Fear Nothing

5

I have seen photographs of California pepper trees in sunlight. When brightly limned, they are lacy, graceful, green dreams of trees.

At night, the pepper acquires a different character from the one that it reveals in daylight. It appears to hang its head, letting its long branches droop to conceal a face drawn with care or grief.

These trees flanked the long driveway to Kirk’s Funeral Home, which stood on a three-acre knoll at the northeast edge of town, inland of Highway 1 and reached by an overpass. They waited like lines of mourners, paying their respects.

As I climbed the private lane, on which low mushroom-shaped landscape lamps cast rings of light, the trees stirred in a breeze. The friction between wind and leaves was a whispery lamentation.

No cars were parked along the mortuary approach, which meant that no viewings were in progress.

I myself travel through Moonlight Bay only on foot or on my bicycle. There is no point in learning to drive a car. I couldn’t use it by day, and by night I would have to wear sunglasses to spare myself the sting of oncoming headlights. Cops tend to frown on night driving with shades, no matter how cool you look.

The full moon had risen.

I like the moon. It illuminates without scorching. It burnishes what is beautiful and grants concealment to what is not.

At the broad crown of the hill, the blacktop looped back on itself to form a spacious turnaround with a small grassy circle at its center. In the circle was a cast-concrete reproduction of Michelangelo’s Pietà.

The body of the dead Christ, cradled on his mother’s lap, was luminous with reflected moonlight. The Virgin also glowed faintly. In sunshine, this crude replica must surely look unspeakably tacky.

Faced with terrible loss, however, most mourners find comfort in assurances of universal design and meaning, even when as clumsily expressed as in this reproduction. One thing I love about people is their ability to be lifted so high by the smallest drafts of hope.

I stopped under the portico of the funeral home, hesitating because I couldn’t assess the danger into which I was about to leap.

The massive two-story Georgian house — red brick with white wood trim — would have been the loveliest house in town, were the town not Moonlight Bay. A spaceship from another galaxy, perched here, would have looked no more alien to our coastline than did Kirk’s handsome pile. This house needed elms, not pepper trees, drear heavens rather than the clear skies of California, and periodic lashings with rains far colder than those that would drench it here.

The second floor, where Sandy lived, was dark.

The viewing rooms were on the ground floor. Through beveled, leaded panes that flanked the front door, I saw a weak light at the back of the house.

I rang the bell.

A man entered the far end of the hallway and approached the door. Although he was only a silhouette, I recognized Sandy Kirk by his easy walk. He moved with a grace that enhanced his good looks.

He reached the foyer and switched on both the interior lights and the porch lights. When he opened the door, he seemed surprised to see me squinting at him from under the bill of my cap.

“Christopher?”

“Evening, Mr. Kirk.”

“I’m so very sorry about your father. He was a wonderful man.”

“Yes. Yes, he was.”

“We’ve already collected him from the hospital. We’re treating him just like family, Christopher, with the utmost respect — you can be sure of that. I took his course in twentieth-century poetry at Ashdon. Did you know that?”

“Yes, of course.”

“From him I learned to love Eliot and Pound. Auden and Plath. Beckett and Ashbery. Robert Bly. Yeats. All of them. Couldn’t tolerate poetry when I started the course — couldn’t live without it by the end.”

“Wallace Stevens. Donald Justice. Louise Glück. They were his personal favorites.”

Sandy smiled and nodded. Then: “Oh, excuse me, I forgot.”

Out of consideration for my condition, he extinguished both the foyer and porch lights.

Standing on the dark threshold, he said, “This must be terrible for you, but at least he isn’t suffering anymore.”

Sandy’s eyes were green, but in the pale landscape lighting, they looked as smooth-black as certain beetles’ shells.

Studying his eyes, I said, “Could I see him?”

“What — your father?”

“I didn’t turn the sheet back from his face before they took him out of his room. Didn’t have the heart for it, didn’t think I needed to. Now…I’d really like just one last look.”

Sandy Kirk’s eyes were like a placid night sea. Below the unremarkable surface were great teeming depths.

His voice remained that of a compassionate courtier to the bereaved. “Oh, Christopher…I’m sorry, but the process has begun.”

“You’ve already put him in the furnace?”

Having grown up in a business conducted with a richness of euphemisms, Sandy winced at my bluntness. “The deceased is in the cremator, yes.”

“Wasn’t that terribly quick?”

“In our work, there’s no wisdom in delay. If only I’d known you were coming…”

I wondered if his beetle-shell eyes would be able to meet mine so boldly if there had been enough light for me to see their true green color.

Into my silence, he said, “Christopher, I’m so distressed by this, seeing you in this pain, knowing I could have helped.”

In my odd life, I have had much experience of some things and little of others. Although I am a foreigner to the day, I know the night as no one else can know it. Although I have been the object on which ignorant fools have sometimes spent their cruelty, most of my understanding of the human heart comes from my relationships with my parents and with those good friends who, like me, live primarily between sunset and dawn; consequently, I have seldom encountered hurtful deception.

I was embarrassed by Sandy’s deceit, as though it shamed not merely him but also me, and I couldn’t meet his obsidian stare any longer. I lowered my head and gazed at the porch floor.

Mistaking my embarrassment for tongue-binding grief, he stepped onto the porch and put one hand on my shoulder.

I managed not to recoil.

“My business is comforting folks, Christopher, and I’m good at it. But truthfully — I have no words that make sense of death or make it easier to bear.”

I wanted to kick his ass.

“I’ll be okay,” I said, realizing that I had to get away from him before I did something rash.

“What I hear myself saying to most folks is all the platitudes you’d never find in the poetry your dad loved, so I’m not going to repeat them to you, not to you of all people.”

Keeping my head down, nodding, I eased backward, out from under his hand. “Thanks, Mr. Kirk. I’m sorry to’ve bothered you.”

“You didn’t bother me. Of course you didn’t. I only wish you’d called ahead. I’d have been able to…delay.”

“Not your fault. It’s all right. Really.”

Having backed off the stepless brick porch onto the blacktop under the portico, I turned away from Sandy.

Retreating once more to that doorway between two darknesses, he said, “Have you given any thought to the service — when you want to hold it, how you want it conducted?”

“No. No, not yet. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

As I walked away, Sandy said, “Christopher, are you all right?”

Facing him from a little distance this time, I spoke in a numb, inflectionless voice that was only half calculated: “Yeah. I’m all right. I’ll be okay. Thanks, Mr. Kirk.”

“I wish you had called ahead.”

Shrugging, I jammed my hands in my jacket pockets, turned from the house once more, and walked past the Pietà.

Flecks of mica were in the mix from which the replica had been poured, and the big moon glimmered in those tiny chips, so that tears appeared to shimmer on the cheeks of Our Lady of Cast Concrete.

I resisted the urge to glance back at the undertaker. I was certain he was still watching me.

I continued down the lane between the forlorn, whispering trees. The temperature had fallen only into the low sixties. The onshore breeze was pure after its journey across thousands of miles of ocean, bearing nothing but the faintest whiff of brine.

Long after the slope of the driveway had taken me out of Sandy’s line of sight, I looked back. I could see just the steeply pitched roof and chimneys, somber forms against the star-salted sky.

I moved off the blacktop onto grass, and I headed uphill again, this time in the sheltering shadows of foliage. The pepper trees braided the moon in their long tresses.

6

The funeral-home turnaround came into sight again. The Pietà. The portico.

Sandy had gone inside. The front door was closed.

Staying on the lawn, using trees and shrubs for cover, I circled to the back of the house. A deep porch stepped down to a seventy-foot lap pool, an enormous brick patio, and formal rose gardens — none of which could be seen from the public rooms of the funeral home.

A town the size of ours welcomes nearly two hundred newborns each year while losing a hundred citizens to death. There were only two funeral homes, and Kirk’s probably received over 70 percent of this business — plus half that from the smaller towns in the county. Death was a good living for Sandy.

The view from the patio must have been breathtaking in daylight: unpopulated hills rising in gentle folds as far to the east as the eye could see, graced by scattered oaks with gnarled black trunks. Now the shrouded hills lay like sleeping giants under pale sheets.

When I saw no one at the lighted rear windows, I quickly crossed the patio. The moon, white as a rose petal, floated on the inky waters of the swimming pool.

The house adjoined a spacious L-shaped garage, which embraced a motor court that could be entered only from the front. The garage accommodated two hearses and Sandy’s personal vehicles — but also, at the end of the wing farthest from the residence, the crematorium.

I slipped around the corner of the garage, along the back of the second arm of the L, where immense eucalyptus trees blocked most of the moonlight. The air was redolent of their medicinal fragrance, and a carpet of dead leaves crunched underfoot.

No corner of Moonlight Bay is unknown to me — especially not this one. Most of my nights have been spent in the exploration of our special town, which has resulted in some macabre discoveries.

Ahead, on my left, frosty light marked the crematorium window. I approached it with the conviction — correct, as it turned out — that I was about to see something stranger and far worse than what Bobby Halloway and I had seen on an October night when we were thirteen….

A decade and a half ago, I’d had as morbid a streak as any boy my age, was as fascinated as all boys are by the mystery and lurid glamour of death. Bobby Halloway and I, friends even then, thought it was daring to prowl the undertaker’s property in search of the repulsive, the ghoulish, the shocking.

I can’t recall what we expected — or hoped — to find. A collection of human skulls? A porch swing made of bones? A secret laboratory where the deceptively normal-looking Frank Kirk and his deceptively normal-looking son Sandy called down lightning bolts from storm clouds to reanimate our dead neighbors and use them as slaves to do the cooking and housecleaning?

Perhaps we expected to stumble upon a shrine to the evil gods Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth in some sinister bramble-festooned end of the rose garden. Bobby and I were reading a lot of H. P. Lovecraft in those days.

Bobby says we were a couple of weird kids. I say we were weird, for sure, but neither more nor less weird than other boys.

Bobby says maybe so, but the other boys gradually grew out of their weirdness while we’ve grown further into ours.

I don’t agree with Bobby on this one. I don’t believe that I’m any more weird than anyone else I’ve ever met. In fact, I’m a damn sight less weird than some.

Which is true of Bobby, too. But because he treasures his weirdness, he wants me to believe in and treasure mine.

He insists on his weirdness. He says that by acknowledging and embracing our weirdness, we are in greater harmony with nature — because nature is deeply weird.

Anyway, one October night, behind the funeral-home garage, Bobby Halloway and I found the crematorium window. We were attracted to it by an eldritch light that throbbed against the glass.

Because the window was set high, we were not tall enough to peer inside. With the stealth of commandos scouting an enemy encampment, we snatched a teak bench from the patio and carried it behind the garage, where we positioned it under the glimmering window.

Side by side on the bench, we were able to reconnoiter the scene together. The interior of the window was covered by a Levolor blind; but someone had forgotten to close the slats, giving us a clear view of Frank Kirk and an assistant at work.

One remove from the room, the light was not bright enough to cause me harm. At least that was what I told myself as I pressed my nose to the pane.

Even though I had learned to be a singularly cautious boy, I was nonetheless a boy and, therefore, in love with adventure and camaraderie, so I might knowingly have risked blindness to share that moment with Bobby Halloway.

On a stainless-steel gurney near the window was the body of an elderly man. It was cloaked in a sheet, with only the ravaged face exposed. His yellow-white hair, matted and tangled, made him look as though he had died in a high wind. Judging by his waxy gray skin, sunken cheeks, and severely cracked lips, however, he had succumbed not to a storm but to a prolonged illness.

If Bobby and I had been acquainted with the man in life, we didn’t recognize him in this ashen and emaciated condition. If he’d been someone we knew even casually, he would have been no less grisly but perhaps less an object of boyish fascination and dark delight.

To us, because we were just thirteen and proud of it, the most compelling and remarkable and wonderful thing about the cadaver was also, of course, the grossest thing about it. One eye was closed, but the other was wide open and staring, occluded by a bright red starburst hemorrhage.

How that eye mesmerized us.

As death-blind as the painted eye of a doll, it nevertheless saw through us to the core.

Sometimes in a silent rapture of dread and sometimes whispering urgently to each other like a pair of deranged sportscasters doing color commentary, we watched as Frank and his assistant readied the cremator in one corner of the chamber. The room must have been warm, for the men slipped off their ties and rolled up their shirtsleeves, and tiny drops of perspiration wove beaded veils on their faces.

Outside, the October night was mild. Yet Bobby and I shivered and compared gooseflesh and wondered that our breath didn’t plume from us in white wintry clouds.

The morticians folded the sheet back from the cadaver, and we boys gasped at the horrors of advanced age and murderous disease. But we gasped with the same sweet thrill of terror that we had felt while gleefully watching videos like Night of the Living Dead.

As the corpse was moved into a cardboard case and eased into the blue flames of the cremator, I clutched Bobby’s arm, and he clamped one damp hand to the back of my neck, and we held fast to each other, as though a supernatural magnetic power might pull us inexorably forward, shattering the window, and sweep us into the room, into the fire with the dead man.

Frank Kirk shut the cremator.

Even through the closed window, the clank of the furnace door was loud enough, final enough, to echo in the hollows of our bones.

Later, after we had returned the teak bench to the patio and had fled the undertaker’s property, we repaired to the bleachers at the football field behind the high school. With no game in progress, that place was unlighted and safe for me. We guzzled Cokes and munched potato chips that Bobby had gotten en route at a 7-Eleven.

“That was cool, that was so cool,” Bobby declared excitedly.

“It was the coolest thing ever,” I agreed.

“Cooler than Ned’s cards.”

Ned was a friend who had moved to San Francisco with his parents just that previous August. He had obtained a deck of playing cards — how, he would never reveal — that featured color photographs of really hot-looking nude women, fifty-two different beauties.

“Definitely cooler than the cards,” I agreed. “Cooler than when that humongous tanker truck overturned and blew up out on the highway.”

“Jeez, yeah, megadegrees cooler than that. Cooler than when Zach Blenheim got chewed up by that pit bull and had to have twenty-eight stitches in his arm.”

“Unquestionably quantum arctics cooler than that,” I confirmed.

“His eye!” Bobby said, remembering the starburst hemorrhage.

“Oh, God, his eye!”

“Gag-o-rama!”

We swilled down Cokes and talked and laughed more than we had ever laughed before in one night.

What amazing creatures we are when we’re thirteen.

There on the athletic-field bleachers, I knew that this macabre adventure had tied a knot in our friendship that nothing and no one would ever loosen. By then we had been friends for two years; but during this night, our friendship became stronger, more complex than it had been at the start of the evening. We had shared a powerfully formative experience — and we sensed that this event was more profound than it seemed to be on the surface, more profound than boys our age could grasp. In my eyes, Bobby had acquired a new mystique, as I had acquired in his eyes, because we had done this daring thing.

Subsequently, I would discover that this moment was merely prelude. Our real bonding came the second week of December — when we saw something infinitely more disturbing than the corpse with the blood-red eye.

Now, fifteen years later, I would have thought that I was too old for these adventures and too ridden by conscience to prowl other people’s property as casually as thirteen-year-old boys seem able to do. Yet here I was, treading cautiously on layers of dead eucalyptus leaves, putting my face to the fateful window one more time.

The Levolor blind, though yellowed with age, appeared to be the same one through which Bobby and I had peered so long ago. The slats were adjusted at an angle, but the gaps between them were wide enough to allow a view of the entire crematorium — into which I was tall enough to see without the aid of a patio bench.

Sandy Kirk and an assistant were at work near the Power Pak II Cremation System. They wore surgeons’ masks, latex gloves, and disposable plastic aprons.

On the gurney near the window was one of the opaque vinyl body bags, unzipped, split like a ripe pod, with a dead man nestled inside. Evidently this was the hitchhiker who would be cremated in my father’s name.

He was about five ten, a hundred sixty pounds. Because of the beating that he had taken, I could not estimate his age. His face was grotesquely battered.

At first I thought that his eyes were hidden by black crusts of blood. Then I realized that both eyes were gone. I was staring into empty sockets.

I thought of the old man with the starburst hemorrhage and how fearsome he had seemed to Bobby and me. That was nothing compared to this. That had been only nature’s impersonal work, while this was human viciousness.

During that long-ago October and November, Bobby Halloway and I periodically returned to the crematorium window. Creeping through the darkness, trying not to trip in the ground ivy, we saturated our lungs with air redolent of the surrounding eucalyptuses, a scent that to this day I identify with death.

During those two months, Frank Kirk conducted fourteen funerals, but only three of those deceased were cremated. The others were embalmed for traditional burials.

Bobby and I lamented that the embalming room offered no windows for our use. That sanctum sanctorum—“where they do the wet work,” as Bobby put it — was in the basement, secure against ghoulish spies like us.

Secretly, I was relieved that our snooping would be restricted to Frank Kirk’s dry work. I believe that Bobby was relieved as well, although he pretended to be sorely disappointed.

On the positive side, I suppose, Frank performed most embalmings during the day while restricting cremations to the night hours. This made it possible for me to be in attendance.

Although the hulking cremator — cruder than the Power Pak II that Sandy uses these days — disposed of human remains at a very high temperature and featured emission-control devices, thin smoke escaped the chimney. Frank conducted only nocturnal cremations out of respect for bereaved family members or friends who might, in daylight, glance at the hilltop mortuary from lower in town and see the last of their loved ones slipping skyward in wispy gray curls.

Conveniently for us, Bobby’s father, Anson, was the editor in chief of the Moonlight Bay Gazette. Bobby used his connections and his familiarity with the newspaper offices to get us the most current information about deaths by accident and by natural causes.

We always knew when Frank Kirk had a fresh one, but we couldn’t be sure whether he was going to embalm it or cremate it. Immediately after sunset, we would ride our bikes to the vicinity of the mortuary and then creep onto the property, waiting at the crematorium window either until the action began or until we had to admit at last that this one was not going to be a burning.

Mr. Garth, the sixty-year-old president of the First National Bank, died of a heart attack in late October. We watched him go into the fire.

In November, a carpenter named Henry Aimes fell off a roof and broke his neck. Although Aimes was cremated, Bobby and I saw nothing of the process, because Frank Kirk or his assistant remembered to close the slats on the Levolor blind.

The blinds were open the second week in December, however, when we returned for the cremation of Rebecca Acquilain. She was married to Tom Acquilain, a math teacher at the junior high school where Bobby attended classes but I did not. Mrs. Acquilain, the town librarian, was only thirty, the mother of a five-year-old boy named Devlin.

Lying on the gurney, swathed in a sheet from the neck down, Mrs. Acquilain was so beautiful that her face was not merely a vision upon our eyes but a weight upon our chests. We could not breathe.

We had realized, I suppose, that she was a pretty woman, but we had never mooned over her. She was the librarian, after all, and someone’s mother, while we were thirteen and inclined not to notice beauty that was as quiet as starlight dropping from the sky and as clear as rainwater. The kind of woman who appeared nude on playing cards had the flash that drew our eyes. Until now, we had often looked at Mrs. Acquilain but had never seen her.

Death had not ravaged her, for she had died quickly. A flaw in a cerebral artery wall, no doubt with her from birth but never suspected, swelled and burst in the course of one afternoon. She was gone in hours.

As she lay on the mortuary gurney, her eyes were closed. Her features were relaxed. She seemed to be sleeping; in fact, her mouth was curved slightly, as though she were having a pleasant dream.

When the two morticians removed the sheet to convey Mrs. Acquilain into the cardboard case and then into the cremator, Bobby and I saw that she was slim, exquisitely proportioned, lovely beyond the power of words to describe. This was a beauty exceeding mere eroticism, and we didn’t look at her with morbid desire but with awe.

She looked so young.

She looked immortal.

The morticians conveyed her to the furnace with what seemed to be unusual gentleness and respect. When the door was closed behind the dead woman, Frank Kirk stripped off his latex gloves and blotted the back of one hand against his left eye and then his right. It was not perspiration that he wiped away.

During other cremations, Frank and his assistant had chatted almost continuously, though we could not quite hear what they said. This night, they spoke hardly at all.

Bobby and I were silent, too.

We returned the bench to the patio. We crept off Frank Kirk’s property.

After retrieving our bicycles, we rode through Moonlight Bay by way of its darkest streets.

We went to the beach.

At this hour, in this season, the broad strand was deserted. Behind us, as gorgeous as phoenix feathers, nesting on the hills and fluttering through a wealth of trees, were the town lights. In front of us lay the inky wash of the vast Pacific.

The surf was gentle. Widely spaced, low breakers slid to shore, lazily spilling their phosphorescent crests, which peeled from right to left like a white rind off the dark meat of the sea.

Sitting in the sand, watching the surf, I kept thinking how near we were to Christmas. Two weeks away. I didn’t want to think about Christmas, but it twinkled and jingled through my mind.

I don’t know what Bobby was thinking. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to talk. Neither did he.

I brooded about what Christmas would be like for little Devlin Acquilain without his mother. Maybe he was too young to understand what death meant.

Tom Acquilain, her husband, knew what death meant, sure enough. Nevertheless, he would probably put up a Christmas tree for Devlin.

How would he find the strength to hang the tinsel on the boughs?

Speaking for the first time since we had seen the sheet unfolded from the woman’s body, Bobby said simply, “Let’s go swimming.”

