Fear Nothing

down a war, and when the worst fear was mere nuclear holocaust.
        What could my brilliant and loving mother possibly have done that would make me either revered or reviled?
        Sprawled on the attic floor, racked by emotion, Father Tom Eliot knew the answer to that mystery and would almost certainly reveal it when he had regained his composure.
        Instead of asking the question at the heart of all that had happened this night, I shakily apologized to the sobbing priest. “I'm sorry. I… I shouldn't have come here. God. Listen. I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. Please.”
        What had my mother done?
        Don't ask.
        Don't ask.
        If he had started to answer my unspoken question, I would have clamped my hands to my ears.
        I called Orson to my side and led him away from the priest, into the maze, proceeding as fast as I dared. The narrow passages twisted and branched until it seemed as though we were not in an attic at all but in a network of catacombs. In places the darkness was nearly blinding; but I'm the child of darkness, never thwarted by it. I brought us quickly to the open trapdoor.
        Though Orson had climbed the ladder, he peered at the descending treads with trepidation and hesitated to find his way into the hall below. Even for a four-footed acrobat, going down a steep ladder was immeasurably more difficult than going up.
        Because many of the boxes in the attic were large and because bulky furniture was also stored there, I knew that a second trap must exist, and that it must be larger than the first, with an associated sling-and-pulley system for raising and lowering heavy objects to and from the second floor. I didn't want to search for it, but I wasn't sure how I could safely climb backward down an attic ladder while carrying a ninety-pound dog.
        From the farthest end of the vast room, the priest called out to me - “Christopher” - in a voice heavy with remorse. “Christopher, I'm lost.”
        He didn't mean that he was lost in his own maze. Nothing as simple as that, nothing as hopeful as that.
        “Christopher, I'm lost. Forgive me. I'm so lost.”
        From elsewhere in the gloom came the child-monkey-not-of-this-world voice that belonged to the Other: struggling toward language, desperate to be understood, charged with longing and loneliness, as bleak as any arctic ice field but also, worse, filled with a reckless hope that would surely never be rewarded.
        This plaintive bleat was so unbearable that it drove Orson to try the ladder and may even have given him the balance to succeed. When he was only halfway to the bottom, he leaped over the remaining treads to the hallway floor.
        The priest's journal had almost slipped out from under my belt and into the seat of my pants. As I descended the ladder, the book rubbed painfully against the base of my spine, and when I reached the bottom I clawed it from under my belt and held it in my left hand, as the Glock was still clamped fiercely in my right.
        Together, Orson and I raced down through the rectory, past the shrine to the Blessed Virgin, where the guttering candle was extinguished by the draft of our passing. We fled along the lower hall, through the kitchen with its three green digital clocks, out the back door, across the porch, into the night and the fog, as if we were escaping from the House of Usher moments before it collapsed and sank into the deep dank tarn.
        We passed the back of the church. Its formidable mass was a tsunami of stone, and while we were in its nightshadow, it seemed about to crest and crash and crush us.
        I glanced back twice. The priest was not behind us. Neither was anything else.
        Although I half expected my bicycle to be gone or damaged, it was propped against the headstone, where I had left it. No monkey business.
        I didn't pause to say a word to Noah Joseph James. In a world crewed up as ours, ninety-six years of life didn't seem as desirable as it had only hours ago.
        After pocketing the pistol and tucking the journal inside my shirt, I ran beside my bike along an aisle between rows of graves, swinging aboard it while on the move. Bouncing off the curb into the street, leaning forward over the handlebars, pedaling furiously, I bored like an auger through the fog, leaving a temporary tunnel in the churning mist behind me.
        Orson had no interest in the spoor of squirrels.