The feathered sentinels didn’t leave their perches to pursue me. They didn’t even rustle the leaves around them.
I was being truthful when I said that I didn’t believe they were going to pull a Hitchcock; but I had not ruled out the possibility altogether. After all, in Wyvern—in all of Moonlight Bay, in fact—even a creature as unintimidating as a nightingale can be more than it seems and more dangerous than a tiger. The end of the world as we know it may lie in the breast of a chimney swift or in the blood of the tiniest mouse.
As I continued along the street, the light of the awakened moon was so bright that I cast a faint shadow, which walked neither ahead of nor behind me, but remained close by my side, as though to remind me that my four-legged brother, who usually occupied that spot, was missing.
6
Half the cottages and bungalows in Dead Town have only stoops. This was one of the other half, a bungalow enhanced by a set of brick steps leading up to a front porch.
A spider had built a web between the pilasters flanking the top of the steps. I couldn’t see this construction in the dark, but it must not have been the home of a giant mutant species, because the silk-thread spokes and spirals were so fragile they dissolved around me without resistance. Some of those fine-spun filaments clung to my face, but I wiped them away with one hand as I crossed the porch, no more concerned about the destruction that I had wrought than Godzilla is concerned about the demolished skyscrapers he leaves in his wake.
Although events of recent weeks had given me a new and profound respect for many of the animals with which we share this world, I’d never be able to embrace pantheism. Pantheists regard all forms of life, even spiders and flies, with reverence, but I can’t ignore the fact that spiders and flies—bugs and worms and wriggly things in general—will feed on me when I’m dead. I don’t feel compelled to treat any creature as a fellow citizen of the planet, with rights equal to mine and deserving of all courtesies, if it regards me as dinner. I’m confident that Mother Nature understands my attitude and is not offended.
The front door, its peeling paint somewhat phosphorescent in the moonlight, was ajar. The corroded hinges didn’t creak but rasped like the dry knuckle bones of a skeleton making a fist.
I stepped inside.
Because I had come in here for the express reason that I felt safer under a roof than in the open, I considered closing the door. Maybe the birds would suddenly shake off their eerie stupor and come shrieking after me.
On the other hand, an open door is an avenue of escape. I left it open.
Although I was wrapped by silky blackness as effective as a blindfold, I knew I was in the living room, because the hundreds of bungalows that do have porches also share exactly the same floor plan, with nothing as grand as a foyer or front hall. Living room, dining room, kitchen, and two bedrooms.
Even when well maintained, these humble homes had offered the minimum comforts to the mostly young military families who occupied them, each family residing here for only a couple of years between transfers. Now they smell of dust, mildew, dry rot, and mice.
The floors are tongue-and-groove wood covered with many coats of paint, except for linoleum in the compact kitchen. Even under a self-proclaimed master of stealth like yours truly, they squeak.
The loose boards didn’t concern me. They ensured that no one could enter from the back of the bungalow and easily sneak up on me.
My eyes adapted to the gloom enough to allow me to see the front windows. Although these panes were set under the porch roof, they were visible even in the indirect moonlight: ash-gray rectangles in the otherwise pervasive blackness.
I went to the nearest of the two windows, neither of which was broken. The glass was dirty, and with a Kleenex I polished a cleaner circle in the center of it.
The front yards of these properties are not deep; between the Indian laurels, I had a view of the nearby street. I didn’t expect to see a parade go past, but since I find majorettes in short skirts to be as much of a turn-on as anybody does, I thought it wise to be prepared.
I switched on my cell phone again and keyed in the number for the unlisted back line that went directly to the broadcasting booth at KBAY, the biggest radio station in Santa Rosita County, where Sasha Goodall was currently the disc jockey on the midnight-to-six airshift. She was also the general manager, but since the station had lost the military audience—and thus a portion of its ad revenue—with the closing of Fort Wyvern, she was not the only one of the surviving employees to have assumed double duty.
The back line doesn’t ring in the booth but activates a flashing blue light on the wall opposite Sasha’s microphone. Evidently, she wasn’t doing on-air patter at the moment, because instead of leaving the call to the engineer, she herself picked it up: “Hey, Snowman.”
