The paper of her brother’s last letter was thin, the typewriting faded and smeared. This was the letter Angela shared most often, with Father Alfonse, with other teachers at school, and with two anthropology professors whose names she found in a textbook bibliography. With these last she pursued a dialogue for almost a year after Gabe dropped out of sight. They seemed to know something about the area to which he had traveled. One of them, a Doctor Foss, claimed to have heard of his village. "The name pops up here and there," she told Angela on the phone, "but I’d always thought it was from one of their myths. Are you sure you have it right?" Angela sent her a copy of Gabe’s letter, and Dr. Foss responded immediately by telegram: Remarkable coincidences with the literature. Am eager to hear more. But Angela had no more to tell. Just the letter, then the silence.

       Poor Gabe. Angela hated to think of him alone. She had been his confidante and protectress. Even he admitted that he never would have recognized his vocation, let alone had the courage to pursue it, had it not been for her faith in him. Where others -- even their own parents -- saw an anemic, timid, bug-eyed, perpetual adolescent, Angela had insisted since middle school on a vision of Gabriel as a blossoming Soldier of Christ -- a late-bloomer maybe, but a boy with a destiny more sure and noble than anything that Fate held in store for his swaggering, clueless peers.

       Just two years older but with the seeming wisdom of maturity, she steered him through his teen years and into college and finally through seminary itself, typing his papers and ironing his surplices and quizzing him nightly on his Latin verbs. Mom and Daddy protested weakly at first (nobody became a priest anymore -- did they?), but they gradually backed off as Angela sculpted her little brother into a strapping, straight-shouldered, smiling version of his formerly geeky self. At the ordination reception Gabe’s father threw his arm around his son’s shoulders and beamed for Angela’s video camera, toothy and proud as if his chip-off-the-block had just scored a trophy-winning touchdown, instead of signing up for a life of poverty, celibacy and self-imposed exile among the world’s unfortunates. When news came of Gabe’s first posting, no one in the Donahue family had ever heard of the place. They couldn’t even find it in the old green world atlas on the bottom bookshelf in the guestroom. Gabe pointed out its location to them, and taught them to say the name of the country, with its unusual accents and surfeit of vowels; more a noise than a word, but Daddy practiced it until he had it almost right.

* * * * *

       Even among their own countrymen, the villagers of B. were famous for their celebrations. Locked in a labyrinth of sheer black cliffs, inaccessible to any but the most intrepid guide or tourist, their sundry fêtes and festivals were the stuff of genuine legend. The village lay but ninety miles, as the buzzard flies, from the capital itself, but to say the word "B." in the city was to invite rushed speech and adamant gestures, nodded heads and urgent denials. Have you heard…it can’t be…that’s preposterous…they have proof… To say you had been to B. was like saying you’d been to the moon: Theoretically possible, but highly unlikely. There were those who maintained that the place did not even exist.

       Father Gabe knew better. He sat slumped on a wooden cot in his rough stone cottage, tucked into the dank elbow where the black B. River, headed sluggishly toward the village, appeared to change its mind and rush away, all froth and fury, in the opposite direction. Gabe appreciated the impulse. On a damp plank across his lap he’d propped his sturdy Olivetti typewriter; the "missionary model;" light, portable and as doggedly indestructible as the souls it served to save. He rolled in a sheet of onionskin and dutifully pecked away, his index fingers dipping and rising like the beaks of busy sparrows.

       That ought to do it, he thought. Then he laughed a grim little laugh. As if he had the slightest notion what, after nearly seven years in B., would "do it."

       The sun poured like lava through the open shutters that faced both the river and Gabe’s futile little garden, run amok by native vines and thistles. In and out of the window a squadron of horse flies flew sorties in a non-stop relay, buzzing Father Gabe, the typewriter, the half-full wash basin on its three-legged stool and a quarter wheel of hard cheese on the bureau. The flies in B. were the size of fat moths at home, with pointed black wings and shimmering bodies of ruby red. It had taken Father Gabe a few years to get used to them. He certainly preferred them to the birds. Their dawn-to-dusk cacophony from the encircling treetops seemed at times to Gabe to be the sound of madness incarnate. His only relief from them was the darkness, and darkness in the forest held terrors of its own. There was nothing about B. that Gabe liked, except the constant thought of leaving it.

