The Book Of Skulls Part 3

Why did I do it, I wonder? I couldn't have been in that much of a hurry to get to the skullhouse. Even if the hitchhiker had taken us fifteen minutes out of our way, so what? Throw a fit over fifteen minutes, with all of eternity ahead? It wasn't the waste of time that was bugging me. It wasn't that garbage about Charles Manson, either. It was something deeper, that I know.

I had this flash of intuition just as Ned was slowing down to offer the hippie a ride. The hippie is a f.a.g, I thought. In just those words. The hippie is a f.a.g. Ned has spotted him, I told myself; using the ESP that his kind seems to have, Ned has spotted him right on the highway, and Ned's going to pick him up and bring him to the motel tonight. I have to be honest with myself. That was what I thought. Accompanied by an image of Ned and the hitchhiker in bed together, kissing, gasping, rolling around, fingering each other, doing whatever it is that h.o.m.os like to do. I didn't have any reason for suspecting stuff like that. The hippie was just a hippie, like five million others: barefoot, long messy hair, furry vest, tie-dyed jeans. Why did I think he was a f.a.g? And even if he was a f.a.g, so what? Didn't Timothy and I pick up girls in New York and Chicago? Why shouldn't Ned get some action of the kind he prefers? What do I have against h.o.m.os.e.xuals? One of my own roommates is one, isn't he? One of my closest friends? I knew what Ned was when he moved in with us. I didn't care, so long as he didn't make pa.s.ses at me. I liked Ned for himself, I didn't give a s.h.i.+t about his s.e.xual preferences. So why this sudden bigotry on the highway? Think about it some, Oliver. Think.

Maybe you were jealous. Eh? What about that possibility, Oliver? Maybe you didn't want Ned carrying on with somebody else? Would you care to examine that notion a little while?

All right. I know he's interested in me. He always has been. That puppydog look in his eyes when he looks at me, that dreamy wistfulness-I know what that means. Not that Ned's ever approached me. He's afraid to, afraid to explode a pretty useful friends.h.i.+p by stepping across the line. But even so, the desire's there. Was I a dog in the manger, then, not giving Ned what he wants from me but not letting him get it from that hippie, either? What a tangled mess this is. But I have to sort everything out. My anger when Ned slowed the car. The shouting. The hysteria. Obviously something was being triggered in me. I've got to think some more about this. I've got to get it together. This frightens me. I'm likely to find out something about myself that I don't want to know.

20. Ned.

And now we've become detectives. Scouting all over Phoenix, trying to trace the skullhouse. I find it amusing: to come this far and not to be able to make the final connection. But all Eli has to go by is his newspaper clipping, which places the monastery "not far north of Phoenix." That's a big place, though, "not far north of Phoenix." It covers everything between here and the Grand Canyon, say, from one side of the state to the other. We need help. After breakfast this morning Timothy took Eli's clipping to the desk clerk, Eli feeling too shy or too eastern-looking to want to do the asking himself. The desk clerk didn't know anything about any monastery anywhere, though, and suggested we inquire at the newspaper office, just across the street. But the newspaper, being an afternoon journal, didn't open shop till nine, and we, still living on eastern standard time, had awakened very early this morning. It was even now only a quarter past eight. So we wandered around town to kill the forty-five minutes, peering at barber shops, at newsstands, at the windows of stores selling Indian pottery and cowboy accessories. The sun was already bright and the thermo-meter on a bank building announced that the temperature was seventy-nine degrees. It promised to be a stifling day. The sky was that fierce desert blue; the mountains just beyond the edge of town were pale brown. The city was silent, scarcely a car in the streets. Unrush hour in downtown Phoenix.

We hardly said a thing to one another. Oliver seemed still to be sulking over the ruckus he had started about that hitchhiker: he apparently felt embarra.s.sed, and with good reason. Timothy acted bored and superior. He had expected Phoenix to be much livelier, the dynamic center of the dynamic Arizona economy, and the quiet here offended him. (Later we discovered that things are dynamic enough a mile or two north of downtown, where the real growth is taking place.) Eli was tense and withdrawn, no doubt wondering whether he had led us across the continent for nothing. And I? Edgy. Dry lips, dry throat. A tightness of the s.c.r.o.t.u.m that comes over me only when I'm very, very, very nervous. Flexing and unflexing my gluteal muscles. What if the skullhouse doesn't exist? Worse, what if it does? An end, then, to my elaborate oscillating dance; I would have to take sides at last, commit myself to the reality of the thing, give myself up wholly to the rites of the Keepers, or else, jeering, depart. What would I do? Always the threat of the Ninth Mystery lurked in the wings, shadowy, menacing, tempting. Eternities must be balanced by extinctions. Two live forever, two die at once. That proposition holds tender, quavering music for me; it s.h.i.+mmers afar; it sings seductively out of the naked hills. I fear it and yet I cannot resist the gamble it offers.

At nine we presented ourselves at the newspaper office. Again Timothy did the talking; his easy, self-a.s.sured, upper-cla.s.s manners carry him smoothly through any kind of situation. The advantages of breeding. He identified us as college students doing research for a thesis on contemporary monasicism, which swept us past a receptionist and a reporter to one of the feature editors, who looked at our clipping and said that he knew nothing about any such monastery in the desert (dejection!) but that there was a man on his staff who specialized in keeping track of all the communes, cult headquarters, and similar settlements on the fringes of the town (hope!). Where was this man now? Oh, he's on vacation, said the editor (despair!). When will he be back in town? Didn't leave town, matter of fact (hope reborn!). Spending his holiday at home. He might be willing to talk. At our request, the editor phoned and got us invited out to the house of this specialist in crackpottery. "He lives up past Bethany Home Road, just off Central, the sixty-four hundred block. You know where that is? You just go up Central, past Camelback, past Bethany Home-"