I don’t have sole possession of the back-line number, and like many privacy-minded people, I directed the phone company to prevent my number from registering on caller ID; yet even when the call doesn’t come through her engineer, Sasha always knows if it’s me.
“Are you spinning a tune?” I asked.
“‘A Mess of Blues.’”
“Elvis.”
“Less than a minute to go.”
“I know how you do that,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Say, ‘Hey, Snowman,’ before I speak a word.”
“So how do I do it?”
“Probably half the calls you ever answer directly on the back line are from me, so you always answer ‘Hey, Snowman.’”
“Wrong.”
“Right,” I insisted.
“I never lie.”
That was true.
“Stay with me, baby,” she said, putting me on hold.
While I waited for her to come back, I could hear her program over the phone line. She did a live public-service spot followed by a doughnut spot—recorded material at the front and back, with a live plug in the center—for a local car dealership.
Her voice is husky yet silky, soft and smooth and inviting. She could sell me a time-share condominium in Hell, as long as it came with air-conditioning.
I tried not to be entirely distracted by that voice as I listened with one ear for a creaking floorboard. Outside, the street remained deserted.
To give herself a full five minutes with me, she set up back-to-back tracks. Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year,” followed by Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.”
When she returned to me, I said, “Never heard such an eclectic program format before. Sinatra, Elvis, and Patsy?”
“It’s a theme show tonight,” she said.
“Theme?”
“Haven’t you been listening?”
“Busy. What theme?”
“‘Night of the Living Dead,’” she said.
“Stylin’.”
“Thanks. What’s happening?”
“Who’s your engineer this shift?”
“Doogie.”
Doogie Sassman is a panoramically tattooed Harley-Davidson fanatic who weighs more than three hundred pounds, twenty-five of which are accounted for by his untamed blond hair and lush silky beard. In spite of having a neck as wide as a pier caisson and a belly on which an entire family of sea gulls could gather to groom themselves, Doogie is a babe magnet who has dated some of the most beautiful women ever to walk the beaches between San Francisco and San Diego. Although he’s a good guy, with enough bearish charm to star in a Disney cartoon, Doogie’s solid success with stunningly gorgeous wahines—who are not normally won over by personality alone—is, Bobby says, one of the greatest mysteries of all time, right up there with what wiped out the dinosaurs and why tornadoes always zero in on trailer parks.
I said, “Can you go canned for a couple of hours and let Doogie run the show from his control panel?”
“You want a quickie?”
“With you, I want a forever.”
“Mr. Romance,” she said sarcastically but with secret delight.
“We’ve got a friend needs hand-holding big time.”
Sasha’s tone grew somber. “What now?”
I couldn’t lay out the situation in plain words, because of the possibility that the call was being monitored. In Moonlight Bay we live in a police state so artfully imposed that it is virtually invisible. If they were listening, I didn’t want to tip them to the fact that Sasha would be going to Lilly Wing’s house, because they might decide to stop her before she got there. Lilly desperately needed support. If Sasha dropped in by surprise, maybe by the back door, the cops would discover that she could stick like a five-barbed fishhook.
“Do you know…” I thought I saw movement in the street, but when I squinted through the bungalow window, I decided I’d seen only a moonshadow, perhaps caused by the tail of a cloud brushing across one cheek of the lunar face. “Do you know thirteen ways?”
“Thirteen ways?”
“The blackbird thing,” I said, wiping at the glass again with the Kleenex. My breath had left a faint condensation.
“Blackbird. Sure.”
We were talking about Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
My father worried about how I, limited by XP, would make it in the world without family, so he bequeathed to me a house without a mortgage and the proceeds of a huge life insurance policy. But he had given me another comforting legacy, too: a love of modern poetry. Because Sasha had acquired this passion from me, we could confound eavesdroppers as Bobby and I had done by using surfer lingo.
“There’s a word you expect him to use,” I said, referring to Stevens, “but it never appears.”
“Ah,” she said, and I knew she was following me.
A lesser poet writing thirteen stanzas relating to a blackbird would surely use the word wing, but Stevens never resorts to it.
“You realize who I mean?” I asked.
“Yes.” She knew that Lilly Wing—once Lilly Travis—had been the first woman I had loved and the first to break my heart.
