Asheville, North CarolinaSummer 1970
The bug-eyed convertible, a midnight-blue Austin-Healey Sprite with supermodel curves and cognac leather seats, hugged the serpentine mountain passes of the Blue Ridge Parkway as it sped toward Asheville, North Carolina.
The night before, Dr. Corwin had made a snap decision after leaving the abandoned theater on the Lower East Side. After checking flight schedules in his apartment and realizing it would be just as fast to jump in his beloved British roadster and drive south, rather than take a connecting flight the next day through Atlanta, he had packed a valise, slept for three hours, and left before the sun rose.
And why not? It was summer, he preferred the wind in his hair to the cramped confines of an airplane, and he had never driven on the famed Blue Ridge Parkway or visited the American South. He wanted to know more about this sprawling country he now called home.
The trip had lived up to his expectations. Once he cleared the congested Northeast Corridor and entered Virginia, tracing the spine of the Appalachians, he drove through a panorama of emerald-green slopes and rounded peaks softened by eons of erosion, the lungs of the continent living and breathing all around him, a temperate rain forest that cradled the sky in its bosom.
Dr. Corwin loved a variety of music, especially swing and the Rolling Stones, but he preferred jazz while driving. Together, he and Thelonious Monk had solved many a thorny physics problem driving in the Berkshires or along the New England coast.
On this particular journey, traffic was so light Dr. Corwin was able to hold the file on Ettore Majorana against the steering wheel and digest it as he drove. The dossier was over a hundred pages long: a summary of Ettore’s work, as well as facts and speculations on his final days and his ties to the Ascendants. Many years ago, a spy within the rival organization had provided excellent details of the entire sad affair, days before the mole was caught and executed by Stefan Kraus.
When Dr. Corwin had finished reading, fascinated by the narrative, he congealed the information in his mind as he crossed the border into North Carolina.
In the 1930s, a splinter faction of the Leap Year Society led by a German scientist and soldier named Stefan Kraus—a Nazi—had recruited Ettore Majorana and revived the Ascendants, igniting a civil war inside the Society. Believing Ettore’s hypothetical tower of infinite particles was the key to marrying macro and micro physics, Stefan forced him to construct a device he believed was a weapon of mass destruction—but which might access another plane of reality called the Fold. Or perhaps it was both.
No one knew, because Ettore had vanished with his device in 1938, never to be seen again.
His research lost forever.
That was, until a neuropsychologist named Waylan Taylor submitted an article to an obscure psychiatric periodical less than a year ago, claiming to have met a disciple of Ettore while traveling in South America.
If Ettore was still alive, huge questions loomed. What was the true nature of his device? How had he escaped on the open sea, and where had he gone? Maybe the answer was prosaic—maybe Ettore had wanted to break free of the iron grip of Stefan Kraus, and carried out an elaborate plan of escape.
Yet this explanation did not jibe with Ettore’s character profile. At the time of his disappearance, the Sicilian physicist was a depressed loner, who had alienated everyone around him. How had he summoned the chutzpah to defy Stefan and flee Europe right under the thumbs of the Ascendants?
Dr. Corwin did not give the alternative explanation the file had proffered any credence—that Ettore’s device had worked, and he had disappeared into some unknown dimension or realm, perhaps even later to return.
Was there a third option?
Something no one was seeing?
There had been alleged Ettore sightings over the years, all over the world, some more credible than others. As for Waylan Taylor, his journal article had mentioned a man named only as X, who claimed to have been Ettore Majorana’s disciple. According to the article, the goal of Dr. Taylor’s recent sabbatical was to expand the limits of psychiatric knowledge by probing the shamanistic practices of indigenous cultures, in order to apply experiential knowledge of psychedelic drugs and phenomena, such as dreamwalking and ritual possession, to accepted psychiatric norms.
It was all very intriguing, yet what had caught the Society’s eye was a drawing of a runic symbol shown to Dr. Taylor by X. The symbol would look nonsensical to most people, but the Leap Year Society used a secret language called Sahin, and the symbol in Dr. Taylor’s paper was the first letter of the Sahin alphabet, surrounded by a simple ouroboros.
Without doubt, a reference to the LYS.
According to the article, X had seen the symbol in Ettore’s notes and asked him about it. Ettore left town the next day, and X never saw him again.
The Society kept a close watch on scientific journals. They had pulled strings to quash the mention of the mysterious X and the Sahin letter when Dr. Taylor’s article was submitted. The reason given to Waylan by the journal’s editor—a fair one—was uncertain source material.
Consumed with questions, Dr. Corwin urged the Austin-Healey up a ridge through a dense evening fog that swallowed the tops of the mountains. The fog thickened to the point where it threatened visibility of the road. Clutching the wheel with a white-knuckle grip, weaving in and out of tractor trailers, he felt as if he were driving through a cloud until he finally pulled into Asheville, where the buildings of the modest downtown, smudges of white stone rising through the mist like statues in an overgrown garden, allowed him to