Although the day had been mild, this was December, and it wasn’t a year when El Niño — the warm current out of the southern hemisphere — ran close to shore. The water temperature was inhospitable, and the air was slightly chilly.

As Bobby undressed, he folded his clothes and, to keep the sand out of them, neatly piled them on a tangled blanket of kelp that had washed ashore earlier in the day and been dried by the sun. I folded my clothes beside his.

Naked, we waded into the black water and then swam out against the tide. We went too far from shore.

We turned north and swam parallel to the coast. Easy strokes. Minimal kicking. Expertly riding the ebb and flow of the waves. We swam a dangerous distance.

We were both superb swimmers — though reckless now.

Usually a swimmer finds cold water less discomfiting after being in it awhile; as the body temperature drops, the difference between skin and water temperatures becomes much less perceptible. Furthermore, exertion creates the impression of heat. A reassuring but false sense of warmth can arise, which is perilous.

This water, however, grew colder as fast as our body temperatures dropped. We reached no comfort point, false or otherwise.

Having swum too far north, we should have made for shore. If we’d had any common sense, we would have walked back to the mound of dry kelp where we’d left our clothes.

Instead, we merely paused, treading water, sucking in deep shuddery breaths cold enough to sluice the precious heat out of our throats. Then as one, without a word, we turned south to swim back the way we had come, still too far from shore.

My limbs grew heavy. Faint but frightening cramps twisted through my stomach. The pounding of my riptide heart seemed hard enough to push me deep under the surface.

Although the incoming swells were as gentle as they had been when we first entered the water, they felt meaner. They bit with teeth of cold white foam.

We swam side by side, careful not to lose sight of each other. The winter sky offered no comfort, the lights of town were as distant as stars, and the sea was hostile. All we had was our friendship, but we knew that in a crisis, either of us would die trying to save the other.

When we returned to our starting point, we barely had the strength to walk out of the surf. Exhausted, nauseated, paler than the sand, shivering violently, we spat out the astringent taste of the sea.

We were so bitterly cold that we could no longer imagine the heat of the crematorium furnace. Even after we had dressed, we were still freezing, and that was good.

We walked our bicycles off the sand, across the grassy park that bordered the beach, to the nearest street.

As he climbed on his bike, Bobby said, “Shit.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We cycled to our separate homes.

We went straight to bed as though ill. We slept. We dreamed. Life went on.

We never returned to the crematorium window.

We never spoke again of Mrs. Acquilain.

All these years later, either Bobby or I would still give his life to save the other — and without hesitation.

How strange this world is: Those things that we can so readily touch, those things so real to the senses — the sweet architecture of a woman’s body, one’s own flesh and bone, the cold sea and the gleam of stars — are far less real than things we cannot touch or taste or smell or see. Bicycles and the boys who ride them are less real than what we feel in our minds and hearts, less substantial than friendship and love and loneliness, all of which long outlast the world.

On this March night far down the time stream from boyhood, the crematorium window and the scene beyond it were more real than I would have wished. Someone had brutally beaten the hitchhiker to death — and then had cut out his eyes.

Even if the murder and the substitution of this corpse for the body of my father made sense when all the facts were known, why take the eyes? Could there possibly be a logical reason for sending this pitiable man eyeless into the all-consuming fire of the cremator?

Or had someone disfigured the hitchhiker sheerly for the deep, dirty thrill of it?

I thought of the hulking man with the shaved head and the single pearl earring. His broad blunt face. His huntsman’s eyes, black and steady. His cold-iron voice with its rusty rasp.

It was possible to imagine such a man taking pleasure from the pain of another, carving flesh in the carefree manner of any country gentleman lazily whittling a twig.

Indeed, in the strange new world that had come into existence during my experience in the hospital basement, it was easy to imagine that Sandy Kirk himself had disfigured the body: Sandy, as good-looking and slick as any GQ model; Sandy, whose dear father had wept at the burning of Rebecca Acquilain. Perhaps the eyes had been offered up at the base of the shrine in the far and thorny corner of the rose garden that Bobby and I had never been able to find.

In the crematorium, as Sandy and his assistant rolled the gurney toward the furnace, the telephone rang.

Guiltily, I flinched from the window as though I had triggered an alarm.

When I leaned close to the glass again, I saw Sandy pull down his surgical mask and lift the handset from the wall phone. The tone of his voice indicated confusion, then alarm, then anger, but through the dual-pane window, I was not able to hear what he was saying.

Sandy slammed down the telephone handset almost hard enough to knock the box off the wall. Whoever had been on the other end of the line had gotten a good ear cleaning.

As he stripped out of his latex gloves, Sandy spoke urgently to his assistant. I thought I heard him speak my name — and not with either admiration or affection.

The assistant, Jesse Pinn, was a lean-faced whippet of a man with red hair and russet eyes and a thin mouth that seemed pinched in anticipation of the taste of a chased-down rabbit. Pinn started to zip the body bag shut over the corpse of the hitchhiker.

Sandy’s suit jacket was hung on one of a series of wall pegs to the right of the door. When he lifted it off the peg, I was astonished to see that under the coat hung a shoulder holster sagging with the weight of a handgun.

Seeing Pinn fumbling with the body bag, Sandy spoke sharply to him — and gestured at the window.

As Pinn hurried directly toward me, I jerked back from the pane. He closed the half-open slats on the blind.

I doubted that I had been seen.

On the other hand, keeping in mind that I am an optimist on such a deep level that it’s a subatomic condition with me, I decided that on this one occasion, I would be wise to listen to a more pessimistic instinct and not linger. I hurried between the garage wall and the eucalyptus grove, through the death-scented air, toward the backyard.

The drifted leaves crunched as hard as snail shells underfoot. Fortunately, I was given cover by the soughing of the breeze through the branches overhead.

The wind was full of the hollow susurrant sound of the sea over which it had so long traveled, and it masked my movements.

It would also cloak the footsteps of anyone stalking me.

I was certain that the telephone call had been from one of the orderlies at the hospital. They had examined the contents of the suitcase, found my father’s wallet, and deduced that I must have been in the garage to witness the body swap.

With this information, Sandy had realized that my appearance at his front door had not been as innocent as it had seemed. He and Jesse Pinn would come outside to see if I was still lurking on the property.

I reached the backyard. The manicured lawn looked broader and more open than I remembered it.

The full moon was no brighter than it had been minutes earlier, but every hard surface that had previously absorbed this languid light now reflected and amplified it. An eerie silver radiance suffused the night, denying me concealment.

I dared not attempt to cross the broad brick patio. In fact I decided to stay well clear of the house and the driveway. Leaving via the same route by which I had arrived would be too risky.

I raced across the lawn to the acre of rose gardens at the back of the property. Before me lay descending terraces with extensive rows of trellises standing at angles to one another, numerous tunnel-like arbors, and a maze of meandering pathways.

Spring along our mellow coast doesn’t delay its debut to match the date celebrating it on the calendar, and already the roses were blooming. The red and other darkly colored flowers appeared to be black in the moonlight, roses for a sinister altar, but there were enormous white blooms, too, as big as babies’ heads, nodding to the lullaby of the breeze.

Men’s voices arose behind me. They were worn thin and tattered by the worrying wind.

Crouching behind a tall trellis, I looked back through the open squares between the white lattice crossings. Gingerly I pushed aside looping trailers with wicked thorns.

Near the garage, two flashlight beams chased shadows out of shrubbery, sent phantoms leaping up through tree limbs, dazzled across windows.

Sandy Kirk was behind one of the flashlights and was no doubt toting the handgun that I had glimpsed. Jesse Pinn might also have a weapon.

There was once a time when morticians and their assistants didn’t pack heat. Until this evening I had assumed I was still living in that era.

I was startled to see a third flashlight beam appear at the far corner of the house. Then a fourth. Then a fifth.

A sixth.

I had no clue as to who these new searchers might be or where they could have come from so quickly. They spread out to form a line and advanced purposefully across the yard, across the patio, past the swimming pool, toward the rose garden, probing with the flashlights, menacing figures as featureless as demons in a dream.

7

The faceless pursuers and the thwarting mazes that trouble us in sleep were now reality.

The gardens stepped in five broad terraces down a hillside. In spite of these plateaus and the gentleness of the slopes between them, I was gathering too much speed as I descended, and I was afraid that I would stumble, fall, and break a leg.

Rising on all sides, the arbors and fanciful trellises began to resemble gutted ruins. In the lower levels, they were overgrown with thorny trailers that clawed the lattice and seemed to writhe with animal life as I fled past them.

The night had fallen into a waking nightmare.

My heart pounded so fiercely that the stars reeled.

I felt as though the vault of the sky were sliding toward me, gaining momentum like an avalanche.

Plunging to the end of the gardens, I sensed as much as saw the looming wrought-iron fence: seven feet high, its glossy black paint glimmering with moonlight. I dug my heels into the soft earth and braked, jarring against the sturdy pickets but not hard enough to hurt myself.

I hadn’t made much noise, either. The spear-point verticals were solidly welded to the horizontal rails; instead of clattering from my impact, the fence briefly thrummed.

I sagged against the ironwork.

A bitter taste plagued me. My mouth was so dry that I couldn’t spit.

My right temple stung. I raised a hand to my face. Three thorns prickled my skin. I plucked them out.

During my flight downhill, I must have been lashed by a trailing rose brier, although I didn’t recall encountering it.

Maybe because I was breathing harder and faster, the sweet fragrance of roses became too sweet, sharpened into a half-rotten stench. I could smell my sunscreen again, too, almost as strongly as when it had been freshly applied — but with a sour taint now — because my perspiration had revitalized the scent of the lotion.

I was overcome by the absurd yet unshakable conviction that the six searchers could sniff me out, as though they were hounds. I was safe for the moment only because I was downwind of them.

Clutching the fence, out of which the thrumming had passed into my hands and bones, I glanced uphill. The search party was moving from the highest terrace to the second.

Six scythes of light slashed through the roses. Portions of the lattice structures, when briefly backlit and distorted by those bright sweeping swords, loomed like the bones of slain dragons.

The gardens presented the searchers with more possible hiding places to probe than did the open lawn above. Yet they were moving faster than before.

I scaled the fence and swung over the top, wary of snaring my jacket or a leg of my jeans on the spear-point pickets. Beyond lay open land: shadowed vales, steadily rising ranks of moonlit hills, widely scattered and barely discernible black oaks.

The wild grass, lush from the recent winter rains, was knee-high when I dropped into it from the fence. I could smell the green juice bursting from the blades crushed beneath my shoes.

Certain that Sandy and his associates would survey the entire perimeter of the property, I bounded downhill, away from the funeral home. I was eager to get beyond the reach of their flashlights before they arrived at the fence.

I was heading farther from town, which wasn’t good. I wouldn’t find help in the wilderness. Every step eastward was a step into isolation, and in isolation I was as vulnerable as anyone, more vulnerable than most.

Some luck was with me because of the season. If the searing heat of summer had already been upon us, the high grass would have been as golden as wheat and as dry as paper. My progress would have been marked by a swath of trampled stalks.

I was hopeful that the still-verdant meadow would be resilient enough to spring shut behind me, for the most part concealing the fact that I had passed this way. Nevertheless, an observant searcher would most likely be able to track me.

Approximately two hundred feet beyond the fence, at the bottom of the slope, the meadow gave way to denser brush. A barrier of tough, five-foot-high prairie cordgrass was mixed with what might have been goatsbeard and massive clumps of aureola.

I hurriedly pushed through this growth into a ten-foot-wide natural drainage swale. Little grew here because an epoch of storm runoff had exposed a spine of bedrock under the hills. With no rain in over two weeks, this rocky course was dry.

I paused to catch my breath. Leaning back into the brush, I parted the tall cordgrass to see how far down into the rose gardens the searchers had descended.

Four of them were already climbing the fence. Their flashlight beams slashed at the sky, stuttered across the pickets, and stabbed randomly at the ground as they clambered up and over the iron.

They were unnervingly quick and agile.

Were all of them, like Sandy Kirk, carrying weapons?

Considering their animal-keen instinct, speed, and persistence, perhaps they wouldn’t need weapons. If they caught me, maybe they would tear me apart with their hands.

I wondered if they would take my eyes.

The drainage channel — and the wider declivity in which it lay — ran uphill to the northeast and downhill to the southwest. As I was already at the extreme northeast end of town, I could find no help if I went uphill.

I headed southwest, following the brush-flanked swale, intending to return to well-populated territory as quickly as possible.

In the shallowly cupped channel ahead of me, the moon-burnished bedrock glowed softly like the milky ice on a winter pond, dwindling into obscurity. The embracing curtains of high, silvery cordgrass appeared to be stiff with frost.

Suppressing all fear of falling on loose stones or of snapping an ankle in a natural borehole, I gave myself to the night, allowing the darkness to push me as wind pushes a sailing ship. I sprinted down the gradual slope with no sensation of feet striking ground, as though I actually were skating across the frozen rock.

Within two hundred yards, I came to a place where hills folded into one another, resulting in a branching of the hollow. With barely any decrease in speed, I chose the right-hand course because it would lead more directly back into Moonlight Bay.

I had gone only a short distance past that intersection when I saw lights approaching. A hundred yards ahead, the hollow turned out of sight to the left, around a sweeping curve of grassy hillside. The source of the questing beams lay beyond that bend, but I could see that they must be flashlights.

None of the men from the funeral home could have gotten out of the rose gardens and ahead of me so quickly. These were additional searchers.

They were attempting to trap me in a pincer maneuver. I felt as though I were being pursued by an army, by platoons that had sprung sorcerously from the ground itself.

I came to a complete halt.

I considered stepping off the bare rock, into concealment behind the man-high prairie grass and other dense brush that still bracketed the drainage swale. No matter how little I disturbed this vegetation, however, I was nearly certain to leave signs of my passage that would be obvious to these trackers. They would burst through the brush and capture me or gun me down as I scrambled up the open hillside.

At the bend ahead, the flashlight beams swelled brighter. Sprays of tall prairie grass flared like beautifully chased forms on a sterling platter.

I retreated to the Y in the hollow and took the left-hand branch that I’d forgone a minute earlier. Within six or seven hundred feet, I came to another Y, wanted to go to the right — toward town — was afraid I’d be playing into their assumptions, and took the left-hand branch instead, although it would lead me deeper into the unpopulated hills.

From somewhere above and off to the west arose the grumble of an engine, distant at first but then suddenly nearer. The engine noise was so powerful that I thought it came from an aircraft making a low pass. This wasn’t the stuttering clatter of a helicopter, but more like the roar of a fixed-wing plane.

Then a dazzling light swept the hilltops to the left and right of me, passing directly across the hollow, sixty to eighty feet over my head. The beam was so bright, so intense, that it seemed to have weight and texture, like a white-hot gush of some molten substance.

A high-powered searchlight. It arced away and reflected off distant ridges to the east and north.

Where did they get this sophisticated ordnance on such short notice?

Was Sandy Kirk the grand kleagle of an antigovernment militia headquartered in secret bunkers jammed with weapons and ammo, deep under the funeral home? No, that didn’t ring true. Such things were merely the stuff of real life these days, the current events of a society in freefall — while this felt uncanny. This was territory through which the wild rushing river of the evening news had not yet swept.

I had to know what was happening up there on higher ground. If I didn’t reconnoiter, I would be no better than a dumb rat in a laboratory maze.

I thrashed through the brush to the right of the swale, crossed the sloping floor of the hollow, and then climbed the long hillside, because the searchlight seemed to have originated in that direction. As I ascended, the beam seared the land above again — indeed, blazing in from the northwest as I’d thought — and then scorched past a third time, brightly illuminating the brow of the hill toward which I was making my way.

After crawling the penultimate ten yards on my hands and knees, I wriggled the final ten on my belly. At the crest, I coiled into an outcropping of weather-scored rocks that provided a measure of cover, and I cautiously raised my head.

A black Hummer — or maybe a Humvee, the original military version of the vehicle before it had been gentrified for sale to civilians — stood one hilltop away from mine, immediately leeward of a giant oak. Even poorly revealed by the backwash of its own lights, the Hummer presented an unmistakable profile: a boxy, hulking, four-wheel-drive wagon perched on giant tires, capable of crossing virtually any terrain.

I now saw two searchlights: Both were hand-held, one by the driver and one by his front-seat passenger, and each had a lens the size of a salad plate. Considering their candlepower, they could have been operated only off the Hummer engine.

The driver extinguished his light and put the Hummer in gear. The big wagon sped out from under the spreading limbs of the oak and shot across the high meadow as though it were cruising a freeway, putting its tailgate toward me. It vanished over the far edge, soon reappeared out of a hollow, and rapidly ascended a more distant slope, effortlessly conquering these coastal hills.

The men on foot, with flashlights and perhaps handguns, were keeping to the hollows. In an attempt to prevent me from using the high ground, to force me down where the searchers might find me, the Hummer was patrolling the hilltops.

“Who are you people?” I muttered.

Searchlights slashed out from the Hummer, raking farther hills, illuminating a sea of grass in an indecisive breeze that ebbed and flowed. Wave after wave broke across the rising land and lapped against the trunks of the island oaks.

Then the big wagon was on the move again, rollicking over less hospitable terrain. Headlights bobbling, one searchlight swinging wildly, along a crest, into a hollow and out again, it motored east and south to another vantage point.

I wondered how visible this activity might be from the streets of Moonlight Bay on the lower hills and the flatlands, closer to the ocean. Possibly only a few townspeople happened to be outside and looking up at an angle that revealed enough commotion to engage their curiosity.

Those who glimpsed the searchlights might assume that teenagers or college boys in an ordinary four-by-four were spotting coastal elk or deer: an illegal but bloodless sport of which most people are tolerant.

Soon the Hummer would arc back toward me. Judging by the pattern of its search, it might arrive on this very hill in two more moves.

I retreated down the slope, into the hollow from which I had climbed: exactly where they wanted me. I had no better choice.

Heretofore, I had been confident that I would escape. Now my confidence was ebbing.

8

I pushed through the prairie grass into the drainage swale and continued in the direction that I had been headed before the searchlights had drawn me uphill. After only a few steps, I halted, startled by something with radiant green eyes that waited on the trail in front of me.

Coyote.

Wolflike but smaller, with a narrower muzzle than that of a wolf, these rangy creatures could nonetheless be dangerous. As civilization encroached on them, they were quite literally murder on family pets even in the supposedly safe backyards of residential neighborhoods near the open hills. In fact, from time to time you heard of a coyote savaging and dragging off a child if the prey was young and small enough. Although they attacked adult humans only rarely, I wouldn’t care to rely on their restraint or on my superior size if I was to encounter a pack — or even a pair — of them on their home ground.

My night vision was still recovering from the dazzle of the searchlights, and a tense moment passed before I perceived that these hot green eyes were too closely set to be those of a coyote. Furthermore, unless this beast was in a full pounce posture with its chest pressed to the ground, its baleful stare was directed at me from too low a position to be that of a coyote.

As my vision readjusted to nightshade and moonlight, I saw that nothing more threatening than a cat stood before me. Not a cougar, which would have been far worse than a coyote and reason for genuine terror, but a mere house cat: pale gray or light beige, impossible to tell which in this gloom.

Most cats are not stupid. Even in the obsessive pursuit of field mice or little desert lizards, they will not venture deeply into coyote country.

Indeed, as I got a clearer view of it, the particular creature before me seemed more than usually quick and alert. It sat erect, head cocked quizzically, ears pricked, studying me intensely.

As I took a step toward it, the cat rose onto all fours. When I advanced another step, the cat spun away from me and dashed along the moon-silvered path, vanishing into the darkness.

Elsewhere in the night, the Hummer was on the move again. Its shriek and snarl rapidly grew louder.

I picked up my pace.

By the time I had gone a hundred yards, the Hummer was no longer roaring but idling somewhere nearby, its engine noise like a slow deep panting. Overhead, the predatory gaze of the lights swept the night for prey.

Upon reaching the next branching of the hollow, I discovered the cat waiting for me. It sat at the point of division, committed to neither trail.

When I moved toward the left-hand path, the cat scurried to the right. It halted after several steps — and turned its lantern eyes on me.

The cat must have been acutely aware of the searchers all around us, not just of the noisy Hummer but of the men on foot. With its sharp senses, it might even perceive pheromones of aggression streaming from them, violence pending. It would want to avoid these people as much as I did. Given the chance, I would be better off choosing an escape route according to the animal’s instincts rather than according to my own.

The idling engine of the Hummer suddenly thundered. The hard peals echoed back and forth through the hollows, so that the vehicle seemed to be simultaneously approaching and racing away. With this storm of sound, indecision flooded me, and for a moment I floundered in it.

Then I decided to go the way of the cat.

As I turned from the left-hand trail, the Hummer roared over the hilltop on the eastern flank of the hollow into which I had almost proceeded. For an instant it hung, suspended, as though weightless in a clock-stopped gap in time, headlights like twin wires leading a circus tightrope walker into midair, one searchlight stabbing straight up at the black tent of the sky. Time snapped across that empty synapse and flowed again: The Hummer tipped forward, and the front wheels crashed onto the hillside, and the rear wheels crossed the crest, and gouts of earth and grass spewed out from under its tires as it charged downhill.

A man whooped with delight, and another laughed. They were reveling in the hunt.

As the big wagon descended only fifty yards ahead of me, the hand-held searchlight swept the hollow.

