Fear Nothing (Moonlight Bay, #1)

by Dean Koontz

Perhaps this is because animals, unlike some people, have always accepted me for what I am. The four-legged citizens of Moonlight Bay seem to possess a more complex understanding of life—as well as more kindness—than at least some of my neighbors.

anthropomorphizing

Cancer was only fate, not murder—unless you wanted to try bringing criminal charges against God.

More than that, he loved me as no one left on earth could love me, as only a parent could love a damaged child. He understood me as perhaps no one would ever understand me again.

Does anyone else ever feel like tbis?

“I swear he knows.” “Sure. Animals know things.”

My mother died suddenly. Although I know that she understood the profound depth of my feeling for her, I wish that I had been able to express it to her adequately on that last day of her life.

Now my father—still with me, if only tenuously—did not hear me when I said, “You gave me life.”

His hand remained cool and limp. I held it anyway, as if to anchor him to this world until I could say good-bye properly.

I could not immediately let go of his slack hand. I kissed his forehead, his rough cheek.

From the hospital room, I telephoned Sandy Kirk at Kirk’s Funeral Home, with whom my father himself had made arrangements weeks ago. In accordance with Dad’s wishes, he was to be cremated.

This was not my father, only his body. My father had gone elsewhere. I opted not to pull the sheet back for one last look at Dad’s sallow face. This wasn’t how I wanted to remember him.

One thing I love about people is their ability to be lifted so high by the smallest drafts of hope.

sanctum sanctorum—“where

We can never know many of the people in our lives, not truly know them, regardless of how deeply we believe that we see into them. Most of them are murky ponds, containing infinite layers of suspended particles, stirred by strange currents in their greatest depths.

Fear nothing. Sasha said, “Life stinks.” “It’s just the rules,” I said. “To get in the game, we have to agree to stop playing someday.”

William Dean Howells, the great poet, wrote that death is at the bottom of everyone’s cup.

Sometimes there is no darker place than our own thoughts: the moonless midnight of the mind.

We are told that the simple minds of animals are not capable of encompassing the concept of their own mortality. Yet every animal possesses a survival instinct and recognizes danger. If it struggles to survive, it understands death, no matter what the scientists and the philosophers might say. This is not New Age sentimentalism. This is simply common sense.

“We’re not here to leave a mark, bro. Monuments, legacies, marks—that’s where we always go wrong. We’re here to revel in the world, to soak in the awesomeness of it, to enjoy the ride.”

“The world’s maximum perfect as it is, beauty from horizon to horizon. Any mark any of us tries to leave—hell, it’s only graffiti. Nothing can improve on the world we’ve been given. Any mark anyone leaves is no better than vandalism.”

Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life—and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.

I do not allow myself to cry. I would rather be a bone worn to dry splinters by the teeth of sorrow than a sponge wrung ceaselessly in its hands.

by their nature, both luck and time run out,

believe in the mercy of Christ.

Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love, which means that to live I must care not about what I am but about what I can become, not about the past but about the future, not even so much about myself as about the bright circle of friends who provide the only light in which I am able to flourish.

Life is shit.

Having only four guiding principles: one, do as little harm to others as possible; two, be there always for your friends; three, be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; four, grab all the fun you can. Put no stock in the opinions of anyone but those closest to you. Forget about leaving a mark on the world. Ignore the great issues of your time and thereby improve your digestion. Don’t dwell in the past. Don’t worry about the future. Live in the moment. Trust in the purpose of your existence and let meaning come to you instead of straining to discover it. When life throws a hard punch, roll with it—but roll with laughter. Catch the wave, dude.

Dead Town is my name for it, not what it was called when Fort Wyvern thrived. It consists of more than three thousand single-family cottages and duplex bungalows in which married active-duty personnel and their dependents were housed if they chose to live on base. Architecturally, these humble structures have little to recommend them, and each is virtually identical to the one next door; they provided the minimum of comforts to the mostly young families who occupied them, each for only a couple of years at a time, over the war-filled decades. But in spite of their sameness, these are pleasant houses, and when you walk through their empty rooms, you can feel that life was lived well in them, with lovemaking and laughter and gatherings of friends.

These days the streets of Dead Town, laid out in a military grid, feature drifts of dust against the curbs and dry tumbleweeds waiting for wind. After the rainy season, the grass quickly turns brown and stays that shade most of the year. The shrubs are all withered, and many of the trees are dead, their leafless branches blacker than the black sky at which they seem to claw. Mice have the houses to themselves, and birds build nests on the front-door lintels, painting the stoops with their droppings.

You might expect that the structures would either be maintained against the real possibility of future need or efficiently razed, but there is no money for either solution. The materials and the fixtures of the buildings have less value than the cost of salvaging them, so no contract can be negotiated to dispose of them in that manner. For the time being, they are left to deteriorate in the elements much as the ghost towns of the gold-mining era were abandoned. Wandering through Dead Town, you feel as though everyone in the world has vanished or died of a plague and that you are alone on the face of the earth. Or that you have gone mad and exist now in a grim solipsist fantasy, surrounded by people you refuse to see. Or that you have died and gone to Hell, where your particular damnation consists of eternal isolation. When you see a scruffy coyote or two prowling between the houses, lean of flank, with long teeth and fiery eyes, they appear to be d...

Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting: that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any one of us as are the present and the past.

With a concession of responsibility unmatched by generations before ours, we have entrusted our lives and futures to professionals and experts who convince us that we have too little knowledge or wit to make any decisions of importance about the management of society. This is the consequence of our gullibility and laziness.

I’m going to try to change that about myself. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to do it. After all, that’s what the world is now about: change. Relentless change.

We are an arrogant species, full of terrible potential, but we also have a great capacity for love, friendship, generosity, kindness, faith, hope, and joy. How we perished by our own hand may be more important than how we came into existence in the first place—which is a mystery that we will now never solve.