The venerable stars. The ancient moon. The old Earth, its timeworn beauty under wraps until sunrise …
Then suddenly the night was new, as the white enigmas appeared. Having been out of sight, tight against the house, directly under the windows, they raced away from the building, past the trunk of the birch, north across the lawn. They halted at the limit of visibility, faint featureless presences, huddling together as if conferring.
Panting agitatedly, beating his forepaws against the windowsill, the wolfhound wanted to be in the night and in pursuit.
“Settle,” Grady said, and again, “settle.” A third issuance of the command was required when always before one had calmed the dog.
Out of the darkness, the visitors returned, not directly but obliquely, angling east toward the front of the house.
Dropping to the floor, beyond the rays of the moonlamp, Merlin became a disembodied presence, a canine poltergeist, knocking across the floorboards, rapping the furniture and the doorjamb with an ectoplasmic tail, abandoning the study for a different haunt.
With the windows at his back, Grady was a blind man all the way across the room, reaching with both hands for the doorway. In the hall, he slid one palm along a wall until he reached the living room.
Already Merlin had materialized at a front window to the right of the door, paws on the sill.
Making his way toward the window to the left of the door, Grady bumped an end table. He heard a lamp wobbling, found it, steadied it.
Earlier, when he opened all the draperies and shades, he hadn’t imagined chasing around the house in pursuit of circling visitors. He merely wanted to have immediate access to any window that gave a view of an area where a noise might arise or entry might be attempted.
By the time he reached the window, he began to suspect that these mysterious animals were as curious about him as he was about them, that they were intent on satisfying that curiosity.
Beyond the porch, east of the house, lay the front yard, part of it overlaid with a faint tracery of moonshadows cast by the intricate branches of the huge birch tree.
The visitors were not on the yard or on that portion of the county lane — Cracker’s Drive — visible from this vantage point.
Nothing else traveled the night, either. No deer were present, though they frequently came to graze upon the lawn. Often coyotes whidded through the lunar glade, all legs and haunches and sharp shoulders, but on this occasion, they were hunting elsewhere.
As though aware of their audience and timing their entrance for maximum drama, the creatures sprang as one over the railing at the north side of the porch, seemed to cross the deck as fast as two pulses of light, and vanished over the railing at the south end.
The speed with which they moved and the darkness of the porch prevented Grady from learning anything more significant about their appearance than he had perceived from a distance in the meadow. He confirmed their size and their nimbleness, and thought he had seen lushly plumed tails, but their faces remained unrevealed.
They ran on all fours, though it seemed that they reared up as they approached the south end of the porch, that they took the last few steps on their hind feet before vaulting over the railing. Their movement wasn’t what he expected of any four-legged mammal in these mountains, though he couldn’t precisely identify the difference.
The instant the creatures leaped out of sight, Merlin abandoned his post and hurried unerringly through the dark living room to the hallway. Most likely, the wolfhound intended to track the animals from one of the library windows at the south side of the house.
Grady was so sure these visitors were intrigued by him and intent upon him that he saw no reason to scramble after them through the gloom, at the risk of falling and breaking a bone. They weren’t going to retreat into the mountains and leave him forever wondering about their nature. They had initiated a process of discovery, and they were not likely to relent from it.
This was an extraordinary expectation. Wild animals were by their nature wary. Even confident predators like mountain lions generally slunk away into the brush at the sight of a human being.
In this wooded vastness, only bears were fearless. An eight-hundred-pound brown bear was as ready to charge a man as to ignore him.
Grady felt his way cautiously through the living room, from sofa to armchair to armchair, and as he reached the hallway, he heard a thin cry of doggy excitement.
Eighteen
The moth danced with the false flame of the ceiling light, and its shadow swelled and shrank across the pages of the books through which Cammy Rivers searched for answers.
The horses and other animals at High Meadows Farm had seemed no worse for the time they spent in a trance, if indeed it was a trance. But such behavior surely must be symptomatic of a physical disorder.
In her apartment kitchen, above the veterinary clinic, the table was stacked with reference volumes that had thus far failed her. The Internet had failed her, as well, so she put aside one book and opened another to its index.
Absence seizures, in epileptics, weren’t accompanied by abnormal movements. The subject appeared conscious but wasn’t, and the seizure could be mistaken for daydreaming or inattentiveness.
The longest absence seizure, however, lasted less than a minute. The Thoroughbreds and their pets at High Meadows reportedly had been in a trance for more than fifteen minutes.
Besides, none of the animals at the farm had been previously diagnosed as epileptic. And it offended reason to suppose that they would all simultaneously manifest a condition that affected on average one in three hundred individuals.
In addition to congenital cases, other incidences of epilepsy could be attributed to birth trauma and blows to the head, as well as to previous cases of meningitis, encephalitis, and bacterial infections of the brain. Symptoms of those preconditional diseases, however, would have been impossible to overlook. None of the animals at High Meadows — let alone all of them — suffered any such illnesses.
After ruling out epilepsy, Cammy moved on to systemic fungal diseases. She had a dim recollection that certain exotic funguses — not more common varieties like coccidioides — could have brain effects that included absence seizures and hallucinations.
Funguses tended to be regional. But she didn’t limit her inquiry to Rocky Mountain or even Western varieties.
Rare indeed were the funguses that could cause such symptoms. Rarer still were those that conceivably could take hold in four different species — horses, goats, cats, and dogs.
She wasn’t going to consider the duck. She had never treated a duck. She didn’t know how ducks thought or if they thought much at all. The duck was at best a distraction. To hell with the duck.
The problem with pinning the event on a fungus was that none of the animals had exhibited any of the more common symptoms of fungal diseases: diarrhea, fever, chronic cough, difficulty breathing, weight loss, lethargy. …
Before leaving High Meadows Farm, Cammy had taken blood samples from seven horses, three goats, and three dogs. In the morning, she would FedEx them to the lab in Colorado Springs.
Considering that none of the animals was suffering and that none had shown any disturbing symptoms other than the communal trance, she would fulfill her responsibilities merely by waiting for the report from the laboratory. But from funguses, she moved on to several thick volumes concerning rare and exotic protozoan diseases.
She had quite literally given her life to healing animals and relieving their suffering. She lived for nothing else. Her patients were her family, her children, her passion, her mission, her only path to peace.
No animal had ever betrayed her. No animal had ever robbed her of her dignity. No animal had ever oppressed and debased her. No animal had ever tortured her.
The shadow of silent wings swelled and shrank across the stacks of books, across the white pages of the open volume, across her badly scarred hands.
