It was Mother's Day, and I was going a hundred and thirty-five miles an hour.

We lived at seventy-five hundred feet in Evergreen, Colorado, west of Denver. I was thirty-four, a vice president at a wireless technology company, and a father. That night my home had been a bad place to be, worse than usual, and at ten o'clock I put a heavy metal CD in a very fast car and drove away from it.

Anyone who has flown into Denver to ski knows the road. Coming down the eastern slope of the Rockies the highway drops on a twelve percent grade into a hard curve, and above the lanes hangs a green sign as wide as the road, lit with flashing yellow. DANGER. 35 MPH CURVE. DANGER. SLOW.

I drove that road to work every day. I knew exactly what it was. Cars went off that cliff, and the deaths were in the newspaper.

What I felt coming under those lights was not rage. It was a flat crushing weight, and underneath it something quieter and worse: that my waking life had become difficult to distinguish from the nightmares I had been having every night since I was a small boy, and that I could not leave, because I loved my children.

Traffic was light. Denver lay below me like a floor of light. On my left, a cliff face rose straight up. On my right, a guardrail, and past it nothing.

Entering the curve I felt the back-end shimmy. I knocked the stick out of sixth into neutral, because touching the brakes would have finished it, and for a moment the car steadied. Then it came around backwards.

Everything slowed down, exactly the way people say it does. I put both hands on the wheel, braced my arms, and felt no panic at all. What I felt was relief. This is how I die, I thought, and I was glad.

Then something pressed me down into the seat.

I have never found a good way to describe it. It came from the top of my head to my feet, and it covered even my bare arms where they were braced. The closest I can get is that it was heavy and soft at once, as though I were being held down by something enormous and gentle. It was not the car doing it.

The rear of the car hit the rising cliff with a roar, and the windshield became a wave of white; every piece of it turned to razor gravel and came at my face. Witnesses told the police the car went end over end three times in the air. It struck the cliff again, spun flat across all eight lanes like a thrown frisbee, cleared the guardrail and dropped into the gorge.

Through all of it I felt nothing bad. I felt held.

I remember the blow that came up my spine when we hit the bottom. Dust and gravel blew through the empty window frames, and rocks landed in my lap. The engine ticked. Smoke came up through the hood, which was no longer where a hood should be. The pressure lifted, and I was sitting there with both hands still on the wheel, alive and extremely surprised about it.

I found my phone in the passenger footwell with its faceplate broken off; the screen cracked, and the antenna snapped. I blew the dust off and it lit up. I called a friend to come and get me. Then I tried to pry my CD out of the player, which tells you something about what shock does to a man's priorities, but the frame was so twisted it would not come.

The front of the car was gone. So was the back. There was no rubber left on any of the four wheels, only jagged metal around the axles, and the struts stood up out of the body like snapped bones. I crawled out through the passenger window on my hands and knees, because the car lay that low.

Then I checked myself. Hands, arms, legs. I felt my face carefully, expecting to find it opened up by that wave of glass.

There was no blood anywhere. Not a scratch, not a bruise, not one broken bone.

I was a decent climber in those days, and my friend was coming, so I went up the hundred-foot cliff face to meet him. I came over the guardrail into flashing lights and a crowd of people looking at me as though I were something that had crawled out of a grave. The paramedics kept me in the ambulance for an hour and a half, two of them just sitting there watching me. I asked when I could go.

They said: not yet. We're waiting for internal bleeding. People go off that cliff a great deal slower than you were going. How are you even alive?

I got home late. My wife opened the door and looked at me and said:

"I guess God didn't want you, either."

II

I should go back because that sentence did not land on a stranger. It landed on a man who had believed it about himself for thirty-four years.

God is real. I have known that from my earliest memory, and I have never once doubted it. That is not the interesting part of my story. The interesting part is that I could know God was real, and know that Jesus was real, and still be entirely certain that His mercy was for other people.

I could not look at images of His face. I do not mean I disliked them. I mean I did not feel worthy to raise my eyes to them.

I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism, at the age of fifty-seven. My wife suggested it, gently, out of nowhere. I did not want the label, and I took the test to prove her wrong, and I scored a perfect hundred. What I felt when I read the list of traits was not shame. It was a relief because it explained half a century of things I had assumed were simply my own fault.

It came with a mind that could hold onto a problem for a very long time. My mother says I was an easy baby: give me a few pots and pans and I would study and manipulate them for hours.

It also came with a permanent low hum of anxiety, and a social phobia so complete that I could not speak to people. Not strangers, not classmates, not my own mother and father. If anyone addressed me, I would go scarlet and freeze. I was certain that if I opened my mouth I would give offense and be rejected, so I kept it shut. I was the boy at the edge of the room, wanting in.

