’t dead. He bounded out of the car with such relief that he nearly knocked me off my feet. His piercing squeal, in the wake of the gunshot, had been an expression of terror, not pain.

I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk, let the Glock slip out of my hand, and pulled the dog into my arms. I held him fiercely, stroking his head, smoothing his black coat, reveling in his panting, in the fast thudding of his heart, in the swish of his tail, reveling even in the dampish reek of him and in the stale-cereal smell of his biscuit-scented breath.

I didn’t trust myself to speak. My voice was a keystone mortared in my throat. If I managed to break it loose, an entire dam might collapse, a babble of loss and longing might pour out of me, and all the unshed tears for my father and for Angela Ferryman might come in a flood.

I do not allow myself to cry. I would rather be a bone worn to dry splinters by the teeth of sorrow than a sponge wrung ceaselessly in its hands.

Besides, even if I could have trusted myself to speak, words weren’t important here. Though he was certainly a special dog, Orson wasn’t going to join me in spirited conversation — at least not if and until I shed enough of my encumbering reason to ask Roosevelt Frost to teach me animal communication.

When I was able to let go of Orson, I retrieved the Glock and rose to my feet to survey the marina parking lot. The fog concealed most of the few cars and recreational vehicles owned by the handful of people who lived on their boats. No one was in sight, and the night remained silent except for the idling car engine.

Apparently the sound of gunfire had been largely contained in the patrol car and suppressed by the fog. The nearest houses were outside the commercial marina district, two blocks away. If anyone aboard the boats had been awakened, they’d evidently assumed that those four muffled explosions had been nothing more than an engine backfiring or dream doors slamming between the sleeping and the waking worlds.

I wasn’t in immediate danger of being caught, but I couldn’t cycle away and expect to escape blame and punishment. I had killed the chief of police, and though he had no longer been the man whom Moonlight Bay had long known and admired, though he had metamorphosed from a conscientious servant of the people into someone lacking all the essential elements of humanity, I couldn’t prove that this hero had become the very monster that he was sworn to oppose.

Forensic evidence would convict me. Because of the identity of the victim, first-rate police-lab technicians from both county and state offices would become involved, and when they processed the patrol car, they wouldn’t miss anything.

I could never tolerate imprisonment in some narrow candlelit cell. Though my life is limited by the presence of light, no walls must enclose me between the sunset and the dawn. None ever will. The darkness of closed spaces is profoundly different from the darkness of the night; the night has no boundaries, and it offers endless mysteries, discoveries, wonders, opportunities for joy. Night is the flag of freedom under which I live, and I will live free or die.

I was sickened by the prospect of getting back into the patrol car with the dead man long enough to wipe down everything on which I might have left a fingerprint. It would be a futile exercise, anyway, because I’d surely overlook one critical surface.

Besides, a fingerprint wasn’t likely to be the only evidence that I’d left behind. Hairs. A thread from my jeans. A few tiny fibers from my Mystery Train cap. Orson’s hairs in the backseat, the marks of his claws on the upholstery. And no doubt other things equally or more incriminating.

I’d been damn lucky. No one had heard the shots. But by their nature, both luck and time run out, and although my watch contained a microchip rather than a mainspring, I swore that I could hear it ticking.

Orson was nervous, too, vigorously sniffing the air for monkeys or another menace.

I hurried to the back of the patrol car and thumbed the button to release the trunk lid. It was locked, as I’d feared.

Tick, tick, tick.

Steeling myself, I returned to the open front door. I inhaled deeply, held my breath, and leaned inside.

Stevenson sat twisted in his seat, head tipped back against the doorpost. His mouth shaped a silent gasp of ecstasy, and his teeth were bloody, as though he had fulfilled his dreams, had been biting young girls.

Drawn by a meager cross-draft, entering through the shattered window, a scrim of fog floated toward me, as if it were steam rising off the still-warm blood that stained the front of the dead man’s uniform.

I had to lean in farther than I hoped, one knee on the passenger seat, to switch off the engine.

Stevenson’s black-olive eyes were open. No life or unnatural light glimmered in them, yet I half expected to see them blink, swim into focus, and fix on me.

Before the chief’s clammy gray hand could reach out to clutch at me, I plucked the keys from the ignition, backed out of the car, and finally exhaled explosively.

In the trunk I found the large first-aid kit that I expected. From it, I extracted only a thick roll of gauze bandage and a pair of scissors.

While Orson patrolled the entire perimeter of the squad car, diligently sniffing the air, I unrolled the gauze, doubling it again and again into a collection of five-foot loops before snipping it with the scissors. I twisted the strands tightly together, then tied a knot at the upper end, another in the middle, and a third at the lower end. After repeating this exercise, I joined the two multiple-strand lengths together with a final knot — and had a fuse approximately ten feet long.

Tick, tick, tick.

I coiled the fuse on the sidewalk, opened the fuel port on the side of the car, and removed the tank cap. Gasoline fumes wafted out of the neck of the tank.

At the trunk again, I replaced the scissors and what remained of the roll of gauze in the first-aid kit. I closed the kit and then the trunk.

The parking lot remained deserted. The only sounds were the drops of condensation plopping from the Indian laurel onto the squad car and the soft ceaseless padding of my worried dog’s paws.

Although it meant another visit with Lewis Stevenson’s corpse, I returned the keys to the ignition. I’d seen a few episodes from the most popular crime series on television, and I knew how easily even fiendishly clever criminals could be tripped up by an ingenious homicide detective. Or by a best-selling female mystery novelist who solves real murders as a hobby. Or a retired spinster schoolteacher. All this between the opening credits and the final commercial for a vaginal deodorant. I intended to give them — both the professionals and the meddlesome hobbyists — damned little with which to work.

The dead man croaked at me as a bubble of gas broke deep in his esophagus.

“Rolaids,” I advised him, trying unsuccessfully to cheer myself.

I didn’t see any of the four expended brass cartridges on the front seat. In spite of the platoons of amateur sleuths waiting to pounce, and regardless of whether having the brass might help them identify the murder weapon, I didn’t have the nerve to search the floor, especially under Stevenson’s legs.

Anyway, even if I found all the cartridges, there was still a bullet buried in his chest. If it wasn’t too grossly distorted, this wad of lead would feature score marks that could be matched to the singularities of the bore of my pistol, but even the prospect of prison wasn’t sufficient to make me take out my penknife and perform exploratory surgery to retrieve the incriminating slug.

If I’d been a different man than I am, with the stomach for such an impromptu autopsy, I wouldn’t have risked it, anyway. Assuming that Stevenson’s radical personality change — his newfound thirst for violence — was but one symptom of the weird disease he carried, and assuming that this illness could be spread by contact with infected tissues and bodily fluids, this type of grisly wet work was out of the question, which is also why I had been careful not to get any of his blood on me.

When the chief had been telling me about his dreams of rape and mutilation, I’d been sickened by the thought that I was breathing the same air that he’d used and exhaled. I doubted, however, that the microbe he carried was airborne. If it were that highly contagious, Moonlight Bay wouldn’t be on a roller-coaster ride to Hell, as he had claimed the town was: It would long ago have arrived in the sulfurous Pit.

Tick, tick, tick.

According to the gauge on the instrument panel, the fuel tank was nearly full. Good. Perfect. Earlier in the night, at Angela’s, the troop had taught me how to destroy evidence and possibly conceal a murder.

The fire should be so intense that the four brass cartridges, the sheet-metal body of the car, and even portions of the heavier frame would melt. Of the late Lewis Stevenson, little more than charred bones would remain, and the soft lead slug would effectively vanish. Certainly, none of my fingerprints, hairs, or clothes fibers would survive.

Another slug had passed through the chief’s neck, pulverizing the window in the driver’s door. It was now lying somewhere out in the parking lot or, with luck, was at rest deep in the ivy-covered slope that rose from the far end of the lot to the higher-situated Embarcadero Way, where it would be all but impossible to find.

Incriminating powder burns marred my jacket. I should have destroyed it. I couldn’t. I loved that jacket. It was cool. The bullet hole in the pocket made it even cooler.

“Gotta give the spinster schoolteachers some chance,” I muttered as I closed the front and back doors of the car.

The brief laugh that escaped me was so humorless and bleak that it scared me almost as much as the possibility of imprisonment.

I ejected the magazine from the Glock, took one cartridge from it, which left six, and then slapped it back into the pistol.

Orson whined impatiently and picked up one end of the gauze fuse in his mouth.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said — and then gave him the double take that he deserved.

The mutt might have picked it up solely because he was curious about it, as dogs tend to be curious about everything.

Funny white coil. Like a snake, snake, snake…but not a snake. Interesting. Interesting. Master Snow’s scent on it. Might be good to eat. Almost anything might be good to eat.

Just because Orson picked up the fuse and whined impatiently didn’t necessarily mean that he understood the purpose of it or the nature of the entire scheme I’d concocted. His interest — and uncanny timing — might be purely coincidental.

Yeah. Sure. Like the purely coincidental eruption of fireworks every Independence Day.

Heart pounding, expecting to be discovered at any moment, I took the twisted gauze fuse from Orson and carefully knotted the cartridge to one end of it.

He watched intently.

“Do you approve of the knot,” I asked, “or would you like to tie one of your own?”

At the open fuel port, I lowered the cartridge into the tank. The weight of it pulled the fuse all the way down into the reservoir. Like a wick, the highly absorbent gauze would immediately begin to soak up the gasoline.

Orson ran nervously in a circle: Hurry, hurry. Hurry quick. Quick, quick, quick, Master Snow.

I left almost five feet of fuse out of the tank. It hung along the side of the patrol car and trailed onto the sidewalk.

After fetching my bicycle from where I’d leaned it against the trunk of the laurel, I stooped and ignited the end of the fuse with my butane lighter. Although the exposed length of gauze was not gasoline-soaked, it burned faster than I expected. Too fast.

I climbed onto my bike and pedaled as if all of Hell’s lawyers and a few demons of this earth were baying at my heels, which they probably were. With Orson sprinting at my side, I shot across the parking lot to the ramped exit drive, onto Embarcadero Way, which was deserted, and then south past the shuttered restaurants and shops that lined the bay front.

The explosion came too soon, a solid whump that wasn’t half as loud as I’d anticipated. Around and even ahead of me, orange light bloomed; the initial flare of the blast was refracted a considerable distance by the fog.

Recklessly, I squeezed the hand brake, slid through a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, came to a halt with one foot on the blacktop, and looked back.

Little could be seen, no details: a core of hard yellow-white light surrounded by orange plumes, all softened by the deep, eddying mist.

The worst thing I saw wasn’t in the night but inside my head: Lewis Stevenson’s face bubbling, smoking, streaming hot clear grease like bacon in a frying pan.

“Dear God,” I said in a voice that was so raspy and tremulous that I didn’t recognize it.

Nevertheless, I could have done nothing else but light that fuse. Although the cops would know Stevenson had been killed, evidence of how it was done — and by whom — would now be obliterated.

I made the drive chain sing, leading my accomplice dog away from the harbor, through a spiraling maze of streets and alleyways, deeper into the murky, nautilus heart of Moonlight Bay. Even with the heavy Glock in one pocket, my unzipped leather jacket flapped as though it were a cape, and I fled unseen, avoiding light for more than one reason now, a shadow flowing liquidly through shadows, as though I were the fabled Phantom, escaped from the labyrinth underneath the opera house, now on wheels and hell-bent on terrorizing the world above ground.