Sasha is the second woman I have loved in the most profound sense of the word, and she swears that she will never break my heart. I believe her. She never lies.
Sasha has also assured me that if I ever cheat on her, she’ll use her Black & Decker power drill to put a half-inch bit through my heart.
I have seen the drill. The bits—an extensive set—that go with it are kept in a plastic case. On the steel shank of the half-inch auger bit, using red nail polish, she has painted my name: Chris. I’m pretty sure this is a joke.
She doesn’t have to worry. If I ever broke her heart, I would drill my own chest and save her the trouble of having to wash her hands afterward.
Call me Mr. Romance.
“What’s the hand-holding about?” Sasha asked.
“You’ll find out when you get there.”
“Any message?” she asked.
“Hope. That’s the message. There’s still hope.”
I wasn’t as confident as I sounded. There might be no truth in the message I’d just sent to Lilly. I’m not proud of the fact that, unlike Sasha, I sometimes lie.
“Where are you?” Sasha asked.
“Dead Town.”
“Damn.”
“Well, you asked.”
“Always in trouble.”
“My motto.”
I didn’t dare tell her about Orson, not even indirectly, using poetry code. My voice might crack, revealing the intensity of my anguish, which I was striving mightily to contain. If she thought he was in serious jeopardy, she would insist on coming to Wyvern to search for him.
She would have been a big help. I’d recently been surprised to discover Sasha possessed self-defense skills and weapons expertise that weren’t taught in any disc-jockey school. Though she didn’t look like an Amazon, she could do battle like one. She was, however, an even better friend than fighter, and Lilly Wing needed Sasha’s sympathy and compassion more than I needed backup.
“Chris, you know what your problem is?”
“Too good-looking?”
“Yeah, right,” she said sarcastically.
“Too smart?”
“Your problem is reckless caring.”
“Then I better ask my doctor for some who-gives-a-damn pills.”
“I love you for it, Snowman, but it’s going to get you killed.”
“This is for a friend,” I reminded her, meaning Lilly Wing. “Anyway, I’ll be all right. Bobby’s coming.”
“Ah. Then I’ll start working on your eulogy.”
“I’ll tell him you said that.”
“The Two Stooges.”
“Let me guess—we’re Curly and Larry.”
“Right. Neither of you is smart enough to be Moe.”
“Love you, Goodall.”
“Love you, Snowman.”
I switched off the phone and was about to turn away from the window, when I saw movement in the street again. This time it wasn’t merely the shadow of a cloud gliding across a corner of the moon.
This time I saw monkeys.
I clipped the phone to my belt, freeing both hands.
The monkeys were not in a barrel and not in a pack. The correct word for monkeys traveling in a group is not pack or herd, not pride or flock, but troop.
Recently, I have learned a great deal about monkeys, not only the term troop. For the same reason, if I were living in the Florida Everglades, I would become an expert on alligators.
Here, now, deep in Dead Town, a troop of monkeys passed the bungalow, moving in the direction I’d been headed. In the moonlight, their coats looked silvery rather than brown.
In spite of this luster, which made them more visible than they would have been otherwise, I had difficulty taking an accurate count. Five, six, eight…Some traveled on all fours, some were half erect; a few stood up almost as straight as a human. Ten, eleven, twelve…
They were not moving fast, and they repeatedly raised their heads, scanning the night ahead and on both sides, sometimes peering suspiciously back the way they had come. Although their pace and alert demeanor might signify caution or even fear, I suspected that they were not afraid of anything and that instead they were searching for something, hunting something.
Maybe me.
Fifteen, sixteen.
In a circus ring, costumed in sequined vests and red fezzes, a troop of monkeys might inspire smiles, laughter, delight. These specimens didn’t dance, caper, tumble, twirl, jig, or play miniature accordions. Not one seemed interested in a career in entertainment.
Eighteen.
They were rhesus monkeys, the species most often used in medical research, and all were at the upper end of the size range for their kind: more than two feet tall, twenty-five or even thirty pounds of bone and muscle. I knew from hard experience that these particular rhesuses were quick, agile, strong, uncannily smart, and dangerous.