Seize the Night

fruit juice.
    His left arm trailed off the settee, the back of the hand against the Persian carpet, palm turned up. His other arm lay across his chest.
    His head was propped on two small brocade pillows, and his face was concealed beneath a square of black silk.
    Sasha was covering the room behind us, less interested in the corpse than in guarding against a surprise assault.
    The black veil over the face did not bellow or even flutter. The man under it was not breathing.
    I knew that he was dead, knew what killed him—not a contagious disease, but a phenobarbital fizz or its lethal equivalent—yet I was reluctant to remove the silk mask for the same reason that any child, having pondered the possibility of a boogeyman, is hesitant to push back the sheets, rise up on his mattress, lean out, and peek under the bed.
    Hesitantly, I pinched a corner of the silk square between thumb and forefinger, and pulled it off the man's face.
    He was alive. That was my first impression. His eyes were open, and I thought I saw life in them.
    After a breathless moment, I realized that his stare was fixed.
    His eyes appeared to be moving only because reflections of images on the TV screen were twitching in them.
    The light was just bright enough to allow me to identify the deceased.
    His name was Tom Sparkman. He was an associate of Roger Stanwyk's, a professor at Ashdon, also a biochemist, and no doubt deeply involved in Wyvern business.
    The body showed no signs of corruption. It couldn't have been here a long time.
    Reluctantly, I touched the back of my left hand to Sparkman's brow.
    “Still warm,” I whispered.
    We followed Roosevelt to a button-tufted sofa with carved-wood rails at seat and crest, on which a second man lay, with hands folded across his abdomen. This one was wearing his shoes, and his drained glass lay on its side on the carpet, where he'd dropped it.
    Roosevelt peeled back the square of black silk that concealed the man's face. The light was not as good here, the corpse not as close to the television as Sparkman, and I wasn't able to identify the body.
    Two seconds after switching on my flashlight, I clicked it off.
    Cadaver number two was Lennart. Toregard, a Swedish mathematician on a four-year contract to teach one class a semester at Ashdon, which was surely a front for his real work, at Wyvern. Toregard's eyes were closed.
    His face was relaxed. A faint smile suggested he was having a pleasant dream—or was in the middle of one when death claimed him.
    Bobby slipped two fingers under Toregard's wrist, feeling for a pulse.
    He shook his head, nothing.
    Bat wing shadows swooped along one wall, across the ceiling.
    Sasha spun toward the movement.
    I reached under my jacket, but there was no shoulder holster, no gun.
    The shadows were only shadows, sent flying through the room by a sudden flurry of action on the television screen.
    The third corpse was slumped in a huge armchair, legs propped on a matching footstool, arms on the chair arms. Bobby stripped away the silk hood, I flashed the light on and off, and Roosevelt whispered, “Colonel Ellway.” Colonel Eaton Ellway had been second in command of Fort Wyvern and had retired to Moonlight Bay after the base was closed.
    Retired. Or engaged in a clandestine assignment in civilian clothes.
    With no additional dead men to investigate, I finally registered what was on the television. It was tuned to a cable channel that was running an animated feature film, Disney's The Lion King .
    We stood for a moment, listening to the house.
    Other music and other voices came from other rooms.
    Neither the music nor the voices were made by the living.
    Death lives here.
    From the living room—a chamber grossly misnamed—we cautiously crossed the front hall to the study. Sasha and Roosevelt halted at the doorway.
    A tambour door was open on an entertainment center incorporated into a wall of bookshelves, and The Lion King was on the television, with the volume low. Nathan Lane and company were singing “Hakuna Matata.”
    Inside, Bobby and I found two more members of this suicide club with squares of black silk over their heads. A man sat at the desk, and a woman was slumped in a Morris chair, empty drinking glasses near each of them.
    I no longer had the heart to strip away their veils. The black silk might have been cult paraphernalia with a symbolic meaning that was comprehensible only to those who had come together in this ritual of self-destruction. I thought,