“Big?” I asked.
“You’re probably thinking of an organ grinder’s monkey, one of those tiny cute little things. Rhesuses aren’t like that.”
“How big?”
“Probably two feet tall. Maybe twenty-five pounds.”
Such a monkey would seem enormous when encountered, unexpected, in the middle of a kitchen table.
I said, “You must have been pretty surprised.”
“More than surprised. I was a little scared. I know how strong those buggers are for their size. Mostly they’re peaceable, but once in a while you get one with a mean streak, and he’s a real handful.”
“Not the kind of monkey anyone would keep as a pet.”
“God, no. Not anyone normal—at least not in my book. Well, I’ll admit that rhesuses can be cute sometimes, with their pale little faces and that ruff of fur. But this one wasn’t cute.” Clearly, she could see it in her mind’s eye. “No, not this one.”
“So where did it come from?”
Instead of answering, Angela stiffened in her chair and cocked her head, listening intently to the house.
I couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.
Apparently, neither did she. Yet when she spoke again, she did not relax. Her thin hands were locked clawlike on the cordial glass. “I couldn’t figure how the thing got inside, into the house. December wasn’t overly warm that year. No windows or doors were open.”
“You didn’t hear it enter the room?”
“No. I was making noise with the cookie sheets, the mixing bowls. Music on the radio. But the damn thing must’ve been sitting on the table a minute or two, anyway, because by the time I realized it was there, it had eaten half the tangerine.”
Her gaze swept the kitchen, as though from the corner of her eye she had seen purposeful movement in the shadows at the periphery.
After steadying her nerves with brandy once more, she said, “Disgusting—a monkey right on the kitchen table, of all places.”
Grimacing, she brushed one trembling hand across the polished pine, as though a few of the creature’s hairs might still be clinging to the table four years after the incident.
“What did you do?” I pressed.
“I edged around the kitchen to the back door, opened it, hoping the monkey would run out.”
“But it was enjoying the tangerine, feeling pretty comfortable where it was,” I guessed.
“Yeah. It looked at the open door, then at me—and it actually seemed to laugh. This little tittering noise.”
“I swear I’ve seen dogs laugh now and then. Monkeys probably do, too.”
Angela shook her head. “Can’t remember any of them laughing in the lab. Of course, considering what their lives were like…they didn’t have much reason to be in high spirits.”
She looked up uneasily at the ceiling, on which three small overlapping rings of light quivered like the smoldering eyes of an apparition: images of the trio of ruby-red glasses on the table.
Encouraging her to continue, I said, “It wouldn’t go outside.”
Instead of responding, she rose from her chair, stepped to the back door, and tested the dead bolt to be sure it was still engaged.
“Angela?”
Hushing me, she pulled aside the curtain to peer at the patio and the moonlit yard, pulled it aside with trembling caution and only an inch, as if she expected to discover a hideous face pressed to the far side of the pane, gazing in at her.
My cordial glass was empty. I picked up the bottle, hesitated, and then put it down without pouring more.
When Angela turned away from the door, she said, “It wasn’t just a laugh, Chris. It was this frightening sound I could never adequately describe to you. It was an evil…an evil little cackle, a vicious edge to it. Oh, yes, I know what you’re thinking—this was just an animal, just a monkey, so it couldn’t be either good or evil. Maybe mean but not vicious, because animals can be bad-tempered, sure, but not consciously malevolent. That’s what you’re thinking. Well, I’m telling you, this one was more than just mean. This laugh was the coldest sound I’ve ever heard, the coldest and the ugliest—and evil.”
“I’m still with you,” I assured her.
Instead of returning to her chair from the door, she moved to the kitchen sink. Every square inch of glass in the windows above the sink was covered by the curtains, but she plucked at those panels of yellow fabric to make doubly sure we were fully screened from spying eyes.
Turning to stare at the table as though the monkey sat there even now, Angela said, “I got the broom, figuring I’d shoo the thing onto the floor and then toward the door. I mean, I didn’t take a whack at it or anything, just brushed at it. You know?”