Being able to entertain such a flamboyantly romantic image of myself in the immediate aftermath of murder doesn’t speak well of me. In my defense, I can only say that by recasting these events as a grand adventure, with me in a dashing role, I was desperately trying to quell my fear and, more desperately still, struggling to suppress the memories of the shooting. I also needed to suppress the ghastly images of the burning body that my active imagination generated like an endless series of pop-up spooks leaping from the black walls of a funhouse.

Anyway, this shaky effort to romanticize the event lasted only until I reached the alleyway behind the Grand Theater, half a block south of Ocean Avenue, where a grime-encrusted security lamp made the fog appear to be brown and polluted. There, I swung off my bike, let it clatter to the pavement, leaned into a Dumpster, and brought up what little I had not digested of my midnight dinner with Bobby Halloway.

I had murdered a man.

Unquestionably, the victim had deserved to die. And sooner or later, relying on one excuse or another, Lewis Stevenson would have killed me, regardless of his coconspirators’ inclination to grant special dispensation to me; arguably, I acted in self-defense. And to save Orson’s life.

Nevertheless, I’d killed a human being; even these qualifying circumstances didn’t alter the moral essence of the act. His vacant eyes, black with death, haunted me. His mouth, open in a silent scream, his bloodied teeth. Sights are readily recalled from memory; recollections of sounds and tastes and tactile sensations are far less easily evoked; and it is virtually impossible to experience a scent merely by willing it to rise from memory. Yet earlier I’d recalled the fragrance of my mother’s shampoo, and now the metallic odor of Stevenson’s fresh blood lingered so pungently that it kept me hanging on to the Dumpster as if I were at the railing of a yawing ship.

In fact, I was shaken not solely by having killed him but by having destroyed the corpse and all evidence with brisk efficiency and self-possession. Apparently I had a talent for the criminal life. I felt as though some of the darkness in which I’d lived for twenty-eight years had seeped into me and had coalesced in a previously unknown chamber of my heart.

Purged but feeling no better for it, I boarded the bicycle again and led Orson through a series of byways to Caldecott’s Shell at the corner of San Rafael Avenue and Palm Street. The service station was closed. The only light inside came from a blue-neon wall clock in the sales office, and the only light outside was at the soft-drink vending machine.

I bought a can of Pepsi to cleanse the sour taste from my mouth. At the pump island, I opened the water faucet partway and waited while Orson drank his fill.

“What an awesomely lucky dog you are to have such a thoughtful master,” I said. “Always tending to your thirst, your hunger, your grooming. Always ready to kill anyone who lifts a finger against you.”

The searching look that he turned on me was disconcerting even in the gloom. Then he licked my hand.

“Gratitude acknowledged,” I said.

He lapped at the running water again, finished, and shook his dripping snout.

Shutting off the faucet, I said, “Where did Mom get you?”

He met my eyes again.

“What secret was my mother keeping?”

His gaze was unwavering. He knew the answers to my questions. He just wasn’t talking.

27

I suppose God really might be loafing around in St. Bernadette’s Church, playing air guitar with a companion band of angels, or games of mental chess. He might be there in a dimension that we can’t quite see, drawing blueprints for new universes in which such problems as hatred and ignorance and cancer and athlete’s-foot fungus will have been eliminated in the planning stage. He might be drifting high above the polished-oak pews, as if in a swimming pool filled with clouds of spicy incense and humble prayer instead of water, silently bumping into the columns and the corners of the cathedral ceiling as He dreamily meditates, waiting for parishioners in need to come to Him with problems to be solved.

This night, however, I felt sure God was keeping His distance from the rectory adjoining the church, which gave me the creeps when I cycled past it. The architecture of the two-story stone house — like that of the church itself — was modified Norman, with enough of the French edge abraded to make it fit more comfortably in the softer climate of California. The overlapping black-slate tiles of the steep roof, wet with fog, were as armor-thick as the scales on the beetled brow of a dragon, and beyond the blank black eyes of window glass — including an oculus on each side of the front door — lay a soulless realm. The rectory had never appeared forbidding to me before, and I knew that I now viewed it with uneasiness only because of the scene I had witnessed between Jesse Pinn and Father Tom in the church basement.

I pedaled past both the rectory and the church, into the cemetery, under the oaks, and among the graves. Noah Joseph James, who’d had ninety-six years from birthday to deathbed, was just as silent as ever when I greeted him and parked my bike against his headstone.

I unclipped the cell phone from my belt and keyed in the number for the unlisted back line that went directly to the broadcasting booth at KBAY. I heard four rings before Sasha picked up, although no tone would have sounded in the booth; she would have been alerted to the incoming call solely by a flashing blue light on the wall that she faced when at her microphone. She answered it by pushing a hold button, and while I waited, I could hear her program over the phone line.

Orson began to sniff out squirrels again.

Shapes of fog drifted like lost spirits among the gravestones.

I listened to Sasha run a pair of twenty-second “doughnut” spots — which are not ads for doughnuts but commercials with recorded beginnings and endings that leave a hole for live material in the center. She followed these with some way smooth historical patter about Elton John, and then brought up “Japanese Hands” with a silky six-bar talk-over. Evidently the Chris Isaak festival had ended.

Taking me off hold, she said, “I’m doing back-to-back tracks, so you’ve got just over five minutes, baby.”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“Only a handful of people have this number, and most of them are asleep at this hour. Besides, when it comes to you, I’ve got great intuition. The moment I saw the phone light flash, my nether parts started to tingle.”

“Your nether parts?”

“My female nether parts. Can’t wait to see you, Snowman.”

“Seeing would be a good start. Listen, who else is working tonight?”

“Doogie Sassman.” He was her production engineer, operating the board.

“Just the two of you there alone?” I worried.

“You’re jealous all of a sudden? How sweet. But you don’t have to worry. I don’t measure up to Doogie’s standards.”

When Doogie wasn’t parked in a command chair at an audio control panel, he spent most of his time with his massive legs wrapped around a Harley-Davidson. He was five feet eleven and weighed three hundred pounds. His wealth of untamed blond hair and his naturally wavy beard were so lush and silky that you had to resist the urge to pet him, and the colorful mural that covered virtually every inch of his arms and torso had put some tattooist’s child through college. Yet Sasha wasn’t entirely joking when she said that she didn’t measure up to Doogie’s standards. With the opposite sex, he had more bearish charm than Pooh to the tenth power. Since I’d met him six years ago, each of the four women with whom he’d enjoyed a relationship had been stunning enough to attend the Academy Awards in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, sans makeup, and outshine every dazzling starlet at the ceremony.

Bobby says that Doogie Sassman (pick one) has sold his soul to the devil, is the secret master of the universe, has the most astonishingly proportioned genitalia in the history of the planet, or produces sexual pheromones that are more powerful than Earth’s gravity.

I was glad Doogie was working the night, because I had no doubt that he was a lot tougher than any of the other engineers at KBAY.

“But I thought there’d be someone besides the two of you,” I said.

Sasha knew I wasn’t jealous of Doogie, and now she heard the concern in my voice. “You know how things have tightened up here since Fort Wyvern closed and we lost the military audience at night. We’re barely making money on this airshift even with a skeleton staff. What’s wrong, Chris?”

“You keep the station doors locked, don’t you?”

“Yeah. All us late-night jocks and jockettes are required to watch Play Misty for Me and take it to heart.”

“Even though it’ll be after dawn when you leave, promise me you’ll have Doogie or someone from the morning shift walk you out to your Explorer.”

“Who’s on the loose — Dracula?”

“Promise me.”

“Chris, what the hell—”

“I’ll tell you later. Just promise me,” I insisted.

She sighed. “All right. But are you in some kind of trouble? Are you—”

“I’m all right, Sasha. Really. Don’t worry. Just, damn it, promise me.”

“I did promise—”

“You didn’t use the word.”

“Jesus. Okay, okay. I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die. But now I’m expecting a great story later, at least as spooky as the ones I used to hear around Girl Scout campfires. You’ll be waiting for me at home?”

“Will you wear your old Girl Scout uniform?”

“The only part of it I could duplicate are the kneesocks.”

“That’s enough.”

“You’re stirred by that picture, huh?”

“Vibrating.”

“You’re a bad man, Christopher Snow.”

“Yeah, I’m a killer.”

“See you in a little while, killer.”

We disconnected, and I clipped the cell phone to my belt once more.

For a moment I listened to the silent cemetery. Not a single nightingale performed, and even the chimney swifts had gone to bed. No doubt the worms were awake and laboring, but they always conduct their solemn work in a respectful hush.

To Orson, I said, “I find myself in need of some spiritual guidance. Let’s pay a visit to Father Tom.”

As I crossed the cemetery on foot and went behind the church, I drew the Glock from my jacket pocket. In a town where the chief of police dreamed of beating and torturing little girls and where undertakers carried handguns, I could not assume that the priest would be armed solely with the word of God.

The rectory had appeared dark from the street, but from the backyard I saw two lighted windows in a rear room on the second floor.

After the scene that I’d witnessed in the basement of the church, from the cover of the crèche, I wasn’t surprised that the rector of St. Bernadette’s was unable to sleep. Although it was nearly three o’clock in the morning, four hours since Jesse Pinn’s visit, Father Tom was still reluctant to turn out the light.

“Make like a cat,” I whispered to Orson.

We crept up a set of stone steps and then, as silently as possible, across the wooden floor of the back porch.

I tried the door, but it was locked. I had been hoping that a man of God would consider it a point of faith to trust in his Maker rather than in a dead bolt.

I didn’t intend to knock or to go around to the front and ring the bell. With murder already under my belt, it seemed foolish to have qualms about engaging in criminal trespass. I hoped to avoid breaking and entering, however, because the sound of shattering glass would alert the priest.

Four double-hung windows faced onto the porch. I tried them one by one, and the third was unlocked. I had to tuck the Glock in my jacket pocket again, because the wood of the window was swollen with moisture and moved stiffly in the frame; I needed both hands to raise the lower sash, pressing first on the horizontal muntin and then hooking my fingers under the bottom rail. It slid upward with sufficient rasping and squeaking to lend atmosphere to an entire Wes Craven film.

Orson chuffed as though scornful of my skills as a lawbreaker. Everyone’s a critic.

I waited until I was confident that the noise had not been heard upstairs, and I slipped through the open window into a room as black as the interior of a witch’s purse.

“Come on, pal,” I whispered, for I didn’t intend to leave him outside alone, without a gun of his own.

Orson sprang inside, and I slid the window shut as quietly as possible. I locked it, too. Although I didn’t believe that we were currently being watched by members of the troop or by anyone else, I didn’t want to make it easy for someone or something to follow us into the rectory.

A quick sweep with my penlight revealed a dining room. Two doors — one to my right, the other in the wall opposite the windows — led from the room.

Switching off the penlight, drawing the Glock again, I tried the nearer door, to the right. Beyond lay the kitchen. The radiant numerals of digital clocks on the two ovens and the microwave cast just enough light to enable me to cross to the pivot-hinged hall door without walking into the refrigerator or the cooking island.