And it came with the nightmares.

Every night. Not the ordinary kind. In them I was hunted through the dark by figures that meant to tear me apart and eat me, and they were vivid, and they were patient, and they were hungry. I would wake with my heart slamming, soaked, sometimes having wet the bed, and lie there in the dark until it got light.

Here is the part I have never been able to explain. I had never seen a monster of any kind. We were not allowed to watch the family's new color television, that was for adults. I had never been inside a movie theater. I read constantly, but what I was given were the Hardy Boys and Tom Sawyer and cowboy stories. I had never so much as opened a comic book with a creature in it.

I had no idea where the horrific creatures came from. And because I could not speak to anyone about anything, I never asked.

We moved every year or so, my father climbing a corporation, and the one constant place in my life, the only room on earth where I felt safe, was a Catholic church. I could feel God there. It was unmistakable and it never failed. And even there, kneeling in the safest place I knew, I assumed that I was one more disappointment to Him, exactly as I was to everyone else.

III

I built fortresses.

The summer after third grade I took a hatchet and a bow saw out of my father's garage and walked out of our suburb in Hamburg, New York, across a farm and a few miles further, into a national forest. I found a ridge above a creek, high enough that I judged it would not flood, and I began to cut down trees.

I did this every day for weeks, alone, from after breakfast until nearly dark. I trimmed the trunks, cut them to length, dragged them up to the site — the heaviest things I had ever lifted — notched the ends, and started laying up walls.

One day the saw came off a branch and ran across the back of my left hand. I still have the scars. I bled the whole way home, and my mother, who had five children and no time, cleaned the wounds and then asked what on earth I had been doing. I told her I was building a log cabin in the woods. She laughed. I did not laugh back, because I never did. She said, what woods? There were no woods near us.

I told her about the forest past the farm at the eastern edge of the neighborhood, and her eyes went wide, and she did not believe me. Of course she did not. I was seven years old.

She kept me home until Saturday, when my father was back from the flour mill, and sent him with me to find out the truth. We walked out of the neighborhood, climbed a barbed wire fence, crossed a tilled field in the heat, and crawled through another fence into the trees. To his credit, he did not complain once.

I took him along the game path to the creek and up the creek to my ridge, and there it was: a half-built log cabin, walls up to his waist, two window openings already framed.

He said: You built this? Yourself?

I could see he did not believe me. So I walked him over to the last log I had been working, where his orange bow saw and blue-handled hatchet lay exactly where I had dropped them, and I showed him the half-cut branch at the base of it, and the dried blood down the side of the wood.

Then he believed me.

In seventh grade, in Oklahoma, I dug a two-room fort underground in a pasture, with a working fireplace and log benches along the walls. In eighth grade I built a dam across a fifteen-foot ravine that backed up a pond a hundred yards long; the rancher who owned the land asked my father who had made it. I would need water, when the time came to hide.

By then the nightmares had changed. The things in them had begun to catch me. And one night I dreamed of a figure that was not like the others — enormous, and so malevolent that I have never found language for it — and it wanted to take me with it.

At fifteen I had still never read a frightening book or seen a frightening film. What I asked my mother for were college textbooks, so I could teach myself Russian, in case of war with the Soviets, and how to design a helicopter. If I could build one, I thought, I could get away.

From what, I could not have told you. I never once connected it to the dreams.

IV

At sixteen I found beer, and beer gave me friends.

I want to be honest about that, because it is the shape of the next twenty years. Alcohol got me past the wall for a few hours at a time, and a few hours at a time was enough to have people around me. It was also how I learned, eventually, that other people did not wake up every morning in terror. I had assumed everyone did.

Girls, I was interested in. Girls, I could not speak to at all.

I had thought about the priesthood — the church being the only place I had ever felt safe — and I set it aside, because if I ever did find the love I wanted and then failed at that too, I would have disappointed Him worse than before.

I took an engineering degree, then economics, and went into wireless technology. I read constantly outside of work, partly because ideas fascinated me and partly because a book cannot reject you. A doctor told me my blood type was rare and went only to newborns needing their blood replaced, and that each unit served two of them. So I began giving every twelve weeks. I am sixty-six now. In forty-five years I have missed twice. If Christ could give His blood for us, I could not see how to justify keeping mine.

In my late twenties I married. I will not go into that marriage, because wonderful children came out of it and I love them. I will say only this. Two days before the wedding, with people already traveling, I arrived at her parents' house and was informed there would be no Catholic priest. It had been my one condition. She had not even inquired. I went through with it anyway, because people were on their way, and because I did not believe I could do better.

An inability to read people is not a small thing. I could not tell who was safe. It made me easy to use for the sort of person who is looking for someone easy to manipulate.

