I took Coen’s revolver. I hadn’t mentioned it last night, so I thought I would now.

David and Mauve are to be married on the 27th. I forget the Duvals are not the Duvals yet. I’ve been invited to attend. The ceremony will be held on a hill overlooking the Duval family farm, where a platform is presently being built. Arrangements for an officiating Catholic priest out of San Francisco are being made. I don’t know if I’ll go.

Ed visits every few hours, giving me news when I request it and simple company otherwise. The man is stalwart of soul. If the week’s events haven’t shaken him nothing ever will. This morning we sat and read through the journal in its entirety, both of us having realized he never had. As we came to little Otto’s description of Ashcroft, the pug-nosed bumblebee, he stopped me.

“His red handkerchief,” he said, stationed like a sentry in the middle of the homestead’s single room.

“What about it?”

“There was a newsman, a travelling newsman in town yesterday. I know you said no news, but, well, you’ll want to hear it. The Germans changed their flag this week. It’s all red, Chuck. A red flag, like his handkerchief.”

Black bowler hats, blue coats, and now red flags. The colors of the madmen.

“Did he have other news?”

“Ashcroft has all of Europe now. Austria-Hungary agreed to it under threat of extermination. The Ottomans have part of something still, I can’t remember what, but nothing in Europe. Switzerland held a long time, longer than anyone expected. The Germans say there isn’t a Swiss man left alive, only women and children. I can’t imagine they had the chance to fight to the last man. Something terrible must have happened.”

“We don’t have the right to be surprised anymore, not after France. This is becoming something more than a land war. The only border yet standing is the one between the Five and Ashcroft.”

“Who are they, really?”

I let him read the full transcription of Anne’s entries.

“Isha. Have we found out who this Isha could be?”

“As far as we know Isha is a god, a real being known only to us and the cult in San Francisco.”

“And Ashcroft, of course,” Ed said, lifting his cap and scratching his hair. He hadn’t changed clothes since we’d arrived.

“Of course? What makes you say that?” I was, through no fault of Ed’s, growing tired of the conversation.

“He must have figured out how the journal worked, right? Otherwise how could he have known how to use it?”

“Perhaps he didn’t. He was a conduit, I think.”

“Surely he knew something!”

“What difference does it make?” My head was starting to pound. I wished desperately for the day to end so I could get some rest.

“All the difference in the world! If Ashcroft knows about this god, that puts a wrench in the works, doesn’t it? If he’s relying on an outside source for his power, then I’d bet he’s scared of losing it and ready to throw everything at protecting it. Am I wrong? These blue coats of his, they would suggest I’m exactly right. They tracked you all the way out here. How do you suppose they did that?”

“That doesn’t mean he’s in league with Isha.”

“Doesn’t it?” Ed began pacing the floor, hands gesticulating with his words. “I got a question for you, Chuck, a real simple question.”

“What is it?”

“Why haven’t we destroyed it yet? What’s stopping us from taking that book to the fireplace right now and burning it?”

“Someone tried it once before and that person is dead."

“Of course he died! He went into the fire with it!”

“Fine!”

I grabbed the diary from the table and threw it into the smoldering ashes of the fire, which were kicked up by the impact and reignited. The flames flew out orange and blue around it, splattering the pages but leaving them markless. Deep within the flames, inside the blue cores of the limbs, I could see empty blackness at the very centers, where the burning was continuously being born, the places where the fire and the fuel were separated. The black wombs of the flame grew, until they had engulfed the blue completely, leaving the orange with unnatural pits scattered along its bottom. Soon the orange, too, was being overtaken, like the banks of a floodplain, writhing with an unfelt, unseen wind. It was as if they were crying out in pain. The child, laying in the bed, began to whimper, and the whimpers turned to tears, and the tears turned to wails. The orange had disappeared then, so that the book was encircled by a halo of black, rippling around its corners and rising above its face to near the top of the fireplace. I toppled to the ground, reached desperately at the book and, without so much as a flash of heat, pulled it from the coals. I threw it to the floor and looked down at my open hands, still slick with sweat and clammy from the incoming wind through the open windows. I shook there, kneeling upon the splintered floorboards, listening to the child’s cries die down across the room. The memory of lavender and formaldehyde came to me, invading my nostrils. There was a hand on my shoulder. Ed spoke behind me in a deep tone, like a father biding his child to sleep.

“We’ll find another way. There’s always a way.”

He left us, headed back to town for wedding preparation. A grave stillness overcame the house, the rattling in the broken windows faded into silence, the child ruffled the sheets of the bed in slumber. I knelt for a long time, staring at the book, not knowing what to do. I need not worry the bride and groom with this, and I hope Ed feels the same. This is a battle for another day. We are safe here.