Fear Nothing

“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 quick 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