At work I did well. I was the first vice president in that company's history under forty. We fought and won the wireless standards war of the 1990s and it built the networks everyone is holding in their hand right now. The better it went at the office, the worse it was at home, until the Mother's Day I have already described.

And afterwards I stayed seven more years, for the children, and my son came out of those tough years, and I am proud of him beyond measure.

I went to daily Mass in that period. The Eucharist was the only joy in it. But I never went to confession. Not once, not in years — because I was afraid of being turned away.

That is what unworthiness does. It will let you kneel in front of God every morning and keep you from asking Him for anything.

V

I divorced in 2001. That was no easier than the marriage.

I became a Eucharistic minister, and then took Communion to Catholics in hospitals, and I kept giving blood. And in between, I went looking for things that might kill me.

Fast cars, driven badly. Motorcycles with no helmet. Diving with sharks over open ocean. It was not despair with a plan. It was a man who did not particularly care to live still doing his best to be useful, and who found that the two could sit side by side without much trouble.

Then I found cave diving, and I loved it more than anything, and I want to be careful about why. In a flooded limestone cavern under the Yucatán there is no light at all except what you bring. There is absolute silence. There are no people to fail at talking to, no predators looking for a way in, no guilt about a life going wrong on the surface — and there are no demons in the dark down there. There is only God, and He is very close.

It also has the highest death rate of any sport on earth. That was, if I am honest, part of the attraction.

I had an expedition planned to push the mapped limit of a cave system in Mexico. It was a few months out when I went to sea.

VI

The race was Newport, Rhode Island, to Bermuda, in early November — a notoriously bad month in the North Atlantic. I arrived at the marina with a sea bag on my shoulder in falling snow. A tropical storm was coming up the coast, and a nor'easter was coming down from Canada, and the forecast had them meeting.

Seven boats went out at a cold, gray dawn into eight-foot seas, sleeting, in the thirties. Within twelve hours the two systems joined. Within twenty-four we were in a force twelve gale, one notch below hurricane, in thirty-five-foot seas. Two of us on deck at all times, one clipped in at the helm fighting to keep her from rolling, the other clipped in nearby in case the first went over the side — not that finding him would have been possible, because there was no turning that boat around in those seas.

In the first three days, three of the seven boats were dismasted and one was rolled completely over and came back up. We heard their distress calls on the radio.

I was seasick and I was strangely at peace. It was like being in the caves: a place of one simple problem, where my ordinary anxieties could not reach me. I had always loved the sea. I thought drowning would be a decent way to go.

The hard part was sleep. Below decks it was like being inside a cocktail shaker worked by a drunk, the hull booming, the rigging banging against seventy feet of mast. On the third night I came off the helm at midnight desperate for rest, timed the roll, and threw myself into a bunk narrower than my shoulders with the ceiling a foot above my face.

A rogue wave hit us on the port side and knocked her flat, mast in the water. I was thrown out of the bunk into what had been the wall. The ocean came in through the companionway. Four of us went up without harnesses onto a vertical deck in pitch dark, the only light a single lamp glowing under the water at the masthead and the captain's torch as he shouted orders while still strapped in. We freed the clutches; she came up, the engine caught, the pumps started.

I crawled back into my bunk soaked and shaking from the bitter cold, and I prayed. Not for safety. I prayed the prayer I had been praying for years: that I might one day have a creative life, and the love of a good woman.

I was quite sure God was tired of hearing it from me.

And then, in the middle of all that noise, a voice. A man's voice, with authority in it, and everything else went quiet around it.

He said: You will have your dream.

And then He said: But it won't happen the way you expect it to.

VII

I got up at four for my watch and came out of the galley into a different world. The storm was gone. The Milky Way stood horizon to horizon. It had come up into the sixties, warm as spring after what we had been through, and the sea had gone gentle. I clipped my lines to the stern rail, took the wheel, picked a star, and steered southeast for Bermuda.

It should have been a moment of joy. Instead, I spent it arguing with myself.

Would God speak to me? To a man who had never in his life felt part of anything, never worthy of anyone? Or had an exhausted mind simply produced what it most wanted to hear?

A hallucination, I decided. Obviously.

Except for that second sentence. But it won't happen the way you expect it to. If I were inventing a voice to comfort myself, why would I invent a warning?

So, I prayed again, and I was ashamed of the prayer even as I made it. I said: I know that if that really was You, then asking for this is ungrateful. But I need a sign. Please. Please give me a sign that it was You.

A brilliant white cross appeared in the sky to the east.

I stared at it and waited for it to go. I got chills across my whole body. It did not go. I held my hand out toward it with my thumb up and the cross ran from the tip of my thumb to my wrist, and it was as bright as a neon sign, and it stayed there for twenty or thirty minutes while I steered the boat and wept.

