Fighting the urge to clamp his hands to his ears in the dim red light Kierk gropes wildly for the light switches beside the glass door. On finding it the main primate room beyond blinks into medical brightness, and at the same time it is as if all the sound in the world shuts off. The overpowering sound is gone. The vibration is gone. Everything is still. His heartbeat now the only sound.

Kierk walks cautiously into the long room. In the stacked cages on either side the monkeys all stare at him. As he moves forward they track him, silent and totem-like. Around him the various stations of scientific equipment have been trashed. Something is so wrong but he keeps moving like a dream to the other end, past the broken glass, the shattered slides, the twisted monitoring equipment, the lab chairs that seem violently torn by some immense and impossible strength. It is as if a great force has destroyed everything. The normal musk of the animal room is present but also something sickly sweet like rotten flowers.

At the end of the area is the closed door to the cage-cleaning room, its glass portal pitch-black. The lights are still off inside. In the eerie silence he hears movement, as if some great bulk is shifting inside the darkness. There is some kind of grunt, or exhalation, but at a monstrous register, and then a low drawn-out hiss that ends abruptly, followed by a slithering of something being withdrawn. Then there is a clanging so loud it makes Kierk startle. A distant sound recedes. Slowly, extremely slowly, he reaches out to flip on the light switch outside the door. With a click he finds himself staring through the portal into the bright cage-cleaning room, which has only rubber hoses and overturned empty cages on the floor, bare walls on all sides. In the center, with the floors sloping toward it, a gigantic metal drain glistens and drips.

THURSDAY

Kierk wakes up to an echo of sound abandoning him—knock knock—before his eyes blink open. Only a hint of the dream comes back to him. Kierk had been sitting at an ornate dinner and opposite him, so tall in the dark he could not make out its head, some giant being had been seated. It had rapped one of its human hands against the table. Knock knock.

Body slick with night sweats, he brushes his teeth vigorously, as if he could purge himself of last night’s events via thorough oral hygiene. After discovering what had happened in the primate lab, staying to talk with the security guards who eventually showed up, giving a statement, and then walking back home in the early morning, Kierk is exhausted. And his forearm aches. Unwrapping the gauze he sees a decent-size scab from the shallow excision.