       He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a dirty yellow handkerchief. As miserable as were the summer months, winters in B. ached to the marrow with a vicious, piercing cold. Snow itself was rare in the valley, except when it arrived in a gushing avalanche from high in the rocky pastures, up where the villainous black rocks met the lowering sky. Then the crashing ice and melt water filled the River with a fury that trapped poor Gabe behind his warped plank door and shuttered window. He would hear the wind scream at the water, and the water roar back in reply, and over all the sound of rolling thunder in the mountains where the snowfields shifted, and he would almost long for the stupid drone of the blood-flies. Which was worse? It didn’t matter. Neither season was avoidable. The point was simply to endure.

        He did not freeze, those winter days and nights. The weavers of B. had plenty of wool, and Gabe was the frequent recipient of their cast-offs: rough, unwashed robes and blankets that stank of shit and straw, but were as warm as the beasts from which they came. Oh, he was taken care of, all right. Each week a carter dumped a load of log ends and dried goat turds for his squat iron stove. A boy brought by milk, yogurt and cheese so fresh it danced upon Gabe’s tongue. In the village, the blood-spattered butcher winked while wrapping bones, scraps and gizzards in a swath of filthy brown paper. "The holy man needs meat," the butcher would call with a grin. And he’d sail the packet just so into the priest’s waiting hands, at the far edge of a market-day crowd that clamored for choice joints and organs like a crush of Wall Street brokers. The grunting baker handed him twisted loaves of bread. A whiskered old woman offered cakes of fiery ground spices wrapped in leaves. Baskets of ripe fruit were left by his door. The villagers saw to it that he did not die. As the years passed, Gabe could not help but be almost resentful of their charity.

       Above the drone of the flies there rose a familiar clamor -- the village band, tuning their dented instruments in preparation for yet another ritual -- or perhaps spontaneous -- Bacchanalia. Lord knew what the occasion was this time. A birthday maybe, or a wedding, or a funeral, or a footrace, or even a new batch of their wretched moonshine, distilled from kitchen scraps and dung. It didn’t take much to make a party in B. He heard a drum, beating arhythmically, then the instrument that was like a clarinet only louder, then another like a bagpipe only harsher, then several things that might be flutes, and finally the violins -- real violins; these at least he knew by name, except that their tone bore no relation to what he had once associated with this most noble of instruments. They barked and squealed and soared, bows slicing strings like hacksaws, a soundtrack from the Devil’s own nightmares. The band was not far away, playing as they walked. Father Gabe resumed his pecking:

       The din of the band was almost upon him now. It followed the flies in through the window and around the room, filling every nook and sticky corner. He stopped his ears with his typing fingers and waited until the parade passed by. When the music was finally but a rumor downwind (or a ringing in his head; he couldn’t tell which) he pulled his letter off the carriage, slid the plank and typewriter beneath his bed and rummaged in his bureau drawer for a used envelope. The packet of fresh ones he’d brought to B. was long since gone. Now he rationed and recycled envelopes from the letters he’d received during his first year and a half as a missionary, when people still wrote to him -- his sister Angela, Father Alfonse, a Trappist uncle in Kentucky. It had been over five years now since the last letter, though old Lolto, B.’s ancient postman, still came through the village punctually, every six weeks, navigating river and rope bridge and miles of cliff-hugging paths no wider than a strip of duct tape; a changeable route to and from the capital, the details of which he revealed to no one.

       It was Lolto who brought the Sisters’ packages, just one or two a year now, shoebox reminders of Father Gabe’s former, and possibly irretrievable, existence. The sight of the postman’s red canoe, bobbing closer and closer on the river’s dirty surface, never failed to lift Gabe’s spirits like a fragile crystal ball that would be smashed to slivers on the packed earth floor when Lolto shook his head, frowning beneath his drooping leather hat and enormous black moustache. The old man took whatever letters Father Gabe had ready. Then the young priest waited through six more weeks of wonder and worry, during which he timidly began to build fresh hopes that would be dashed again upon Lolto’s return.

