Watchers

again. He began to whimper strangely. By the time they were ten miles from home, he was shivering.
    “What’s wrong with you, fur face?” she asked.
    With his expressive brown eyes, Einstein tried hard to convey a complex and important message, but she could not understand him.
    Half an hour before dusk, when they reached the city and departed the freeway for surface streets, Einstein began alternately to whine and growl low in his throat.
    “What’s wrong with him?” Nora asked.
    Frowning, Travis said, “I don’t know.”
    As they pulled into the driveway of Travis’s rented house and parked in the shade of the date palm, the retriever began to bark. He had never barked in the truck, not once on their long journey. It was ear-splitting in that confined space, but he would not stop.
    When they got out of the truck, Einstein bolted past them, positioned himself between them and the house, and continued barking.
    Nora moved along the walkway toward the front door, and Einstein darted at her, snarling. He seized one leg of her jeans and tried to pull her off balance. She managed to stay. on her feet and, when she retreated to the birdbath, he let go of her.
    “What’s gotten into him?” she asked Travis.
    Staring thoughtfully at the house, Travis said, “He was like this in the woods that first day . . . when he didn’t want me to follow the dark trail.”
    Nora tried to coax the dog closer in order to pet him.
    But Einstein would not be coaxed. When Travis tested the dog by approaching the house, Einstein snarled and forced him to retreat.
    “Wait here,” Travis told Nora. He walked to the Airstream in the driveway and went inside.
    Einstein trotted back and forth in front of the house, looking up at the door and windows, growling and whining.
    As the sun rolled down the western sky and kissed the surface of the sea, the residential street was quiet, peaceful, ordinary in every respect—yet Nora felt a wrongness in the air. A warm wind off the Pacific elicited whispers from the palm and eucalyptus and ficus trees, sounds that might have been pleasant any other day but which now seemed sinister. In the lengthening shadows, in the last orange and purple light of the day, she also perceived an indefinable
    menace. Except for the dog’s behavior, she had no reason to think that danger was near at hand; her uneasiness was not intellectual but instinctual.
    When Travis returned from the trailer, he was carrying a large revolver. It had been in a bedroom drawer, unloaded, throughout their honeymoon trip. Now, Travis finished inserting cartridges into the chambers and snapped the cylinder shut.
    ‘Is that necessary?” she asked worriedly.
    ‘Something was in the woods that day,” Travis said, “and though I never actually saw it . . . well, it put the hair up on the back of my neck. Yeah, I think the gun might be necessary.”
    Her own reaction to the whispering trees and afternoon shadows gave her a hint of what Travis must have felt in the woods, and she had to admit that the gun made her feel at least slightly better.
    Einstein had stopped pacing and had taken up his guard position on the walkway again, barring their approach to the house.
    To the retriever, Travis said, “Is someone inside?” A quick wag of the tail. Yes.
    “Men from the lab?” One bark. No.
    “The other experimental animal you told us about?” Yes.
    “The thing that was in the woods?”
    Yes.
    “All right, I’m going in there.”
    No.
    “Yes,” Travis insisted. “It’s my house, and we’re not going to run from this, whatever the hell it is.”
    Nora remembered the magazine photograph of the movie monster to which Einstein had reacted so strongly. She did not believe anything even remotely like that creature could actually exist. She believed that Einstein was exaggerating or that they had misunderstood what he had been trying to tell them about the photo. Nevertheless, she suddenly wished they had not only the revolver but a shotgun.
    “This is a .357 Magnum,” Travis told the dog, “and one shot, even if it hits an arm or a leg, will knock down the biggest, meanest man and keep him down. He’ll feel as if he’s been hit by a cannonball. I’ve taken firearms training from the best, and I’ve done regular target practice over the years to keep my edge. I really know what I’m doing, and I’ll be able to handle myself in there. Besides, we can’t just call the cops, can we? Because whatever they find in there