Fear Nothing

it's time for show-and-tell,” Angela said with evident ambivalence. “But… oh, Chris, it's going to break your heart.” Sadness elongated her features. “I think you need to know… but it's going to break your heart.”
        When she turned from me and crossed the kitchen, I began to follow her.
        She stopped me. “I'll have to turn some lights on to get what I need. You better wait here, and I'll bring everything back.”
        I watched her navigate the dark dining room. In the living room, she switched on a single lamp, and from there she moved out of sight.
        Restlessly, I circled this room to which I had been confined, my mind spinning as I prowled. The monkey was and was not a monkey, and its wrongness lay in this simultaneous wasness and notness. This would seem to make sense only in a Lewis Carroll world, with Alice at the bottom of a magical rabbit hole.
        At the back door, I tried the dead bolt again. Locked.
        I drew the curtain aside and surveyed the night. I could not see Orson.
        Trees were stirring. The wind had returned.
        Moonlight was on the move. Apparently, new weather was coming in from the Pacific. As the wind flung tattered clouds across the face of the moon, a silvery radiance appeared to ripple across the nightscape. In fact, what traveled were the dappling shadows of the clouds, and the movement of the light was but an illusion. Nevertheless, the backyard was transformed into a winter stream, and the light purled like water moving under ice.
        From elsewhere in the house came a brief wordless cry. It was as thin and forlorn as Angela herself.

----

    13
        
        The cry was so short-lived and so hollow that it might have been no more real than the movement of the moonlight across the backyard, merely a ghost of sound haunting a room in my mind. Like the monkey, it possessed both a quality of wasness and notness.
        As the door curtain slipped through my fingers and fell silently across the glass, however, a muffled thump sounded elsewhere in the house and shuddered through the walls.
        The second cry was briefer and thinner than the first-but it was unmistakably a bleat of pain and terror.
        Maybe she had merely fallen off a step stool and sprained her ankle. Maybe I'd heard only wind and birds in the eaves. Maybe the moon is made of cheese and the sky is a chocolate nonpareil with sugar stars.
        I called loudly to Angela.
        She didn't answer.
        The house was not so large that she could have failed to hear me. Her silence was ominous.
        Cursing under my breath, I drew the Glock from my jacket pocket. I held it in the candlelight, searching desperately for safeties.
        I found only one switch that might be what I wanted. When I pressed it down, an intense beam of red light shot out of a smaller hole below the muzzle and painted a bright dot on the refrigerator door.
        My dad, wanting a weapon that was user-friendly even to gentle professors of literature, had paid extra for laser sighting. Good man.
        Although I didn't know much about handguns, but I knew some models of pistols featured “safe action” systems with only internal safety devices that disengaged as the trigger was pulled and, after firing, engaged again. Maybe this was one of those weapons. If not, then I would either find myself unable to get off a shot when confronted by an assailant - or, fumbling in panic, would shoot myself in the foot.
        I didn’t like the way that my hands were shaking, but I sure as hell couldn’t pause for deep breathing exercise or meditation.
        Although I wasn't trained for this work, there was no one but me to do the job. Admittedly, I thought about getting out of there, climbing on my bike, riding to safety, and placing an anonymous emergency call to the police. Thereafter, however, I would never be able to look at myself in a mirror - or even meet Orson's eyes.
        As I crossed the kitchen to the open door at the dining room, I considered returning the pistol to my pocket and taking a knife from the cutlery drawer. Telling the story of the monkey, Angela had shown me where the blades were kept.
        Reason prevailed. I was no more practiced with knives than I was expert with firearms.
        Besides, using a knife, slashing and gouging at another human being, seemed to require a ruthlessness greater than that needed to pull a trigger. I