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.”