The hallway led past dark rooms to a foyer lit only by a single small candle. On a three-legged, half-moon table against one wall was a shrine to the Holy Mother. A votive candle in a ruby-red glass fluttered fitfully in the half-inch of wax that remained.

In this inconstant pulse of light, the face on the porcelain figure of Mary was a portrait less of beatific grace than of sorrow. She appeared to know that the resident of the rectory was, these days, more a captive of fear than a captain of faith.

With Orson at my side, I climbed the two broad flights of stairs to the second floor. The felon freak and his four-legged familiar.

The upstairs hall was in the shape of an L, with the stairhead at the junction. The length to the left was dark. At the end of the hall directly ahead of me, a ladder had been unfolded from a ceiling trapdoor; a lamp must have been lit in a far corner of the attic, but only a ghostly glow stepped down the ladder treads.

Stronger light came from an open door on the right. I eased along the hall to the threshold, cautiously looked inside, and found Father Tom’s starkly furnished bedroom, where a crucifix hung above the simple dark-pine bed. The priest was not here; he was evidently in the attic. The bedspread had been removed and the covers neatly folded back, but the sheets had not been disturbed.

Both nightstand lamps were lit, which made that area too bright for me, but I was more interested in the other end of the room, where a writing desk stood against the wall. Under a bronze desk lamp with a green glass shade lay an open book and a pen. The book appeared to be a journal or diary.

Behind me, Orson growled softly.

I turned and saw that he was at the bottom of the ladder, gazing up suspiciously at the dimly lighted attic beyond the open trapdoor. When he looked at me, I raised a finger to my lips, softly hushed him, and then motioned him to my side.

Instead of climbing like a circus dog to the top of the ladder, he came to me. For the time being, anyway, he still seemed to be enjoying the novelty of routine obedience.

I was certain that Father Tom would make enough noise descending from the attic to alert me long before his arrival. Nevertheless, I stationed Orson immediately inside the bedroom door, with a clear view of the ladder.

Averting my face from the light around the bed, crossing the room toward the writing desk, I glanced through the open door of the adjoining bathroom. No one was in there.

On the desk, in addition to the journal, was a decanter of what appeared to be Scotch. Beside the decanter was a double-shot glass more than half full of the golden liquid. The priest had been sipping it neat, no ice. Or maybe not just sipping.

I picked up the journal. Father Tom’s handwriting was as tight and precise as machine-generated script. I stepped into the deepest shadows in the room, because my dark-adapted eyes needed little light by which to read, and I scanned the last paragraph on the page, which referred to his sister. He had broken off in mid sentence:

Orson stood alertly at the open door, watching the hall.

I turned to the first page of the journal and saw that the initial entry was dated January 1 of this year:

For a full understanding of his sister’s situation and condition, I would have to find the previous volume or volumes of this journal, but I had no time to search for them.

Something thumped in the attic. I froze, staring at the ceiling, listening. At the doorway, Orson pricked one ear.

When half a minute passed without another sound, I turned my attention once more to the journal. With a sense of time running out, I searched hurriedly through the book, reading at random.

Much of the contents concerned the priest’s theological doubts and agonies. He struggled daily to remind himself — to convince himself, to plead with himself to remember — that his faith had long sustained him and that he would be utterly lost if he could not hold fast to his faith in this crisis. These sections were grim and might have been fascinating reading for the portrait of a tortured psyche that they provided, but they revealed nothing about the facts of the Wyvern conspiracy that had infected Moonlight Bay. Consequently, I skimmed through them.

I found one page and then a few more on which Father Tom’s neat handwriting deteriorated into a loose scrawl. These passages were incoherent, ranting and paranoid, and I assumed that they had been composed after he’d poured down enough Scotch to start speaking with a burr.

More disturbing was an entry dated February 5—three pages on which the elegant penmanship was obsessively precise:

Those seven words were repeated line after line, nearly two hundred times. Not a single one appeared to have been hastily penned; each sentence was so meticulously inscribed on the page that a rubber stamp and an ink pad could hardly have produced more uniform results. Scanning this entry, I could feel the desperation and terror that the priest had felt when he’d written it, as if his turbulent emotions had been infused into the paper with the ink, to radiate from it evermore.

I wondered what incident on the fifth of February had brought Father Tom to the edge of an emotional and spiritual abyss. What had he seen? I wondered if perhaps he had written this impassioned but despairing incantation after experiencing a nightmare similar to the dreams of rape and mutilation that had troubled — and ultimately delighted — Lewis Stevenson.

Continuing to page through the entries, I found an interesting observation dated the eleventh of February. It was buried in a long, tortured passage in which the priest argued with himself over the existence and nature of God, playing both skeptic and believer, and I would have skimmed over it if my eye had not been caught by the word troop.

A forlorn cry from the attic called my attention away from the journal. This was a wordless wail of fear and pain, so eerie and so pathetic that dread reverberated like a gong note through my mind simultaneously with a chord of sympathy. The voice sounded like that of a child, perhaps three or four years old, lost and afraid and in extreme distress.

Orson was so affected by the cry that he quickly padded out of the bedroom, into the hallway.

The priest’s journal was slightly too large to fit into one of my jacket pockets. I tucked it under the waistband of my jeans, against the small of my back.

When I followed the dog into the hall, I found him at the foot of the folding ladder again, gazing up at the pleated shadows and soft light that hung in the rectory attic. He turned his expressive eyes on me, and I knew that if he could speak, he would say, We’ve got to do something.

This peculiar dog not only harbors a fleet of mysteries, not only exhibits greater cleverness than any dog should possess, but often seems to have a well-defined sense of moral responsibility. Before the events of which I write herein, I had sometimes half-seriously wondered if reincarnation might be more than superstition, because I could envision Orson as a committed teacher or dedicated policeman or even as a wise little nun in a former life, now reborn in a downsized body, furry, with tail.

Of course, ponderings of this nature have long qualified me as a candidate for the Pia Klick Award for exceptional achievement in the field of airheaded speculation. Ironically, Orson’s true origins as I would soon come to understand them, although not supernatural, would prove to be more astonishing than any scenario that I and Pia Klick, in fevered collaboration, could have imagined.

Now the cry issued from above a second time, and Orson was so affected that he let out a whine of distress too thin to carry into the attic. Even more than the first time, the wailing voice seemed to be that of a small child.

It was followed by another voice, too low for the words to be distinct. Though I was sure that this must be Father Tom, I couldn’t hear his tone well enough to tell if it was consoling or threatening.

28

If I’d trusted to instinct, I would have fled the rectory right then, gone directly home, brewed a pot of tea, spread lemon marmalade on a scone, popped a Jackie Chan movie on the TV, and spent the next couple of hours on the sofa, with an afghan over my lap and with my curiosity on hold.

Instead, because pride prevented me from admitting that I had a sense of moral responsibility less well-developed than that of my dog, I signaled Orson to stand aside and wait. Then I went up the ladder with the 9-millimeter Glock in my right hand and Father Tom’s stolen journal riding uncomfortably against the small of my back.

Like a raven frantically beating its wings against a cage, dark images from Lewis Stevenson’s descriptions of his sick dreams flapped through my mind. The chief had fantasized about girls as young as his granddaughter, but the cry that I’d just heard sounded as though it had come from a child much younger than ten. If the rector of St. Bernadette’s was in the grip of the same dementia that had afflicted Stevenson, however, I had no reason to expect him to limit his prey to those ten or older.

Near the top of the ladder, one hand on the flimsy, collapsible railing, I turned my head to peer down along my flank and saw Orson staring up from the hallway. As instructed, he had not tried to climb after me.

He’d been solemnly obedient for the better part of an hour, having commented on my commands with not a single sarcastic chuff or rolling of the eyes. This restraint marked a personal best for him. In fact, it was a personal best by a margin of at least half an hour, an Olympic-caliber performance.

Expecting to take a kick in the head from an ecclesiastical boot, I climbed higher nonetheless, into the attic. Evidently I’d been sufficiently stealthy to avoid drawing Father Tom’s attention, because he wasn’t waiting to kick my sinus bones deep into my frontal lobe.

The trapdoor lay at the center of a small clear space that was surrounded, as far as I could discern, by a maze of cardboard cartons of various sizes, old furniture, and other objects that I couldn’t identify — all stacked to a height of about six feet. The bare bulb directly over the trap was not lit, and the only light came from off to the left, in the southeast corner, toward the front of the house.

I eased into the vast attic in a crouch, though I could have stood erect. The steeply pitched Norman roof provided plenty of clearance between my head and the rafters. Although I wasn’t concerned about walking face-first into a roof beam, I still believed there was a risk of being clubbed on the skull or shot between the eyes or stabbed in the heart by a crazed cleric, and I was intent on keeping as low a profile as possible. If I could have slithered on my belly like a snake, I wouldn’t have been all the way up in a crouch.

The humid air smelled like time itself distilled and bottled: dust, the staleness of old cardboard, a lingering woody fragrance from the rough-sawn rafters, mildew spooring, and the faint stink of some small dead creature, perhaps a bird or mouse, festering in a lightless corner.

To the left of the trapdoor were two entrances into the maze, one approximately five feet wide, and the other no wider than three feet. Assuming that the roomier passage provided the most direct route across the cluttered attic and, therefore, was the one that the priest regularly used to go to and from his captive — if indeed there was a captive — I slipped quietly into the narrower aisle. I preferred to take Father Tom by surprise rather than encounter him accidentally at some turning in this labyrinth.

To both sides of me were boxes, some tied with twine, others festooned with peeling lengths of shipping tape that brushed like insectile feelers against my face. I moved slowly, feeling my way with one hand, because the shadows were confounding, and I dared not bump into anything and set off a clatter.

I reached a T intersection but didn’t immediately step into it. I stood at the brink, listening for a moment, holding my breath, but heard nothing.

Cautiously I leaned out of the first passageway, looking right and left along this new corridor in the maze, which was also only three feet wide. To the left, the lamplight in the southeast corner was slightly brighter than before. To the right lay deep sable gloom that wouldn’t yield its secrets even to my night-loving eyes, and I had the impression that a hostile inhabitant of this darkness was within arm’s length, watching and set to spring.

Assuring myself that all trolls lived under bridges, that wicked gnomes lived in caves, that gremlins established housekeeping only in machinery, and that goblins — being demons — wouldn’t dare to take up residence in a rectory, I stepped into the new passageway and turned left, putting my back to the impenetrable dark.

At once a squeal arose, so chilling that I swung around and thrust the pistol toward the blackness, certain that trolls, wicked gnomes, gremlins, goblins, ghosts, zombies, and several psychotic mutant altar boys were descending on me. Fortunately I didn’t squeeze the trigger, because this transient madness passed, and I realized that the cry had arisen from the same direction as before: from the lighted area in the southeast corner.

This third wail, which had covered the noise that I’d made when turning to confront the imaginary horde, was from the same source as the first two, but here in the attic, it sounded different from how it had sounded when I’d been down in the second-floor hallway. For one thing, it didn’t seem as much like the voice of a suffering child as it had earlier. More disconcerting: The weirdness factor was a lot higher, way off the top of the chart, as if several bars of theremin music had issued from a human throat.