I threw myself to the ground and rolled for cover. The rocky swale was hell on bones, and I felt my sunglasses crack apart in my shirt pocket.

As I scrambled to my feet, a beam as bright as an oak-cleaving thunderbolt sizzled across the ground on which I had been standing. Wincing at the glare, squinting, I saw the searchlight quiver and then sweep away to the south. The Hummer was not coming up the hollow toward me.

I might have stayed where I was, at the intersection of the trails, with the narrower point of the hill at my back, until the Hummer moved out of the vicinity, rather than risk encountering it in the next hollow. When four flashlights winked far back on the trail that I had followed to this point, however, I ceased to have the luxury of hesitation. I was beyond the reach of these men’s lights, but they were approaching at a trot, and I was in imminent danger of discovery.

When I rounded the point of the hill and entered the hollow to the west of it, the cat was still there, as though waiting for me. Presenting its tail to me, it scampered away, though not so fast that I lost sight of it.

I was grateful for the stone under me, in which I could not leave betraying footprints — and then I realized that only fragments of my broken sunglasses remained in my shirt pocket. As I ran, I fingered my pocket and felt one bent stem and a jagged piece of one lens. The rest must have scattered on the ground where I had fallen, at the fork in the trail.

The four searchers were sure to spot the broken frames. They would divide their forces, two men to each hollow, and they would come after me harder and faster than ever, energized by this evidence that they were closing on their quarry.

On the far side of this hill, out of the vale where I had barely escaped the searchlight, the Hummer began to climb again. The shriek of its engine rose in pitch, swelled in volume.

If the driver paused on this grassy hilltop to survey the night once more, I would run undetected beneath him and away. If instead he raced across the hill and into this new hollow, I might be caught in his headlights or pinned by a searchlight beam.

The cat ran, and I ran.

As it sloped down between dark hills, the hollow grew wider than any that I had traveled previously, and the rocky swale in the center widened, too. Along the verge of the stone path, the tall cordgrass and the other brush bristled thicker than elsewhere, evidently watered by a greater volume of storm runoff, but the vegetation was too far to either side to cast even a faint dappling of moonshadows over me, and I felt dangerously exposed. Furthermore, this broad declivity, unlike those before it, ran as straight as a city street, with no bends to shield me from those who might enter it in my wake.

On the highlands, the Hummer seemed to have come to a halt once more. Its grumble drained away in the sluicing breeze, and the only engine sounds were mine: the rasp and wheeze of breathing, heartbeat like a pounding piston.

The cat was potentially fleeter than I — wind on four feet; it could have vanished in seconds. For a couple of minutes, however, it paced me, staying a constant fifteen feet ahead, pale gray or pale beige, a mere ghost of a cat in the moonglow, occasionally glancing back with eyes as eerie as séance candles.

Just when I began to think that this creature was purposefully leading me out of harm’s way, just as I began to indulge in one of those orgies of anthropomorphizing that make Bobby Halloway’s brain itch, the cat sped away from me. If that dry rocky wash had been filled with a storm gush, the tumbling water could not have outrun this feline, and in two seconds, three at most, it disappeared into the night ahead.

A minute later, I found the cat at the terminus of the channel. We were in the dead end of a blind hollow, with exposed grassy hills rising steeply on three sides. They were so steep, in fact, that I could not scale them quickly enough to elude the two searchers who were surely pursuing on foot. Boxed in. Trapped.

Driftwood, tangled balls of dead weeds and grass, and silt were mounded at the end of the wash. I half expected the cat to give me an evil Cheshire grin, white teeth gleaming in the gloom. Instead, it scampered to the pile of debris and slinked-wriggled into one of many small gaps, disappearing again.

This was a wash. Therefore the runoff had to go somewhere when it reached this point.

Hastily I climbed the nine-foot-long, three-foot-high slope of packed debris, which sagged and rattled and crunched but held beneath me. It was all drifted against a grid of steel bars, which served as a vertical grate across the mouth of a culvert set into the side of the hill.

Beyond the grate was a six-foot-diameter concrete drain between anchoring concrete buttresses. It was apparently part of a flood-control project that carried storm water out of the hills, under the Pacific Coast Highway, into drains beneath the streets of Moonlight Bay, and finally to the sea.

A couple of times each winter, maintenance crews would clear the trash away from the grate to prevent water flow from being completely impeded. Clearly, they had not been here recently.

Inside the culvert, the cat meowed. Magnified, its voice echoed with a new sepulchral tone along the concrete tunnel.

The openings in the steel-bar grid were four-inch squares, wide enough to admit the supple cat but not wide enough for me. The grate extended the width of the opening, from buttress to buttress, but it didn’t reach all the way to the top.

I swung legs-first and backward through the two-foot-high gap between the top of the grate and the curved ceiling of the drain. I was grateful that the grid had a headrail, for otherwise I would have been poked and gouged painfully by the exposed tops of the vertical bars.

Leaving the stars and the moon behind, I stood with my back to the grate, peering into absolute blackness. I had to hunch only slightly to keep from bumping my head against the ceiling.

The smell of damp concrete and moldering grass, not entirely unpleasant, wafted from below.

I eased forward, sliding my feet. The smooth floor of the culvert had only a slight pitch. After just a few yards, I stopped, afraid I would blunder into a sudden drop-off and wind up dead or broken-backed at the bottom.

I withdrew the butane lighter from a pocket of my jeans, but I was reluctant to strike a flame. The light flickering along the curved walls of the culvert would be visible from outside.

The cat called again, and its radiant eyes were all that I could see ahead. Guessing at the distance between us, judging by the angle at which I looked down upon the animal, I deduced that the floor of the huge culvert continued at an increased — but not drastic — slope.

I proceeded cautiously toward the lambent eyes. When I drew close to the creature, it turned away, and I halted at the loss of its twin beacons.

Seconds later it spoke again. Its green gaze reappeared and fixed unblinking on me.

Edging forward once more, I marveled at this odd experience. All that I had witnessed since sundown — the theft of my father’s body, the battered and eyeless corpse in the crematorium, the pursuit from the mortuary — was incredible, to say the least, but for sheer strangeness, nothing equaled the behavior of this small descendant of tigers.

Or maybe I was making a lot more of the moment than it deserved, attributing to this simple house cat an awareness of my plight that it didn’t actually possess.

Maybe.

Blindly, I came to another mound of debris smaller than the first. Unlike the previous heap, this one was damp. The flotsam squished beneath my shoes, and a sharper stench rose from it.

I clambered forward, cautiously groping at the darkness in front of me, and I discovered that the debris was packed against another steel-bar grate. Whatever trash managed to wash over the top of the first grate was caught here.

After climbing this barrier and crossing safely to the other side, I risked using the lighter. I cupped my hand around the flame to contain and direct the glow as much as possible.

The cat’s eyes blazed bright: gold now, flecked with green. We stared at each other for a long moment, and then my guide — if that’s what it was — whipped around and sprinted out of sight, down into the drain.

Using the lighter to find my way, keeping the flame low to conserve butane, I descended through the heart of the coastal hills, passing smaller tributary culverts that opened into this main line. I arrived at a spillway of wide concrete steps on which were puddles of stagnant water and a thin carpet of hardy gray-black fungus that probably thrived only during the four-month rainy season. The scummy steps were treacherous, but for the safety of maintenance crews, a steel handrail was bolted to one wall, hung now with a drab tinsel of dead grass deposited by the most recent flood.

As I descended, I listened for the sounds of pursuit, voices in the tunnel behind me, but all I heard were my own stealthy noises. Either the searchers had decided that I hadn’t escaped by way of the culvert — or they had hesitated so long before following me into the drain that I had gotten well ahead of them.

At the bottom of the spillway, on the last two broad steps, I almost plunged into what I thought at first were the pale, rounded caps of large mushrooms, clusters of vile-looking fungi growing here in the lightless damp, no doubt poisonous in the extreme.

Clutching the railing, I eased past sprouting forms on the slippery concrete, reluctant to touch them even with one of my shoes. Standing in the next length of sloping tunnel, I turned to examine this peculiar find.

When I cranked up the flame on the lighter, I discovered that before me lay not mushrooms but a collection of skulls. The fragile skulls of birds. The elongated skulls of lizards. The larger skulls of what might have been cats, dogs, raccoons, porcupines, rabbits, squirrels….

Not a scrap of flesh adhered to any of these death’s-heads, as if they had been boiled clean: white and yellow-white in the butane light, scores of them, perhaps a hundred. No leg bones, no rib cages, just skulls. They were arranged neatly side by side in three rows — two on the bottom step and one on the second from the bottom — facing out, as though, even with their empty eye sockets, they were here to bear witness to something.

I had no idea what to make of this. I saw no satanic markings on the culvert walls, no indications of macabre ceremonies of any kind, yet the display had an undeniably symbolic purpose. The extent of the collection indicated obsession, and the cruelty implicit in so much killing and decapitation was chilling.

Recalling the fascination with death that had gripped me and Bobby Halloway when we were thirteen, I wondered if some kid, far weirder than we ever were, had done this grisly work. Criminologists claim that by the age of three or four, most serial killers begin torturing and killing insects, progressing to small animals during childhood and adolescence, and finally graduating to people. Maybe in these catacombs, a particularly vicious young murderer was practicing for his life’s work.

In the middle of the third and highest row of these bony visages rested a gleaming skull that was markedly different from all the others. It appeared to be human. Small but human. Like the skull of an infant.

“Dear God.”

My voice whispered back to me along the concrete walls.

More than ever, I felt as though I were in a dreamscape, where even such things as concrete and bone were no more solid than smoke. Nevertheless, I did not reach out to touch the small human skull — or any of the others, for that matter. However unreal they might seem, I knew that they would be cold, slick, and too solid to the touch.

Anxious to avoid encountering whoever had acquired this grim collection, I continued downward through the drain.

I expected the cat with the enigmatic eyes to reappear, pale paws meeting concrete with feather-on-feather silence, but either it remained out of sight ahead of me or it had detoured into one of the tributary lines.

Sections of sloped concrete pipe alternated with more spillways, and just as I was beginning to worry that the lighter didn’t contain enough fuel to see me to safety, a circle of dim gray light appeared and gradually brightened ahead. I hurried toward it and found that no grate barred the lower end of the tunnel, which led into an open drainage channel of mortar-set river rock.

I was in familiar territory at last, the northern flats of town. A couple of blocks from the sea. Half a block from the high school.

After the dank culvert, the night air smelled not merely fresh but sweet. The high points of the polished sky glittered diamond-white.

9

According to the digital light board on the Wells Fargo Bank building, the time was 7:56 P.M., which meant that my father had been dead less than three hours, though days seemed to have passed since I’d lost him. The same sign set the temperature at sixty degrees, but the night seemed colder to me.

Around the corner from the bank and down the block, the Tidy Time Laundromat was flooded with fluorescent light. Currently no customers were doing their laundry.

With the dollar bill ready in my hand, with my eyes squinted to slits, I went inside, into the flowery fragrance of soap powders and the chemical keenness of bleach, my head lowered to maximize the protection provided by the bill of my cap. I ran straight to the change machine, fed it, snatched up the four quarters that it spat into the tray, and fled.

Two blocks away, outside the post office, stood a pay phone with winglike sound shields. Above the phone, mounted on the wall of the building, was a security light behind a wire cage.

When I hung my hat on the cage, shadows fell.

I figured that Manuel Ramirez would still be at home. When I phoned him, his mother, Rosalina, said that he had been gone for hours. He was working a double shift because another officer had called in sick. This evening he was on desk duty; later, after midnight, he would be on patrol.

I punched in the main number of the Moonlight Bay Police and asked the operator if I could speak to Officer Ramirez.

Manuel, in my judgment the best cop in town, is three inches shorter than I am, thirty pounds heavier, twelve years older, and a Mexican American. He loves baseball; I never follow sports because I have an acute sense of time slipping away and a reluctance to use my precious hours in too many passive activities. Manuel prefers country music; I like rock. He is a staunch Republican; I have no interest in politics. In movies, his guilty pleasure is Abbott and Costello; mine is the immortal Jackie Chan. We are friends.

“Chris, I heard about your dad,” Manuel said when he came on the line. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Neither do I, really.”

“No, there never is anything to say, is there?”

“Not that matters.”

“You going to be okay?”

To my surprise, I couldn’t speak. My terrible loss seemed suddenly to be a surgeon’s needle that stitched shut my throat and sewed my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

Curiously, immediately after Dad’s death, I’d been able to answer this same question from Dr. Cleveland without hesitation.

I felt closer to Manuel than to the physician. Friendship thaws the nerves, making it possible for pain to be felt.

“You come over some evening when I’m off duty,” Manuel said. “We’ll drink some beer, eat some tamales, watch a couple of Jackie Chan movies.”

In spite of baseball and country music, we have much in common, Manuel Ramirez and I. He works the graveyard shift, from midnight until eight in the morning, sometimes doubling on the swing shift when, as on this March evening, there is a personnel shortage. He likes the night as I do, but he also works it by necessity. Because the graveyard shift is less desirable than daytime duty, the pay is higher. More important, he is able to spend afternoons and evenings with his son, Toby, whom he cherishes. Sixteen years ago, Manuel’s wife, Carmelita, died minutes after bringing Toby into the world. The boy is gentle, charming — and a victim of Down’s syndrome. Manuel’s mother moved into his house immediately after Carmelita’s death and still helps to look after Toby. Manuel Ramirez knows about limitations. He feels the hand of fate every day of his life, in an age when most people no longer believe in purpose or destiny. We have much in common, Manuel Ramirez and I.

“Beer and Jackie Chan sound great,” I agreed. “But who makes the tamales — you or your mother?”

“Oh, not mi madre, I promise.”

Manuel is an exceptional cook, and his mother thinks that she is an exceptional cook. A comparison of their cooking provides a fearsomely illuminating example of the difference between a good deed and a good intention.

A car passed in the street behind me, and when I looked down, I saw my shadow pull at my unmoving feet, stretching from my left side around to my right, growing not merely longer but blacker on the concrete sidewalk, straining to tear loose of me and flee — but then snapping back to the left when the car passed.

“Manuel, there’s something you can do for me, something more than tamales.”

“You name it, Chris.”

After a long hesitation, I said, “It involves my dad…his body.”

Manuel matched my hesitation. His thoughtful silence was the equivalent of a cat’s ears pricking with interest.

He heard more in my words than they appeared to convey. His tone was different when he spoke this time, still the voice of a friend but also the harder voice of a cop. “What’s happened, Chris?”

“It’s pretty weird.”

“Weird?” he said, savoring the word as though it were an unexpected taste.

“I’d really rather not talk about it on the phone. If I come over to the station, can you meet me in the parking lot?”

I couldn’t expect the police to switch off all their office lights and take my statement by the glow of candles.

Manuel said, “We’re talking something criminal?”

“Deeply. And weird.”

“Chief Stevenson’s been working late today. He’s still here but not for much longer. You think maybe I should ask him to wait?”

In my mind rose the eyeless face of the dead hitchhiker.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, Stevenson should hear this.”

“Can you be here in ten minutes?”

“See you then.”

I racked the telephone handset, snatched my cap off the light cage, turned to the street, and shielded my eyes with one hand as two more cars drove past. One was a late-model Saturn. The other was a Chevy pickup.

No white van. No hearse. No black Hummer.

I didn’t actually fear that the search for me was still on. By now the hitchhiker would be charring in the furnace. With the evidence reduced to ashes, no obvious proof existed to support my bizarre story. Sandy Kirk, the orderlies, and all the nameless others would feel safe.

Indeed, any attempt to kill or abduct me would risk witnesses to that crime, who would then have to be dealt with, increasing the likelihood of still more witnesses. These mysterious conspirators were best served now by discretion rather than aggression — especially when their sole accuser was the town freak, who came out of his heavily curtained house only between dusk and dawn, who feared the sun, who lived by the grace of cloaks and veils and hoods and masks of lotion, who crawled even the night town under a carapace of cloth and chemicals.

Considering the outrageous nature of my accusations, few would find my story credible, but I was sure that Manuel would know I was telling the truth. I hoped the chief would believe me, too.

I stepped away from the telephone outside the post office and headed for the police station. It was only a couple of blocks away.

As I hurried through the night, I rehearsed what I would tell Manuel and his boss, Lewis Stevenson, who was a formidable figure for whom I wanted to be well prepared. Tall, broad-shouldered, athletic, Stevenson had a face noble enough to be stamped in profile on ancient Roman coins. Sometimes he seemed to be but an actor playing the role of dedicated police chief, although if it was a performance, then it was of award caliber. At fifty-two, he gave the impression — without appearing to try — that he was far wiser than his years, easily commanding respect and trust. There was something of the psychologist and something of the priest in him — qualities everyone in his position needed but few possessed. He was that rare person who enjoyed having power but did not abuse it, who exercised authority with good judgment and compassion, and he’d been chief of police for fourteen years without a hint of scandal, ineptitude, or inefficiency in his department.

Thus I came through lampless alleys lit by a moon riding higher in the sky than it had been earlier, came past fences and footpaths, past gardens and garbage cans, came mentally murmuring the words with which I hoped to tell a convincing story, came in two minutes instead of the ten that Manuel had suggested, came to the parking lot behind the municipal building and saw Chief Stevenson in a conspiratorial moment that stripped away all the fine qualities I’d projected onto him. Revealed now was a man who, regardless of his noble face, did not deserve to be honored by coins or by monuments or even by having his photograph hung in the station house next to those of the mayor, the governor, and the President of the United States.

Stevenson stood at the far end of the municipal building, near the back entrance to the police station, in a cascade of bluish light from a hooded security lamp above the door. The man with whom he conferred stood a few feet away, only half revealed in blue shadows.

I crossed the parking lot, heading toward them. They didn’t see me coming because they were deeply engrossed in conversation. Furthermore, I was mostly screened from them as I passed among the street-department trucks and squad cars and water-department trucks and personal vehicles, while also staying as much as possible out of the direct light from the three tall pole lamps.

Just before I would have stepped into the open, Stevenson’s visitor moved closer to the chief, shedding the shadows, and I halted in shock. I saw his shaved head, his hard face. Red-plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans, work shoes.

At this distance, I wasn’t able to see his pearl earring.

I was flanked by two large vehicles, and I quickly retreated a few steps to shelter more completely in the oily darkness between them. One of the engines was still hot; it pinged and ticked as it cooled.

Although I could hear the voices of the two men, I could not make out their words. An onshore breeze still romanced the trees and quarreled against all the works of man, and this ceaseless whisper and hiss screened the conversation from me.

I realized that the vehicle to my right, the one with the hot engine, was the white Ford van in which the bald man had driven away from Mercy Hospital earlier in the night. With my father’s mortal remains.

I wondered if the keys might be in the ignition. I pressed my face to the window in the driver’s door, but I couldn’t see much of the interior.

If I could steal the van, I would most likely have possession of crucial proof that my story was true. Even if my father’s body had been taken elsewhere and was no longer in this van, forensic evidence might remain — not least, some of the hitchhiker’s blood.

I had no idea how to hot-wire an engine.

Hell, I didn’t know how to drive.

And even if I discovered that I possessed a natural talent for the operation of motor vehicles that was the equivalent of Mozart’s brilliance at musical composition, I wouldn’t be able to drive twenty miles south along the coast or thirty miles north to another police jurisdiction. Not in the glare of oncoming headlights. Not without my precious sunglasses, which lay broken far away in the hills to the east.

Besides, if I opened the van door, the cab lights would wink on. The two men would notice.

They would come for me.

They would kill me.

The back door of the police station opened. Manuel Ramirez stepped outside.

Lewis Stevenson and his conspirator broke off their urgent conversation at once. From this distance, I wasn’t able to discern whether Manuel knew the bald man, but he appeared to address only the chief.

I couldn’t believe that Manuel — good son of Rosalina, mourning widower of Carmelita, loving father of Toby — would be a part of any business that involved murder and grave-robbing. We can never know many of the people in our lives, not truly know them, regardless of how deeply we believe that we see into them. Most of them are murky ponds, containing infinite layers of suspended particles, stirred by strange currents in their greatest depths. But I was willing to bet my life that Manuel’s clear-water heart concealed no capacity for treachery.

I wasn’t willing to bet his life, however, and if I called out to him to search the back of the white van with me, to impound the vehicle for an exhaustive forensics workup, I might be signing his death warrant as well as mine. In fact, I was sure of it.

Abruptly Stevenson and the bald man turned from Manuel to survey the parking lot. I knew then that he had told them about my telephone call.

I dropped into a crouch and shrank deeper into the gloom between the van and the water-department truck.

At the back of the van, I tried to read the license plate. Although usually I am plagued by too much light, this time I was hampered by too little.

Frantically, I traced the seven numbers and letters with my fingertips. I wasn’t able to memorize them by braille reading, however, at least not quickly enough to avoid discovery.

I knew that the bald man, if not Stevenson, was coming to the van. Was already on the move. The bald man, the butcher, the trader in bodies, the thief of eyes.

Staying low, I retraced the route by which I had come through the ranks of parked trucks and cars, returning to the alley and then scurrying onward, using rows of trash cans as cover, all but crawling to a Dumpster and past it, to a corner and around, into the other alleyway, out of sight of the municipal building, rising to my full height now, running once more, as fleet as the cat, gliding like an owl, a creature of the night, wondering if I would find safe shelter before dawn or would still be afoot in the open to curl and blacken under the hot rising sun.