“Sure.”
“But it wasn’t intimidated,” she said. “It exploded with rage. Threw down the half-eaten tangerine and grabbed the broom and tried to pull it away from me. When I wouldn’t let go, it started to climb the broom straight toward my hands.”
“Jesus.”
“Nimble as anything. So fast. Teeth bared and screeching, spitting, coming straight at me, so I let go of the broom, and the monkey fell to the floor with it, and I backed up until I bumped into the refrigerator.”
She bumped into the refrigerator again. The muffled clink of bottles came from the shelves within.
“It was on the floor, right in front of me. It knocked the broom aside. Chris, it was so furious. Fury out of proportion to anything that had happened. I hadn’t hurt it, hadn’t even touched it with the broom, but it wasn’t going to take any crap from me.”
“You said rhesuses are basically peaceable.”
“Not this one. Lips skinned back from its teeth, screeching, running at me and then back and then at me again, hopping up and down, tearing at the air, glaring at me so hatefully, pounding the floor with its fists…”
Both of her sweater sleeves had partly unrolled, and she drew her hands into them, out of sight. This memory monkey was so vivid that apparently she half expected it to fling itself at her right here, right now, and bite off the tips of her fingers.
“It was like a troll,” she said, “a gremlin, some wicked thing out of a storybook. Those dark-yellow eyes.”
I could almost see them myself. Smoldering.
“And then suddenly, it leaps up the cabinets, onto the counter near me, all in a wink. It’s right there”—she pointed—“beside the refrigerator, inches from me, at eye level when I turn my head. It hisses at me, a mean hiss, and its breath smells like tangerines. That’s how close we are. I knew—”
She interrupted herself to listen to the house again. She turned her head to the left to look toward the open door to the unlighted dining room.
Her paranoia was contagious. And because of what had happened to me since sundown, I was vulnerable to the infection.
Tensing in my chair, I cocked my head to allow any sinister sound to fall into the upturned cup of my ear.
The three rings of reflected light shimmered soundlessly on the ceiling. The curtains hung silently at the windows.
After a while Angela said, “Its breath smelled like tangerines. It hissed and hissed. I knew it could kill me if it wanted, kill me somehow, even though it was only a monkey and hardly a fourth my weight. When it had been on the floor, maybe I could have drop-kicked the little son of a bitch, but now it was right in my face.”
I had no difficulty imagining how frightened she had been. A seagull, protecting its nest on a seaside bluff, diving repeatedly out of the night sky with angry shrieks and a hard burrrr of wings, pecking at your head and snaring strands of hair, is a fraction the weight of the monkey that she’d described but nonetheless terrifying.
“I considered running for the open door,” she said, “but I was afraid I would make it angrier. So I froze here. My back against the refrigerator. Eye to eye with the hateful thing. After a while, when it was sure I was intimidated, it jumped off the counter, shot across the kitchen, pushed the back door shut, climbed qui
ck onto the table again, and picked up the unfinished tangerine.”
I poured another shot of apricot brandy for myself after all.
“So I reached for the handle of this drawer here beside the fridge,” she continued. “There’s a tray of knives in it.”
Keeping her attention on the table, as she had that Christmas Eve, Angela skinned back the cardigan sleeve and reached blindly for the drawer again, to show me which one contained the knives. Without taking a step to the side, she had to lean and stretch.
“I wasn’t going to attack it, just get something I could defend myself with. But before I could put my hand on anything, the monkey leaped to its feet on the table, screaming at me again.”
She groped for the drawer handle.
“It snatches an apple out of the bowl and throws it at me,” she said, “really whales it at me. Hits me on the mouth. Splits my lip.” She crossed her arms over her face as if she were even now under assault. “I try to protect myself. The monkey throws another apple, then a third, and it’s shrieking hard enough to crack crystal if there were any around.”
