Fear Nothing

also, at the end of the wing farthest from the residence, the crematorium.
        I slipped around the corner of the garage, along the back of the second arm of the L, where immense eucalyptus trees blocked most of the moonlight. The air was redolent of their medicinal fragrance, and a carpet of dead leaves crunched underfoot.
        No corner of Moonlight Bay is unknown to me-especially not this one. Most of my nights have been spent in the exploration of our special town, which has resulted in some macabre discoveries.
        Ahead, on my left, frosty light marked the crematorium window. I approached it with the conviction-correct, as it turned out-that I was about to see something stranger and far worse than what Bobby Halloway and I had seen on an October night when we were thirteen…
        

    * * *
        
        A decade and a half ago, I'd had as morbid a streak as any boy my age, was as fascinated as all boys are by the mystery and lurid glamour of death. Bobby Halloway and I, friends even then, thought it was daring to prowl the undertaker's property in search of the repulsive, the ghoulish, the shocking.
        I can't recall what we expected - or hoped - to find. A collection of human skulls? A porch swing made of bones? A secret laboratory where the deceptively normal-looking Frank Kirk and his deceptively normal-looking son Sandy called down lightning bolts from storm clouds to reanimate our dead neighbors and use them as slaves to do the cooking and housecleaning?
        Perhaps we expected to stumble upon a shrine to the evil gods Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth in some sinister bramble-festooned end of the rose garden. Bobby and I were reading a lot of H. P. Lovecraft in those days.
        Bobby says we were a couple of weird kids. I say we were weird, for sure, but neither more nor less weird than other boys.
        Bobby says maybe so, but the other boys gradually grew out of their weirdness while we've grown further into ours.
        I don't agree with Bobby on ' this one. I don't believe that I'm any more weird than anyone else I've ever met. In fact, I'm a damn sight less weird than some.
        Which is true of Bobby, too. But because he treasures his weirdness, he wants me to believe in and treasure mine.
        He insists on his weirdness. He says that by acknowledging and embracing our weirdness, we are in greater harmony with nature - because nature is deeply weird.
        Anyway, one October night, behind the funeral-home garage, Bobby Halloway and I found the crematorium window. We were attracted to it by an eldritch light that throbbed against the glass.
        Because the window was set high, we were not tall enough to peer inside.
        With the stealth of commandos scouting an enemy encampment, we snatched a teak bench from the patio and carried it behind the garage, where we positioned it under the glimmering window.
        Side by side on the bench, we were able to reconnoiter the scene together. The interior of the window was covered by a Levelor blind; but someone had forgotten to close the slats, giving us a clear view of Frank Kirk and an assistant at work.
        One remove from the room, the light was not bright enough to cause me harm. At least that was what I told myself as I pressed my nose to the pane.
        Even though I had learned to be a singularly cautious boy, I was nonetheless a boy and, therefore, love with adventure and camaraderie, so I might knowingly have risked blindness to share that moment with Bobby Halloway.
        On a stainless-steel gurney near the window was the body of an elderly man. It was cloaked in a sheet, with only the ravaged face exposed. His yellow-white hair, matted and tangled, made him look as though he had died in a high wind. Judging by his waxy gray skin, sunken cheeks, and severely cracked lips, however, he had succumbed not to a storm but to a prolonged illness.
        If Bobby and I had been acquainted with the man in life, we didn't recognize him in this ashen and emaciated condition. If he'd been someone we knew even casually, he would have been no less grisly but perhaps less an object of boyish fascination and dark delight.
        To us, because we were just thirteen and proud of it, the most compelling and remarkable and wonderful thing about the cadaver was also, of course, the grossest thing about it. One eye was closed, but the other was wide open and staring, occluded by a bright red