I considered retracing my path to the ladder, but I was in too deep to turn back now. There was still a chance, however slim, that I was hearing a child in jeopardy.

Besides, if I retreated, my dog would know that I had haired out. He was one of my three closest friends in a world where only friends and family matter, and as I no longer had any family, I put enormous value on his high opinion of me.

The boxes on my left gave way to stacked wicker lawn chairs, a jumbled collection of thatched and lacquered baskets made of wicker and reed, a battered dresser with an oval mirror so grimy that I cast not even a shadowy reflection in it, unguessable items concealed by drop cloths, and then more boxes.

I turned a corner, and now I could hear Father Tom’s voice. He was speaking softly, soothingly, but I couldn’t make out a word of what he said.

I walked into a cobweb barrier, flinching as it clung to my face and brushed like phantom lips against my mouth. With my left hand I wiped the tattered strands from my cheeks and from the bill of my cap. The gossamer had a bitter-mushroom taste; grimacing, I tried to spit it out without making a sound.

Because I was hoping again for revelations, I was compelled to follow the priest’s voice as irresistibly as I might have followed the music of a piper in Hamelin. All the while, I was struggling to repress the desire to sneeze, which was spawned by dust with a scent so musty that it must have come from the previous century.

After one more turn, I was in a last short length of passageway. About six feet beyond the end of this narrow corridor of boxes was the steeply pitched underside of the roof at the east flank — the front — of the building. The rafters, braces, collar beams, and the underside of the roof sheathing, to which the slate was attached, were revealed by muddy-yellow light issuing from a source out of sight to the right.

Creeping to the end of the passage, I was acutely aware of the faint creaking of the floorboards under me. It was no louder or more suspicious than the ordinary settling noises in this high redoubt, but it was nonetheless potentially betraying.

Father Tom’s voice grew clearer, although I could catch only one word in five or six.

Another voice rose, higher-pitched and tremulous. It resembled the voice of a very young child — and yet was nothing as ordinary as that. Not as musical as the speech of a child. Not half as innocent. I couldn’t make out what, if anything, it was saying. The longer I listened, the eerier it became, until it made me pause — though I didn’t dare pause for long.

My aisle terminated in a perimeter passage that extended along the eastern flank of the attic maze. I risked a peek into this long straight run.

To the left was darkness, but to the right was the southeast corner of the building, where I had expected to find the source of the light and the priest with his wailing captive. Instead, the lamp remained out of sight to the right of the corner, around one more turn, along the south wall.

I followed this six-foot-wide perimeter passage, half crouched by necessity now, for the wall to my left was actually the steeply sloped underside of the roof. To my right, I passed the dark mouth of another passageway between piles of boxes and old furniture — and then halted within two steps of the corner, with only the last wall of stored goods between me and the lamp.

Abruptly a squirming shadow leaped across the rafters and roof sheathing that formed the wall ahead of me: a fierce spiky thrashing of jagged limbs with a bulbous swelling at the center, so alien that I nearly shouted in alarm. I found myself holding the Glock in both hands.

Then I realized that the apparition before me was the distorted shadow of a spider suspended on a single silken thread. It must have been dangling so close to the source of the light that its image was projected, greatly enlarged, across the surfaces in front of me.

For a ruthless killer, I was far too jumpy. Maybe the caffeine-laden Pepsi, which I’d drunk to sweeten my vomit-soured breath, was to blame. Next time I killed someone and threw up, I’d have to use a caffeine-free beverage and lace it with Valium, in order to avoid tarnishing my image as an emotionless, efficient homicide machine.

Cool with the spider now, I also realized that I could at last hear the priest’s voice clearly enough to understand his every word: “…hurts, yes, of course, it hurts very much. But now I’ve cut the transponder out of you, cut it out and crushed it, and they can’t follow you anymore.”

I flashed back to the memory of Jesse Pinn stalking through the cemetery earlier in the night, holding the peculiar instrument in his hand, listening to faint electronic tones and reading data on a small, glowing green screen. He’d evidently been tracking the signal from a surgically implanted transponder in this creature. A monkey, was it? Yet not a monkey?

“The incision wasn’t very deep,” the priest continued. “The transponder was just under the subcutaneous fat. I’ve sterilized the wound and sewn it up.” He sighed. “I wish I knew how much you understand me, if at all.”

In Father Tom’s journal, he had referred to the members of a new troop that was less hostile and less violent than the first, and he had written that he was committed to their liberation. Why there should be a new troop, as opposed to an old one, or why they should be set loose in the world with transponders under their skin — even how these smarter monkeys of either troop could have come into existence in the first place — I couldn’t fathom. But it was clear that the priest styled himself as a modern-day abolitionist fighting for the rights of the oppressed and that this rectory was a key stop on an underground railroad to freedom.

When he had confronted Father Tom in the church basement, Pinn must have believed that this current fugitive had already received superficial surgery and moved on, and that his hand-held tracker was picking up the signal from the transponder no longer embedded in the creature it was meant to identify. Instead, the fugitive was recuperating here in the attic.

The priest’s mysterious visitor mewled softly, as if in pain, and the cleric replied with a sympathetic patter perilously close to baby talk.

Taking courage from the memory of how meekly the priest had responded to the undertaker, I crossed the remaining couple of feet to the final wall of boxes. I stood with my back to the end of the row, knees bent only slightly to accommodate the slope of the roof. From here, to see the priest and the creature with him, I needed only to lean to my right, turn my head, and look into the perimeter aisle along the south flank of the attic where the light and the voices originated.

I hesitated to reveal my presence only because I recalled some of the odder entries in the priest’s diary: the ranting and paranoid passages that bordered on incoherence, the two hundred repetitions of I believe in the mercy of Christ. Perhaps he wasn’t always as meek as he had been with Jesse Pinn.

Overlaying the odors of mildew and dust and old cardboard was a new medicinal scent composed of rubbing alcohol, iodine, and an astringent antiseptic cleanser.

Somewhere in the next aisle, the fat spider reeled itself up its filament, away from the lamplight, and the magnified arachnid shadow rapidly dwindled across the slanted ceiling, shrinking into a black dot and finally vanishing.

Father Tom spoke reassuringly to his patient: “I have antibiotic powder, capsules of various penicillin derivatives, but no effective painkiller. I wish I did. But this world is about suffering, isn’t it? This vale of tears. You’ll be all right. You’ll be just fine. I promise. God will look after you through me.”

Whether the rector of St. Bernadette’s was a saint or villain, one of the few rational people left in Moonlight Bay or way insane, I couldn’t judge. I didn’t have enough facts, didn’t understand the context of his actions.

I was certain of only one thing: Even if Father Tom might be rational and doing the right thing, his head nevertheless contained enough loose wiring to make it unwise to let him hold the baby during a baptism.

“I’ve had some very basic medical training,” the priest told his patient, “because for three years after seminary, I was called to a mission in Uganda.”

I thought I heard the patient: a muttering that reminded me — but not quite — of the low cooing of pigeons blended with the more guttural purr of a cat.

“I’m sure you’ll be all right,” Father Tom continued. “But you really must stay here a few days so I can administer the antibiotics and monitor the healing of the wound. Do you understand me?” With a note of frustration and despair: “Do you understand me at all?”

As I was about to lean to the right and peer around the wall of boxes, the Other replied to the priest. The Other: That was how I thought of the fugitive when I heard it speaking from such close range, because this was a voice that I was not able to imagine as being either that of a child or a monkey, or of anything else in God’s Big Book of Creation.

I froze. My finger tightened on the trigger.

Certainly it sounded partly like a young child, a little girl, and partly like a monkey. It sounded partly like a lot of things, in fact, as though a highly creative Hollywood sound technician had been playing with a library of human and animal voices, mixing them through an audio console until he’d created the ultimate voice for an extraterrestrial.

The most affecting thing about the Other’s speech was not the tonal range of it, not the pattern of inflections, and not even the earnestness and the emotion that clearly shaped it. Instead, what most jolted me was the perception that it had meaning. I was not listening merely to a babble of animal noises. This was not English, of course, not a word of it; and although I’m not multilingual, I’m certain it wasn’t any foreign tongue, either, for it was not complex enough to be a true language. It was, however, a fluent series of exotic sounds crudely composed like words, a powerful but primitive attempt at language, with a small polysyllabic vocabulary, marked by urgent rhythms.

The Other seemed pathetically desperate to communicate. As I listened, I was surprised to find myself emotionally affected by the longing, loneliness, and anguish in its voice. These were not qualities that I imagined. They were as real as the boards beneath my feet, the stacked boxes against my back, and the heavy beating of my heart.

When the Other and the priest both fell silent, I wasn’t able to look around the corner. I suspected that whatever the priest’s visitor might look like, it would not pass for a real monkey, as did those members of the original troop that had been tormenting Bobby and that Orson and I had encountered on the southern horn of the bay. If it resembled a rhesus at all, the differences would be greater and surely more numerous than the baleful dark-yellow color of the other monkeys’ eyes.

If I was afraid of what I might see, my fear had nothing whatsoever to do with the possible hideousness of this laboratory-born Other. My chest was so tight with emotion that I couldn’t draw deep breaths, and my throat was so thick that I could swallow only with effort. What I feared was meeting the gaze of this entity and seeing my own isolation in its eyes, my own yearning to be normal, which I’d spent twenty-eight years denying with enough success to be happy with my fate. But my happiness, like everyone’s, is fragile. I had heard a terrible longing in this creature’s voice, and I felt that it was akin to the sharp longing around which I had ages ago formed a pearl of indifference and quiet resignation; I was afraid that if I met the Other’s eyes, some resonance between us would shatter that pearl and leave me vulnerable once more.

I was shaking.

This is also why I cannot, dare not, will not express my pain or my grief when life wounds me or takes from me someone I love. Grief too easily leads to despair. In the fertile ground of despair, self-pity can sprout and thrive. I can’t begin to indulge in self-pity, because by enumerating and dwelling upon my limitations, I will be digging a hole so deep that I’ll never again be able to crawl out of it. I’ve got to be something of a cold bastard to survive, live with a chinkless shell around my heart at least when it comes to grieving for the dead. I’m able to express my love for the living, to embrace my friends without reservation, to give my heart without concern for how it might be abused. But on the day that my father dies, I must make jokes about death, about crematoriums, about life, about every damn thing, because I can’t risk—won’t risk — descending from grief to despair to self-pity and, finally, to the pit of inescapable rage and loneliness and self-hatred that is freakdom. I can’t love the dead too much. No matter how desperately I want to remember them and hold them dear, I have to let them go — and quickly. I have to push them out of my heart even as they are cooling in their deathbeds. Likewise, I have to make jokes about being a killer, because if I think too long and too hard about what it really means to have murdered a man, even a monster like Lewis Stevenson, then I will begin to wonder if I am, in fact, the freak that those nasty little shitheads of my childhood insisted that I was: the Nightcrawler, Vampire Boy, Creepy Chris. I must not care too much about the dead, either those whom I loved or those whom I despised. I must not care too much about being alone. I must not care too much about what I cannot change. Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love, which means that to live I must care not about what I am but about what I can become, not about the past but about the future, not even so much about myself as about the bright circle of friends who provide the only light in which I am able to flourish.

