Fear Nothing

30

The Nantucket-style house, with dark wood-shingle siding and deep white porches, seems to have slid three thousand miles during an unnoticed tipping of the continent, coming to rest here in the California hills above the Pacific. Looking more suitable to the landscape than logic says it should, sitting toward the front of the one-acre lot, shaded by stone pines, the residence exudes the charm, grace, and warmth of the loving family that lives within its walls.

All the windows were dark, but before long, light would appear in a few of them. Rosalina Ramirez would rise early to prepare a lavish breakfast for her son, Manuel, who would soon return from a double shift of policework — assuming he wouldn’t be delayed by the extensive paperwork associated with Chief Stevenson’s immolation. As he was a better cook than his mother, Manuel would prefer to make his own breakfast, but he would eat what she gave him and praise it. Rosalina was still sleeping; she had the large bedroom that had once belonged to her son, a room he’d not used since his wife died giving birth to Toby.

Beyond a deep backyard, shingled to match the house and with windows flanked by white shutters, stands a small barn with a gambrel roof. Because the property is at the extreme southern end of town, it offers access to riding trails and the open hills; the original owner had stabled horses in the barn. Now the structure is a studio, where Toby Ramirez builds his life from glass.

Approaching through the fog, I saw the windows glowing. Toby often wakes long before dawn and comes out to the studio.

I propped the bike against the barn wall and went to the nearest window. Orson put his forepaws on the windowsill and stood beside me, peering inside.

When I pay a visit to watch Toby create, I usually don’t go into the studio. The fluorescent ceiling panels are far too bright. And because borosilicate glass is worked at temperatures exceeding twenty-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, it emits significant amounts of intense light that can damage anyone’s eyes, not just mine. If Toby is between tasks, he may turn the lights off, and then we talk for a while.

Now, wearing a pair of goggles with didymium lenses, Toby was in his work chair at the glassblowing table, in front of the Fisher Multi-Flame burner. He had just finished forming a graceful pear-shaped vase with a long neck, which was still so hot that it was glowing gold and red; now he was annealing it.

When a piece of glassware is removed suddenly from a hot flame, it will usually cool too quickly, develop stresses — and crack. To preserve the item, it must be annealed — that is, cooled in careful stages.

The flame was fed by natural gas mixed with pure oxygen from a pressurized tank that was chained to the glassblowing table. During the annealing process, Toby would feather out the oxygen, gradually reducing the temperature, giving the glass molecules time to shift to more stable positions.

Because of the numerous dangers involved in glassblowing, some people in Moonlight Bay thought it was irresponsible of Manuel to allow his Down’s-afflicted son to practice this technically demanding art and craft. Fiery catastrophes were envisioned, predicted, and awaited with impatience in some quarters.

Initially, no one was more opposed to Toby’s dream than Manuel. For fifteen years, the barn had served as a studio for Carmelita’s older brother, Salvador, a first-rank glass artist. As a child, Toby had spent uncounted hours with his uncle Salvador, wearing goggles, watching the master at work, on rare occasion donning Kevlar mittens to transfer a vase or bowl to or from the annealing oven. While he’d appeared to many to be passing those hours in stupefaction, with a dull gaze and a witless smile, he had actually been learning without being directly taught. To cope, the intellectually disadvantaged often must have superhuman patience. Toby sat day after day, year after year, in his uncle’s studio, watching and slowly learning. When Salvador died two years ago, Toby — then only fourteen — asked his father if he might continue his uncle’s work. Manuel had not taken the request seriously, and he’d gently discouraged his son from dwelling on this impossible dream.

One morning before dawn, he found Toby in the studio. At the end of the worktable, standing on the fire-resistant Ceramfab top, was a family of simple blown-glass swans. Beside the swans stood a newly formed and annealed vase into which had been introduced a calculated mixture of compatible impurities that imparted to the glass mysterious midnight-blue swirls with a silvery glitter like stars. Manuel knew at once that this piece was equal to the finest vases that Salvador had ever produced; and Toby was at that very moment flame-annealing an equally striking piece of work.

The boy had absorbed the technical aspects of glass craft from his uncle, and in spite of his mild retardation, he obviously knew the proper procedures for avoiding injury. The magic of genetics was involved, too, for he possessed a striking talent that could not have been learned. He wasn’t merely a craftsman but an artist, and not merely an artist but perhaps an idiot savant to whom the inspiration of the artist and the techniques of the craftsman came with the ease of waves to the shore.

Gift shops in Moonlight Bay, Cambria, and as far north as Carmel sold all the glass Toby produced. In a few years, he might become self-supporting.

