Seize the Night

a window. We reached the next fence before we realized that Mungojerrie wasn't with us.
    Panicked, we doubled back, searching among the neatly trimmed shrubs and hedges, whispering his name, which isn't easy to whisper with a straight face, and we found him near the Stanwyks' porch. He was a ghostly gray shape on the black lawn.
    We squatted around our diminutive team leader, and Roosevelt switched his brain to the Weird Channel to find out what the cat was thinking.
    “He wants to go inside,” Roosevelt whispered.
    “Why?” I asked.
    Roosevelt murmured, “Something's wrong here.”
    “What?” Sasha asked.
    “Death lives here,” Roosevelt interpreted.
    “He keeps the yard nice,” Bobby said.
    “Doogie's waiting,” Sasha reminded the cat.
    Roosevelt said, “Mungojerrie says people in the house need help.”
    “How can he tell?” I asked, immediately knew the answer, and found myself repeating it with Sasha and Bobby in a whispered chorus, “Cats know things.”
    I was tempted to snatch up the cat, tuck him under my arm, and run away from here with him as if he were a football. He had fangs and claws, of course, and might object. More to the point, we needed to have his willing cooperation in the search ahead of us. He might be disinclined to cooperate if I treated him like a piece of sporting goods, even if I had no intention of drop-kicking him to Wyvern.
    Forced to take a closer look at the Victorian house, I realized the place had a Twilight Zone quality. On the upper floor, windows revealed rooms brightened only by the flickering light of television screens, an unmistakable pulsing radiance. Downstairs, the two rooms at the back of the house—probably kitchen and dining room—were lit by the orange, draft shaken flames of candles or oil lamps.
    Our Tonto-with-a-tail sprang to his feet and sprinted to the house, went boldly up the steps and disappeared into the shadows of the back porch.
    Maybe Mr. Mungojerrie, phenomenal feline, has a well-honed sense of civic responsibility. Maybe his moral compass is so exquisitely magnetized that he cannot turn away from those in need. I suspected, however, that his compelling motivation was the well-known curiosity of his species, which so frequently leads to their demise.
    The four of us remained squatting in a semicircle for a moment, until Bobby said, “Am I wrong to think this sucks?” An informal poll showed a hundred percent agreement with the it sucks point of view.
    Reluctantly, stealthily, we followed Mungojerrie onto the back porch, where he was scratching persistently at the door.
    Through the four glass panes in the door, we had a clear view of a kitchen so Victorian in its detail and bric-a-brac that I would not have been surprised to see Charles Dickens, William Gladstone, and Jack the Ripper having tea. The room was lit by an oil lamp on the oval table, as though someone within were my brother in XP.
    Sasha took the initiative and knocked.
    No one answered.
    Mungojerrie continued to scratch at the door.
    “We get the point,” Bobby told him.
    Sasha tried the knob, which turned.
    Hoping to be thwarted by a dead bolt, we were dismayed to learn that the door was unlocked. It swung open a few inches.
    Mungojerrie squeezed through the narrow gap and vanished inside before Sasha could have second thoughts.
    “Death, much death,” Roosevelt murmured, evidently communicating with the mouser.
    I wouldn't have been surprised if Dr. Stanwyk had appeared at the door, dressed in a bio-secure suit like Hodgson, face seething with hideous parasites, a white-eyed crow perched on his shoulder. This man who had once seemed wise and kind—if eccentric—now loomed ominously in my imagination, like the uninvited party guest in Poe's “The Masque of the Red Death.” The Roger and Marie Stanwyk I had known for years were an odd but nonetheless happy and compatible couple in their early fifties.
    He sported muttonchops and a lush mustache, and was rarely seen in anything but a suit and tie, you sensed that he longed to wear wing collars and to carry a pocket watch on a fob, but felt these would be eccentricities in excess of those expected of a renowned scientist, nevertheless, he frequently allowed himself to wear quaint vests, and he spent an inordinate amount of time working at his Sherlockian pipe with tamp, pick, and spoon. Marie, a plump-cheeked matron with a rosy complexion, was a collector of antique ornamental tea caddies and nineteenth-century