Fear Nothing

of the magical looking-glass, I had to assume that every face was a false face.
        Edgy from the caffeine but with a craving for more, I took my cup to the coffeemaker and refilled it.
        “What I can tell you,” Roosevelt said, “is there were supposed to be dogs out at Fort Wyvern as well as cats.”
        “Orson didn't come from Wyvern.”
        “Where did he come from?”
        I stood with my back against the refrigerator, sipping the hot coffee.
        “One of my mom's colleagues gave him to us. Their dog had a lot of puppies, and they needed to find homes for them.”
        “One of your mom's colleagues at the university?”
        “Yeah. A professor at Ashdon.”
        Roosevelt Frost stared, unspeaking, and a terrible cloud of pity crossed his face, darkened his eyes. I felt as though he could hear the rumbling of an apocalyptic storm that eluded my ears, and that all the lightning bolts of its assault were destined to strike me.
        “What?” I asked, and heard a quavery note in my voice that I did not like.
        He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and kept his silence. Suddenly he seemed to want to avoid my eyes. Now both he and Orson were studying the damn dog biscuits.
        The cat had no interest in the biscuits. Instead, he watched me.
        If another cat made of pure gold with eyes of jewels, standing silent guard for millennia in the most sacred room of a pyramid far beneath a sea of sand, had suddenly come to life before my eyes, it would not have seemed more mysterious than this cat with his steady, somehow ancient gaze.
        To Roosevelt, I said, “You don't think that's where Orson came from? Not Wyvern? Why would my mother's colleague lie to her?
        He shook his head, as if he didn't know, but he knew all right.
        I was frustrated by the way he fluctuated between making disclosures and guarding his secrets. I didn't understand his game, couldn't grasp why he was alternately forthcoming and closemouthed.
        Under the gray cat's hieroglyphic gaze, in the draft-trembled candlelight, with the humid air thickened by mystery as manifest as incense, I said, “All you need to complete your act is a crystal ball, silver hoop earrings, a Gypsy headband, and a Romanian accent.”
        I couldn't get a rise out of him.
        Returning to my chair at the table, I tried to use what little I knew to encourage him to believe that I knew even more. Maybe he would open up further if he thought some of his secrets weren't so secret, after all. “There weren't only cats and dogs in the labs at Wyvern. There were monkeys.”
        Roosevelt didn't reply, and he still avoided my eyes.
        “You do know about the monkeys?” I asked.
        “No,” he said, but he glanced from the biscuits to the security camera monitor in the hutch.
        “I suspect it's because of the monkeys that you got a mooring outside the marina three months ago.”
        Realizing that he had betrayed his knowledge by looking at the monitor when I mentioned the monkeys, he returned his attention to the dog biscuits.
        Only a hundred moorings were available in the bay waters beyond the marina, and they were nearly as prized as the dock slips, though it was a necessary inconvenience to travel to and from your moored boat in another craft. Roosevelt had subleased a space from Dieter Gessel, a fisherman whose trawler was docked farther out along the northern horn with the rest of the fishing fleet but who had kept a junk dinghy at the mooring against the day when he retired and acquired a pleasure boat. Rumor was that Roosevelt was paying five times what the lease was costing Dieter.
        I had never before asked him about because wasn't any of my business unless he brought it up first.
        Now I said, “Every night, you move the Nostromo from this slip out to the mooring, and you sleep there. Every night without fail - except tonight, while you're waiting here for me. Folks thought you were going to buy a second boat, something smaller and fun, just to play with. When you didn't, when you just went out there every night to bunk down, they figured - 'well, okay, he's a little eccentric anyway, old Roosevelt, talking to people's pets and whatnot.”
        He remained silent.
        He and Orson appeared to be so intensely and equally fascinated by those three dog biscuits that I could almost believe either of them might