“Found,” he said, and I inhaled his breath. It smelled of sweet wine and broken bread.

I felt myself falling, tumbling through space, overcome by shame and sorrow and a sense of loss that would never end, a denial of all that I loved that would stay with me through all eternity. I was aflame, screaming and howling, beating at the fires with my fists, but they would not be extinguished. My whole being was alive with burning. The heat coursed through my veins. It animated my muscles. It gave form to my speech and light to my eyes. I twisted in the air and saw, far below, the waters of a great ocean. I glimpsed my own burning shape reflected in them, and others beside me. This world was dark, but we would bring light to it.

Found.

And so we fell like stars, and at the moment of impact I wrapped the tattered remnants of charred black wings around me, and the fires went out at last.

I was being dragged somewhere by the collar of my jacket. I didn’t want to go. I had trouble keeping my eyes open, so that the world drifted between darkness and half-light. I heard myself speaking, muttering the same words over and over.

“Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.”

I was almost at Brightwell’s car. It was a big blue Mercedes, but the backseat had been removed to enable him to push back the driver’s seat and give him room to enter. The car stank of meat. I tried to fight him, but I was weak and disoriented. I felt drunk, and the taste of sweet wine was upon my tongue. He opened the trunk, and it was filled with burning flesh. My eyes closed for the last time.

And a voice called my name.

“Charlie,” it said. “How have you been? I hope we’re not interrupting.”

I opened my eyes.

I was still standing at the open door of my Mustang. Brightwell had moved a few steps from his car, but had not yet reached me. To my right was the black Peugeot, and the bearded man with the clerical collar had jumped from the car and was now pumping my hand furiously.

“It’s been a long time. We had some trouble finding this place, let me tell you. I never thought that a city boy like you would end up out in the boonies. You remember Paul?”

The younger man stepped around the hood of the Peugeot. He was careful not to turn his back on the huge figure watching us from a short distance away. Brightwell seemed uncertain of how to proceed, then turned around, got in his car, and drove in the direction of Black Point. I tried to make out the license plate, but my brain was unable to make sense of the numbers.

“Who are you?” I said.

“Friends,” said the bearded man.

I looked down at my right hand. There was blood dripping from my fingers. I rolled up my sleeve and saw five deep puncture wounds upon my arm.

I stared at the road ahead, but the Mercedes was gone from sight.

The cleric handed me a handkerchief to stem the bleeding.

“On the other hand,” he said, “that was definitely not a friend.”

We sat around the kitchen table while the marshes prepared to flood, waiting for the coming of the tides that would bring with them death and regeneration. Already the air felt different; there was a stillness to nature, a watchfulness, as though every living thing that depended on the marshes for its existence was attuned to their rhythms and knew instinctively what was about to occur.

I cleaned out the cuts on my arm, although I could not quite trace the chain of events that led to my receiving them. I still had a sense of vertigo, a dizziness that left me feeling uncertain on my feet, and I could not rinse the taste of sweet wine from my mouth.

I offered my visitors coffee, but they expressed a preference for tea. Rachel had left some herbal tea behind the instant coffee. It smelled a little like someone had taken a leak in a rosebush. The bearded cleric, who said his name was Martin Reid, winced slightly when he tasted it, but he persevered. Clearly, those years spent following his vocation had endowed him with a degree of inner strength.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“It wasn’t too hard to connect you to the events in Brooklyn,” he said. “You make quite an impression wherever you go. We learned a little more about you from Mr. Neddo in New York.”

Neddo’s involvement with these men was a surprise. I had to confess that Neddo now unconditionally gave me the creeps. I couldn’t deny that he had an extensive knowledge of certain matters, but the pleasure that he derived from it was troubling. Being around him was like keeping company with a semireformed addict whose ambition to stay clean was not as urgent as his love for the narcotic.

“I think Mr. Neddo may be morally suspect,” I said. “You may become tainted by association.”

“We are all flawed in our own way.”

“Maybe, but my closet isn’t filled with Chinese skulls fresh from the executioner’s gun.”

Reid conceded the point.

“Admittedly, I try not to delve too deeply into his acquisitions. He is, nevertheless, a useful source of information, and you have reason to be grateful to him for informing us of your visit to him, and of the path that your investigation is following. The gentleman on the road didn’t look best pleased by our intrusion into his business. If we hadn’t arrived when we did, it could have turned very ugly. Or in his case, uglier.”

“He certainly isn’t a looker,” I conceded.

Reid gave up on his tea. “That’s terrible,” he said. “I’ll still be tasting that on the day I die.”

I apologized once again.

“The man on the road told me that his name was Brightwell,” I said. “I think you know a little more than that about him.”

The younger priest, who had introduced himself as Paul Bartek, looked to his colleague. They were both Cistercian monks, based in Europe but staying for the present in a monastery in Spencer. Reid had a Scottish accent, but Bartek’s was harder to identify: there were traces of French and American English, as well as something more exotic.

“Tell me what happened on the road,” said Reid. “What did you feel?”

I tried to recall the sensations I had experienced. The memory seemed to intensify my nausea, but I persevered.

“One minute he seemed to be leaning against his car, and the next he was right in my face,” I said. “I could smell his breath. It smelled like wine. Then he was gripping my arm and dragging me toward his car. He made those cuts on my arm. The trunk opened, and it looked like a wound. It was made of flesh and blood, and it stank.”

Reid and Bartek exchanged a look.

“What?” I said.

“We could see both of you as we approached,” said Bartek. “He never moved. He didn’t touch you.”

I displayed the cuts for them.

“Yet I have these.”

“That you do,” said Reid. “There’s no denying it. Did he say anything to you?”

“He said that I was hard to track down, and that we had matters to discuss.”

“Anything else?”

I remembered the sensation of falling, of burning. I did not want to share it with these men because it brought with it a sense of great shame and regret, but something told me that they were trustworthy, even good, and that they were ready to provide answers to some of the questions that I had.

“There was a sense of vertigo, of descending from a great height. I was burning, and there were others burning around me. I heard him speak as he was dragging me to the car, or as I thought he was.”

“What did he say?”

“‘Found.’ He said I was found.”

If Reid was surprised by this, then he kept it hidden well. Bartek didn’t have his friend’s poker features. He looked shocked.