by Dean Koontz
Although he was convinced that disease had not played a role in the behavior and death of the raccoons, Eduardo could not be certain of his diagnosis, so he took precautions when handling the bodies. He tied a bandanna over his nose and mouth, and wore a pair of rubber gloves. He didn’t handle the carcasses directly but lifted each with a short-handled shovel and slipped it into its own large plastic trash bag. He twisted the top of each bag, tied a knot in it, and put it in the cargo area of the Cherokee station wagon in the garage. After hosing off the small smears of blood on the front porch, he used several cotton cloths to scrub the kitchen floor with pure Lysol. Finally he threw the cleaning rags into a bucket, stripped off the gloves and dropped them on top of the rags, and set the bucket on the back porch to be dealt with later.
He also put a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun and the .22 pistol in the Cherokee. He took the video camera with him, because he didn’t know when he might need it. Besides, the tape currently in the camera contained the footage of the raccoons, and he didn’t want that to disappear as had the tape he’d taken of the luminous woods and the black doorway. For the same reason, he took the yellow tablet that was half filled with his handwritten account of these recent events.
By the time he was ready to drive into Eagle’s Roost, the long twilight had surrendered to night. He didn’t relish returning to a dark house, though he had never been skittish about that before. He turned on lights in the kitchen and the downstairs hall. After further thought, he switched on lamps in the living room and study.
He locked up, backed the Cherokee out of the garage—and thought too much of the house remained dark. He went back inside to turn on a couple of upstairs lights. By the time he returned to the Cherokee and headed down the half-mile driveway toward the county road to the south, every window on both floors of the house glowed.
The Montana vastness appeared to be emptier than ever before. Mile after mile, up into the black hills on one hand and across the timeless plains on the other, the few tiny clusters of lights that he saw were always in the distance. They seemed adrift on a sea, as if they were the lights of ships moving inexorably away toward one horizon or another.
Though the moon had not yet risen, he didn’t think its glimmer would have made the night seem any less enormous or more welcoming. The sense of isolation that troubled him had more to do with his interior landscape than with the Montana countryside.
He was a widower, childless, and most likely in the last decade of his life, separated from so many of his fellow men and women by age, fate, and inclination. He had never needed anyone but Margarite and Tommy. After losing them, he had been resigned to living out his years in an almost monkish existence—and had been confident that he could do so without succumbing to boredom or despair. Until recently he’d gotten along well enough. Now, however, he wished that he had reached out to make friends, at least one, and had not so single-mindedly obeyed his hermit heart.
Mile by lonely mile, he waited for the distinctive rustle of plastic in the cargo space behind the back seat.
He was certain the raccoons were dead. He didn’t understand why he should expect them to revive and tear their way out of the bags, but he did.
Worse, he knew that if he heard them ripping at the plastic, sharp little claws busily slicing, they would not be the raccoons he had shoveled into the bags, not exactly, maybe not much like them at all, but changed.
“Foolish old coot,” he said, trying to shame himself out of such morbid and peculiar contemplations.
Eight miles after leaving his driveway, he finally encountered other traffic on the county route. Thereafter, the closer he drew to Eagle’s Roost, the busier the two-lane blacktop became, though no one would ever have mistaken it for the approach road to New York City—or even Missoula.
He had to drive through town to the far side, where Dr. Lester Yeats maintained his professional offices and his home on the same five-acre property where Eagle’s Roost again met rural fields. Yeats was a veterinarian who, for years, had cared for Stanley Quartermass’ horses—a white-haired, white-bearded, jolly man who would have made a good Santa Claus if he’d been heavy instead of whip-thin.
The house was a rambling gray clapboard structure with blue shutters and a slate roof. Because there were also lights on in the one-story barnlike building that housed Yeats’s offices and in the adjacent stables where four-legged patients were kept, he drove a few hundred feet past the house to the end of the graveled lane.
As Eduardo was getting out of the Cherokee, the front door of the office barn opened, and a man came out in a wash of fluorescent light, leaving the door ajar behind him. He was tall, in his early thirties, rugged-looking, with thick brown hair. He had a broad and easy smile. “Howdy. What can I do for you?”
“Lookin’ for Lester Yeats,” Eduardo said.
“Dr. Yeats?” The smile faded. “You an old friend or something?”
“Business,” Eduardo said. “Got some animals I’d like him to take a look at.”
Clearly puzzled, the stranger said, “Well, sir, I’m afraid Les Yeats isn’t doing business any more.”
“Oh? He retire?”
“Died,” the young man said.
“He did? Yeats?”
“More than six years ago.”
That startled Eduardo. “Sorry to hear it.” He hadn’t quite realized so much time had passed since he’d last seen Yeats.
A warm breeze sprang up, stirring the larches that were grouped at various points around the buildings.
The stranger said, “My name’s Travis Potter. I bought the house and practice from Mrs. Yeats. She moved to a smaller place in town.”
They shook hands, and instead of identifying himself, Eduardo said, “Dr. Yeats took care of our horses out at the ranch.”
