Fear Nothing

building. The rafters, braces, collar beams, and the underside of the roof sheathing, to which the slate was attached, were revealed by muddy-yellow light issuing from a source out of sight to the right.

Creeping to the end of the passage, I was acutely aware of the faint creaking of the floorboards under me. It was no louder or more suspicious than the ordinary settling noises in this high redoubt, but it was nonetheless potentially betraying.

Father Tom’s voice grew clearer, although I could catch only one word in five or six.

Another voice rose, higher-pitched and tremulous. It resembled the voice of a very young child — and yet was nothing as ordinary as that. Not as musical as the speech of a child. Not half as innocent. I couldn’t make out what, if anything, it was saying. The longer I listened, the eerier it became, until it made me pause — though I didn’t dare pause for long.

My aisle terminated in a perimeter passage that extended along the eastern flank of the attic maze. I risked a peek into this long straight run.

To the left was darkness, but to the right was the southeast corner of the building, where I had expected to find the source of the light and the priest with his wailing captive. Instead, the lamp remained out of sight to the right of the corner, around one more turn, along the south wall.

I followed this six-foot-wide perimeter passage, half crouched by necessity now, for the wall to my left was actually the steeply sloped underside of the roof. To my right, I passed the dark mouth of another passageway between piles of boxes and old furniture — and then halted within two steps of the corner, with only the last wall of stored goods between me and the lamp.

Abruptly a squirming shadow leaped across the rafters and roof sheathing that formed the wall ahead of me: a fierce spiky thrashing of jagged limbs with a bulbous swelling at the center, so alien that I nearly shouted in alarm. I found myself holding the Glock in both hands.

Then I realized that the apparition before me was the distorted shadow of a spider suspended on a single silken thread. It must have been dangling so close to the source of the light that its image was projected, greatly enlarged, across the surfaces in front of me.

For a ruthless killer, I was far too jumpy. Maybe the caffeine-laden Pepsi, which I’d drunk to sweeten my vomit-soured breath, was to blame. Next time I killed someone and threw up, I’d have to use a caffeine-free beverage and lace it with Valium, in order to avoid tarnishing my image as an emotionless, efficient homicide machine.

Cool with the spider now, I also realized that I could at last hear the priest’s voice clearly enough to understand his every word: “…hurts, yes, of course, it hurts very much. But now I’ve cut the transponder out of you, cut it out and crushed it, and they can’t follow you anymore.”

I flashed back to the memory of Jesse Pinn stalking through the cemetery earlier in the night, holding the peculiar instrument in his hand, listening to faint electronic tones and reading data on a small, glowing green screen. He’d evidently been tracking the signal from a surgically implanted transponder in this creature. A monkey, was it? Yet not a monkey?

“The incision wasn’t very deep,” the priest continued. “The transponder was just under the subcutaneous fat. I’ve sterilized the wound and sewn it up.” He sighed. “I wish I knew how much you understand me, if at all.”

In Father Tom’s journal, he had referred to the members of a new troop that was less hostile and less violent than the first, and he had written that he was committed to their liberation. Why there should be a new troop, as opposed to an old one, or why they should be set loose in the world with transponders under their skin — even how these smarter monkeys of either troop could have come into existence in the first place — I couldn’t fathom. But it was clear that the priest styled himself as a modern-day abolitionist fighting for the rights of the oppressed and that this rectory was a key stop on an underground railroad to freedom.

When he had confronted Father Tom in the church basement, Pinn must have believed that this current fugitive had already received superficial surgery and moved on, and that his hand-held tracker was picking up the signal from the transponder no longer embedded in the creature it was meant to identify. Instead, the fugitive was recuperating here in the attic.

The priest’s mysterious visitor mewled softly, as if in pain, and the cleric replied with a sympathetic patter perilously close to baby talk.

Taking courage from the memory of how meekly the priest had responded to the undertaker, I crossed the remaining couple of feet to the final wall of boxes. I stood with my back to the end of the row, knees bent only slightly to accommodate the slope of the roof. From here, to see the priest and the creature with him, I needed only to lean to my right, turn my head, and look into the perimeter aisle along the south flank of the attic where the light and the voices originated.

I hesitated to reveal my presence only because I recalled some of the odder entries in the priest’s diary: the ranting and paranoid passages that bordered on incoherence, the two hundred repetitions of I believe in the mercy of Christ. Perhaps he wasn’t always as meek as he had been with Jesse Pinn.

Overlaying the odors of mildew and dust and old cardboard was a new medicinal scent composed of rubbing alcohol, iodine, and an astringent antiseptic cleanser.

Somewhere in the next aisle, the fat spider reeled itself up its filament, away from the lamplight, and the magnified arachnid shadow rapidly dwindled across the slanted ceiling, shrinking into a black dot and finally vanishing.

Father Tom spoke reassuringly to his patient: “I have antibiotic powder, capsules of various penicillin derivatives, but no effective painkiller. I wish I did. But this world is about suffering, isn’t it? This vale of tears. You’ll be all right. You’ll be just fine. I promise. God will look after you through me.”

Whether the rector of St. Bernadette’s was a saint or villain, one of the few rational people left in Moonlight Bay or way insane, I couldn’t judge. I didn’t have enough facts, didn’t understand the context of his actions.

I was certain of only one thing: Even if Father Tom might be rational and doing the right thing, his head nevertheless contained enough loose wiring to make it unwise to let him hold the baby during a baptism.

“I’ve had some very basic medical training,” the priest told his patient, “because for three years after seminary, I was called to a mission in Uganda.”

I thought I heard the patient: a muttering that reminded me — but not quite — of the low cooing of pigeons blended with the more guttural purr of a cat.

“I’m sure you’ll be all right,” Father Tom continued. “But you really must stay here a few days so I can administer the antibiotics and monitor the healing of the wound. Do you understand me?” With a note of frustration and despair: “Do you understand me at all?”

As I was about to lean to the right and peer around the wall of boxes, the Other replied to the priest. The Other: That was how I thought of the fugitive when I heard it speaking from such close range, because this was a voice that I was not able to imagine as being either that of a child or a monkey, or of anything else in God’s Big Book of Creation.

I froze. My finger tightened on the trigger.

Certainly it sounded partly like a young child, a little girl, and partly like a monkey. It sounded partly like a lot of things, in fact, as though a highly creative Hollywood sound technician had been playing with a library of human and animal voices, mixing them through an audio console until he’d created the ultimate voice for an extraterrestrial.

The most affecting thing about the Other’s speech was not the tonal range of it, not the pattern of inflections, and not even the earnestness and the emotion that clearly shaped it. Instead, what most jolted me was the perception that it had meaning. I was not listening merely to a babble of animal noises. This was not English, of course, not a word of it; and although I’m not multilingual, I’m certain it wasn’t any foreign tongue, either, for it was not complex enough to be a true language. It was, however, a fluent series of exotic sounds crudely composed like words, a powerful but primitive attempt at language, with a small polysyllabic vocabulary, marked by urgent rhythms.

The Other seemed pathetically desperate to communicate. As I listened, I was surprised to find myself emotionally affected by the longing, loneliness, and anguish in its voice. These were not qualities that I imagined. They were as real as the boards beneath my feet, the stacked boxes against my back, and the heavy beating of my heart.