Breathless. Dean Koontz

       Chapter Eight

      With darkness at the windows and with the great mass of Merlin slumped at his feet, Grady Adams ate dinner at the kitchen table. The dog hoped for a piece or two of chicken but did not beg, feigning disinterest to preserve his dignity.

      The CD player on a nearby counter provided music. Grady didn’t have a TV, and he didn’t want one. Although he usually preferred silence even to the most elegant noise, at times Merlin’s presence and books did not adequately fill his leisure hours.

      At the moment, books were giving him little of what he sought from them, while Beethoven’s Opus 27, Number 2 – the “Moonlight” Sonata – was both balm and inspiration.

      Having exhausted his collection of illustrated volumes, he pored through essays about the Colorado mountains while he ate, through memoirs of lives passed in these precincts of the natural world. He skimmed pages in search of references to unknown animals, for strange tales about white-furred creatures that were playful but shy.

      He suspected the books would not help him, but he searched them anyway. The encounter in the meadow had affected him powerfully for reasons he could understand but for others that he only half grasped. Something more about the creatures than their uniqueness and their mysterious nature affected him, some quality he sensed that they possessed but that remained too elusive to name.

      Merlin leaped to his feet so suddenly that he knocked his head against the underside of the table. The wolfhound was at no risk of concussion. The table would collapse long before the dog did.

      When Merlin padded out of the kitchen, into the hallway that led to the living room, Grady put down his fork, let his book fall shut, and sat listening for a bark. After half a minute, having heard neither a bark nor the thudding paws of the returning son of Ireland, he opened the book again.

      As Grady picked up his fork, Merlin thumped along the hall to the kitchen doorway, where he stood in a posture of alarm. Easily read, his expression said, We’ve got a situation, Dad. What do I have to do – learn Morse code and beat out a message with my tail?

      “All right, okay,” Grady said, rising from the dinette chair.

      The dog hurried toward the front of the house once more. Grady found him in the open vestibule, off the living room, his back to the front door, facing the stairs to the second floor, ears pricked.

      The rooms above were as silent as they should have been, as they always were in a house where a man lived alone with a dog that seldom left his side.

      Nevertheless, Merlin abruptly galloped up the stairs two at a time. He disappeared into the second-floor hallway before his master had climbed three steps behind him.

      In the upper hall, Grady switched on the ceiling light. Past a half-open door, he found the dog standing in shadows in the master bedroom. The wolfhound was at a window that faced onto the roof of the front porch, alert to something beyond the glass.

      Grady left the lamps unlit. With its secondhand light, the moon painted the peeling white bark of the spreading birch that overhung the house, and silvered the autumn leaves that would be sovereign-gold in sunshine.

      As Grady moved toward Merlin, before he could lean close to the window, a tom-tom and pitter-patter quickened across the porch roof. Several racing feet, by the sound of them.

      Although Merlin was tall enough to see out of the lower panes, he put his forepaws on the windowsill and rose to a better view.

      By the time Grady insisted on a place beside the window-hogging wolfhound and put his forehead to the cool glass, the noise stopped. Whatever once prowled the porch roof had now gone vertical.

      In the windless night, the lower branches of the lacy birch first tossed but then merely trembled as the principal agitation shifted to higher realms. As something ascended, the tree opened its autumn purse and paid out a wealth of leaves.

      Grady disengaged the window lock, but before he could raise the lower sash, the climbers sprang from tree to house roof: one thud, immediately another. Judging by their footfalls, they seemed to be exploring this way and that, up the slate slope toward the ridgeline.

      Paws still on the windowsill, Merlin tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling.

      “Maybe raccoons,” Grady said.

      Snorting dismissively, the wolfhound dropped from the window, turned toward the bedroom, and cocked his head to listen.

      The master-bedroom fireplace stood directly above the fireplace in the living room. A metallic rattle and creak echoed down the shared flue, drawing Merlin to the hearth.

      Something on the roof was testing the copper spark-arresting hood atop the chimney. Having installed it himself, Grady knew that it couldn’t be easily removed.

      Because no fire currently burned, the damper was engaged between the smoke chamber and the firebox. If something got into the flue, it could not penetrate the steel-plate damper and enter the bedroom.

      Abandoning the chimney hood, the roof-travelers scurried down the west slope.

      As the noises faded toward the back of the house, Merlin hurried out of the bedroom. Grady reached the top of the stairs just as the wolfhound arrived at the bottom.

      Descending, he wondered if he had locked the back door after they had come in from the dog’s late-afternoon exercise. Then he wondered why he was apprehensive.

      He could not deny that something less than fear but more than mere disquiet gripped him as he sought Merlin through the first floor and found him in the kitchen. The dog stood at the door. He wanted to go outside.

      Grady hesitated.