The Everlasting

SEVERAL YEARS AFTER the war, during the mid-afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript and disappearing into the countryside to raise goats, I received a book in the post.

This was not, in itself, remarkable; most members of the Cantford College Department of History received so many books in the post that their offices had been overtaken by a series of architecturally unsound towers, which would collapse if anyone exhaled too aggressively in their presence.

But this particular book was different, because this particular book did not—according to every archaeologist, historian, medievalist, linguist, antiquarian, archivist, and even most of the conspiracy theorists I had ever consulted—exist.

True, I may have harbored certain fantasies that I would one day prove them all wrong. I may have pictured myself unlocking a long-lost vault or descending into a catacomb, perhaps holding a torch aloft and whispering, to no one in particular, By Jove, I’ve found it.