       For there was only the mail. No telephone service reached B.; no reliable roads or radio or TV or even satellite signals penetrated the mountain fortress that was the village’s protection as well as its curse. No one came, since Father Gabe and Father Thomas. No one except Lolto. He took the mail to the capital, and he brought the mail in, and what he did otherwise Father Gabe had no notion. The old rascal never spent a copper at the open-air taverns on the square. He had tales to tell, of the city and the world at large and the sights and sounds he’d seen on television and heard in the big cafés. These stories held his audiences spellbound, or rocked them with laughter, or shocked them, sometimes, into protests and tears -- but however entertaining they might be, they were flatly and unanimously disbelieved. He brought gifts too, bought or stolen on his journeys: golden whiskey for the men, pastel scarves and stockings for the women, and for the children fat bundles of black and white newspapers, which they folded into clever pointed hats.

       Father Gabe wondered what tales of B. Lolto told on his travels, and who, if anyone, believed them. Visit after visit Gabe asked, no begged, to accompany the old man out of the forest, back to the main road and home. But no matter how he struggled to communicate his mounting sense of urgency, Lolto was implacable. "No, no," he would say, shaking his furry head. He spoke slowly, with large, gentle gestures, as if explaining something to a toddler. "Much too dangerous. Much too far." And he would row away again.

       Gabe dug out an old envelope; a letter from his sister sent in the second year of his posting. He crossed out his own simple address (no numbers, just words: this man, this place) and wrote for the umpteenth time the location of the Parish House in western Pennsylvania which he’d once thought of as home. Lolto was due, any day now. Gabe wondered if he should try the embassy again. Or maybe another newspaper or radio station. Once he’d even written his Pennsylvania senator, but of course there had been no reply. He shook his head and smiled thinly. Who was he kidding? He could write to the President. To the Pope. To the Queen of England, if he felt like it. It wouldn’t make a wink of difference.

       His sister’s letter -- her last -- lay on the bureau where he’d set it aside. How many times had he poured over it, word by fading word? He unfolded and reread it anyway.

       But of course they had. Father Gabe had not shared the details of his companion’s death with his sister, nor even with Father Alfonse. Poor Thomas. The unfortunate little boozer. When the fever took him he hardly seemed to fight it. One day Gabe watched him swell like an inflatable boat until his enormous body half-filled their tiny house. He screamed for two days without stopping. He would not eat or drink. His skin was like fire to the touch. At the end, when it was time for the last sacraments, Gabe could not even get close to him. He begged the villagers to go and find a doctor, but they just set their faces like stones and shook their shaggy heads. There was nothing Gabe could do.

       The worst part was not Thomas’ death, however, but the night that followed it: the drums, the chanting, the screaming pigs that bled like crimson fountains beneath a forest of flashing knives in the torch-lit fringes of the square. He’d tried to say a simple Mass in the thatched barn that had been granted them, begrudgingly, as a temporary place of worship. This is not our way, he tried to say. The villagers, terrifying in their beaten copper masks and gaudy feather suits, came closer, shining in the firelight, confidant that their magic was stronger than his. At last he’d fled the square, leaving behind the poor priest’s remains. Weeks later he tried to ask Lolto what had become of them. "Your friend is safe," the postman assured him, flashing a grin of six gapped teeth beneath his moustache. But he would say no more.

       The letter continued:

       No, Gabe had not told his sister everything -- and not just about Father Thomas. There had been more to the night of the trumpets, too -- or rather, to his morning in the deserted square. Much more. He had no words to describe what had happened, except to put it down in plain, simple English, but when he tried (several times) he couldn’t himself believe what he read. How could he expect Angie to? Or his parents, with whom he knew she shared his letters? Or Father Alfonse? Or worst of all the Bishop? Hallucinations, they would say. Forest fever. A virus in his brain. Or they’d think he’d gone the way of Father Thomas before he died; a slave to the bottle and a stranger to his senses. They would abandon him, if they hadn’t already. Maybe he’d said too much as it was.

