Orson started after the beast, barking, all his fear forgotten. When I called him back, he did not obey.
Then the larger form of the troop leader appeared again, more fleetingly than before, a sinuous shape billowing like a flung cape, gone almost as soon as it appeared but lingering long enough to make Orson reconsider the wisdom of pursuing the rhesus that had tried to steal my cap.
“Jesus,” I said explosively as the dog whined and backed away from the chase.
I snatched the cap off the ground but didn’t return it to my head. Instead, I folded it and jammed it into an inside pocket of my jacket.
Shakily, I assured myself that I was okay, that I hadn’t been bitten. If I’d been scratched, I didn’t feel the sting of it, not on my hands or face. No, I hadn’t been scratched. Thank God. If the monkey was carrying an infectious disease communicable only by contact with bodily fluids, I couldn’t have caught it.
On the other hand, I’d smelled its fetid breath when we were face-to-face, breathed the very air that it exhaled. If this was an airborne contagion, I was already in possession of a one-way ticket to the cold-holding room.
In response to a tinny clatter behind me, I swung around and discovered that my fallen bicycle was being dragged into the fog by something I couldn’t see. Flat on its side, combing sand with its spokes, the rear wheel was the only part of the bike still in sight, and it almost disappeared into the murk before I reached down with one hand and grabbed it.
The hidden bicycle thief and I engaged in a brief tug of war, which I handily won, suggesting that I was pitted against one or two rhesus monkeys and not against the much larger troop leader. I stood the bike on its wheels, leaned it against my body to keep it upright, and once more raised the Glock.
Orson returned to my side.
Nervously, he relieved himself again, shedding the last of his beer. I was half surprised that I hadn’t wet my pants.
For a while I gasped noisily for breath, shaking so badly that even a two-hand grip on the pistol couldn’t keep it from jigging up and down. Gradually I grew calmer. My heart worked less diligently to crack my ribs.
Like the hulls of ghost ships, gray walls of mist sailed past, an infinite flotilla, towing behind them an unnatural stillness. No chittering. No squeals or shrieks. No loonlike cries. No sigh of wind or sough of surf. I felt almost as though, without realizing it, I had been killed in the recent confrontation, as though I now stood in a chilly antechamber outside the corridor of life, waiting for a door to open into Judgment.
Finally it became apparent that the games were over for a while. Holding the Glock with only one hand, I began to walk the bicycle east along the horn. Orson padded at my side.
I was sure that the troop was still monitoring us, although from a greater distance than before. I saw no stalking shapes in the fog, but they were out there, all right.
Monkeys. But not monkeys. Apparently escaped from a laboratory at Wyvern.
The end of the world, Angela had said.
Not by fire.
Not by ice.
Something worse.
Monkeys. The end of the world by monkeys.
Apocalypse with primates.
Armageddon. The end, fini, omega, doomsday, close the door and turn out the lights forever.
This was totally, fully, way crazy. Every time I tried to get my mind around the facts and pull them into some intelligible order, I wiped out big time, got radically clamshelled by a huge wave of imponderables.
Bobby’s attitude, his relentless determination to distance himself from the insoluble troubles of the modern world and be a champion slacker, had always struck me as a legitimate lifestyle choice. Now it seemed to be not merely legitimate but reasoned, logical, and wise.
Because I was not expected to survive to adulthood, my parents raised me to play, to have fun, to indulge my sense of wonder, to live as much as possible without worry and without fear, to live in the moment with little concern for the future: in short, to trust in God and to believe that I, like everyone, am here for a purpose; to be as grateful for my limitations as for my talents and blessings, because both are part of a design beyond my comprehension. They recognized the need for me to learn self-discipline, of course, and respect for others. But, in fact, those things come naturally when you truly believe that your life has a spiritual dimension and that you are a carefully designed element in the mysterious mosaic of life. Although there had appeared to be little chance that I would outlive both parents, Mom and Dad prepared for this eventuality when I was first diagnosed: They purchased a large second-to-die life-insurance policy, which would now provide handsomely for me even if I never earned another cent from my books and articles. Born for play and fun and wonder, destined never to have to hold a job, destined never to be burdened by the responsibilities that weigh down most people, I could give up my writing and become such a total surf bum that Bobby Halloway, by comparison, would appear to be a compulsive workaholic with no more capacity for fun than a cabbage. Furthermore, I could embrace absolute slackerhood with no guilt whatsoever, with no qualms or doubts, because I was raised to be what all humanity might 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 Embarcadero 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 bestseller—but perhaps smart enough to be the most dangerous, uncontrollable pest humanity had ever known. Imagine what damage rats could do, how rapidly their numbers would grow, if they were even half as smart as human beings and could learn how to avoid all traps and poisons.
