Fear Nothing

was a thing, death itself, a monster, a fist-in-the-face reminder that we all perish and rot and turn to dust. I'm ashamed to say that I hated her a little because I'd felt obliged to come upstairs to help her, hated her for having put me in this vise, hated myself for hating her, my loving nurse, hated her for making me myself. This greasy emotional spiral was actually less about hatred than about panic, but it involved hatred nonetheless.
        Sometimes there is no darker place than our own thoughts: the moonless midnight of the mind.
        My hands were clammy. The butt of the pistol was slick with cold perspiration.
        I stopped chasing ghosts and reluctantly returned to the upstairs hallway. A doll was waiting for me.
        This was one of the largest from Angela's hobby-room shelves, nearly two feet high. It sat on the floor, legs splayed, facing me in the light that came through the open door from the only room that I hadn't yet explored, the one opposite the hall bath. Its arms were outstretched, and something hung across both its hands.
        This was not good.
        I know not good when I see it, and this was fully, totally, radically not good .
        In the movies, a development like the appearance of this doll was inevitably followed by the dramatic entrance of a really big guy with a bad attitude. A really big guy wearing a cool hockey mask. Or a hood. He'd be carrying an even cooler chain saw or a compressed-air nail gun or, in an unplugged mood, an ax big enough to decapitate a T-Rex.
        I glanced into the hobby room, which was still half illuminated by the worktable lamp. No intruder lurked there.
        Move. To the hall bathroom. It was still deserted. I needed to use the facilities. Not a convenient time. Move.
        Now to the doll, which was dressed in black sneakers, black jeans, and a black T-shirt. The object in its hands was a navy-blue cap with two words embroidered in ruby-red thread above the bill: Mystery Train .
        For a moment I thought it was a cap like mine. Then I saw that it was my own, which I'd left downstairs on the kitchen table.
        Between glances at the head of the stairs and at the open door to the only room that I hadn't searched, expecting trouble from one source or the other, I plucked the cap from the small china hands. I pulled it on my head.
        In the right light and circumstances, any doll can have an eerie or evil aspect. This was different, because not a single feature in this bisque face struck me as malevolent, yet the skin on the back of my neck creped like Halloween-party bunting.
        What spooked me was not any strangeness about the doll but an uncanny familiarity: It had my face. It had been modeled after me.
        I was simultaneously touched and creeped out. Angela had cared for me enough to sculpt my features meticulously, to memorialize me lovingly in one of her creations and keep it upon her shelves of favorites. Yet unexpectedly coming upon such an image of oneself wakes primitive fears - as if I might touch this fetish and instantly find my mind and soul trapped within it, while some malignant spirit, previously immobilized in the doll, came forth to establish itself in my flesh. Gleeful at its release, it would lurch into the night to crack virgins' skulls and eat the hearts of babies in my name.
        In ordinary times - if such times exist - I am entertained by an unusually vivid imagination. Bobby Halloway calls it, with some mockery, “the three-hundred-ring circus of your mind.” This is no doubt a quality I inherited from my mother and father, who were intelligent enough to know that little could be known, inquisitive enough never to stop learning, and perceptive enough to understand that all things and all events contain infinite possibilities. When I was a child, they read to me the verses of A. A. Milne and Beatrix Potter but also, certain that I was precocious, Donald Justice and Wallace Stevens. Thereafter, my imagination has always churned with images from lines of verse: from Timothy Tim's ten pink toes to fireflies twitching in the blood. In extraordinary times - such as this night of stolen cadavers - I am too imaginative for my own good, and in the three-hundred-ring circus of my mind, all the tigers wait to kill their trainers and all the clowns hide butcher knives and evil hearts under their baggy clothes.
         Move .
        One more room. Check it out, protect my