Seize the Night

weight of moral responsibility. Not guilt. She was smart enough to know that no guilt should attend what she'd done.
    But she also knew that even moral acts can have dimensions that scar the mind and wound the heart.
    If she had answered my question with a smile and assurances that she was fine, she would not have been the Sasha Goodall that I love, and I would have had reason to suspect that she was becoming.
    We rode through Moonlight Bay in silence, each of us occupied with his or her own thoughts.
    A couple miles from the Stanwyk house, the cat lost interest in the view through the windshield. He surprised me by stepping down onto my chest and peering into my eyes.
    His green gaze was intense and unwavering, and I met it directly for an eerily long time, wondering what he might be thinking.
    How radically different his thinking must be from ours, even if he shares our high level of intelligence. He experiences this world from a perspective nearly as unlike ours as our perspective would be unlike that of a being raised on another planet. He faces each day without carrying on his back the weight of human history, philosophy, triumph, tragedy, noble intentions, foolishness, greed, envy, and hubris, it must be liberating to be without that burden. He is both savage and civilized. He is closer to nature than we are, therefore, he has fewer illusions about it, knows that life is hard by design, that nature is beautiful but cold. And although Roosevelt says other cats of Mungojerrie's breed escaped from Wyvern, their numbers cannot be large, while Mungojerrie isn't as singular a specimen as Orson seems to be, and while cats by nature are more adaptable to solitude than dogs are, this small creature must at times know a profound loneliness.
    When I began to pet him, Mungojerrie broke eye contact and curled up on my chest. He was a small, warm weight, and I could feel his heartbeat both against my body and under my stroking hand.
    I am not an animal communicator, but I think I know why he led us into the Stanwyk house. We were not there to bear witness to the dead.
    We were there solely to do what needed to be done for Father Tom Eliot.
    Since time immemorial, people have suspected that some animals have at least one sense in addition to our own. An awareness of things we do not see. A prescience.
    Couple that special perception with intelligence, and suppose that with greater intelligence comes a more refined conscience. In passing the Stanwyk house, Mungojerrie might have sensed the mental anguish, the spiritual agony, and the emotional pain of Father Tom Eliot—and might have felt compelled to bring deliverance to that suffering man.
    Or maybe I'm full of crap.
    The possibility exists that I am both full of crap and right about Mungojerrie.
    Cats know things.

23
    Haddenbeck Road is a lonely stretch of two-lane blacktop that for a few miles runs due east, paralleling the southern perimeter of Fort Wyvern, but then strikes southeast, serving a score of ranches in the least populated portion of the county. Summer heat, winter rains, and California's most violent weather—earthquakes—have left the pavement cracked, hoved, and ragged at the edges. Skirts of wild grass and, for a short while here in early spring, an embroidery of wildflowers separate the highway from the sensuously rolling fields that embrace it.
    When we had traveled some distance without encountering oncoming headlights, Sasha suddenly braked to a halt and said, “Look at this.” I sat up in full view, as did Roosevelt and Bobby, and surveyed the night around us in confusion as Sasha rammed the Expedition into reverse and backed up about twenty feet.
    “Almost ran over them,” she said.
    On the pavement ahead of us, revealed by the headlights, were enough snakes to fill the cages of every reptile house in every zoo in the country.
    Leaning forward into the front seat, Bobby whistled softly and said, “Must be an open door to Hell around here somewhere.”
    “All rattlers?”
    Roosevelt asked, taking the ice pack off his swollen eye, squinting for a better look.
    “Hard to tell,” Sasha said. “But I think so.” Mungojerrie stood with hind paws on my right knee, forepaws on the dashboard, head craned forward. He made one of those cat sounds that are half hiss, half growl, and all loathing.
    Even from a distance of only twenty-five feet, it was impossible to make an accurate count of the number of serpents in the squirming mass on the highway,