Were these monkeys truly escapees from a laboratory, loose in the world and cleverly eluding capture? If so, how did they get to be so intelligent in the first place? What did they want? What was their agenda? Why hadn’t a massive effort been launched to track them down, round them up, and return them to better cages from which they could never break free?
Or were they tools being used by someone at Wyvern? The way the cops use trained police dogs. The way the Navy uses dolphins to search for enemy submarines and, in wartime—it is rumored—even to plant magnetic packages of explosives on the hulls of targeted boats.
A thousand other questions swarmed through my mind. All of them were equally crazy.
Depending on the answers, the ramifications of these monkeys’ heightened intelligence could be earth-shattering. The possible consequences to human civilization were especially alarming when you considered the viciousness of these animals and their apparently innate hostility.
Angela’s prediction of doom might not have been farfetched, might actually have been less pessimistic than my assessment of the situation would be when—if ever—I knew all the facts. Certainly, doom had come to Angela herself.
I also intuited that the monkeys were not the entire story. They were but one chapter of an epic. Other astonishments were awaiting discovery.
Compared to the project at Wyvern, Pandora’s fabled box, from which had been unleashed all the evils that plague humanity—wars, pestilence, diseases, famines, floods—might prove to have held only a collection of petty nuisances.
In my haste to get to the marina, I was cycling too fast to allow Orson to keep pace with me. He was sprinting full throttle, ears flapping, panting hard, but falling steadily behind.
In truth, I was cranking the bike to the max not because I was in a hurry to reach the marina but because, unconsciously, I wanted to outrace the tidal wave of terror sweeping toward us. There was no escaping it, however, and no matter how furiously I pedaled, I could outrun nothing but my dog.
Recalling Dad’s final words, I stopped pedaling and coasted until Orson was able to stay at my side without heroic effort.
Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life—and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.
Besides, the best way to deal with a rising sea of trouble is to catch the wave at the zero break and ride it out, slide along the face straight into the cathedral, get totally Ziplocked in the green room, walk the board all the way through the barrel, hooting, showing no fear. That’s not only cool: It’s classic.
22
With a gentle and even tender sound, like flesh on flesh in a honeymoon bed, low waves slipped between the pilings and slapped against the sea wall. The damp air offered a faint and pleasant aromatic mèlange of brine, fresh kelp, creosote, rusting iron, and other fragrances I couldn’t quite identify.
The marina, tucked into the sheltered northeast corner of the bay, offers docking for fewer than three hundred vessels, only six of which are full-time residences for their owners. Although social life in Moonlight Bay does not center around boating, there is a long waiting list for any slip that becomes available.
I walked my bike toward the west end of the main pier, which ran parallel to shore. The tires swished and bumped softly across the dew-wet, uneven planks. Only one boat in the marina had lights in its windows at that hour. Dock lamps, though dim, showed me the way through the fog.
Because the fishing fleet ties up farther out along the northern horn of the bay, the comparatively sheltered marina is reserved for pleasure craft. There are sloops and ketches and yawls ranging from modest to impressive—although more of the former than the latter—motor yachts mostly of manageable length and price, a few Boston Whalers, and even two houseboats. The largest sailing yacht—in fact, the largest boat—docked here is currently Sunset Dancer, a sixty-foot Windship cutter. Of the motor yachts, the largest is Nostromo, a fifty-six-foot Bluewater coastal cruiser; and it was to this boat that I was headed.
At the west end of the pier, I took a ninety-degree turn onto a subsidiary pier that featured docking slips on both sides. The Nostromo was in the last berth on the right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
That was the code Sasha had used to identify the man who had come to the radio station seeking me, who hadn’t wanted his name used on the phone, and who had been reluctant to come to Bobby’s house to talk with me. It was a line from a poem by Robert Frost, one that most eavesdroppers would be unlikely to recognize, and I had assumed that it referred to Roosevelt Frost, who owned the Nostromo.
As I leaned my bicycle against the dock railing near the gangway to Roosevelt’s slip, tidal action caused the boats to wallow in their berths. They creaked and groaned like arthritic old men murmuring feeble complaints in their sleep.
I had never bothered to chain my bike when I left it unattended, because until this night Moonlight Bay had been a refuge from the crime that infected the modern world. By the time this weekend passed, our picturesque town might lead the country in murders, mutilations, and priest beatings, per capita, but we probably didn’t have to worry about a dramatic increase in bicycle theft.
The gangway was steep because the tide was not high, and it was slippery with condensation. Orson descended as carefully as I did.
We were two-thirds of the way down to the port-side finger of the slip when a low voice, hardly more than a gruff whisper, seeming to originate magically from the fog directly over my head, demanded, “Who goes there?”