10

I assumed that I could safely go home but that I might be foolish to linger there too long. I wouldn’t be overdue at the police station for another two minutes, and they would wait for me at least ten minutes past the appointed time before Chief Stevenson realized that I must have seen him with the man who had stolen my father’s body.

Even then, they might not come to the house in search of me. I was still not a serious threat to them — and not likely to become one. I had no proof of anything I’d seen.

Nevertheless, they seemed inclined to take extreme measures to prevent the exposure of their inscrutable conspiracy. They might be loath to leave even the smallest of loose ends — which meant a knot in my neck.

I expected to find Orson in the foyer when I unlocked the front door and stepped inside, but he was not waiting for me. I called his name, but he didn’t appear; and if he had been approaching through the gloom, I would have heard his big paws thumping on the floor.

He was probably in one of his dour moods. For the most part, he is good-humored, playful, and companionable, with enough energy in his tail to sweep all the streets in Moonlight Bay. From time to time, however, the world weighs heavily on him, and then he lies as limp as a rug, sad eyes open but fixed on some doggy memory or on some doggy vision beyond this world, making no sound other than an occasional attenuated sigh.

More rarely, I have found Orson in a state of what seems to be bleakest dejection. This ought to be a condition too profound for any dog to wear, although it fits him well.

He once sat before a mirrored closet door in my bedroom, staring at his reflection for nearly half an hour — an eternity to the dog mind, which generally experiences the world as a series of two-minute wonders and three-minute enthusiasms. I hadn’t been able to tell what fascinated him in his image, although I ruled out both canine vanity and simple puzzlement; he seemed full of sorrow, all drooping ears and slumped shoulders and wagless tail. I swear, at times his eyes brimmed with tears that he was barely able to hold back.

“Orson?” I called.

The switch operating the staircase chandelier was fitted with a rheostat, as were most of the switches throughout the house. I dialed up the minimum light that I needed to climb the stairs.

Orson wasn’t on the landing. He wasn’t waiting in the second-floor hall.

In my room, I dialed a wan glow. Orson wasn’t here, either.

I went directly to the nearest nightstand. From the top drawer I withdrew an envelope in which I kept a supply of knocking-around money. It contained only a hundred and eighty dollars, but this was better than nothing. Though I didn’t know why I might need the cash, I intended to be prepared, so I transferred the entire sum to one of the pockets of my jeans.

As I slid shut the nightstand drawer, I noticed a dark object on the bedspread. When I picked it up, I was surprised that it was actually what it had appeared to be in the shadows: a pistol.

I had never seen this weapon before.

My father had never owned a gun.

Acting on instinct, I put down the pistol and used a corner of the bedspread to wipe my prints off it. I suspected that I was being set up to take a fall for something I had not done.

Although any television emits ultraviolet radiation, I’ve seen a lot of movies over the years, because I’m safe if I sit far enough from the screen. I know all the great stories of innocent men — from Cary Grant and James Stewart to Harrison Ford — relentlessly hounded for crimes they never committed and incarcerated on trumped-up evidence.

Stepping quickly into the adjacent bathroom, I switched on the low-watt bulb. No dead blonde in the bathtub.

No Orson, either.

In the bedroom once more, I stood very still and listened to the house. If other people were present, they were only ghosts drifting in ectoplasmic silence.

I returned to the bed, hesitated, picked up the pistol, and fumbled with it until I ejected the magazine. It was fully loaded. I slammed the magazine back into the butt. Being inexperienced with handguns, I found the piece heavier than I had expected: It weighed at least a pound and a half.

Next to where I’d found the gun, a white envelope lay on the cream-colored bedspread. I hadn’t noticed it until now.

I withdrew a penlight from a nightstand drawer and focused the tight beam on the envelope. It was blank except for a professionally printed return address in the upper left corner: Thor’s Gun Shop here in Moonlight Bay. The unsealed envelope, which bore neither a stamp nor a postmark, was slightly crumpled and stippled with curious indentations.

When I picked up the envelope, it was faintly damp in spots. The folded papers inside were dry.

I examined these documents in the beam of the penlight. I recognized my father’s careful printing on the carbon copy of the standard application, on which he had attested to the local police that he had no criminal record or history of mental illness that would be grounds to deny him the right to own this firearm. Also included was a carbon copy of the original invoice for the weapon, indicating that it was a 9-millimeter Glock 17 and that my father had purchased it with a check.

The date on the invoice gave me a chill: January 18, two years ago. My father had bought the Glock just three days after my mother had been killed in the car crash on Highway 1. As though he thought he needed protection.

In the study across the hallway from the bedroom, my compact cellular phone was recharging. I unplugged it and clipped it to my belt, at my hip.

Orson was not in the study.

Earlier, Sasha had stopped by the house to feed him. Maybe she had taken him with her when she’d gone. If Orson had been as somber as he’d been when I’d left for the hospital — and especially if he had settled into an even blacker mood — Sasha might not have been able to leave the poor beast here alone, because as much compassion as blood flows through her veins.

Even if Orson had gone with Sasha, who had transferred the 9-millimeter Glock from my father’s room to my bed? Not Sasha. She wouldn’t have known the gun existed, and she wouldn’t have prowled through my dad’s belongings.

The desk phone was connected to an answering machine. Next to the blinking message light, the counter window showed two calls.

According to the machine’s automatic time-and-date voice, the first call had come in only half an hour ago. It lasted nearly two minutes, although the caller spoke not a word.

Initially, he drew slow deep breaths and let them out almost as slowly, as though he possessed the magical power to inhale the myriad scents of my rooms even across a telephone line, and thereby discover if I was home or out. After a while, he began to hum as though he had forgotten that he was being recorded and was merely humming to himself in the manner of a daydreamer lost in thought, humming a tune that seemed to be improvised, with no coherent melody, spiraling and low, eerie and repetitive, like the song a madman might hear when he believes that angels of destruction, in choirs, are singing to him.

I was sure he was a stranger. I believed that I would have been able to recognize the voice of a friend even from nothing more than the humming. I was also sure that he had not reached a wrong number; somehow he was involved with the events following my father’s death.

By the time the first caller disconnected, I discovered that I had tightened my hands into fists. I was holding useless air in my lungs. I exhaled a hot dry gust, inhaled a cool sweet draft, but could not yet unclench my hands.

The second call, which had come in only minutes before I had returned home, was from Angela Ferryman, the nurse who had been at my father’s bedside. She didn’t identify herself, but I recognized her thin yet musical voice: Through her message, it quickened like an increasingly restless bird hopping from picket point to picket point along a fence.

“Chris, I’d like to talk to you. Have to talk. As soon as it’s convenient. Tonight. If you can, tonight. I’m in the car, on my way home now. You know where I live. Come see me. Don’t call. I don’t trust phones. Don’t even like making this call. But I’ve got to see you. Come to the back door. No matter how late you get this, come anyway. I won’t be asleep. Can’t sleep.”

I put a new message tape on the machine. I hid the original cassette under the crumpled sheets of writing paper at the bottom of the wastebasket beside my desk.

These two brief tape recordings wouldn’t convince a cop or a judge of anything. Nevertheless, they were the only scraps of evidence I possessed to indicate that something extraordinary was happening to me — something even more extraordinary than my birth into this tiny sunless caste. More extraordinary than surviving twenty-eight years unscathed by xeroderma pigmentosum.

I had been home less than ten minutes. Nevertheless, I was lingering too long.

As I searched for Orson, I more than half expected to hear a door being forced or glass breaking on the lower floor and then footsteps on the stairs. The house remained quiet, but this was a tremulous silence like the surface tension on a pond.

The dog wasn’t moping in Dad’s bedroom or bathroom. Not in the walk-in closet, either.

Second by second, I grew more worried about the mutt. Whoever had put the 9-millimeter Glock pistol on my bed might also have taken or harmed Orson.

In my room again, I located a spare pair of sunglasses in a bureau drawer. They were in a soft case with a Velcro seal, and I clipped the case in my shirt pocket.

I glanced at my wristwatch, on which the time was displayed by light-emitting diodes.

Quickly, I returned the invoice and the police questionnaire to the envelope from Thor’s Gun Shop. Whether it was more evidence or merely trash, I hid it between the mattress and box springs of my bed.

The date of purchase seemed significant. Suddenly everything seemed significant.

I kept the pistol. Maybe this was a setup, just like in the movies, but I felt safer with a weapon. I wished that I knew how to use it.

The pockets of my leather jacket were deep enough to conceal the gun. It hung in the right pocket not like a weight of dead steel but like a thing alive, like a torpid but not entirely dormant snake. When I moved, it seemed to writhe slowly: fat and sluggish, an oozing tangle of thick coils.

As I was about to go downstairs to search for Orson, I recalled a July night when I had watched him from my bedroom window as he sat in the backyard, his head tilted to lift his snout to the breeze, transfixed by something in the heavens, deep in one of his most puzzling moods. He had not been howling, and in any event the summer sky had been moonless; the sound he made was neither a whine nor a whimper but a mewling of singular and disturbing character.

Now I raised the blind at that same window and saw him in the yard below. He was busily digging a black hole in the moon-silvered lawn. This was peculiar, because he was a well-behaved dog and never a digger.

As I looked on, Orson abandoned the patch of earth at which he had been furiously clawing, moved a few feet to the right, and began to dig a new hole. A quality of frenzy marked his behavior.

“What’s happened, boy?” I wondered, and in the yard below, the dog dug, dug, dug.

On my way downstairs, with the Glock coiling heavily in my jacket pocket, I remembered that July night when I had gone into the backyard to sit beside the mewling dog….

His cries grew as thin as the whistle-hiss of a glassblower shaping a vase over a flame, so soft that they did not even disturb the nearest of our neighbors, yet there was such wretchedness in the sound that I was shaken by it. With those cries he shaped a misery darker than the darkest glass and stranger in form than anything a blower could blow.

He was uninjured and did not appear to be ill. For all I could tell, the sight of the stars themselves was the thing that filled him with torment. Yet if the vision of dogs is as poor as we are taught, they can’t see the stars well or at all. And why should stars cause Orson such anguish, anyway, or the night that was no deeper than other nights before it? Nevertheless, he gazed skyward and made tortured sounds and didn’t respond to my reassuring voice.

When I put a hand on his head and stroked his back, I felt hard shudders passing through him. He sprang to his feet and padded away, only to turn and stare at me from a distance, and I swear that for a while he hated me. He loved me as always; he was still my dog, after all, and could not escape loving me; but at the same time, he hated me intensely. In the warm July air, I could virtually feel the cold hatred radiating off him. He paced the yard, alternately staring at me — holding my gaze as only he among all dogs is able to hold it — and looking at the sky, now stiff and shaking with rage, now weak and mewling with what seemed despair.

When I’d told Bobby Halloway about this, he’d said that dogs are incapable of hating anyone or of feeling anything as complex as genuine despair, that their emotional lives are as simple as their intellectual lives. When I insisted on my interpretation, Bobby had said, “Listen, Snow, if you’re going to keep coming here to bore my ass off with this New Age crap, why don’t you just buy a shotgun and blow my brains out? That would be more merciful than the excruciatingly slow death you’re dealing out now, bludgeoning me with your tedious little stories and your moronic philosophies. There are limits to human endurance, Saint Francis — even to mine.”

I know what I know, however, and I know Orson hated me that July night, hated me and loved me. And I know that something in the sky tormented him and filled him with despair: the stars, the blackness, or perhaps something he imagined.

Can dogs imagine? Why not?

I know they dream. I’ve watched them sleep, seen their legs kick as they chase dream rabbits, heard them sigh and whimper, heard them growl at dream adversaries.

Orson’s hatred that night did not make me fear him, but I feared for him. I knew his problem was not distemper or any physical ailment that might have made him dangerous to me, but was instead a malady of the soul.

Bobby raves brilliantly at the mention of souls in animals and splutters ultimately into a tremendously entertaining incoherence. I could sell tickets. I prefer to open a bottle of beer, lean back, and have the whole show to myself.

Anyway, throughout that long night, I sat in the yard, keeping Orson company even though he might not have wanted it. He glowered at me, remarked upon the vaulted sky with razor-thin cries, shuddered uncontrollably, circled the yard, circled and circled until near dawn, when at last he came to me, exhausted, and put his head in my lap and did not hate me anymore.

Just before sunrise, I went upstairs to my room, ready for bed hours earlier than usual, and Orson came with me. Most of the time, when he chooses to sleep to my schedule, he curls near my feet, but on this occasion he lay on his side with his back to me, and until he slept, I stroked his burly head and smoothed his fine black coat.

I myself slept not at all that day. I lay thinking about the hot summer morning beyond the blinded windows. The sky like an inverted blue porcelain bowl with birds in flight around its rim. Birds of the day, which I had seen only in pictures. And bees and butterflies. And shadows ink-pure and knife-sharp at the edges as they never can be in the night. Sweet sleep couldn’t pour into me because I was filled to the brim with bitter yearning.

Now, nearly three years later, as I opened the kitchen door and stepped onto the back porch, I hoped that Orson wasn’t in a despondent mood. This night, we had no time for therapy either for him or for me.

My bicycle was on the porch. I walked it down the steps and rolled it toward the busy dog.

In the southwest corner of the yard, he had dug half a dozen holes of various diameters and depths, and I had to be careful not to twist an ankle in one of them. Across that quadrant of the lawn were scattered ragged clumps of uprooted grass and clods of earth torn loose by his claws.

“Orson?”

He did not respond. He didn’t even pause in his frenzied digging.

Giving him a wide berth to avoid the spray of dirt that fanned out behind his excavating forepaws, I went around the current hole to face him.

“Hey, pal,” I said.

The dog kept his head down, his snout in the ground, sniffing inquisitively as he dug.

The breeze had died, and the full moon hung like a child’s lost balloon in the highest branches of the melaleucas.

Overhead, nighthawks dived and soared and barrel-looped, crying peent-peent-peent as they harvested flying ants and early-spring moths from the air.

Watching Orson at work, I said, “Found any good bones lately?”

He stopped digging but still didn’t acknowledge me. Urgently he sniffed the raw earth, the scent of which rose even to me.

“Who let you out here?”

Sasha might have brought him outside to toilet, but I was sure that she would have returned him to the house afterward.

“Sasha?” I asked nevertheless.

If Sasha were the one who had left him loose to wreak havoc on the landscaping, Orson was not going to rat on her. He wouldn’t meet my eyes lest I read the truth in them.

Abandoning the hole he had just dug, he returned to a previous pit, sniffed it, and set to work again, seeking communion with dogs in China.

Maybe he knew that Dad was dead. Animals know things, as Sasha had noted earlier. Maybe this industrious digging was Orson’s way of working off the nervous energy of grief.

I lowered my bicycle to the grass and hunkered down in front of the burrowing fiend. I gripped his collar and gently forced him to pay attention to me.

“What’s wrong with you?”

His eyes had in them the darkness of the ravaged soil, not the brighter glimmering darkness of the starry sky. They were deep and unreadable.

“I’ve got places to go, pal,” I told him. “I want you to come with me.”

He whined and twisted his head to look at the devastation all around him, as though to say that he was loath to leave this great work unfinished.

“Come morning, I’m going to stay at Sasha’s place, and I don’t want to leave you here alone.”

His ears pricked, although not at the mention of Sasha’s name or at anything I had said. He wrenched his powerful body around in my grip to look toward the house.

When I let go of his collar, he raced across the yard but then stopped well short of the back porch. He stood at attention, head raised high, utterly still, alert.

“What is it, fella?” I whispered.

From a distance of fifteen or twenty feet, even with the breeze dead and the night hushed, I could barely hear his low growl.

On my way out of the house, I had dialed the switches all the way off, leaving lightless rooms behind me. Blackness still filled the place, and I could see no ghostly face pressed to any of the panes.

Orson sensed someone, however, because he began to back away from the house. Suddenly he spun around with the agility of a cat and raced toward me.

I raised my bike off its side, onto its wheels.

Tail low but not tucked between his legs, ears flattened against his head, Orson shot past me to the back gate.

Trusting in the reliability of canine senses, I joined the dog at the gate without delay. The property is surrounded by a silvered cedar fence as tall as I am, and the gate is cedar, too. The gravity latch was cold under my fingers. Quietly I slipped it open and silently cursed the squeaking hinges.

Beyond the gate is a hard-packed dirt footpath bordered by houses on one side and by a narrow grove of old red-gum eucalyptuses on the other. As we pushed through the gate, I half expected someone to be waiting for us, but the path was deserted.

To the south, beyond the eucalyptus grove, lies a golf course and then the Moonlight Bay Inn and Country Club. At this hour on a Friday night, viewed between the trunks of the tall trees, the golf course was as black and rolling as the sea, and the glittering amber windows of the distant inn were like the portals on a magnificent cruise ship forever bound for far Tahiti.

To the left, the footpath led uphill toward the heart of town, ultimately terminating in the graveyard adjacent to St. Bernadette’s, the Catholic church. To the right, it led downhill toward the flats, the harbor, and the Pacific.

I shifted gears and cycled uphill, toward the graveyard, with the eucalyptus perfume reminding me of the light at a crematorium window and of a beautiful young mother lying dead upon a mortician’s gurney, but with good Orson trotting alongside my bike and with the faint strains of dance music filtering across the golf course from the inn, and with a baby crying in one of our neighbors’ houses to my left, but with the weight of the Glock pistol in my pocket and with nighthawks overhead snapping insects in their sharp beaks: the living and the dead all together in the trap of land and sky.

11

I wanted to talk to Angela Ferryman, because her message on my answering machine had seemed to promise revelations. I was in the mood for revelations.

First, however, I had to call Sasha, who was waiting to hear about my father.

I stopped in St. Bernadette’s cemetery, one of my favorite places, a harbor of darkness in one of the more brightly lighted precincts of town. The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns, supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns, and the quiet space below is laid out in aisles similar to those in any library; the gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those who have been blotted from the pages of life, who may be forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here.

Orson wandered, though not far from me, sniffing the spoor of the squirrels that, by day, gathered acorns off the graves. He was not a hunter tracking prey but a scholar satisfying his curiosity.

From my belt, I unclipped my cellular phone, switched it on, and keyed in Sasha Goodall’s mobile number. She answered on the second ring.

“Dad’s gone,” I said, meaning more than she could know.

Earlier, in anticipation of Dad’s death, Sasha had expressed her sorrow. Now her voice tightened slightly with grief so well controlled that only I could have heard it: “Did he…did he go easy at the end?”

“No pain.”

“Was he conscious?”

“Yeah. We had a chance to say good-bye.”

Fear nothing.

Sasha said, “Life stinks.”

“It’s just the rules,” I said. “To get in the game, we have to agree to stop playing someday.”

“It still stinks. Are you at the hospital?”

“No. Out and about. Rambling. Working off some energy. Where’re you?”

“In the Explorer. Going to Pinkie’s Diner to grab breakfast and work on my notes for the show.” She would be on the air in three and a half hours. “Or I could get takeout, and we could go eat somewhere together.”

“I’m not really hungry,” I said truthfully. “I’ll see you later though.”

“When?”

“You go home from work in the morning, I’ll be there. I mean, if that’s okay.”

“That’s perfect. Love you, Snowman.”

“Love you,” I replied.

“That’s our little mantra.”

“It’s our truth.”

I pushed end on the keypad, switched off the phone, and clipped it to my belt again.

When I cycled out of the cemetery, my four-legged companion followed but somewhat reluctantly at first. His head was full of squirrel mysteries.

I made my way to Angela Ferryman’s house as far as possible by alleyways where I was not likely to encounter much traffic and on streets with widely spaced lampposts. When I had no choice but to pass under clusters of streetlamps, I pedaled hard.

Faithfully, Orson matched his pace to mine. He seemed happier than he had been earlier, now that he could trot at my side, blacker than any nightshadow that I could cast.

We encountered only four vehicles. Each time, I squinted and looked away from the headlights.

Angela lived on a high street in a charming Spanish bungalow that sheltered under magnolia trees not yet in bloom. No lights were on in the front rooms.

An unlocked side gate admitted me to an arbor-covered passage. The walls and arched ceiling of the arbor were entwined with star jasmine. In summer, sprays of the tiny five-petaled white flowers would be clustered so abundantly that the lattice would seem to be draped with multiple layers of lace. Even this early in the year, the hunter-green foliage was enlivened by those pinwheel-like blooms.

While I breathed deeply of the jasmine fragrance, savoring it, Orson sneezed twice.

I wheeled my bike out of the arbor and around to the back of the bungalow, where I leaned it against one of the redwood posts that supported the patio cover.

“Be vigilant,” I told Orson. “Be big. Be bad.”

He chuffed as though he understood his assignment. Maybe he did understand, no matter what Bobby Halloway and the Rationality Police would say.

Beyond the kitchen windows and the translucent curtains was a slow pulse of candlelight.

The door featured four small panes of glass. I rapped softly on one of them.

Angela Ferryman drew aside the curtain. Her quick nervous eyes pecked at me — and then at the patio beyond me to confirm that I had come alone.

With a conspiratorial demeanor, she ushered me inside, locking the door behind us. She adjusted the curtain until she was convinced that no gap existed through which anyone could peer in at us.