“Are you saying it knew what was in that drawer?”
Lowering her arms from the defensive posture, she said, “It had some intuitive sense what was in there, yeah.”
“And you didn’t try for the knife again?”
She shook her head. “The monkey moved like lightning. Seemed like it could be off that table and all over me even as I was pulling the drawer open, biting my hand before I could get a good grip on the handle of a knife. I didn’t want to be bitten.”
“Even if it wasn’t foaming at the mouth, it might have been rabid,” I agreed.
“Worse,” she said cryptically, rolling up the cuffs of the cardigan sleeves again.
“Worse than rabies?” I asked.
“So I’m standing at the refrigerator, bleeding from the lip, scared, trying to figure what to do next, and Rod comes home from work, comes through the back door there, whistling, and walks right into the middle of this weirdness. But he doesn’t do anything you might expect. He’s surprised—but not surprised. He’s surprised to see the monkey here, yeah, but not surprised by the monkey itself. Seeing it here, that’s what rattles him. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so.”
“Rod—damn him—he knows this monkey. He doesn’t say, A monkey? He doesn’t say, Where the hell did a monkey come from? He says, Oh, Jesus. Just, Oh, Jesus. It’s cool that night, there’s a threat of rain, he’s wearing a trench coat, and he takes a pistol out of one of his coat pockets—as if he was expecting something like this. I mean, yeah, he’s coming home from work, and he’s in uniform, but he doesn’t wear a sidearm at the office. This is peacetime. He’s not in a war zone, for God’s sake. He’s stationed right outside Moonlight Bay, at a desk job, pushing papers and claiming he’s bored, just putting on weight and waiting for retirement, but suddenly he’s got this pistol on him that I don’t even know he’s been carrying until I see it now.”
Colonel Roderick Ferryman, an officer in the United States Army, had been stationed at Fort Wyvern, which had long been one of the big economic engines that powered the entire county. The base had been closed eighteen months ago and now stood abandoned, one of the many military facilities that, deemed superfluous, had been decommissioned following the end of the Cold War.
Although I had known Angela—and to a far lesser extent, her husband—since childhood, I had never known what, exactly, Colonel Ferryman did in the Army.
Maybe Angela hadn’t really known, either. Until he came home that Christmas Eve.
“Rod—he’s holding the gun in his right hand, arm out straight and stiff, the muzzle trained square on the monkey, and he looks more scared than I am. He looks grim. Lips tight. All the color is gone from his face, just gone, he looks like bone. He glances at me, sees my lip starting to swell and blood all over my chin, and he doesn’t even ask about that, looks right back at the monkey, afraid to take his eyes off it. The monkey’s holding the last piece of tangerine but not eating now. It’s staring very hard at the gun. Rod says, Angie, go to the phone. I’m going to give you a number to call.”
“Do you remember the number?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s not in service these days. I recognized the exchange, ’cause it was the same first three digits as his office number on the base.”
“He had you call Fort Wyvern.”
“Yes. But the guy who answers—he doesn’t identify himself or say which office he’s in. He just says hello, and I tell him Colonel Ferryman is calling. Then Rod reaches for the phone with his left hand, the pistol still in his right. He tells the guy, I just found the rhesus here at my house, in my kitchen. He listens, keeping his eyes on the monkey, and then he says, Hell if I know, but it’s here, all right, and I need help to bag it.”
“And the monkey’s just watching all this?”
“When Rod hangs up the phone, the monkey raises its ugly little eyes from the gun, looks straight at him, a challenging and angry look, and then coughs out that damn sound, that awful little laugh that makes your skin crawl. Then it seems to lose interest in Rod and me, in the gun. It eats the last segment of the tangerine and starts to peel another one.”
As I lifted the apricot brandy that I had poured but not yet touched, Angela returned to the table and picked up her half-empty glass. She surprised me by clinking her glass against mine.
“What’re we toasting?” I asked.
“The end of the world.”
“By fire or ice?”