Sometimes, nature throws a bone to those she maims. Witness my own ability to compose sentences and paragraphs with some skill.

Now, in the studio, orange light flared and billowed from the large, bushy annealing flame. Toby took care to turn the pear-shaped vase so that it was bathed uniformly by the fire.

With a thick neck, rounded shoulders, and proportionately short arms and stocky legs, he might have been a storybook gnome before a watch fire deep in the earth. Brow sloped and heavy. Bridge of the nose flat. Ears set too low on a head slightly too small for his body. His soft features and the inner epicanthic folds of his eyes give him a perpetual dreamy expression.

Yet on his high work chair, turning the glass in the flame, adjusting the oxygen flow with intuitive precision, face shimmering with reflected light, eyes concealed behind didymium goggles, Toby did not in any way seem below average, did not in any way impress me as being diminished by his condition. To the contrary, observed in his element, in the act of creation, he appeared exalted.

Orson snorted with alarm. He dropped his forepaws from the window, turned away from the studio, and tightened into a wary crouch.

Turning as well, I saw a shadowy figure crossing the backyard, coming toward us. In spite of the darkness and fog, I recognized him at once because of the easy way that he carried himself. It was Manuel Ramirez: Toby’s dad, number two in the Moonlight Bay Police Department but now at least temporarily risen by succession to the top post, due to the fiery death of his boss.

I put both hands in my jacket pockets. I closed my right hand around the Glock.

Manuel and I were friends. I wouldn’t feel comfortable pointing a gun at him, and I certainly couldn’t shoot him. Unless he was not Manuel anymore. Unless, like Stevenson, he had become someone else.

He stopped eight or ten feet from us. In the annealing flame’s coruscating orange glow, which pierced the nearby window, I could see that Manuel was wearing his khaki uniform. His service pistol was holstered on his right hip. Although he stood with his thumbs hooked in his gun belt, he would be able to draw his weapon at least as quickly as I could pull the Glock from my jacket.

“Your shift over already?” I asked, although I knew it wasn’t.

Instead of answering me, he said, “I hope you’re not expecting beer, tamales, and Jackie Chan movies at this hour.”

“I just stopped by to say hello to Toby if he happened to be between jobs.”

Manuel’s face, too worn with care for his forty years, had a naturally friendly aspect. Even in this Halloween light, his smile was still engaging, reassuring. As far as I could see, the only luminosity in his eyes was the reflected light from the studio window. Of course, that reflection might mask the same transient flickers of animal eyeshine that I’d seen in Lewis Stevenson.

Orson was reassured enough to ease out of his crouch. But he remained wary.

Manuel exhibited none of Stevenson’s simmering rage or electric energy. As always, his voice was soft and almost musical. “You never did come around to the station after you called.”

I considered my answer and decided to go with the truth. “Yes, I did.”

“So when you phoned me, you were already close,” he guessed.

“Right around the corner. Who’s the bald guy with the earring?”

Manuel mulled over his answer and followed my lead with some truth of his own. “His name’s Carl Scorso.”

“But who is he?”

“A total dirtbag. How far are you going to carry this?”

“Nowhere.”

He was silent, disbelieving.

“It started out a crusade,” I admitted. “But I know when I’m beaten.”

“That sure would be a new Chris Snow.”

“Even if I could contact an outside authority or the media, I don’t understand the situation well enough to convince them of anything.”

“And you have no proof.”

“Nothing substantive. Anyway, I don’t think I’d be allowed to make that contact. If I could get someone to come investigate, I don’t think I or any of my friends would be alive to greet them when they got here.”

Manuel didn’t reply, but his silence was all the answer I needed.

He might still be a baseball fan. He might still like country music, Abbott and Costello. He still understood as much as I did about limitations and still felt the hand of fate as I did. He might even still like me — but he was no longer my friend. If he wouldn’t be sufficiently treacherous to pull the trigger on me himself, he would watch as someone else did.

Sadness pooled in my heart, a greasy despondency that I’d never felt before, akin to nausea. “The entire police department has been co-opted, hasn’t it?”

His smile had faded. He looked tired.

When I saw weariness in him rather than anger, I knew that he was going to tell me more than he should. Riven by guilt, he would not be able to keep all his secrets.

I already suspected that I knew one of the revelations he would make about my mother. I was so loath to hear it that I almost walked away. Almost.

“Yes,” he said. “The entire department.”

“Even you.”

“Oh, mi amigo, especially me.”

“Are you infected by whatever bug came out of Wyvern?”

“‘Infection’ isn’t quite the word.”

“But close enough.”

“Everyone else in the department has it. But not me. Not that I know. Not yet.”

