regaining my footing, I steeled myself against the likelihood that one of the immense bats — if that’s what they were — would soar up through the branches below me and tear off a piece of my face. At the taste of me, it would call up others of its kind, and an Odd feast would begin.
I regained my footing, not expecting to keep it long. But as I shivered, listening to the tumult and the screaming below, I dared to hope that the prey at ground level might be so plentiful that the flock, the colony, whatever it should be called, would be satiated by what it killed on the woodland floor.
From a TV documentary, I remembered a variety of bat that had curved incisors as sharp as razors and another variety that possessed claws so sharp and so precisely hooked that it could rip fish out of the water and fly away with them. Nature films can inspire as many nightmares as any blood-soaked monster movie ever made.
Abruptly the darkness ebbed as morning light once more flowed down over me and through the branches to the floor of the woods. The tide of sunshine washed away the creatures that the unnatural night had brought with it, as if they had never existed. As far as I could see, nothing dead or alive waited on the carpet of leaves below.
Fourteen
All in white and immense, like an array of taut mainsails and topsails and staysails, Chef Shilshom seemed about to glide away wherever the wind might carry him. But the kitchen, of course, was windless, and the chef was intent upon adding to a pile of eyes on the cutting board beside the sink, where he was blinding several pounds of potatoes before peeling them.
My morning had been exhausting, especially as I’d eaten nothing but an almond croissant, and I needed to fill my fuel tank. “Sir, I don’t want to bother you, but Roseland is taking a lot out of me today. I could use some protein.”
“Mmmmm,” he said, and pointed to a warm quiche on a cooling rack and to a fresh cheesecake to which the lemon glaze had recently been applied.
As a guest granted kitchen privileges, I could have made a ham sandwich or searched out a leftover chicken breast. Instead I cut and plated a wedge of the quiche
I don’t worry about cholesterol. Considering my gift and the limited life expectancy it almost certainly ensures, my arteries will be as squeaky-clean as those of a newborn when I die, even if I eat nothing but ice cream at every meal.
Sitting on a stool at the island nearest to the chef, I watched him carve the faults out of the potatoes with an intensity that was a little disturbing. Tip of the tongue pinched between his teeth, plump cheeks rosier than usual, eyes slitted as if with contempt, and a fine dew of perspiration on his forehead all seemed to indicate that in his imagination he was cutting the eyes from something potentially more responsive than potatoes.
Since coming to Roseland, my attempts to get information out of Chef Shilshom had been relatively subtle, my approach for the most part oblique. That strategy hadn’t gotten me anywhere. Earlier, over the croissant, I had been a bit bolder, and although I hadn’t pushed him so hard as to make him spill a single secret, I had rattled him enough to expose his concealed hostility when his reflection in the window revealed him glaring at me behind my back.
Halfway through my wedge of quiche, I said, “Sir, do you recall earlier when I asked you about the horse I sometimes see?”
“Mmmmm.”
“A black stallion, a Friesian.”
“If you say so.”
“Since Mr. Wolflaw keeps no horses, I thought it might belong to a neighbor, and you said perhaps it did.”
“There you go.”
“But I wonder, sir, how did the horse get through the front gate, with a guard there and everything?”
“How indeed?”
“Perhaps it climbed over the estate wall.”
The chef could not easily pretend distraction when taunted with such absurdity. He glanced at me but then preferred to talk to the current potato that he was mutilating. “There haven’t been horses here in many years.”
“Then what did I see?”
“I wonder.”
I finished the rest of my quiche and said, “Sir, did you notice an eclipse of the sun a short while ago?”
Now peeling the potatoes, he said, “Eclipse?”
“Day turning to night. Like a few thousand years ago people thought God was turning off the sun as punishment, so they went mad with fear and tore their hair out and sacrificed babies and lashed themselves with brambles and promised never to fornicate again, because they were ignorant, though that wasn’t really their fault, considering that there wasn’t either the History Channel or NatGeo back then, and maybe some of them tried to Google ‘sun goes out’ to learn what was happening, but they were way too far ahead of their time.”
Peeling determinedly, Chef Shilshom said, “I don’t understand you, Mr. Thomas.”
“You aren’t the first,” I assured him.
I tried the cheesecake. It was delicious.
“Sir,” I continued, “putting the mystery horse aside for a moment, do you know of an animal in these parts that is at least the size of a man, perhaps larger, with crimson eyes that glow in the dark and a really horrendous odor?”
The chef had been taking the skin off a potato in a single long ribbon, as if he collected spud peels the same way that some people collected string in giant balls that grew as big as automobiles. But partway through my question, his hand faltered, and a prematurely severed peel unraveled into the sink.
I doubt that Sherlock Holmes was my great-grandfather, but I deduced that the incident of the severed peel indicated Chef Shilshom knew the stinky animals to which I referred. He appeared alarmed by what I’d said, and intent on concealing his concern.
He at once continued peeling, but he took so long to decide on his response that his anxiety became more apparent. Finally he said, “Horrendous odor?”
“Very stinky, sir.”
“As large as a man?”
“Yes, sir. Maybe larger.”
“What did they look like?”
“I only ran into them in the dark.”
“But still you must have seen something of them.”
“No, sir. It was very dark.”
He relaxed a little. “We have no animals that big in these parts.”
“What about bears?”
“Well.”
“California black bears?”
He said, “Mmmmm.”
“Maybe the bears climbed the estate wall to kill and eat all the mountain lions.”
The slippery potato popped out of his hand and thumped around the stainless-steel sink.
“Could it be bears?” I pressed, though I knew it hadn’t been anything as cuddly as the killing machine that is a bear.
Having retrieved the potato, the chef began to peel again, but he lacked the composure with which he’d begun the chore. He hacked clumsily at that example of Idaho’s finest, and I felt embarrassed for him.
“Maybe you should stay in at night, Mr. Thomas.”
After skinning the rest of the potato in a most unfortunate manner, the chef dropped it in a large pot half
