Seize the Night

Lion King failed to fill me with magic-kingdom joy.
    I hoped Manuel knew what he was talking about when he predicted the imminent availability of a vaccine, a cure.
    Bobby gently draped the square of silk over the woman's face, concealing her tortured features.
    As Bobby's hands came close to her, I tensed and found myself repositioning my grip on the extinguished flashlight, as if I might use it as a weapon. I half expected to see the woman's eyes shift, to hear her snarl, to see those pointed teeth flash and blood spurt, even as she looped the rosary around his neck and pulled him down into a deadly embrace.
    I am not the only one with a hyperactive imagination. I saw a wariness in Bobby's face. His hands twitched nervously as he replaced the silk.
    And after we left the study, Sasha hesitated and then returned to the open door to check the room once more. She no longer gripped the .38 in both hands but nonetheless held it at the ready, as though she wouldn't have been surprised to discover that even a glassful of the Jonestown punch, their version of a Heaven's Gate cocktail, was not poisonous enough to put down the creature in the Morris chair.
    Also on the ground floor were a sewing room and a laundry room, but both were deserted.
    In the hallway, Roosevelt whispered Mungojerrie's name, because we had yet to see the cat since we'd entered the house.
    A soft answering meow followed by two more, audible above the competing sound tracks of the Disney movie, drew us forward along the hall.
    Mungojerrie was sitting on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs.
    In the gloom, his radiant green eyes fixed on Roosevelt, then shifted to Sasha when she quietly but urgently suggested that we get the hell out of here.
    Without the cat, we had little chance of conducting a successful search of Wyvern. We were hostage to his curiosity to whatever it was that motivated him to turn his back to us on the newel post, sprint agilely up the handrail, spring to the stairs, and disappear into the darkness of the upper floor.
    “What's he doing?” I asked Roosevelt.
    “Wish I knew. It takes two to communicate,” he murmured.

22
    As before, Sasha took the point position as we ascended the stairs.
    I brought up the rear. The carpeted treads creaked a little underfoot, more than a little under Roosevelt's feet, but the movie soundtrack drifting up from the living room and study—and similar sounds coming from upstairs—effectively masked the noises we made.
    At the top of the stairs, I turned and looked down. There weren't any dead people standing in the foyer, with their heads concealed under black silk. Not even one. I had expected five.
    Six doors led off the upstairs hall. Five were open, and pulsing light came from three rooms. Competing sound tracks indicated that The Lion King was not the universal choice of entertainment for these condemned.
    Unwilling to pass an unexplored room and possibly leave an assailant behind us, Sasha went to the first door, which was closed. I stood with my back to the wall at the hinged edge of the door, and she put her back to the wall on the other side. I reached across, gripped the knob, and turned it. When I pushed the door open, Sasha went through fast and low, the gun in her right hand, feeling for the light switch with her left.
    A bathroom. Nobody there.
    She backed into the hall, switching off the light but leaving the door open.
    Beside the bathroom was a linen closet.
    Four rooms remained. Doors open. Light and voices and music coming from three of them.
    I emphatically am not a gun lover, having fired one for the first time only a month previously. I still worry about shooting myself in the foot, and would rather shoot myself in the foot than be forced ever again to kill another human being. But now I was seized by a desire for a gun that was probably only slightly down the scale of desperation from the urgency with which a half-starved man craves food, because I couldn't bear to see Sasha taking all the risks.
    At the next room, she cleared the doorway quickly. When there was not an immediate outburst of gunfire, Bobby and I followed her inside, while Roosevelt watched the hall from the threshold.
    A bedside lamp glowed softly. On the television was a Nature Channel documentary that might have been soothing, even elegiac, when it had been turned on to provide a distraction for the doomed as they drank their spiked fruit punch, but at the moment a fox was chewing the guts out of a