“What ranch would that be?”
“Quartermass Ranch.”
“Ah,” Travis Potter said, “then you must be the…Mr. Fernandez, is it?”
“Oh, sorry, yeah, Ed Fernandez,” he replied, and had the uneasy feeling that the vet had been about to say “the one they talk about” or something of the sort, as if he was a local eccentric.
He supposed that might, in fact, be the case. Inheriting his spread from his rich employer, living alone, a recluse with seldom a word for anyone even when he ventured into town on errands, he might have become a minor enigma about whom townspeople were curious. The thought of it made him cringe.
“How many years since you’ve had horses?” Potter asked.
“Eight. Since Mr. Quartermass died.”
He realized how odd it was—not having spoken with Yeats in eight years, then showing up six years after he died, as if only a week had gone by.
They stood in silence a moment. The June night around them was filled with cricket songs.
“Well,” Potter said, “where are these animals?”
“Animals?”
“You said you had some animals for Dr. Yeats to look at.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“He was a good vet, but I assure you I’m his equal.”
“I’m sure you are, Dr. Potter. But these are dead animals.”
“Dead animals?”
“Raccoons.”
“Dead raccoons?”
“Three of them.”
“Three dead raccoons?”
Eduardo realized that if he did have a reputation as a local eccentric, he was only adding to it now. He was so out of practice at conversation that he couldn’t get to the point.
He took a deep breath and said what was necessary without going into the story of the doorway and other oddities: “They were acting funny, out in broad daylight, running in circles. Then one by one they dropped over.” He succinctly described their death throes, the blood in their nostrils and ears. “What I wondered was—could they be rabid?”
“You’re up against those foothills,” Potter said. “There’s always a little rabies working its way through the wild populations. That’s natural. But w
e haven’t seen evidence of it around here for a while. Blood in the ears? Not a rabies symptom. Were they foaming at the mouth?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Running in a straight line?”
“Circles.”
A pickup truck drove by on the highway, country music so loud on its radio that the tune carried all the way to the back of Potter’s property. Loud or not, it was a mournful song.
“Where are they?” Potter asked.
“Got them bagged in plastic in the Cherokee here.”
“You get bitten?”
“No,” Eduardo said.
“Scratched?”
“No.”
“Any contact with them whatsoever?”
Eduardo explained about the precautions he’d taken: the shovel, bandanna, rubber gloves.
Cocking his head, looking puzzled, Travis Potter said, “You telling me everything?”
“Well, I think so,” he lied. “I mean, their behavior was pretty strange, but I’ve told you everything important, no other symptoms I noticed.”
Potter’s gaze was forthright and penetrating, and for a moment Eduardo considered opening up and revealing the whole bizarre story.
Instead, he said, “If it isn’t rabies, does it sound like maybe it could be plague?”
Potter frowned. “Doubtful. Bleeding from the ears? That’s an uncommon symptom. You get any flea bites being around them?”
“I’m not itchy.”
The warm breeze pumped itself into a gust of wind, rattling the larches and startling a night bird out of the branches. It flew low over their heads with a shriek that startled them.
Potter said, “Well, why don’t you let these raccoons with me, and I’ll have a look.”
They removed the three green plastic bags from the Cherokee and carried them inside. The waiting room was deserted; Potter had evidently been doing paperwork in his office. They went through a door and down a short hallway to the white-tiled surgery, where they put the bags on the floor beside a stainless-steel examination table.
The room felt cool and looked cold. Harsh white light fell on the enamel, steel, and glass surfaces. Everything gleamed like snow and ice.
“What’ll you do with them?” Eduardo asked.
“I don’t have the means to test for rabies here. I’ll take tissue samples, send them up to the state lab, and we’ll have the results in a few days.”
“That’s all?”
“What do you mean?”
Poking one of the bags with the toe of his boot, Eduardo said, “You going to dissect one of them?”
“I’ll store them in one of my cold lockers and wait for the state lab’s report. If they’re negative for rabies, then, yeah, I’ll perform an autopsy on one of them.”
“Let me know what you find?”
Potter gave him that penetrating stare again. “You sure you weren’t bitten or scratched? Because if you were, and if there’s any reason at all to suspect rabies, you should get to a doctor now and start the vaccine right away, tonight—”
“I’m no fool,” Eduardo said. “I’d tell you if there was any chance I’d been infected.”
Potter continued to stare at him.
Looking around the surgery, Eduardo said, “You really modernized the place from the way it was.”
“Come on,” the veterinarian said, turning to the door. “I have something I want to give you.”
Eduardo followed him into the hall and through another door into Potter’s private office. The vet rummaged in the drawers of a white, enameled-metal storage cabinet and handed him a pair of pamphlets—one on rabies, one on bubonic plague.
“Read up on the symptoms for both,” Potter said. “You notice anything similar in yourself, even similar, get to your doctor.”
“Don’t like doctors much.”
“That’s not the point. You have a doctor?”
