Seize the Night

again.
    While my eyes and the monkey's had been locked, I'd fallen into a curious physical detachment so complete that I had ceased to feel the spasms of pain in my cramping calf. Now the agony returned, worse than before.
    Because all the members of the search party were distracted and making noise, I exercised the cramped muscle as best I could by shifting my weight firmly back and forth from heel to toe of my left foot.
    This maneuver relieved the pain somewhat, although not enough to ensure that I would be able to move gracefully if one of the monkeys invited me to waltz.
    The conferring members of the search party began to jabber in louder voices. They were excited. Although I don't believe they have a language in remotely the sense that we do, their bleats and hisses and growls and warbles were obviously argumentative. They appeared to have forgotten what they had come looking for in the first place. Easily distracted, quick to fall into disorganization, prone to put aside mutual interests in favor of quarreling among themselves for the first time, these guys seemed an awful lot like human beings.
    The longer I listened to them, the more I dared to believe that I would get out of this bungalow alive.
    I was still rocking my foot, flexing and contracting my calf, when one of the quarrelers broke away from the rest of the search party and crossed the kitchen to the dining-room doorway. The instant I saw its eye shine, I stopped moving and pretended to be a broom.
    The monkey halted at the dining-room threshold and shrieked. It seemed to be calling to other members of the troop, who were, presumably, waiting outside on the front porch or searching the bedrooms.
    Answering voices rose at once. They grew nearer.
    The prospect of sharing this small kitchen with even more monkeys possibly with the entire troop punctured my half-inflated hope of survival. As my shaky confidence rapidly gave way to confident desperation, I examined my options and found no new ones.
    The depth of my desperation was so abyssal that I actually asked myself what the immortal Jackie Chan would do in a situation like this.
    The answer was simple, Jackie would erupt out of the broom closet with an athletic leap that landed him in the very midst of the search party, drop kick one of them between the legs, karate-chop two of them in their necks as he somersaulted to his feet, get off a cool one-liner, break the arms and legs of multiple adversaries during an astonishing pirouette of flashing fists and feet, execute a series of charming and hilarious rubber-faced expressions the likes of which no one has seen since the days of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, tap-dance across the heads of the remaining members of the troop, crash through the window above the sink, and flee to safety. Jackie Chan never gets calf cramps.
    Meanwhile, my calf cramp had become so painful that my eyes were watering.
    More monkeys entered the kitchen. They were chattering as they came, as if the discovery of any decomposing critter was the ideal occasion to call in all the relatives, open a keg of beer, and have a hootenanny.
    I couldn't discern how many joined the original six searchers.
    Maybe two. Maybe four. Not more than five or six.
    Too many.
    None of the newcomers showed the least interest in my corner of the room. They joined the others around whatever fascinating mound of rotting flesh they had discovered, and the lively argument continued.
    My luck wouldn't hold. At any moment they might decide to finish their inspection of the cabinets. The individual that had nearly discovered me might remember it had sensed something odd in this vicinity.
    I considered slipping out of the broom closet, creeping along the wall, easing through the doorway, and taking refuge in a corner of the dining room, as far away from the main traffic pattern as I could get.
    Before they had entered the kitchen, the first squad of searchers must have satisfied themselves that no one was lurking in that chamber, they wouldn't thoroughly inspect the same territory again.
    With my cramp, I couldn't move fast, but I could still rely on the cover of darkness, my old friend. Besides, if I had to stay where I was much longer, my nerves were going to wind so tight that I'd implode.
    Just as I convinced myself that I had to move, one of the monkeys sprinted away from whatever reeking pile they had gathered to discuss, returning to the dining-room doorway. It shrieked, perhaps calling for yet