“So maybe they had no choice. You did.”

“I decided to cooperate because there might be a lot more good that comes from this than bad.”

“From the end of the world?”

“They’re working to undo what’s happened.”

“Working out there at Wyvern, underground somewhere?”

“There and other places, yeah. And if they find a way to combat it…then wonderful things could come from this.”

As he spoke, his gaze moved from me to the studio window.

“Toby,” I said.

Manuel’s eyes shifted to me again.

I said, “This thing, this plague, whatever it is — you’re hoping that if they can bring it under control, they’ll be able to use it to help Toby somehow.”

“You have a selfish interest here, too, Chris.”

From the barn roof, an owl asked its single question of identity five times in quick succession, as if suspicious of everyone in Moonlight Bay.

I took a deep breath and said, “That’s the only reason my mother would work on biological research for military purposes. The only reason. Because there was a very good chance that something would come of it that might cure my XP.”

“And something may still come of it.”

“It was a weapons project?”

“Don’t blame her, Chris. Only a weapons project would have tens of billions of dollars behind it. She’d never have had a chance to do this work for the right reasons. It was just too expensive.”

This was no doubt true. Nothing but a weapons project would have the bottomless resources needed to fund the complex research that my mother’s most profound concepts necessitated.

Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow was a theoretical geneticist. This means that she did the heavy thinking while other scientists did the heavy lifting. She didn’t spend much of her time in laboratories or even working in the virtual lab of a computer. Her lab was her mind, and it was extravagantly equipped. She theorized, and with guidance from her, others sought to prove her theories.

I have said that she was brilliant but perhaps not that she was extraordinarily brilliant. Which she was. She could have chosen any university affiliation in the world. They all sought her.

My father loved Ashdon, but he would have followed her where she wished to go. He would have thrived in any academic environment.

She restricted herself to Ashdon because of me. Most of the truly great universities are in either major or midsize cities, where I’d be no more limited by day than I am in Moonlight Bay, but where I’d have no hope of a rich life by night. Cities are bright even after sunset. And the few dark precincts of a city are not places where a young boy on a bicycle could safely go adventuring between dusk and dawn.

She made less of her life in order to make more of mine. She confined herself to a small town, willing to leave her full potential unrealized, to give me a chance at realizing mine.

Tests to determine genetic damage in a fetus were rudimentary when I was born. If the analytic tools had been sufficiently advanced for my XP to have been detected in the weeks following my conception, perhaps she would have chosen not to bring me into the world.

How I love the world in all its beauty and strangeness.

Because of me, however, the world will grow ever stranger in the years to come — and perhaps less beautiful.

If not for me, she would have refused to put her mind to work for the project at Wyvern, would never have led them on new roads of inquiry. And we would not have followed one of those roads to the precipice on which we now stand.

As Orson moved to make room for him, Manuel came to the window. He stared in at his son, and with his face more brightly lit, I could see not a wild light in his eyes but only overwhelming love.

“Enhancing the intelligence of animals,” I said. “How would that have military applications?”

“For one thing, what better spy than a dog as smart as a human being, sent behind enemy lines? An impenetrable disguise. And they don’t check dogs’ passports. What better scout on a battlefield?”

Maybe you engineer an exceptionally powerful dog that’s smart but also savagely vicious when it needs to be. You have a new kind of soldier: a biologically designed killing machine with the capacity for strategizing.

“I thought intelligence depended on brain size.”

He shrugged. “I’m just a cop.”

“Or on the number of folds in the brain surface.”

“Evidently they discovered different. Anyway,” Manuel said, “there was a previous success. Something called the Francis Project, several years ago. An amazingly smart golden retriever. The Wyvern operation was launched to capitalize on what they learned from that. And at Wyvern it wasn’t just about animal intelligence. It was about enhancing human intelligence, about lots of things, many things.”

In the studio, hands covered with Kevlar gloves, Toby placed the hot vase into a bucket half filled with vermiculite. This was the next stage of the annealing process.

Standing at Manuel’s side, I said, “Many things? What else?”

“They wanted to enhance human agility, speed, longevity — by finding ways not just to transfer genetic material from one person to another but from species to species.”

Species to species.

I heard myself say, “Oh, my God.”

Toby poured more of the granular vermiculite over the vase, until it was covered. Vermiculite is a superb insulator that allows the glass to continue cooling very slowly and at a constant rate.

I remembered something Roosevelt Frost had said: that the dogs, cats, and monkeys were not the only experimental subjects in the labs at Wyvern, that there was something worse.

“People,” I said numbly. “They experimented on people?”

