have been if we hadn’t violated the terms of the lease and been evicted
from Eden.
Like all who are born of man and woman, I live by the whims of fate:
Because of my XP, I’m just more acutely aware of the machinations of
fate than most people are, and this awareness is liberating.
Yet, as I walked my bicycle eastward along the peninsula, I persevered
in my search for meaning in all that I’d seen and heard since sunset.
Before the troop had arrived to torment Orson and me, I’d been trying
to pin down exactly what was different about these monkeys; now I
returned to that riddle. Unlike ordinary rhesuses, these were bold
rather than shy, brooding rather than lighthearted.
The most obvious difference was that these monkeys were hot tempered,
vicious. Their potential for violence was not, however, the primary
quality that separated them from other rhesuses; it was only a
consequence of another, more profound difference that I recognized but
that I was inexplicably reluctant to consider.
The curdled fog was as thick as ever, but gradually it began to
brighten. Smears of blurry light appeared in the murk: buildings and
streetlamps along the shore.
Orson whined with delight-or just relief-at these signs of
civilization, but we weren’t any safer in town than out of it.
When we left the southern horn entirely and entered Embar cadero Way, I
paused to take my cap from the jacket pocket in which I had tucked
it.
I put it on and gave the visor a tug. The Elephant Man adjusts his
costume.
Orson peered up at me, cocked his head consideringly, and then chuffed
as though in approval. He was the Elephant Man’s dog, after all, and
as such, a measure of his own self-image was dependent upon the style
and grace with which I comported myself.
Because of the streetlamps, visibility had increased to perhaps a
hundred feet. Like the ghost tides of an ancient and long-dead sea,
fog surged off the bay and into the streets; each fine drop of mist
refracted the golden sodium-vapor light and translated it to the next
drop.
if members of the troop still accompanied us, they would be forced to
lurk at a greater distance here than they had on the barren peninsula,
to avoid being seen. Like players in a recasting of Poe’s “The Murders
in the Rue Morgue,” they would have to confine their skulking to parks,
unilluminated alleyways, balconies, high ledges, parapets, and
rooftops.
At this late hour, no pedestrians or motorists were in sight. The town
appeared to have been abandoned.
I was overcome by the disturbing notion that these silent and empty
streets foreshadowed a real, frightening desolation that would befall
Moonlight Bay in the not-too-distant future. Our little burg was
preparing to be a ghost town.
I climbed onto my bike and headed north on Embarcadero Way. The man
who had contacted me through Sasha, at the radio station, was waiting
on his boat at the marina.
As I pedaled along the deserted avenue, my mind returned to the
millennium monkeys. I was sure that I had identified the most
fundamental difference between ordinary rhesuses and this extraordinary
troop that secretly roamed the night, but I was reluctant to accept my
own conclusion, inevitable though it seemed: These monkeys were smarter
than ordinary monkeys.
Way smarter, radically smarter.
They had understood the purpose of Bobby’s camera, and they had stolen
it. They filched his new camera, too.
They recognized my face among the faces of the thirty dolls in Angela’s
workroom, and they used that one to taunt me. Later, they set a fire
to conceal Angela’s murder.
The big brows at Fort Wyvern might have been engaged in secret
bacteriological-warfare research, but that didn’t explain why their
laboratory monkeys were markedly smarter than any monkeys that had
previously walked the earth.
just how smart was “markedly smarter”? Maybe not smart enough to win a
bundle on Jeopardy! Maybe not smart enough to teach poetry at the
university level or to successfully manage a radio station or to track
the patterns of surf worldwide, maybe not even smart enough to write a
New York Times best-seller-but perhaps smart enough to be the most