A ten-minute drive. We left sleepy downtown behind, plunging northward through the busy uptown section, all gla.s.s skysc.r.a.pers and sprawling shopping centers, and pa.s.sed through that into a district of impressive-looking modern homes half concealed by thick gardens of tropical vegetation. Beyond that a short way, into a more modest residential zone, and we came to the house of the man who had the answers. His name was Gilson. Forty, deep tan, open blue eyes, high s.h.i.+ny forehead. A pleasant sort. Keeping track of the lunatic fringe was plainly a hobby, not an obsession, with him; this wasn't the sort of man who had obsessions. Yes, he knew about the Brotherhood of the Skulls, though he didn't call it that. "The Mexican Fathers" was the term he used. Hadn't been there himself, no, though he had talked to someone who had, visitor from Ma.s.sachusetts, maybe even the same one who wrote the newspaper article. Timothy asked if Gilson could tell us where the monastery was. Gilson invited us inside: small house, clean, typical southwestern decor-Navaho rugs on the wall, half a dozen Hopi pots in cream and orange occupying the bookshelves. He produced a map of Phoenix and environs. "Here you are, now," he said, tapping the map. "To get out of town you go over here, Black Canyon Highway, that's a freeway, you pick it up here and ride north. Follow the signs to Prescott, though of course you don't want to go anywhere near that far. Now, here, you see, not much past city limits, a mile, two miles, you get off the freeway-you got a map? Here, let me mark it. And you follow this road here-then you turn onto this one, see, going northeast-I guess you drive six, seven miles-" He sketched a series of zigzags on our roadmap and finally a big X. "No," he said, "that isn't where the monastery is. That's where you leave your car and walk. The road becomes just a trail, there, no car could possibly get through, not even a jeep, but young fellers like you, you won't have any problems, it's just three, four miles straight east." "What if we miss it?" Timothy asked. "The monastery, not the road." "You won't," Gilson told us. "But if you come to the Fort McDowell Indian Reservation, you'll know you've gone a little too far. And when you see Roosevelt Lake, you'll know you've gone a whole lot too far."

He asked us, as we left, to stop by at his house on our way back through town and tell him what we had discovered up there. "Like to keep my files up to date," he said. "Been meaning to have a look at the place myself, only, you know how it is, lot of things to do and so little time for doing them."

Sure, we told him. We'll give you the whole story.

Into the car. Oliver driving, Eli navigating, the map spread out wide in his lap. Westward to Black Canyon Highway. A broad super-highway, frying in the midmorning heat. No traffic other than a few huge trucks. We headed north. All our questions would shortly be answered; doubtless some new ones would be asked. Our faith, or perhaps merely our naivete, would be repaid. I felt a chill in the midst of the torrid zone. I heard a brawling, surging overture rising from the pit, ominous, Wagnerian, tubas and trombones making a dark, throbbing music. The curtain was going up, though I was not sure if we were entering the last act or the first. No longer did I doubt that the skullhouse would be there. Gilson had been too matter-of-fact about it; it was no myth, just another manifestation of the urge to spirituality that this desert seemed to awaken in mankind. We would find the monastery, and it would be the right one, the lineal descendant of the one described in the Book of Skulls. Another delicious s.h.i.+ver: what if we came face to face with the very author of that ancient ma.n.u.script, millennial, timeless? Anything is possible, if ye have faith.

Faith. How much of my life has been shaped by that five-letter Anglo-Saxon word? Portrait of the artist as a young snot. The parochial school, its leaky roof, wind whistling through the windows so sorely in need of puttying, the pale sisters steely in their severe eyegla.s.ses scowling at us in the hall. The catechism. The well-scrubbed little boys, white s.h.i.+rts, red ties. Father Burke instructing us. Plump, young, pink-faced, always beads of sweat on his upper lip, a bulge of soft flesh hanging over his clerical collar. He must have been, oh, twenty-five, twenty-six years old, a young priest, itchy in his celibacy, dong not yet withered, wondering in the dark hours whether it all was worth it. To Ned, age seven, he was the embodiment of Holy Writ, fierce, immense. Always a yardstick in his hand, and he used it, too: he'd read his Joyce, he played the role, wielding the pandybat. Asking me now to stand. I rise, trembling, wanting to s.h.i.+t in my pants and run. My nose running. (My nose dripped constantly until I was twelve; my image of my child-self is marred by a dark smudge, a sticky dirt-mustache. p.u.b.erty shut off the tap.) My wrist goes now to my snout: a quick wipe. "Don't be disgusting!" from Father Burke, watery blue eyes flas.h.i.+ng. G.o.d is love, G.o.d is love; what then is Father Burke? The yardstick whoos.h.i.+ng through the air. The lightnings of his terrible swift sword. He gestures irritably at me. "The Apostles' Creed, now, out with it!"

I say, stammering, "I believe in G.o.d the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ-and in Jesus Christ-"

Faltering. From behind me, a hoa.r.s.e whisper, Sandy Dolan: "His only son, our Lord." My knees shake. My soul quakes. Last Sunday, after ma.s.s, Sandy Dolan and I went peering into windows and saw his sister changing her clothes, fifteen years old, little pink-tipped b.r.e.a.s.t.s, dark hair below. Dark hair. We'll grow hair too, Sandy whispered. Did G.o.d see us spying on her? The Lord's Day, and such a sin! Now the yardstick flicks warningly.

"-his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born from the Virgin Mary-" Yes. Now I'm into the heart of it, the melodramatic part that I love so much. I speak more confidently, loudly, my voice a clear fluting soprano. "-suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, descended to h.e.l.l, on the third day rose again from the dead, ascended to the heavens-ascended to the heavens-"

I am lost again. Sandy, help me! But Father Burke is too close. Sandy does not dare speak.

"-ascended to the heavens-"

"He's up there already, boy," the priest snaps. "Get on with it! Ascended to the heavens-"

My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth. They all stare at me. Can't I sit down? Can't Sandy continue? Seven years old, Lord, must I know the whole creed?

The yardstick-the yardstick- Incredibly, the father himself prompts me. "Sits at the right hand-"

Blessed clue. I seize on it. "Sits on the right hand-"

"At the right hand!" And my left hand gets the pandybat. A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick makes my trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: and at the sound and the pain scalding tears are driven into my eyes. May I sit down, now? No, I must go on. They expect so much of me. Old Sister Mary Joseph, face a ma.s.s of wrinkles, reading one of my poems aloud in the auditorium, my ode on Easter Sunday, telling me afterward I have great gifts. Go on, now. The creed, the creed, the creed! It isn't fair. You hit me, now I ought to be allowed to sit. "Continue," says the inexorable father. "Sits at the right hand-"

