Fear Nothing

these pitiful creatures who come to me to be freed from torment and control. Jesse Pinn or those who give him orders may kill Laura, but she is not Laura anymore, Laura is long lost, and I can't let their threats stop my work. They may kill me, but until they do
        
        Orson stood alertly at the open door, watching the hall.
        I turned to the first page of the journal and saw that the initial entry was dated January 1 of this year:
        
         Laura has been held for more than nine months now, and I've given up all hope that I will ever see her again. And if I were given the chance to see her again, I might refuse, God forgive me, because I would be too afraid of facing what she might have become. Every night, I petition the Holy Mother to intercede with her Son to take Laura from the suffering of this world.
        
        For a full understanding of his sister's situation and condition, I would have to find the previous volume or volumes of this journal, but I had no time to search for them.
        Something thumped in the attic. I froze, staring at the ceiling, listening. At the doorway, Orson pricked one ear.
        When half a minute passed without another sound, I turned my attention once more to the journal. With a sense of time running out, I searched hurriedly through the book, reading at random.
        Much of the contents concerned the priest's theological doubts and agonies. He struggled daily to remind himself-to convince himself, to plead with himself to remember-that his faith had long sustained him and that he would be utterly lost if he could not hold fast to his faith in this crisis. These sections were grim and might have been fascinating reading for the portrait of a tortured psyche that they provided, but they revealed nothing about the facts of the Wyvern conspiracy that had infected Moonlight Bay. Consequently, I skimmed through them.
        I found one page and then a few more on which Father Tom's neat handwriting deteriorated into a loose scrawl. These passages were incoherent, ranting and paranoid, and I assumed that they had been composed after he'd poured down enough Scotch to start speaking with a burr.
        More disturbing was an entry dated February 5-three pages on which the elegant penmanship was obsessively precise:
        
         I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ. I believe in the mercy of Christ…
        
        Those seven words were repeated line after line, nearly two hundred times. Not a single one appeared to have been hastily penned; each sentence was so meticulously inscribed on the page that a rubber stamp and an ink pad could hardly have produced more uniform results. Scanning this entry, I could feel the desperation and terror that the priest had felt when he'd written it, as if his turbulent emotions had been infused into the paper with the ink, to radiate from it evermore.
         I believe in the mercy of Christ.
        I wondered what incident on the fifth of February had brought Father Tom to the edge of an emotional and spiritual abyss. What had he seen? I wondered if perhaps he had written this impassioned but despairing incantation after experiencing a nightmare similar to the dreams of rape and mutilation that had troubled-and ultimately delighted-Lewis Stevenson.
        Continuing to page through the entries, I found an interesting observation dated the eleventh of February. It was buried in a long, tortured passage in which the priest argued with himself over the existence and nature of God, playing both skeptic and believer, and I would have skimmed over it if my eye had not been caught by the word troop.
        
         This new troop, to whose freedom I have committed myself, gives me hope precisely because it is the antithesis of the original troop. There is no evil in these newest creatures, no thurst for violence, no rage-
        
        A forlorn cry from the attic called my attention away from the journal. This was a wordless wail of fear and pain, so eerie and so pathetic that dread reverberated like a gong note through my mind simultaneously with a chord of sympathy. The voice sounded like that of a child, perhaps three or four years old, lost and afraid and in extreme distress.
        Orson was so affected by the cry that he quickly padded out of the bedroom, into the