Fear Nothing

sound.
        Because I was hoping again for revelations, I was compelled to follow the priest's voice as irresistibly as I might have followed the music of a piper in Hamelin. All the while, I was struggling to repress the desire to sneeze, which was spawned by dust with a scent so musty that it must have come from the previous century.
        After one more turn, I was in a last short length of passageway. About six feet beyond the end of this narrow corridor of boxes was the steeply pitched underside of the roof at the east flank - the front - of the 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