They disguised themselves in ingenious ways, as animals and objects (he knew that one of the lamp mantels in the drawing room, which when lit glowed and sizzled just like all the others, was in fact a devil named Flot, but for a long time he pretended not to know). Not all of them intended him harm, not all seemed to concern themselves with him, but he felt always that he was at threat, in a way that none of the folk around him seemed to him to be: as though they all lived out of harm's way in Faraway County and he alone lived in some dangerous city neighborhood, Five Points, Robber's Roost, the loiterers and evildoers and unregenerates eyeing him and grinning.

Sometimes they caused him harm. Sometimes they were able to kill his birds and chase away his helpers. In the greatest and most sorrowful defeat he suffered, they killed his parents. But they could not touch him, not deeply, not mortally.

Nor did they know that he had learned how to reach the lands beyond death without himself having to die. He traversed the hilly uplands that were Heaven, and found his parents there, weak and vanishing sometimes, distracted, unintelligible, like the gibbering ghosts of Homer's underworld, but sometimes in good fettle and able to return his embraces and answer his questions. Why, if there are so many dead, did he see only the two of them here, and mere glimpses of others? They answered softly, maybe even without speaking, but he thought he heard them say that the land is vast, actually endless, room enough for multitudes. And why when he came here did he feel so oppressed and watchful, and when he was in the underworld feel so alert, so powerful, so delighted even? They didn't know, they were only sure that they would not.

Yes, when he was in Hell, invisible to his enemies, he seemed to himself to be huge and ruthless. He overheard there the devils plan how they would invite him to join their fellowship, because he was so strong an opponent they could not defeat him; then when certain ambassadors came to him in his house, he, knowing their mission, was able to imprison them in a number of bottles specially prepared, and there they stayed, unable to get out. All the while they inveigled him he had kept his eyes fixed on his mother's picture of a holy angel, star on her forehead, who guides a little child across a rickety bridge over a chasm. In such ways he imprisoned some thousands of devils in his green and brown bottles when he was at his busiest. For the frontispiece of his book, he drew a portrait of himself, showing his weapons, his beloved starling, the Cross, his bottles, and a legend: Scourge of the Devils.

When later on he read Swedenborg, he understood in what place he had wandered so long as a youth, for Swedenborg taught that the world beyond death has the shape of the human body: head and heart and limbs and all other members. That, then, is where he had been journeying all along, right here where he now was—inside his skin and flesh. He could laugh by then, and he laughed aloud in pity and wonder for all that he had suffered in here, in the body-shaped world, which is at once in the midmost of everything and is its outermost as well.

* * * *

The later, unbound pages that are now included with the Welkin manuscript were apparently written when Welkin in later life rediscovered what he called the “Battle Book.” The handwriting of these later pages is that of a different man entirely: a swift, fair-sized script, careless of margins and written on sheets of varying sizes.

In the “Battle Book” itself, there is a Welkin drawing of Horace Osterwald, in which he appears as an opponent, murderer, and front for demons; the portrait is carefully enmeshed in powerful signs, including a drawing of a beef heart pierced with tatting needles. But there is also, among the unbound pages, a photograph of him, dating from the 1870s perhaps: a lean man with a wide white moustache, a gaze of compassionate, calm inquiry (or is that simply the nineteenth-century photography face, the features composed for a long exposure?). He sits in a wicker peacock chair and holds in his lap a great curled labial shell.

Hurd Hope Welkin's parents provided in their will for a guardian for their son for life. Horace Osterwald was a church deacon and former schoolmaster, and it was he who first interested Welkin in the wonders of the created world: animals and insects, rocks and flowers. He set him to collecting and classifying, naming and sorting—perhaps to calm his spirits with work that was exacting, time-consuming, and boring, or to reveal to him that these were creatures with their own insides and not the hiding places of demon enemies or both.

Actually the demons were—Welkin knew—still there, but they had become less compelling, or attractive; he began to feel their attention slip away from him, and it seemed to him that they turned instead toward the things he studied, the things that he placed beneath his lenses, copied in colored inks: as though they hungered painfully for what they couldn't have, the sealed and well-made solidity that any leaf, any quartz crystal or hair root possesses. So he ceased to fear them, or hate them, and when we cease to fear them, or to love or hate them in fear, they lose their interest in us, and go away.

"Whether it were the attentions of that good man,” he wrote of Osterwald, “who was for so long my only friend, that effected my release from the self-cast spells I labored under, or merely that (as has been often noted in cases of dementia praecox) the mania passed away by a natural physiological reduction, I do not know. But even now, in my old age, when I take up our albums of pressed specimens or the curious stones he liked to bring me, I can feel a sort of thrill through me that is the old madness, still lying like a long-healed lesion in my being. One of those stones was taken from the stomach of a deer, and Horace Osterwald called it a mad-stone, and said that it had the natural power to keep melancholy at bay. I no longer believe, if I was ever tempted to do, that it keeps me safe, but I still have it, in my pocket, for Horace was very clear that it would help me whether I believed in it or not."

From stones and plants Welkin at Horace's urgings moved on to more fearsome things, to the weather and the animal world, with their apparent free will and their malevolence or benevolence. With them it wasn't enough merely to classify and sort, because thunder clearly spoke in words to him and foxes really looked out from their eyes into his, and this conviction took time and care to overcome: not to you, son, Horace would say to him, taking his hand; not at you. Last of all he faced those wise apes or primates his fellow townspeople, whose hostile or needful souls, clothed in the figments of their flesh and their dress, he had always shrunk from.

Then when he could do that he was empty, or the world was: still, and possessed only by itself. He could ever after name the summer day on which, at dinner, he had looked up from his soup and realized that not for one moment in this day, from dawn to blue-green evening, had he feared, or sought to see, or growled at, a demon in hiding, and what was more wonderful, hadn't even noticed he had not. He put down his spoon, and with Horace he knelt on the floor and prayed. The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of Hell gat hold upon me, he said. Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee. For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.

He was asked later by one who knew of his experiences if he didn't regret so much of his youth spent in unrealities, and he said he felt no regret, only gratitude that he had left them behind. Maybe there's always a regret, though, that the once-possessed know, along with their thanksgiving: to feel the wild beings they have shared themselves with, the vivid powers making free within them, depart, and leave them nothing but themselves.