Or were they?
Thorne had the sense that something was wrong. Something right before his eyes, something that he could see but couldn't see. With the effort of staring, he began to think his eyes were playing tricks on him. He thought he detected a slight movement in the bushes to the Tight. The pattern of the leaves seemed to shift in the moonlight. Shift, and stabilize again.
But he wasn't sure.
Thorne stared forward, straining. And as he looked he began to think that it wasn't the bushes that had caught his eye, but rather the chain-link fence. For most of its length, the fence was overgrown with an irregular tangle of vines, but in a few places the regular diamond pattern of links was visible. And there was something strange about that pattern. The fence seemed to be moving, rippling.
Thorne watched carefully. Maybe it is moving, he thought. Maybe there's an animal inside the fence, pushing against it, making it move. But that didn't seem quite right.
It was something else…
Suddenly, lights came on inside the store. They shone through the barred windows, casting a geometric pattern of dark shadows across the open clearing, and onto the bushes by the tennis court. And for a moment - just a rnoment - Thorne saw that the bushes beside the tennis court were oddly shaped, and that they were actually two dinosaurs, seven feet tall, standing side by side, staring right at him.
Their bodies seemed to be covered in a patchwork pattern of light and dark that made them blend in perfectly with leaves behind them, and ith the fence of the tennis court. Thorne was confused. Their concealment had been perfect - too perfect - until the lights from the store windows had shone out and caught them in the sudden bright glare.
Thorne watched, holding his breath. And then he realized that the leafy light-and-dark pattern went only partway up their bodies, to mid-thorax. Above that, the animals had a kind of diamond-shaped crisscross pattern that matched the fence.
And as Thorne stared, the complex patterns on their bodies faded, the animals turned a chalky white, and then a series of vertical striped shadows began to appear, which exactly matched the shadows cast by the windows.
And before his eyes, the two dinosaurs disappeared from view again. Squinting, with concentrated effort, he could just barely distinguish the outlines of their bodies. He would never have been able to see them at all, had he not already known they were there.
They were chameleons. But with a power of mimicry unlike any chameleon Thorne had ever seen.
Slowly, he backed away into the shed, moving deeper into darkness.
"My God!" Levine exclaimed, staring out the window.
"Sorry," Harding said "But I had to turn on the lights. That boy needs help. I can't do it in the dark."
Levine did not answer her. He was staring out the window, trying to comprehend what he had just seen. He now realized what he had glimpsed the day Diego was killed. That brief momentary sense that something was wrong. Levine now knew what it was. But it was quite beyond anything that was known among terrestrial animals and -
"What is it?" she said, standing alongside him at the window. "Is it Thorne?"
"Look," Levine said.
She stared out through the bars. "At the bushes? What7 What am I supposed to - "
Look," he said.
She watched for a moment longer, then shook her head. "I'm sorry."
"Start at the bottom of the bushes," Levine told her. "Then let your eyes move up very slowly…Just look…and you'll see the outline."
He heard her sigh. "I'm sorry."
"Then turn out the lights again," he said. "And you'll see,"
She turned the lights out, and for a moment Levine saw the two animals in sharp relief, their bodies pale white with vertical stripes in the moonlight. Almost immediately, the pattern started to fade.
Harding came back, pushed in alongside him, and this time she saw the animals instantly. Just as Levine knew she would.
"No shit," she said. "There are two of them?"
"Yes. Side by side."
"And…is the pattern fading?"
"Yes. It's fading." As they watched, the striped pattern on their skins was replaced by the leafy pattern of the rhododendrons behind them. Once again, the two dinosaurs blended into invisibility. But such complex patterning implied that their epidermal layers were arranged in a manner similar to the chromatophores of marine invertebrates. The subtlety of shading, the rapidity of the changes all suggested -
Harding frowned. "What are they?" she asked.
"Chameleons of unparalleled skill, obviously. Although I'm not sure one is entirely justified in referring to them as chameleons, since technically chameleons have only the ability - "
"What are they?" Sarah said impatiently.
"Actually, I'd say they're Carnotaurus sastrei. Type specimen's from Patagonia. Two meters in height, with distinctive heads - you notice the short, bulldog snouts, and the pair of large horns above the eyes? Almost like wings - "
"They're carnivores?"
"Yes, of course, they have the - "