Seize the Night (14 page)

I switched on the spotlight and swept it left and right along the street. Deserted.

“I thought you were on it,” I said.

“Was.”

“Now?”

“Not.”

“So?”

“New plan,” he said.

“I’m waiting.”

“You’re
the planning dude,” Bobby said, shifting the Jeep into park.

Another weird scream—like fingernails scraping on a chalkboard, the dying wail of a cat, and the sob of a terrified child all woven together and re-created on a malfunctioning synthesizer by a musician whacked on crystal meth—brought us out of our seats, not merely because it was eerie enough to snap our veins like rubber bands, but because it came from behind us.

I was not aware of pulling my legs up, swiveling, gripping the roll bar, and standing on my seat. I must have done so, and with the swift grace of an Olympic gymnast, because that was where I found myself as the scream reached a crescendo and abruptly cut off.

Likewise, I wasn’t consciously aware of Bobby grabbing the shotgun, flinging open his door, and leaping out of the Jeep, but there he was, holding the 12-gauge Mossberg, facing back the way we had come.

“Light,” he said.

The spotlight was still in my hand. I clicked it on even as he spoke.

No missing link loomed behind the Jeep.

The knee-deep grass swooned as a bare whisper of wind romanced it. If any predator had been trying to squirm toward us, using the grass as cover, it would have disturbed the courtly patterns drawn by the gentle caress of the breeze, and it would have been easy to spot.

The bungalow was one of those that lacked a porch, fronted only by two steps and a stoop, and the door was closed. The three windows were intact, and no boogeyman glowered at us from behind any of those dusty panes.

Bobby said, “It sounded right here.”

“Like right under my butt.”

He had a solid grip on the shotgun. Looking around at the night, as creeped out as I was by the deceptive peacefulness of it, he said, “This sucks.”

“It sucketh,” I agreed.

A look of high suspicion crimped his face, and he backed slowly away from the Jeep.

I didn’t know if he had glimpsed something under the vehicle or if he was just operating on a hunch.

Dead Town was even more silent than its name implied. The faint breeze was expressive but mute.

Still standing on the passenger seat, I glanced down along the side of the Jeep, at the lazily undulating blades of grass. If some foul-tempered freak erupted from beneath the vehicle, it could climb the door and be at my neck before I would be able to locate either a crucifix or an even halfway attractive necklace of garlic.

I needed only one hand for the spotlight. I slipped the Glock out of my shoulder holster.

When Bobby had backed off three or four steps from the Jeep, he knelt on one knee.

To throw a little light where he needed to peek, I held the spotlight out of the Jeep and directed the beam toward the undercarriage on my side, hoping to backlight whatever might be hiding there.

In the classic, wary half-kneel of the experienced monster hunter, Bobby tilted his head and slowly lowered it to peer under the Jeep.

“Nada,” he said.

“Zip?”

“Zero.”

“I was stoked,” I said.

“I was pumped.”

“Ready to kick ass.”

We were lying.

As Bobby rose to his feet, another scream tore the night: the same scraping-fingernails-dying-cat-sobbing-child-mal-functioning-synthesizer wail that had made us jump like lightning-struck cats only moments ago.

This time I had a better fix on the source of the scream, and I shifted my attention to the bungalow roof, where the spotlight revealed Big Head. There was no question now: This was the creature that Bobby had called Big Head, because its head was undeniably big.

It was crouched at one end of the roof, right on the peak, maybe sixteen feet above us, like Kong on the Empire State Building but re-created in a direct-to-video flick that lacked the budget for a larger set, fighter planes, or even a damsel in peril. With its arms covering its face as though the sight of us hideous human beings frightened and disgusted it, Big Head studied Bobby and me with radiant green eyes, which we could see through the gap between its crossed arms.

Even though the beast’s face was covered, I could discern that the head was disproportionately large for the body. I also suspected that it was malformed. Malformed not just by human standards but surely by the standards of monkey beauty, as well.

