Breathless

might arise or entry might be attempted.
    By the time he reached the window, he began to suspect that these mysterious animals were as curious about him as he was about them, that they were intent on satisfying that curiosity.
    Beyond the porch, east of the house, lay the front yard, part of it overlaid with a faint tracery of moonshadows cast by the intricate branches of the huge birch tree.
    The visitors were not on the yard or on that portion of the county lane—Cracker’s Drive—visible from this vantage point.
    Nothing else traveled the night, either. No deer were present, though they frequently came to graze upon the lawn. Often coyotes whidded through the lunar glade, all legs and haunches and sharp shoulders, but on this occasion, they were hunting elsewhere.
    As though aware of their audience and timing their entrance for maximum drama, the creatures sprang as one over the railing at the north side of the porch, seemed to cross the deck as fast as two pulses of light, and vanished over the railing at the south end.
    The speed with which they moved and the darkness of the porch prevented Grady from learning anything more significant about their appearance than he had perceived from a distance in the meadow. He confirmed their size and their nimbleness, and thought he had seen lushly plumed tails, but their faces remained unrevealed.
    They ran on all fours, though it seemed that they reared up as they approached the south end of the porch, that they took the last few steps on their hind feet before vaulting over the railing. Their movement wasn’t what he expected of any four-legged mammal in these mountains, though he couldn’t precisely identify the difference.
    The instant the creatures leaped out of sight, Merlin abandoned his post and hurried unerringly through the dark living room to the hallway. Most likely, the wolfhound intended to track the animals from one of the library windows at the south side of the house.
    Grady was so sure these visitors were intrigued by him and intent upon him that he saw no reason to scramble after them through the gloom, at the risk of falling and breaking a bone. They weren’t going to retreat into the mountains and leave him forever wondering about their nature. They had initiated a process of discovery, and they were not likely to relent from it.
    This was an extraordinary expectation. Wild animals were by their nature wary. Even confident predators like mountain lions generally slunk away into the brush at the sight of a human being.
    In this wooded vastness, only bears were fearless. An eight-hundred-pound brown bear was as ready to charge a man as to ignore him.
    Grady felt his way cautiously through the living room, from sofa to armchair to armchair, and as he reached the hallway, he heard a thin cry of doggy excitement.

Eighteen

T he moth danced with the false flame of the ceiling light, and its shadow swelled and shrank across the pages of the books through which Cammy Rivers searched for answers.
    The horses and other animals at High Meadows Farm had seemed no worse for the time they spent in a trance, if indeed it was a trance. But such behavior surely must be symptomatic of a physical disorder.
    In her apartment kitchen, above the veterinary clinic, the table was stacked with reference volumes that had thus far failed her. The Internet had failed her, as well, so she put aside one book and opened another to its index.
    Absence seizures, in epileptics, weren’t accompanied by abnormal movements. The subject appeared conscious but wasn’t, and the seizure could be mistaken for daydreaming or inattentiveness.
    The longest absence seizure, however, lasted less than a minute. The Thoroughbreds and their pets at High Meadows reportedly had been in a trance for more than fifteen minutes.
    Besides, none of the animals at the farm had been previously diagnosed as epileptic. And it offended reason to suppose that they would all simultaneously manifest a condition that affected on average one in three hundred individuals.
    In addition to congenital cases, other incidences of epilepsy could be attributed to birth trauma and blows to the head, as well as to previous cases of meningitis, encephalitis, and bacterial infections of the brain. Symptoms of those preconditional diseases, however, would have been impossible to overlook. None of the animals at High Meadows—let alone all of them—suffered any such illnesses.
    After ruling out epilepsy, Cammy moved on to