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.
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.