I couldn’t determine whether it had been spawned primarily from a rhesus or from another primate. It was covered in matted fur not unlike that of a rhesus, with long arms and hunched shoulders that were definitely simian, although it appeared to be stronger than any mere monkey, as formidable as a gorilla though otherwise nothing like one. You wouldn’t have required my hyperactive imagination to wonder if, in certain aspects of the creature, you were glimpsing a spectrum of species so broad that the genetic sampling had extended beyond the warm-blooded classes of vertebrates to include reptilian traits—and worse.

“Extreme geek-a-mo,” Bobby said as he edged back to the Jeep.

“Major geekster,” I agreed.

On the roof, Big Head turned its face skyward, as if studying the stars, still concealing its features behind the mask of its arms.

Suddenly I found myself identifying with this creature. Its posture, its very attitude, told me that it was covering its face out of embarrassment or shame, that it didn’t want us to see what it looked like because it knew we would find it repulsive, which meant that it must
feel
repulsive. Perhaps I was able to interpret its behavior and intuit its feelings because I’d lived twenty-eight years as an outsider. I’d never felt the need to hide my face, but as a small child I’d known the pain of being an outcast when cruel kids called me Nightcrawler, Dracula, Ghoul Boy, and worse.

Echoing in my mind was my own voice from a moment ago—
major geekster
—and I winced. Our pursuit of this creature reminded me of the way bullies had chased me when I’d been a boy. Even when I had learned to defend myself and fight back, they were sometimes not dissuaded, willing to risk a drubbing merely for the chance to harass and torment me. Of course, with Orson and Jimmy in peril, Bobby and I had good reason to follow any lead. We hadn’t been motivated by meanness; but what troubled me, in retrospect, was the strange dark wild delight with which we had mounted the chase.

The stargazer shifted its attention from the heavens and peered down at us again, still hiding its face.

I directed the spotlight onto the asphalt shingles near the creature’s feet, letting the backwash illuminate it rather than directly assaulting it with the beam.

My discretion didn’t encourage Big Head to lower its arms. It did, however, issue a sound unlike the previous screams, one at odds with its fierce appearance: a cross between the cooing of pigeons and the more guttural purr of a cat.

Bobby tore his attention away from the beast long enough to conduct a three-hundred-sixty-degree sweep of the neighborhood around us.

I, too, had been stricken by the nape-crinkling feeling that Big Head might be distracting us from a more immediate threat.

“Super placid,” Bobby reported.

“For now.”

Big Head’s cooing-purring grew louder and then became a fluent series of exotic sounds, simple and rhythmic and patterned, but not like mere animal noises. These were modulated groups of syllables, full of inflection, delivered with urgency and emotion, and it was no stretch to think of them as
words
. If this speech wasn’t complex enough to be defined as a language in the sense that English, French, or Spanish is a language, it was at least a primitive attempt to convey meaning, a language in the making.

“What’s it want?” Bobby asked.

His question, whether he realized it or not, arose from the perception that the creature was not just chattering at us but
speaking
to us.

“No clue,” I said.

Big Head’s voice was neither deep nor menacing. Although as strange as a bagpipe employed by a reggae band, it was pitched like that of a child of nine or ten, not entirely human but halfway there, edgy, eerily lilting without being musical, with a pleading note that aroused sympathy in spite of the source.

“Poor sonofabitch,” I said, as it fell silent again.

“You serious?”

“Sorrowful damn thing.”

Bobby studied this Quasimodo in search of a bell tower and finally allowed, “Maybe.”

“Certified sorrowful.”

“You want to go up on the roof, give it a big hug?”

“Later.”

“I’ll turn on the Jeep’s radio. You can go up there and ask it to dance, make it feel attractive.”

“I’ll pity it from afar.”

“Typical man. You talk a good game of compassion, but you can’t play it.”

“I’m afraid of rejection.”

“You’re afraid of commitment.”

Turning away from us, Big Head dropped its arms from its face. On all fours, straddling the ridgeline, it raced across the bungalow roof.

“Keep the light on it!” Bobby said.