“Never need one.”
“Then you call me, and I’ll get a doctor to you, one way or the other. Understand?”
“All right.”
“You’ll do it?”
“Sure will.”
Potter said, “You have a telephone out there?”
“Of course. Who doesn’t have a phone these days?”
The question seemed to confirm that he had an image as a hermit and an eccentric. Which maybe he deserved. Because now that he thought about it, he hadn’t used the phone to receive or place a call in at least five or six months. He doubted if it’d rung more than three times in the past year, and one of those was a wrong number.
Potter went to his desk, picked up a pen, pulled a notepad in front of him, and wrote the number down as Eduardo recited it. He tore off another sheet of notepaper and gave it to Eduardo because it was imprinted with his office address and his own phone numbers.
Eduardo folded the paper into his wallet. “What do I owe you?”
“Nothing,” Potter said. “These weren’t your pet raccoons, so why should you pay? Rabies is a community problem.”
Potter accompanied him out to the Cherokee.
The larches rustled in the warm breeze, crickets chirruped, and a frog croaked like a dead man trying to talk.
As he opened the driver’s door, Eduardo turned to the vet and said, “When you do that autopsy…”
“Yes?”
“Will you look just for signs of known diseases?”
“Disease pathologies, trauma.”
“That’s all?”
“What else would I look for?”
Eduardo hesitated, shrugged, and said, “Anything…strange.”
That stare again. “Well, sir,” Potter said, “I will now.”
All the way home through that dark and forlorn land, Eduardo wondered if he had done the right thing. As far as he could see, there were only two alternatives to the course of action he’d taken, and both were problematic.
He could have disposed of the raccoons on the ranch and waited to see what would happen next. But he might have been destroying important evidence that something not of this earth was hiding in the Montana woods.
Or he could have explained to Travis Potter about the luminous trees, throbbing sounds, waves of pressure, and black doorway. He could have told him about the raccoons keeping him under surveillance—and the sense he’d had that they were serving as surrogate eyes for the unknown watcher in the woods. If he was generally regarded as the old hermit of Quartermass Ranch, however, he wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Worse, once the veterinarian had spread the story, some busybody public official might get it in his head that poor old Ed Fernandez was senile or even flat-out deranged, a danger to himself and others. With all the compassion in the world, sorrowful-eyed and soft-voiced, shaking their heads sadly and telling themselves they were doing it for his own good, they might commit him against his will for medical examinations and a psychiatric review.
He was loath to be carted away to a hospital, poked and prodded and spoken to as if he had reverted to infancy. He wouldn’t react well. He knew himself. He would respond to them with stubbornness and contempt, irritating the do-gooders to such an extent that they might induce a court to take charge of his affairs and order him transferred to a nursing home or some other facility for the rest of his days.
He had lived a long time and had seen how many lives were ruined by people operating with the best intentions and a smug assurance of their own superiority and wisdom. The destruction of one more old man wouldn’t be noticed, and he had no wife or children, no friend or relative, to stand with him against the killing kindness of the state.
Giving the dead animals to Potter to be tested and autopsied was, therefore, as far as Eduardo had dared to go. He only worried that, considering the inhuman nature of the entity that controlled the coons, he might have put Travis Potter at risk in some way he couldn’t foresee.
Eduardo had hinted at a strangeness, however, and Potter had seemed to have his share of common sense. The vet knew the risks assoc
iated with disease. He would take every precaution against contamination, which would probably also be effective against whatever unguessable and unearthly peril the carcasses might pose in addition to microbiotic infection.
Beyond the Cherokee, the home lights of unmet families shone far out on the sea of night. For the first time in his life, Eduardo wished that he knew them, their names and faces, their histories and hopes.
He wondered if some child might be sitting on a distant porch or at a window, staring across the rising plains at the headlights of the Cherokee progressing westward through the June darkness. A young boy or girl, full of plans and dreams, might wonder who was in the vehicle behind those lights, where he was bound, and what his life was like.
The thought of such a child out there in the night gave Eduardo the strangest sense of community, an utterly unexpected feeling that he was part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan, flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble and admirable, with a common destiny that every member shared.
For him, that was an unusually optimistic and philosophically generous view of his fellow men and women, uncomfortably close to sentimentality. But he was warmed as well as astonished by it.
He was convinced that whatever had come through the doorway was inimical to humankind, and his brush with it had reminded him that all of nature was, in fact, hostile. It was a cold and uncaring universe, either because God had made it that way as a test to determine good souls from bad, or simply because that’s the way it was. No man could survive in civilized comfort without the struggles and hard-won successes of all the people who had gone before him and who shared his time on earth with him. If a new evil had entered the world, one to dwarf the evil of which some men and women were capable, humanity would need a sense of community more desperately than ever before in its long and troubled journey.
The house came into view when he was a third of the way along the half-mile driveway, and he continued uphill, approaching to within sixty or eighty yards of it before realizing that something was wrong. He braked to a full stop.