I nod. "Sits at the right hand of G.o.d the Father Almighty, thence will come to judge the living and the dead." The worst is over. Heart pounding, I rush through the rest. "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the remission of sins, the resurrection of the flesh, and eternal life." A mumbled torrent of words. "Amen." Should one finish with amen? I am so confused I don't know. Father Burke smiles sourly; I tumble into my seat, drained. There's faith for you. Faith. The Christ Child in the manger and the yardstick descending toward your knuckles. Cold hallways; scowling faces; the dry, powdery smell of the holy. One day Cardinal Cus.h.i.+ng paid us a visit. The whole school was in terror; it couldn't have been more frightening if the Savior Himself had stepped out of a textbook closet. The angry glances, the furious whispered warnings: stay in line, sing in tune, keep your mouth shut, show your respect. G.o.d is love, G.o.d is love. And the beads, the crucifixes, the pastel portraits of the Virgin, the Friday fish, the nightmare of first communion, the terror of stepping into the confessional-all the apparatus of faith, the debris of centuries-well, of course, I had to junk all that. Escaping from the Jesuits, from my mother, from the apostles and martyrs, St. Patrick, St. Brendan, St. Dionysius, St. Ignatius, St. Anthony, St. Theresa, St. Thais the penitent harlot, St. Kevin, St. Ned. I became a stinking accursed apostate, not the first of my family to fall away from truth. When I go to d.a.m.nation I'll meet uncles and cousins galore, turning on their spits. And now Eli Steinfeld demands new faith of me. As we all know, says Eli, G.o.d is irrelevant, an embarra.s.sment; to admit in our modern age that you have faith in His existence is something like admitting you have pimples on your a.s.s. We sophisticates, we who have seen everything and know it for the shuck it is, can't bring ourselves to surrender to Him, much as we'd like to let the obsolete old b.a.s.t.a.r.d make all the hard decisions for us. But wait, crieth Eli! Give up your cynicism, give up your shallow mistrust of the invisible! Einstein, Bohr, and Thomas Edison have destroyed our capacity to embrace the Hereafter, but would you not gladly embrace the Here-and-Now? Believe, says Eli. Believe in the impossible. Believe because it is impossible. Believe that the received history of the world is a myth and that myth is what survives of the true history. Believe in the Skulls, believe in their Keepers. Believe. Believe. Believe. Make an act of faith, and life eternal shall be your reward. Thus speaketh Eli. We go north, east, north, east again, zigzagging into the th.o.r.n.y wilderness, and we must have faith.

21. Timothy.

I try to be cheerful, I try not to complain, but sometimes I get pushed too far. This trek through the desert at high noon, for example. You have to be a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t to impose something like this on yourself, even for the sake of living ten thousand years. That part of it is c.r.a.p, of course: unreal, idiotic. What is real is the heat. My guess is that it's 95, 100, even 105 degrees out here. Not even April yet, and we're in a furnace. The famous dry heat of Arizona that they keep telling you about; sure, it's hot, but it's dry heat, you don't feel it. c.r.a.p. I feel it. My jacket is off and my s.h.i.+rt is open and I'm roasting. If I didn't have this c.r.a.ppy fair skin of mine I'd take the s.h.i.+rt off altogether, but then I'd fry. Oliver already has his s.h.i.+rt off, and he's blonder than I am; maybe his skin doesn't burn, peasant skin, Kansas skin. Every step is a struggle. And how much farther do we have to go, anyway? Five miles? Ten?

The car is a long way behind us. It's half past twelve now, and we've been walking since noon, quarter of, something like that. The pathway is about eighteen inches wide, and in places it's narrower than that. In places, actually, there isn't any pathway at all, and we have to hop and scramble over tangles of underbrush. We plod single file like four freaked-out Navahos stalking Custer's army. Even the lizards laugh at us. Jesus, I don't know how anything manages to stay alive here, the lizards, the plants, baked to pieces like this. The ground isn't really soil and it isn't really sand; it's something dry and crumbly that makes a soft crunching sound as we step on it. The silence here magnifies the sound. The silence is scary. We haven't been talking. Eli plods ahead as though he's rus.h.i.+ng toward the Holy Grail. Ned huffs and puffs: he isn't strong and this hike is using him up. Oliver, bringing up the rear, is, as usual, completely sealed into himself. He could be an astronaut marching across the moon. Occasionally Ned cuts in to tell us something about the plant life. I never realized he was such a botany freak. There are very few of the tremendous vertical cacti here, the saguaros, though I see a few, fifty or sixty feet tall, some way back from the path. What we have instead, thousands of them, is a weird thing about six feet high, with a gnarled gray woody trunk and a lot of long dangling cl.u.s.ters of spines and green b.u.mpy things. The chainfruit cholla, Ned calls it, and warns us to keep far away from it. The spines are sharp. So we avoid it; but there's another cholla here, the teddybear cholla, that's not so easy to avoid. The teddybear is a b.u.mmer. Little stubby plants a foot or two high, covered with thousands of fuzzy straw-colored spines: you look at a teddybear the wrong way, and the spines jump up and bite you. I swear they do. My boots are covered with p.r.i.c.kles. The teddybear breaks easily and chunks come loose and roll away; they lie scattered everywhere, a lot of them right in the path. Ned says that each chunk will take root eventually and become a whole new plant. We have to watch our steps all the time for fear of coming down on one. You can't just kick a teddybear chunk aside if it's in your way, either. I tried that and the cactus stuck to my boot, and I reached down to pull it off, only to get it stuck to my fingertips next. A hundred needles jabbing me at once. Like fire. I yelled. Most uncool screams. Ned had to pry it away, using two twigs as handles. My fingers still burn. Dark, tiny points are buried in the flesh. I wonder if they'll get infected. There's plenty of other cactus here, too-barrel cactus, p.r.i.c.kly pear, six or seven more that not even Ned can put names to. And leafy trees with thorns, mesquite, acacia. All the plants here are hostile. Don't touch me, they say, don't touch me or you'll be sorry. I wish I was anywhere else. But we walk on, on, on. I'd trade Arizona for the Sahara, even up, throwing in half of New Mexico to sweeten the deal. How much longer? How much hotter? c.r.a.p. c.r.a.p. c.r.a.p. c.r.a.p.

"Hey, look here!" Eli, pointing. To the left of the path, half hidden in a yellow tangle of cholla: a big round boulder, as big as a man's torso, dark rough stone different in texture and composition from the local chocolate-colored sandstone. This is black volcanic rock, basalt, granite, diabase, one of those. Eli crouches by it and, picking up a piece of wood, begins to push the cactus away from it. "See?" he says. "The eyes? The nose?" He's right. Great deep eyesockets are visible. A tremendous triangular gouge of a nose-hole. And down at ground level, a row of immense teeth, an upper jaw, the teeth biting into the sandy soil.

A skull.

