Fear Nothing

the way he had come, and the jittery sound seemed to issue not from overhead but from within him, as though locusts were swarming in his blood.
        His shadow repeatedly darted ahead of him and then leaped behind until he passed beyond the arcing sword of light from the swinging fixture, became one with the darkness, and rounded the corner into the other arm of the L-shaped room.
        I returned the Glock to my jacket pocket.
        From the cover of the dysfunctional creche, I watched Father Tom Eliot. He was lying at the foot of the stairs, in the fetal position, curled around his pain.
        I considered going to him to determine if he was seriously hurt, and to learn what I could about the circumstances that lay behind the confrontation I had just witnessed, but I was reluctant to reveal myself. I stayed where I was.
        Any enemy of Jesse Pinn's should be an ally of mine - but I could not be certain of Father Tom's goodwill. Although adversaries, the priest and the mortician were players in some mysterious underworld of which I had been utterly unaware until this very night, so each of them had more in common with the other than with me. I could easily imagine that, at the sight of me, Father Tom would scream for Jesse Pinn, and that the undertaker would fly back, black suit flapping, with the inhuman caterwaul vibrating between his thin lips.
        Besides, Pinn and his crew evidently were holding the priest's sister somewhere. Possession of her gave them a lever and fulcrum with which to move Father Tom, while I had no leverage whatsoever.
        The chilling music of the torquing chains gradually faded, and the sword of light described a steadily diminishing arc.
        Without a protest, without even an involuntary groan, the priest drew himself to his knees, gathered himself to his feet. He was not able to stand fully erect. Hunched like an ape and no longer comic in any aspect of face or body, with one hand on the railing, he began to pull himself laboriously up the steep, creaking steps toward the church above.
        When at last he reached the top, he would switch off the lights, and I would be left here below in a darkness that even St. Bernadette herself, miracle worker of Lourdes, would find daunting. Time to go.
        Before retracing my path through the life-size figures of the creche, I raised my eyes for the first time to the painted eyes of the lute-playing angel in front of me-and thought I saw a blue to match my own. I studied the rest of the lacquered-plaster features and, although the light was weak, I was sure that this angel and I shared a face.
        This resemblance paralyzed me with confusion, and I struggled to understand how this Christopher Snow angel could have been here waiting for me. I have rarely seen my own face in brightness, but I know its reflection from the mirrors of my dimly lit rooms, and this was a similar light. This was unquestionably me: beatific as I am not, idealized, but me.
        Since my experience in the hospital garage, every incident and object seemed to have significance. No longer could I entertain the possibility of coincidence. Everywhere I looked, the world oozed uncanniness.
        This was, of course, the route to madness: viewing all of life as one elaborate conspiracy conducted by elite manipulators who see all and know all. The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut. Cosmically speaking, we are barely able to tie our shoes. If there is, indeed, some secret order to the universe, it is not of our doing, and we are probably not even capable of apprehending it.
        The priest was a third of the way up the stairs.
        Stupefied, I studied the angel.
        Many nights during the Christmas season, year after year, I had cycled along the street on which St. Bernadette's stood. The creche had been arranged on the front lawn of the church, each figure in its proper place, none of the gift-bearing magi posing as a proctologist to camels - and this angel had not been there. Or I hadn't realized that it was there. The likely explanation, of course, was that the display was too brightly lighted for me to risk admiring it; the Christopher Snow angel had been part of the scene, but I had always turned my face from