I was shaking as I contemplated turning the corner and facing the Other, in whose eyes I might see far too much of myself. I was clutching the Glock as if it were a talisman rather than a weapon, as though it were a crucifix with which I could ward off all that might destroy me, but I forced myself into action. I leaned to the right, turned my head — and saw no one.

This perimeter passage along the south side of the attic was wider than the one along the east flank, perhaps eight feet across; and on the plywood floor, tucked in against the eaves, was a narrow mattress and a tangle of blankets. The light came from a cone-shaped brass desk lamp plugged into a GFI receptacle that was mounted on an eave brace. Beside the mattress were a thermos, a plate of sliced fruit and buttered bread, a pail of water, bottles of medication and rubbing alcohol, the makings for bandages, a folded towel, and a damp washcloth spotted with blood.

The priest and his guest seemed to have vanished as if they had whispered an incantation.

Although immobilized by the emotional impact of the longing in the Other’s voice, I could not have been standing at the end of the box row for more than a minute, probably half a minute, after the creature had fallen silent. Yet neither Father Tom nor his visitor was in sight in the passageway ahead.

Silence ruled. I heard not a single footfall. Not any creak or pop or tick of wood that sounded more significant than the usual faint settling noises.

I actually looked up into the rafters toward the center of the space, overcome by the bizarre conviction that the missing pair had learned a trick from the clever spider and had drawn themselves up gossamer filaments, curling into tight black balls in the shadows overhead.

As long as I stayed close to the wall of boxes on my right side, I had sufficient headroom to stand erect. Soaring from the eaves to my left, the sharply pitched rafters cleared my head by six or eight inches. Nevertheless, I moved defensively in a modified crouch.

The lamp was not dangerously bright, and the brass cone focused the light away from me, so I moved to the mattress for a closer look at the items arrayed beside it. With the toe of one shoe, I disturbed the tangled blankets; although I’m not sure what I expected to find under them, what I did find was a lot of nothing.

I wasn’t concerned that Father Tom would go downstairs and find Orson. For one thing, I didn’t think he was finished with his work up here in the attic. Besides, my criminally experienced mutt would have the street savvy to duck for cover and lie low until escape was more feasible.

Suddenly, however, I realized that if the priest went below, he might fold away the ladder and close the trapdoor. I could force it open and release the ladder from above, but not without making almost as much racket as Satan and his conspirators had made when cast out of Heaven.

Rather than follow this passage to the next entrance to the maze and risk encountering the priest and the Other on the route they might have taken, I turned back the way I’d come, reminding myself to be light on my feet. The high-quality plyboard had few voids, and it was screwed rather than nailed to the floor joists, so I was virtually silent even in my haste.

When I turned the corner at the end of the row of boxes, plump Father Tom loomed from the shadows where I had stood listening only a minute or two ago. He was dressed neither for Mass nor bed, but was wearing a gray sweat suit and a sheen of sweat, as if he’d been fending off gluttonous urges by working out to an exercise video.

“You!” he said bitterly when he recognized me, as though I were not merely Christopher Snow but were the devil Baal and had stepped out of a conjurer’s chalk pentagram without first asking permission or obtaining a lavatory pass.

The sweet-tempered, jovial, good-natured padre that I had known was evidently vacationing in Palm Springs, having given the keys of his parish to his evil twin. He poked me in the chest with the blunt end of a baseball bat, hard enough to hurt.

Because even XP-Man is subject to the laws of physics, I was rocked backward by the blow, stumbled into the eaves, and cracked the back of my head against a rafter. I didn’t see stars, not even a great character actor like M. Emmet Walsh or Rip Torn, but if not for the cushion provided by my James Dean thatch of hair, I might have gone out cold.

Poking me in the chest again with the baseball bat, Father Tom said, “You! You!”

Indeed, I was me, and I had never tried to claim otherwise, so I didn’t know why he should be so incensed.

“You!” he said with a new rush of anger.

This time he rammed the damn bat into my stomach, which winded me but not as badly as it might have if I hadn’t seen it coming. Just before the blow landed, I sucked in my stomach and tightened my abdominal muscles, and because I’d already thrown up what was left of Bobby’s chicken tacos, the only consequence was a hot flash of pain from my groin to my breastbone, which I would have laughed off if I’d been wearing my armored spandex superhero uniform under my street clothes.

I pointed the Glock at him and wheezed threateningly, but he was either a man of God with no fear of death — or he was nuts. Gripping the bat with both hands to put even more power behind it, he poked it savagely at my stomach again, but I twisted to the side and dodged the blow, although unfortunately I mussed my hair on a rough-sawn rafter.

I was nonplussed to be in a fight with a priest. The encounter seemed more absurd than frightening — though it was plenty frightening enough to make my heart race and to make me worry that I’d have to return Bobby’s jeans with urine stains.

“You! You!” he said more angrily than ever and seemingly with more surprise, too, as though my appearance in his dusty attic were so outrageous and improbable that his astonishment would grow at an ever-accelerating rate until his brain went nova.

He swung at me again. He would have missed this time even if I hadn’t wrenched myself away from the bat. He was a priest, after all, not a ninja assassin. He was middle-aged and overweight, too.

The baseball bat smashed into one of the cardboard boxes with enough force to tear a hole in it and knock it out of the stack into the empty aisle beyond. Although woefully ignorant of even the basic principles of the martial arts and not gifted with the physique of a mighty warrior, the good father could not be faulted for a lack of enthusiasm.

I couldn’t imagine shooting him, but I couldn’t very well allow him to club me to death. I backed away from him, toward the lamp and the mattress in the wider aisle along the south side of the attic, hoping that he would recover his senses.

Instead, he came after me, swinging the bat from left to right, cutting the air with a whoosh, then immediately swinging it right to left, chanting “You!” between each swing.

His hair was disarranged and hanging over his brow, and his face appeared to be contorted as much by terror as by rage. His nostrils dilated and quivered with each stentorian breath, and spittle flew from his mouth with each explosive repetition of the pronoun that seemed to constitute his entire vocabulary.

I was going to end up radically dead if I waited for Father Tom to recover his senses. If he even had senses left, the priest wasn’t carrying them with him. They were put away somewhere, perhaps over in the church, locked up with a splinter of a saint’s shinbone in the reliquary on the altar.

As he swung at me again, I searched for that animal eyeshine I’d seen in Lewis Stevenson, because a glimpse of that uncanny glow might justify meeting violence with violence. It would mean I was battling not a priest or an ordinary man, but something with one foot in the Twilight Zone. But I couldn’t see a glimmer. Perhaps Father Tom was infected with the same disease that had corrupted the police chief’s mind, but if so, he didn’t seem as far gone as the cop.

Moving backward, attention on the baseball bat, I hooked the lamp cord with my foot. Proving myself a worthy victim for an aging, overweight priest, I fell flat on my back, drumming a nice paradiddle on the floor with the back of my skull.

The lamp fell over. Fortunately, it neither went out nor flung its light directly into my sensitive eyes.

I shook my foot out of the entangling cord and scooted backward on my butt as Father Tom rushed in and hammered the floor with the bat.

He missed my legs by inches, punctuating the assault with that now-familiar accusation in the second-person singular: “You!”

“You!” I said somewhat hysterically, casting it right back at him as I continued to scoot out of his way.

I wondered where all these people were who supposedly revered me. I was more than ready to be revered a little, but Stevenson and Father Tom Eliot certainly didn’t qualify for the Christopher Snow Admiration Society.

Although the priest was streaming sweat and panting, he was out to prove he had stamina. He approached in the stooped, hunch-shouldered, rolling lurch of a troll, as if he were on a work-release program from under the bridge to which he was usually committed. This cramped posture allowed him to raise the bat high over his head without cracking it against an overhanging rafter. He wanted to keep it high over his head because he clearly intended to play Babe Ruth with my skull and make my brains squirt out my ears.

Eyeshine or no eyeshine, I was going to have to blast the chubby little guy without delay. I couldn’t scoot backward as fast as he could troll-walk toward me, and although I was a little hysterical — okay, way hysterical — I could figure the odds well enough to know that even the greediest bookie in Vegas wouldn’t cover a bet on my survival. In my panic, hammered by terror and by a dangerously giddy sense of the absurd, I thought that the most humane course of action would be to shoot him in the gonads because he had taken a vow of celibacy, anyway.

Fortunately, I never had the opportunity to prove myself to be the expert marksman that such a perfectly placed shot would have required. I aimed in the general direction of his crotch, and my finger tightened on the trigger. No time to use the laser sighting. Before I could squeeze off a round, something monstrous growled in the passageway behind the priest, and a great dark snarling predator leaped on his back, causing him to scream and drop the baseball bat as he was driven to the attic floor.

For an instant, I was stunned that the Other should be so utterly unlike a rhesus and that it should attack Father Tom, its nurse and champion, rather than tear out my throat. But, of course, the great dark snarling predator was not the Other: It was Orson.

Standing on the priest’s back, the dog bit at the sweat-suit collar. Fabric tore. He was snarling so viciously that I was afraid he’d actually maul Father Tom.

I called him off as I scrambled to my feet. The mutt obeyed at once, without inflicting a wound, not a fraction as bloodthirsty as he’d pretended to be.

The priest made no effort to get up. He lay with his head turned to one side, his face half covered with tousled, sweat-soaked hair. He was breathing hard and sobbing, and after every third or fourth breath, he said bitterly, “You….”

Obviously he knew enough about what was happening at Fort Wyvern and in Moonlight Bay to answer many if not all of my most pressing questions. Yet I didn’t want to talk to him. I couldn’t talk to him.

The Other might not have left the rectory, might still be here in the shadowy cloisters of the attic. Although I didn’t believe that it posed a serious danger to me and Orson, especially not when I had the Glock, I had not seen it and, therefore, couldn’t dismiss it as a threat. I didn’t want to stalk it — or be stalked by it — in this claustrophobic space.

Of course, the Other was merely an excuse to flee.

Those things that I truly feared were the answers Father Tom might give to my questions. I thought I was eager to hear them, but evidently I was not yet prepared for certain truths.

You.

He’d spoken that one word with seething hatred, with uncommonly dark emotion for a man of God but also for a man who was usually kind and gentle. He transformed the simple pronoun into a denunciation and a curse.

You.

Yet I’d done nothing to earn his enmity. I hadn’t given life to the pitiable creatures that he had committed himself to freeing. I hadn’t been a part of the program at Wyvern that had infected his sister and possibly him, as well. Which meant that he hated not me, as a person, but hated me because of who I was.

And who was I?

Who was I if not my mother’s son?

According to Roosevelt Frost — and even Chief Stevenson — there were, indeed, those who revered me because I was my mother’s son, though I’d yet to meet them. For the same lineage, I was hated.

Christopher Nicholas Snow, only child of Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow, whose own mother named her after a flower. Christopher born of Wisteria, come into this too-bright world near the beginning of the Disco Decade. Born in a time of tacky fashion trends and frivolous pursuits, when the country was eagerly winding down a war, and when the worst fear was mere nuclear holocaust.

What could my brilliant and loving mother possibly have done that would make me either revered or reviled?

Sprawled on the attic floor, racked by emotion, Father Tom Eliot knew the answer to that mystery and would almost certainly reveal it when he had regained his composure.