       He did not even tell Angie everything about the birds. He didn’t mention how, in the burning loneliness of the noonday sun, he had heard them whisper. At first it was a hushing, sandpaper sound, like a steady wind in small dry leaves. The air was absolutely still, and Gabe wondered at first if he was hearing some sort of insects in the trees. But soon the sound of words, of voices, became undeniable -- and Gabe wanted badly to deny them. He could not say which bird whispered what. Syllables came to him in a tangle as tight as the winding vines that hung in curtains all around the square. Here was a sentence, there a phrase, and between them slipped the blade of a single word. A curse? A prayer? A sigh? As the voices began to swell he strained to hear more, but soon, as their words began to become distinct, he had stopped his ears with his fingers. It was as if he turned up their volume. They became insistent. Clamoring. As demanding, in their hissing, insidious way, as the blare of the trumpets themselves.

       They spoke of simple faults: A stutter, a harelip, a limp. A child who couldn’t see. A girl who grew too tall. A boy who wet himself. A mute. A webbed foot. A disturbing birthmark. A nagging cough. A stump. The whispers were overlapped and jumbled, each breathless with its own small story, spending words as quickly as a drunkard’s last coins. As each bird finished its story -- or so Gabe assumed -- it flew slowly up above the trees and out of sight.

       Later he tried to pretend he had imagined them. Maybe he slept in the square and dreamed them. Maybe he conjured them, like Ebenezer and his ghosts, out of a glass of bad wine or a piece of moldy cheese. Talking birds, after all, were not only impossible, they were a sacrilege. Maybe they hadn’t happened at all.

       Yet he knew what he knew. There had been the trumpets, and the guards, and the long night of terror such as he had never known, and then the birds had whispered words he couldn’t forget. Then he went home and slept like a dead man until the following day.

       This was what he didn’t tell Angie in his letter. It was what he’d been trying not to think about, every waking minute of every day, for six long years. Each August since, on the night the trumpets sounded, he’d covered his head with his pillow and tried not to imagine what was happening in the square. The following day he would keep his eyes lowered, working in the rank weeds of his garden or washing his tattered cassocks on the rocks in the river. In this, at least, he was successful. He never saw or heard the birds again.

       Angela might be married by now, or dead. His parents? Daddy was sick with stomach troubles when Gabe left the States. Father Alfonse could long be gone -- though wouldn’t the nuns have told him; a card or a note tucked in among the Argyles? But a card may have been lost -- all the packages had been opened before delivery; ripped and retaped, and who knew to what extent plundered en route. "It is the Customs," Lolto insisted when Gabe protested the first time. "They must see everything."

       Gabe sealed his letter and lay it on the bureau next to his leather-bound breviary, a book that had proved itself about as useful in this place as a Pittsburgh Yellow Pages. No longer did he find solace in its familiar, measured lines of prayer and response. The "daily" celebration of the Mass he claimed in his letter to Father Alfonse was an outright lie. He had not delivered a public service for many years now, the novelty having long since worn off for even the most curious villagers. For a time after Father Thomas died he performed the Mass outside his cottage each dawn, for whoever might be curious enough to stop by. Soon he cut back to every other day, then weekly, and finally he abandoned it altogether. When he read at all now, which he did rarely, it was one of his language books (perhaps his pleas for help were poorly phrased?), or one of the medical reference books he’d brought with him (he knew cures for just about everything but loneliness). And of course he had his thumb-worn Readers’ Digests, stacked in tipsy stalagmites about his floor and under his bed and even on his rickety wooden porch, from where he’d planned on moving them before the rains came years ago, but he never got around to it. The porch piles were no longer readable, but he had plenty of others when he needed them.

