And it didn’t look away.
Although I wasn’t betrayed by eyeshine, as the monkey was, my eyes might be serving as mirrors in which its radiant glare was dimly reflected. Perhaps it detected the merest pinpoint glimmers of its own fiery scrutiny returned to it, wasn’t sure that it saw anything at all, but remained transfixed by the mystery.
I considered closing my eyes, letting the monkey’s bright stare fall upon my unreflective lids. But I was afraid that I would miss its sudden blink of comprehension and would fail to shoot it before it launched itself in at me and, perhaps, bit my gun hand or climbed my body to claw and chew my face.
Meeting its gaze at this close range, with such intensity, I was surprised that my fear and thick revulsion could coexist with a mess of other powerful emotions: anger at those who had brought this new species into existence, sorrow over the hideous oncoming corruption of this beautiful world that God has given us, wonder at the inhuman but undeniable intelligence in these strange eyes. Bleak despair, too. And loneliness. And yet…an irrational wild hope.
Standing in my line of fire, unaware that it was vulnerably exposed to an emotional basket case with a handgun, the creature burbled softly, more like a pigeon than a rhesus. The sound had an inquisitive quality.
One of the other monkeys shrieked.
I almost fired the Glock reflexively.
Two additional voices scolded the first.
In front of me, the monkey spun away from the broom closet. It scampered deeper into the kitchen, drawn by the commotion.
In fact, the uproar indicated that all six were now gathered at the farther end of the room. I saw no shining eyes turned in my direction.
They had found something of interest. I could imagine only that it was the source of the putrid odor.
As I eased up on the trigger, I realized that a glutinous mass had risen into my throat—maybe my heart, maybe my lunch—and I had to swallow hard to get it down and to be able to breathe again.
While my eyes and the monkey’s had been locked, I’d fallen into a curious physical detachment so complete that I had ceased to feel the spasms of pain in my cramping calf. Now the agony returned, worse than before.
Because all the members of the search party were distracted and making noise, I exercised the cramped muscle as best I could by shifting my weight firmly back and forth from heel to toe of my left foot. This maneuver relieved the pain somewhat, although not enough to ensure that I would be able to move gracefully if one of the monkeys invited me to waltz.
The conferring members of the search party began to jabber in louder voices. They were excited. Although I don’t believe they have a language in remotely the sense that we do, their bleats and hisses and growls and warbles were obviously argumentative. They appeared to have forgotten what they had come looking for in the first place. Easily distracted, quick to fall into disorganization, prone to put aside mutual interests in favor of quarreling among themselves—for the first time, these guys seemed an awful lot like human beings.
The longer I listened to them, the more I dared to believe that I would get out of this bungalow alive.
I was still rocking my foot, flexing and contracting my calf, when one of the quarrelers broke away from the rest of the search party and crossed the kitchen to the dining-room doorway. The instant I saw its eyeshine, I stopped moving and pretended to be a broom.
The monkey halted at the dining-room threshold and shrieked. It seemed to be calling to other members of the troop, who were, presumably, waiting outside on the front porch or searching the bedrooms.
Answering voices rose at once. They grew nearer.
The prospect of sharing this small kitchen with even more monkeys—possibly with the entire troop—punctured my half-inflated hope of survival. As my shaky confidence rapidly gave way to confident desperation, I examined my options and found no new ones.
The depth of my desperation was so abyssal that I actually asked myself what the immortal Jackie Chan would do in a situation like this. The answer was simple: Jackie would erupt out of the broom closet with an athletic leap that landed him in the very midst of the search party, drop-kick one of them between the legs, karate-chop two of them in their necks as he somersaulted to his feet, get off a cool one-liner, break the arms and legs of multiple adversaries during an astonishing pirouette of flashing fists and feet, execute a series of charming and hilarious rubber-faced expressions the likes of which no one has seen since the days of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, tap-dance across the heads of the remaining members of the troop, crash through the window above the sink, and flee to safety. Jackie Chan never gets calf cramps.
Meanwhile, my calf cramp had become so painful that my eyes were watering.
More monkeys entered the kitchen. They were chattering as they came, as if the discovery of any decomposing critter was the ideal occasion to call in all the relatives, open a keg of beer, and have a hootenanny.
