Breathless

better.”
    “Prepared me?”
    “On the phone. For this.”
    As he ushered her into the kitchen, she said, “I brought my medical bag.”
    “I don’t mean prepared that way. I mean, you know,
prepared.”
He closed the door. “But there’s no way you could be. Prepared, I mean. For this.”
    “Are you babbling?”
    “Sounds like babbling, doesn’t it? A lot’s happened. I don’t know what to make of it. Of them. Maybe you will. They’re in the living room.”
    Cammy followed him across the kitchen. At the threshold of the hallway, he halted. She almost collided with him.
    He turned to her. “I’m half afraid to take you in there.”
    “Afraid—why?”
    “Maybe you won’t be surprised. You’ll have a name for them. Then it’s not something, after all. It sure seems like it is. Something, I mean. But what do I know? I’m babbling, aren’t I?”
    “Which sure isn’t like you.”
    “They ate my chicken. Some was Merlin’s chicken. I’m assuming it was them. I don’t have actual proof.”
    “I’m not here to make an arrest.”
    “But who else would’ve eaten it? Maybe whoever switched on the lights in the workshop.”
    Clueless but game, Cammy said, “Maybe the light switches smell like chicken. That would be proof of something.”
    After turning away from her, he at once faced her again. “I don’t care they ate it. What surprises me is they would come right in. In the house, I mean. Wild animals aren’t that bold.”
    He started toward the living room, but three steps along the hallway, he stopped and turned to her. She collided with him.
    Steadying Cammy with one hand, Grady said, “Wild, bold—but not dangerous. Just the opposite. Almost tame. Like somebody’s pets.”
    He let go of her and headed along the hallway again.
    Expecting him to halt suddenly, Cammy hesitated to follow.
    At the living-room archway, he glanced back. “What’re you doing? Come on, come on.”
    In the front room, Merlin sat at attention. He glanced at Cammy, and his tail twitched, but he didn’t hurry to her as he usually did. He was captivated by the two creatures in front of him, on the sofa.
    They were the size of six-year-old children. They sat as kidsmight sit, not on their haunches as a dog or a cat, but on their posteriors, legs straight in front of them.
    In its forepaws, each held a dog toy, which it was examining with interest. A plush yellow duck, a plush purple bunny.
    They were almost like plush toys themselves: dense, lustrous, snow-white fur. Furless and coal-black noses, lips, and paws.
    Grady said, “Well? Is this really something? Is this something or isn’t it?”
    Cammy glanced at him. Nodded. Found her voice. “Yeah. It’s something, all right.”
    She put down her medical bag. Her knees had gone weak. She sat on a footstool directly opposite the animals.
    Their skulls were not long like those of dogs, but round, and their faces were flat compared to the faces of dogs. Their nose leather and lips seemed feline. They looked more like otters than like cats, but they were not otters.
    Because their heads were larger in proportion to their bodies than was usually the case in animals, the enormous eyes didn’t seem grotesque, and they weren’t protuberant. When they blinked, their lids were as black as their noses and lips.
    Other aspects of the creatures were different from anything Cammy expected in furred mammals. Above all else, however, their eyes compelled her attention.
    Some nocturnal animals, like African bush babies, had large eyes in proportion to the size of their heads. None she could think of was a fraction as enormous as these.
    “Large eyes aren’t essential to night vision,” she said, as much to herself as to Grady, thinking aloud. “Diurnal-nocturnal animals,like dogs and cats—they’re able to see well in the dark because they have large pupils and a lot of photoreceptors in their retinas.”
    Many animal eyes lacked a sclera—the white—as prominent as it was in the human eye. In most dogs, the sclera became visible largely when the animal looked sideways. The pair on the couch seemed to have no sclera whatsoever.
    “The iris,” she said, “the pigmented portion, appears to wrap the eyeball far enough that the sclera never rotates into view.”
    This alone suggested the possibility of numerous structural differences from the eyes of other animals. The cornea’s convex arc was a more impressive engineering feat here than in the human eye. The