Though the kitchen was pleasantly warm, Angela was wearing not only a gray sweat suit but also a navy-blue wool cardigan over the sweats. The cable-knit cardigan might have belonged to her late husband; it hung to her knees, and the shoulder seams were halfway to her elbows. The sleeves had been rolled so often that the resultant cuffs were as thick as great iron manacles.

In this bulk of clothing, Angela appeared thinner and more diminutive than ever. Evidently she remained chilly; she was virtually colorless, shivering.

She hugged me. As always it was a fierce, sharp-boned, strong hug, though I sensed in her an uncharacteristic fatigue.

She sat at the polished-pine table and invited me to take the chair opposite hers.

I took off my cap and considered removing my jacket as well. The kitchen was too warm. The pistol was in my pocket, however, and I was afraid it might fall out on the floor or knock against the chair as I pulled my arms from the coat sleeves. I didn’t want to alarm Angela, and she was sure to be frightened by the gun.

In the center of the table were three votive candles in little ruby-red glass containers. Arteries of shimmering red light crawled across the polished pine.

A bottle of apricot brandy also stood on the table. Angela had provided me with a cordial glass, and I half filled it.

Her glass was full to the brim. This wasn’t her first serving, either.

She held the glass in both hands, as if taking warmth from it, and when she raised it with both hands to her lips, she looked more waiflike than ever. In spite of her gauntness, she could have passed for thirty-five, nearly fifteen years younger than her true age. At this moment, in fact, she seemed almost childlike.

“From the time I was a little girl, all I ever really wanted to be was a nurse.”

“And you’re the best,” I said sincerely.

She licked apricot brandy from her lips and stared into her glass. “My mother had rheumatoid arthritis. It progressed more quickly than usual. So fast. By the time I was six, she was in leg braces and using crutches. Shortly after my twelfth birthday, she was bedridden. She died when I was sixteen.”

I could say nothing meaningful or helpful about that. No one could have. Any words, no matter how sincerely meant, would have tasted as false as vinegar is bitter.

Sure enough, she had something important to tell me, but she needed time to marshal all the words into orderly ranks and march them across the table at me. Because whatever she had to tell me — it scared her. Her fear was visible: brittle in her bones and waxy in her skin.

Slowly working her way to her true subject, she said, “I liked to bring my mother things when she couldn’t get them easily herself. A glass of iced tea. A sandwich. Her medicine. A pillow for her chair. Anything. Later, it was a bedpan. And toward the end, fresh sheets when she was incontinent. I never minded that, either. She always smiled at me when I brought her things, smoothed my hair with her poor swollen hands. I couldn’t heal her, or make it possible for her to run again or dance, couldn’t relieve her pain or her fear, but I could attend her, make her comfortable, monitor her condition — and doing those things was more important to me than…than anything.”

The apricot brandy was too sweet to be called brandy but not as sweet as I had expected. Indeed, it was potent. No amount of it could make me forget my parents, however, or Angela her mother.

“All I ever wanted to be was a nurse,” she repeated. “And for a long time it was satisfying work. Scary and sad, too, when we lost a patient, but mostly rewarding.” When she looked up from the brandy, her eyes were pried wide open by a memory. “God, I was so scared when you had appendicitis. I thought I was going to lose my little Chris.”

“I was nineteen. Not too little.”

“Honey, I’ve been your visiting nurse since you were diagnosed when you were a toddler. You’ll always be a little boy to me.”

I smiled. “I love you, too, Angela.”

Sometimes I forget that the directness with which I express my best emotions is unusual, that it can startle people and — as in this case — move them more deeply than I expect.

Her eyes clouded with tears. To repress them, she bit her lip, but then she resorted to the apricot brandy.

Nine years ago, I’d had one of those cases of appendicitis in which the symptoms do not manifest until the condition is acute. After breakfast, I suffered mild indigestion. Before lunch, I was vomiting, red-faced, and gushing sweat. Stomach pain twisted me into the curled posture of a shrimp in the boiling oil of a deep fryer.

My life was put at risk because of the delay caused by the need for extraordinary preparations at Mercy Hospital. The surgeon was not, of course, amenable to the idea of cutting open my abdomen and conducting the procedure in a dark — or even dimly lighted — operating room. Yet protracted exposure to the bright lights of the surgery was certain to result in a severe burn to any skin not protected from the glare, risking melanoma but also inhibiting the healing of the incision. Covering everything below the point of incision — from my groin to my toes — was easy: a triple layer of cotton sheeting pinned to prevent it from slipping aside. Additional sheeting was used to improvise complex tenting over my head and upper body, designed to protect me from the light but also to allow the anesthesiologist to slip under from time to time, with a penlight, to take my blood pressure and my temperature, to adjust the gas mask, and to ensure that the electrodes from the electrocardiograph remained securely in place on my chest and wrists to permit continued monitoring of my heart. Their standard procedure required that my abdomen be draped except for a window of exposed skin at the site of the surgery, but in my case this rectangular window had to be reduced to the narrowest possible slit. With self-retaining retractors to keep the incision open and judicial use of tape to shield the skin to the very lip of the cut, they dared to slice me. My guts could take all the light that my doctors wanted to pour into them — but by the time they got that far, my appendix had burst. In spite of a meticulous cleanup, peritonitis ensued; an abscess developed and was swiftly followed by septic shock, requiring a second surgical procedure two days later.

After I recovered from septic shock and was no longer in danger of imminent death, I lived for months with the expectation that what I had endured might trigger one of the neurological problems related to XP. Generally these conditions develop after a burn or following long-term cumulative exposure to light — or for reasons not understood — but sometimes they apparently can be engendered by severe physical trauma or shock. Tremors of the head or the hands. Hearing loss. Slurred speech. Even mental impairment. I waited for the first signs of a progressive, irreversible neurological disorder — but they never came.

William Dean Howells, the great poet, wrote that death is at the bottom of everyone’s cup. But there is still some sweet tea in mine.

And apricot brandy.

After taking another thick sip from her cordial glass, Angela said, “All I ever wanted was to be a nurse, but look at me now.”

She wanted me to ask, and so I did: “What do you mean?”

Gazing at captive flames through a curve of ruby glass, she said, “Nursing is about life. I’m about death now.”

I didn’t know what she meant, but I waited.

“I’ve done terrible things,” she said.

“I’m sure you haven’t.”

“I’ve seen others do terrible things, and I haven’t tried to stop them. The guilt’s the same.”

“Could you have stopped them if you’d tried?”

She thought about that awhile. “No,” she said, but she looked no less troubled.

“No one can carry the whole world on her shoulders.”

“Some of us better try,” she said.

I gave her time. The brandy was fine.

She said, “If I’m going to tell you, it has to be now. I don’t have much time. I’m becoming.”

“Becoming?”

“I feel it. I don’t know who I’ll be a month from now, or six months. Someone I won’t like to be. Someone who terrifies me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know.”

“How can I help?” I asked.

“No one can help. Not you. Not me. Not God.” Having shifted her gaze from the votive candles to the golden liquid in her glass, she spoke quietly but fiercely: “We’re screwing it up, Chris, like we always do, but this is bigger than we’ve ever screwed up before. Because of pride, arrogance, envy…we’re losing it, all of it. Oh, God, we’re losing it, and already there’s no way to turn back, to undo what’s been done.”

Although her voice was not slurred, I suspected that she had drunk more than one previous glass of apricot brandy. I tried to take comfort in the thought that drink had led her to exaggerate, that whatever looming catastrophe she perceived was not a hurricane but only a squall magnified by mild inebriation.

Nevertheless, she had succeeded in countering the warmth of the kitchen and the cordial. I no longer considered removing my jacket.

“I can’t stop them,” she said. “But I can stop keeping secrets for them. You deserve to know what happened to your mom and dad, Chris — even if pain comes with the knowledge. Your life’s been hard enough, plenty hard, without this, too.”

Truth is, I don’t believe my life has been especially hard. It has been different. If I were to rage against this difference and spend my nights yearning for so-called normalcy, then I would surely make life as hard as granite and break myself on it. By embracing difference, by choosing to thrive on it, I lead a life no harder than most others and easier than some.

I didn’t say a word of this to Angela. If she was motivated by pity to make these pending revelations, then I would compose my features into a mask of suffering and present myself as a figure of purest tragedy. I would be Macbeth. I would be mad Lear. I would be Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2, doomed to the vat of molten steel.

“You’ve got so many friends…but there’re enemies you don’t know about,” Angela continued. “Dangerous bastards. And some of them are strange…. They’re becoming.”

That word again. Becoming.

When I rubbed the back of my neck, I discovered that the spiders I felt were imaginary.

She said, “If you’re going to have a chance…any chance at all…you need to know the truth. I’ve been wondering where to begin, how to tell you. I think I should start with the monkey.”

“The monkey?” I echoed, certain I had not heard her correctly.

“The monkey,” she confirmed.

In this context, the word had an inescapable comic quality, and I wondered again about Angela’s sobriety.

When at last she looked up from her glass, her eyes were desolate pools in which lay drowned some vital part of the Angela Ferryman whom I had known since childhood. Meeting her stare — its bleak gray sheen — I felt the nape of my neck shrink, and I no longer found any comic potential whatsoever in the word monkey.

12

“It was Christmas Eve four years ago,” she said. “About an hour after sunset. I was here in the kitchen, baking cookies. Using both ovens. Chocolate-chip in one. Walnut-oatmeal in the other. The radio was on. Somebody like Johnny Mathis singing ‘Silver Bells.’”

I closed my eyes to try to picture the kitchen on that Christmas Eve — but also to have an excuse to shut out Angela’s haunted stare.

She said, “Rod was due home any minute, and we both were off work the entire holiday weekend.”

Rod Ferryman had been her husband.

Over three and a half years ago, six months after the Christmas Eve of which Angela was speaking, Rod had committed suicide with a shotgun in the garage of this house. Friends and neighbors had been stunned, and Angela had been devastated. He was an outgoing man with a good sense of humor, easy to like, not depressive, with no apparent problems that could have driven him to take his own life.

“I’d decorated the Christmas tree earlier in the day,” Angela said. “We were going to have a candlelight dinner, open some wine, then watch It’s a Wonderful Life. We loved that movie. We had gifts to exchange, lots of little gifts. Christmas was our favorite time of year, and we were like kids about the gifts….”

She fell silent.

When I dared to look, I saw that she had closed her eyes. Judging by her wrenched expression, her quicksilver memory had slipped from that Christmas night to the evening in the following June when she found her husband’s body in the garage.

Candlelight flickered across her eyelids.

In time, she opened her eyes, but for a while they remained fixed on a faraway sight. She sipped her brandy.

“I was happy,” she said. “The cookie smells. The Christmas music. And the florist had delivered a huge poinsettia from my sister, Bonnie. It was there on the end of the counter, so red and cheerful. I felt wonderful, really wonderful. It was the last time I ever felt wonderful — and the last time I ever will. So…I was spooning cookie batter onto a baking sheet when I heard this sound behind me, an odd little chirrup, and then something like a sigh, and when I turned, there was a monkey sitting right on this table.”

“Good heavens.”

“A rhesus monkey with these awful dark-yellow eyes. Not like their normal eyes. Strange.”

“Rhesus? You recognized the species?”

“I paid for nursing school by working as a lab assistant for a scientist at UCLA. The rhesus is one of the most commonly used animals in experiments. I saw a lot of them.”

“And suddenly one of them is sitting right here.”

“There was a bowl of fruit on the table — apples and tangerines. The monkey was peeling and eating one of the tangerines. Neat as you please, this big monkey placing the peelings in a tidy pile.”

“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 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 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, doesn’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?”

She seemed about to tell me, but then she pressed her lips together.

“Angela?”

I gave a sample every month myself, for Dr. Cleveland, and often Angela drew it. In my case it was for an experimental procedure that might detect early indications of skin and eye cancers from subtle changes in blood chemistry. Although giving the samples was painless and for my own good, I resented the invasion, and I could imagine how deeply I would resent it if it were compulsory rather than voluntary.

She said, “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you. Even though you need to know to…to defend yourself. Telling you all of it is like lighting a fuse. Sooner or later, your whole world blows up.”

“Was the monkey carrying a disease?”

“I wish it were a disease. Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe I’d be cured by now. Or dead. Dead would be better than what’s coming.”

She snatched up her empty cordial glass, made a fist around it, and for a moment I thought she would hurl it across the room.

“The monkey never bit me,” she insisted, “never clawed me, never even touched me, for God’s sake. But they won’t believe me. I’m not sure even Rod believed me. They won’t take any chances. They made me…Rod made me submit to sterilization.”

Tears stood in her eyes, unshed but shimmering like the votive light in the red glass candleholders.

“I was forty-five years old then,” she said, “and I’d never had a child, because I was already sterile. We’d tried so hard to have a baby — fertility doctors, hormone therapy, everything, everything — and nothing worked.”

Oppressed by the suffering in Angela’s voice, I was barely able to remain in my chair, looking passively up at her. I had the urge to stand, to put my arms around her. To be the nurse this time.

With a tremor of rage in her voice, she said, “And still the bastards made me have the surgery, permanent surgery, didn’t just tie my tubes but removed my ovaries, cut me, cut out all hope.” Her voice almost broke, but she was strong. “I was forty-five, and I’d given up hope anyway, or pretended to give it up. But to have it cut out of me… The humiliation of it, the hopelessness. They wouldn’t even tell me why. Rod took me out to the base the day after Christmas, supposedly for an interview about the monkey, about its behavior. He wouldn’t elaborate. Very mysterious. He took me into this place…this place out there that even most people on the base didn’t know existed. They sedated me against my will, performed the surgery without my permission. And when it was all over, the sons of bitches wouldn’t even tell me why!”

I pushed my chair away from the table and got to my feet. My shoulders ached, and my legs felt weak. I hadn’t been expecting to hear a story of this weight.

Although I wanted to comfort her, I didn’t attempt to approach Angela. The cordial glass was still sealed in the hard shell of her fist. Grinding anger had sharpened her once-pretty face into a collection of knives. I didn’t think she would want me to touch her just then.

Instead, after standing awkwardly at the table for seconds that were interminable, not sure what to do, I went at last to the back door and double-checked the dead bolt to confirm that it was engaged.

“I know Rod loved me,” she said, although the anger in her voice didn’t soften. “It broke his heart, just broke him entirely, to do what he had to do. Broke his heart to cooperate with them, tricking me into surgery. He was never the same after that.”

I turned and saw that her fist was cocked. The blades of her face were polished by candlelight.

“And if his superiors had understood how close Rod and I had always been, they would have known he couldn’t go on keeping secrets from me, not when I’d suffered so much for them.”

“Eventually he told you all of it,” I guessed.

“Yes. And I forgave him, truly forgave him for what had been done to me, but he was still in despair. There was nothing I could do to nurse him out of it. So deep in despair…and so scared.” Now her anger was veined with pity and with sorrow. “So scared he had no joy in anything anymore. Finally he killed himself…and when he was dead, there was nothing left to cut out of me.”

She lowered her fist. She opened it. She stared at the cordial glass — and then carefully set it on the table.

“Angela, what was wrong with the monkey?” I asked.

She didn’t reply.

Images of candle flames danced in her eyes. Her solemn face was like a stone shrine to a dead goddess.

I repeated the question: “What was wrong with the monkey?”

When at last Angela spoke, her voice was hardly louder than a whisper: “It wasn’t a monkey.”

I knew that I had heard her correctly, yet her words made no sense. “Not a monkey? But you said—”

“It appeared to be a monkey.”

“Appeared?”

“And it was a monkey, of course.”

Lost, I said nothing.

“Was and wasn’t,” she whispered. “And that’s what was wrong with it.”

She did not seem entirely rational. I began to wonder if her fantastic story had been more fantasy than truth — and if she knew the difference.

Turning away from the votive candles, she met my eyes. She was not ugly anymore, but she wasn’t pretty again, either. Hers was a face of ashes and shadows. “Maybe I shouldn’t have called you. I was emotional about your dad dying. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“You said I need to know…to defend myself.”

She nodded. “You do. That’s right. You need to know. You’re hanging by such a thin thread. You need to know who hates you.”

I held out my hand to her, but she didn’t take it.

“Angela,” I pleaded, “I want to know what really happened to my parents.”

“They’re dead. They’re gone. I loved them, Chris, loved them as friends, but they’re gone.”

“I still need to know.”

“If you’re thinking that somebody has to pay for their deaths…then you have to realize that nobody ever will. Not in your lifetime. Not in anyone’s. No matter how much of the truth you learn, no one will be made to pay. No matter what you try to do.”

I found that I had drawn my hand back and had curled it into a fist on the table. After a silence, I said, “We’ll see.”

“I’ve quit my job at Mercy this evening.” Revealing this sad news, she appeared to shrink, until she resembled a child in adult clothing, once more the girl who had brought iced tea, medicine, and pillows to her disabled mother. “I’m not a nurse anymore.”

“What will you do?”

She didn’t answer.

“It was all you ever wanted to be,” I reminded her.

“Doesn’t seem any point to it now. Bandaging wounds in a war is vital work. Bandaging wounds in the middle of Armageddon is foolish. Besides, I’m becoming. I’m becoming. Don’t you see?”

In fact, I didn’t see.

“I’m becoming. Another me. Another Angela. Someone I don’t want to be. Something I don’t dare think about.”

I still didn’t know what to make of her apocalyptic talk. Was it a rational response to the secrets of Wyvern or the result of the personal despair arising from the loss of her husband?

She said, “If you insist on knowing about this, then once you know, there’s nothing to do but sit back, drink what pleases you most, and watch it all end.”

“I insist anyway.”

“Then I guess it’s time for show-and-tell,” Angela said with evident ambivalence. “But…oh, Chris, it’s going to break your heart.” Sadness elongated her features. “I think you need to know…but it’s going to break your heart.”

When she turned from me and crossed the kitchen, I began to follow her.

She stopped me. “I’ll have to turn some lights on to get what I need. You better wait here, and I’ll bring everything back.”

I watched her navigate the dark dining room. In the living room, she switched on a single lamp, and from there she moved out of sight.

Restlessly, I circled this room to which I had been confined, my mind spinning as I prowled. The monkey was and was not a monkey, and its wrongness lay in this simultaneous wasness and notness. This would seem to make sense only in a Lewis Carroll world, with Alice at the bottom of a magical rabbit hole.

At the back door, I tried the dead bolt again. Locked.

I drew the curtain aside and surveyed the night. I could not see Orson.

Trees were stirring. The wind had returned.

Moonlight was on the move. Apparently, new weather was coming in from the Pacific. As the wind flung tattered clouds across the face of the moon, a silvery radiance appeared to ripple across the nightscape. In fact, what traveled were the dappling shadows of the clouds, and the movement of the light was but an illusion. Nevertheless, the backyard was transformed into a winter stream, and the light purled like water moving under ice.

From elsewhere in the house came a brief wordless cry. It was as thin and forlorn as Angela herself.

13

The cry was so short-lived and so hollow that it might have been no more real than the movement of the moonlight across the backyard, merely a ghost of sound haunting a room in my mind. Like the monkey, it possessed both a quality of wasness and notness.

As the door curtain slipped through my fingers and fell silently across the glass, however, a muffled thump sounded elsewhere in the house and shuddered through the walls.

The second cry was briefer and thinner than the first — but it was unmistakably a bleat of pain and terror.

Maybe she had merely fallen off a step stool and sprained her ankle. Maybe I’d heard only wind and birds in the eaves. Maybe the moon is made of cheese and the sky is a chocolate nonpareil with sugar stars.

I called loudly to Angela.

She didn’t answer.

The house was not so large that she could have failed to hear me. Her silence was ominous.

Cursing under my breath, I drew the Glock from my jacket pocket. I held it in the candlelight, searching desperately for safeties.

I found only one switch that might be what I wanted. When I pressed it down, an intense beam of red light shot out of a smaller hole below the muzzle and painted a bright dot on the refrigerator door.

My dad, wanting a weapon that was user-friendly even to gentle professors of literature, had paid extra for laser sighting. Good man.

I didn’t know much about handguns, but I knew some models of pistols featured “safe action” systems with only internal safety devices that disengaged as the trigger was pulled and, after firing, engaged again. Maybe this was one of those weapons. If not, then I would either find myself unable to get off a shot when confronted by an assailant — or, fumbling in panic, would shoot myself in the foot.

Although I wasn’t trained for this work, there was no one but me to do the job. Admittedly, I thought about getting out of there, climbing on my bike, riding to safety, and placing an anonymous emergency call to the police. Thereafter, however, I would never be able to look at myself in a mirror — or even meet Orson’s eyes.

I didn’t like the way my hands were shaking, but I sure as hell couldn’t pause for deep-breathing exercises or meditation.

As I crossed the kitchen to the open door at the dining room, I considered returning the pistol to my pocket and taking a knife from the cutlery drawer. Telling the story of the monkey, Angela had shown me where the blades were kept.

Reason prevailed. I was no more practiced with knives than I was expert with firearms.

Besides, using a knife, slashing and gouging at another human being, seemed to require a ruthlessness greater than that needed to pull a trigger. I figured I could do whatever was necessary if my life — or Angela’s — was on the line, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I was better suited to the comparatively dry business of shooting than to the up-close-and-personal wet work of evisceration. In a desperate confrontation, a flinch might be fatal.

