Seize the Night

To throw a little light where he needed to peek, I held the spotlight out of the Jeep and directed the beam toward the undercarriage on my side, hoping to backlight whatever might be hiding there.

In the classic, wary half-kneel of the experienced monster hunter, Bobby tilted his head and slowly lowered it to peer under the Jeep.

“Nada,” he said.

“Zip?”

“Zero.”

“I was stoked,” I said.

“I was pumped.”

“Ready to kick ass.”

We were lying.

As Bobby rose to his feet, another scream tore the night: the same scraping-fingernails-dying-cat-sobbing- child-mal-functioning-synthesizer wail that had made us jump like lightning-struck cats only moments ago.

This time I had a better fix on the source of the scream, and I shifted my attention to the bungalow roof, where the spotlight revealed Big Head. There was no question now: This was the creature that Bobby had called Big Head, because its head was undeniably big.

It was crouched at one end of the roof, right on the peak, maybe sixteen feet above us, like Kong on the Empire State Building but re-created in a direct-to-video flick that lacked the budget for a larger set, fighter planes, or even a damsel in peril. With its arms covering its face as though the sight of us hideous human beings frightened and disgusted it, Big Head studied Bobby and me with radiant green eyes, which we could see through the gap between its crossed arms.

Even though the beast’s face was covered, I could discern that the head was disproportionately large for the body. I also suspected that it was malformed. Malformed not just by human standards but surely by the standards of monkey beauty, as well.

I couldn’t determine whether it had been spawned primarily from a rhesus or from another primate. It was covered in matted fur not unlike that of a rhesus, with long arms and hunched shoulders that were definitely simian, although it appeared to be stronger than any mere monkey, as formidable as a gorilla though otherwise nothing like one. You wouldn’t have required my hyperactive imagination to wonder if, in certain aspects of the creature, you were glimpsing a spectrum of species so broad that the genetic sampling had extended beyond the warm-blooded classes of vertebrates to include reptilian traits — and worse.

“Extreme geek-a-mo,” Bobby said as he edged back to the Jeep.

“Major geekster,” I agreed.

On the roof, Big Head turned its face skyward, as if studying the stars, still concealing its features behind the mask of its arms.

Suddenly I found myself identifying with this creature. Its posture, its very attitude, told me that it was covering its face out of embarrassment or shame, that it didn’t want us to see what it looked like because it knew we would find it repulsive, which meant that it must feel repulsive. Perhaps I was able to interpret its behavior and intuit its feelings because I’d lived twenty-eight years as an outsider. I’d never felt the need to hide my face, but as a small child I’d known the pain of being an outcast when cruel kids called me Nightcrawler, Dracula, Ghoul Boy, and worse.

Echoing in my mind was my own voice from a moment ago — major geekster — and I winced. Our pursuit of this creature reminded me of the way bullies had chased me when I’d been a boy. Even when I had learned to defend myself and fight back, they were sometimes not dissuaded, willing to risk a drubbing merely for the chance to harass and torment me. Of course, with Orson and Jimmy in peril, Bobby and I had good reason to follow any lead. We hadn’t been motivated by meanness; but what troubled me, in retrospect, was the strange dark wild delight with which we had mounted the chase.

The stargazer shifted its attention from the heavens and peered down at us again, still hiding its face.

I directed the spotlight onto the asphalt shingles near the creature’s feet, letting the backwash illuminate it rather than directly assaulting it with the beam.

My discretion didn’t encourage Big Head to lower its arms. It did, however, issue a sound unlike the previous screams, one at odds with its fierce appearance: a cross between the cooing of pigeons and the more guttural purr of a cat.

Bobby tore his attention away from the beast long enough to conduct a three-hundred-sixty-degree sweep of the neighborhood around us.

I, too, had been stricken by the nape-crinkling feeling that Big Head might be distracting us from a more immediate threat.

“Super placid,” Bobby reported.

“For now.”

Big Head’s cooing-purring grew louder and then became a fluent series of exotic sounds, simple and rhythmic and patterned, but not like mere animal noises. These were modulated groups of syllables, full of inflection, delivered with urgency and emotion, and it was no stretch to think of them as words. If this speech wasn’t complex enough to be defined as a language in the sense that English, French, or Spanish is a language, it was at least a primitive attempt to convey meaning, a language in the making.

“What’s it want?” Bobby asked.

His question, whether he realized it or not, arose from the perception that the creature was not just chattering at us but speaking to us.

“No clue,” I said.

Big Head’s voice was neither deep nor menacing. Although as strange as a bagpipe employed by a reggae band, it was pitched like that of a child of nine or ten, not entirely human but halfway there, edgy, eerily lilting without being musical, with a pleading note that aroused sympathy in spite of the source.

“Poor sonofabitch,” I said, as it fell silent again.

“You serious?”

“Sorrowful damn thing.”

Bobby studied this Quasimodo in search of a bell tower and finally allowed, “Maybe.”

“Certified sorrowful.”

“You want to go up on the roof, give it a big hug?”

“Later.”

“I’ll turn on the Jeep’s radio. You can go up there and ask it to dance, make it feel attractive.”

“I’ll pity it from afar.”

“Typical man. You talk a good game of compassion, but you can’t play it.”

“I’m afraid of rejection.”

“You’re afraid of commitment.”

Turning away from us, Big Head dropped its arms from its face. On all fours, straddling the ridgeline, it raced across the bungalow roof.

“Keep the light on it!” Bobby said.

I tried, but the creature moved quicker than a striking snake. I expected it to launch itself off the roof and straight at us or disappear across the peak and down the far slope, but it traveled the length of the ridgeline and sprang without hesitation into the fifteen-foot gap between this bungalow and the next. With catlike poise, it landed atop the neighboring house, where it reared onto its hind legs, cast a green-eyed glance back at us, then dropped low, sprinted from gable to gable, leaped to a third roof, crossed over that ridgeline, and disappeared onto the back of the house.

During its swift flight, captured repeatedly by the spotlight beam but for only an instant at a time, the creature’s face had been less than half revealed in kaleidoscopic glimpses. I was left with impressions rather than clear images. The back of its skull seemed to be elongated, and like a cowl, its forehead appeared to overhang its large sunken eyes. The lumpish face might have been distorted by excrescences of bone. To an even greater degree than the head was disproportionate to the body, the mouth appeared too large for the head. Cracking its steam- shovel jaws, the creature revealed an abundance of sharp curved teeth more wicked-looking than Jack the Ripper’s cutlery collection.

Bobby gave me a chance to reconsider my assessment of Big Head. “Sorrowful?”