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room. Even when it wasn’t storming out, the Paleobiology offices at the Royal Ontario Museum were a wonderfully macabre place — especially in the evening after most of the lights had been turned off. Bones were everywhere. Here, a black
Smilodon
skull with fifteen-centimeter-long saber teeth. There, the curving brown claws of an ornithomimid mounted on a metal stand, poised as if ready to seize fresh prey. Sprawling across a table, the articulated yellow skeleton of a Pliocene crocodile. Scattered about: boxes of shark teeth, sorting trays with thousands of bone chips, a small cluster of fossil dinosaur eggs looking as though they were about to hatch, and plaster jackets containing heaven-only-knows-what brought back from the latest dig.
    From outside, the claps of thunder were like dinosaur roars, echoing down the millennia.
    This was my favorite time. The phones had stopped ringing and the grad students and volunteer catalogers had gone home. It was the one opportunity in the day for me to relax and get caught up on some of my paperwork.
    And, when all that was done, I took my old Toshiba palmtop out of the locked drawer in my desk and wrote my daily entry in this diary. (I normally wouldn’t run a computer during an electrical storm, but my trusty Tosh was battery powered.) I executed a macro that jumped to the bottom of my diary file, inserted the current date — 16 February 2013 — boldfaced it, and typed a colon and two spaces. I was about to begin today’s write-up when my eyes were caught by the tail end of the previous entry.
I let my tears flow freely
, it said.
    Huh?
    I scrolled back a few pages.
    My heart pounded erratically.
    What the hell was this?
    Where did this entry come from?
    Living dinosaurs? A journey back through time? An attack by — ? Was this some kind of joke? If I ever found out who’d been messing with my diary, I’d kill him. I was so pissed off, I barely noticed that the freak lightning storm had stopped almost as suddenly as it had begun.
    I jumped to the top of the document. I’d begun a new diary file on January 1, about six weeks ago, but this file started with a date only five days ago. Still, there were pages and pages of unfamiliar material here. I began to read from the beginning.
    Fred, who lives down the street from me, has a cottage on Georgian Bay. One weekend he went up there alone and left his tabby cat back home with his wife and kids. The damned tabby ran in front of a car right outside my townhouse. Killed instantly.
    Those weren’t my words. Where was my diary? How did this get here in its place? What the hell was going on?
    And what’s this about Tess and Klicks — ? Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ…

Countdown: 16
    To really understand a man, you have to get inside his head.
    —Rudolph L. Schroeder, Canadian clinical psychologist (1941– )
    Mesozoic sunlight shone through the glassteel window that ran around the curving rim of the
Sternberger
’s habitat, stinging my eyes and casting harsh shadows on the flat rear wall. I woke up still feeling strangely light-headed and buoyant. I looked around the semicircular chamber, but Klicks was nowhere to be found. The bastard had gone outside without me. I quickly shed my PJs, pulled on the same Tilley pants that I’d worn yesterday, fumbled into my shirt, jacket, and boots, and opened door number one, bounding down the little ramp that led to the outer hatch. Much to my surprise, I hit my head on the low ceiling as I went down the ramp. Rubbing my bruised pate, I opened the blue outer door panel and looked down at the crater wall. In the brown earth, I could clearly see the skid marks made by Klicks’s size twelves. To their right, there were giant triple-clawed tyrannosaur tracks, made by the beasts that had reconnoitered us last night. Also visible: tiny two-pronged marks made by the minuscule tyrannosaur finger-claws.
    I took a deep breath and walked forward. The first step, as the saying goes, was a doozy. The