The basement smelled like the inside of a church - not incense exactly, but something older than incense. Stone, perhaps. Old paper. The specific silence of a place that had been kept, not merely stored.
Joshua had been in his grandfather's house for four days and had not yet gone downstairs.
There was no reason to avoid it, exactly. He had been through every other room - the two bedrooms, the study with its wall of books organized in a system he couldn't decode, the kitchen with its inexplicable collection of mismatched coffee cups. He had found his grandfather's winter coats still hanging in the hall closet and had stood in front of them for a while without touching them, the way you stand in front of something when you haven't decided yet whether it is going to cost you something. He had found a drawer in the study desk that was locked and a key on his grandfather's ring that didn't match any lock he could locate, which he took as information. He had found, on the nightstand, a rosary in a small leather pouch, worn smooth, and next to it a prayer book in Latin so battered that the spine had been repaired twice with what appeared to be electrical tape.
His grandfather, Teodor Maren, had died on the second of February at the age of eighty-nine, in the bed he had slept in for thirty-one years, in this house in this town, apparently without complaint. The hospice nurse said he had been praying when she last checked on him. The next time she checked, he was gone.
Joshua had known him less than he should have. That was the honest accounting. His father's falling-out with Teodor had been total, architectural - the kind that reorganizes a family's entire geography without anyone ever saying precisely why. Joshua had met him perhaps a dozen times in his life. He remembered a man who was quiet in the way that certain old things are quiet: not empty, but settled. He remembered hands that were enormous for a small man, and a voice that seemed to come from somewhere lower than his chest. He remembered being eight years old and watching his grandfather pray before dinner - not the quick Catholic two-step his parents sometimes performed at holidays, but something deliberate, something that required the full minute it took - and feeling obscurely that he was watching a man do something serious. Something that counted.
He was thirty-two years old. His grandfather had left him the house, the contents, and a letter from an attorney in Edwardsville informing him that there were no other assets and no other instructions, except one: There are things in the basement that require your particular attention. You will know them when you find them.
The house was in Alton, on a street that climbed the bluff above the river, the kind of street where the houses were close together and old enough to have settled into their foundations like people who have finally stopped fighting something. It was the last week of February. The Mississippi was visible between houses at the end of the block, grey and high with February snowmelt. Joshua had driven down from Bloomington in under three hours, arriving after dark, and had spent the first night on the couch because making the bed seemed like a commitment he wasn't ready to make.
He was a historian by training and trade - the history of ideas, specifically, which his department chair cheerfully described to parents at orientation as "philosophy that admits it might be wrong." He spent his days reading dead men's arguments about the nature of authority, the grounding of moral obligation, the question of whether the good is discovered or invented. He was reasonably good at it. He had published two papers that other historians of ideas had read, and one that someone outside the field had cited in a book about political theology, which he had been told was unusual and which had not yet produced any observable consequences.
He was also, he had been told by two separate therapists over the past decade, very good at knowing what he thought and less good at knowing what he felt. He was working on this. Progress was unclear.
He had taken a leave of absence for the spring semester to settle the estate. There wasn't much estate to settle. Mostly there was the house, and the question of whether to sell it, and the locked drawer, and the basement he kept not going into.
On the fourth day he went into the basement.
He told himself it was practical - he needed to know what was down there before he could make any decisions about the property. He told himself this while he stood at the top of the stairs for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, his hand on the door frame, the light from the kitchen warm at his back and the dark below him cool and still.
The stairs were solid. Someone had maintained them. The railing was tight in its brackets. He found the pull-string light at the bottom and the light came on, a bare bulb, casting the space in warm yellow.
It was a basement of the particular kind that belongs to a certain generation of Midwestern men - not finished, not decorated, not given over to the storage of recreational equipment or holiday boxes, but organized. Workbench along the north wall with tools arranged by type and size, each one hanging on a hook or sitting in its designated place, each one clean and oiled. Metal shelving units along the east wall, contents labeled in his grandfather's handwriting - small, precise, European-looking letters. A wooden cabinet, padlocked, against the south wall. In the center of the room, a table with nothing on it, as though it had been cleared recently and left ready.
