But it didn't make any difference anyway, because she wasn't there. I opened the front door and closed it quietly behind me. The house smelled of dusty heat from the radiators and a kind of damp wood funk that came up from the floors in winter. I started to reach for the light but hung back when I heard someone talking or murmuring in the bedroom. Ah ha! Saxony was having a snooze.

Walking on the toes of my sneakers from the kitchen to the bedroom, I heard a voice murmuring again. It was almost unfamiliar. Almost too high and disconnected for it to be hers. I opened the door as slowly as I could to avoid any creaks it might make. The shades were drawn all the way down. The only thing on the bed was an ethereally white, totally familiar lump with its back turned to me. Nails. Very adorable, but a lousy substitute at the moment for Saxony.

His legs stuck out stiffly in front of him. He twitched a few times and his jaws snapped at the air. I thought he was just having another Nails nightmare. Then he spoke.

"The fur. It is. Breathe through the fur."

A chill needle ran up my spine to my neck. The fucking dog talked. The fucking dog talked. I couldn't move. I wanted to hear more, I wanted to run like hell.

My eyes raced past the corners of the room. We were alone. I was alone.

Willie Morris's memoir of James Jones was on the night table, my other pair of stringy black sneakers was outside the closet door, the dog was on the bed.

"Thomas. Yes, Thomas."

I screeched. I didn't leap in the air when he said my name, but a spasm flicked down my backbone at the same time as I yelped.

There was a flurry of white motion, a couple of sharp barks, and then he was standing on the bed looking at me, tail wagging. He looked like lovely old dumb Nails.

"I heard you!" Scared as I was, I felt like an idiot talking to him like that. He kept on wagging his white whip tail. It slowed for a split second when I said that, but went right back up to its fast windshield-wiper speed.

"Don't you shit around with me, Nails. I'm telling you – I heard you!" What the hell was I doing? He played out the whole bad-doggie bit: the tail went between his legs and his ears pressed down close to his head.

"Goddammit, goddammit, dog. I heard everything. Don't fuck around with me! I heard what you said. 'Breathe through the fur.'"

I was about to say more when he did an odd thing. He closed his eyes for a long time, then sat back on his legs like a frog, looking resigned.

"Well? Huh? Well, say something more. Go ahead. Just don't fool around!" I honestly didn't know what I was saying. He opened his eyes and looked right at me.

"They're home," he said. "They'll be in here in a minute." His voice was clear and understandable, but it sounded like a dwarf's – high and squeezed up through his throat. But he was right. Car doors slammed and I heard the mumble of voices from outside. I looked at him and he blinked.

"But who are you?"

He said nothing more. The front door clicked, and seconds later the house was filled with light brown shopping bags, cold cheeks, and Nails's barks.

I wanted to tell someone, but every time I got up enough nerve to talk to Saxony, I remembered the James Thurber story about the unicorn in the garden. A mousy little man discovers a unicorn in his garden. He tells his monstrous wife. She laughs it off the way she laughs off everything he says. The unicorn keeps coming to visit, but it only visits him. In turn he keeps telling the old battle-ax about his nice new friend. Finally she gets fed up and calls for the guys in the white coats with the butterfly nets. The story goes on, and in the end she's the one who gets carted away, but I only thought about it up to that point: where the husband told her once too often about the unicorn and she reached for the telephone and the number of the loony bin.

If not Saxony, then I certainly wasn't going to tell Anna. I had gotten myself into enough trouble when I told her about seeing Krang the Kite on Sharon Lee's face. All I had to do now was add Nails the Talking Dog to my list, and my days as Marshall France's biographer would be over.

But after that, he stayed away from me. He didn't come up on the bed in the morning, didn't follow me around the house anymore. I watched him like a hawk whenever we were in the same room together, but his tight, absent face betrayed nothing but dog eyes and a flash of bubblegum-pink gums whenever he was eating or cleaning himself. He was very much the dog.

Porpoises talked, didn't they? And hadn't they discovered a couple of words in ape language? What about that woman in Africa, Goodall? So what was so strange about a talking dog? These and other stupid rationalizations fluttered across my brain on featherless wings. I had witnessed one of the great wonders of the world, and yet I wondered if it wasn't the way all mad people began down "that" road. Kite faces on women, talking dogs… All the things that I knew were a little weird about me stood up, took a bow, and started walking around inside me at top speed: liking my mask collection a little too much, talking about my father so much that I obviously had some kind of fixation about him… Things like that.

Nails was killed forty-eight hours later. Every night before bedtime, Mrs. Fletcher fed him and led him out for his last run. No one paid much attention to the leash law in Galen, and wandering dogs were a common sight at all times of the day.

That night a thick winter fog had settled over everything, and the few sounds that seeped in from the street were muffled. Saxony was working on her marionette in the kitchen and I was typing up some notes on Chapter Three when the doorbell rang. I yelled that I would get it and tapped a last key before I got up from my chair.

A young pretty girl I'd never seen before stood on the porch under the bare overhead light. She looked very happy.

"Hi, Mr. Abbey. Is Mrs. Fletcher in?"

"Mrs. Fletcher? I think so." The door to the upstairs was closed. I climbed all the way up and knocked to get her. She came out in her robe and slippers.

"Hi, Tom. What's up? I'm right in the middle of Kojak."

"There's a girl downstairs who wants to see you."

"At this time of night?"

"Yes. She's waiting for you at the front door."

"Out in this weather? Give me your arm so I can get down these stairs without breaking my leg."

When we got to the bottom, the girl was standing in the same place.

"Carolyn Cort! What brings you out here tonight?" She rummaged through the pockets of her robe and came up with a battered pink leather eyeglass ease. Hooking the fragile-looking spectacles over her ears, she took a step forward. "Huh?"

Carolyn Cort smiled, reached out, and touched the old woman on the elbow. She looked back and forth between the two of us. For a moment I was afraid that she was a Friend of God or a Jesus freak or something, come out in the middle of the night to convert the heathen. "Mrs. Fletcher, you'll never believe this. Nails just got killed! He got hit in the fog!"

I closed my eyes and rubbed the bottom of my face. I felt the fog come up into my nose, and it almost made me cough. I still had my eyes closed when the old woman spoke. Her voice was shrill and excited.

"What's today? Is it right, Carolyn? I can't remember!"

I heard a nervous giggle and opened my eyes. Carolyn was smiling from ear to ear and nodding. "It's exact, Goosey! It's October 24th!"

I looked at Mrs. Fletcher. She was smiling too, just as hard as Carolyn. She put a hand to her mouth. Her smile sneaked out from beneath the hand and somehow continued to spread.

"Who did it, Carolyn?"

"Sam Dorris! Just as it was supposed to be!"

"Thank God!"

"Yes. Then Timmy Benjamin broke his finger playing football with his brothers!"