Instead of asking the question at the heart of all that had happened this night, I shakily apologized to the sobbing priest. “I’m sorry. I…I shouldn’t have come here. God. Listen. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Please.”

What had my mother done?

Don’t ask.

Don’t ask.

If he had started to answer my unspoken question, I would have clamped my hands to my ears.

I called Orson to my side and led him away from the priest, into the maze, proceeding as fast as I dared. The narrow passages twisted and branched until it seemed as though we were not in an attic at all but in a network of catacombs. In places the darkness was nearly blinding; but I’m the child of darkness, never thwarted by it. I brought us quickly to the open trapdoor.

Though Orson had climbed the ladder, he peered at the descending treads with trepidation and hesitated to find his way into the hall below. Even for a four-footed acrobat, going down a steep ladder was immeasurably more difficult than going up.

Because many of the boxes in the attic were large and because bulky furniture was also stored there, I knew that a second trap must exist, and that it must be larger than the first, with an associated sling-and-pulley system for raising and lowering heavy objects to and from the second floor. I didn’t want to search for it, but I wasn’t sure how I could safely climb backward down an attic ladder while carrying a ninety-pound dog.

From the farthest end of the vast room, the priest called out to me—“Christopher”—in a voice heavy with remorse. “Christopher, I’m lost.”

He didn’t mean that he was lost in his own maze. Nothing as simple as that, nothing as hopeful as that.

“Christopher, I’m lost. Forgive me. I’m so lost.”

From elsewhere in the gloom came the child-monkey-not-of-this-world voice that belonged to the Other: struggling toward language, desperate to be understood, charged with longing and loneliness, as bleak as any arctic ice field but also, worse, filled with a reckless hope that would surely never be rewarded.

This plaintive bleat was so unbearable that it drove Orson to try the ladder and may even have given him the balance to succeed. When he was only halfway to the bottom, he leaped over the remaining treads to the hallway floor.

The priest’s journal had almost slipped out from under my belt and into the seat of my pants. As I descended the ladder, the book rubbed painfully against the base of my spine, and when I reached the bottom I clawed it from under my belt and held it in my left hand, as the Glock was still clamped fiercely in my right.

Together, Orson and I raced down through the rectory, past the shrine to the Blessed Virgin, where the guttering candle was extinguished by the draft of our passing. We fled along the lower hall, through the kitchen with its three green digital clocks, out the back door, across the porch, into the night and the fog, as if we were escaping from the House of Usher moments before it collapsed and sank into the deep dank tarn.

We passed the back of the church. Its formidable mass was a tsunami of stone, and while we were in its nightshadow, it seemed about to crest and crash and crush us.

I glanced back twice. The priest was not behind us. Neither was anything else.

Although I half expected my bicycle to be gone or damaged, it was propped against the headstone, where I had left it. No monkey business.

I didn’t pause to say a word to Noah Joseph James. In a world as screwed up as ours, ninety-six years of life didn’t seem as desirable as it had only hours ago.

After pocketing the pistol and tucking the journal inside my shirt, I ran beside my bike along an aisle between rows of graves, swinging aboard it while on the move. Bouncing off the curb into the street, leaning forward over the handlebars, pedaling furiously, I bored like an auger through the fog, leaving a temporary tunnel in the churning mist behind me.

Orson had no interest in the spoor of squirrels. He was as eager as I was to put distance between us and St. Bernadette’s.

We had gone several blocks before I began to realize that escape wasn’t possible. The inevitable dawn restricted me to the boundaries of Moonlight Bay, and the madness in St. Bernadette’s rectory was to be found in every corner of the town.

More to the point, I was trying to run away from a threat that could never be escaped even if I could fly to the most remote island or mountaintop in the world. Wherever I went, I would carry with me the thing that I feared: the need to know. I wasn’t frightened merely of the answers that I might receive when I asked questions about my mother. More fundamentally, I was afraid of the questions themselves, because the very nature of them, whether they were eventually answered or not, would change my life forever.

29

From a bench in the park at the corner of Palm Street and Grace Drive, Orson and I studied a sculpture of a steel scimitar balanced on a pair of tumbling dice carved from white marble, which were in turn balanced on a highly polished representation of Earth hewn from blue marble, which itself was perched upon a large mound of bronze cast to resemble a pile of dog poop.

This work of art has stood at the center of the park, surrounded by a gently bubbling fountain, for about three years. We’ve sat here many nights, pondering the meaning of this creation, intrigued and edified and challenged — but not particularly enlightened — by it.

Initially we believed that the meaning was clear. The scimitar represents war or death. The tumbling dice represent fate. The blue marble sphere, which is Earth, is a symbol of our lives. Put it all together, and you have a statement about the human condition: We live or die according to the whims of fate, our lives on this world ruled by cold chance. The bronze dog poop at the bottom is a minimalist repetition of the same theme: Life is shit.

Many learned analyses have followed the first. The scimitar, for example, might not be a scimitar at all; it might be a crescent moon. The dice-like forms might be sugar cubes. The blue sphere might not be our nurturing planet — merely a bowling ball. What the various forms symbolize can be interpreted in a virtually infinite number of ways, although it is impossible to conceive of the bronze casting as anything but dog poop.

Seen as a moon, sugar cubes, and a bowling ball, this masterwork may be warning that our highest aspirations (reaching for the moon) cannot be achieved if we punish our bodies and agitate our minds by eating too many sweets or if we sustain lower-back injury by trying too hard to torque the ball when we’re desperate to pick up a seven-ten split. The bronze dog poop, therefore, reveals to us the ultimate consequences of a bad diet combined with obsessive bowling: Life is shit.

Four benches are placed around the broad walkway that encircles the fountain in which the sculpture stands. We have viewed the piece from every perspective.

The park lamps are on a timer, and they are all extinguished at midnight to conserve city funds. The fountain stops bubbling as well. The gently splashing water is conducive to meditation, and we wish that it spritzed all night; although even if I were not an XPer, we would prefer no lamplight. Ambient light is not only sufficient but ideal for the study of this sculpture, and a good thick fog can add immeasurably to your appreciation of the artist’s vision.

Prior to the erection of this monument, a simple bronze statue of Junipero Serra stood on the plinth at the center of the fountain for over a hundred years. He was a Spanish missionary to the Indians of California, two and a half centuries ago: the man who established the network of missions that are now landmark buildings, public treasures, and magnets for history-minded tourists.

Bobby’s parents and a group of like-minded citizens had formed a committee to press for the banishment of the Junipero Serra statue on the grounds that a monument to a religious figure did not belong in a park created and maintained with public funds. Separation of Church and State. The United States Constitution, they said, was clear on this issue.

Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow—“Wissy” to her friends, “Mom” to me — in spite of being a scientist and rationalist, led the opposing committee that wished to preserve the statue of Serra. “When a society erases its past, for whatever reason,” she said, “it cannot have a future.”

Mom lost the debate. Bobby’s folks won.

The night the decision came down, Bobby and I met in the most solemn circumstances of our long friendship, to determine if family honor and the sacred obligations of bloodline required us to conduct a vicious, unrelenting feud — in the manner of the legendary Hatfields and McCoys — until even the most distant cousins had been sent to sleep with the worms and until one or both of us was dead. After consuming enough beer to clear our heads, we decided that it was impossible to conduct a proper feud and still find the time to ride every set of glassy, pumping monoliths that the good sea sent to shore. To say nothing of all the time spent on murder and mayhem that might have been spent ogling girls in bun-floss bikinis.

Now I entered Bobby’s number in the keypad on my phone and pressed send.

I turned the volume up a little so Orson might be able to hear both sides of the conversation. When I realized what I had done, I knew that unconsciously I had accepted the most fantastic possibility of the Wyvern project as proven fact — even though I was still pretending to have my doubts.

Bobby answered on the second ring: “Go away.”

“You asleep?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sitting here in Life Is Shit Park.”

“Do I care?”

“Some really bad stuff has gone down since I saw you.”

“It’s the salsa on those chicken tacos,” he said.

“I can’t talk about it on the phone.”

“Good.”

“I’m worried about you,” I said.

“That’s sweet.”

“You’re in real danger, Bobby.”

“I swear I flossed, Mom.”

Orson chuffed with amusement. The hell he didn’t.

“Are you awake now?” I asked Bobby.

“No.”

“I don’t think you were asleep in the first place.”

He was silent. Then: “Well, there’s been a way spooky movie on all night since you left.”

“Planet of the Apes?” I guessed.

“On a three-hundred-sixty-degree, wraparound screen.”

“What’re they doing?”

“Oh, you know, the usual monkeyshines.”

“Nothing more threatening?”

“They think they’re cute. One of them’s at the window right now, mooning me.”

“Yeah, but did you start it?”

“I get the feeling they’re trying to irritate me until I come outside again.”

Alarmed, I said, “Don’t go.”

“I’m not a moron,” he said sourly.

“Sorry.”

“I’m an asshole.”

“That’s right.”

“There’s a critical difference between a moron and an asshole.”

“I’m clear on that.”

“I wonder.”

“Do you have the shotgun with you?”

“Jesus, Snow, didn’t I just say I’m not a moron?”

“If we can ride this barrel until dawn, then I think we’re safe until sundown tomorrow.”

“They’re on the roof now.”

“Doing what?”

“Don’t know.” He paused, listening. “At least two of them. Running back and forth. Maybe looking for a way in.”

Orson jumped off the bench and stood tensely, one ear pricked toward the phone, a worried air about him. He seemed to be willing to shed some doggy pretenses if that didn’t disturb me.

“Is there a way in from the roof?” I asked Bobby.

“The bathroom and kitchen vent ducts aren’t large enough for these bastards.”

Surprisingly, considering all its other amenities, the cottage had no fireplace. Corky Collins — formerly Toshiro Tagawa — had most likely decided against a fireplace because, unlike the warm waters of a spa, the stone hearth and hard bricks of a firebox didn’t provide an ideal spot to get it on with a couple of naked beach girls. Thanks to his single-minded lasciviousness, there was now no convenient chimney to admit the monkeys.

I said, “I’ve got some more Nancy work to squeeze in before dawn.”

“How’s that panning out?” Bobby asked.

“I’m awesomely good at it. Come morning, I’ll spend the day at Sasha’s, and we’ll both be at your place first thing tomorrow evening.”

“You mean I’ve got to make dinner again?”

“We’ll bring pizza. Listen, we’re gonna get slammed, I think. One of us, anyway. And the only way to prevent it is hang together. Better get what sleep you can during the day. Tomorrow night might be radically hairy out there on the point.”

“So you’ve got a handle on this?” Bobby said.

“There isn’t a handle on it.”

“You’re not as cheerful as Nancy Drew.”

I wasn’t going to lie to him, not to him any more than to Orson or Sasha. “There’s no solution. There’s no way to zip it shut or put a button on it. Whatever’s going down here — we’ll have to live with it the rest of our lives. But maybe we can find a way to ride the wave, even though it’s a huge spooky slab.”

After a silence, Bobby said, “What’s wrong, bro?”

“Didn’t I just say?”

“Not everything.”

“I told you, some of it’s not for the phone.”

“I’m not talking about details. I’m talking about you.”