“Soldiers court-martialed and found guilty of murder, condemned to life sentences in military prisons. They could rot there…or take part in the project and maybe win their freedom as a reward.”

“But experimenting on people…”

“I doubt your mother knew anything about that. They didn’t always share with her all the ways they applied her ideas.”

Toby must have heard our voices at the window, because he took off the insulated gloves and raised the big goggles from his eyes to squint at us. He waved.

“It all went wrong,” Manuel said. “I’m no scientist. Don’t ask me how. But it went wrong not just in one way. Many ways. It blew up in their faces. Suddenly things happened they weren’t expecting. Changes they didn’t contemplate. The experimental animals and the prisoners — their genetic makeup underwent changes that weren’t desired and couldn’t be controlled….”

I waited a moment, but he apparently wasn’t prepared to tell me more. I pressed him: “A monkey escaped. A rhesus. They found it in Angela Ferryman’s kitchen.”

The searching look that Manuel turned on me was so penetrating that I was sure he had seen into my heart, knew the contents of my every pocket, and had an accurate count of the number of bullets left in the Glock.

“They recaptured the rhesus,” he said, “but made the mistake of attributing its escape to human error. They didn’t realize it had been let go, released. They didn’t realize there were a few scientists in the project who were…becoming.”

“Becoming what?”

“Just…becoming. Something new. Changing.”

Toby switched off the natural gas. The Fisher burner swallowed its own flames.

“Changing how?” I asked Manuel.

“Whatever delivery system they developed to insert new genetic material in a research animal or prisoner…that system just took on a life of its own.”

Toby turned off all but one panel of fluorescents, so I could go inside for a visit.

Manuel said, “Genetic material from other species was being carried into the bodies of the project scientists without their being aware of it. Eventually, some of them began to have a lot in common with the animals.”

“Jesus.”

“Too much in common maybe. There was some kind of…episode. I don’t know the details. It was extremely violent. People died. And all the animals either escaped or were let out.”

“The troop.”

“About a dozen smart, vicious monkeys, yes. But also dogs and cats…and nine of the prisoners.”

“And they’re still loose?”

“Three of the prisoners were killed in the attempt to recapture them. The military police enlisted our help. That’s when most of the cops in the department were contaminated. But the other six and all the animals…they were never found.”

The man-size barn door opened, and Toby stepped into the threshold. “Daddy?” Shuffling as much as walking, he came to his father and hugged him fiercely. He grinned at me. “Hello, Christopher.”

“Hi, Toby.”

“Hi, Orson,” the boy said, letting go of his father and dropping to his knees to greet the dog.

Orson liked Toby. He allowed himself to be petted.

“Come visit,” Toby said.

To Manuel, I said, “There’s a whole new troop now. Not violent like the first. Or at least…not violent yet. All tagged with transponders, which means they were set loose on purpose. Why?”

“To find the first troop and report their whereabouts. They’re so elusive that all other attempts to locate them have failed. It’s a desperation plan, an attempt to do something before the first troop breeds too large. But this isn’t working, either. It’s just creating another problem.”

“And not only because of Father Eliot.”

Manuel stared at me for a long moment. “You’ve learned a lot, haven’t you?”

“Not enough. And too much.”

“You’re right — Father Tom isn’t the problem. Some have sought him out. Others chew the transponders out of each other. This new troop…they’re not violent but they’re plenty smart and they’ve become disobedient. They want their freedom. At any cost.”

Hugging Orson, Toby repeated his invitation to me: “Come visit, Christopher.”

Before I could respond, Manuel said, “It’s almost dawn, Toby. Chris has to be going home.”

I looked toward the eastern horizon, but if the night sky was beginning to turn gray in that direction, the fog prevented me from seeing the change.

“We’ve been friends for quite a few years,” Manuel said. “Seems like I owed you some pieces of the explanation. You’ve always been good to Toby. But you know enough now. I’ve done what’s right for an old friend. Maybe I’ve done too much. You go on home now.” Without my noticing, he had moved his right hand to the gun in his holster. He patted the weapon. “We won’t be watching any Jackie Chan movies anymore, you and me.”

He was telling me not to come back. I wouldn’t have tried to maintain our friendship, but I might have returned to see Toby from time to time. Not now.

I called Orson to my side, and Toby reluctantly let him go.

“Maybe one more thing,” Manuel said as I gripped the handlebars of my bike. “The benign animals who’ve been enhanced — the cats, the dogs, the new monkeys — they know their origins. Your mother…well, maybe you could say she’s a legend to them…their maker…almost like their god. They know who you are, and they revere you. None of them would ever hurt you. But the original troop and most of the people who’ve been altered…even if on some level they like what they’re becoming, they still hate your mother because of what they’ve lost. And they hate you for obvious reasons. Sooner or later, they’re going to act on that. Against you. Against people close to you.”