He really does care, I thought. Even for me. Even I am included in this.

I was forty-six years old. I told myself I had plenty of time.

VIII

Nine years went by and nothing happened except that I had given up the worst of the risky activities.

I came home from long hours running a company to weekends with my children. I understood by then that if God had pulled me out of that gorge, and out of the caves, and off that boat, He had presumably done it for a reason, and that the reason was probably not me. It was more likely something I was supposed to do for other people.

I had told my children fantastical bedtime stories for years, and my eldest daughter suggested I turn them into a book. I prayed about it for a long time and concluded that yes, I should write — but not that. Something bigger. A story that could reach people who would never pick up anything with a cross on the cover, and I could make them think about what a life aimed at nothing but the self actually costs.

I am an engineer and an economist. I took up fiction in my spare time, on airplanes and Sunday afternoons, with the serene confidence of a man who has no idea what he is doing.

The first draft was terrible.

And meanwhile I was fifty-five, and He had not delivered. So, I doubted. I went back over the memory of the voice in the storm and had to remind myself of the cross in the sky to steady my fears. I wondered whether I had failed God. In that period I finally made a general confession — the whole of it, all of it, everything I had been too frightened to bring for forty years — and the relief of it went through me like something tearing.

Still nothing.

IX

In 2015 I left the industry and moved to a fishing town in North Carolina of a few thousand people, where the road ends at the sea, so that I could write full time.

I knew exactly what I was giving up by going. In a town that size I was never going to meet anyone. I had not been in a relationship in five years, and I was tired of trying. The woman I had been praying for did not exist. I had made my peace with it and I went anyway, because the writing and the giving of blood were the parts I could still do.

That, it turned out, was the whole point.

He had told me it would not happen the way I expected. What He meant, I think, was that He was waiting for me to move first. Nine years I had waited for delivery. The moment I actually changed my life instead of asking for a different one, He was ready.

I met Angela Kirsten on the third Sunday of Lent, after Mass, on a rainy afternoon. We were introduced by my German Shepherd, Odin, who had opinions about who should be spoken to.

We matched on everything: God, family, art, books. We were both from small towns in Oklahoma. We had both gone to Oklahoma State and missed each other there by three months, which I have always taken as deliberate, because I would not have been ready.

She was raised Baptist. Nobody asked her to do anything; we simply went to Mass together every week, and after a while she said she wanted to become Catholic. So, after doing what was necessary, I got the sacrament I had gone through a wedding without thirty years earlier.

Not long after we married, I was diagnosed with invasive melanoma.

Angela had one place in the world she wanted to see, and it was Medjugorje. An opportunity came out of nowhere and I took it, and delayed my treatment to go, which no sensible person would recommend and which I would do again. The whole valley there is filled with something I can only call Spirit, thick as fog. Angela made her own teary general confession while we were there and considers it the turning point of her life.

And I went to a healing service, and a priest prayed over me, and my melanoma was gone.

I know how that sounds. I have spent a career among engineers. I am telling you what happened.

But that is not even the part I would put first.

After that healing, the demonic nightmares stopped. For by then, that is what they were.

Fifty-seven years of them. Every night since before I could read. They stopped, and in the years since, not one has come back.

X

Apocalypse is a Greek word that does not mean the end of the world. It means the unveiling. The Book of Revelation is the book of the uncovering — the moment the thing that was always there is finally seen.

I have come to believe that every one of us gets a personal apocalypse. Not a catastrophe. A revealing: the end of who we were, and the uncovering of what was standing behind it the whole time.

Mine was not the crash, though I would have told you it was. It was not the voice in the bunk, or even the cross over the Atlantic.

Mine was the slow, humiliating, decades-long discovery that the mercy applied even to me.

I never had to be argued into believing that God exists. What I had to be dragged into believing — through a wrecked car in a gorge, a gale in the North Atlantic, a sign in the sky I had no right to ask for, a woman introduced to me by a dog, and a valley in Bosnia where a fifty-seven-year darkness finally let go — is that He was not disappointed in me. That He never had been. That the thing I could not look at was looking back at me with love, and had been the entire time.

If you have read this far and something in it sounded familiar — if you believe every word of the faith and have quietly exempted yourself from the good part of it — then this was written for you, and I would ask you to consider that you may be as wrong as I was, and for exactly as long.

I write novels now. They are about a boy who builds something that can save everyone he loves, and about what it costs him to keep using it, and about a world that decides to worship what it has made. Ten books, when they are done.

I did not choose that subject. I have been dreaming about it since I was six years old.

Douglas Charles Smith writes fiction as Engelbrektsson. The Apocalypse Game is a ten-book series. Book One, The Black Awakening, will be given away free — a chapter a week, read aloud by the author — beginning the first Sunday of Advent.