Fear Nothing by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

depths.
    His voice remained that of a compassionate courtier to the bereaved. “Oh, Christopher…I’m sorry, but the process has begun.”
    “You’ve already put him in the furnace?”
    Having grown up in a business conducted with a richness of euphemisms, Sandy winced at my bluntness. “The deceased is in the cremator, yes.”
    “Wasn’t that terribly quick?”
    “In our work, there’s no wisdom in delay. If only I’d known you were coming…”
    I wondered if his beetle-shell eyes would be able to meet mine so boldly if there had been enough light for me to see their true green color.
    Into my silence, he said, “Christopher, I’m so distressed by this, seeing you in this pain, knowing I could have helped.”
    In my odd life, I have had much experience of some things and little of others. Although I am a foreigner to the day, I know the night as no one else can know it. Although I have been the object on which ignorant fools have sometimes spent their cruelty, most of my understanding of the human heart comes from my relationships with my parents and with those good friends who, like me, live primarily between sunset and dawn; consequently, I have seldom encountered hurtful deception.
    I was embarrassed by Sandy’s deceit, as though it shamed not merely him but also me, and I couldn’t meet his obsidian stare any longer. I lowered my head and gazed at the porch floor.
    Mistaking my embarrassment for tongue-binding grief, he stepped onto the porch and put one hand on my shoulder.
    I managed not to recoil.
    “My business is comforting folks, Christopher, and I’m good at it. But truthfully—I have no words that make sense of death or make it easier to bear.”
    I wanted to kick his ass.
    “I’ll be okay,” I said, realizing that I had to get away from him before I did something rash.
    “What I hear myself saying to most folks is all the platitudes you’d never find in the poetry your dad loved, so I’m not going to repeat them to you, not to you of all people.”
    Keeping my head down, nodding, I eased backward, out from under his hand. “Thanks, Mr. Kirk. I’m sorry to’ve bothered you.”
    “You didn’t bother me. Of course you didn’t. I only wish you’d called ahead. I’d have been able to…delay.”
    “Not your fault. It’s all right. Really.”
    Having backed off the stepless brick porch onto the blacktop under the portico, I turned away from Sandy.
    Retreating once more to that doorway between two darknesses, he said, “Have you given any thought to the service—when you want to hold it, how you want it conducted?”
    “No. No, not yet. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
    As I walked away, Sandy said, “Christopher, are you all right?”
    Facing him from a little distance this time, I spoke in a numb, inflectionless voice that was only half calculated: “Yeah. I’m all right. I’ll be okay. Thanks, Mr. Kirk.”
    “I wish you had called ahead.”
    Shrugging, I jammed my hands in my jacket pockets, turned from the house once more, and walked past the Pietà.
    Flecks of mica were in the mix from which the replica had been poured, and the big moon glimmered in those tiny chips, so that tears appeared to shimmer on the cheeks of Our Lady of Cast Concrete.
    I resisted the urge to glance back at the undertaker. I was certain he was still watching me.
    I continued down the lane between the forlorn, whispering trees. The temperature had fallen only into the low sixties. The onshore breeze was pure after its journey across thousands of miles of ocean, bearing nothing but the faintest whiff of brine.
    Long after the slope of the driveway had taken me out of Sandy’s line of sight, I looked back. I could see just the steeply pitched roof and chimneys, somber forms against the star-salted sky.
    I moved off the blacktop onto grass, and I headed uphill again, this time in the sheltering shadows of foliage. The pepper trees braided the moon in their long tresses.

 
    6
    The funeral-home