to the back of the house. A deep porch stepped down to a seventy-foot lap pool, an enormous brick patio, and formal rose gardens—none of which could be seen from the public rooms of the funeral home.
A town the size of ours welcomes nearly two hundred newborns each year while losing a hundred citizens to death. There were only two funeral homes, and Kirk’s probably received over 70 percent of this business—plus half that from the smaller towns in the county. Death was a good living for Sandy.
The view from the patio must have been breathtaking in daylight: unpopulated hills rising in gentle folds as far to the east as the eye could see, graced by scattered oaks with gnarled black trunks. Now the shrouded hills lay like sleeping giants under pale sheets.
When I saw no one at the lighted rear windows, I quickly crossed the patio. The moon, white as a rose petal, floated on the inky waters of the swimming pool.
The house adjoined a spacious L-shaped garage, which embraced a motor court that could be entered only from the front. The garage accommodated two hearses and Sandy’s personal vehicles—but also, at the end of the wing farthest from the residence, the crematorium.
I slipped around the corner of the garage, along the back of the second arm of the L, where immense eucalyptus trees blocked most of the moonlight. The air was redolent of their medicinal fragrance, and a carpet of dead leaves crunched underfoot.
No corner of Moonlight Bay is unknown to me—especially not this one. Most of my nights have been spent in the exploration of our special town, which has resulted in some macabre discoveries.
Ahead, on my left, frosty light marked the crematorium window. I approached it with the conviction—correct, as it turned out—that I was about to see something stranger and far worse than what Bobby Halloway and I had seen on an October night when we were thirteen….
A decade and a half ago, I’d had as morbid a streak as any boy my age, was as fascinated as all boys are by the mystery and lurid glamour of death. Bobby Halloway and I, friends even then, thought it was daring to prowl the undertaker’s property in search of the repulsive, the ghoulish, the shocking.
I can’t recall what we expected—or hoped—to find. A collection of human skulls? A porch swing made of bones? A secret laboratory where the deceptively normal-looking Frank Kirk and his deceptively normal-looking son Sandy called down lightning bolts from storm clouds to reanimate our dead neighbors and use them as slaves to do the cooking and housecleaning?
Perhaps we expected to stumble upon a shrine to the evil gods Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth in some sinister bramble-festooned end of the rose garden. Bobby and I were reading a lot of H. P. Lovecraft in those days.
Bobby says we were a couple of weird kids. I say we were weird, for sure, but neither more nor less weird than other boys.
Bobby says maybe so, but the other boys gradually grew out of their weirdness while we’ve grown further into ours.
I don’t agree with Bobby on this one. I don’t believe that I’m any more weird than anyone else I’ve ever met. In fact, I’m a damn sight less weird than some.
Which is true of Bobby, too. But because he treasures his weirdness, he wants me to believe in and treasure mine.
He insists on his weirdness. He says that by acknowledging and embracing our weirdness, we are in greater harmony with nature—because nature is deeply weird.
Anyway, one October night, behind the funeral-home garage, Bobby Halloway and I found the crematorium window. We were attracted to it by an eldritch light that throbbed against the glass.
Because the window was set high, we were not tall enough to peer inside. With the stealth of commandos scouting an enemy encampment, we snatched a teak bench from the patio and carried it behind the garage, where we positioned it under the glimmering window.
Side by side on the bench, we were able to reconnoiter the scene together. The interior of the window was covered by a Levolor blind; but someone had forgotten to close the slats, giving us a clear view of Frank Kirk and an assistant at work.
One remove from the room, the light was not bright enough to cause me harm. At least that was what I told myself as I pressed my nose to the pane.
Even though I had learned to be a singularly cautious boy, I was