Relentless

that is astonished by the universe and life, that knows regardless of the vicissitudes of existence, we were born for freedom and for joy and for laughter. Cullen, there are another half dozen things he said of me that he says of you in the identical language, in the same tone of scorn and near outrage. And this makes me afraid for you, very afraid for you and everyone you love.”
    So rapidly and urgently had he spoken that while I followed all he said, I did not fully grasp the darker implications of his words or why, sentence by sentence, his anxiety curdled into anguish.
    John Clitherow paused only to take a deep breath, and he resumed before I could ask a question: “I wrote Waxx’s newspaper, a response to the review of my book. Wasn’t an angry word in it. I kept it brief and humorous—and only noted a couple of the many errors of fact in his summary of the plot. Five days later, my wife and I came home from an evening at the theater. Laurel, the baby-sitter, was asleep on the sofa, and the kids were safe in bed. But after Laurel had gone home, I found my letter to Waxx’s newspaper in my study. It was the original that I had mailed, now pinned to my desk by a knife. The blade of the knife was wet with blood. In the low lamplight, Ihad seen our cat sleeping on the office sofa, and now I saw the stain under her, and she was not sleeping. Right then the phone rang, and though the caller’s ID was blocked, I took the call. He said only, ‘Doom,’ and hung up. I’d never heard his voice, but I knew it had to be Waxx.”
    Because I was on the cell, no phone cord tethered me to the desk, and I rose from the chair. Sitting, I could not draw a deep breath, for I felt as though a passive posture invited an attack. Movement was imperative, being ready to respond, being watchful.
    “He’s been here,” I told Clitherow, “but I can’t prove it.”
    I described Waxx’s bold intrusion the previous afternoon, when he had toured the house with such nonchalance that it seemed as if he operated under the misapprehension that our home was a public establishment.
    The note of anguish in Clitherow’s voice phased into something colder, what seemed to me to be an icy despair. “Get out of there. Don’t spend another night.”
    Pacing, I quickly told him about the critic’s second visit, the Tasering in the lightless bedroom.
    “Go now,” he said. “Right now. Go somewhere you have no previous connection, somewhere he can’t find you.”
    “That’s more or less the plan. My wife must be almost finished packing. We—”
    “Now,”
Clitherow insisted. “You can’t prove he Tasered you.
I
can’t prove he killed my mother and father, but he did.”
    The air seemed to have thickened, offering such resistance that I came to a halt.
    “I can’t prove he killed Margaret, my wife, but the sonofabitch did. He did. It was him.”
    As he spoke, I stepped out of my study, into the foyer, from which I could see the hallway that served all the ground-floor rooms.
    “I can’t prove he killed Emily and Sarah….” Clitherow’s voice broke on
Emily
and faltered to a halt on
Sarah
.
    He’d had two daughters. Both under the age of ten.
    Although much journalism has become advocacy in our time, I read various sources of news for the challenge of sifting the facts from the deceit and the delusion. So many people close to a novelist as well known as John Clitherow could not have suffered untimely deaths without exciting the nose for blood that still can wake a beguiled reporter to recognize genuine injustice. But I had seen nothing about this storm of homicide that tore his life asunder and blew him into hiding.
    If Waxx had visited our house only once, if I had not been Tasered, I might not have believed Clitherow’s claims. His story was cogent, his narrative voice convincing; yet the high body count—and the consequent implication that Waxx was not merely a sociopath of epic proportions but instead virtually a fiend—was flamboyant in a way that his novels never were.
    Recent events reminded me, however, that truth is paradoxical, that it is always stranger than fiction. We invent fiction either to distract ourselves from the world—and thus from the truth of things— or to explain the world to ourselves, but we cannot invent truth, which simply
is
. Truth, when we recognize it, always surprises us, which is why we so seldom choose to recognize it; we abhor profound surprises and prefer what is familiar,