As a thirteen-year-old boy, I had been able to look into the crematorium. Yet all these years later, I still wasn’t ready to watch the grimmer show in an embalming chamber.

Swiftly crossing the dining room, I called out to Angela once more. Again, she failed to respond.

I wouldn’t call her a third time. If indeed an intruder was in the house, I would only be revealing my position each time I shouted Angela’s name.

In the living room, I didn’t pause to switch off the lamp, but I stepped wide of it and averted my face.

Squinting in the stinging rain of foyer light, I glanced through the open door to the study. No one was in there.

The powder-room door was ajar. I pushed it all the way open. I didn’t need to turn on a light to see that no one was in there, either.

Feeling naked without my cap, which I had left on the kitchen table, I switched off the ceiling fixture in the foyer. Blessed gloom fell.

I peered up at the landing where the shadowy stairs turned back and disappeared overhead. As far as I could tell, no lights were lit on the upper floor — which was fine with me. My dark-adapted eyes were my biggest advantage.

The cellular phone was clipped to my belt. As I started up the stairs, I considered calling the police.

After my failure to keep our appointment earlier in the evening, however, Lewis Stevenson might be looking for me. If so, then the chief himself would answer this call. Maybe the bald man with the earring would come along for the ride.

Manuel Ramirez couldn’t assist me himself, because he was the duty officer this evening, restricted to the station. I didn’t feel safe asking for any other officer. As far as I knew, Chief Stevenson might not be the only compromised cop in Moonlight Bay; perhaps every member of the force, except Manuel, was involved in this conspiracy. In fact, in spite of our friendship, I couldn’t trust Manuel, either, not until I knew a lot more about this situation.

Climbing the stairs, I gripped the Glock with both hands, ready to press the laser-sighting switch if someone moved. I kept reminding myself that playing hero meant trying not to shoot Angela by mistake.

I turned at the landing and saw that the upper flight was darker than the lower. No ambient light from the living room reached this high. I ascended quickly and silently.

My heart was doing more than idling; it was revving nicely, but I was surprised that it wasn’t racing. Only yesterday, I could not have imagined that I would be able to adapt so rapidly to the prospect of imminent violence. I was even beginning to recognize within myself a disconcerting enthusiasm for danger.

Four doors opened off the upstairs hall. Three were closed. The fourth — the door farthest from the stairs — was ajar, and from the room beyond came a soft light.

I disliked passing the three closed rooms without confirming that they were deserted. I would be leaving my back vulnerable.

Given my XP, however, and especially considering how quickly my eyes would sting and water when exposed to very bright light, I’d be able to search those spaces only with the pistol in my right hand and the penlight in my left. This would be awkward, time-consuming, and dangerous. Each time I stepped into a room, no matter how low I crouched and how fast I moved, the penlight would instantly pinpoint my location for any would-be assailant before I found him with the narrow beam.

My best hope was to play to my strengths, which meant using the darkness, blending with the shadows. Moving sideways along the hall, keeping a watch in both directions, I made no sound, and neither did anyone else in the house.

The second door on the left was open only a crack, and the narrow wedge of light revealed little of the room beyond. Using the gun barrel, I pushed the door inward.

The master bedroom. Cozy. The bed was neatly made. A gaily colored afghan draped one arm of an easy chair, and on the footstool waited a folded newspaper. On the bureau, a collection of antique perfume bottles sparkled.

One of the nightstand lamps was aglow. The bulb was not strong, and the pleated-fabric shade screened most of the rays.

Angela was nowhere to be seen.

A closet door stood open. Perhaps Angela had come upstairs to fetch something from there. I couldn’t see anything but hanging clothes and shoe boxes.

The door to the adjacent bathroom was ajar, and the bathroom was dark. To anyone in there, looking out, I was a well-lit target.

I approached the bathroom as obliquely as possible, aiming the Glock at the black gap between the door and the jamb. When I pushed on the door, it opened without resistance.

The smell stopped me from crossing the threshold.

Because the glow of the nightstand lamp didn’t illuminate much of the space before me, I fished the penlight from my pocket. The beam glistered across a red pool on a white tile floor. The walls were sprayed with arterial gouts.

Angela Ferryman was slumped on the floor, head bent backward over the rim of the toilet bowl. Her eyes were as wide, pale, and flat as those of a dead seagull that I had once found on the beach.

At a glance, I thought her throat appeared to have been slashed repeatedly with a half-sharp knife. I couldn’t bear to look at her too closely or for too long.

The smell was not merely blood. Dying, she had fouled herself. A draft bathed me in the stench.

A casement window was cranked all the way open. It wasn’t a typically small bathroom window but large enough to have provided escape for the killer, who must have been liberally splashed with his victim’s blood.

Perhaps Angela had left the window open. If there was a first-story porch roof under it, the killer could have entered as well as exited by this route.

Orson had not barked — but then this window was toward the front of the house, and the dog was at the back.

Angela’s hands were at her sides, almost lost in the sleeves of the cardigan. She looked so innocent. She looked twelve.

All her life, she had given of herself to others. Now someone, unimpressed by her selfless giving, had cruelly taken all that was left.

Anguished, shaking uncontrollably, I turned away from the bathroom.

I hadn’t approached Angela with questions. I hadn’t brought her to this hideous end. She had called me, and although she had used her car phone, someone had known that she needed to be silenced permanently and quickly. Maybe these faceless conspirators decided that her despair made her dangerous. She had quit her job at the hospital. She felt that she had no reason to live. And she was terrified of becoming, whatever that meant. She was a woman with nothing to lose, beyond their control. They would have killed her even if I had not responded to her call.

Nevertheless, I was awash in guilt, drowning in cold currents, robbed of breath, and I stood gasping.

Nausea followed those currents, rippling like a fat slippery eel through my gut, swimming up my throat and almost surging into my mouth. I choked it down.

I needed to get out of here, yet I couldn’t move. I was half crushed under a weight of terror and guilt.

My right arm hung at my side, pulled as straight as a plumb line by the weight of the gun. The penlight, clutched in my left hand, stitched jagged patterns on the wall.

I could not think clearly. My thoughts rolled thickly, like tangled masses of seaweed in a sludge tide.

On the nearer nightstand, the telephone rang.

I kept my distance from it. I had the queer feeling that this caller was the deep-breather who had left the message on my answering machine, that he would try to steal some vital aspect of me with his bloodhound inhalations, as if my very soul could be vacuumed out of me and drawn away across the open telephone line. I didn’t want to hear his low, eerie, tuneless humming.

When at last the phone fell silent, my head had been somewhat cleared by the strident ringing. I clicked off the penlight, returned it to my pocket, raised the big pistol from my side — and realized that someone had switched on the light in the upstairs hall.

Because of the open window and the blood smeared on the frame, I had assumed I was alone in the house with Angela’s body. I was wrong. An intruder was still present — waiting between me and the stairs.

The killer couldn’t have slipped out of the master bath by way of the bedroom; a messy trail of blood would have marked his passage across the cream-colored carpet. Yet why would he have escaped from the upstairs only to return immediately through a ground-floor door or window?

If, after fleeing, he had changed his mind about leaving a potential witness and had decided to come back to get me, he wouldn’t have turned on the light to announce his presence. He would have preferred to take me by surprise.

Cautiously, squinting against the glare, I stepped into the hallway. It was deserted.

The three doors that had been closed when I had first come upstairs were now standing wide open. The rooms beyond them were forbiddingly bright.

14

Like blood out of a wound, silence welled from the bottom of the house into this upstairs hall. Then a sound rose, but it came from outside: the keening of the wind under the eaves.

A strange game seemed to be under way. I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know the identity of my adversary. I was screwed.

Flicking a wall switch, I brought forth a soothing flow of shadows to the hall, which made the lights in the three open rooms seem brighter by comparison.

I wanted to run for the stairs. Get down, out, away. But I didn’t dare leave unexplored rooms at my back this time. I’d end up like Angela, throat slashed from behind.

My best chance of staying alive was to remain calm. Think. Approach each door with caution. Inch my way out of the house. Make sure my back was protected every step of the way.

I squinted less, listened more, heard nothing, and moved to the doorway opposite the master bedroom. I didn’t cross the threshold but remained in the shadows, using my left hand as a visor to shade my eyes from the harsh overhead light before me.

This might have been a son’s or daughter’s room if Angela had been able to have children. Instead, it contained a tool cabinet with many drawers, a bar stool with a back, and two high worktables placed to form an L. Here she spent time at her hobby: dollmaking.

A quick glance along the hallway. Still alone.

Keep moving. Don’t be an easy target.

I pushed the hobby-room door all the way open. No one was hiding behind it.

I stepped briefly into the brightly lighted room, staying sideways to the hall to cover both spaces.

Angela was a fine dollmaker, as proved by the thirty dolls on the shelves of an open display cabinet at the far end of the hobby room. Her creations were attired in richly imagined, painstakingly realized costumes that Angela herself had sewn: cowboy and cowgirl outfits, sailor suits, party dresses with petticoats…. The wonder of the dolls, however, was their faces. She sculpted each head with patience and real talent, and she fired it in a kiln in the garage. Some were matt-finish bisque. Others were glazed. All were hand-painted with such attention to detail that their faces looked real.

Over the years, Angela had sold some of her dolls and had given many away. These remaining were evidently her favorites, with which she had been most reluctant to part. Even under the circumstances, alert for the approach of a psychopath with a half-sharp knife, I saw that each face was unique — as though Angela wasn’t merely making dolls but was lovingly imagining the possible faces of the children whom she had never carried in her womb.

I switched off the ceiling fixture, leaving only a worktable lamp. In the sudden swelling of shadows, the dolls appeared to shift on the shelves, as if preparing to leap to the floor. Their painted eyes — some bright with points of reflected light and some with a fixed inky glare — seemed watchful and intent.

I had the heebie-jeebies. Big time.

The dolls were only dolls. They were no threat to me.

Back into the corridor, sweeping the Glock left, right, left again. No one.

Next along this side of the hall was a bathroom. Even with my eyes narrowed to slits to filter out the dazzle of porcelain and glass and mirrors and yellow ceramic tile, I could see into every corner. No one was waiting there.

As I reached inside to switch off the bathroom lights, a noise rose behind me. Back toward the master bedroom. A quick rapping like knuckles on wood. From the corner of my eye, I saw movement.

I spun toward the sound, bringing up the Glock in a two-hand grip again, as if I knew what the hell I was doing, imitating Willis and Stallone and Schwarzenegger and Eastwood and Cage from a hundred jump-run-shoot-chase movies, as if I actually believed that they knew what the hell they were doing. I expected to see a hulking figure, demented eyes, an upraised arm, an arcing knife, but I was still alone in the hallway.

The movement I’d seen was the master-bedroom door being pushed shut from the inside. In the diminishing wedge of light between the moving door and the jamb, a twisted shadow loomed, writhed, shrank. The door fell shut with a solid sound like the closing of a bank vault.

That room had been deserted when I left it, and no one had come past me since I’d stepped into the hallway. Only the murderer could be in there — and only if he’d returned through the bathroom window from a porch roof where he’d been when I’d discovered Angela’s body.

If the killer was already in the master bedroom again, however, he couldn’t also have slipped behind me, moments earlier, to turn on the second-floor lights. So there were two intruders. I was caught between them.

Go forward or back? Lousy choice. Deep shit either way, and me without rubber boots.

They would expect me to run for the stairs. But it was safer to do the unexpected, so without hesitation I rushed to the master-bedroom door. I didn’t bother with the knob, kicked hard, sprung the latch, and pushed inside with the Glock in front of me, ready to squeeze off four or five shots at anything that moved.

I was alone.

The nightstand lamp was still lit.

No bloody footprints stained the carpet, so no one could have reentered the splattered bathroom from outside and then returned here by that route to close the hall door.

I checked the bathroom anyway. I left the penlight in my pocket this time, relying on an influx of faint light from the bedroom lamp, because I didn’t need — or want — to see all the vivid details again. The casement window remained open. The smell was as repulsive as it had been two minutes ago. The shape slumped against the toilet was Angela. Although she was mercifully veiled in gloom, I could see her mouth gaping as though in amazement, her wide eyes unblinking.

I turned away and glanced nervously at the open door to the hall. No one had followed me in here.

Baffled, I retreated to the middle of the bedroom.

The draft from the bathroom window was not strong enough to have blown the bedroom door shut. Besides, no draft had cast the twisted shadow that I had glimpsed.

Although the space under the bed might have been large enough to hide a man, he would have been uncomfortably compressed between the floor and the box springs, with frame slats banding his back. Anyway, no one could have squirmed into that hiding place before I’d kicked my way into the room.

I could see through the open door to the walk-in closet, which obviously did not harbor an intruder. I took a closer look anyway. The penlight revealed an attic access in the closet ceiling. Even if a fold-down ladder was fitted to the back of that trap door, no one could have been spider-quick enough to climb into the attic and pull the ladder after himself in the two or three seconds that I had taken to burst in from the hallway.

Two draped windows flanked the bed. Both proved to be locked from the inside.

He hadn’t gone out that way, but maybe I could. I wanted to avoid returning to the hall.

Keeping the bedroom door in view, I tried to open a window. It was painted shut. These were French windows with thick mullions, so I couldn’t just break a pane and climb out.

My back was to the bathroom. Suddenly I felt as though spiders were twitching through the hollows of my spine. In my mind’s eye, I saw Angela behind me, not lying by the toilet any longer but risen, red and dripping, eyes as bright and flat as silver coins. I expected to hear the wound bubbling in her throat as she tried to speak.

When I turned, tingling with dread, she was not behind me, but the hot breath of relief that erupted from me proved how seriously I’d been gripped by this fantastic expectation.

I was still gripped by it: I expected to hear her thrash to her feet in the bathroom. Already, my anguish over her death had been supplanted by fear for my own life. Angela was no longer a person to me. She was a thing, death itself, a monster, a fist-in-the-face reminder that we all perish and rot and turn to dust. I’m ashamed to say that I hated her a little because I’d felt obliged to come upstairs to help her, hated her for having put me in this vise, hated myself for hating her, my loving nurse, hated her for making me hate myself.

Sometimes there is no darker place than our own thoughts: the moonless midnight of the mind.

My hands were clammy. The butt of the pistol was slick with cold perspiration.

I stopped chasing ghosts and reluctantly returned to the upstairs hallway. A doll was waiting for me.

This was one of the largest from Angela’s hobby-room shelves, nearly two feet high. It sat on the floor, legs splayed, facing me in the light that came through the open door from the only room that I hadn’t yet explored, the one opposite the hall bath. Its arms were outstretched, and something hung across both its hands.

This was not good.

I know not good when I see it, and this was fully, totally, radically not good.

In the movies, a development like the appearance of this doll was inevitably followed by the dramatic entrance of a really big guy with a bad attitude. A really big guy wearing a cool hockey mask. Or a hood. He’d be carrying an even cooler chain saw or a compressed-air nail gun or, in an unplugged mood, an ax big enough to decapitate a T-Rex.

I glanced into the hobby room, which was still half illuminated by the worktable lamp. No intruder lurked there.

Move. To the hall bathroom. It was still deserted. I needed to use the facilities. Not a convenient time. Move.

Now to the doll, which was dressed in black sneakers, black jeans, and a black T-shirt. The object in its hands was a navy-blue cap with two words embroidered in ruby-red thread above the bill: Mystery Train.

For a moment I thought it was a cap like mine. Then I saw that it was my own, which I’d left downstairs on the kitchen table.

Between glances at the head of the stairs and at the open door to the only room that I hadn’t searched, expecting trouble from one source or the other, I plucked the cap from the small china hands. I pulled it on my head.

In the right light and circumstances, any doll can have an eerie or evil aspect. This was different, because not a single feature in this bisque face struck me as malevolent, yet the skin on the back of my neck creped like Halloween-party bunting.

What spooked me was not any strangeness about the doll but an uncanny familiarity: It had my face. It had been modeled after me.

I was simultaneously touched and creeped out. Angela had cared for me enough to sculpt my features meticulously, to memorialize me lovingly in one of her creations and keep it upon her shelves of favorites. Yet unexpectedly coming upon such an image of oneself wakes primitive fears — as if I might touch this fetish and instantly find my mind and soul trapped within it, while some malignant spirit, previously immobilized in the doll, came forth to establish itself in my flesh. Gleeful at its release, it would lurch into the night to crack virgins’ skulls and eat the hearts of babies in my name.

In ordinary times — if such times exist — I am entertained by an unusually vivid imagination. Bobby Halloway calls it, with some mockery, “the three-hundred-ring circus of your mind.” This is no doubt a quality I inherited from my mother and father, who were intelligent enough to know that little could be known, inquisitive enough never to stop learning, and perceptive enough to understand that all things and all events contain infinite possibilities. When I was a child, they read to me the verses of A. A. Milne and Beatrix Potter but also, certain that I was precocious, Donald Justice and Wallace Stevens. Thereafter, my imagination has always churned with images from lines of verse: from Timothy Tim’s ten pink toes to fireflies twitching in the blood. In extraordinary times — such as this night of stolen cadavers — I am too imaginative for my own good, and in the three-hundred-ring circus of my mind, all the tigers wait to kill their trainers and all the clowns hide butcher knives and evil hearts under their baggy clothes.

Move.

One more room. Check it out, protect my back, then straight down the stairs.

Superstitiously avoiding contact with the doppelgänger doll, stepping wide of it, I went to the open door of the room opposite the hall bath. A guest bedroom, simply furnished.

Tucking my capped head down and squinting against the glare from the ceiling fixture, I saw no intruder. The bed had side rails and a footboard behind which the spread was tucked, so the space under it was revealed.

Instead of a closet, there were a long walnut bureau with banks of drawers and a massive armoire with a pair of side-by-side drawers below and two tall doors above. The space behind the armoire doors was large enough to conceal a grown man with or without a chain saw.

Another doll awaited me. This one was sitting in the center of the bed, arms outstretched like the arms of the Christopher Snow doll behind me, but in the shrouding brightness, I couldn’t tell what it held in its pink hands.

I switched off the ceiling light. One nightstand lamp remained lit to guide me.

I backed into the guest room, prepared to respond with gunfire to anyone who appeared in the hall.

The armoire hulked at the edge of my vision. If the doors began to swing open, I wouldn’t even need the laser sighting to chop holes in them with a few 9-millimeter rounds.

I bumped into the bed and turned from both the hall door and the armoire long enough to check out the doll. In each upturned hand was an eye. Not a hand-painted eye. Not a glass-button eye taken from the dollmaker’s supply cabinet. A human eye.

The armoire doors hung unmoving on piano hinges.

Nothing but time moved in the hall.

I was as still as ashes in an urn, but life continued within me: My heart raced as it had never raced before, no longer merely revving nicely, but spinning with panic in its squirrel cage of ribs.

Once more I looked at the offering of eyes that filled those small china hands — bloodshot brown eyes, milky and moist, startling and startled in their lidless nakedness. I knew that one of the last things ever seen through them was a white van pulling to a stop in response to an upturned thumb. And then a man with a shaven head and one pearl earring.

Yet I was sure that I wasn’t dealing with that same bald man here, now, in Angela’s house. This game-playing wasn’t his style, this taunting, this hide-and-seek. Quick, vicious, violent action was more to his taste.

Instead, I felt as though I had stumbled into a sanitarium for sociopathic youth, where psychotic children had savagely overthrown their keepers and, giddy with freedom, were now at play. I could almost hear their hidden laughter in other rooms: macabre silvery giggles stifled behind small cold hands.

I refused to open the armoire.

I had come up here to help Angela, but there was no helping her now or ever. All I wanted was to get downstairs, outside, onto my bicycle, and away.

As I started toward the door, the lights went out. Someone had thrown a breaker in a junction box.

This darkness was so bottomless that it didn’t welcome even me. The windows were heavily draped, and the milk-pitcher moon couldn’t find gaps through which to pour itself. All was blackness on blackness.

Blindly, I rushed toward the door. Then I angled to one side of it when I was overcome by the conviction that someone was in the hall and that I would encounter the thrust of a sharp blade at the threshold.

I stood with my back to the bedroom wall, listening. I held my breath but was unable to quiet my heart, which clattered like horses’ hooves on cobblestones, a runaway parade of horses, and I felt betrayed by my own body.

Nevertheless, over the thundering stampede of my heart, I heard the creak of the piano hinges. The armoire doors were coming open.

Jesus.

It was a prayer, not a curse. Or maybe both.

Holding the Glock in a two-hand grip again, I aimed toward where I thought the big armoire stood. Then I reconsidered and swung the muzzle three inches to the left. Only to swing it immediately back to the right.

I was disoriented in the absolute blackness. Although I was certain that I would hit the armoire, I couldn’t be sure that I would put the round straight through the center of the space above the two drawers. The first shot had to count, because the muzzle flash would give away my position.

I couldn’t risk pumping out rounds indiscriminately. Although a spray of bullets would probably waste the bastard, whoever he might be, there was a chance that I would only wound him — and a smaller but still very real chance that I would merely piss him off.

When the pistol magazine was empty — then what?

Then what?

I sidled to the hallway, risking an encounter there, but it didn’t happen. As I crossed the threshold, I pulled the guest-room door shut behind me, putting it between me and whoever had come out of the armoire — assuming I hadn’t imagined the creaking of the piano hinges.