I tried, but the creature moved quicker than a striking snake. I expected it to launch itself off the roof and straight at us or disappear across the peak and down the far slope, but it traveled the length of the ridgeline and sprang without hesitation into the fifteen-foot gap between this bungalow and the next. With catlike poise, it landed atop the neighboring house, where it reared onto its hind legs, cast a green-eyed glance back at us, then dropped low, sprinted from gable to gable, leaped to a third roof, crossed over that ridgeline, and disappeared onto the back of the house.

During its swift flight, captured repeatedly by the spotlight beam but for only an instant at a time, the creature’s face had been less than half revealed in kaleidoscopic glimpses. I was left with impressions rather than clear images. The back of its skull seemed to be elongated, and like a cowl, its forehead appeared to overhang its large sunken eyes. The lumpish face might have been distorted by excrescences of bone. To an even greater degree than the head was disproportionate to the body, the mouth appeared too large for the head. Cracking its steam-shovel jaws, the creature revealed an abundance of sharp curved teeth more wicked-looking than Jack the Ripper’s cutlery collection.

Bobby gave me a chance to reconsider my assessment of Big Head. “Sorrowful?”

“I still think so.”

“You’re nothing but cardiac muscle, dude.”

“Lub-dub.”

“Anything moves that fast, teeth that big—its diet isn’t just fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.”

I switched off the handheld spot. Although the beam had been directed away from me, I was groggy from a surfeit of light. I had not seen much, yet I’d seen too much.

Neither of us suggested going on another Big Head hunt. Surfers don’t trade bite for bite with sharks; when we see enough fins, we get out of the water. Considering this creature’s speed and agility, we wouldn’t have a chance of catching it, anyway, not on foot or in the Jeep, and even if we did find and corner it, we weren’t prepared to capture or kill it.

“Supposing we don’t just want to sit here sucking down beer and trying to forget we saw anything,” Bobby wondered as he got behind the wheel.

“Suppose.”

“Then what was that thing?”

Settling into the passenger seat again, working my feet around the beer cooler, I said, “Could be an offspring of the original troop that escaped from the lab. There might be bigger, stranger mutations occurring in the new generation.”

“We’ve seen beaucoup offspring before. And you saw a bunch earlier tonight, right?”

“Yeah.”

“They look like normal monkeys.”

“Yeah.”

“This was awesomely not normal.”

I knew now what Big Head was, where it had come from, but I wasn’t ready to tell Bobby quite yet. Instead, I said, “This is the street where they trapped me in the bungalow.”

Assessing the sameness of the houses around us, he said, “You can tell one of these streets from another?”

“Mostly.”

“Then you’re spending a seriously psychotic amount of time here, bro.”

“Nothing hot on TV.”

“Try stamp collecting.”

“Couldn’t handle the excitement.”

As Bobby drove off the rutted lawn and over the curb, into the street, I holstered the 9-millimeter Glock and told him to turn right.

Two blocks later, I said, “Stop. Here. This is where they were spinning the manhole cover.”

“If they take over the world, they’ll probably make that an Olympic event.”

“At least it’s more exciting than synchronized swimming.”

As I got out of the Jeep, he said, “Where you going?”

“Pull forward and park with one wheel on the manhole. I don’t think they’re still here. They’ve moved on. But just in case, I don’t want them coming up behind us while we’re inside.”

“Inside what?”

I walked in front of the vehicle and directed Bobby until he stopped with the right front tire squarely atop the manhole cover.

He switched off the engine and, with the shotgun, got out of the Jeep.

The weak onshore breeze grew a little stronger, and the clouds in the west, which had swallowed the moon, were gradually expanding eastward, devouring the stars.

“Inside what?” Bobby repeated.

I pointed to the bungalow where I’d squeezed into the broom closet to hide from the troop. “I want to see what was rotting in the kitchen.”

“Want to?”

“Need to,” I said, heading toward the bungalow.

“Perverse,” he said, falling in beside me.

“The troop was fascinated.”

“We want to lower ourselves to monkey level?”

“Maybe this is important.”

He said, “My belly’s full of kibby and beer.”

“So?”

“Just a friendly warning, bro. Right now I’ve got a low puke threshold.”