I nodded. I was already acting on that assumption. “And you can’t protect me?”

He didn’t reply. He put his arm around his son. In this new Moonlight Bay, family might still matter for a while, but already the concept of community was slipping away.

“Can’t or won’t protect me?” I wondered. Without waiting through another silence, I said, “You never told me who Carl Scorso is,” referring to the bald man with the earring, who had apparently taken my father’s body to an autopsy room in some secure facility still operative beneath a far corner of Fort Wyvern.

“He’s one of the original prisoners who signed on for the experiments. The genetic damage related to his previous sociopathic behavior has been identified and edited out. He’s not a dangerous man anymore. He’s one of their few successes.”

I stared at him but couldn’t read his true thoughts. “He killed a transient and tore the guy’s eyes out.”

“No. The troop killed the transient. Scorso just found the body along the road and brought it to Sandy Kirk for disposal. It happens now and then. Hitchhikers, drifters…there’s always been lots of them moving up and down the California coast. These days, some of them don’t get farther than Moonlight Bay.”

“And you live with that, too.”

“I do what I’m told,” he said coldly.

Toby put his arms around his father as if to protect him, giving me a look of dismay because of the way that I’d challenged his dad.

Manuel said, “We do what we’re told. That’s the way it is here, these days, Chris. Decisions have been made at a very high level to let this business play out quietly. A very high level. Just suppose the President of the United States himself was something of a science buff, and suppose that he saw a chance to make history by putting huge funds behind genetic engineering the way Roosevelt and Truman funded the Manhattan Project, the way Kennedy funded the effort to put a man on the moon, and suppose he and everyone around him — and the politicians who’ve come after him — are now determined to cover this up.”

“Is that what’s happened?”

“No one at the top wants to risk the public’s wrath. Maybe they’re not just afraid of being booted out of office. Maybe they’re afraid of being tried for crimes against humanity. Afraid of being torn apart by angry mobs. I mean…soldiers from Wyvern and their families, who might’ve been contaminated — they’re all over the country now. How many have they passed it to? Could be panic in the streets. An international movement to quarantine the whole U.S. And for no good reason. Because the powers that be think the whole thing might run its course without a major effect, peak soon and then just peter out.”

“Is there a chance of that?”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t think there’s a chance of that.”

He shrugged and with one hand smoothed Toby’s hair, which was spiky and disarranged from the strap on the goggles that he’d been wearing. “Not all the people with symptoms of change are like Lewis Stevenson. What’s happening to them has infinite variety. And some who go through a bad phase…they get over it. They’re in flux. This isn’t an event, like an earthquake or a tornado. This is a process. If it had ever gotten to be necessary, I would’ve dealt with Lewis myself.”

Admitting nothing, I said, “Maybe it was more necessary than you realized.”

“Can’t have just anybody making those judgment calls. There’s got to be order, stability.”

“But there is none.”

“There’s me,” he said.

“Is it possible you’re infected and don’t know it?”

“No. Not possible.”

“Is it possible you’re changing and don’t realize it?”

“No.”

“Becoming?”

“No.”

“You scare the hell out of me, Manuel.”

The owl hooted again.

A faint but welcome breeze stirred like a ladle through the soupy fog.

“Go home,” Manuel said. “It’ll be light soon.”

“Who ordered Angela Ferryman killed?”

“Go home.”

“Who?”

“No one.”

“I think she was murdered because she was going to try to go public. She had nothing to lose, she told me. She was afraid of what she was…becoming.”

“The troop killed her.”

“Who controls the troop?”

“No one. We can’t even find the fuckers.”

I thought I knew one place where they hung out: the drainage culvert in the hills, where I’d found the collection of skulls. But I wasn’t going to share this information with Manuel, because at this point I couldn’t be sure who were my most dangerous enemies: the troop — or Manuel and the other cops.

“If no one sent them after her, why’d they do it?”

“They have their own agenda. Maybe sometimes it matches ours. They don’t want the world to know about this, either. Their future isn’t in undoing what’s been done. Their future is the new world coming. So if somehow they learned Angela’s plans, they’d deal with her. There’s no mastermind behind this, Chris. There’re all these factions — the benign animals, the malevolent ones, the scientists at Wyvern, people who’ve been changed for the worse, people who’ve been changed for the better. Lots of competing factions. Chaos. And the chaos will get worse before it gets better. Now go home. Drop this. Drop it before someone targets you like they targeted Angela.”

“Is that a threat?”

