“Your head’s as hard as an oyster shell.”
“Yeah, but there’s a pearl inside.”
“It’s not a pearl,” he assured me. “It’s a fossilized seagull dropping.”
“You’ve got a way with words. You should write a book.”
He squeezed out a sneer as thin as a shaving of lemon peel. “I’d rather screw a cactus.”
“That’s pretty much what it’s like. But rewarding.”
“This wave is going to put you through the rinse cycle and then down the drain.”
“Maybe. But it’ll be a totally cool ride. And aren’t you the one who said we’re here to enjoy the ride?”
Finally defeated, he stepped out of my way, raised his right hand, and 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.
FOUR
DEEP NIGHT
21
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 together in the secret laboratory of Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s megalomaniacal great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Heather Frankenstein.
The project leaders at Fort Wyvern had been worried that the monkey in Angela’s kitchen had either scratched or bitten her. Considering the scientists’ fear, it was logical to infer that the beast had carried an infectious disease transmitted by blood, saliva, or other bodily fluids. This inference was supported by the physical examination to which she’d been subjected. For four years, they had also taken monthly blood samples from her, which meant that the disease had a potentially long incubation period.
Biological warfare. The leaders of every country on Earth denied making preparations for such a hateful conflict. Evoking the name of God, warning of the judgment of history, they solemnly signed fat treaties guaranteeing never to engage in this monstrous research and development. Meanwhile, each nation was busily brewing anthrax cocktails, packaging bubonic-plague aerosols, and engineering such a splendiferous collection of exotic new viruses and bacteria that no line at any unemployment office anywhere on the planet would ever contain a single out-of-work mad scientist.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t understand why they would have forcibly subjected Angela to sterilization. No doubt certain diseases increase the chances that one’s offspring will suffer birth defects. Judging by what Angela had told me, however, I didn’t think that the people at Wyvern sterilized her out of a concern either for her or for any children that she might conceive. They appeared to have been motivated not by compassion but by fear swollen nearly to panic.
I had asked Angela if the monkey was carrying a disease. She had as much as denied it: I wish it were a disease. Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe I’d be cured by now. Or dead. Dead would be better than what’s coming.
But if not a disease, what?
Suddenly the loonlike cry that we had heard earlier now pierced the night and fog again, jolting me out of my ruminations.
Orson twitched to a full stop. I halted, too, and the click-tick of the bicycle fell silent.
The cry seemed to issue from the west and south, and after only a brief moment, an answering call came, as best I could tell, from the north and east. We were being stalked.
Because sound traveled so deceptively through the mist, I was not able to judge how far from us the cries arose. I would have bet one lung that they were close.
The rhythmic, heartlike pulse of the surf throbbed through the night. I wondered which Chris Isaak song Sasha was spinning across the airwaves at that moment.
Orson began to move again, and so did I, a little faster than before. We had nothing to gain by hesitating. We wouldn’t be safe until we were off the lonely peninsula and back in town—and perhaps not even then.
When we had gone no more than thirty or forty feet, that eerie ululant cry rose again. It was answered, as before.
This time we kept moving.
My heart was racing, and it didn’t slow when I reminded myself that these were only monkeys. Not predators. Eaters of fruits, berries, nuts. Members of a peaceable kingdom.
Suddenly, perversely, Angela’s dead face flashed onto my memory screen. I realized what I had misinterpreted, in my shock and anguish, when I’d first found her body. Her throat appeared to have been slashed repeatedly with a half-sharp knife, because the wound was ragged. In fact, it hadn’t been slashed: It had been bitten, torn, chewed. I could see the terrible wound more clearly now than I’d been willing to see it when standing on the threshold of the bathroom.
Furthermore, I half recalled other marks on her, wounds that I’d not had the stomach to consider at the time. Livid bite marks on her hands. Perhaps even one on her face.
Monkeys. But not ordinary monkeys.
The killers’ actions in Angela’s house—the business with the dolls, the game of hide-and-seek—had seemed like the play of demented children. More than one of these monkeys must have been in those rooms: small enough to hide in places where a man could not have been concealed, so inhumanly quick as to have seemed like ghosts.
Another cry arose in the murk and was answered by a low hooting from two other locations.
Orson and I kept moving briskly, but I resisted the urge to bolt. If I broke into a run, my haste might be interpreted—and rightly—as a sign of fear. To a predator, fear indicates weakness. If they perceived any weakness, they might attack.
I had the Glock, on which my grip was so tight that the weapon seemed to be welded to my hand. But I didn’t know how many of these creatures might be in this troop: perhaps only three or four, perhaps ten, maybe even more. Considering that I had never fired a gun before—except once, earlier this evening, entirely by accident—I was not going to be able to cut down all of these beasts before they overwhelmed me.