Orson put his head in my lap, as if he thought I would take some consolation from petting him and scratching behind his ears. In fact, I did. It always works. A good dog is a medicine for melancholy and a better stress reliever than Valium.

“You’re doing cool,” Bobby said, “but you’re not being cool.”

“Bob Freud, bastard grandson of Sigmund.”

“Lie down on my couch.”

Smoothing Orson’s coat in an attempt to smooth my nerves, I sighed and said, “Well, what it boils down to is, I think maybe my mom destroyed the world.”

“Solemn.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“This science thing of hers?”

“Genetics.”

“Remember how I warned you against trying to leave your mark.”

“I think it’s worse than that. I think maybe, at the start, she was trying to find a way to help me.”

“End of the world, huh?”

“End of the world as we know it,” I said, remembering Roosevelt Frost’s qualification.

“Beaver Cleaver’s mom never did much more than bake a cake.”

I laughed. “How would I make it without you, bro?”

“There’s only one important thing I ever did for you.”

“What’s that?”

“Taught you perspective.”

I nodded. “What’s important and what isn’t.”

“Most isn’t,” he reminded me.

“Even this?”

“Make love to Sasha. Get some solid sleep. We’ll have a bitchin’ dinner tomorrow night. We’ll kick some monkey ass. Ride some epic waves. A week from now, in your heart, your mom is just your mom again — if you want to let it be that way.”

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully.

“Attitude, bro. It’s everything.”

“I’ll work on it.”

“One thing surprises me, though.”

“What?”

“Your mom must’ve been really pissed about losing the fight to keep that statue in the park.”

Bobby broke the connection. I switched off my phone.

Is this really a wise strategy for living? Insisting that most of life isn’t to be taken seriously. Relentlessly viewing it as a cosmic joke. Having only four guiding principles: one, do as little harm to others as possible; two, be there always for your friends; three, be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; four, grab all the fun you can. Put no stock in the opinions of anyone but those closest to you. Forget about leaving a mark on the world. Ignore the great issues of your time and thereby improve your digestion. Don’t dwell in the past. Don’t worry about the future. Live in the moment. Trust in the purpose of your existence and let meaning come to you instead of straining to discover it. When life throws a hard punch, roll with it — but roll with laughter. Catch the wave, dude.

This is how Bobby lives, and he is the happiest and most well-balanced person I have ever known.

I try to live as Bobby Halloway does, but I’m not as successful at it as he is. Sometimes I thrash when I should float. I spend too much time anticipating and too little time letting life surprise me. Maybe I don’t try hard enough to live like Bobby. Or maybe I try too hard.

Orson went to the pool that surrounded the sculpture. He lapped noisily at the clear water, obviously savoring the taste and the coolness of it.

I remembered that July night in our backyard when he had stared at the stars and fallen into blackest despair. I had no accurate way to determine how much smarter Orson was than an ordinary dog. Because his intelligence had somehow been enhanced by the project at Wyvern, however, he understood vastly more than nature ever intended a dog to understand. That July night, recognizing his revolutionary potential yet — perhaps for the first time — grasping the terrible limitations placed on him by his physical nature, he’d sunk into a slough of despondency that almost claimed him permanently. To be intelligent but without the complex larynx and other physical equipment to make speech possible, to be intelligent but without the hands to write or make tools, to be intelligent but trapped in a physical package that will forever prevent the full expression of your intelligence: This would be akin to a person being born deaf, mute, and limbless.

I watched Orson now with astonishment, with a new appreciation for his courage, and with a tenderness I had never felt before for anyone on this earth.

He turned from the pool, licking at the water that dripped from his chops, grinning with pleasure. When he saw me looking at him, he wagged his tail, happy to have my attention or just happy to be with me on this strange night.

For all his limitations and in spite of all the good reasons why he should be perpetually anguished, my dog, for God’s sake, was better at being Bobby Halloway than I was.

Does Bobby have a wise strategy for living? Does Orson? I hope one day to have matured enough to live as well by their philosophy as they do.

Getting up from the bench, I pointed to the sculpture. “Not a scimitar. Not a moon. It’s the smile of the invisible Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland.”

Orson turned to gaze up at the masterwork.

“Not dice. Not sugar cubes,” I continued. “A pair of either the grow-small or grow-big pills that Alice took in the story.”

Orson considered this with interest. On video, he had seen Disney’s animated version of this classic tale.

“Not a symbol of the earth. Not a blue bowling ball. A big blue eye. Put it all together and what does it mean?”

Orson looked at me for elucidation.

“The Cheshire smile is the artist laughing at the gullible people who paid him so handsomely. The pair of pills represent the drugs he was high on when he created this junk. The blue eye is his eye, and the reason you can’t see his other eye is because he’s winking it. The bronze pile at the bottom is, of course, dog poop, which is intended to be a pungent critical comment on the work — because, as everyone knows, dogs are the most perceptive of all critics.”

If the vigor with which Orson wagged his tail was a reliable indication, he enjoyed this interpretation enormously.

He trotted around the entire fountain pool, reviewing the sculpture from all sides.

Perhaps the purpose for which I was born is not to write about my life in search of some universal meaning that may help others to better understand their own lives — which, in my more egomaniacal moments, is a mission I have embraced. Instead of striving to make even the tiniest mark on the world, perhaps I should consider that, possibly, the sole purpose for which I was born is to amuse Orson, to be not his master but his loving brother, to make his strange and difficult life as easy, as full of delight, and as rewarding as it can be. This would constitute a purpose as meaningful as most and more noble than some.

Pleased by Orson’s wagging tail at least as much as he seemed to be pleased by my latest riff on the sculpture, I consulted my wristwatch. Less than two hours remained until dawn.

I had two places I wanted to go before the sun chased me into hiding. The first was Fort Wyvern.

From the park at Palm Street and Grace Drive in the southeast quadrant of Moonlight Bay, the trip to Fort Wyvern takes less than ten minutes by bicycle, even allowing for a pace that will not tire your canine brother. I know a shortcut through a storm culvert that runs under Highway 1. Beyond the culvert is an open, ten-foot-wide, concrete drainage channel that continues deep into the grounds of the military base after being bisected by the chain-link fence — crowned with razor wire — that defines the perimeter of the facility.

Everywhere along the fence — and throughout the grounds of Fort Wyvern — large signs in red and black warn that trespassers will be prosecuted under federal statutes and that the minimum sentence upon conviction involves a fine of no less than ten thousand dollars and a prison sentence of no less than one year. I have always ignored these threats, largely because I know that because of my condition, no judge will sentence me to prison for this minor offense. And I can afford the ten thousand bucks if it comes to that.

One night, eighteen months ago, shortly after Wyvern officially closed forever, I used a bolt cutter to breach the chain-link where it descended into the drainage channel. The opportunity to explore this vast new realm was too enticing to resist.

If my excitement seems strange to you — considering that I was not an adventuresome boy at the time but a twenty-six-year-old man — then you are probably someone who can catch a plane to London if you wish, sail off to Puerto Vallarta on a whim, or take the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. You probably have a driver’s license and a car. You probably have not spent your entire life within the confines of a town of twelve thousand people, ceaselessly traveling it by night until you know its every byway as intimately as you know your own bedroom, and you are probably, therefore, not just a little crazy for new places, new experiences. So cut me some slack.

Fort Wyvern, named for General Harrison Blair Wyvern, a highly decorated hero of the First World War, was commissioned in 1939, as a training and support facility. It covers 134,456 acres, which makes it neither the largest nor by far not the smallest military base in the state of California.

During the Second World War, Fort Wyvern established a school for tank warfare, offering training in the operation and maintenance of every tread-driven vehicle in use in the battlefields of Europe and in the Asian theater. Other schools under the Wyvern umbrella provided first-rate education in demolitions and bomb disposal, sabotage, field artillery, field medical service, military policing, and cryptography, as well as basic training to tens of thousands of infantrymen. Within its boundaries were an artillery range, a huge network of bunkers serving as an ammunition dump, an airfield, and more buildings than exist within the city limits of Moonlight Bay.

At the height of the Cold War, active-duty personnel assigned to Fort Wyvern numbered — officially—36,400. There were also 12,904 dependents and over four thousand civilian personnel associated with the base. The military payroll was well over seven hundred million dollars annually, and the contract expenditures exceeded one hundred and fifty million per annum.

When Wyvern was shut down at the recommendation of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, the sound of money being sucked out of the county economy was so loud that local merchants were unable to sleep because of the noise and their babies cried in the night for fear of having no college tuition when eventually they would need it. KBAY, which lost nearly a third of its potential county-wide audience and fully half of its late-night listeners, was forced to trim staff, which was why Sasha found herself serving as both the post-midnight jock and the general manager and why Doogie Sassman worked eight hours of overtime per week for regular wage and never flexed his tattooed biceps in protest.

By no means continuous but nevertheless frequent major building projects of a high-security nature were undertaken on the grounds of Fort Wyvern by military contractors whose laborers were reportedly sworn to secrecy and remained, for life, at risk of being charged with treason for a slip of the tongue. According to rumor, because of its proud history as a center of military training and education, Wyvern was chosen as the site of a major chemical-biological warfare research facility constructed as a huge self-contained, biologically secure, subterranean complex.

Given the events of the past twelve hours, I felt confident in assuming that more than a scrap of truth underlay these rumors, although I have never seen a single thread of evidence that such a stronghold exists.

The abandoned base offers sights that are, however, as likely to amaze you, give you the creeps, and make you ponder the extent of human folly as anything you will see in a cryobiological warfare laboratory. I think of Fort Wyvern, in its present state, as a macabre theme park, divided into various lands much the same as Disneyland is divided, with the difference that only one patron, along with his faithful dog, is admitted at any one time.

Dead Town is one of my favorites.

Dead Town is my name for it, not what it was called when Fort Wyvern thrived. It consists of more than three thousand single-family cottages and duplex bungalows in which married active-duty personnel and their dependents were housed if they chose to live on base. Architecturally, these humble structures have little to recommend them, and each is virtually identical to the one next door; they provided the minimum of comforts to the mostly young families who occupied them, each for only a couple of years at a time, over the war-filled decades. But in spite of their sameness, these are pleasant houses, and when you walk through their empty rooms, you can feel that life was lived well in them, with lovemaking and laughter and gatherings of friends.

These days the streets of Dead Town, laid out in a military grid, feature drifts of dust against the curbs and dry tumbleweeds waiting for wind. After the rainy season, the grass quickly turns brown and stays that shade most of the year. The shrubs are all withered, and many of the trees are dead, their leafless branches blacker than the black sky at which they seem to claw. Mice have the houses to themselves, and birds build nests on the front-door lintels, painting the stoops with their droppings.

You might expect that the structures would either be maintained against the real possibility of future need or efficiently razed, but there is no money for either solution. The materials and the fixtures of the buildings have less value than the cost of salvaging them, so no contract can be negotiated to dispose of them in that manner. For the time being, they are left to deteriorate in the elements much as the ghost towns of the gold-mining era were abandoned.