“Nothing that easy,” she said.
She was as serious as stone.
Her eyes seemed to be the color of the brushed stainless-steel drawer fronts in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital, and her stare was too direct until, mercifully, she shifted it from me to the cordial glass in her hand.
“When Rod hangs up the phone, he wants me to tell him what happened, so I do. He has a hundred questions, and he keeps asking about my bleeding lip, about whether the monkey touched me, bit me, as if he can’t quite believe the business with the apple. But he won’t answer any of my questions. He just says, Angie, you don’t want to know. Of course I want to know, but I understand what he’s telling me.”
“Privileged information, military secrets.”
“My husband had been involved in sensitive projects before, national-security matters, but I thought that was behind him. He said he couldn’t talk about this. Not to me. Not to anyone outside the office. Not a word.”
Angela continued to stare at her brandy, but I sipped mine. It didn’t taste as pleasing as it had before. In fact, this time I detected an underlying bitterness, which reminded me that apricot pits were a source of cyanide.
Toasting the end of the world tends to focus the mind on the dark potential in all things, even in a humble fruit.
Asserting my incorrigible optimism, I took another long sip and concentrated on tasting only the flavor that had pleased me previously.
Angela said, “Not fifteen minutes pass before three guys respond to Rod’s phone call. They must’ve driven in from Wyvern using an ambulance or something for cover, though there wasn’t any siren. None of them are wearing uniforms, either. Two of them come around to the back, open the door, and step into the kitchen without knocking. The third guy must have picked the lock on the front door and come in that way, quiet as a ghost, because he steps into the dining-room doorway the same time as the other two come in the back. Rod’s still got the pistol trained on the monkey—his arms shaking with fatigue—and all three of the others have tranquilizer-dart guns.”
I thought of the quiet lamplit street out front, the charming architecture of this house, the pair of matched magnolia trees, the arbor hung with star jasmine. No one passing the place that night would have guessed at the strange drama playing out within these ordinary stucco walls.
“The monkey seems like he’s expecting them,” Angela said, “isn’t concerned, does
n’t try to get away. One of them shoots him with a dart. He bares his teeth and hisses but doesn’t even try to pluck the needle out. He drops what’s left of the second tangerine, struggles hard to swallow the bite he has in his mouth, then just curls up on the table, sighs, goes to sleep. They leave with the monkey, and Rod goes with them, and I never see the monkey again. Rod doesn’t come back until three o’clock in the morning, until Christmas Eve is over, and we never do exchange gifts until late Christmas Day, and by then we’re in Hell and nothing’s ever going to be the same. No way out, and I know it.”
Finally she tossed back her remaining brandy and put the glass down on the table so hard that it sounded like a gunshot.
Until this moment she had exhibited only fear and melancholy, both as deep as cancer in the bone. Now came anger from a still deeper source.
“I had to let them take their goddamn blood samples the day after Christmas.”
“Who?”
“The project at Wyvern.”
“Project?”
“And once a month ever since—their sample. Like my body isn’t mine, like I’ve got to pay a rent in blood just to be allowed to go on living in it.”
“Wyvern has been closed a year and a half.”
“Not all of it. Some things don’t die. Can’t die. No matter how much we wish them dead.”
Although she was thin almost to the point of gauntness, Angela had always been pretty in her way. Porcelain skin, a graceful brow, high cheekbones, sculpted nose, a generous mouth that balanced the otherwise vertical lines of her face and paid out a wealth of smiles—these qualities, combined with her selfless heart, made her lovely in spite of the fact that her skull was too near the skin, her skeleton too ill-concealed beneath the illusion of immortality that the flesh provides. Now, however, her face was hard and cold and ugly, fiercely sharpened at every edge by the grinding wheel of anger.
“If I ever refuse to give them the monthly sample, they’ll kill me. I’m sure of that. Or lock me away in some secret hospital out there where they can keep a closer watch on me.”
“What’s the sample for? What’re they afraid of?”