11

The front door of the bungalow was open, as I had left it. The living room still smelled of dust, mildew, dry rot, and mice; in addition, there was now a lingering odor of mangy monkey.

My flashlight, which I’d not dared to use here before, revealed a series of three-inch-long, yellowish-white cocoons fixed in the angle where the back wall met the ceiling, home to developing moths or butterflies, or perhaps egg cases spun by an exceptionally fertile spider. Lighter rectangles on the discolored walls marked where pictures had once hung. The plaster wasn’t as fissured as you would expect in a house that was more than six decades old and that had been abandoned for nearly two years, but a web of fine cracks gave the walls the appearance of eggshells beginning to give way to hatching entities.

On the floor, in a corner, was a child’s red sock. It couldn’t have anything to do with Jimmy, because it was caked with dust and had been here for a long time.

As we crossed to the dining-room door, Bobby said, “Got a new board yesterday.”

“The world’s ending, you go shopping.”

“Friends at Hobie made it for me.”

“Hot?” I asked as I led him into the dining room.

“Haven’t ridden it yet.”

In one corner, at the ceiling, was a cluster of cocoons similar to those in the previous room. They were also big, each three to four inches long and, at the widest point, approximately the diameter of plump frankfurters.

Outside of this bungalow, I had never seen anything quite like these silken constructs. I moved directly under them, fixing them with the light.

“Not uncreepy,” Bobby said.

Within a couple of the cocoons were dark shapes, curled like question marks, but they were so heavily swaddled in flossy filaments that I could make out no details of them.

“See anything moving?” I asked.

“No.”

“Me neither.”

“Might be dead.”

“Yeah,” I said, though I wasn’t convinced. “Just some big, dead, half-made moths.”

“Moths?”

“What else?” I asked.

“Huge.”

“Maybe new moths. A new, bigger species. Becoming.”

“Bugs? Becoming?”

“If people, dogs, birds, monkeys…why not bugs?”

Frowning, Bobby thought about that. “Probably wouldn’t be smart to buy any more wool sweaters.”

A cold quiver of nausea wound through me as I realized that I’d been in these rooms in absolute darkness, unaware of the fat cocoons overhead. I’m not entirely sure why I found this thought so deeply disturbing. After all, it wasn’t likely that I’d been in danger of being pinned to the wall by some bug and imprisoned in a suffocating cocoon of my own. On the other hand, this was Wyvern, so perhaps I’d been in precisely such danger.

Partly, the nausea was caused by the stench wafting from the kitchen. I’d forgotten how fiercely ripe it was.

Holding the shotgun in his right hand, covering his nose and mouth with his left, Bobby said, “Tell me the stink doesn’t get worse than this.”

“It doesn’t get worse than this.”

“But it does.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Let’s be quick.”

Just as I moved the flashlight away from the cocoons, I thought I saw one of the dark, curled forms writhe inside its silken sac.

I focused the beam on the cluster again.

None of the mystery bugs moved.

Bobby said, “Jumpy?”

“Aren’t you?”

“As a toad.”

We ventured into the kitchen, where the linoleum cracked and popped underfoot and where the reek of decomposition was as thick in the air as a cloud of vaporized, rancid cooking oil in the kitchen of a greasy-spoon restaurant.

Before searching for the source of the stench, I directed the light overhead. The upper cabinets hung under a soffit, and in the angle where the soffit met the ceiling, there were more cocoons than in the previous two rooms combined. Thirty or forty. Most were in the three-to-four-inch range, though a few were half again as large. Another twenty were nestled around the boxy fluorescent fixture in the center of the ceiling.

“Not good,” Bobby said.

I lowered the flashlight and at once discovered the source of the putrescent smell. A dead man was sprawled on the floor in front of the sink.

At first I thought he must have been killed by whatever made the cocoons. I expected to see a wad of spun silk in his open mouth, yellowish-white sacs bulging from his ears, wispy filaments trailing from his nose.

The cocoons, however, had nothing to do with it. This was a suicide.

