ORIGINAL FICTION: "Climbers" (Chapter Twenty-Three)

they wanted to leave: No impression at all. From the air on a moonless night, you couldn't have found it at all. But this was not a moonless light. It was a full moon, and that had some people worried. Would the German bombers follow that moon out of the east to find the city yet again? They were getting few and far between, but you never know. This would be the perfect night for a raid. Few high clouds, a light wind and that fantastic moon, made all the brighter by the lack of competition in the darkness. Instinctively, both Arthur and the Captain were straining to hear the first distant drone of engines in the sky. Climbers, as far as they could tell, made no noise at all.
Sometime after eleven, Arthur got a glimpse of movement high up in the tree he was facing. It wasn't the big tree he had first seen them in, but that was no surprise. The climbers did vary their routine and location from night to night. It looked like tonight they would be in this one. Arthur slowly- very slowly- adjusted his position on the ground to get a better look at the tree in question off to his left. To his right, Captain Jack saw Arthur shift in the blankets. It was a give away. There had to be a reason, and there it was, up in that tree. The Captain had been watching Arthur to spot the climbers It had paid off. Now in a direct line beyond Arthur's position, Capt. Jack could see slow movement high up in a tree close to seventy five yards away. Without the steadily- brightening light of the moon, he would have never seen it. Now, there it was. Or rather, there they were.
One, two and now three small figures could be seen carefully working their way out from the main trunk to the ends of the branches. Going for what few green leaves were left, the pickings were getting quite sparse in the park. What did the climbers do in the winter? Where did they live? What did they eat? Oddly enough, both men were contemplating that very same thing as they watched the climbers eat. Captain Jack's attention was drawn, however, to something else. A noise in the distance.
From their positions low on the ground in the roots of the trees, neither of these two observers had observed the walking path running between the trees. Neither one had thought about it, since neither had bothered to use it in the daylight. Now here it was going on midnight and someone else had decided that this now moonlit path was the only way to get through Hyde Park without taking a serious fall. They were probably right. This young couple (alright, older than Arthur and younger than the Captain- does that make them middle aged?) had been at an underground party. Now it was time to try to get safely home. And don't get all worked up about this underground thing. In France, the Underground was the French resistance to the German occupation. The principal German occupation at that point being the subjugation of France. In London, the Underground was the subway. In this particular case, the “underground party” was just that: A party in the subway. That far underground, the party was safe from the Germans and London was safe from the party. But now it was time to go home, the hard way: At night through Hyde Park. As the moon lit their way down the path, they had no idea what sort of party their progress was interrupting. They would soon find out.
Watching the climbers to his left, with the path behind both himself and the tree he was seated against, Arthur didn't hear the approaching uneven footsteps of two people struggling to walk in the dark. Captain Jack, on the other hand, had been watching the climbers (and Arthur) from the far side of the path, and therefore did in fact have a ear turned directly down the path toward the oncoming entourage of two. Neither of them heard the walking couple before the climbers, all of whom suddenly got very hard to see. Stretched out long and flat against the limbs, blending ever so slightly into the branches, the three climbers became unmoving additions to the tree they were in. Arthur peered at the tree to