The ground-floor lights were evidently on their own circuit. A glow rose through the stairwell at the end of the black hall.

Instead of waiting to see who, if anyone, would burst out of the guest room, I ran to the stairs.

I heard a door open behind me.

Gasping, descending two stairs at a time, I was almost to the landing when my head in miniature sailed past. It shattered against the wall in front of me.

Startled, I brought an arm up to shield my eyes. China shrapnel tattooed my face and chest.

My right heel landed on the bullnose edge of a step and skidded off. I nearly fell, pitched forward, slammed into the landing wall, but kept my balance.

On the landing, crunching shards of my glazed face underfoot, I whipped around to confront my assailant.

The decapitated body of the doll, appropriately attired in basic black, hurtled down. I ducked, and it passed over my head, thumping against the wall behind me.

When I looked up and covered the dark top of the stairs with the gun, there was no one to shoot — as if the doll had torn off its own head to throw at me and then had hurled itself into the stairwell.

The downstairs lights went out.

Through the forbidding blackness came the smell of something burning.

15

Groping in the impenetrable gloom, I finally found the handrail. I clutched at the smooth wood with one sweaty hand and started down the lower flight of stairs toward the foyer.

This darkness had a strange sinuosity, seemed to coil and writhe around me as I descended through it. Then I realized that it was the air, not the darkness, that I was feeling: serpentine currents of hot air swarming up the stairwell.

An instant later, tendrils and then tentacles and then a great pulsing mass of foul-smelling smoke poured into the stairwell from below, invisible but palpable, enveloping me as some giant sea anemone might envelop a diver. Coughing, choking, struggling to breathe, I reversed directions, hoping to escape through a second-floor window, although not through the master bathroom where Angela waited.

I returned to the landing and clambered up three or four steps of the second flight before halting. Through smoke-stung eyes flooded with tears — and through the pall of smoke itself — I saw a throbbing light above.

Fire.

Two fires had been set, one above and one below. Those unseen psychotic children were busy in their mad play, and there seemed to be so many of them. I was reminded of the veritable platoon of searchers that appeared to spring from the ground outside the mortuary, as though Sandy Kirk possessed the power to summon the dead from their graves.

Downward, once more and quickly, I plunged toward the only hope of nourishing air. I would find it, if anywhere, at the lowest point of the structure, because smoke and fumes rise while the blaze sucks in cooler air at its base in order to feed itself.

Each inhalation caused a spasm of coughing, increased my feeling of suffocation, and fed my panic, so I held my breath until I reached the foyer. There, I dropped to my knees, stretched out on the floor, and discovered that I could breathe. The air was hot and smelled sour, but all things being relative, I was more thrilled by it than I had ever been by the crisp air coming off the washboard of the Pacific.

I didn’t lie there and surrender to an orgy of respiration. I hesitated just long enough to draw several deep breaths to clear my soiled lungs, and to work up enough saliva to spit some of the soot out of my mouth.

Then I raised my head to test the air and to learn how deep the precious safe zone might be. Not deep. Four to six inches. Nevertheless, this shallow pool ought to be enough to sustain me while I found my way out of the house.

Wherever the carpet was afire, of course, there would be no safe-air zone whatsoever.

The lights were still out, the smoke was blindingly thick, and I squirmed on my stomach, frantically heading toward where I believed I would find the front door, the nearest exit. The first thing I encountered in the murk was a sofa, judging by the feel of it, which meant that I had passed through the archway and into the living room, at least ninety degrees off the course I imagined I’d been following.

Now luminous orange pulses passed through the comparatively clear air near the floor, underlighting the curdled masses of smoke as if they were thunderheads looming over a plain. From my eye-to-the-carpet perspective, the beige nylon fibers stretched away like a vast flat field of dry grass, fitfully brightened by an electrical storm. This narrow, life-sustaining realm under the smoke seemed to be an alternate world into which I had fallen after stepping through a door between dimensions.

The ominous throbs of light were reflections of fire elsewhere in the room, but they didn’t relieve the gloom enough to help me find the way out. The stroboscopic flickering only contributed to my confusion and scared the hell out of me.

As long as I couldn’t see the blaze, I could pretend that it was in a distant corner of the house. Now I no longer had the refuge of pretense. Yet there was no advantage to glimpsing the reflected fire, because I wasn’t able to tell if the flames were inches or feet from me, whether they were burning toward or away from me, so the light increased my anxiety without providing guidance.

Either I was suffering worse effects of smoke inhalation than I realized, including a distorted perception of time, or the fire was spreading with unusual swiftness. The arsonists had probably used an accelerant, maybe gasoline.

Determined to get back into the foyer and then to the front door, I sucked desperately at the increasingly acrid air near the floor and squirmed across the room, digging my elbows into the carpet to pull myself along, ricocheting off furniture, until I cracked my forehead solidly against the raised brick hearth of the fireplace. I was farther than ever from the foyer, and yet I couldn’t picture myself crawling into the fireplace and up the chimney like Santa Claus on his way back to the sleigh.

I was dizzy. A headache split my skull on a diagonal from my left eyebrow to the part in my hair on the right. My eyes stung from the smoke and the salty sweat that poured into them. I wasn’t choking again, but I was gagging on the pungent fumes that flavored even the clearer air near the floor, and I was beginning to think I might not survive.

Trying hard to remember where the fireplace was situated in relationship to the foyer arch, I squirmed along the raised hearth and then angled off into the room again.

It seemed absurd to me that I couldn’t find my way out of this place. This wasn’t a mansion, for God’s sake, not a castle, merely a modest house with seven rooms, none of them large, and 2.5 baths, and not even the cleverest Realtor in the country could have described it in such a way as to give the impression that it had enough rattling-around space to satisfy the Prince of Wales and his retinue.

On the evening news, from time to time, you see stories about people dying in house fires, and you can never quite understand why they couldn’t make it to a door or window, when one or the other was surely within a dozen steps. Unless they were, of course, drunk. Or wasted on drugs. Or foolish enough to rush back into the flames to rescue Fluffy, the kitten. Which may sound ungrateful of me after I myself was this same night rescued, in a sense, by a cat. But now I understood how people died in these circumstances: The smoke and the churning darkness were more disorienting than drugs or booze, and the longer you breathed the tainted air, the less nimble your mind became, until your thoughts rambled and even panic couldn’t focus them.

When I had first climbed the stairs to see what had happened to Angela, I had been amazed at how calm and collected I was in spite of the threat of imminent violence. With a fat dollop of male pride as cloying as a cupful of mayonnaise, I had even sensed in my heart a disconcerting enthusiasm for danger.

What a difference ten minutes can make. Now that it was brutally apparent to me that I was never going to acquit myself in these situations with even half the aplomb of Batman, the romance of danger failed to stir me.

Suddenly, creeping out of the dismal blear, something brushed against me and nuzzled my neck, my chin: something alive. In the three-hundred-ring circus of my mind, I pictured Angela Ferryman on her belly, reanimated by some evil voodoo, slithering across the floor to meet me, and planting a cold-lipped, bloody kiss on my throat. The effects of oxygen deprivation were becoming so severe that even this hideous image was not sufficient to shock me into a clearer state of mind, and I reflexively squeezed off a shot.

Thank God, I fired entirely in the wrong direction, because even as the crack of the shot echoed through the living room, I recognized the cold nose at my throat and the warm tongue in my ear as those of my one and only dog, my faithful companion, my Orson.

“Hey, pal,” I said, but it came out as a meaningless croak.

He licked my face. He had dog’s breath, but I couldn’t really blame him for that.

I blinked furiously to clear my vision, and red light pulsed through the room brighter than ever. Still, I got no better than a smeary impression of his furry face pressed to the floor in front of mine.

Then I realized that if he could get into the house and find me, he could show me the way out before we caught fire with a stink of burning denim and fur.

I gathered sufficient strength to rise shakily to my feet. That stubborn eel of nausea swam up my throat again, but as before I choked it down.

Squeezing my eyes shut, trying not to think about the wave of intense heat that abruptly broke over me, I reached down and gripped Orson’s thick leather collar, which was easy to find because he was pressed against my legs.

Orson kept his snout close to the floor, where he could breathe, but I had to hold my breath and ignore the nostril-tickling smoke as the dog led me through the house. He walked me into as few pieces of furniture as he could manage, and I have no suspicion whatever that he was amusing himself in the midst of such tragedy and terror. When I smacked my face into a door frame, I didn’t knock out any teeth. Nevertheless, during that short journey, I thanked God repeatedly for testing me with XP rather than with blindness.

Just when I thought I might pass out if I didn’t drop to the floor to get some air, I felt a cold draft on my face, and when I opened my eyes, I could see. We were in the kitchen, into which the fire had not yet reached. There was no smoke, either, because the breeze coming in the open back door drove it all into the dining room.

On the table were the votive candles in ruby-red holders, the cordial glasses, and the open bottle of apricot brandy. Blinking at this cozy tableau, I could half believe that the events of the past several minutes had been only a monstrous dream and that Angela, still lost in her dead husband’s cardigan, would sit here with me once more, refill her glass, and finish her strange story.

My mouth was so dry and foul that I almost took the bottle of brandy with me. Bobby Halloway would have beer, however, and that would be better.

The dead bolt on the kitchen door was disengaged now. As clever as Orson might be, I doubted that he could have opened a locked door to reach me; for one thing, he didn’t have a key. Evidently the killers had fled by this route.

Outside, wheezing to expel a few final traces of smoke from my lungs, I shoved the Glock in my jacket pocket. I nervously surveyed the backyard for assailants as I blotted my damp hands on my jeans.

Like fishes schooling below the silvered surface of a pond, cloud shadows swam across the moonlit lawn.

Nothing else moved except the wind-shaken vegetation.

Grabbing my bicycle and wheeling it across the patio toward the arbor-covered passageway, I looked up at the house in astonishment, amazed that it was not entirely engulfed in flames. Instead, from the exterior, there were as yet only minor indications of the blaze growing from room to room inside: bright vines of flames twining up the draperies at two upstairs windows, white petals of smoke flowering from attic vent holes in the eaves.

Except for the bluster and grumble of the inconstant wind, the night was preternaturally silent. Moonlight Bay is no city, but it usually has a distinct night voice nonetheless: a few cars on the move, distant music from a cocktail lounge or a kid practicing guitar on a back porch, a barking dog, the whisking sound of the big brushes on the street-cleaning machine, voices of strollers, laughter from the high-school kids gathered outside the Millennium Arcade down on Embarcadero Way, now and then a melancholy whistle as an Amtrak passenger train or a chain of freight cars approaches the Ocean Avenue crossing…. Not at this moment, however, and not on this night. We might as well have been in the deadest neighborhood of a ghost town deep in the Mojave Desert.

Apparently, the crack of the single gunshot that I had fired in the living room had not been loud enough out here to draw anyone’s attention.

Under the lattice arch, through the sweet fragrance of jasmine, walking the bicycle, its wheel bearings clicking softly, my heart thudding not softly at all, I hurried after Orson to the front gate. He leaped up and pawed open the latch, a trick of his that I’d seen before. Together we followed the walkway to the street, moving quickly but not running.

We were in luck: no witnesses. No traffic was either approaching or receding along the street. No one was on foot, either.

If a neighbor saw me running from the house just as it went up in flames, Chief Stevenson might decide to use that as an excuse to come looking for me. To shoot me down when I resisted arrest. Whether I resisted or not.

I swung onto my bike, balancing it by keeping one foot on the pavement, and looked back at the house. The wind trembled the leaves of the huge magnolia trees, and through the branches, I could see fire lapping at several of the downstairs and upstairs windows.

Full of grief and excitement, curiosity and dread, sorrow and dark wonder, I raced along the pavement, heading for a street with fewer lamps. Panting loudly, Orson sprinted at my side.

We had gone nearly a block when I heard the windows begin to explode at the Ferryman house, blown out by the fierce heat.

16

Stars between branches, leaf-filtered moonlight, giant oaks, a nurturing darkness, the peace of gravestones — and, for one of us, the eternally intriguing scent of hidden squirrels: We were back in the cemetery adjacent to St. Bernadette’s Catholic Church.

My bike was propped against a granite marker topped by the haloed head of a granite angel. I was sitting — sans halo — with my back against another stone that featured a cross at its summit.

Blocks away, sirens shrieked into sudden silence as fire-department vehicles arrived at the Ferryman residence.

I hadn’t cycled all the way to Bobby Halloway’s house, because I’d been hit by a persistent fit of coughing that hampered my ability to steer. Orson’s gait had grown wobbly, too, as he expelled the stubborn scent of the fire with a series of violent sneezes.

Now, in the company of a crowd too dead to be offended, I hawked up thick soot-flavored phlegm and spat it among the gnarled surface roots of the nearest oak, with the hope that I wasn’t killing this mighty tree that had survived two centuries of earthquakes, storms, fires, insects, disease, and — more recently — modern America’s passion for erecting a minimall with doughnut shop on every street corner. The taste in my mouth could not have been much different if I had been eating charcoal briquettes in a broth of starter fluid.

Having been in the burning house a shorter time than his more reckless master, Orson recovered faster than I. Before I was half done hawking and spitting, he was padding back and forth among the nearest tombstones, diligently sniffing out arboreal bushy-tailed rodents.

Between spells of hacking and expectorating, I talked to Orson if he was in sight, and sometimes he lifted his noble black head and pretended to listen, occasionally wagging his tail to encourage me, though often he was unable to tear his attention away from squirrel spoor.

“What the hell happened in that house?” I asked. “Who killed her, why were they playing games with me, what was the point of all that business with the dolls, why didn’t they just slit my throat and burn me with her?”

Orson shook his head, and I made a game of interpreting his response. He didn’t know. Shook his head in bafflement. Clueless. He was clueless. He didn’t know why they hadn’t slit my throat.

“I don’t think it was the Glock. I mean, there were more than one of them, at least two, probably three, so they could easily have overpowered me if they’d wanted. And though they slashed her throat, they must have been carrying guns of their own. I mean, these are serious bastards, vicious killers. They cut people’s eyes out for the fun of it. They wouldn’t be squeamish about carrying guns, so they wouldn’t be intimidated by the Glock.”

Orson cocked his head, considering the issue. Maybe it was the Glock. Maybe it wasn’t. Then again, maybe it was. Who knew? What’s a Glock, anyway? And what’s that smell? Such an amazing smell. Such a luxurious fragrance. Is that squirrel piss? Excuse me, Master Snow. Business. Business to attend to here.

“I don’t think they set the house afire to kill me. They didn’t really care whether they killed me or not. If they cared, they would have made a more direct effort to get me. They set the fire to cover up Angela’s murder. That was the reason, nothing more.”

Sniff, sniff, sniff-sniff-sniff: out with the remaining bad air of the burning house, in with the revitalizing scent of squirrel, out with the bad, in with the good.

“God, she was such a good person, so giving,” I said bitterly. “She didn’t deserve to die like that, to die at all.”

Orson paused in his sniffing but only briefly. Human suffering. Terrible. Terrible thing. Misery, death, despair. But nothing to be done. Nothing to be done about it. Just the way of the world, the nature of human existence. Terrible. Come smell the squirrels with me, Master Snow. You’ll feel better.

A lump rose in my throat, not poignant grief but something more prosaic, so I hacked with tubercular violence and finally planted a black oyster among the tree roots.

“If Sasha were here,” I said, “I wonder if right now I’d remind her so much of James Dean?”

My face felt greasy and tender. I wiped at it with a hand that also felt greasy.

Across the thin grass on the graves and across the polished surfaces of the granite markers, the moonshadows of wind-trembled leaves danced like cemetery fairies.

Even in this peculiar light, I could see that the palm of the hand I had put to my face was smeared with soot. “I must stink to high heaven.”

Immediately, Orson lost interest in the squirrel spoor and came eagerly to me. He sniffed vigorously at my shoes, along my legs, across my chest, finally sticking his snout under my jacket and into my armpit.

Sometimes I suspect that Orson not only understands more than we expect a dog to understand, but that he has a sense of humor and a talent for sarcasm.

Forcibly withdrawing his snout from my armpit, holding his head in both hands, I said, “You’re no rose yourself, pal. And what kind of guard dog are you, anyway? Maybe they were already in the house with Angela when I arrived, and she didn’t know it. But how come you didn’t bite them in the ass when they left the place? If they escaped by the kitchen door, they went right past you. Why didn’t I find a bunch of bad guys rolling around on the backyard, clutching their butts and howling in pain?”

Orson’s gaze held steady, his eyes deep. He was shocked by the question, the implied accusation. Shocked. He was a peaceful dog. A dog of peace, he was. A chaser of rubber balls, a licker of faces, a philosopher and boon companion. Besides, Master Snow, the job was to prevent villains from entering the house, not to prevent them from leaving. Good riddance to villains. Who wants them around, anyway? Villains and fleas. Good riddance.

As I sat nose-to-nose with Orson, staring into his eyes, a sense of the uncanny came over me — or perhaps it was a transient madness — and for a moment I imagined that I could read his true thoughts, which were markedly different from the dialogue that I invented for him. Different and unsettling.

I dropped my bracketing hands from his head, but he chose not to turn away from me or to lower his gaze.

I was unable to lower mine.

To express a word of this to Bobby Halloway would have been to elicit a recommendation of lobotomy: Nevertheless, I sensed that the dog feared for me. Pitied me because I was struggling so hard not to admit the true depth of my pain. Pitied me because I could not acknowledge how profoundly the prospect of being alone scared me. More than anything, however, he feared for me, as though he saw an oncoming juggernaut of which I was oblivious: a great white blazing wheel, as big as a mountain, that would grind me to dust and leave the dust burning in its wake.

“What, when, where?” I wondered.

Orson’s stare was intense. Anubis, the dog-headed Egyptian god of tombs, weigher of the hearts of the dead, could not have stared more piercingly. This dog of mine was no Lassie, no carefree Disney pooch with strictly cute moves and an unlimited capacity for mischievous fun.

“Sometimes,” I told him, “you spook me.”

He blinked, shook his head, leaped away from me, and padded in circles among the tombstones, busily sniffing the grass and the fallen oak leaves, pretending to be just a dog again.

Maybe it wasn’t Orson who had spooked me. Maybe I had spooked myself. Maybe his lustrous eyes had been mirrors in which I’d seen my own eyes; and in the reflections of my eyes, perhaps I had seen truths in my own heart that I was unwilling to look upon directly.

“That would be the Halloway interpretation,” I said.

With sudden excitement, Orson pawed through a drift of fragrant leaves still damp from an afternoon watering by the sprinkler system, burrowed his snout among them as though engaged in a truffle hunt, chuffed, and beat the ground with his tail.

Squirrels. Squirrels had sex. Squirrels had sex, had sex right here. Squirrels. Right here. Squirrel-heat-musk smell here, right here, Master Snow, here, come smell here, come smell, quick quick quick quick, come smell squirrel sex.

“You confound me,” I told him.

My mouth still tasted like the bottom of an ashtray, but I was no longer hacking up the phlegm of Satan. I should be able to steer to Bobby’s place now.

Before fetching my bike, I rose onto my knees and turned to face the headstone against which I had been leaning. “How’re things with you, Noah? Still resting in peace?”

I didn’t have to use the penlight to read the engraving on the stone. I’d read it a thousand times before, and I’d spent hours pondering the name and the dates under it.

NOAH JOSEPH JAMES

June 5, 1888-July 2, 1984

Noah Joseph James, the man with three first names. It’s not your name that amazes me; it’s your singular longevity.

Ninety-six years of life.

Ninety-six springs, summers, autumns, winters.

Against daunting odds, I have thus far lived twenty-eight years. If Lady Fortune comes to me with both hands full, I might make thirty-eight. If the physicians prove to be bad prognosticators, if the laws of probability are suspended, if fate takes a holiday, perhaps I’ll live to be forty-eight. Then I would have enjoyed one half the span of life granted to Noah Joseph James.

I don’t know who he was, what he did with the better part of a century here on earth, whether he had one wife with whom to share his days or outlived three, whether the children whom he fathered became priests or serial killers, and I don’t want to know. I’ve fantasized a rich and wondrous life for this man. I believe him to have been well traveled, to have been to Borneo and Brazil, to Mobile Bay during Jubilee and to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, to the sun-washed isles of Greece and to the secret land of Shangri-la high in the fastness of Tibet. I believe that he loved truly and was deeply loved in return, that he was a warrior and a poet, an adventurer and a scholar, a musician and an artist and a sailor who sailed all the seven seas, who boldly cast off what limitations — if any — were placed upon him. As long as he remains only a name to me and is otherwise a mystery, he can be whatever I want him to be, and I can vicariously experience his long, long life in the sun.

Softly I said, “Hey, Noah, I’ll bet when you died back there in 1984, undertakers didn’t carry guns.”

I rose to my feet and stepped to the adjacent tombstone, where my bicycle was propped under the guardian gaze of the granite angel.

Orson let out a low growl. Abruptly he was tense, alert. His head was raised high, ears pricked. Although the light was poor, his tail seemed to be tucked between his legs.

I followed the direction of his coaly gaze and saw a tall, stoop-shouldered man stalking among the tombstones. Even in the softening shadows, he was a collection of angles and sharp edges, like a skeleton in a black suit, as if one of Noah’s neighbors had climbed out of his casket to go visiting.