He didn’t reply.

As I started away, walking the bicycle across the backyard, Toby said, “Christopher Snow. Snow for Christmas. Christmas and Santa. Santa and sleigh. Sleigh on snow. Snow for Christmas. Christopher Snow.” He laughed with innocent delight, entertained by this awkward word game, and he was clearly pleased by my surprise.

The Toby Ramirez I had known would not have been capable of even such a simple word-association game as this one.

To Manuel, I said, “They’ve begun to pay for your cooperation, haven’t they?”

His fierce pride in Toby’s exhibition of this new verbal skill was so touching and so deeply sad that I could not look at him.

“In spite of all that he didn’t have, he was always happy,” I said of Toby. “He found a purpose, fulfillment. Now what if they can take him far enough that he’s dissatisfied with what he is…but then they can’t take him all the way to normal?”

“They will,” Manuel said with a measure of conviction for which there could be no justification. “They will.”

“The same people who’ve created this nightmare?”

“It’s not got only a dark side.”

I thought of the pitiful wails of the visitor in the rectory attic, the melancholy quality of its changeling voice, the terrible yearning in its desperate attempts to convey meaning in a caterwaul. I thought of Orson on that summer night, despairing under the stars.

“God help you, Toby,” I said, because he was my friend, too. “God bless you.”

“God had His chance,” Manuel said. “From now on, we’ll make our own luck.”

I had to get away from there, and not solely because dawn was soon to arrive. I started walking the bike across the backyard again — and didn’t realize that I’d broken into a run until I was past the house and in the street.

When I glanced back at the Nantucket-style residence, it looked different from the way that it had always been before. Smaller than I remembered. Huddled. Forbidding.

In the east, a silver-gray paleness was forming high above the world, either sunrise seeping in or Judgment coming.

In twelve hours I had lost my father, the friendship of Manuel and Toby, many illusions, and much innocence. I was overcome by the terrifying feeling that more and perhaps worse losses lay ahead.

Orson and I fled to Sasha’s house.

31

Sasha’s house is owned by KBAY and is a perk of her position as general manager of the station. It’s a small two-story Victorian with elaborate millwork enhancing the faces of the dormers, all the gableboards, the eaves, the window and door surrounds, and the porch railings.

The house would be a jewel box if it weren’t painted the station colors. The walls are canary yellow. The shutters and porch railings are coral pink. All the other millwork is the precise shade of Key-lime pie. The result is as though a flock of Jimmy Buffett fans, high on Margaritas and piña coladas, painted the place during a long party weekend.

Sasha doesn’t mind the flamboyant exterior. As she notes, she lives within the house, not outside where she can see it.

The deep back porch is enclosed with glass; and with the help of an electric space heater in cooler months, Sasha has transformed it into an herb greenhouse. On tables and benches and sturdy metal racks stand hundreds of terra-cotta pots and plastic trays in which she cultivates tarragon and thyme, angelica and arrowroot, chervil and cardamom and coriander and chicory, spearmint and sweet cicely, ginseng, hyssop, balm and basil, marjoram and mint and mullein, dill, fennel, rosemary, chamomile, tansy. She uses these in her cooking, to make wonderful, subtly scented potpourris, and to brew health teas that challenge the gag reflex far less than you would expect.

I don’t bother to carry a key of my own. A spare is tucked into a terra-cotta pot shaped like a toad, under the yellowish leaves of a rue plant. As the deadly dawn brightened to a paler gray in the east and the world prepared to murder dreams, I let myself into the shelter of Sasha’s home.

In the kitchen, I immediately switched on the radio. Sasha was winding through the last half hour of her show, giving a weather report. We were still in the wet season, and a storm was coming in from the northwest. We would have rain shortly after nightfall.

If she had predicted that we were due for a hundred-foot tidal wave and volcanic eruptions with major rivers of lava, I would have listened with pleasure. When I heard her smooth, slightly throaty radio voice, a big stupid smile came over my face, and even on this morning near the end of the world, I couldn’t help but be simultaneously soothed and aroused.

As the day brightened beyond the windows, Orson padded directly to the pair of hard-plastic bowls that stood on a rubber mat in one corner. His name is painted on each: Wherever he goes, whether to Bobby’s cottage or to Sasha’s, he is family.

As a puppy, my dog was given a series of names, but he didn’t care to respond to any of them on a regular basis. After noticing how intently the mutt focused on old Orson Welles movies when we ran them on video — and especially on the appearance of Welles himself in any scene — we jokingly renamed him after the actor-director. He has ever since answered to this moniker.