It looks a thousand years old. We can see traces of more delicate carving, indicating cheekbones, brow ridges, and other features; but most of this has been obliterated by time. A skull, though. Unmistakably a skull. It's a road marker, telling us that that which we seek is not much farther down the road-or perhaps warning us that we ought to turn back now. Eli stands a long time, studying the skull. Ned. Oliver. They're fascinated by it. A cloud pa.s.ses over us, shadowing the boulder, changing our view of its contours, and it seems to me now that the empty eyes have turned and are staring at us. The heat's getting me. Eli says, "It's probably pre-Columbian. They brought it with them from Mexico, I'd imagine." We peer ahead, into the heat haze. Three great saguaros, like columns, block our view. We must pa.s.s between them. And beyond? The skullhouse itself? No doubt. Suddenly I wonder what I'm doing here, how I ever let myself into this craziness. What had seemed like a joke, a lark, now seems all too real.

Never to die. Oh, c.r.a.p! How can such things be? We'll waste days here, finding out. An adventure in lunacy. Skulls in the road. Cactus. Heat. Thirst. Two must die if two are to live. All the mystical garbage Eli's been spouting now is summed up for me in that globe of rough black stone, so solid, so undeniable. I've committed myself to something that's altogether beyond my understanding, and there may well be danger in it for me. But there's no turning back now.

22. Eli.

And if there had been no skullhouse here? And if we had come to the end of the path, only to find a wall of impenetrable thorns and spines? I confess I was expecting that. This whole expedition just one more failure, one more fiasco of Eli the schmeggege. The skull by the road turning out to be a false clue, the ma.n.u.script a dreamy fable, the newspaper article a hoax, the X on our map a mere pointless prank. Nothing before us but cactus and mesquite, a scraggly wasteland, an armpit of a desert where not even pigs would deign to s.h.i.+t, and then what would I have done? I would have turned with great dignity to my three weary companions and said, "Gentlemen, I have been deceived, and you have been misled. We have chased the wild goose." With an apologetic half-smile playing about the corners of my lips. And then they seize me calmly, without malice, having known all along that it was bound to come to this in the end, and they strip me, they thrust the wooden stake into my heart, they nail me to a towering saguaro, they press me to death beneath flat rocks, they rub chollas into my eyes, they burn me alive, they bury me chest-deep in an anthill, they castrate me with their fingernails, all the while solemnly chanting, Schmeggege, schlemihl, schlemazel, schmendrick, schlep! Patiently I accept my well-earned punishment. I am no stranger to humiliation. I am never surprised by disaster.

Humiliation? Disaster? As in the Margo fiasco? My most recent major debacle. It still stings. Last October, early in the semester, a rainy, foggy night. We had some first-rate pot, alleged Panama Red that had come to Ned through the alleged h.o.m.os.e.xual underground, and we pa.s.sed the pipe, Timothy, Ned, and I, with Oliver, of course, abstaining, piously sipping some cheap red wine. One of the Rasoumovsky quartets played in the background, rising eloquently above the drumbeats of the rain: as we soared high, Beethoven gave us a mystic noise, a second cellist unaccountably seeming to join the group, even an oboe at odd moments, a transcendental ba.s.soon below the strings. The berserk five-dimensional musicology of the stoned. Ned hadn't hyped us: the dope was superb. And somehow I found myself drifting, getting into a talking trip, a confessional trip, unloading everything, saying suddenly to Timothy that what I regretted most of all was that I have never in my life made it even once with what I'd consider a really beautiful girl.

Timothy, sympathetic, concerned, asked me who I'd consider a really beautiful girl. I was silent, contemplating my options. Ned, being helpful, suggested Raquel Welch, Catherine Deneuve, Lainie Kazan. At last, coming on with marvelous ingenuousness, I blurted, "I consider Margo a really beautiful girl." Timothy's Margo. Timothy's goyishe G.o.ddess, the golden s.h.i.+kse. Having said it, I felt a swiftly sketched series of quick interchanges of dialogue resonating through my cannabis-ridden mind, a lengthy pa.s.sage of words, and then time, as it will do when it is under the influence of pot, inverted itself so that I heard my entire scenario being performed, each line arriving strictly on cue. Timothy was asking me, quite earnestly, if Margo turned me on. I a.s.sured him, just as earnestly, that she did. He wanted to know, then, if I'd feel less inadequate, more fulfilled, if I were to make it with her. Hesitantly now, wondering what his game was, I answered in vague circ.u.mlocutions, only to hear him say, astoundingly, that he would arrange everything for tomorrow night. Arrange what, I asked? Margo, he said. He would set me up with Margo, as an act of Christian charity.

"And would she-"

"Sure she would. She thinks you're cute."

"We all think you're cute, Eli." That was Ned.

"But I couldn't-she wouldn't-how-what-"

"I bestow her upon you," said Timothy magnificently. The grand seigneur, making a lordly gesture. "I can't let my friends walk around in a state of frustration and unrequited longing. Tomorrow at eight, her place. I'll tell her to expect you."

"It seems like a cheat," I said, growing morose. "Too easy. Unreal."

"Don't be an a.s.s. Accept it as vicarious experience. Like going to the movies, only more intimate."

"And more tactile," said Ned.

"I think you're putting me on," I told Timothy.

"Scout's honor! She's yours!"

He began describing Margo's preferences in bed, her special erogenous zones, the little signals they used. I caught the spirit of the thing, flew high and higher, got myself into a laughter trip, began capping Timothy's graphic descriptions with scabrous fantasies of my own. Of course, when I crashed an hour or two later I was certain Timothy had been putting me on, and that tumbled me into a dark abyss. For I had always been convinced that the Margos of this world are not for me. The Timothys would f.u.c.k their way through whole brigades of Margos, but I would have never a one. In truth I wors.h.i.+ped her from afar. The prototypical s.h.i.+kse, the flower of Aryan womanhood, slim and long-legged, two inches taller than I am (it seems so much more, when the girl is taller than you!), silky golden hair, sly blue eyes, upturned b.u.t.ton nose, wide agile lips. A strong girl, a lively girl, a star basketball player (Oliver himself respected her abilities on the court), an outstanding scholar, a wry and supple wit: why, she was frightening, numbingly perfect, one of those flawless female creatures that our aristocracy sp.a.w.ns in such mult.i.tudes, born to rule serenely over country estates or to prance with poodles down Second Avenue. Margo for me? My sweaty hairy body to cover hers? My stubbly cheek to rub against her satiny skin? Yes, and frogs would couple with comets. To Margo I must seem something coa.r.s.e and grubby, the pathetic representative of an inferior species. Any commerce between us would be unnatural, an alloying of silver and bra.s.s, a mixing of alabaster and charcoal. I dismissed the whole project from my mind. But at lunch Timothy reminded me of my date. It's impossible, I said, giving him six swift excuses-study, a paper due, a difficult translation, and so forth. He swept my feeble temporizings aside. Report to her apartment at eight, he said. I felt a wave of terror. "I can't," I insisted. "You're prost.i.tuting her, Timothy. What am I supposed to do, walk in, unzip my fly, jump on top? There's no way it would work out. You can't make a fantasy come true just by waving your magic wand." Timothy shrugged.

