made the shaka sign.
I held the bike with my gun hand long enough to make the Star Trek
sign.
In response, he gave me the finger.
With Orson at my side, I walked the bike eastward through the sand,
heading toward the rockier part of the peninsula. Before I’d gone far,
I heard Bobby say something behind me, but I couldn’t catch his
words.
I stopped, turned, and saw him heading back toward the cottage.
“What’d You say?”
“Here comes the fog,” he repeated.
Looking beyond him, I saw towering white masses descending out of the
west, an avalanche of churning vapor patinaed with moonlight. Like
some silently toppling wall of doom in a dream.
The lights of town seemed to be a continent away.
By the time Orson and I walked out of the dunes and reached the
sandstone portion of the peninsula, thick clouds swaddled us. The fog
bank was hundreds of feet deep, and though a pale dusting of moonlight
sifted through the mist all the way to the ground, we were in a gray
murk more blinding than a starless, moonless night would have been.
The lights of town were no longer visible.
The fog played tricks with sound. I could still hear the rough murmur
of breaking surf, but it seemed to come from all four sides, as though
I were on an island instead of a peninsula.
I wasn’t confident about being able to ride my bicycle in that cloying
gloom. Visibility continuously shifted between zero and a maximum of
six feet. Although no trees or other obstacles lay along the curved
horn, I could easily become disoriented and ride off the edge of the
beach scarp; the bike would pitch forward, and when the front tire
plowed into the soft sand of the slope below the scarp, I would come to
a sudden halt and take a header off the bike to the beach, possibly
breaking a limb or even my neck.
Besides, to build speed and to keep my balance, I would have to steer
the bike with two hands, which meant pocketing the pistol.
After my conversation with Bobby, I was loath to let go of the Glock.
In the fog, something could close to within a few feet of me before I
became aware of it, which wouldn’t leave me time enough to tear the gun
out of my jacket pocket and get off a shot.
I walked at a relatively brisk pace, wheeling the bicycle with my left
hand, pretending I was carefree and confident, and Orson trotted
slightly ahead of me. The dog was wary, no good at whistling in the
graveyard either literally or figuratively. He turned his head
ceaselessly from side to side.
The click of the wheel bearings and the tick of the drive chain
betrayed my position. There was no way to quiet the bicycle short of
picking it up and carrying it, which I could do with one arm but only
for short distances.
The noise might not matter, anyway. The monkeys probably had acute
animal senses that detected the most meager stimuli; in fact, they were
no doubt able to track me by scent.
Orson would be able to smell them, too. In this nebulous night, his
black form was barely visible, and I couldn’t see if his hackles were
raised, which would be a sure sign that the monkeys were nearby.
As I walked, I wondered what it was about these creatures that made
them different from an ordinary rhesus.
In appearance, at least, the beast in Angela’s kitchen had been a
typical example of its species, even if it had been at the upper end of
the size range for a rhesus. She’d said only that it had “awful dark
yellow eyes,” but as far as I knew, that was well within the spectrum
of eye colors for this group of primates. Bobby hadn’t mentioned
anything strange about the troop that was bedeviling him, other than
their peculiar behavior and the unusual size of their shadowy leader:
no misshapen craniums, no third eyes in their foreheads, no bolts in
their necks to indicate that they had been stitched and stapled