And then as the darkness slowly deepened, their eyes began to glow. Pink at first and almost pretty, like little fairy lights, they rapidly became as red as I imagined the eyes of wolves might be at night, although these creatures were nothing as endearing as wolves.
In the past, I had found myself pitted against murderers, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, a misguided former billionaire and monk, kidnappers, terrorists, and others who at some point in their lives had slipped or been dragged, or plunged gleefully, into the dark side. I don’t do battle against vampires and werewolves for the simple reason that they don’t exist.
Nevertheless, gazing down through the oak branches at the red-eyed mob, I was tempted to picture a few dozen escapees from a young-adult novel who were looking for blood and new girlfriends. Whatever they were, however, I sensed that they wouldn’t be sufficiently good-looking to get dates for the prom.
There was a reasonably good chance that these beasts were not climbers. Mountain lions can climb, but coyotes can’t. Bears can climb, but wolves can’t. Squirrels are great at it, rabbits embarrass themselves trying. I might merely have to wait out these creatures until this strange twilight relented, as it had done before.
One of them began to climb.
Abandoning the first crotch of the tree, I scampered up as quickly as a boy playing monkey.
Glancing down, I was heartened to see that my pursuer—no more than a shadowy form—was struggling to ascend. It seemed to be poorly equipped for climbing. Judging by its growls, its squeals of rage, and the furious thrashing of greenery, the thing regarded the tree as a conscious adversary that was willfully thwarting it, and it retaliated by smashing at the branches and shaking from them great sprays of leaves.
The higher I went, the less foliage between me and the sky, the better the light should have become. But this sun sought the sea as fast as a burning ship that had taken cannonballs through its hull.
In a couple of minutes, I would have no light at all. Feeling my way blindly through an oaken maze, high above the earth, seemed as sure a way to die as any.
Before I ran out of twilight, I began to run out of tree. These higher limbs were less formidable than lower ones, and they sagged treacherously. My feet slipped frequently, and my hands ached from gripping with such intensity.
I halted and eased down to sit with my back against the much-diminished main trunk. I straddled a limb that didn’t offer much of a butt rest and that would restore to me a boys’-choir voice if my weight suddenly shifted.
Even over my rough breathing, I could hear thrashing far below, as the infuriated creature tried to ascend by beating the oak into submission. I took comfort that its IQ, while no doubt high enough to allow it to run for elective office, seemed to be only a fraction of mine.
The ozone odor remained with me, faint but persistent. At what must have been a height of sixty feet, however, I could smell nothing of the mob below.
A minute or two later, that stink began to rise to me once more, and I realized that the climber must be making progress, after all.
Darkness took the sky above, and for a moment I could only feel and imagine the black limbs of the oak, not see them.
The loss of light didn’t bring the beast below to a halt. It continued to thrash vigorously through the resisting tree, snapping branch-lets, raising such commotion in the leaves as a squall of wind might have done. Grunts of satisfaction seemed to indicate that safe footing had been found, while snarls and squeals of frustration no doubt marked those moments when the way upward was neither obvious nor easy. Twice, an ugly wet chortling, disturbing and protracted, seemed to suggest that the thing was delighted by the prospect of tearing off my face, putting it on a kaiser roll with mustard, and eating it.
As the odor of the creature grew stronger, I began to feel like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, except that instead of the implacable Inspector Javert, my pursuer was a red-eyed demonic mutant something.
The absolute darkness was now relieved by what appeared to be the light of a rising yellowish moon. The oak around me reappeared, though like a less than fully imagined tree in a dream. I remained unable to see the climber below.
I could no longer afford to wait for this unscheduled night to recede and to take the mysterious creatures with it, as happened in the stable. This event had already lasted longer than the first, and I had no reason to expect that in another minute I would find myself freed from the current weirdness and returned to the daylight of that kinder, gentler Roseland.
As the stench grew, I rose gingerly, pressing my back to the trunk, and gripped a branch above me, first with one hand, then with both. I turned on the limb to peer down into the quadrant of the great oak through which the thing was making its way.
The action I intended might result in losing my footing, losing my overhead grip, and plunging through battering, skewering phalanxes of limbs and branches with a cry far less triumphant than the cry with which Tarzan conquered jungles. But I could see nothing else to do but wait for the beast to appear below me and, as it attempted to clamber up to my level, kick it repeatedly in the face until it lost its grip—or bit off my foot.
Sometimes I wish I liked guns.
I’ve had to resort to them at times, but always with reluctance. The terrifying games that my disturbed mother played with a pistol when I was a boy have left me with an abiding aversion to firearms and a preference for simpler weapons—in this case as simple as my foot—that might sooner or later get me killed.
The singular stink had become nearly thick enough to make my eyes water, but the climber had not yet appeared, although the noise of its ascent was greater and closer.
Only when something swung around from the farther side of the oak onto my limb, behind me and slightly to my left, did I realize there had been at least one other climber in addition to the freak that I’d been tracking. It seized my right shoulder in one brutish hand, and I knew next would come a bite, a slash.
Before claws or teeth could draw blood, I thrust backward with my entire body. My feet slipped off the curve of bark—and treaded empty air. I was hanging only from the limb above my head, but with that sudden move I also knocked my attacker off the tree. Clutching fast to my shoulder was its only hope, but its terrible weight was such that I felt as if, in its grasp, my muscle might be separating from the shoulder bone. Pain shot up my arm and into my right hand, which slipped off the branch.
I hung now only by my left hand, but the abrupt change in my position jolted the creature clinging to me, and its hand—which felt poorly articulated, of limited dexterity—slipped off my shoulder. With a howl, the thing fell away and quickly had the howl knocked out of it as it slammed through the unforgiving architecture of the oak. The beast, of which I hadn’t a single glimpse, must have crashed into the mob at the base of the tree, because shrieks of pain and outrage rose from below.
As those cries began to subside, the crepitation of a thousand long, leathery wings reverberated through the blind-dark woods. The swarm, most likely the same that I had seen descending out of the northwest the previous evening, seethed among the oaks, attacking the beasts below, who squealed in terror.
As I restored my two-hand grip on the overhead limb and began to swing gently back and forth in the hope of 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 and a slice of the cheesecake, and poured a glass of milk.
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 filled with water.
I said, “The first time I ran into them was in the stable, this morning, about half an hour after dawn.”
He picked up another spud and went at it as though he despised everything Idahoan and was particularly infuriated by potatoes.
“The second time,” I said, “was just twenty minutes ago, in a grove of oak trees, where it got so dark I thought there must be an eclipse.”