I a.s.sumed that the matter was ended. Oliver had basketball practice that night. Ned went to the movies. About half past seven Timothy excused himself. Library work, he said, see you at ten. I was alone in the apartment we shared. Unsuspecting. Busied myself with my paper. At eight a key turning in the door; Margo entered; a ravis.h.i.+ng smile, molten gold. For me, panic, consternation. "Timothy here?" she asked, casually locking the door behind her. Thunder in my chest. "Library," I blurted. "Back at ten." No place to hide for me. Margo pouted. "I was sure I'd find him here. Well, it's his tough luck. Are you very busy, Eli?" A sparkling blue-eyed wink. She draped herself serenely on the couch.

"I've been doing this paper," I said. "On the irregular forms of the verb to-"

"How fascinating! Would you like to smoke?"

I understood. They had set it up. A conspiracy to make me happy, whether I liked it or not. I felt patronized, used, mocked. Should I order her to leave? No, schmendrick, don't be dumb. She's yours for two hours. To h.e.l.l with the moral frills. The end justifies the means. Here's your chance and you won't get another. I swaggered toward the couch. Eli, swaggering, yes! She had two fat joints, professionally rolled. Coolly she lit one, pulled deep, handed it to me; my wrist shook, I nearly jabbed the burning end of the joint into her arm in my tremor as I took it from her. Raw stuff; I coughed; she patted my back. Schlemihl. Schlep. She inhaled and flashed her eyebrows in an "oh, wow!" at me. The pot did nothing for me at all, though; I was too tense, and the adrenaline in me burned away the effect before it could take hold. I was conscious of the reek of my perspiration. Rapidly the stick was down to a roach. Margo, already looking stoned, proffered the other one. I shook my head. "Later," I said.

She rose and prowled around the room. "It's awfully hot in here, don't you think?" What a cliche number! A clever girl like Margo could have been capable of better. She stretched. Yawned. She was wearing tight white hip-huggers and a skimpy top, flat tawny midriff bare. No bra, no panties, obviously: the little hummocks of her nipples were visible, and the slacks, clinging skintight to her round, small b.u.t.tocks, revealed no telltale underwear creases. Ah, Eli, you observant devil, you suave and skillful manipulator of womanfles.h.!.+ "So hot in here," she said, stony-dreamy. Off with the top. Favoring me with an innocent smile, as if to say: we're all old friends, we don't need to fret about silly taboos, why should t.i.ts be more sacred than elbows? Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were medium-big, full, high, marvelously firm, undoubtedly the most successful b.r.e.a.s.t.s I had ever seen. I sought ways of looking at them without seeming to. At the movies it's easier; you don't have an I-thou relations.h.i.+p with what's happening on screen. She began an astrology rap, trying to put me at ease, I suppose. Much stuff about the conjunction of planets in the so-and-so house. I could only jabber in response. Smoothly she glided into palm reading: that was her new bag, the mysteries of the crevices. "The gypsies mostly rip the public off," she said seriously, "but that doesn't mean there isn't some substance to the basic idea. You see, your whole future life is programmed into the DNA molecules, and they govern the patterns of the palm of your hand. Here, let me have a look." Taking my hand, drawing me down next to her on the couch. How idiotic I felt, practically a male virgin in my att.i.tude if not in actual experiential qualifications, needing to be coaxed into the obvious. Margo bent low over my palm, tickling me. "This, you see, that's the life line-oh, it's long, it's very long!" I sneaked covert glances at her headlights while she did her palmistry number. "And this," she said, "that's the mount of Venus. You see this line angling in here? It tells me that you're a man of powerful pa.s.sions but that you restrain them, you repress a lot. Isn't that so?" All right. I'll play your game, Margo. My arm suddenly around her shoulders, my hand groping for her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "Oh, yes, Eli, yes, yes!" Hamming it up. A clinch; a smeary kiss. Her lips were parted and I did the expected. But I felt no pa.s.sions, powerful or otherwise. All this seemed formal, a minuet, something programmed from outside; I couldn't relate to it, to the whole idea of making it with Margo. Unreal. unreal, unreal. Even when she slithered free of me and dropped the hip-huggers, revealing sharp hipbones, taut boyish b.u.t.tocks, tight off-yellow curls, I felt no desire. She smiled at me, beckoned, invited me. For her this was no more apocalyptic than a handshake, a peck on the cheek. For me the galaxies upheaved. How easy it should have been for me. Drop the pants, get on her, inside her, move the hips, oh ah oh ah, hey wow groovy! But I suffered from s.e.x-in-the-head; I was too preoccupied with the notion of Margo as unattainable symbol of perfection to realize that Margo was very much attainable and not even all that perfect-pale scar of appendectomy; faint stretch marks on her hips, the terminal moraines of a much chunkier preadolescent girl; thighs a shade too thin.

So I blew it. Yes, I stripped, and yes, we scampered to the bed, and yes, I couldn't get it up, and yes, Margo helped me, and at last libido triumphed over mortification and I became properly stiff and throbbing, and then, wild bull of the pampas, I flung myself at her, clawing, grappling, frightening her with my ferocity, practically raping her, only to have the wick soften at the critical instant of insertion, and then-oh, yes, blunder upon blunder, gaucherie upon gaucherie, Margo alternately terrified and amused and solicitous, until at last came consummation, followed almost instantly by eruption, followed by chasms of self-contempt and craters of revulsion. I couldn't bear to look at her. I rolled free, hid in the pillows, reviled myself, reviled Timothy, reviled D. H. Lawrence. "Can I help you?" Margo asked, stroking my sweaty back. "Please go," I said. "Please. And don't say anything to anyone." But of course she did. They all knew. My clumsiness, my absurd incompetence, my seven varieties of ambiguity culminating eventually in seven species of impotence. Eli the schmeggege, blowing his big chance with the grooviest wench he'll ever touch. Another in his long series of lovingly crafted fiascos. And we might have had another here, slogging through cactusville to ultimate disappointment, and the three of them might well have said, at the end of our trek, "Well, what else should we have expected from Eli?" But the skullhouse was there.