I couldn’t discern how many joined the original six searchers. Maybe two. Maybe four. Not more than five or six.
Too many.
None of the newcomers showed the least interest in my corner of the room. They joined the others around whatever fascinating mound of rotting flesh they had discovered, and the lively argument continued.
My luck wouldn’t hold. At any moment they might decide to finish their inspection of the cabinets. The individual that had nearly discovered me might remember it had sensed something odd in this vicinity.
I considered slipping out of the broom closet, creeping along the wall, easing through the doorway, and taking refuge in a corner of the dining room, as far away from the main traffic pattern as I could get. Before they had entered the kitchen, the first squad of searchers must have satisfied themselves that no one was lurking in that chamber; they wouldn’t thoroughly inspect the same territory again.
With my cramp, I couldn’t move fast, but I could still rely on the cover of darkness, my old friend. Besides, if I had to stay where I was much longer, my nerves were going to wind so tight that I’d implode.
Just as I convinced myself that I had to move, one of the monkeys sprinted away from whatever reeking pile they had gathered to discuss, returning to the dining-room doorway. It shrieked, perhaps calling for yet additional members of the troop to come here and sniff the vile remains.
Even above the chattering and muttering of the crowd clustered around the dead thing, I could hear an answering cry from elsewhere in the bungalow.
The kitchen was only marginally less noisy than a monkey house at a zoo. Maybe the lights would come on and I’d discover myself in a Twilight Zone moment. Maybe Christopher Snow wasn’t my current identity but merely the name under which I had lived in a previous life, and now I was one of them, reincarnated as a rhesus. Maybe we weren’t in a Dead Town bungalow but were in a giant cage, surrounded by people pointing and laughing as we swung from ropes and scratched our bald butts.
As though I had tempted fate merely by thinking about the lights coming on, a glow arose toward the front of the house. I was aware of it, at first, solely because the monkey at the threshold of the dining room began to resolve out of the blackness, the way an image gradually solidifies on Polaroid film.
This development didn’t alarm or even surprise the beast, so I assumed that it had called for the light.
I wasn’t as sanguine about these changing circumstances as the monkey appeared to be. The shroud of darkness in which I’d been hiding was going to be stripped away.
8
Because the approaching luminosity was frost white rather than yellow and because it didn’t throb like an open flame, it was most likely produced by a flashlight. The beam wasn’t focused on the doorway; instead, the monkey standing there was illuminated by the indirect radiance, indicating that the source was a two-or three-battery model, not just a penlight.
Evidently, to the extent that their small hands could serve them, the members of the troop were tool users. They had either found the flashlight or stolen it—probably the latter, because these monkeys have no more respect for the law and property rights than they have for Miss Manners’ rules of etiquette.
The individual at the doorway faced the steadily brightening dining room with a peculiar air of expectation, perhaps even with a degree of wonder.
At the farther end of the kitchen, out of my line of sight, the rest of the searchers had fallen silent. I suspected that their posture matched that of the rhesus I could see, that they were equally fascinated or even awed.
Since the source of the glow was surely nothing more exotic than a flashlight, I assumed that something about the bearer of the light elicited these monkeys’ reverence. I was curious about that individual, but reluctant to die for the satisfaction of my curiosity.
Already, a dangerous amount of light was passing through the doorway. Absolute darkness no longer reigned. I could make out the general shapes of the cabinets across the kitchen.
When I glanced down, I was still in shadow, but I could see my hands and the pistol. Worse, I could see my clothes and shoes, which were all black.
The cramp burned in my leg. I tried not to think about it. That was like trying not to think about a grizzly bear while it gnawed off your foot.
To clear my vision, I was now blinking away both involuntary tears of pain and a flood of cold sweat. Forget about the danger posed by the rapidly receding darkness: Soon the troop was going to be able to smell eau de Snow even over the malodor of decomposition.
The monkey at the dining-room threshold took two steps backward as the light advanced. If the beast looked in my direction, it could not fail to see me.
I was almost reduced to the childhood game of pretending with all my might to be invisible.
Then, in the dining room, the bearer of the flashlight evidently halted and turned toward something else of interest. A murmur swept through the searchers in the kitchen as the glow diminished.
