Seize the Night (10 page)

A member of the second squad began to move slowly toward me, its bright eyes sliding nervously from side to side while it felt its way through the cloying murk. As the clever little beast approached, I could hear it rhythmically slapping its right hand against the wall to keep itself oriented.

In another corner of the room, rusted hinges squeaked. One of the shiplap doors banged shut, its loose joints rattling.

Evidently, they were opening the cabinets and fumbling blindly inside.

I had hoped that they would not be intelligent enough to conduct a thorough search or, conversely, that they would be too intelligent to endanger themselves by poking blindly into places where an armed man might be waiting to blast them to monkey hell. They were smart enough to be thorough, all right, but too reckless to be as cautious as the situation required. From past encounters, I had already known all this about them; but having jammed myself into the broom coffin, having regretted doing so almost as soon as I was encased, I’d been in denial.

The wall slapper was still coming toward me, no more than three feet away. Its eyes continued to blaze at the gloom on all sides of it, not just at me.

More hinges squeaked. A warped cabinet door stuttered open with some resistance, and another door banged shut.

The cramp in my calf abruptly became more severe. Hot. Sharp. I clenched my teeth to keep from groaning. I had a headache, too: The cap button felt as if it had been pressed all the way through my skull, into my brain, and had begun working its way out through my right eye. My neck ached. My scrunched shoulders didn’t feel too good, either. I had a nagging pain in the small of my back, a spot of tenderness in the gum at an upper right molar, a queasy feeling that I was developing serious hemorrhoids at the tender age of twenty-eight, and was in general feeling pretty much, you know, blah.

The wall slapper stopped slapping the wall when it reached the corner and discovered the cabinetry. It was directly in front of me now.

I was almost four feet taller than this monkey, and a hundred twenty pounds heavier. Though it was unnervingly intelligent, I was a lot smarter than it. Nevertheless, I gazed down at it with dread and loathing, cringing inwardly, with no less repulsion and fear for my life than I would have felt if this had been a demon risen straight from Hell.

It is easy to make jokes about the troop when you are at a comfortable distance from them. Yet a close encounter reduces you to primal fear, fills you with a heart-chilling sense of the
alien,
and infuses the waking world with that acutely real yet simultaneously surreal atmosphere of your most horrific nightmares.

The sympathy I’d had for them earlier was still with me, markedly diminished, but I couldn’t feel the pity at all. Good.

Judging by where its bright eyes were focused and by the fumbling sounds its hands made, the monkey was exploring the face frame to which the broom-closet door should have been attached.

The Glock weighed less than three pounds, but it felt as heavy as a granite gravestone. I tightened my finger on the trigger.

Eighteen rounds.

Seventeen, really.

I would have to count the shots as I squeezed them off—and save the last round for myself.

Above the other sounds in the kitchen, I heard the monkey pluck at one of the loose and broken hinges from which the broom-closet door had once hung.

The total depth of my pathetic hiding place was only two feet, which meant I was standing mere inches from the inquisitive primate. If it reached inside, there was no chance whatsoever that it would fail to discover me. Only the terrible stench in the kitchen prevented it from smelling me.

The cramp in my left calf twisted like barbed wire through the muscle. I was afraid that my foot was going to start twitching involuntarily.

Elsewhere in the room, a cabinet door banged shut.

Then another opened with a squeak of hinges.

Linoleum crackled under small, quick feet.

A monkey spat, as though trying to rid itself of the air’s foul taste.

I had the curious feeling that I was about to wake up and find myself safe in bed, beside Sasha.

My heart was racing, and now it hammered even faster when Sasha’s face bloomed in my mind. The possibility that I would never hear her voice again, never hold her again, never look again into her kind eyes: This was as frightening as the likelihood that I would be torn apart by the troop. And more terrifying, still, was the thought of not being at her side to help her cope with this strange and violent new world, of leaving her alone when, at the next day’s end, night returned home to Moonlight Bay once more.

Before me, the monkey remained invisible except for its luminous eyes, which seemed to grow brighter as it peered suspiciously into the broom closet. Its attention traveled upward from my feet, across my body, to my face.

Its night vision might be better than mine, but in this pure liquid blackness, which was as unrelieved as that four miles down at the bottom of the sea, I was sure that we were equally blind.

Yet our eyes locked.

We seemed to be in a staring contest, and I didn’t believe that my imagination was boiling over. The creature wasn’t looking at my brow or at the bridge of my nose; it was looking directly into
both
my eyes.

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.

Headlight beams flashed through the spaces between bungalows. The truck. It was passing on the next street parallel to this one, behind the small houses.

Although I hadn’t seen any details of the vehicle, I was sure Bobby had arrived. The pitch of the engine was similar to that of his Jeep, and it was speeding toward the commercial district of Dead Town, where we were supposed to meet.

I headed in that direction as the roar of the truck rapidly diminished. The pain was gone from my calf, but the nerve continued to flutter, leaving my left leg weaker than my right. With the cramp threatening to recur, I didn’t even try to run.