The pathway wound up a gentle grade, taking us through ever more dense thickets of cholla and mesquite, until, abruptly, we came to a broad sandy clearing. From left to right stretched a series of black basalt skulls, similar to the one we had seen farther back but much smaller, about the size of basketb.a.l.l.s, set in the sand at intervals of perhaps twenty inches. On the far side of the row of skulls, some fifty yards beyond, we saw the House of Skulls crouching like a sphinx in the desert: a fairly large one-story building, flattopped, with coa.r.s.e yellow-brown stucco walls. Seven columns of white stone decorated its windowless facade. The effect was one of stark simplicity, broken only by the frieze running along the pediment: skulls in low relief, presenting their left profiles. Sunken cheeks, hollow nostrils, huge round eyes. The mouths gaped wide in grisly grins. The large sharp teeth, carefully delineated, seemed poised for a fierce snap. And the tongues-ah, a truly sinister touch, skulls with tongues!-the tongues were twisted into elegant, horrid sideways S-curves, the tips protruding just past the teeth, flickering like the forked tongues of serpents. There were dozens of these reduplicated skulls, obsessively identical, frozen in weird suspension, one after another after another marching out of sight around the corners of the building; they had the nightmarish quality I detect in most pre-Columbian Mexican art. They would have been more appropriate, I felt, along the rim of some altar on which living hearts were cut with obsidian knives from quivering b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

The building appeared to be U-shaped, with two long subordinate wings sprouting behind the main section. I saw no doors. Perhaps fifteen yards in front of the facade, though, the entrance to a stone-lined vault could be seen at the center of the clearing: it yawned, dark and mysterious, like the gateway to the underworld. Immediately I realized that this must be a pa.s.sage leading into the House of Skulls. I walked toward it and peered in. Darkness within. Do we dare enter? Should we not wait for someone to emerge and summon us? But no one emerged; and the heat was brutal. I felt the skin over my nose and cheeks already stiffening and swelling, going red and glossy from sunburn, winter's paleness exposed to this desert sun for half a day. We stared at each other. The Ninth Mystery was hot in my mind and probably in theirs. We may go in, but we shall not all come forth. Who to live, who to die? I found myself unwillingly contemplating candidates for destruction, weighing my friends in the balance, quickly surrendering Timothy and Oliver to death and then pulling back, reconsidering that too ready judgment, subst.i.tuting Ned for Oliver, Oliver for Timothy, Timothy for Ned, myself for Timothy, Ned for myself, Oliver for Ned, around and around, inconclusively, indecisively. My faith in the truth of the Book of Skulls had never been stronger. My sense of standing at the brink of infinity had never been greater or more terrifying. "Let's go," I said hoa.r.s.ely, my voice splitting, and took a few uneasy steps forward. A stone staircase led steeply down into the vault. Five, six, seven feet underground, and I found myself in a dark tunnel, wide but low-roofed, at best five feet high. The air was cool. By dim strands of light I caught glimpses of embellishment on the walls: skulls, skulls, skulls. Not a shred of Christian imagery visible anywhere so far at this so-called monastery, but the symbolism of death was ubiquitous. From above Ned called: "What do you see?" I described the tunnel and told them to follow me. Down they came, shuffling, uncertain: Ned, Timothy, Oliver. Crouching, I went forward. The air grew much cooler. We could no longer see anything, other than the dim purplish glow at the entranceway. I tried to keep count of my paces. Ten, twelve, fifteen. Surely we should be under the building now. Abruptly there was a polished stone barrier in front of me, a single slab, completely filling the tunnel. I realized only at the last moment that it was there, catching an icy glint in the faint light, and halted before I crashed into it. A dead end? Yes, of course, and in another moment we would hear the clang behind us as a twenty-ton stone slab was lowered into place over the mouth of the tunnel, and then we would be trapped, left here to starve or asphyxiate, while peals of monstrous laughter rang in our ears. But nothing so melodramatic occurred. Tentatively I pressed my palm against the cold stone slab that blocked our way, and-the effect was pure Disneyland, wonderful hok.u.m-the slab yielded, swinging smoothly away from me. It was perfectly counterbalanced; the lightest touch was enough to open it. Exactly right, I felt, that we should enter into the House of Skulls in this operatic manner. I expected melancholy trombones and ba.s.set horns and a chorus of ba.s.ses intoning the Requiem in reverse: Pietatis fons, me salva, gratis salvas salvandos qui, majestatis tremendae rex. An opening above. Knees bent, we crept toward it. Stairs, again. Up. Emerging, one by one, into a huge square room whose walls were of some gritty pale sandstone. There was no roof, only a dozen or so black, thick beams s.p.a.ced at intervals of three or four feet, admitting the sunlight and the choking heat. The floor of the chamber was of purple-green slate, somewhat oily and glossy of texture. In the middle of the room was a tub-sized fountain of green jade, with a human figure about three feet high rising from it; the figure's head was a skull, and a steady trickle of water dribbled from its jaws, splas.h.i.+ng into the basin below. In the four corners of the room stood tall stone statuettes, Mayan or Aztec in style, depicting men with curved, angular noses, thin cruel lips, and immense ear-ornaments. There was a doorway at the side of the room opposite the exit from the subterranean vault, and a man stood framed in it, so motionless that I thought at first he was a statue, too. When all four of us were in the room, he said, in a deep, resonant voice, "Good afternoon. I am Frater Antony."

He was a short, stocky man, no more than five-feet-five, who wore only a pair of faded blue denims cut to midthigh. His skin was deeply tanned, almost to a mahogany color, and appeared to have the texture of very fine leather. His broad, high-domed skull was utterly bald, lacking even a fringe of hair behind the ears. His neck was short and thick, his shoulders wide and powerful, his chest deep, his arms and legs heavily muscled; he gave an impression of overwhelming strength and vitality. His general appearance and his vibrations of competence and power reminded me in an extraordinary way of Pica.s.so: a small, solid, timeless man, capable of enduring anything. I had no idea how old he might be. Not young, certainly, but far from decrepit. Fifty? Sixty? A well-preserved seventy? His agelessness was the most disconcerting thing about him. He seemed untouched by time, wholly uncorroded: this, I thought, is what an immortal ought to look like.

