Fear Nothing

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