Oily gloom welled out of the corners, and now I heard the sound that had captured the monkeys’ attention. The drone of an engine. Perhaps a truck. It was growing louder.
From the front of the house came a cry of alarm.
In the dining room, the bearer of the light switched it off.
The search party fled the kitchen. The linoleum crackled under their feet, but they made no other sound.
From the dining room onward, they retreated with the stealth they had exhibited when originally charging the bungalow from the street.
They were so silent that I wasn’t convinced they had entirely withdrawn. I half suspected they were toying with me, waiting just inside the dining-room doorway. When I limped out of the kitchen, they would swarm over me, gleefully yelling “Surprise,” gouge out my eyes, bite off my lips, and conduct a fortune-telling session with my entrails.
The growl of the engine grew steadily louder, although the vehicle that produced it was still some distance away.
During all the nights I had explored Fort Wyvern’s desolate precincts, I had never until now heard an engine or other mechanical sound. Generally this place was so quiet that it might have been an outpost at the end of time, when the sun no longer rose and the stars remained fixed in the heavens and the only sound was the occasional low moan of a wind from nowhere.
As I tentatively eased out of the broom closet, I remembered something Bobby had asked when I’d told him to come in by the river: Do I have to creep or can I strut?
I had said that sneaky didn’t matter anymore. By that, I hadn’t meant that he should arrive with drum and fife. I had also told him to watch his ass.
Although I had never imagined that Bobby would drive into Wyvern, I was more than half convinced that the approaching vehicle was his Jeep. I should have anticipated this. Bobby was Bobby, after all.
I’d first thought that the troop had reacted with fright to the engine noise, that they had fled in fear of being spotted, pursued. They spend most of their time in the hills, in the wild, coming into Moonlight Bay—on what mysterious missions I do not know—only after sundown, preferring to limit their visits to nights when they have the double cover of darkness and fog. Even then, they travel as much as possible by storm drains, parks, arroyos, dry riverbeds, vacant lots, and perhaps from tree to tree. With rare exception, they do not show themselves, and they are masters of secrecy, moving among us as covertly as termites move through the walls of our houses, as unnoticed as earthworms tunneling the ground under our feet.
Here on turf more congenial to them, however, their reaction to the sound of an engine might be bolder and more aggressive than it would have been in town. They might not flee from it. They might be drawn to it. If they followed it without showing themselves and waited for the driver to park and get out…
The engine roar grew steadily louder. The vehicle was in the neighborhood, probably only a few blocks away.
Abandoning caution, trying to shake the pain out of my leg as though it were a biting mongrel that could be kicked loose, I hobbled out of the kitchen and hurried blindly through the monkeyless dining room. As far as I could tell, none of the flea farms lingered in the living room, either.
At the window from which I had watched them earlier, I put my brow to the glass and saw eight or ten members of the troop in the street. They were dropping, one by one, through the open manhole, into which their comrades had apparently already vanished.
Happily, Bobby wasn’t in jeopardy of having his brain scooped out and his skull turned into a flowerpot to beautify some monkey den. Not immediate jeopardy, anyway.
As fast as flowing water, the monkeys poured into the manhole, gone in a quicksilver ripple. In their wake, the tree-lined street appeared to be no more substantial than a dreamscape, a mere illusion of twisted shadows and secondhand light, and it was almost possible to believe that the troop had been as imaginary as the cast of a nightmare.
Heading for the front door, I returned the spare magazine to the pocket in my shoulder holster. I held on to the Glock.
When I reached the porch, I heard the manhole cover being slid into place. I was surprised that the monkeys were strong enough to maneuver that heavy object from the storm drain below, a tricky task even for a grown man.
The engine noise reverberated through the bungalows and trees. The vehicle was close, yet I saw no headlights.
As I reached the street, still working the last of the cramp out of my leg, the manhole cover clanked into its niche. I arrived in time to see the curved point of a steel grappling hook wiggle out of a slot in the iron, extracted from below. City street-department crews carry such implements to snare and lift these covers without having to pry them loose from the edge. The monkeys must have found or stolen the hook; hanging from the service ladder in the drain, a couple of them were able to leverage the disc into place, covering their trail.
Their use of tools had ominous implications that I was loath to consider.