Seize the Night

additional members of the troop to come here and sniff the vile remains.
    Even above the chattering and muttering of the crowd clustered around the dead thing, I could hear an answering cry from elsewhere in the bungalow.
    The kitchen was only marginally less noisy than a monkey house at a zoo.
    Maybe the lights would come on and I'd discover myself in a Twilight Zone moment. Maybe Christopher Snow wasn't my current identity but merely the name under which I had lived in a previous life, and now I was one of them , reincarnated as a rhesus. Maybe we weren't in a Dead Town bungalow but were in a giant cage, surrounded by people pointing and laughing as we swung from ropes and scratched our bald butts.
    As though I had tempted fate merely by thinking about the lights coming on, a glow arose toward the front of the house. I was aware of it, at first, solely because the monkey at the threshold of the dining room began to resolve out of the blackness, the way an image gradually solidifies on Polaroid film.
    This development didn't alarm or even surprise the beast, so I assumed that it had called for the light.
    I wasn't as sanguine about these changing circumstances as the monkey appeared to be. The shroud of darkness in which I'd been hiding was going to be stripped away.

8
    Because the approaching luminosity was frost white rather than yellow and because it didn't throb like an open flame, it was most likely produced by a flashlight. The beam wasn't focused on the doorway, instead, the monkey standing there was illuminated by the indirect radiance, indicating that the source was a two- or three-battery model, not just a penlight.
    Evidently, to the extent that their small hands could serve them, the members of the troop were tool users. They had either found the flashlight or stolen it—probably the latter, because these monkeys have no more respect for the law and property rights than they have for Miss Manners' rules of etiquette.
    The individual at the doorway faced the steadily brightening dining room with a peculiar air of expectation, perhaps even with a degree of wonder.
    At the farther end of the kitchen, out of my line of sight, the rest of the searchers had fallen silent. I suspected that their posture matched that of the rhesus I could see, that they were equally fascinated or even awed.
    Since the source of the glow was surely nothing more exotic than a flashlight, I assumed that something about the bearer of the light elicited these monkeys' reverence. I was curious about that individual, but reluctant to die for the satisfaction of my curiosity.
    Already, a dangerous amount of light was passing through the doorway.
    Absolute darkness no longer reigned. I could make out the general shapes of the cabinets across the kitchen.
    When I glanced down, I was still in shadow, but I could see my hands and the pistol. Worse, I could see my clothes and shoes, which were all black.
    The cramp burned in my leg. I tried not to think about it. That was like trying not to think about a grizzly bear while it gnawed off your foot.
    To clear my vision, I was now blinking away both involuntary tears of pain and a flood of cold sweat. Forget about the danger posed by the rapidly receding darkness, Soon the troop was going to be able to smell eau de Snow even over the malodor of decomposition.
    The monkey at the dining-room threshold took two steps backward as the light advanced. If the beast looked in my direction, it could not fail to see me.
    I was almost reduced to the childhood game of pretending with all my might to be invisible.
    Then, in the dining room, the bearer of the flashlight evidently halted and turned toward something else of interest. A murmur swept through the searchers in the kitchen as the glow diminished.
    Oily gloom welled out of the corners, and now I heard the sound that had captured the monkeys' attention. The drone of an engine.
    Perhaps a truck. It was growing louder.
    From the front of the house came a cry of alarm.
    In the dining room, the bearer of the light switched it off.
    The search party fled the kitchen. The linoleum crackled under their feet, but they made no other sound.
    From the dining room onward, they retreated with the stealth they had exhibited when originally charging the bungalow from the street.
    They were so silent that I wasn't convinced they had entirely withdrawn.
    I half suspected they were toying with me, waiting just inside the dining-room doorway. When I limped out of the