Absolute darkness no longer reigned. I could make out the general shapes
of the cabinets across the kitchen.
When I glanced down, I was still in shadow, but I could see my hands and
the pistol. Worse, I could see my clothes and shoes, which were all
black.
The cramp burned in my leg. I tried not to think about it. That was like
trying not to think about a grizzly bear while it gnawed off your foot.
To clear my vision, I was now blinking away both involuntary tears of
pain and a flood of cold sweat. Forget about the danger posed by the
rapidly receding darkness, Soon the troop was going to be able to smell
eau de Snow even over the malodor of decomposition.
The monkey at the dining-room threshold took two steps backward as the
light advanced. If the beast looked in my direction, it could not fail
to see me.
I was almost reduced to the childhood game of pretending with all my
might to be invisible.
Then, in the dining room, the bearer of the flashlight evidently halted
and turned toward something else of interest. A murmur swept through the
searchers in the kitchen as the glow diminished.
Oily gloom welled out of the corners, and now I heard the sound that had
captured the monkeys’ attention. The drone of an engine.
Perhaps a truck. It was growing louder.
From the front of the house came a cry of alarm.
In the dining room, the bearer of the light switched it off.
The search party fled the kitchen. The linoleum crackled under their
feet, but they made no other sound.
From the dining room onward, they retreated with the stealth they had
exhibited when originally charging the bungalow from the street.
They were so silent that I wasn’t convinced they had entirely withdrawn.
I half suspected they were toying with me, waiting just inside the
dining-room doorway. When I limped out of the kitchen, they would swarm
over me, gleefully yelling “Surprise, ” gouge out my eyes, bite off my
lips, and conduct a fortune-telling session with my entrails.
The growl of the engine grew steadily louder, although the vehicle that
produced it was still some distance away.
During all the nights I had explored Fort Wyvern’s desolate precincts, I
had never until now heard an engine or other mechanical sound.
Generally this place was so quiet that it might have been an outpost at
the end of time, when the sun no longer rose and the stars remained
fixed in the heavens and the only sound was the occasional low moan of a
wind from nowhere.
As I tentatively eased out of the broom closet, I remembered something
Bobby had asked when I’d told him to come in by the river, Do I have to
creep or can I strut?
I had said that sneaky didn’t matter anymore. By that, I hadn’t meant
that he should arrive with drum and LIFE. I had also told him to watch
his ass.
Although I had never imagined that Bobby would drive into Wyvern, I was
more than half convinced that the approaching vehicle was his Jeep.
I should have anticipated this. Bobby was Bobby, after all.
I’d first thought that the troop had reacted with fright to the engine
noise, that they had fled in fear of being spotted, pursued.
They spend most of their time in the hills, in the wild, coming into
Moonlight Bay on what mysterious missions I do not knowonly after
sundown, preferring to limit their visits to nights when they have the
double cover of darkness and fog. Even then, they travel as much as
possible by storm drains, parks, arroyos, dry riverbeds, vacant lots,
and perhaps from tree to tree. With rare exception, they do not show
themselves, and they are masters of secrecy, moving among us as covertly
as termites move through the walls of our houses, as unnoticed as
earthworms tunneling the ground under our feet.
Here on turf more congenial to them, however, their reaction to the
sound of an engine might be bolder and more aggressive than it would
have been in town. They might not flee from it. They might be drawn to