        It was to his porch he went now, to taste the humid forest air and plan the rest of another interminable day. The sound of the band had faded at last. All he heard was the droning of flies and the slapping, shushing sound of the river making its about-face before him. God, how he hated this place. Behind him, on the other side of a twisted mile of treacherous roots and plants without names, lay the village. He would wander there toward sunset, taking his flashlight with the Sisters’ hoarded batteries. He would choke down a stony, stale roll and a cup of gray coffee or maybe a glass of brick-red wine, and he’d make his way back in the dark as the celebration (whatever it was tonight) grew into lunacy -- dancing, drunkenness, even public coupling in the firelight. These run-of the-mill festivities were open to him, but he could no longer bear to witness them. He would walk home alone, the path worn smooth and familiar under his boots. Perhaps, he mused, he would be eaten by something in the forest. Then Father Alfonse could worry about the mail that never came. Provided, of course, that he noticed.

       Father Gabe’s eye picked up a motion downriver, on the incoming fork, a kind of wrinkle in the heat waves that rose off the fetid brown surface like poison gasses, which he often suspected they were. His heart skipped a beat and his palms went cold. Lolto. A day early, maybe? Or maybe right on time. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the face the old bastard would be wearing as his ridiculous red canoe approached, and what he might be carrying in the heavy net bag he wore over his shoulder. Gabe ran inside for the letter to Father Alfonse. Oh God, he thought, just one postcard, no matter who it’s from, and I’ll say the Mass twice tonight and three times tomorrow in the middle of the village square. He came down off the porch and through the tall grass to the water’s edge, heedless of the giant snakes he saw there sometimes, sunning themselves like spotted logs on the muddy bank. Lolto was standing in the canoe, rowing easily in the slow current with a long, smooth paddle. The priest waved one hand in greeting, and Lolto answered in kind. Now the thick moustache was visible, and soon the afternoon sun lit up the skin on the old man’s face and arms, the color of unpolished brass. Finally Gabe saw his eyes, red as furnaces, and he searched the postman’s face to see the curve of his mouth.

       "Hey Uncle," Gabe cried in the B. tongue, using one of the local honorifics. "Hey Uncle, is there something for me?"

       The response confused him.

       "Nothing, my Father," Lolto called out. But beneath the moustache, Gabe could see now that he was grinning. The priest held his hands out in question. Lolto’s grin widened and the old man rowed closer, close enough to take Gabe’s letter from him. Then he expertly steered the boat away, toward the first ripples where the now departing river picked up speed.

       "Nothing my Father, but you wait," Lolto called. "I am bringing something next time. Something that will make you smile."

       "What do you mean, Uncle? Will there be a letter?" Gabe shouted, already fearing that his voice could not be heard above the bubbling whitecaps. But Lolto seemed to understand. As the water whipped the small canoe around and began to pull it quickly downstream and away, he turned and waved his paddle in farewell.

       "Better than a letter, my Father!" he shouted in a clear, ringing voice. "Better than all your letters!"

       Then the river grabbed Lolto like a fist grabs a rock, and hurled him away downstream and out of sight.

* * * * *

       Angela never met Dr. Foss, but she did speak with her once on the phone, after Gabe had been silent for over a year. The professor was a bit cold; less interested in helping Gabe than in every scrap of information Angela could give her about the Mission. She wanted to know how the S. mountains had been chosen -- how had Gabe even known about them?

        "I have no idea," Angela insisted. "I couldn’t even find them in the atlas."

       "You’re not the only one," Dr. Ross said. "Nobody invades them, because there isn’t anything there of value. There are some peaks on the outskirts that the climbers go for, but they tend to climb up and come right back down without ever penetrating the middle. There are a couple of botanists who have done field work in the valleys, but for some reason they haven’t published their findings. So that brother of yours could be important."

       "Of course he’s important," Angela said indignantly.

       "I mean important to other people. His letter has caused quite a commotion."

       "A commotion? Where?" Angela hadn’t agreed that the professor could share Gabe’s letter -- in fact, she’d explicitly asked her not to.

       "Just here in the department. Dr. Tobin. Professor Phelps. And Dr. Howard at Bloomington, naturally. He did his dissertation on legends of the S. mountain cultures. He’s very eager to follow up on this."

       "We can’t follow up if we can’t find Gabe."

       "But I don’t see how I can help you there ."