The man stopped in the very row of graves in which Orson and I stood, and he consulted a curious object in his left hand. It appeared to be the size of a cellular telephone, with an illuminated display screen.

He tapped on the instrument’s keypad. The eerie music of electronic notes carried briefly through the cemetery, but these were different from telephone tones.

Just as a scarf of cloud blew off the moon, the stranger brought the sour-apple-green screen closer to his face for a better look at whatever data it provided, and those two soft lights revealed enough for me to make an identification. I couldn’t see the red of his hair or his russet eyes, but even in profile the whippet-lean face and thin lips were chillingly familiar: Jesse Pinn, assistant mortician.

He was not aware of Orson and me, though we stood only thirty or forty feet to his left.

We played at being granite. Orson wasn’t growling anymore, even though the soughing of the breeze through the oaks would easily have masked his grumble.

Pinn raised his face from the hand-held device, glanced to his right, at St. Bernadette’s, and then consulted the screen again. Finally he headed toward the church.

He remained unaware of us, although we were little more than thirty feet from him.

I looked at Orson.

He looked at me.

Squirrels forgotten, we followed Pinn.

17

The mortician hurried to the back of the church, never glancing over his shoulder. He descended a broad set of stone stairs that led to a basement door.

I followed closely to keep him in sight. Halting only ten feet from the head of the stairs and at an angle to them, I peered down at him.

If he turned and looked up, he would see me before I could move out of sight, but I was not overly concerned. He seemed so involved in the task at hand that the summons of celestial trumpets and the racket of the dead rising from their graves might not have drawn his attention.

He studied the mysterious device in his hand, switched it off, and tucked it into an inside coat pocket. From another pocket he extracted a second instrument, but the light was too poor to allow me to see what he held; unlike the first item, this one incorporated no luminous parts.

Even above the susurration of wind and oak leaves, I heard a series of clicks and rasping noises. These were followed by a hard snap, another snap, and then a third.

On the fourth snap, I thought I recognized the distinctive sound. A Lockaid lock-release gun. The device had a thin pick that you slipped into the key channel, under the pin tumblers. When you pulled the trigger, a flat steel spring jumped upward and lodged some of the pins at the sheer line.

A few years ago, Manuel Ramirez gave me a Lockaid demonstration. Lock-release guns were sold only to law-enforcement agencies, and the possession of one by a civilian was illegal.

Although Jesse Pinn could hang a consoling expression on his mug as convincingly as could Sandy Kirk, he incinerated murder victims in a crematorium furnace to assist in the cover-up of capital crimes, so he was not likely to be fazed by laws restricting Lockaid ownership. Maybe he had limits. Maybe, for instance, he wouldn’t push a nun off a cliff for no reason whatsoever. Nevertheless, recalling Pinn’s sharp face and the stiletto flicker of his red-brown eyes as he had approached the crematorium window earlier this evening, I wouldn’t have put money on the nun at any odds.

The undertaker needed to fire the lock-release gun five times to clear all the pins and disengage the dead bolt. After cautiously trying the door, he returned the Lockaid to his pocket.

When he pushed the door inward, the windowless basement proved to be lighted. Silhouetted, he stood listening on the threshold for perhaps half a minute, his bony shoulders canted to the left and his half-hung head cocked to the right, wind-spiked hair bristling like straw; abruptly he jerked himself into a better posture, like a suddenly animated scarecrow pulling loose of its supporting cross, and he went inside, pushing the door only half shut behind him.

“Stay,” I whispered to Orson.

I went down the stairs, and my ever-obedient dog followed me.

When I put one ear to the half-open door, I heard nothing from the basement.

Orson stuck his snout through the eighteen-inch gap, sniffing, and although I rapped him lightly on the top of the head, he didn’t withdraw.

Leaning over the dog, I put my snout through the gap, too, not for a sniff but far enough inside to see what lay beyond. Squinting against the fluorescent glare, I saw a twenty-by-forty-foot room with concrete walls and ceiling, lined with equipment that served the church and the attached wing of Sunday-school rooms: five gas-fired furnaces, a big water heater, electric-service panels, and machinery that I didn’t recognize.

Jesse Pinn was three-quarters of the way across this first room, approaching a closed door in the far wall, his back to me.

Stepping away from the door, I unclipped the glasses case from my shirt pocket. The Velcro closure peeled open with a sound that made me think of a snake breaking wind, though I don’t know why, as I’d never in my life heard a snake breaking wind. My aforementioned flamboyant imagination had taken a scatological turn.

By the time I put on the glasses and peered inside again, Pinn had disappeared into the second basement room. That farther door stood half open as well, and light blazed beyond.

“It’s a concrete floor in there,” I whispered. “My Nikes won’t make a sound, but your claws will tick. Stay.”

I pressed open the door before me and eased into the basement.

Orson remained outside, at the foot of the stairs. Perhaps he was obedient this time because I’d given him a logical reason to be.

Or perhaps, because of something he had smelled, he knew that proceeding farther was ill-advised. Dogs have an olfactory sense thousands of times sharper than ours, bringing them more data than all human senses combined.

With the sunglasses, I was safe from the light, yet I could see more than well enough to navigate the room. I avoided the open center, staying close to the furnaces and the other equipment, where I could duck into a niche and hope to hide if I heard Jesse Pinn returning.

Time and sweat had by now diminished the effectiveness of the sunscreen on my face and hands, but I was counting on my layer of soot to protect me. My hands appeared to be sheathed in black silk gloves, and I assumed that my face was equally masked.

When I reached the inner door, I heard two distant voices, both male, one belonging to Pinn. They were muffled, and I couldn’t understand what was being said.

I glanced at the outside door, where Orson peered in at me, one ear at attention and the other at ease.

Beyond the inner door was a long, narrow, largely empty room. Only a few of the overhead lights were aglow, suspended on chains between exposed water pipes and heating ducts, but I didn’t remove my sunglasses.

At the end, this chamber proved to be part of an L-shaped space, and the next length, which opened to the right, was longer and wider than the first, although still dimly lighted. This second section was used as a storeroom, and seeking the voices, I crept past boxes of supplies, decorations for various holidays and celebrations, and file cabinets full of church records. Everywhere shadows gathered like convocations of robed and cowled monks, and I removed my sunglasses.

The voices grew louder as I proceeded, but the acoustics were terrible, and I still couldn’t discern any words. Although he was not shouting, Pinn was angry, which I deduced from a low menace in his voice. The other man sounded as though he was trying to placate the undertaker.

A complete life-size crèche was arrayed across half the width of the room: not merely Joseph and the Holy Virgin at a cradle with the Christ child, but also the entire manger scene with wise men, camels, donkeys, lambs, and heralding angels. The stable was made of lumber, and the bales of hay were real; the people and animals were plaster over chicken wire and lath, their clothes and features painted by a gifted artist, protected by a waterproof lacquer that gave them a supernatural glow even in this poor light. Judging by the tools, paint, and other supplies at the periphery of the collection, repairs were being made, after which the crèche would be put under drop cloths until next Christmas.

Beginning to make out scattered words of Pinn’s conversation with the unknown man, I moved among the figures, some of which were taller than I am. The scene was disorienting because none of the elements was staged for display; none was in its proper relationship to the others. One of the wise men stood with his face in the bell of an angel’s raised trumpet, and Joseph appeared to be engaged in a conversation with a camel. Baby Jesus lay unattended in His cradle, which stood on a bale of hay to one side. Mary sat with a beatific smile and an adoring gaze, but the object of her attention, rather than being her holy child, was a galvanized bucket. Another wise man seemed to be looking up a camel’s butt.

I wended through this disorganized crèche, and near the end of it, I used a lute-playing angel for cover. I was in shadows, but peering past the curve of a half-furled wing, I saw Jesse Pinn in the light about twenty feet away, hectoring another man near the stairs that led up to the main floor of the church.

“You’ve been warned,” Pinn said, raising his voice until it was almost a snarl. “How many times have you been warned?”

At first I could not see the other man, who was blocked by Pinn. He spoke quietly, evenly, and I could not hear what he said.

The undertaker reacted in disgust and began to pace agitatedly, combing one hand through his disarranged hair.

Now I saw that the second man was Father Tom Eliot, rector of St. Bernadette’s.

“You fool, you stupid shit,” Pinn said furiously, bitterly. “You prattling, God-gushing moron.”

Father Tom was five feet eight, plump, with the expressive and rubbery face of a natural-born comedian. Although I wasn’t a member of his — or any — church, I’d spoken with him on several occasions, and he seemed to be a singularly good-natured man with a self-deprecating sense of humor and an almost childlike enthusiasm for life. I had no trouble understanding why his parishioners adored him.

Pinn did not adore him. He raised one skeletal hand and pointed a bony finger at the priest: “You make me sick, you self-righteous son of a bitch.”

Evidently Father Tom had decided to weather this outrageous verbal assault without response.

As he paced, Pinn chopped at the air with the sharp edge of one hand, as though struggling — with considerable frustration — to sculpt his words into a truth that the priest could understand. “We’re not taking any more of your crap, no more of your interference. I’m not going to threaten to kick your teeth out myself, though I’d sure as hell enjoy doing it. Never liked to dance, you know, but I’d sure like to dance on your stupid face. But no threats like before, no, not this time, not ever again. I’m not even going to threaten to send them after you, because I think that would actually appeal to you. Father Eliot the martyr, suffering for God. Oh, you’d like that — wouldn’t you? — being a martyr, suffering such a rotten death without complaint.”

Father Tom stood with his head bowed, his eyes downcast, his arms straight at his sides, as though waiting patiently for this storm to pass.

The priest’s passivity inflamed Pinn. The mortician made a sharp-knuckled fist of his right hand and pounded it into the palm of his left, as if he needed to hear the hard snap of flesh on flesh, and now his voice was as rich with scorn as with fury. “You’d wake up some night, and they’d be all over you, or maybe they’d take you by surprise in the bell tower or in the sacristy when you’re kneeling at the prie-dieu, and you’d surrender yourself to them in ecstasy, in a sick ecstasy, reveling in the pain, suffering for your God — that’s the way you’d see it — suffering for your dead God, suffering your way straight into Heaven. You dumb bastard. You hopeless retard. You’d even pray for them, pray your heart out for them as they tore you to pieces. Wouldn’t you, priest?”

To all of this, the chubby priest responded with lowered eyes and mute endurance.

Keeping my own silence required effort. I had questions for Jesse Pinn. Lots of questions.

Here, however, there was no crematory fire to which I could hold his feet to force answers out of him.

Pinn stopped pacing and loomed over Father Tom. “No more threats against you, priest. No point to it. Just gives you a thrill to think of suffering for the Lord. So this is what’ll happen if you don’t stay out of our way — we’ll waste your sister. Pretty Laura.”

Father Tom raised his head and met Pinn’s eyes, but still he said nothing.

“I’ll kill her myself,” Pinn promised. “With this gun.”

He withdrew a pistol from inside his suit coat, evidently from a shoulder holster. Even at a distance and in this poor light, I could see that the barrel was unusually long.

Defensively, I put my hand into my jacket pocket, on the butt of the Glock.

“Let her go,” said the priest.

“We’ll never let her go. She’s too…interesting. Fact is,” Pinn said, “before I kill Laura, I’ll rape her. She’s still a good-looking woman, even if she’s getting strange.”

Laura Eliot, who had been a friend and colleague of my mother’s, was indeed a lovely woman. Although I hadn’t seen her in a year, her face came readily to mind. Supposedly, she had obtained employment in San Diego when Ashdon eliminated her position. Dad and I had received a letter from Laura, and we’d been disappointed that she hadn’t come around to say good-bye in person. Evidently that was a cover story and she was still in the area, being held against her will.

Finding his voice at last, Father Tom said, “God help you.”

“I don’t need help,” Pinn said. “When I jam the gun in her mouth, just before I pull the trigger, I’ll tell her that her brother says he’ll see her soon, see her soon in Hell, and then I’ll blow her brains out.”

“God help me.”

“What did you say, priest?” Pinn inquired mockingly.

Father Tom didn’t answer.

“Did you say, ‘God help me’?” Pinn taunted. “‘God help me’? Not very damn likely. After all, you aren’t one of His anymore, are you?”

This curious statement caused Father Tom to lean back against the wall and cover his face with his hands. He might have been weeping; I couldn’t be sure.

“Picture your lovely sister’s face,” said Pinn. “Now picture her bone structure twisting, distorting, and the top of her skull blowing out.”

He fired the pistol at the ceiling. The barrel was long because it was fitted with a sound suppressor, and instead of a loud report, there was nothing but a noise like a fist hitting a pillow.

In the same instant and with a hard clang, the bullet struck the rectangular metal shade of the lamp suspended directly above the mortician. The fluorescent tube didn’t shatter, but the lamp swung wildly on its long chains; an icy blade of light like a harvesting scythe cut bright arcs through the room.

In the rhythmic sweep of light, though Pinn himself did not at first move, his scarecrow shadow leaped at other shadows that flapped like blackbirds. Then he holstered the pistol under his coat.

As the chains of the swinging light fixture torqued, the links twisted against one another with enough friction to cause an eerie ringing, as if lizard-eyed altar boys in blood-soaked cassocks and surplices were ringing the unmelodious bells of a satanic mass.

The shrill music and the capering shadows seemed to excite Jesse Pinn. An inhuman cry issued from him, primitive and psychotic, a caterwaul of the sort that sometimes wakes you in the night and leaves you wondering about the species of origin. As that spittle-rich sound sprayed from his lips, he hammered his fists into the priest’s midsection, two hard punches.

Quickly stepping out from behind the lute-playing angel, I tried to draw the Glock, but it caught on the lining of my jacket pocket.

As Father Tom doubled over from the two blows, Pinn locked his hands and clubbed them against the back of the priest’s neck.

Father Tom dropped to the floor, and I finally ripped the pistol out of my pocket.

Pinn kicked the priest in the ribs.

I raised the Glock, aimed at Pinn’s back, and engaged the laser sighting. As the mortal red dot appeared between his shoulder blades, I was about to say enough, but the mortician relented and stepped away from the priest.

I kept my silence, but to Father Tom, Pinn said, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. If you can’t be part of the future, then get the hell out of the way.”

That sounded like a parting line. I switched off the laser sighting and retreated behind the angel just as the undertaker turned away from Father Tom. He didn’t see me.

To the singing of the chains, Jesse Pinn walked back the way he had come, and the jittery sound seemed to issue not from overhead but from within him, as though locusts were swarming in his blood. His shadow repeatedly darted ahead of him and then leaped behind until he passed beyond the arcing sword of light from the swinging fixture, became one with the darkness, and rounded the corner into the other arm of the L-shaped room.

I returned the Glock to my jacket pocket.

From the cover of the dysfunctional crèche, I watched Father Tom Eliot. He was lying at the foot of the stairs, in the fetal position, curled around his pain.

I considered going to him to determine if he was seriously hurt, and to learn what I could about the circumstances that lay behind the confrontation I had just witnessed, but I was reluctant to reveal myself. I stayed where I was.

Any enemy of Jesse Pinn’s should be an ally of mine — but I could not be certain of Father Tom’s goodwill. Although adversaries, the priest and the mortician were players in some mysterious underworld of which I had been utterly unaware until this very night, so each of them had more in common with the other than with me. I could easily imagine that, at the sight of me, Father Tom would scream for Jesse Pinn, and that the undertaker would fly back, black suit flapping, with the inhuman caterwaul vibrating between his thin lips.

Besides, Pinn and his crew evidently were holding the priest’s sister somewhere. Possession of her gave them a lever and fulcrum with which to move Father Tom, while I had no leverage whatsoever.

The chilling music of the torquing chains gradually faded, and the sword of light described a steadily diminishing arc.

Without a protest, without even an involuntary groan, the priest drew himself to his knees, gathered himself to his feet. He was not able to stand fully erect. Hunched like an ape and no longer comic in any aspect of face or body, with one hand on the railing, he began to pull himself laboriously up the steep, creaking steps toward the church above.

When at last he reached the top, he would switch off the lights, and I would be left here below in a darkness that even St. Bernadette herself, miracle worker of Lourdes, would find daunting. Time to go.

Before retracing my path through the life-size figures of the crèche, I raised my eyes for the first time to the painted eyes of the lute-playing angel in front of me — and thought I saw a blue to match my own. I studied the rest of the lacquered-plaster features and, although the light was weak, I was sure that this angel and I shared a face.

This resemblance paralyzed me with confusion, and I struggled to understand how this Christopher Snow angel could have been here waiting for me. I have rarely seen my own face in brightness, but I know its reflection from the mirrors of my dimly lit rooms, and this was a similar light. This was unquestionably me: beatific as I am not, idealized, but me.

Since my experience in the hospital garage, every incident and object seemed to have significance. No longer could I entertain the possibility of coincidence. Everywhere I looked, the world oozed uncanniness.

This was, of course, the route to madness: viewing all of life as one elaborate conspiracy conducted by elite manipulators who see all and know all. The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut. Cosmically speaking, we are barely able to tie our shoes. If there is, indeed, some secret order to the universe, it is not of our doing, and we are probably not even capable of apprehending it.

The priest was a third of the way up the stairs.

Stupefied, I studied the angel.

Many nights during the Christmas season, year after year, I had cycled along the street on which St. Bernadette’s stood. The crèche had been arranged on the front lawn of the church, each figure in its proper place, none of the gift-bearing magi posing as a proctologist to camels — and this angel had not been there. Or I hadn’t realized that it was there. The likely explanation, of course, was that the display was too brightly lighted for me to risk admiring it; the Christopher Snow angel had been part of the scene, but I had always turned my face from it, squinted my eyes.

The priest was halfway up the stairs and climbing faster.

Then I remembered that Angela Ferryman had attended Mass at St. Bernadette’s. Undoubtedly, considering her dollmaking, she had been prevailed upon to lend her talent to the making of the crèche.

End of mystery.

I still couldn’t understand why she would have assigned my face to an angel. If my features belonged anywhere in the manger scene, they should have been on the donkey. Clearly, her opinion of me had been higher than I warranted.

Unwanted, an image of Angela rose in my mind’s eye: Angela as I had last seen her on the bathroom floor, her eyes fixed on some last sight farther away than Andromeda, head tilted backward into the toilet bowl, throat slashed.

Suddenly I was certain that I had missed an important detail when I’d found her poor torn body. Repulsed by the gouts of blood, gripped by grief, in a state of shock and fear, I had avoided looking long at her — just as, for years, I had avoided looking at the figures in the brightly lighted crèche outside the church. I had seen a vital clue, but it had not registered consciously. Now my subconscious taunted me with it.

As Father Tom reached the top of the steps, he broke into sobs. He sat on the landing and wept inconsolably.

I could not hold fast to a mental image of Angela’s face. Later there would be time to confront and, reluctantly, explore that Grand Guignol memory.

From angel to camel to magi to Joseph to donkey to Holy Virgin to lamb to Lamb, I wove silently through the crèche, then past file cabinets and boxes of supplies, into the shorter and narrower space where little was stored, and onward toward the door of the utilities room.

The sounds of the priest’s anguish resonated off the concrete walls, fading until they were like the cries of some haunting entity barely able to make itself heard through the cold barrier between this world and the next.

Grimly, I recalled my father’s wrenching grief in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital, on the night of my mother’s death.

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I keep my own anguish private. When one of those wild cries threatens to arise, I bite hard until I chew the energy out of it and swallow it unspoken.

In my sleep I grind my teeth — no surprise — until I wake some nights with aching jaws. Perhaps I am fearful of giving voice in dreams to sentiments I choose not to express when awake.

On the way out of the church basement, I expected the undertaker — waxy and pale, with eyes like day-old blood blisters — to drop on me from above or to soar out of the shadows around my feet or to spring like an evil jack-in-the-box from a furnace door. He was not waiting anywhere along my route.

Outside, Orson came to me from among the tombstones, where he had hidden from Pinn. Judging by the dog’s demeanor, the mortician was gone.

He stared at me with great curiosity — or I imagined that he did — and I said, “I don’t really know what happened in there. I don’t know what it meant.”

He appeared dubious. He has a gift for looking dubious: the blunt face, the unwavering eyes.

“Truly,” I insisted.

With Orson padding at my side, I returned to my bicycle. The granite angel guarding my transportation did not resemble me in the least.

The fretful wind had again subsided into a caressing breeze, and the oaks stood silent.

A shifting filigree of clouds was silver across the silver moon.

A large flock of chimney swifts swooped down from the church roof and alighted in the trees, and a few nightingales returned, too, as though the cemetery had not been sanctified until Pinn had departed it.

Holding my bike by the handlebars, I pondered the ranks of tombstones and said: “‘…the dark grew solid around them, finally changing to earth.’ That’s Louise Glück, a great poet.”

Orson chuffed as if in agreement.

“I don’t know what’s happening here, but I think a lot of people are going to die before this is over — and some of them are likely to be people we love. Maybe even me. Or you.”

Orson’s gaze was solemn.

I looked past the cemetery at the streets of my hometown, which were suddenly a lot scarier than any bone-yard.

“Let’s get a beer,” I said.

I climbed on my bike, and Orson danced a dog dance across the graveyard grass, and for the time being, we left the dead behind.