Fear Nothing by Dean Koontz Page B

remains at a very high temperature and featured emission-control devices, thin smoke escaped the chimney. Frank conducted only nocturnal cremations out of respect for bereaved family members or friends who might, in daylight, glance at the hilltop mortuary from lower in town and see the last of their loved ones slipping skyward in wispy gray curls.
    Conveniently for us, Bobby’s father, Anson, was the editor in chief of the
Moonlight Bay Gazette.
Bobby used his connections and his familiarity with the newspaper offices to get us the most current information about deaths by accident and by natural causes.
    We always knew when Frank Kirk had a fresh one, but we couldn’t be sure whether he was going to embalm it or cremate it. Immediately after sunset, we would ride our bikes to the vicinity of the mortuary and then creep onto the property, waiting at the crematorium window either until the action began or until we had to admit at last that this one was not going to be a burning.
    Mr. Garth, the sixty-year-old president of the First National Bank, died of a heart attack in late October. We watched him go into the fire.
    In November, a carpenter named Henry Aimes fell off a roof and broke his neck. Although Aimes was cremated, Bobby and I saw nothing of the process, because Frank Kirk or his assistant remembered to close the slats on the Levolor blind.
    The blinds were open the second week in December, however, when we returned for the cremation of Rebecca Acquilain. She was married to Tom Acquilain, a math teacher at the junior high school where Bobby attended classes but I did not. Mrs. Acquilain, the town librarian, was only thirty, the mother of a five-year-old boy named Devlin.
    Lying on the gurney, swathed in a sheet from the neck down, Mrs. Acquilain was so beautiful that her face was not merely a vision upon our eyes but a weight upon our chests. We could not breathe.
    We had realized, I suppose, that she was a pretty woman, but we had never mooned over her. She was the librarian, after all, and someone’s mother, while we were thirteen and inclined not to notice beauty that was as quiet as starlight dropping from the sky and as clear as rainwater. The kind of woman who appeared nude on playing cards had the flash that drew our eyes. Until now, we had often looked at Mrs. Acquilain but had never
seen
her.
    Death had not ravaged her, for she had died quickly. A flaw in a cerebral artery wall, no doubt with her from birth but never suspected, swelled and burst in the course of one afternoon. She was gone in hours.
    As she lay on the mortuary gurney, her eyes were closed. Her features were relaxed. She seemed to be sleeping; in fact, her mouth was curved slightly, as though she were having a pleasant dream.
    When the two morticians removed the sheet to convey Mrs. Acquilain into the cardboard case and then into the cremator, Bobby and I saw that she was slim, exquisitely proportioned, lovely beyond the power of words to describe. This was a beauty exceeding mere eroticism, and we didn’t look at her with morbid desire but with awe.
    She looked so young.
    She looked immortal.
    The morticians conveyed her to the furnace with what seemed to be unusual gentleness and respect. When the door was closed behind the dead woman, Frank Kirk stripped off his latex gloves and blotted the back of one hand against his left eye and then his right. It was not perspiration that he wiped away.
    During other cremations, Frank and his assistant had chatted almost continuously, though we could not quite hear what they said. This night, they spoke hardly at all.
    Bobby and I were silent, too.
    We returned the bench to the patio. We crept off Frank Kirk’s property.
    After retrieving our bicycles, we rode through Moonlight Bay by way of its darkest streets.
    We went to the beach.
    At this hour, in this season, the broad strand was deserted. Behind us, as gorgeous as phoenix feathers, nesting on the hills and fluttering through a wealth of