       "Is that all you people can say? Aren’t you supposed to be experts? What good is it being an expert if you can’t do anything?" Angela’s voice was rising. She didn’t care about Doctor this and Professor that. She wanted Gabe home, and never to hear about B. again.

        "I remind you Ms. Donahue, that you contacted me."

        Angela took a deep breath. There was no point in making enemies.

        "I’m sorry to be so blunt. It’s just that I’m worried."

        "Of course you’re worried, dear. Anyone would be."

        That was the last Angela heard from her. Father died, then mother, and Augusts came and went and came again. Sometimes she sat at night, in the weak, warm breeze of a window fan, with the atlas and Gabe’s letters on her dining room table, and thought of things that the Professor had said: Nothing there of value. Could be important. Of course you’re worried. Dear.

* * * * *

       The red canoe rode lower than usual in the dark water. Already the morning sun pierced the tallest forest branches with needles of searing white heat. Father Gabe stood again on the river’s bank, a letter (to Angela, this time) in his hand. He waved his hand in a broad, high arc. Lolto grinned and waved back as usual. But there was something else to his gesture. He was pointing at something in the boat; something large -- a bundle of some kind -- stowed behind him. A bundle that moved. The canoe came closer still. Lolto grinned more broadly. The bundle moved again, and became a woman.

        Lolto docked clumsily in the tall weeds, and the woman disembarked. No one had yet said a word. She was perhaps fifty years old, squat and mannish, wearing American running shoes, blue jeans and a wide straw hat under which her wrinkled, sunburned face looked like an overripe tomato. Red letters on her gray T-shirt spelled "NOTRE DAME." The middle of both words fell into a dark, sweat-stained crevasse between her sizable breasts. She held out a plump pink hand.

        "Father Donahue?"

        She spoke English. The first English Gabe had heard in nearly seven years. He couldn’t think of how to answer, so he simply took her hand and repeated her words:

       "Father Donahue." His own name sounded strange on his lips.

        Lolto hefted a nylon duffel and two smaller bags from the canoe and set them on the bank, then without further ado began to push away. The priest looked at the postman in alarm, still waiting for an explanation. Lolto nodded toward the woman, then toward Gabe, and smiled even bigger than before.

        "You will not be alone now," he said in the language of B. "I have brought you a woman."

       And again the river carried him swiftly away.

        The woman was Rita Foss. She had come to B., she told him, as a scientist. She was a Doctor of Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. "Not from Notre Dame?" said Gabe, finding his voice, saying the first thing he could think of. No, she said, giving him an odd look. She was here because of things he’d written in letters to his sister.

        "Then Angela is all right?" Gabe almost shouted. "Why hasn’t she written? Why hasn’t anyone written?"

        They had walked as far as Father Gabe’s porch, and were standing among the moldy Readers’ Digests. Gabe struggled with the duffel; Rita carried the two smaller bags. He was aware of how he must appear to her, at the entrance to his primitive little cottage, with his knife-cut hair and tangled beard, his hacked-off shorts and the patched remains of a khaki shirt hanging from his skinny shoulders. But she had eyes only for the river and the forest, which she appeared to regard as rare and wonderful. For a minute Gabe wondered if she hadn’t heard him.

        "Angela and I haven’t, um, been in touch for a while," she finally said. "Shortly after I learned about your visit here, I put in with the embassy in the capital for permission to visit. They sat on my letter for several years. Frankly I’d given up. I finally got the okay just a few months ago. Out of the blue. No apologies, nothing. Just a one-page letter saying ‘You may come,’ and some travel information, and the name and description of the man who met me at the airport."

        Gabe pointed toward the river. "You mean Lolto?"

        "Yes. Funny sort, isn’t he? Hardly said a word the whole way -- except that you’d been waiting for me. What could he have meant by that?"

        "He said that to you in English?"

        "Oh, yes. He seemed to speak it well. Just not very much. But how can you have been waiting for me? You’ve never heard of me. Have you?"

        Gabe sighed. In seven years he had heard no word of English from Lolto. With his elbow he shoved open the warped cottage door.

        "No," he answered. "No, I haven’t heard of you. And I haven’t been waiting for you. I’ve just been living here alone, wishing there was some way to go home."

