Seize the Night

rotting in the kitchen.”
    “Want to?”
    “Need to,” I said, heading toward the bungalow.
    “Perverse,” he said, falling in beside me.
    “The troop was fascinated.”
    “We want to lower ourselves to monkey level?”
    “Maybe this is important.”
    He said, “My belly's full of kibby and beer.”
    “So?”
    “Just a friendly warning, bro. Right now I've got a low puke threshold.”

11
    The front door of the bungalow was open, as I had left it. The living room still smelled of dust, mildew, dry rot, and mice, in addition, there was now a lingering odor of mangy monkey.
    My flashlight, which I'd not dared to use here before, revealed a series of three-inch-long, yellowish-white cocoons fixed in the angle where the back wall met the ceiling, home to developing moths or butterflies, or perhaps egg cases spun by an exceptionally fertile spider. Lighter rectangles on the discolored walls marked where pictures had once hung. The plaster wasn't as fissured as you would expect in a house that was more than six decades old and that had been abandoned for nearly two years, but a web of fine cracks gave the walls the appearance of eggshells beginning to give way to hatching entities.
    On the floor, in a corner, was a child's red sock. It couldn't have anything to do with Jimmy, because it was caked with dust and had been here for a long time.
    As we crossed to the dining-room door, Bobby said, “Got a new board yesterday.”
    “The world's ending, you go shopping.”
    “Friends at Hobie made it for me.”
    “Hot?” I asked as I led him into the dining room.
    “Haven't ridden it yet.”
    In one corner, at the ceiling, was a cluster of cocoons similar to those in the previous room. They were also big, each three to four inches long and, at the widest point, approximately the diameter of plump frankfurters.
    Outside of this bungalow, I had never seen anything quite like these silken constructs. I moved directly under them, fixing them with the light.
    “Not uncreepy,” Bobby said.
    Within a couple of the cocoons were dark shapes, curled like question marks, but they were so heavily swaddled in flossy filaments that I could make out no details of them.
    “See anything moving?” I asked.
    “No.”
    “Me neither.”
    “Might be dead.”
    “Yeah,” I said, though I wasn't convinced. “Just some big, dead, half made moths.”
    “Moths?”
    “What else?” I asked.
    “Huge.”
    “Maybe new moths. A new, bigger species. Becoming.”
    “Bugs? Becoming?”
    “If people, dogs, birds, monkeys … why not bugs?”
    Frowning, Bobby thought about that. “Probably wouldn't be smart to buy any more wool sweaters.”
    A cold quiver of nausea wound through me as I realized that I'd been in these rooms in absolute darkness, unaware of the fat cocoons overhead. I'm not entirely sure why I found this thought so deeply disturbing. After all, it wasn't likely that I'd been in danger of being pinned to the wall by some bug and imprisoned in a suffocating cocoon of my own. On the other hand, this was Wyvern, so perhaps I'd been in precisely such danger.
    Partly, the nausea was caused by the stench wafting from the kitchen. I'd forgotten how fiercely ripe it was.
    Holding the shotgun in his right hand, covering his nose and mouth with his left, Bobby said, “Tell me the stink doesn't get worse than this.”
    “It doesn't get worse than this.”
    “But it does.”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “Let's be quick.”
    Just as I moved the flashlight away from the cocoons, I thought I saw one of the dark, curled forms writhe inside its silken sac.
    I focused the beam on the cluster again.
    None of the mystery bugs moved.
    Bobby said, “Jumpy?”
    “Aren't you?”
    “As a toad.”
    We ventured into the kitchen, where the linoleum cracked and popped underfoot and where the reek of decomposition was as thick in the air as a cloud of vaporized, rancid cooking oil in the kitchen of a greasy-spoon restaurant.
    Before searching for the source of the stench, I directed the light overhead. The upper cabinets hung under a soffit, and in the angle where the soffit met the ceiling, there were more cocoons than in the previous two rooms combined. Thirty or forty. Most were in the three-to-four-inch range, though a few were half again as large.
    Another twenty were nestled around the boxy fluorescent fixture in the center of the ceiling.
    “Not good,” Bobby said.
    I lowered the flashlight and at once discovered the source of the putrescent