Wandering through Dead Town, you feel as though everyone in the world has vanished or died of a plague and that you are alone on the face of the earth. Or that you have gone mad and exist now in a grim solipsist fantasy, surrounded by people you refuse to see. Or that you have died and gone to Hell, where your particular damnation consists of eternal isolation. When you see a scruffy coyote or two prowling between the houses, lean of flank, with long teeth and fiery eyes, they appear to be demons, and the Hades fantasy is the easiest one to believe. If your father was a professor of poetry, however, and if you are blessed or cursed with a three-hundred-ring circus of a mind, you can imagine countless scenarios to explain the place.

This night in March, I cycled through a couple of streets in Dead Town, but I didn’t stop to visit. The fog had not reached this far inland, and the dry air was warmer than the humid murk along the coast; though the moon had set, the stars were bright, and the night was ideal for sightseeing. To thoroughly explore even this one land in the theme park that is Wyvern, however, you need to devote a week to the task.

I was not aware of being watched. After what I’d learned in the past few hours, I knew that I must have been monitored at least intermittently on my previous visits.

Beyond the borders of Dead Town lie numerous barracks and other buildings. A once-fine commissary, a barber shop, a dry cleaner, a florist, a bakery, a bank: their signs peeling and caked with dust. A day-care center. High-school-age military brats attended classes in Moonlight Bay; but there are a kindergarten and an elementary school here. In the base library, the cobwebbed shelves are stripped of books except for one overlooked copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Dental and medical clinics. A movie theater with nothing on its flat marquee except a single enigmatic word: WHO. A bowling alley. An Olympic-size pool now drained and cracked and blown full of debris. A fitness center. In the rows of stables, which no longer shelter horses, the unlatched stall doors swing with an ominous chorus of rasping and creaking each time the wind stiffens. The softball field is choked with weeds, and the rotting carcass of a mountain lion that lay for more than a year in the batter’s cage is at last only a skeleton.

I was not interested in any of these destinations, either. I cycled past them to the hangarlike building that stands over the warren of subterranean chambers in which I found the Mystery Train cap last autumn.

Clipped to the back rack of my bicycle is a police flashlight with a switch that allows the beam to be adjusted to three degrees of brightness. I parked at the hangar and unsnapped the flashlight from the rack.

Orson finds Fort Wyvern alternately frightening and fascinating, but regardless of his reaction on any particular night, he stays at my side, uncomplaining. This time, he was clearly spooked, but he didn’t hesitate or whine.

The smaller man-size door in one of the larger hangar doors was unlocked. Switching on the flashlight, I went inside with Orson at my heels.

This hangar isn’t adjacent to the airfield, and it’s unlikely that aircraft were stored or serviced here. Overhead are the tracks on which a mobile crane, now gone, once moved from end to end of the structure. Judging by the sheer mass and complexity of the steel supports for these elaborate rails, the crane lifted objects of great weight. Steel bracing plates, still bolted to the concrete, once must have been surmounted by substantial machinery. Elsewhere, curiously shaped wells in the floor, now empty, appear to have housed hydraulic mechanisms of unknowable purpose.

In the passing beam of my flashlight, geometric patterns of shadow and light leaped off the crane tracks. Like the ideograms of an unknown language, they stenciled the walls and the Quonset-curve of the ceiling, revealing that half the panes in the high clerestory windows were broken.

Unnervingly, the impression wasn’t of a vacated machine shop or maintenance center, but of an abandoned church. The oil and chemical stains on the floor gave forth an incenselike aroma. The penetrating cold was not solely a physical sensation but affected the spirit as well, as if this were a deconsecrated place.

A vestibule in one corner of the hangar houses a set of stairs and a large elevator shaft from which the lift mechanism and the cab have been removed. I can’t be sure, but judging from the aftermath left by those who had gutted the building, access to the vestibule once must have been through another chamber; and I suspect that the existence of the stairs and elevator were kept secret from most of the personnel who had worked in the hangar or who’d had occasion to pass through it.

A formidable steel frame and threshold remain at the top of the stairwell, but the door is gone. With the flashlight beam, I chased spiders and pill bugs from the steps and led Orson downward through a film of dust that bore no footprints except those that we had left during other visits.

The steps serve three subterranean floors, each with a footprint considerably larger than the hangar above. This webwork of corridors and windowless rooms has been assiduously stripped of every item that might provide a clue to the nature of the enterprise conducted here — stripped all the way to the bare concrete. Even the smallest elements of the air-filtration and plumbing systems have been torn out.

I have a sense that this meticulous eradication is only partly explained by their desire to prevent anyone from ascertaining the purpose of the place. Although I’m operating strictly on intuition, I believe that as they scrubbed away every trace of the work done here, they were motivated in part by shame.

I don’t believe, however, that this is the chemical-biological warfare facility that I mentioned earlier. Considering the high degree of biological isolation required, that subterranean complex is surely in a more remote corner of Fort Wyvern, dramatically larger than these three immense floors, more elaborately hidden, and buried far deeper beneath the earth.

Besides, that facility is apparently still operative.

Nevertheless, I am convinced that dangerous and extraordinary activities of one kind or another were conducted beneath this hangar. Many of the chambers, reduced only to their basic concrete forms, have features that are at once baffling and — because of their sheer strangeness — profoundly disquieting.

One of these puzzling chambers is on the deepest level, down where no dust has yet drifted, at the center of the floor plan, ringed by corridors and smaller rooms. It is an enormous ovoid, a hundred and twenty feet long, not quite sixty feet in diameter at its widest point, tapering toward the ends. The walls, ceiling, and floor are curved, so that when you stand here, you feel as if you are within the empty shell of a giant egg.

Entrance is through a small adjacent space that might have been fitted out as an airlock. Rather than a door, there must have been a hatch; the only opening in the walls of this ovoid chamber is a circle five feet in diameter.

Moving across the raised, curved threshold and passing through this aperture with Orson, I swept the light over the width of the surrounding wall, marveling at it as always: five feet of poured-in-place, steel-reinforced concrete.

Inside the giant egg, the continuous smooth curve that forms the walls, the floor, and the ceiling is sheathed in what appears to be milky, vaguely golden, translucent glass at least two or three inches thick. It’s not glass, however, because it’s shatterproof and because, when tapped hard, it rings like tubular bells. Furthermore, no seams are evident anywhere.

This exotic material is highly polished and appears as slick as wet porcelain. The flashlight beam penetrates this coating, quivers and flickers through it, flares off the faint golden whorls within, and shimmers across its surface. Yet the stuff was not in the least slippery as we crossed to the center of the chamber.

My rubber-soled shoes barely squeaked. Orson’s claws made faint elfin music, ringing off the floor with a tink-ting like finger bells.

On this night of my father’s death, on this night of nights, I wanted to return to this place where I’d found my Mystery Train cap the past autumn. It had been lying in the center of the egg room, the only object left behind in the entire three floors below the hangar.

I had thought that the cap had merely been forgotten by the last worker or inspector to leave. Now I suspected that on a certain October night, persons unknown had been aware of me exploring this facility, that they had been following me floor to floor without my knowledge, and that they had eventually slipped ahead of me to place the cap where I would be sure to find it.

If this was the case, it seemed to be not a mean or taunting act but more of a greeting, perhaps even a kindness. Intuition told me that the words Mystery Train had something to do with my mother’s work. Twenty-one months after her death, someone had given me the cap because it was a link to her, and whoever had made the gift was someone who admired my mother and respected me if only because I was her son.

This is what I wanted to believe: that there were, indeed, those involved in this seemingly impenetrable conspiracy who did not see my mother as a villain and who felt friendly toward me, even if they did not revere me, as Roosevelt insisted. I wanted to believe that there were good guys in this, not merely bad, because when I learned what my mother had done to destroy the world as we know it, I preferred to receive that information from people who were convinced, at least, that her intentions had been good.

I didn’t want to learn the truth from people who looked at me, saw my mother, and bitterly spat out that curse and accusation: You!

“Is anyone here?” I asked.

My question spiraled in both directions along the walls of the egg room and returned to me as two separate echoes, one to each ear.

Orson chuffed inquiringly. This soft sound lingered along the curved planes of the chamber, like a breeze whispering across water.

Neither of us received an answer.

“I’m not out for vengeance,” I declared. “That’s behind me.”

Nothing.

“I don’t even intend to go to outside authorities anymore. It’s too late to undo whatever’s been done. I accept that.”

The echo of my voice gradually faded. As it sometimes did, the egg room filled with an uncanny silence that felt as dense as water.

I waited a minute before breaking that silence again: “I don’t want Moonlight Bay wiped from the map — and me and my friends with it — for no good reason. All I want now is to understand.”

No one cared to enlighten me.

Well, coming here had been a long shot anyway.

I wasn’t disappointed. I have rarely allowed myself to feel disappointment about anything. The lesson of my life is patience.

Above these man-made caverns, dawn was rapidly approaching, and I couldn’t spare more time for Fort Wyvern. I had one more essential stop to make before retreating to Sasha’s house to wait out the reign of the murderous sun.

Orson and I crossed the dazzling floor, in which the flashlight beam was refracted along glimmering golden whorls like galaxies of stars underfoot.

Beyond the entry portal, in the drab concrete vault that might have once been an airlock, we found my father’s suitcase. The one that I had put down in the hospital garage before hiding under the hearse, that had been gone when I’d come out of the cold-holding room.

It had not, of course, been here when we had passed through five minutes ago.

I stepped around the suitcase, into the room beyond the vault, and swept that space with the light. No one was there.

Orson waited diligently at the suitcase, and I returned to his side.

When I lifted the bag, it was so light that I thought it must be empty. Then I heard something tumble softly inside.

As I was releasing the latches, my heart clutched at the thought that I might find another pair of eyeballs in the bag. To counter this hideous image, I conjured Sasha’s lovely face in my mind, which started my heart beating again.

When I opened the lid, the suitcase appeared to contain only air. Dad’s clothes, toiletries, paperback books, and other effects were gone.

Then I saw the photograph in one corner of the bag. It was the snapshot of my mother that I had promised would be cremated with my father’s body.

I held the picture under the flashlight. She was lovely. And such fierce intelligence shone from her eyes.

In her face, I saw certain aspects of my own countenance that made me understand why Sasha could, after all, look favorably on me. My mother was smiling in this picture, and her smile was so like mine.

Orson seemed to want to look at the photograph, so I turned it toward him. For long seconds his gaze traveled the image. His thin whine, when he looked away from her face, was the essence of sadness.

We are brothers, Orson and I. I am the fruit of Wisteria’s heart and womb. Orson is the fruit of her mind. He and I share no blood, but we share things more important than blood.

When Orson whined again, I firmly said, “Dead and gone,” with that ruthless focus on the future that gets me through the day.

Forgoing one more look at the photograph, I tucked it into my shirt pocket.

No grief. No despair. No self-pity.

Anyway, my mother is not entirely dead. She lives in me and in Orson and perhaps in others like Orson.

Regardless of any crimes against humanity of which my mother might stand accused by others, she is alive in us, alive in the Elephant Man and his freak dog. And with all due humility, I think the world is better for us being in it. We are not the bad guys.

As we left the vault, I said “Thank you” to whoever had left the photograph for me, though I didn’t know if they could hear and though I was only assuming that their intentions had been kind.

Above ground, outside the hangar, my bicycle was where I’d left it. The stars were where I’d left them, too.

I cycled back through the edge of Dead Town and toward Moonlight Bay, where the fog — and more — waited for me.