        She squinted, as if trying to bring him into focus. Fat red flies buzzed in the air between them. She took off her hat and set her bags on the bed.

        "Why haven’t you left?" she asked.

        Father Gabe regarded her with amazement. Did this woman have any idea what sort of place she’d come to?

       "This is not," he said, "an easy place to leave."

       She shrugged, turning her broad back to him and tugging at the zipper of one of the small cases.

        "Not if you get attached to it, I guess," she said. "I’m just here for some research. A few weeks at most. Maybe six." Gabe was going to reply, but her next words froze him in place. "I’m lucky I got here in August. I hope I haven’t missed it."

       "Missed what?"

       "The night of the trumpets and all that. You don’t know how fortunate you’ve been. You may be the first person outside these mountains to have first-hand knowledge of these things."

        The priest dropped the duffel on the earth floor with a thump that turned Rita around. She looked annoyed.

        "Careful," she said. "My cameras are in there."

        "Sorry." Then he laughed -- a raucous laugh, that surprised the annoyance off Rita’s face and replaced it with a hint of concern. "Terribly sorry," he repeated, still laughing. "But don’t worry about your cameras. I doubt they’ll be of any use to you."

        And they faced each other across the little room.

* * * * *

       Rita was in B. for one week. On her last day she borrowed Gabe’s typewriter. She wrote to an academic colleague, the very same woman with whom she’d first heard of Gabe and the village, in that letter from Angela long ago. Her typing was fast and sure, ten fingers flying like the patter of rain on a roof. Gabe stood outside, watching the River.

       She typed:

       Gabe found the letter that evening, still in the roll of the typewriter, the black sturdy case of which had been tossed on the floor, under a wadded shirt and a damp towel. He had not expected her to go so quickly, when the final trumpets sounded. He had planned on trying to dissuade her.

       It had happened at dusk. He had brewed them a pot of tea. There were still enough hoarded tea bags from the nuns to last -- well, he didn’t want to think how long. He had no sugar to put in it, only goat’s milk. Rita said she didn’t mind.

        "I’ve put stranger things in my tea," she said. He thought she might have a story to tell, but she seemed to have even less to say to him than usual. The sun was finally setting and he was coming in from the porch, just ducking his head under the doorjamb, when the trumpets began.

       "God in Heaven," she said. The blood rushed from her face. For a moment she seemed to gasp for air. Then she grabbed her camera, notebook and baseball cap and pushed past him and out the door.

       "This is it," she shouted, but the trumpets ate her words and threw them to the sky. She ran into the forest, and he followed.

       He did not catch her.

       The last he was certain that he saw of her was her wide rear end beneath her baggy T-shirt, her blue-veined legs below, and her camera slung behind her, all lit by torchlight at the guarded village gate. Helmeted men with dark brown rifles parted ranks to let her pass. Gabe huffed and hollered, thirty yards behind, vines and nettles slapping his face and uncovered arms. In some places the path was nearly blocked by black webs that hung taut and sticky in the deepening twilight. He hacked at them, karate-like, and blundered on.

       Of course he was refused. "Go home, Father," the armed men called to him. "She’s ours now." He yelled at them, first in their language and then in English; furious, desperate, demanding to be admitted. Behind the guards the bonfires began to rise. "Go home," they said. So he did.

       In the morning he tucked Rita’s letter into his last hoarded envelope and got it ready for Lolto, whom he expected any day. He hoped her words would reach this Marcie person. He hoped Marcie would be concerned -- that she would take some kind of action. But he didn’t expect it. He stood on the sagging porch, the magazine piles rotting around him. The river churned and foamed, oblivious as always to his presence. The flies were thicker than usual. He looked up. Overhead, almost out of sight, a lone black buzzard dipped and soared, then flew silently away.

* * * * *

       The guide was unfathomably old -- the oldest person Angela had ever seen. His wrinkles, especially around his eyes, were deep, long creases that might have held worlds within them, or knowledge, or maybe some fluid richer than blood that gave his cheeks their burnished glow. His vein-shot, yellow eyes held their black pupils like little moons at full eclipse. His head was small. He had no lips. He stank. He would not take Angela to B.

