old man, with a weak heart. I was strong, I said, and there was a good chance I'd be 
alive for another thirty, maybe forty years, which was an agony to me, but what could I 
do?
  	"'So take your own life,' he said to me. He made it sound so simple. 'Cut your 
throat. God understands.'"
  	"'He does?' I said to him."
  	"'Certainly,' he told. 'This world is Hell. Just look around. What do you see?'"
  	"I told him what I saw. Fire, smoke, block earth. "
  	"'See?'he said, 'Hell.'"
  	"I told him, though of course I was still dreaming, I was going to take his 
advice. I was going to go back to my room, find a sharp knife, and kill myself. But for 
some reason, as often happens in dreams, I didn't go home. I went into Bucharest. To the 
cinema where Brother Stefan used to bring me sometimes, to see films. We went inside. It 
was very dark. We found seats and Stefan had me sit down. Then the film began. And it was 
a film about some earthly paradise. It made me weep, it was so perfect, this place. The 
music, the way the people looked. Beautiful men and women, all so lovely it took my 
breath away to look at them. There was one young man in particular-and it makes me 
ashamed to write this, but if I don't do it here, in my last confession, where will I do 
it?-a young man with dark hair and light-filled eyes, who opened his arms to me. He was 
naked, on the screen, with open arms, inviting me into his embrace. I turned to Father 
Stefan in the darkness, and he said the very thing that was going through my mind. 'He 
wants to take you into his arms.'"
  	"I started to deny it. But Stefan interrupted me and said: 'Look at him. Look at 
his face. It's flawless. Look at his body. It's perfect. And there-between his legs-'"
  	"I covered my face in shame, but Stefan pulled my hands from my face and told me 
not to be ashamed, just to look, and enjoy looking. 'God made all of this for our 
pleasure,' he said. 'Why would he give us such a hunger to look at nakedness unless he 
wanted us to take pleasure in it?'"
  	"I asked Stefan how he knew it was God's work. Perhaps the Devil had made 
nakedness, I said, to tempt us and ensnare us. He laughed, and put his arm around me, and 
kissed me on the cheek as though I was just a little child."
  	"'This isn't the Devil's work,' he said. 'This is your invitation to paradise.'"
  	Then he kissed me again, and I felt a warm wind blowing, as though it was spring 
in whatever country they had created on the screen. And the wind made me want to die with 
pleasure, because it smelled of a time I remembered from long ago."
  	"So now I have come back to my room. I have a knife. When I have finished writing 
this I will leave what I have written on the table, and I will go out into the field, and 
cut my wrists. I know we are taught that self-slaughter is a sin, and that the Lord does 
not wish us to harm ourselves, but if He does not wish me to end my life, why is this 
knife within reach of my hand, and why is my heart so much at peace?"
  	His body was found about a hundred yards from the place where Sandru's 
frost-covered body had been discovered. Coming so soon upon the death of the old priest, 
the death of Jan Valek undid the Brotherhood completely. Orders came from Bucharest, and 
the Brotherhood was disbanded. There was no need to guard the Fortress any longer, the 
Archbishop said. The brothers would be more useful to the Church if they worked with the 
sick and the dying, to offer the Lord's comfort where it was most needed.
  	Within a week, the Order of St. Teodor had left the Fortress Goga.
  
  	There were those among the villagers who felt that the Fortress had invited its 
abandonment, and began its own process of self-slaughter. Superstition, no doubt; but it 
was certainly strange that after five centuries of life, during which span it had 
remained strong, a quick process of disintegration should begin as soon as the community 
of caretakers departed.
  	True, the winter immediately following was particularly severe. But there had 
been heavier snows on the roofs and they had not bowed beneath the weight; there had been 
stronger winds through the casements and they'd not broken open and smashed, there had 
been more persistent floodings of the lower floors, and the doors had not been carried 
off on their rotted hinges.
  	By the time the spring came round-which was late April that year-the Fortress had 
effectively become uninhabitable. It was as though its soul had gone out of it, and now 
all it wanted was to allow the seasons to take their steady toll. They were guileless 
collaborators. The summer was as violently hot as the winter had been bitter, and it bred 
all manner of destroyers in the fabric of the building. Worm and fly and wasp contributed 
to the baking heat of the sun with their burrowings and layings and nestings. Beams that 
had taken ten men to lift them became dusty, hollow things, as delicate as the bones of 
immense birds. Unable to support their own weight, they collapsed upon themselves, 
bringing down entire floors as they fell. By the time September arrived, the Fortress was 
open to the elements. The ward where the brothers had optimistically laid out rows of 
beds now had a ceiling of cloud. When the first rains of autumn came the mattresses were 
soaked; fungus and mildew sprouted where the sick would have lain. The place stank of rot 
from end to end.
  	And finally, somewhere in the middle of the second winter in its empty state, the 
floorboards cracked and opened up, and the lowest level of the Fortress, the level where 
Father Sandru had brought Zeffer to show him the tiled chamber, became available to sky 
and storm. If anyone had ventured into the Fortress that winter they would have witnessed 
the most delicate of spectacles. Through the eight vaults above the once-tiled room-which 
were now all cracked like eggs-snow came spiraling down. It fell into a room denuded. The 
workmen Zeffer had hired to do the work of removing the tiles had first been obliged to 
empty the room of all the monks had left in there. Some of the furniture had subsequently 
been stolen, some broken up for firewood, and the rest-perhaps a quarter of the 
bounty-simply left to decay where it had been piled up. The snow, spiraling down, settled 
in little patches on the floor; patches which would not melt for the next four months, 
but only get wider and deeper as the winter's storms got worse, the snow heavier.
  	Just before the thaw, in the middle of the following April, the weight of snow 
and ice finally brought the vaults down, in one calamitous descent. There was nobody 
there to witness it, nor anyone within earshot to hear it. The room which had contained 
the Hunt was buried in the debris of all the vaults, plaster and wood and stone filling 
the chamber to the middle of the walls. Nobody who visited the Fortress in subsequent 
years-and there were a few explorers who came there every summer, usually imagining 
they'd stumbled on something darkly marvelous-a Fortress, perhaps, belonging to Vlad the 
Impaler, whose legendary territories lay only a few hundred miles off to the west, in 
Transylvania-none of these visitors dug through the overgrown ruins with any great 
enthusiasm; certainly none ever asked themselves what function the half-buried room might 
have once served. Nor, should it be said, would they have been able to guess, even the 
cleverest of them. The mystery of the ruined chamber had been removed to another 
continent, where it was presently unfolding its dubious raptures for the delectation of a 
new and vulnerable audience. Men and women who-like the tiles-had in many cases lately 
left their homelands; and in their haste to be famous left behind them such talismans as 
hearth and altar might have offered by way of protection against the guileful Hunt.