There was talk after his death that his papers should go to some more august repository than the local library, which pleasant and spacious as it was for a town such as it served tended to be damp, being right next to the river; many of its older books smelled of it, faintly, shamefully. Welkin himself had made no arrangement for the disposition of his stuff. In the end it went to the library by default, no one caring to make an appeal for it to any other body or institution, maybe because it would have meant accounting for or explaining that manuscript book.
Rosie Rasmussen had read it, or read some of it, in revulsion and pity, the day she was given a complete tour of the library, from basement to dome, and a survey of its holdings. It was one of those times when Rosie went out (she felt) in disguise among her neighbors, to listen to their needs and hopes, and ask questions (when she could think of questions), and try to think of ways to help. During the time that she'd been doing this—she'd been director of the Rasmussen Foundation then for a dozen years—she had got better at it, the Zorro disguise became familiar to her and the phrases that promised to advance causes without exactly promising to pay last month's bills came more readily and with less shame. And yet now and then she would be told some extraordinary story, or have an age-old seam of need or hurt opened to her that she'd never known about, or had known about for years but had never understood or put together—and she would think how big the world is, all folded up though it is and so secret.
That was how she felt before Welkin's book, which the librarian lifted out of its archive box and put on the table before her. It was all handwritten, in a tiny perfectly legible hand, legible except for the paragraphs and pages of symbols meaningless to her. There were many illustrations done in what seemed to be colored pencils. The pages were sewn together with strong red thread, shoemaker's thread maybe, and there was a leather wrapper on which his name had been burned with a tool of some kind, and more symbols. No one, the librarian said, had ever recognized any of the symbols; they were his alone. Rosie turned the pages, awed by the care and thought the young man—only twenty-four—had lavished on the thing, thinking of him laboring over it, choosing among his tools, coloring carefully these demon faces, thinking. Every page had faint guidelines laid down in red ink to keep the pictures and the text squared up.
The saddest and most fearful thing in it, Rosie thought, though she'd read only a few pages, was how proud he seemed to be of what he'd done: how strong a demon battler he'd been, how he kept them at bay and hurt and harried them. How, in the end, he won, or said he had. It was almost hard to think about.
But it was time then for her to go meet the artist who claimed to be able to restore the long boarded-up pictures (of Dante, Shakespeare, Homer, and Longfellow) that filled the dome above. So Rosie closed the book, and the librarian replaced it in its box; Rosie would never look into it again.
* * * *
Pins, common steel ones with colored glass heads; the smoke of burned bay leaves and certain other fumigations; abjurings and yells spoken at varying speeds; and the written signaculae. These, though, could very quickly be emptied of their power, thus forcing him to discover others all in a moment, which fortunately he could usually do. They knew this, in Hell, as they knew and feared his other weapons; in their great conclaves they complained to their chiefs of his depredations and the harms they had all suffered at his hands. (He made a picture of them all gathered there in Hell, just as he had witnessed it, and surrounded the picture with images of the pins, the leaves, the words, the marks, to make them suffer the more.)
They disguised themselves in ingenious ways, as animals and objects (he knew that one of the lamp mantels in the drawing room, which when lit glowed and sizzled just like all the others, was in fact a devil named Flot, but for a long time he pretended not to know). Not all of them intended him harm, not all seemed to concern themselves with him, but he felt always that he was at threat, in a way that none of the folk around him seemed to him to be: as though they all lived out of harm's way in Faraway County and he alone lived in some dangerous city neighborhood, Five Points, Robber's Roost, the loiterers and evildoers and unregenerates eyeing him and grinning.
Sometimes they caused him harm. Sometimes they were able to kill his birds and chase away his helpers. In the greatest and most sorrowful defeat he suffered, they killed his parents. But they could not touch him, not deeply, not mortally.
Nor did they know that he had learned how to reach the lands beyond death without himself having to die. He traversed the hilly uplands that were Heaven, and found his parents there, weak and vanishing sometimes, distracted, unintelligible, like the gibbering ghosts of Homer's underworld, but sometimes in good fettle and able to return his embraces and answer his questions. Why, if there are so many dead, did he see only the two of them here, and mere glimpses of others? They answered softly, maybe even without speaking, but he thought he heard them say that the land is vast, actually endless, room enough for multitudes. And why when he came here did he feel so oppressed and watchful, and when he was in the underworld feel so alert, so powerful, so delighted even? They didn't know, they were only sure that they would not.
Yes, when he was in Hell, invisible to his enemies, he seemed to himself to be huge and ruthless. He overheard there the devils plan how they would invite him to join their fellowship, because he was so strong an opponent they could not defeat him; then when certain ambassadors came to him in his house, he, knowing their mission, was able to imprison them in a number of bottles specially prepared, and there they stayed, unable to get out. All the while they inveigled him he had kept his eyes fixed on his mother's picture of a holy angel, star on her forehead, who guides a little child across a rickety bridge over a chasm. In such ways he imprisoned some thousands of devils in his green and brown bottles when he was at his busiest. For the frontispiece of his book, he drew a portrait of himself, showing his weapons, his beloved starling, the Cross, his bottles, and a legend: Scourge of the Devils.
When later on he read Swedenborg, he understood in what place he had wandered so long as a youth, for Swedenborg taught that the world beyond death has the shape of the human body: head and heart and limbs and all other members. That, then, is where he had been journeying all along, right here where he now was—inside his skin and flesh. He could laugh by then, and he laughed aloud in pity and wonder for all that he had suffered in here, in the body-shaped world, which is at once in the midmost of everything and is its outermost as well.
* * * *
The later, unbound pages that are now included with the Welkin manuscript were apparently written when Welkin in later life rediscovered what he called the “Battle Book.” The handwriting of these later pages is that of a different man entirely: a swift, fair-sized script, careless of margins and written on sheets of varying sizes.
In the “Battle Book” itself, there is a Welkin drawing of Horace Osterwald, in which he appears as an opponent, murderer, and front for demons; the portrait is carefully enmeshed in powerful signs, including a drawing of a beef heart pierced with tatting needles. But there is also, among the unbound pages, a photograph of him, dating from the 1870s perhaps: a lean man with a wide white moustache, a gaze of compassionate, calm inquiry (or is that simply the nineteenth-century photography face, the features composed for a long exposure?). He sits in a wicker peacock chair and holds in his lap a great curled labial shell.
Hurd Hope Welkin's parents provided in their will for a guardian for their son for life. Horace Osterwald was a church deacon and former schoolmaster, and it was he who first interested Welkin in the wonders of the created world: animals and insects, rocks and flowers. He set him to collecting and classifying, naming and sorting—perhaps to calm his spirits with work that was exacting, time-consuming, and boring, or to reveal to him that these were creatures with their own insides and not the hiding places of demon enemies or both.