The never-closed gates of the abbey came before him and he drove in, dousing his lights so as not to disturb, or alert, the housemaster or porter, and rolled to a stop. He thought of his bed, his desk, the work on his desk, the unfinished finished thing. All the same as always. He felt entirely whole, as he had never quite felt before, and at the same time no different at all. He wondered if he could ever tell anything of this to his wife. He thought of going to knock on Brother Lewis's door, just to tell him not to worry, it was all okay. Would Brother Lewis understand? Maybe they could sit a while together, in silence: for there was finally nothing to say.

Down at the Paradise, things did get a little wilder and not so Edenic as the night met the morning. The stolid Mexican migrant workers who had quietly filled the seats when Pierce was there were gone, asleep in their dorms even as Pierce was asleep in his, and another bunch had come in, louder and richer and wanting more, getting it too. Women came along with some of them, shrinking back or shrieking, in delight or maybe defensively. Guys climbed to the runway and some, wide eyed and bleating, were ready to show themselves along with the girls, who managed them with skill and wisdom, gave them their money's worth too, the bouncers drawing close just in case and a sharklike police cruiser drifting slowly past without stopping. Orion set, or seemed to in the turning of the world. Dawn was green and calm when the abbey bells rang for Prime, and the men there arose to pray: the first hour of day, the hour at which the manna fell on the Hebrews in the desert, when Christ was brought before Pilate, who asked him What is truth? At this hour too, Christ sat down, back in his body after his Resurrection, to eat fish and honey with his disciples. In the silent Retreat House refectory Pierce sat down before his own breakfast, a more lavish meal surely than the monks were given, retreatants not expected to attain the same levels of abnegation as the parfaits. But then he decided that he would go to Mass instead, as he had not done since coming here. He would receive Communion. Then he would gather up his papers and his disks, clean and close his room, and go home.

11

In the Free Library on River Street in Blackbury Jambs, they will give you if you ask for it a small brochure or pamphlet, published some time ago, about the life and work of Hurd Hope Welkin, “the Educated Shoemaker.” In the .900s on the lower floor, they have several of his once-popular natural history books, such as The Daughters of Air and Water (about clouds) and Ancient as the Sky (geological formations). In an alcove of the main reading room is the well-known last photograph (a Santa with fluffy beard and laughing crow's-feet) next to a framed letter of commendation from Louis Agassiz.

He was never really a shoemaker, as he's often described; he owned a small specialty boot manufactory down the Blackbury River from the Jambs, a business he inherited from his father, who really had started as a cobbler. He was self-educated, though; he never went to high school, and taught himself botany and biology and ornithology when those were branches of knowledge that could be mastered one by one, and he did come late in life to be nominated for membership in several learned societies, and (the pamphlet will tell you) campaigned to have scientific journals exempted from international postage and pass freely around the world. The pamphlet lists the four species of local wildflower he discovered and named, and has somewhat muddy reproductions of his own drawings of them. There's a picture of the big plain house on West Plain Road that burned down in 1924; he lived alone there all of his life after his parents’ death (a double suicide, but the pamphlet doesn't mention that) and died on the lawn in a kitchen chair on a warm spring afternoon in 1911, aetat seventy-five, no age he had ever expected to reach—so he once said.

Down in the basement archives of the library are other documents, which you can consult if you can convince the librarian you have good reason to look at them, though no one has asked lately. Here are the pamphlets Welkin wrote in support of many causes, and letters to and from him over many decades, and copies of his journal The Hylozoist, all filed in red cases. And here too is the remarkable manuscript account of his combat over many years with a number of demons or devils who pestered him and pursued him in youth: how he suffered, and struggled; how he freed himself at last from their dominion.

There was talk after his death that his papers should go to some more august repository than the local library, which pleasant and spacious as it was for a town such as it served tended to be damp, being right next to the river; many of its older books smelled of it, faintly, shamefully. Welkin himself had made no arrangement for the disposition of his stuff. In the end it went to the library by default, no one caring to make an appeal for it to any other body or institution, maybe because it would have meant accounting for or explaining that manuscript book.

Rosie Rasmussen had read it, or read some of it, in revulsion and pity, the day she was given a complete tour of the library, from basement to dome, and a survey of its holdings. It was one of those times when Rosie went out (she felt) in disguise among her neighbors, to listen to their needs and hopes, and ask questions (when she could think of questions), and try to think of ways to help. During the time that she'd been doing this—she'd been director of the Rasmussen Foundation then for a dozen years—she had got better at it, the Zorro disguise became familiar to her and the phrases that promised to advance causes without exactly promising to pay last month's bills came more readily and with less shame. And yet now and then she would be told some extraordinary story, or have an age-old seam of need or hurt opened to her that she'd never known about, or had known about for years but had never understood or put together—and she would think how big the world is, all folded up though it is and so secret.

That was how she felt before Welkin's book, which the librarian lifted out of its archive box and put on the table before her. It was all handwritten, in a tiny perfectly legible hand, legible except for the paragraphs and pages of symbols meaningless to her. There were many illustrations done in what seemed to be colored pencils. The pages were sewn together with strong red thread, shoemaker's thread maybe, and there was a leather wrapper on which his name had been burned with a tool of some kind, and more symbols. No one, the librarian said, had ever recognized any of the symbols; they were his alone. Rosie turned the pages, awed by the care and thought the young man—only twenty-four—had lavished on the thing, thinking of him laboring over it, choosing among his tools, coloring carefully these demon faces, thinking. Every page had faint guidelines laid down in red ink to keep the pictures and the text squared up.

The saddest and most fearful thing in it, Rosie thought, though she'd read only a few pages, was how proud he seemed to be of what he'd done: how strong a demon battler he'd been, how he kept them at bay and hurt and harried them. How, in the end, he won, or said he had. It was almost hard to think about.

But it was time then for her to go meet the artist who claimed to be able to restore the long boarded-up pictures (of Dante, Shakespeare, Homer, and Longfellow) that filled the dome above. So Rosie closed the book, and the librarian replaced it in its box; Rosie would never look into it again.

* * * *

Pins, common steel ones with colored glass heads; the smoke of burned bay leaves and certain other fumigations; abjurings and yells spoken at varying speeds; and the written signaculae. These, though, could very quickly be emptied of their power, thus forcing him to discover others all in a moment, which fortunately he could usually do. They knew this, in Hell, as they knew and feared his other weapons; in their great conclaves they complained to their chiefs of his depredations and the harms they had all suffered at his hands. (He made a picture of them all gathered there in Hell, just as he had witnessed it, and surrounded the picture with images of the pins, the leaves, the words, the marks, to make them suffer the more.)