Dean Koontz 3-Book Thriller Collection: Breathless, What the Night Knows, 77 Shadow Street. Dean Koontz
Читать онлайн книгу.
didn’t say there was. I just said speculating about their origins is going to lead to some scary what-ifs.”
“Right now I just want to experience them,” Grady said. “If I think too much about what they might be, that’s going to color how I interpret their behavior.”
Watching the animals drink, Merlin seemed to strike a proud pose, as if they were good students to whom he had successfully imparted the right technique for drinking from a bowl.
“Anyway,” Cammy said, “you can’t know for sure there’s nothing scary about them.”
“There’s nothing scary about them,” he insisted.
“Not now, they’re as cute as Muppets now, but maybe later when the lights are off and you’re asleep, that’s when they reveal their true grotesque form.”
“You don’t really believe that’s a possibility.”
“No. It’s a what-if, but it’s a ridiculous what-if.”
“Anyway, they’re a lot cuter than Muppets,” he said. “Some Muppets creep me out. Nothing about these two creeps me out.”
“Muppets creep you out? Freud would find that interesting.”
“Not all Muppets creep me out. Just a few.”
“Surely not Kermit.”
“Of course not Kermit. But Big Bird’s a freak.”
“He’s a freak?”
“A total freak.”
As predictably steady, reliable, and self-contained as Grady might be, his conversation could take unpredictable deadpan turns. Cammy liked that. He was smart and amusing, but he was safe.
“Big Bird,” she said. “Is that why you don’t have a TV?”
“It’s one of the reasons.”
Riddle and then Puzzle finished drinking. They sat up on their haunches like a couple of giant prairie dogs, folded their hands on their bellies, and regarded Grady with expectation.
“Maybe they’re hungry,” Cammy suggested.
“They already ate three chicken breasts. And as far as I know, they ate the pan, too.”
“You don’t know these guys are the chicken thieves. There might be another factor – whoever went in your workshop, the garage, whoever switched on the lights.”
“See, this is why I make furniture.”
“What’s furniture got to do with it?”
“When I make furniture, I don’t have to think. My hands do all the thinking for me.”
“Even if Puzzle and Riddle did eat the chicken,” Cammy said, “maybe that’s the only thing they’ve had to eat all day. You don’t want to send them to bed hungry.”
“Because they might eat me alive in the middle of the night? Problem is, I don’t have any more chicken.”
“Give them some of Merlin’s kibble, see if they like it.”
“If I pour bowls of kibble for them, I’ll have to give Merlin some, and he’s already had all he should have for one day.”
“Merlin isn’t fat. You’d have to dole out kibble with a shovel to overfeed him. Give him a bowl, let him celebrate his new friends.”
“They do look like they expect something. Maybe you’re right, maybe they’re hungry.”
He kept forty pounds of Science Diet in the pantry – twenty pounds in a large aluminum can with an airtight lid, and an unopened twenty-pound backup bag. He put a large scoopful in Merlin’s food bowl and a smaller serving in each of two cereal bowls.
The wolfhound was trained to sit in front of his bowl and wait for permission to eat. The word okay released him to his meal.
Puzzle and Riddle studied Merlin and mimicked him, sitting at their bowls. When the dog ate, the two tasted their kibble, found it acceptable, and chowed down.
Needing to go home and get to work with the memory stick from Grady’s camera, still too enchanted to leave, Cammy watched the three eat. “In his way, Merlin’s as wonderful and mysterious as they are.”
Grady seemed surprised. “I was thinking the same thing.”
After his return to the mountains, near the end of his first year, Grady had told Cammy that he’d rediscovered the mystery of the ordinary. He said, if you allowed yourself to be enchanted by the beauty to be seen in even ordinary things, then all things proved to be extraordinary. Shortly thereafter, she gave Merlin to him, a puppy as large as some grown dogs, rough-coated, shaggy-browed, and as magical as the magician for whom he had been named.
Cammy said, “You know High Meadows Farm?”
“That’s the Vironi place, they raise Thoroughbreds?”
“Yeah. Something happened at High Meadows this afternoon, right before twilight.”
She told him about the strange condition of the horses and the other animals.
“Diagnosis?” he asked.
“I was working on it when you called me out here. Now I don’t think there can be a diagnosis because there wasn’t an illness.”
“But you said, they were in something like a trance.”
“I don’t know what this means, it’s just what I feel …” She took a deep breath, blew it out. “There wasn’t anything wrong with them, something was right with them.”
“I can understand why you wouldn’t know what that means.”
She told him about the incident with the abused breeder dogs that had been rescued from the puppy mill. “I didn’t witness the trance part, but I saw the change in the dogs after it, they were happy, totally and suddenly socialized. Somehow, what happened at our clinic and what happened at High Meadows Farm must be related to Puzzle and Riddle.”
“I don’t see how, but I think you’re right. This many wheels of weirdness have to be on the same train.”
The wolfhound and his new companions finished eating. Merlin noisily licked his chops. With their fingers, Puzzle and Riddle meticulously combed the fur around their mouths.
Picking up her medical bag, Cammy said, “I’ll make my inquiries before I go to bed. By midmorning sometime, I should have replies, but I doubt there’s any chance we’ll be enlightened. Then we’ll have to decide what to do next.”
“Come here for lunch?”
“Yeah. Okay. Unless I have an emergency the techs can’t handle and that I can’t pass along to Amos Renfrew. He’s the best cow doc in the county, and he’s good enough with horses, but his heart isn’t in small-animal care. I wouldn’t recommend him for a dog in serious shape, he might overlook something.”
Merlin settled to the floor in a weary heap. Puzzle and Riddle snuggled against opposite sides of him, apparently at last worn out. The wolfhound was like a great woolly coat that had been thrown down, and the golden-eyed pair were the coat’s dazzling trim.
When Cammy opened the back door and stepped onto the porch, Grady followed her, but the animals remained behind.
“I’m pretty sure they’re already asleep,” Grady said. “Sometimes I think it would be a great blessing to walk on all fours and have a smaller brain.”
She shook her head. “It’s not their smaller brains that let them sleep so easily. It’s their innocence.”
“Then I’ll be awake all night, maybe forever.”
His singular smile was the best last sight to any evening,