        "Even if we found it," he said, "we would never find our way out." His English was surprisingly good. Angela pressed for facts: had he heard of two priests, Americans, many years ago, who had gotten lost with their guide and ended up in B? Had the guide never emerged? Had there been no tales or rumors? Had he himself perhaps…?

        "No priests, no guide, no stories." The man was emphatic, even angry, in his denials. "When we speak of B. it is only to entertain the children by the campfire, or to frighten them when they’ve disobeyed. I am not even sure that such a place exists."

        What is said to the children, she asked, to frighten them?

        He laughed his lipless laugh, but there was no mirth in him. "When the children of B. misbehave," he hissed, "they are transformed into bugs and bats. And then they are swatted when they try to fly away." He clapped his tiny hands, watching her reaction. His smile faded. "That is what we tell them."

        "But you must try to take me there," Angela said. "I will pay you whatever you ask."

        He took her instead to Q. A long enough journey, he said, for a woman. Maybe in Q. there would be talk of priests and guides. The people there had long memories, and their men traveled far into the mountains, chasing lost sheep and searching for silver in the caves and fissures.

        Angela had heard of Q. It was where Gabe and Father Thomas had intended to establish themselves. A place where Father Alfonse had said they were needed. A real place on a real map. She supposed it was better than nothing.

        They traveled a sluggish river the color of a sidewalk penny. Dense curtains of enormous, humming insects hovered over the fetid water. The brassy sun beat down on them incessantly. Sweat covered Angela’s body like a second skin. Thin men with dark eyes clustered on the river’s banks, calling out what seemed to Angela to be sad, short songs in complex harmony. "Beggars," spat the guide, and rowed on by. Sometimes the forest thinned and she saw across sandbars to the rancorous folds of the mountains, black-faced, trapped in shadow even when the sun was full upon them. My God, she thought, he was only a boy. Why did you send him here?

        She had sold the house for travel money, and left her class of third-graders halfway through the term. She telegraphed Dr. Foss before she left, seeking some crumb of encouragement, but she received no answer. She had a camera, a tape recorder, and enough money (she hoped) in multiple currencies to bribe whoever might need bribing, or to buy information that might otherwise stay locked away. So far there had be none to buy. There was apparently nothing to know. When she said she was going to B., people smiled. Many tourists, they told her, had set their sights on B. But the world was still waiting for its first snapshot.

        For now it seemed that Q. would have to do. It lay not far off a branch of the river, a shallow green creek choked tight with fallen leaves the size of platters, through which the old guide pushed them for half a day with a long smooth pole, swearing and straining but scorning her offers of help. At last they tied the boat to a rotted dock and hiked into a forest so thick that Angela couldn’t believe that a path existed, even when she felt it unfolding softly under her nervous feet. As a child, Gabe had refused to walk through uncut grass, fearing what might lurk or lunge there. How had he survived such a place?

        The village was small. Some cottages of pitted stone, a squat thatched store, a common hall, a ruined church. A church?

        "The Jesuits came years ago," the guide said with a shrug. "But they had to leave. The building is used now as a brewery."

        Q.’s residents paid them little attention. Visitors were not uncommon, the guide explained, though they never stayed long. They came to photograph the children, who were famous for a certain game they played. In this town where even the teachers could neither write nor read, the boys and girls obtained from somewhere printed paper; delicate sheets of onionskin and light blue aerograms with dotted red borders, all covered with smudged black letters in a language that meant nothing to anyone. The kids used the paper to craft marvelous folded creatures; birds and butterflies of startling, lifelike intricacy. These they traded among themselves, and kept in clever cages made from reeds and branches. Local legend had it that once each year, on a moonlit night in August, the cages were opened and the best-made of these creatures would take flight, flapping silently over the treetops while the children danced and sang a plaintive farewell.

        But his was only legend, the old guide assured her. No one outside the village had ever seen the paper creatures fly. Not that he had ever heard. And he had lived a very long time, and had of heard of many strange things indeed.

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