From above came the shearing sound of wings, cutting the air into scimitar shapes. I looked up, ducking defensively, as a flock of birds made a low pass, in tight formation, and vanished into the night ahead.

Their speed and the darkness prevented me from identifying their species. This might have been the mysterious crew that had roosted in the tree under which I’d placed my call to Bobby.

When I reached the end of the block, the birds were flying in a circle over the intersection, as if marking time until I caught up with them. I counted ten or twelve, more than had kept watch over me from the Indian laurel.

Their behavior was peculiar, but I didn’t feel that they intended any harm.

Even if I was wrong and they posed a danger to me, there was no way to avoid them. If I changed my route, they could easily follow.

As they passed across the face of the descendent moon, traveling more slowly than before, I saw them clearly enough to identify them tentatively as nighthawks. Because they live by my schedule, I am familiar with this species, also known as nightjars, which encompasses seventy varieties, including the whippoorwill.

Nighthawks feed on insects—moths, flying ants, mosquitoes, beetles—and dine while on the wing. Snatching tidbits from the air, they jink this way and that, exhibiting a singular swooping-darting-twisting pattern of flight that, as much as anything, identifies them.

The full moon provides them with the ideal circumstances for a banquet, because in its radiance, flying insects are more visible. Ordinarily, nighthawks are ceaselessly active in these conditions, their harsh churring calls cutting the air as they feast.

The lunar lamp above, currently unobstructed by clouds, ensured good hunting, yet these birds were not inclined to take advantage of the ideal conditions. Acting counter to instinct, they squandered the moonlight, flying monotonously in a circle that was approximately forty feet in diameter, around and around over the intersection. For the most part, they proceeded in single file, though three pairs flew side by side, none feeding or issuing a single cry.

I crossed the intersection and kept going.

In the distance, the sound of the engine abruptly cut off. If it was Bobby’s Jeep, he must have arrived at our rendezvous point.

I was a third of the way into the subsequent block when the flock followed. They passed overhead at a higher altitude than previously but low enough to cause me to tuck my head down.

When I arrived at another intersection, they had again formed a bird carousel, minus calliope, circling thirty feet overhead. Although any attempt to take a count would have resulted in more vertigo than waits in a bottle of tequila, I was sure the number of nighthawks had grown.

Over the next two blocks, the size of the flock swelled until it wasn’t necessary to take a count to verify the increase. By the time I reached the three-way intersection in which this street ended, at least a hundred birds were circling quietly above. For the most part, they were now grouped in pairs, and there were two layers to this flying feathered ring, one about five to ten feet higher than the other.

I stopped, gazing up, transfixed.

Thanks to the circus between my ears, I can seize upon the smallest disquieting observation and from it extrapolate a terror of cataclysmic proportions. Yet, though the birds unnerved me, I still didn’t believe they were a threat.

Their unnatural behavior was ominous without implying aggression. This aerial ballet, humdrum in its pattern yet inexpressibly graceful, conveyed a mood as clear and unmistakable as any ballet ever performed by dancers on a stage, as affecting as any piece of music ever meant to touch the heart—and the mood here was sorrow. Sorrow so poignant that it pinched my breath and made me feel as though something more bitter than blood were pumping through my veins.

To poets but also to those whose stomachs curdle at the mention of poetry, birds in flight usually evoke thoughts of freedom, hope, faith, joy. The thrum of these pinions, however, was as bleak as the keening of an arctic wind coming across a thousand miles of barren ice; it was a forlorn sound, and in my heart it coalesced into an icy weight.

With the exquisite timing and choreography that suggests psychic connections among the members of a flock, the double ring of birds fluidly combined into a single ascending spiral. They rose like a coil of dark smoke, around and up and up through the flue of the night, across the pocked moon, becoming steadily less visible against the stars, until at last they dissipated like mere fumes and soot across the rooftop of the world.

All was silent. Windless. Dead.

This behavior of the nighthawks had been unnatural, certainly, but not a meaningless aberration, not a mere curiosity. There was calculation—therefore meaning—in their air show.

The puzzle resisted an easy solution.

Actually, I wasn’t sure I wanted to fit all the pieces together. The resultant picture was not likely to be comforting. The birds themselves posed no threat, but their bizarre performance couldn’t be construed as a good thing.

A sign. An omen.

Not the kind of omen that makes you want to buy a lottery ticket or take a quick trip to Vegas. Certainly not an omen that would make you decide to commit more of your net worth to the stock market. No, this was an omen that might inspire you to move to rural New Mexico, up into the fastness of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, as far from civilization as you could get, with a hoard of food, twenty thousand rounds of ammunition—and a prayer book.

I returned the pistol to the holster under my jacket.

Suddenly I was tired, drained.

I took a few deep breaths, but each inhalation was as stale as the air I exhaled.

When I wiped a hand across my face, hoping to slough off my weariness, I expected my skin to be greasy. Instead, it was dry and hot.

I found a penny-size tender spot just below my left cheekbone. Gently massaging it with a fingertip, I tried to remember whether I had knocked against anything during the night’s adventures.