When he found both bowls empty, Orson picked up one of them in his mouth and brought it to me. I filled it with water and returned it to the rubber mat, which prevented it from sliding on the white ceramic-tile floor.

He snatched up the second bowl and looked beseechingly at me. As is true of virtually any dog, Orson’s eyes and face are better designed for a beseeching look than are the expressive features of the most talented actor who ever trod the boards.

At the dining table with Roosevelt and Orson and Mungojerrie aboard the Nostromo, I had recalled those well-executed but jokey paintings of dogs playing poker and it had occurred to me that my subconscious had been trying to tell me something important by so vividly resurrecting this image from my memory. Now I understood. Each of the dogs in those paintings represents a familiar human type, and each is obviously as smart as any human being. On the Nostromo, because of the game that Orson and the cat had played with each other, “mocking their stereotypes,” I had realized that some of these animals out of Wyvern might be far smarter than I had previously thought — so smart that I wasn’t yet ready to face the awesome truth. If they could hold cards and talk, they might win their share of poker hands; they might even take me to the cleaners.

“It’s a little early,” I said, taking the food dish from Orson. “But you did have a very active night.”

After shaking a serving of his favorite dry dog food from the box into his bowl, I circled the kitchen, closing the Levolor blinds against the growing threat of the day. As I was shutting the last of them, I thought I heard a door close softly elsewhere in the house.

I froze, listening.

“Something?” I whispered.

Orson looked up from his bowl, sniffed the air, cocked his head, then chuffed and once more turned his attention to his food.

The three-hundred-ring circus of my mind.

At the sink I washed my hands and splashed some cold water on my face.

Sasha keeps an immaculate kitchen, gleaming and sweet-smelling, but it’s cluttered. She’s a superb cook, and clusters of exotic appliances take up at least half the counter space. So many pots, pans, ladles, and utensils dangle from overhead racks that you feel as if you’re spelunking through a cavern where every inch of the ceiling is hung with stalactites.

I moved through her house, closing blinds, feeling the vibrant spirit of her in every corner. She is so alive that she leaves an aura behind her that lingers long after she has gone.

Her home has no interior-design theme, no harmony in the flow of furniture and artwork. Rather, each room is a testament to one of her consuming passions. She is a woman of many passions.

All meals are taken at a large kitchen table, because the dining room is dedicated to her music. Along one wall is an electronic keyboard, a full-scale synthesizer with which she could compose for an orchestra if she wished, and adjacent to this is her composition table with music stand and a stack of pages with blank musical staffs awaiting her pencil. In the center of the room is a drum set. In a corner stands a high-quality cello with a low, cellist’s stool. In another corner, beside a music stand, a saxophone hangs on a brass sax rack. There are two guitars as well, one acoustic and one electric.

The living room isn’t about appearances but about books — another of her passions. The walls are lined with bookshelves, which overflow with hardcovers and paperbacks. The furniture is not trendy, neither stylish nor styleless: neutral-tone chairs and sofas selected for the comfort they provide, for the fact that they’re perfect for sitting and talking or for spending long hours with a book.

On the second floor, the first room from the head of the stairs features an exercise bicycle, a rowing machine, a set of hand weights from two to twenty pounds, calibrated in two-pound increments, and exercise mats. This is her homeopathic-medicine room, as well, where she keeps scores of bottles of vitamins and minerals, and where she practices yoga. When she uses the Exercycle, she won’t get off until she’s streaming sweat and has churned up at least thirty miles on the odometer. She stays on the rowing machine until she’s crossed Lake Tahoe in her mind, keeping a steady rhythm by singing tunes by Sarah McLachlan or Juliana Hatfield or Meredith Brooks or Sasha Goodall, and when she does stomach crunches and leg lifts, the padded mats under her seem as if they will start smoking before she’s half done. When she’s finished exercising, she’s always more energetic than when she began, flushed and buoyant. And when she concludes a session of meditation in various yoga positions, the intensity of her relaxation seems powerful enough to blow out the walls of the room.

God, I love her.

As I stepped from the exercise room into the upstairs hall, I was stricken once more by that premonition of impending loss. I began to shake so badly that I had to lean against the wall until the episode passed.

Nothing could happen to her in daylight, not on the ten-minute drive from the broadcast studios on Signal Hill through the heart of town. The night is when the troop seems to roam. By day they go to ground somewhere, perhaps in the storm drains under the town or even in the hills where I’d found the collection of skulls. And the people who can no longer be trusted, the changelings like Lewis Stevenson, seem more in control of themselves under the sun than under the moon. As with the animal men in The Island of Dr. Moreau, the wildness in them will not be as easily suppressed at night. With the dusk, they lose a measure of self-control; a sense of adventure springs up in them, and they dare things that they never dream about by day. Surely nothing could happen to Sasha now that dawn was upon us; for perhaps the first time in my life, I felt relief at the rising of the sun.

