Forty-seven
When Cammy started toward the house, Merlin and his buddies romped ahead of her, across the back porch, and inside, as if to announce her arrival.
Barefoot, in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, Grady sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. “Have a cup?”
“Better get more presentable,” Cammy said. “We’re going to have a lot of company soon.” As she poured coffee into a mug for herself and settled at the table, she gave him a condensed version of events and said, “I’m so sorry, Grady. I didn’t think either Eleanor or Sidney would do anything like this, certainly not without discussing the situation first.”
The coffee tasted fine, but her news appeared to sour him on it. He pushed his mug aside. “It’s obvious in retrospect. But you can’t have seen it coming.”
“We could turn them loose in the woods,” she said, and knew it was a lame solution.
“They’d come right back,” he said, as a noise caused him to look toward the pantry.
“Oh, my,” Cammy said as she saw Riddle standing on his hind legs and turning the doorknob with both hands.
“Just watch,” Grady said.
Merlin and Puzzle were standing behind Riddle, waiting for him to finish the task.
When the door came open, Riddle dropped to all fours, entered the pantry, rose on his hind legs again, and switched on the lights.
Cammy eased her chair away from the table, rose quietly, and moved into the kitchen for a better view through the doorway.
Merlin remained an observer, but Puzzle went into the pantry with Riddle. The two climbed different walls of shelves, peering at the boxes, cans, and jars.
“I only saw the aftermath of their foraging this morning,” Grady murmured as he joined Cammy. “I want to see how they do it.”
Puzzle descended to the floor with a box of Cheez-Its. She sat, turning the box this way and that, apparently intrigued by the bright colors and the picture of the tasty little crackers.
When Riddle returned to the pantry floor, he had a small jar, the contents of which Grady couldn’t identify. The creature studied the lid only a moment, then twisted it off.
Cammy said, “Grady, he shouldn’t have that!”
She started toward the pantry, but before she’d taken two steps, Riddle had put the jar aside and thrust a jalapeño into his mouth. He issued an “Eeee” of shock and spat out the pepper.
Apparently, the remaining juice was nonetheless offensive, for he spat on the floor, spat on Puzzle, spat on himself, and made a repetitive sound of disgust: “Eck, eck, eck, eck.”
“I’ll get a slice of bread,” Grady said, hurrying to a loaf on the counter by the ovens. “It’ll cool his tongue.”
Perhaps because the heat of the pepper lingered, Riddle became more alarmed. He raced out of the pantry and into the kitchen, wove past Merlin and circled Cammy twice before dashing into the hallway.
Grady started after him with the bread, but Riddle returned at top speed, dropped to his drinking bowl, and splashed his entire face in the water.
“Bread is better, short stuff,” Grady said—and then looked at Cammy in shock. “What did I just see?”
For a moment, she couldn’t answer him. What they had both seen was Riddle running upright like a man, as no animal that sprinted as fast as a cat on all fours should be able to run erect. When he had wanted to run tall, something had happened to his hips, to his knees and hocks and stifles, as if the joints had the capacity to shift from one configuration to another as required.
Riddle raised his dripping face out of the water dish, plopped backward onto his butt, and suffered a sneezing fit.
Forty-eight
As in the night, Tom Bigger felt accompanied in the light. No one shadowed him on either the golden hills to the east or in the seaside fields to the west. No coyotes slunk, no great blue herons stalked. Yet he sensed that he was not alone.
Traffic increased with sunrise, and some southbound cars slowed as the approaching drivers glimpsed his hulking form, his ravaged face. He was an also-ran Elephant Man, a walking third-rate sideshow worth a few minutes of dinner conversation, a self-made monster who hadn’t needed Nature’s assistance to discover his inner horror and manifest it in his flesh.
Having walked throughout the night, Tom could not walk all day. At ten o’clock, he came to a motel where the vacancy sign, lit even in daylight to give it punch, was made a laughable understatement by the empty parking lot. This establishment was not a unit in a lodging chain, but a mom-and-pop operation, a little too cute in its details but perfectly maintained.
In times not too far in the past, he would have been turned away with minimal courtesy or none, not primarily because he was a fright to see, perhaps not even because his beard stubble and tequila eyes and backpack made him a hobo variant, but certainly because he had no credit card, no ID, and wanted to pay cash up front. Suppose that in a drunken fit he trashed the room—how would they track him down to make him pay? He had been turned away from places worse than this one.
But these were harder times than people had known in a while. Cash ruled, and even more so in a downturn when few people were spending either greenbacks or plastic. He figured they would take his money, because if they were too picky about their clientele these days, they might as well burn the business down and collect the insurance.
At the door to the motel office, he hesitated. He turned away, retreated a few steps, but halted and then faced the entrance again.
For as long as he could remember, Tom disliked going inside places where he had never been before. Whether it was this place or any other, crossing a threshold for the first time made him nervous.
In fact, at all times he preferred the outdoors, because if he crossed the path of the wrong person, he could simply walk away in any direction. Without walls and with sky above instead of ceiling, he had choices. Inside, obstacles to flight and limited exits were always a concern.
The wrong person would not be one who merely giggled at him or made a rude remark about his looks or his condition. He feared a more profound encounter with someone who strongly affected him in ways for which he was not prepared.
He didn’t want to be affected. What had an affect caused an effect. Affect was another word for change, and Tom Bigger didn’t want to change.
He was what he was, and he didn’t know how to be anything else. At forty-eight, he’d been this way twice as long as he had not.
In the motel office, behind the registration counter, a white-haired guy, maybe seventy-something, was sitting at a desk, engrossed in a book. Wearing a gray cardigan over a white shirt, sporting a red bow tie, with a pair of half-lens reading glasses halfway down his nose, he looked as if he had been born an old man.