He smiled warmly, revealing large flawless teeth, and said, "I alone am here to greet you. We get so few visitors, and we expect none. The other fraters are now in the fields and will not return until afternoon devotions." He spoke in perfect English of a peculiarly bloodless, unaccented kind: an IBM accent, so to speak. His voice was steady and musical, his phrasing was unhurried, self-a.s.sured. "Please consider yourselves welcome for as long as you wish to stay. We have facilities for guests, and we invite you to share our retreat. Shall you be with us longer than a single afternoon?"

Oliver stared at me. Timothy. Ned. I was to be spokesman, then. The taste of copper was in my throat. The absurdity, the sheer preposterousness, of what I had to say, rose up and sealed my lips. I felt my sunburned cheeks blazing with shame. Turn and flee, turn and flee, a voice cried between my ears. Down the rabbit hole. Run. Run. Run while you can. I forced out a single rusty syllable: "Yes."

"In that case you will require accommodations. Will you come with me, please?"

He began to leave the room. Oliver shot me a furious glance. "Tell him!" he whispered sharply.

Tell him. Tell him. Tell him. Go on, Eli, say it. What can happen to you? At worst you'll be laughed at. That's nothing new, is it? So tell him. It all converges on this moment, all the rhetoric, all the self-hyping hyperbole, all the intense philosophical debates, all the doubt and the counterdoubt, all the driving. You're here. You think it's the right place. So tell him what you're looking for here. Tell him. Tell him. Tell him.

Frater Antony, overhearing Oliver's whisper, halted and looked back at us. "Yes?" he said mildly.

I struggled dizzily for words and found the right ones at last. "Frater Antony, you ought to know-that we've all read the Book of Skulls-"

There.

The frater's mask of unshakable equanimity slipped for just a moment. I saw a brief flash of-surprise? puzzlement? confusion?-in his dark, enigmatic eyes. But he recovered quickly. "Indeed?" he said, voice as firm as before. "The Book of Skulls? What a strange name that is! What, I wonder, is the Book of Skulls?" The question was meant as a rhetorical one. He turned on me a brilliant, short-lived smile, like a lighthouse beam cutting momentarily through dense fog. But, after the fas.h.i.+on of jesting Pilate, he would not stay for an answer. Calmly he went out, indicating with a casual flip of his fingers that we were to follow him.

23. Ned.

We have something to stew about, now, but at least they're letting us do our stewing in style. A private room for each of us, austere but handsome, quite comfortable. The skullhouse is much bigger than it seemed from outside: the two rear wings are extremely long, and there may be as many as fifty or sixty rooms in the entire complex, excluding the possibility of more subterranean vaults. No room that I've seen has a window. The central chambers, what I think of as "the public rooms," are open-roofed, but the side units in which the fraters live are completely enclosed. If there's an air-conditioning system, I'm unaware of it, having seen no vents or pipes, but when you pa.s.s from one of the roofless rooms to an enclosed one you are conscious of a sharp and definite drop in temperature, from desert-hot to motel roomcomfortable. The architecture is simple: bare rectangular rooms, the walls and ceilings made of rough, unplastered tawny sandstone, uninterrupted by moldings or visible beams or other decorative contrivances. All the floors are of dark slate; there are no carpets or rugs. There seems to be little in the way of furniture; my room offers only a low cot made of logs and thick rope and a short squat storage chest, I suppose for my belongings, fas.h.i.+oned quite superbly from a hard black wood. What does break up the prevailing starkness is a fantastic collection of bizarre pre-Columbian (I guess) masks and statuettes, mounted on walls, standing in corners, set into recessed niches-terrifying faces, all angles and harsh planes, gorgeous in their monstrosity. The imagery of the skull is ubiquitous. I have no idea what led that newspaper reporter to think that this place was occupied by "monks" practicing Christianity; the clipping Eli has speaks of the decor as "a combination of medieval Christian style and what seems to be Aztec motifs," but, though the Aztec influence is obvious enough, where is the Christian? I see no crosses, no stained gla.s.s windows, no images of the saints or the Holy Family, none of the proper paraphernalia. The whole texture of the place is pagan, primitive, prehistoric; this could be a temple to some ancient Mexican G.o.d, even to a Neanderthal deity, but Jesus simply isn't on the premises, or I'm not Boston Irish. Perhaps the clean cold austere refinement of the place gave the newspaperman the feel of a medieval monastery-the echoes, the hint of Gregorian chant in the silent hallways-but without the symbolism of Christianity there can't be Christianity, and such symbols as are on display here are alien ones. The total effect of the place is one of strange luxury combined with immense stylistic restraint: they have understated everything, but a sense of power and grandeur bursts from the walls, the floors, the endlessly receding corridors, the bare rooms, the spa.r.s.e and lean furnis.h.i.+ngs.

Cleanliness is evidently important here. The plumbing arrangements are extraordinary, with bubbling fountains everywhere in the public rooms and the larger halls. My own room has a capacious sunken tub lined with rich green slate, which looks suitable for a maharajah or a Renaissance Pope. As he delivered me to my room, Frater Antony suggested that I might like to take a bath, and his polite statement had the force of an order. Not that I needed much urging, for the hike through the desert had coated me miserably with grime. I treated myself to a long voluptuous soaking, wriggling on the glossy slate, and when I came out I discovered that my filthy, sweaty clothing had disappeared, every sc.r.a.p, shoes and all. To replace it I found on my cot a pair of worn-looking but clean blue shorts of the sort Frater Antony was wearing. Very well: the philosophy here seems to be that less is more. Good riddance to s.h.i.+rts and sweaters; I'll settle for shorts over my naked loins. We have come to an interesting place.

The question of the moment is, Does this place have any connection with Eli's medieval ma.n.u.script and with the supposed cult of immortality? I think it does, but I can't yet be sure of that. It was impossible not to admire the frater's sense of theatricality, his wondrously ambiguous handling of the moment when Eli sprang the Book of Skulls on him a few hours ago. His delicious, reverberating curtain line; The Book of Skulls? What, I wonder, is the Book of Skulls? And a fast exit, allowing him to take possession of all sides of the situation at once. Did he genuinely not know about the Book of Skulls? Why, then, did he seem so jarred, just for an instant, when Eli mentioned it? Can the fondness for skull imagery here be just a coincidence? Has the Book of Skulls been forgotten by its own adherents? Is the frater playing with us, trying to induce uncertainty in us? The esthetics of teasing: how much great art is built on that principle! So we will be teased for a while. I would like to go down the hall and confer with Eli; his mind is quick, he interprets nuances well. I want to know if he was thrown into perplexity by Frater Antony's response to his statement. But I suppose I'll have to wait till later to talk to Eli. Just now my door appears to be locked.