Finally I came to her bedroom. Here you will find no musical instruments, not a single book, no pots or trays of herbs, no bottles of vitamins, no exercise equipment. The bed is simple, with a plain headboard, no footboard, and it is covered with a thin white chenille spread. There’s nothing whatsoever remarkable about the dresser, the nightstands, or the lamps. The walls are pale yellow, the very shade of morning sunlight in a cloud; no artwork interrupts their smooth planes. The room might seem stark to some, but when Sasha’s present, this space is as elaborately decorated as any baroque drawing room in a French castle, as nurturingly serene as any meditation point in a Zen garden. She never sleeps fitfully but always as deep and still as a stone at the bottom of the sea, so you find yourself reaching out to touch her, to feel the warmth of her skin or the throb of her pulse, to quiet the sudden fear for her that grips you from time to time. As with so many things, she has a passion for sleep. She has a passion for passion, too, and when she makes love to you, the room ceases to exist, and you’re in a timeless time and a placeless place, where there’s only Sasha, only the light and the heat of her, the glorious light of her that blazes but doesn’t burn.

As I passed the foot of the bed, heading toward the first of three windows to close the blinds, I saw an object on the chenille spread. It was small, irregular, and highly polished: a fragment of hand-painted, glazed china. Half a smiling mouth, a curve of cheek, one blue eye. A shard from the face of the Christopher Snow doll that had shattered against the wall in Angela Ferryman’s house just before the lights had gone out and the smoke had poured into the stairwell from above and below.

At least one of the troop had been here during the night.

Shaking again but with fury rather than fear this time, I ripped the pistol out of my jacket and set out to search the house, from the attic down, every room, every closet, every cupboard, every smallest space in which one of these hateful creatures might be able to conceal itself. I wasn’t stealthy or cautious. Cursing, making threats that I had every intention of fulfilling, I tore open doors, slammed drawers shut, poked under furniture with a broom handle. In general I created such a racket that Orson sprinted to my side with the expectation of finding me in a battle for my life — then followed me at a cautious distance, as if he feared that, in my current state of agitation, I might shoot myself in the foot and him in the paw if he stayed too close.

None of the troop was in the house.

When I concluded the search, I had the urge to fill a pail with strong ammonia water and sponge off every surface that the intruder — or intruders — might have touched: walls, floor, stair treads and railings, furniture. Not because I believed that they’d left behind any microorganisms that could infect us. Rather, because I found them to be unclean in a profoundly spiritual sense, as though they had come not out of laboratories at Wyvern but out of a vent in the earth from which also rose sulfur fumes, a terrible light, and the distant cries of the damned.

Instead of going for the ammonia, I used the kitchen phone to call the direct booth line at KBAY. Before I entered the last number, I realized that Sasha was off the air and already on her way home. I hung up and keyed in her mobile number.

“Hey, Snowman,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“Five minutes away.”

“Are your doors locked?”

“What?”

“For Christ’s sake, are your doors locked?”

She hesitated. Then: “They are now.”

“Don’t stop for anyone. Not anyone. Not for a friend, not even for a cop. Especially not for a cop.”

“What if I accidentally run down a little old lady?”

“She won’t be a little old lady. She’ll only look like one.”

“You’ve suddenly gotten spooky, Snowman.”

“Not me. The rest of the world. Listen, I want you to stay on the phone until you’re in the driveway.”

“Explorer to control tower: The fog’s pulling back already. You don’t need to talk me in.”

“I’m not talking you in. You’re talking me down. I’m in a state here.”

“I sorta noticed.”

“I need to hear your voice. All the way. All the way home, your voice.”

“Smooth as the bay,” she said, trying to get me to lighten up.

I kept her on the phone until she drove her truck into the carport and switched off the engine.

Sun or no sun, I wanted to go outside and meet her as she opened the driver’s door. I wanted to be at her side with the Glock in my hand as she walked across the house to the rear porch, which was the entrance that she always used.

An hour seemed to pass before I heard her footsteps on the back porch, as she walked between the tables of potted herbs.

When she swung open the door, I was standing in the wide blade of morning light that slashed into the kitchen. I pulled her into my arms, slammed the door behind her, and held her so tightly that for a moment neither of us could breathe. I kissed her then, and she was warm and real, real and glorious, glorious and alive.

No matter how tightly I held her, however, no matter how sweet her kisses, I was still haunted by that presentiment of worse losses to come.