Although I didn’t want to give my fevered imagination such dark material with which to work, I couldn’t help wondering what a rhesus monkey’s teeth were like. All blunt bicuspids? No. Even herbivores—assuming that the rhesus was indeed herbivorous—needed to tear at the peel of a fruit, at husks, at shells. They were sure to have incisors, maybe even pointy eyeteeth, as did human beings. Although these particular specimens might have stalked Angela, the rhesus itself hadn’t evolved as a predator; therefore, they wouldn’t be equipped with fangs. Certain apes had fangs, though. Baboons had enormous, wicked teeth. Anyway, the biting power of the rhesus was moot, because regardless of the nature of their dental armaments, these particular specimens had been well enough equipped to kill Angela Ferryman savagely and quickly.
At first I heard or sensed, rather than saw, movement in the fog a few feet to my right. Then I glimpsed a dark, undefined shape close to the ground, coming at me swiftly and silently.
I twisted toward the movement. The creature brushed against my leg and vanished into the fog before I could see it clearly.
Orson growled but with restraint, as though to warn off something without quite challenging it to fight. He was facing the billowy wall of gray mist that scudded through the darkness on the other side of the bicycle, and I suspected that with light I would see not merely that his hackles were raised but that every hair on his back was standing stiffly on end.
I was looking low, toward the ground, half expecting to see the shining, dark-yellow gaze of which Angela had spoken. The shape that suddenly loomed in the fog was, instead, nearly as big as I am. Maybe bigger. Shadowy, amorphous, like a swooping angel of death hovering in a dream, it was more suggestion than substance, fearsome precisely because it remained mysterious. No baleful yellow eyes. No clear features. No distinct form. Man or ape, or neither: the leader of the troop, there and gone.
Orson and I had come to a halt again.
I turned my head slowly to survey the streaming murk around us, intent on picking up any helpful sound. But the troop moved as silently as the fog.
I felt as though I were a diver far beneath the sea, trapped in blinding currents rich with plankton and algae, having glimpsed a circling shark, waiting for it to reappear out of the gloom and bite me in half.
Something brushed against the back of my legs, plucked at my jeans, and it wasn’t Orson because it made a wicked hissing sound. I kicked at it but didn’t connect, and it vanished into the mist before I could get a look at it.
Orson yelped in surprise, as though he’d had an encounter of his own.
“Here, boy,” I said urgently, and he came at once to my side.
I let go of the bicycle, which clattered to the sand. Gripping the pistol in both hands, I began to turn in a full circle, searching for something to shoot at.
Shrill, angry chittering arose. These seemed recognizably to be the voices of monkeys. At least half a dozen of them.
If I killed one, the others might flee in fear. Or they might react as the tangerine-eating monkey had reacted to the broom that Angela had brandished in her kitchen: with furious aggressiveness.
In any event, visibility was virtually zero, and I couldn’t see their eyeshine or their shadows, so I dared not waste ammunition by firing blindly into the fog. When the Glock was empty, I would be easy prey.
As one, the chittering voices fell silent.
The dense, ceaselessly seething clouds now damped even the sound of the surf. I could hear Orson’s panting and my own too-rapid breathing, nothing else.
The great black form of the troop leader swelled again through the vaporous gray shrouds. It swooped as if it were winged, although this appearance of flight was surely illusory.
Orson snarled, and I juked back, triggering the laser-sighting mechanism. A red dot rippled across the morphing face of the fog. The troop leader, no more defined than a fleeting shadow on a frost-crusted window, was swallowed entirely by the mist before I could pin the laser to its mercurial shape.
I recalled the collection of skulls on the concrete stairs of the spillway in the storm culvert. Maybe the collector wasn’t some teenage sociopath in practice for his adult career. Maybe the skulls were trophies that had been gathered and arranged by the monkeys—which was a peculiar and disturbing notion.
An even more disturbing thought occurred to me: Maybe my skull and Orson’s—stripped of all flesh, hollow-eyed and gleaming—would be added to the display.
Orson howled as a screeching monkey burst through the veils of mist and leaped onto his back. The dog twisted his head, snapping his teeth, trying to bite his unwanted rider, simultaneously trying to thrash it off.
We were so close that even in the meager light and churning mist, I could see the yellow eyes. Radiant, cold, and fierce. Glaring up at me. I couldn’t squeeze off a shot at the attacker without hitting Orson.
The monkey had hardly landed on Orson’s back when it sprang off the dog. It slammed hard into me, twenty-five pounds of wiry muscle and bone, staggering me backward, clambering up my chest, using my leather jacket for purchase, and in the chaos I was unable to shoot it without a high risk of wounding myself.
For an instant, we were face-to-face, eye to murderous eye. The creature’s teeth were bared, and it was hissing ferociously, breath pungent and repulsive. It was a monkey yet not a monkey, and the profoundly alien quality of its bold stare was terrifying.
It snatched my cap off my head, and I swatted at it with the barrel of the Glock. Clutching the hat, the monkey dropped to the ground. I kicked, and the kick connected, knocking the cap out of its hand. Squealing, the rhesus tumbled-scampered into the fog, out of sight.