24. Timothy.

Creepier and creepier. That mile-long hallway. Those skulls all over the place, the Mexican-looking death-masks. Figures who've been flayed and still can grin, faces with skewers jabbed through their tongues and cheeks, bodies with flesh below and skulls on top. Lovely. And that weird old man, speaking to us in a voice that could have come out of a machine. I almost think he's some kind of robot. He can't be real, with that smooth tight skin of his, that bald head that looks as if it's never had any hair, those peculiar glossy eyes-shees.h.!.+

At least the bath was good. Although they've taken my clothes. My wallet, my credit cards, everything. I don't like that angle much, though I suppose there isn't much they can do with my things here. Maybe they just mean to launder them. I don't mind wearing these shorts instead. A little tight around the a.s.s, maybe-I guess I'm bigger than their usual run of guests-but in this heat it's all right to cut down on clothes.

What I do mind is being locked in my room. That bit reminds me of too many horror movies out of TV. Now a secret panel opens in the floor, yeah, and the sacred cobra comes slithering up, hissing and spitting. Or the poison gas enters by way of a hidden vent. Well, I don't mean that seriously. I don't think any harm's going to come to us. Still, it's offensive to be locked up, if you're a guest. Is this the hour for some very special prayer that they don't want us to interrupt? Could be. I'll wait an hour, and then I'll try to force the door. Looks pretty f.u.c.king solid, though, a big burly slab of wood.

No television set in this motel. Nothing much to read, except this booklet they've left on the floor next to my cot. And that's something I've read before. The Book of Skulls, no less. Typewritten, in three languages, Latin, Spanish, English. Cheerful decoration on the front cover: skull and crossbones. Hi ho for the Jolly Roger! But I'm really not amused. And inside the booklet, there's all the stuff Eli read us, that melodramatic c.r.a.p about the eighteen Mysteries. The phrasing's different from his translation, but the meaning's the same. Much talk of eternal life, but much talk of death, too. Too much.

I'd like to get out of this place, if they ever unlock the door. A gag is a gag is a gag, and maybe it seemed a fun idea last month to go tear-a.s.sing out west on Eli's say-so, but now that I'm here I can't understand what could have led me to get into this. If they're for real, which I continue to doubt, I don't want any part of them, and if they're just a bunch of ritual-happy fanatics, which seems quite likely, I still don't want any part of them. I've had two hours here and I think that's about enough. All these skulls blow my mind. The locked-door number, too. The weird old man. Okay, boys, that'll do. Timothy's ready to go home.

25. Eli.

No matter how many times I replayed the little exchange with Frater Antony, I couldn't come to terms with it. Was he putting me on? Pretending ignorance? Pretending knowledge that he doesn't in fact have? Was that a sly smile of the initiate, or a dumb smile of bluffing?

It was possible, I told myself, that they might know the Book of Skulls under some other name. Or that in the course of their migration from Spain to Mexico to Arizona they had undergone some fundamental reshuffling of their theological symbology. I was convinced, despite the frater's oblique reply, that this place had to be the direct successor to the Catalonian monastery in which the ma.n.u.script I had discovered had been written.

I took a bath. The finest bath of my life, the ultimate in baths, the acme. I emerged from the splendiferous tub to discover that my clothes had disappeared and my door was locked. I put on the pair of faded, frayed, tight shorts they had left for me. (They?) And I waited. And I waited. And I waited. Nothing to read, nothing to look at except a fine stone mask of a goggle-eyed skull, mosaic work, an infinity of bits of jade and sh.e.l.l and obsidian and turquoise, a treasure, a masterpiece. I considered taking a second bath just to consume the time. Then my door opened-I heard no key, no click of a lock-and someone who at first glance seemed to be Frater Antony entered. Second glance told me he was someone else: a shade taller, a shade narrower through the shoulders, a shade lighter of skin, but otherwise the same sun-burnished st.u.r.dy stocky pseudo-Pica.s.soid physique. In a curious quiet voice, furry-sounding, a Peter Lorre voice, he said, "I am Frater Bernard. Please accompany me."

The hallway seemed to grow longer as we traversed it. Onward we plodded, Frater Bernard leading the way, my eyes fixed for the most part on the oddly conspicuous ridge of his backbone. Bare feet against the smooth stone floor, a good feeling. Mysterious doors of sumptuous wood standing shut along both sides of the corridor: rooms, rooms, rooms, rooms. A million dollars' worth of grotesque Mexican artifacts mounted on the walls. All the G.o.ds of nightmare peered owlishly down at me. The lights had been turned on, and a soft yellow glow streamed from widely s.p.a.ced skull-shaped sconces, another little melodramatic touch. As we neared the front section of the building, the crossbar of the U, I glanced past Frater Bernard's right shoulder and had a quick, startling glimpse of an unmistakably female figure some forty or fifty feet ahead of me. I saw her step out of the last room in this dormitory wing, unhurriedly cross my path-she seemed to be floating-and vanish into the main section: a short, slender woman wearing a kind of clinging minidress, barely thigh-length, of some soft, pleated white fabric. Her hair was dark and glossy, Latin hair, and hung well below her shoulders. Her skin was deeply tanned, offering a strong contrast to her white garment. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s jutted forward spectacularly; I was in no doubt about her s.e.x. I did not clearly see her face. It surprised me that there should be sorors as well as fraters in this House of Skulls, but perhaps she was a servant, for the place was impeccably clean. I knew there was no point in asking Frater Bernard about her; he wore silence as others might wear armor.

He ushered me into a large room of ceremonial nature, apparently not the same one in which Frater Antony had greeted us, for I saw no sign of a trapdoor leading to the tunnel. The fountain appeared to be of a different shape here, taller, more tulip-shaped, though the figure from which the water flowed looked much like the one in the other room's fountain. Through the openwork beams of the ceiling I saw the slanting light of very late afternoon. The air was hot but not so stifling as it had been before.

Ned, Oliver, and Timothy were already present, each clad only in shorts, all three looking tense and uncertain. Oliver had that peculiar glazed expression that comes over him at moments of great stress. Timothy was trying to look blase, and was failing at it. Ned gave me a quick hard wink, perhaps congratulatory, perhaps in scorn.

There were about a dozen fraters also in the room.