Go back, go back. This is how you climb Mount Purgatory, by going on and back at once. And it gets easier (they all say) the farther up you get.

The low bells rang for Terce, calling the brothers from field and cell and workshop to their prayers.

3

Years before, Pierce set out from the little house he then had in the Faraway Hills, going by bus to New York City, where he had lived before that, thence to travel by air to the Old World. He was bound by a spell he had mistakenly cast on his own soul, and a number of small devils had attached themselves to him; they rose away like blackbirds from a cornfield when he shook himself hard enough spiritually, but settled again as soon as his attention was turned. He wasn't the first traveler to hope that if he moved fast enough they might fall behind.

The Rasmussen Foundation—Boney Rasmussen himself, in fact—had commissioned the trip, though Boney was now dead and what he wanted Pierce to accomplish abroad was perhaps therefore made moot. The Rasmussen Foundation had chosen Pierce because he had discovered, in the home of the late novelist Fellowes Kraft, an unfinished historical epic or fantasia of Kraft's that Boney Rasmussen had been sure was a map or a plan or a guide or a masque or an allegory of some kind that he, Pierce, was uniquely equipped to explicate. Pierce had with him a couple of just-pressed credit cards, the bills for which would be going to the Rasmussen Foundation's accountant ("Don't you lose them,” Rosie Rasmussen, the foundation's new director, told him as she tugged straight the lapels of his overcoat), and a pocketful of cash as well, in the form of azure Peregrine's Cheques, each with the familiar little etched cartouche containing St. James with staff and shell.

Also, he had a new red notebook, made in China; an old guidebook, also red, once the property of Fellowes Kraft, annotated by him in ghostly pencil; and Kraft's autobiography, Sit Down, Sorrow, a limited edition probably not meant for a vade mecum and looking to fall apart before the journey was done.

From those two books, and from some letters of Kraft's to Boney and other remains, Pierce and Rosie had worked out an itinerary. Modeled on Kraft's last trip to Europe in 1968, ten years before and more, it was basically a running line connecting certain map names, some of them very well known and some not: cities and towns, empty plains, fortresses, rooms in high castles, views from promontories. It was arranged west to east, for convenience; it ought maybe to have been more roundabout, narratively, but still it had a shape as laid out that wasn't untrue to the logic of his pursuit, logic being mostly all it had. It would bear him beyond the Iron Curtain if he followed it to the end, a prospect he found absurdly unsettling: to high mountains where ancient medicinal baths bubbled and stank, and in summer porcine party leaders (crowned heads, once) lay sunk in warm mud. From such a spa Kraft had years before sent home a telegram to Boney Rasmussen: Have what we sought for, packed w/ troubles in old kit bag.

At last to the marvelous caves, high up and down deep, that were marked with two stars in the red guidebook (Pierce was studying it again as his bus pulled into Port Authority station in New York City): one a printed star and the other drawn by Kraft in pencil, the quick star we make with a single running line. Crossing a narrow trestle bridge over a cascade that falls to the valley of the Elbe, we pass for 10 km along the Polish-Czech frontier, and then we join again the road from Joachimsbad. A short but stiff climb takes us up to the cavern entrance, from where guided tours descend several times daily to the wonders below the earth.

Despite this prolepsis, Pierce wasn't sure in what his pilgrimage would issue, if in anything. Certainly it was for no discoveries that she supposed he would make that Rosie Rasmussen had sent Pierce off; it was more for his own sake, as she sent her daughter off on some task—to gather flowers, or water them—when the griefs of life came too close, and threatened to engulf her. Pierce was supposed to have a book of his own to finish, too, that he was to do research for in the libraries of England and Europe; but what he hadn't told Rosie, sure that if she knew she would withdraw the foundation's offer, was that there was no book; he had ceased trying to write it.

These nesting negatives—the thing Fellowes Kraft had not really brought home, or Boney had not got from him; the book he hadn't finished, and the one Pierce couldn't write; Rosie's unbelief, and the untruths of the ages that in her opinion had fed Boney's unwillingness to see life, and death, as they are—ought to have added up to only a bigger nothing, but descending from the bus at Port Authority Pierce didn't feel foolish or imposed upon, or even as wretched as he had long been feeling. The air—his own, not the city's—seemed terribly clear for once, the world somber and chastened, emptied somehow but real: as it can seem the day after a dreadful storm-driven argument with a loved one, in which things long unsaid are said or shouted, and then can never be withdrawn. What now? you think on such a day. What now?

He climbed from the bus at the central station and went out into the streets. It was February, and the stirred pudding of snow and filth was thick; the year was an abyssal one in the life of his old city, all former hopes seemingly defeated and the new wealth, though coming on, not yet apparent or even able to be conceived of, by Pierce anyway.

First he had to go twenty blocks south, to where his agent had her office, not different from her apartment, a place he'd never seen before. Julie Rosengarten had shared his own apartment in another part of town, another world-age than this one. He had a tale to tell her, heavier to carry than the bags he lugged, about how he would not be writing the book that she had, on the basis of a few pages of mystification, sold for him to a great and impatient publisher. He was embarrassed at his failure, but more embarrassed at the thing itself that he had conceived of, and as glad to be free of it as a man who has lost a gangrened limb: the rest of him was all the sounder. It was a dumb idea, transcendently, flagrantly dumb, a cheap trick if it had worked and it would not have worked. If ever he wanted to achieve something in history or scholarship, he had to drown those kittens, and never tell.

But passing down through the metropolis, he thought why these scruples, why had his feet grown cold, didn't he see which side his bread was buttered on? If there wasn't this to do, what the hell would there be? And what big crime was the metaphysical trick his proposed book was to play when weighed against the other things now jostling one another onto the best-seller lists (Pierce still kept tabs on these lists)—the sequel, for instance, to Phæton's Car, all about alien visitations in ancient times, by an author once held up to Pierce as an example of how far he might go and not be scorned; another, about Jesus faking his own execution and escaping to England, himself his own Grail, thence to Spain where he founded a royal line, his heirs still traceable today. Or You Can Profit from the Coming Last Days, twenty weeks on the list. Or—everyone was reading it, Pierce saw its glossy black covers everywhere—a long tract about fairies, and their world inside this one, and an endless winter they will turn at last to spring.

And yet:

"I can't write it,” he said to Julie. “I'm not going to."

"Oh for God's sake, Pierce."

"No, really."

"Writers hit these blocks. I know. Believe me."

Subtly plumper, and richer in more ways than one, Julie had otherwise remained the same: her face a direct descendant of the one he'd known, her place her place, and recognizable as such the moment he looked around.