Seize the Night

kitchen, they would swarm over me, gleefully yelling “Surprise,” gouge out my eyes, bite off my lips, and conduct a fortune-telling session with my entrails.
    The growl of the engine grew steadily louder, although the vehicle that produced it was still some distance away.
    During all the nights I had explored Fort Wyvern's desolate precincts, I had never until now heard an engine or other mechanical sound.
    Generally this place was so quiet that it might have been an outpost at the end of time, when the sun no longer rose and the stars remained fixed in the heavens and the only sound was the occasional low moan of a wind from nowhere.
    As I tentatively eased out of the broom closet, I remembered something Bobby had asked when I'd told him to come in by the river, Do I have to creep or can I strut?
    I had said that sneaky didn't matter anymore. By that, I hadn't meant that he should arrive with drum and fife. I had also told him to watch his ass.
    Although I had never imagined that Bobby would drive into Wyvern, I was more than half convinced that the approaching vehicle was his Jeep.
    I should have anticipated this. Bobby was Bobby, after all.
    I'd first thought that the troop had reacted with fright to the engine noise, that they had fled in fear of being spotted, pursued.
    They spend most of their time in the hills, in the wild, coming into Moonlight Bay—on what mysterious missions I do not know—only after sundown, preferring to limit their visits to nights when they have the double cover of darkness and fog. Even then, they travel as much as possible by storm drains, parks, arroyos, dry riverbeds, vacant lots, and perhaps from tree to tree. With rare exception, they do not show themselves, and they are masters of secrecy, moving among us as covertly as termites move through the walls of our houses, as unnoticed as earthworms tunneling the ground under our feet.
    Here on turf more congenial to them, however, their reaction to the sound of an engine might be bolder and more aggressive than it would have been in town. They might not flee from it. They might be drawn to it. If they followed it without showing themselves and waited for the driver to park and get out … The engine roar grew steadily louder. The vehicle was in the neighborhood, probably only a few blocks away.
    Abandoning caution, trying to shake the pain out of my leg as though it were a biting mongrel that could be kicked loose, I hobbled out of the kitchen and hurried blindly through the monkeyless dining room. As far as I could tell, none of the flea farms lingered in the living room, either.
    At the window from which I had watched them earlier, I put my brow to the glass and saw eight or ten members of the troop in the street.
    They were dropping, one by one, through the open manhole, into which their comrades had apparently already vanished.
    Happily, Bobby wasn't in jeopardy of having his brain scooped out and his skull turned into a flowerpot to beautify some monkey den. Not immediate jeopardy, anyway.
    As fast as flowing water, the monkeys poured into the manhole, gone in a quicksilver ripple. In their wake, the tree-lined street appeared to be no more substantial than a dreamscape, a mere illusion of twisted shadows and secondhand light, and it was almost possible to believe that the troop had been as imaginary as the cast of a nightmare.
    Heading for the front door, I returned the spare magazine to the pocket in my shoulder holster. I held on to the Glock.
    When I reached the porch, I heard the manhole cover being slid into place. I was surprised that the monkeys were strong enough to maneuver that heavy object from the storm drain below, a tricky task even for a grown man.
    The engine noise reverberated through the bungalows and trees.
    The vehicle was close, yet I saw no headlights.
    As I reached the street, still working the last of the cramp out of my leg, the manhole cover clanked into its niche. I arrived in time to see the curved point of a steel grappling hook wiggle out of a slot in the iron, extracted from below. City street-department crews carry such implements to snare and lift these covers without having to pry them loose from the edge. The monkeys must have found or stolen the hook, hanging from the service ladder in the drain, a couple of them were able to leverage the disc into place, covering their trail.
    Their use of tools had ominous implications that I was loath to consider.
    Headlight beams flashed through the