Joshua stood at the bottom of the stairs and let his eyes adjust to the detail.
The metal shelves held what he expected: hardware, spare parts, things that accumulate over thirty years in a house. Paint cans, properly sealed and labeled with date and room. Mason jars of screws and bolts and washers sorted with a precision that made him feel, obscurely, that his own sock drawer was a moral failing.
Then the wooden cabinet.
He tried three keys from the ring before the fourth turned. The padlock was good quality - old but maintained, no rust, smooth action. He swung the doors open.
Books. Folders. Two wooden boxes of the kind that once held cigars. And, at the back, something that was not a book and was not a folder and that he almost missed because it was wrapped in oilcloth and placed flat against the back wall, behind everything else, as though it had been put there by someone who wanted it accessible but not obvious.
He pulled it out. It was heavier than it looked. He set it on the cleared table in the center of the room and unwrapped it, his hands doing something careful without him deciding to be careful.
It was a journal. Leather-covered, hand-sewn, the pages thick and cream-colored and only slightly yellowed at the edges. Someone had maintained this too. On the inside front cover, in ink that had faded to a warm brown: T.M. - 1961. His grandfather's initials. Teodor Maren. Below that, a second hand - different ink, different pressure: Pro filio filiique filio. For the son and the son's son.
Joshua stood over it and read those four words several times.
He was the son's son. His father - Teodor's son - had been dead for three years. The falling-out, the distance, the silence across all those years, and now this: for you and for whoever comes after you, written in 1961, eleven years before Joshua's father was born.
He turned the first page.
The journal opened in Polish, which he could not read. It shifted, a few pages in, to Latin, which he could read only partially, with effort - enough to know it was a narrative of some kind, a firsthand account, and that it involved a journey and a document and a name that appeared three times in the first Latin section: Ordo Antiquus. The Ancient Order.
Then, near the middle of the journal, the language shifted again - to English, careful and slightly formal, the English of someone who had learned it as an adult - and Joshua began to read.
What I am writing here I was told not to write down. I was told the writing was unnecessary, that if I understood what I had been given I would not need to write it, and that if I did not understand it, writing it would not help. This was true advice. But I have a son, and may have a son's son, and I find that I cannot carry this alone into whatever comes after me. So I am writing it down, and hiding it well, and trusting that whoever finds it will be ready for it, or will become ready, which is perhaps the same thing in the end.
There is an order to things. Not a human order - not the order that men arrange for their own convenience and call natural when it serves them. A real order. An order that was not invented but discovered, not imposed but received, not maintained by force but by fidelity. This order was once visible in the world. It is no longer visible in the world. But it has not been destroyed. It cannot be destroyed. And there are those who have known this, across a long time, and who have done what such people always do: they kept the record. They passed the knowledge from hand to hand in the dark, like a flame cupped against the wind, and they waited.
I was given the flame. I do not know why I was given it. I was not a remarkable man. I am still not a remarkable man. But I was given it, and I kept it, and now I am trying to give it to you.
You will want to know what the Order is. I cannot tell you in this journal. I can only tell you that it is real, and that its recovery is possible, and that it begins - everything always begins - with a document that should not exist.
The document is in the basement.
Joshua looked up from the journal. He looked around the basement. He had been standing at the cleared table for long enough that his lower back had registered an objection.
He looked at the oilcloth he had set aside. He looked at the shelves, which he had examined but not fully searched. He looked at the two cigar boxes, which he had not yet opened.
He looked at the table itself - solid oak, old, standing on four legs in the center of the room as though waiting.
He crouched down and looked at the underside of the table.
Taped to the inside of the apron, flat and careful, was an envelope.