Riddle put the monkey under Grady’s pillows. With expressions of blissful contentment, the dog and the two somethings curled around one another.

The wolfhound and his posse watched Grady turn out the bedside lamp. They watched him turn out the overhead light.

Leaving on the lamp beside the large Stickley-style reclining chair, Grady went into the closet to retrieve a spare pillow and a blanket.

The snuggling animals raised their heads as he came out of the closet, and they tracked him as he went to the reclining chair. They seemed unmoved by the sour look he gave them.

Grady sat in the roomy chair, which he had built and upholstered the previous year. He stretched out his legs on a matching footstool.

The three compadres watched him solemnly.

He draped the blanket across himself and put the pillow behind his head.

They watched him adjust the pillow and the blanket until he got everything as right as he could. The chair made a comfortable bed, and he was too tired to play here-we-go-’round-the-mulberry-bush with these animated plush toys.

He said, “Just so you know …”

The three caballeros remained interested in him, although he couldn’t honestly claim that they waited with bated breath for what he would say next.

“… I consider this mutiny,” he informed them. “Mutiny indeed. And in the morning, discipline will be administered.”

He switched off the lamp beside the chair.

Their colorful eyes seemed to float in the darkness.

“I see you watching me,” he said.

They didn’t blink.

“I’m counting on you, Merlin. Don’t let them devour me in my sleep.”

Thirty-seven

At the computer in her office at the veterinary clinic, Cammy Rivers wrote e-mails to Dr. Eleanor Fortney of Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in North Grafton, Massachusetts, and to Dr. Sidney Shinseki of Texas A&M University’s College of Veterinary Medicine in College Station, Texas. She attached JPEGs of photos of Puzzle and Riddle.

Eleanor Fortney was an eminent zoologist, an internist, and a surgeon who had been a guest lecturer for a month at Colorado State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Fort Collins, when Cammy had been in her last year of studies at that institution.

As one of the very few CSU students who ever achieved a perfect grade-point average in every semester of her studies, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, Cammy had been able to receive a guaranteed seat in every one of Eleanor’s small-class lectures but had been invited also to participate in three one-on-one conferences that proved to be some of the most intense educational experiences of her life.

By the time Eleanor completed her month in Fort Collins, she had made a persuasive case that, upon graduation, Cammy should come east to Tufts. Eleanor offered a three-year contract to work in a canine-cancer research project of which she was the director, a program with deep funding provided by an alumnus.

Cammy was tempted by the opportunity to advance her career and contribute to research that might save the lives of countless dogs. But ultimately, she declined. She had dreamed for so long of serving animals not in the research lab, but in the course of their day-to-day suffering; she wanted the satisfaction of healing animals whose names she knew and into whose eyes she had looked.

She and Eleanor had remained in touch, however, and were friends who regarded their work not solely as a profession and primarily as a mission. If Puzzle and Riddle were extreme teratogenic individuals, Eleanor’s broad, deep zoological background might enable her to see through the mutations to underlying characteristics that identified their species.

As for Sidney Shinseki: After receiving her veterinary degree, Cammy had done a year of postdoctoral work with him to refine her surgical techniques. He was a sweet old gruff bear of a guy who had a keen diagnostic sense and a talent for making intuitive leaps from a few perplexing facts to the truth toward which they pointed.

After sending the e-mails, Cammy trolled a few institutional zoological archives that could be accessed with ease, searching for photographs of nocturnal creatures with unusually large eyes.

The aye-aye, inhabiting the rain forests of Madagascar, appeared to have larger eyes than it really did. In the photos, they were such a bright orange that the stunning color contributed to an illusion of immensity. Anyway, with its big batlike ears and pointed muzzle, it wouldn’t qualify for a show about mammalian beauty on Animal Planet.

Bush babies’ eyes were markedly larger than those of an aye-aye, especially in proportion to their small heads, but they were ocular nobodies compared to Merlin’s new playmates.

The loris, native to south and southeastern Asia, had large eyes in proportion to its head but not in comparison to Puzzle and Riddle. A tree-creeper feeding largely on lizards and insects, the largest loris weighed only four pounds.

After the excitement of the night, she thought she would not be able to sleep, but she soon began hitting too many wrong keys and too often misclicking the mouse, and she logged off. When she dropped into bed at 1:50 A.M., the room seemed to turn slowly like a carousel … a carousel, and all the beautiful horses were facing in the same direction, toward the mountains and the twilight sky, and something momentous was passing through the day, something so gigantic that she could feel its presence looming, yet it remained invisible, or if it was not invisible, then it must be visible only by indirection, only from the corner of the eye. …

Thirty-eight

Cool and dry, the California night provided perfect weather for walking with a backpack.

To the west of the highway, the dark land sloped to the ocean, which Tom Bigger could see only because the moon trailed a satin train across the water and the breaking surf threw white spray like flung rice to rattle on the shingled shore.

In the east lay hills, visible because they were silhouetted against the star-speckled sky and because, following a rainless summer, they were dressed in pale parched grass. Widely separated hursts of live oaks made Halloween shapes against the pallid meadows.

To every quarter of the compass, the lonely land revealed no signs of habitation.

He knew where he must go and what he must do. But it was a long walk to the city and a hard thing that needed to be done.

Well past midnight, little traffic cruised the highway. These were the hours when long-haul truckers reigned, and they traveled the interstate farther inland.

Even in the darkness, Tom received signs. The headlights of a southbound car revealed a dead rattlesnake on the pavement, its eyes glittering as if sequined, and he knew that it was there only for him to see.

He passed a deer crossing sign that vandals had riddled with bullet holes. And a short distance farther along the shoulder of the highway, his trudging feet scattered small objects that clinked off one another with a brassy sound. When he switched on his flashlight, perhaps twenty expended shell casings gleamed in the dirt and gravel.

Snakes and bullets. Evil and violence.

A low smooth rock formation rose like a bench made by Nature for a weary hiker. He stopped and unburdened himself of the backpack.

He unzipped the storm flap on the lower compartment and withdrew a stuffsack that contained his unloaded pistol. He returned the empty stuffsack to the lower compartment, and zipped shut the storm flap.

Bearing the backpack once more, carrying the gun in his left hand, at his side, out of sight of any motorists who might pass, he continued north.

Since leaving the town, he felt that he was not alone. Mile by mile, the impression of an unseen companion intensified.

From time to time, he stopped and turned slowly in a circle to study the night. He never glimpsed movement other than the swaying of grass and the trembling of leaves in the languid breeze that came off the sea. He never saw a ghostly form, or moonglint in an eye.

He walked about half a mile before he heard the engine of a northbound vehicle. Judging by the sound, it must be a light truck or an SUV, but he did not look back.

Motorists disposed to pick up hitchhikers were less charitable to him because of his size and face. He seldom attempted to thumb a ride. Consequently, he walked facing oncoming traffic, which was safer anyway.

Engine noise grew, headlights washed the pavement, and a Chevy Suburban swept past in the farther lane. Brake lights brightened.

A hundred yards ahead, the vehicle made a U-turn and came south, coasting to a stop beside the highway, about fifty feet from Tom. Doors opened.