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 eye shine, 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.