The revolver lay on his abdomen, where recoil and death spasm had tossed it, and the swollen index finger of his right hand was still hooked through the trigger guard. Judging by the wound in his throat, he’d put the muzzle under his chin and fired one round straight up into his brain.

Entering the lightless kitchen earlier in the night, I had gone directly to the back door, where I’d halted with my hand on the knob when a monkey shadow leaped up the glass. Approaching the door and backing away from it, I must have come within inches of stepping on this corpse.

“This what you expected?” Bobby asked, voice muffled by the hand with which he was trying to filter the sickening odor.

“No.”

I didn’t know what I’d expected, but I was sure this wasn’t the worst thing that had been lurking in the deepest cellars of my imagination. When I’d first seen the cadaver, I’d been relieved—as though subconsciously I had envisioned a specific and far worse discovery than this, an ultimate horror that now I would not have to confront.

Dressed in generic white athletic shoes, chinos, and a red-and-green plaid shirt, the dead man was flat on his back, his left arm at his side, the palm turned up as though seeking alms. He appeared to have been fat, because his clothes were stretched taut over parts of his body, but this was the result of swelling from bacterial-gas formation.

His face was bloated, opaque eyes bulging from the sockets, swollen tongue protruding between grimacing lips and bared teeth. Purge fluid—produced by decomposition and often mistaken for blood by the inexperienced—was draining from the mouth and nostrils. Pale green with areas of greenish black, the flesh was also marbleized by hemolysis of veins and arteries.

Bobby said, “Must’ve been here—what?—a week, two weeks?”

“Not that long. Maybe three or four days.”

The weather had been mild for the past week, neither warm nor chilly, which would have allowed decomposition to proceed at a predictable pace. If the man had been dead much longer than four days, the flesh would have been not pale green but green-black, with patches that were entirely black. Vesicle formation, skin slippage, and hair slippage had occurred but were not yet extreme, enabling me to make an educated guess as to the date of the suicide.

“Still walking around with
Forensic Pathology
in your head,” Bobby said.

“Still.”

My education in death dated to the year I was fourteen. By the time they enter their teens, most boys have a morbid fascination with gruesome comic books, horror novels, and monster movies. Adolescent males measure progress toward manhood by their ability to tolerate the worst gross-outs, those sights and ideas that test courage, the balance of the mind, and the gag reflex. In those days, Bobby and I were fans of H. P. Lovecraft, of the biologically moist art of H. R. Giger, and of low-budget Mexican horror movies full of gore.

We outgrew this fascination to an extent that we didn’t outgrow other aspects of our adolescence, but in those days I explored death further than did Bobby, progressing from bad movies to the study of increasingly clinical texts. I learned the history and techniques of mummification and embalming, the lurid details of epidemics like the Black Death that killed half of Europe between 1348 and 1350.

I realize now that by immersing myself in the study of death, I had hoped to accept my mortality. Long before adolescence, I knew that each of us is sand in an hourglass, steadily running out of the upper globe into the stillness of the globe below, and that in my particular hourglass, the neck between these spheres is wider than in most, the fall of sand faster. This was a heavy truth to have been carried by one so young, but by becoming a graveyard scholar, I meant to rob death of its terror.

In recognition of the steep mortality rate of people with XP, my special parents had raised me to play rather than work, to have fun, to regard the future not with anxiety but with a sense of mystery. From them, I learned to trust God, to believe I was born for a purpose, to be joyful. Consequently, Mom and Dad were disturbed by my obsession with death, but because they were academics with a belief in the liberating power of knowledge, they didn’t hamper my pursuit of the subject.

Indeed, I relied on Dad to acquire the book that completed my death studies:
Forensic Pathology,
published by Elsevier in a series of thick volumes written for law-enforcement professionals involved in criminal investigations. This grisly tome, generously illustrated with victim photographs that will chill the hottest heart and instill pity in all but the coldest, is not on the shelves of most libraries and is not knowingly provided to children. At fourteen, with a life expectancy thought to be—at that time—no greater than twenty, I could have argued that I was not a child but already past middle age.

