all who are born of man and woman, I live by the whims of fate: Because of my XP, I’m just more acutely aware of the machinations of fate than most people are, and this awareness is liberating.
Yet, as I walked my bicycle eastward along the peninsula, I persevered in my search for meaning in all that I’d seen and heard since sunset.
Before the troop had arrived to torment Orson and me, I’d been trying to pin down exactly what was different about these monkeys; now I returned to that riddle. Unlike ordinary rhesuses, these were bold rather than shy, brooding rather than lighthearted. The most obvious difference was that these monkeys were hot-tempered, vicious. Their potential for violence was not, however, the primary quality that separated them from other rhesuses; it was only a consequence of another, more profound difference that I recognized but that I was inexplicably reluctant to consider.
The curdled fog was as thick as ever, but gradually it began to brighten. Smears of blurry light appeared in the murk: buildings and streetlamps along the shore.
Orson whined with delight—or just relief—at these signs of civilization, but we weren’t any safer in town than out of it.
When we left the southern horn entirely and entered Embarcadero Way, I paused to take my cap from the jacket pocket in which I had tucked it. I put it on and gave the visor a tug. The Elephant Man adjusts his costume.
Orson peered up at me, cocked his head consideringly, and then chuffed as though in approval. He was the Elephant Man’s dog, after all, and as such, a measure of his own self-image was dependent upon the style and grace with which I comported myself.
Because of the streetlamps, visibility had increased to perhaps a hundred feet. Like the ghost tides of an ancient and long-dead sea, fog surged off the bay and into the streets; each fine drop of mist refracted the golden sodium-vapor light and translated it to the next drop.
If members of the troop still accompanied us, they would be forced to lurk at a greater distance here than they had on the barren peninsula, to avoid being seen. Like players in a recasting of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” they would have to confine their skulking to parks, unilluminated alleyways, balconies, high ledges, parapets, and rooftops.
At this late hour, no pedestrians or motorists were in sight. The town appeared to have been abandoned.
I was overcome by the disturbing notion that these silent and empty streets foreshadowed a real, frightening desolation that would befall Moonlight Bay in the not-too-distant future. Our little burg was preparing to be a ghost town.
I climbed onto my bike and headed north on Embarcadero Way. The man who had contacted me through Sasha, at the radio station, was waiting on his boat at the marina.
As I pedaled along the deserted avenue, my mind returned to the millennium monkeys. I was sure that I had identified the most fundamental difference between ordinary rhesuses and this extraordinary troop that secretly roamed the night, but I was reluctant to accept my own conclusion, inevitable though it seemed: These monkeys were smarter than ordinary monkeys.
Way smarter, radically smarter.
They had understood the purpose of Bobby’s camera, and they had stolen it. They filched his new camera, too.
They recognized my face among the faces of the thirty dolls in Angela’s workroom, and they used that one to taunt me. Later, they set a fire to conceal Angela’s murder.
The big brows at Fort Wyvern might have been engaged in secret bacteriological-warfare research, but that didn’t explain why their laboratory monkeys were markedly smarter than any monkeys that had previously walked the earth.
Just how smart was “markedly smarter”? Maybe not smart enough to win a bundle on Jeopardy! Maybe not smart enough to teach poetry at the university level or to successfully manage a radio station or to track the patterns of surf worldwide, maybe not even smart enough to write a New York Times bestseller—but perhaps smart enough to be the most dangerous, uncontrollable pest humanity had ever known. Imagine what damage rats could do, how rapidly their numbers would grow, if they were even half as smart as human beings and could learn how to avoid all traps and poisons.
Were these monkeys truly escapees from a laboratory, loose in the world and cleverly eluding capture? If so, how did they get to be so intelligent in the first place? What did they want? What was their agenda?