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-assured. “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 acquire 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 fashion 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.

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 pass 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 motelroom-comfortable. 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, fashioned 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 glass 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 god, 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 sparse and lean furnishings. 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 scrap, 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 shirts 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 manuscript 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.