Forensic Pathology
covers the myriad ways we perish: disease, death by fire, death by freezing, by drowning, by electrocution, by poisoning, by starvation, by suffocation, by strangulation, death from gunshot wounds, from blunt-instrument trauma, from pointed and sharp-edged weapons. By the time I finished this book, I’d outgrown my fascination with death…and my fear of it. The photos depicting the indignity of decomposition proved that the qualities I cherish in the people I love—their wit, humor, courage, loyalty, faith, compassion, mercy—are not ultimately the work of the flesh. These things outlast the body; they live on in the memories of family and friends, live on forever by inspiring others to be kind and loving. Humor, faith, courage, compassion—these don’t rot and vanish; they are impervious to bacteria, stronger than time or gravity; they have their genesis in something less fragile than blood and bone, in a soul that endures.

Though I believe that I’ll live beyond this life and that those I love will be where I go next, I
do
still fear that they will depart ahead of me, leaving me alone. Sometimes I wake from a nightmare in which I’m the sole living person on earth; I lie in bed, trembling, afraid to call out for Sasha or to use the telephone, fearful that no one will answer and that the dream will have become reality.

Now, here, in the bungalow kitchen, Bobby said, “Hard to believe he could be this far gone in three or four days.”

“Exposed to the elements, complete skeletonization can occur in two weeks. Eleven or twelve days under the right circumstances.”

“So at any time…I’m two weeks from being bones.”

“It’s a quashing thought, isn’t it?”

“Major quash.”

Having seen more than enough of the dead man, I directed the flashlight at the items that he evidently had arranged on the floor around himself before pulling the trigger. A California driver’s license with photo identification. A paperback Bible. An ordinary white business envelope on which nothing was written or typed. Four snapshots in a neatly ordered row. A small ruby-red glass of the type that usually contains votive candles, though no candle was in this one.

Learning to live with nausea, trying to will myself to recall the scent of roses, I crouched for a closer look at the driver’s-license photo. In spite of the decomposition, the cadaver’s face had sufficient points of similarity to the face on the license to convince me that they were the same.

“Leland Anthony Delacroix,” I said.

“Don’t know him.”

“Thirty-five years old.”

“Not anymore.”

“Address in Monterey.”

“Why’d he come here to die?” Bobby wondered.

In hope of finding an answer, I turned the light on the four snapshots.

The first showed a pretty blonde of about thirty, wearing white shorts and a bright yellow blouse, standing on a marina dock against a backdrop of blue sky, blue water, and sailboats. Her gamine smile was appealing.

The second evidently had been taken on a different day, in a different place. This same woman, now in a polka-dot blouse, and Leland Delacroix were sitting side by side at a redwood picnic table. His arm was around her shoulders, and she was smiling at him as he faced the camera. Delacroix appeared to be happy, and the blonde looked like a woman in love.

“His wife,” Bobby said.

“Maybe.”

“She’s wearing a wedding ring in the picture.”

The third snapshot featured two children: a boy of about six and an elfin girl who could have been no older than four. In swimsuits, they stood beside an inflatable wading pool, mugging for the camera.

“Wanted to die surrounded by memories of his family,” Bobby suggested.

The fourth snapshot seemed to support that interpretation. The blonde, the children, and Delacroix stood on a green lawn, the kids in front of their parents, posed for a portrait. The occasion must have been special. Even more radiant here than in the other photos, the woman wore a summery dress and high heels. The little girl flashed a gap-toothed smile, clearly delighted by her outfit of white shoes, white socks, and a frilly pink dress flaring over petticoats. So freshly scrubbed and combed that you could almost smell the soap, the boy wore a blue suit, white shirt, and red bow tie. In an army uniform and an officer’s cap—his rank not easy to determine, perhaps a captain—Delacroix was the definition of pride.

Precisely because the subjects were so visibly happy in these shots, the effect of the photos was inexpressibly sad.

“They’re standing in front of one of these bungalows,” Bobby noted, indicating the background of the fourth snapshot.

“Not one of them.
This
one.”

“How can you tell?”

“Gut feeling.”

“So they lived here once?”

“And he came back to die.”

“Why?”