The mansion is a dark myth, the old man a legend. But George believes in the legend of the Odd Fellow-that just over the horizon lives an old married couple who know the secret to immortality. And he's determined to find them, to learn their method or spell-their ritual or curse, whatever it may be. Grace stumbles into the mystery in another era, when she takes a job offer that's too good to be true. Their tales intertwine in the halls of the Odd Fellows Home where the intoxicating life-everlasting concoction contorts reality, and the remnants of a secret society unravel in a fiery dance of deception.

Literary fiction exploring identity, distrust and loyalty, against the backdrop of a fictional dystopian Missouri town. Interspersed with incantations and short poems employed as literary devices.

Excerpt:

Forever can have a beginning with no end, or an end with no beginning. Or forever can have neither beginning nor end. I say forever and mean that for me life began and it will never end.

I'll never die. I mean exactly as I say.

I'm writing it all down for you, for it has been wonderful and horrid. It would have been simple to make better of. That I let it come to this, frailty and sickness lasting for eternity, is shameful. It's damn hell.

You think that I exaggerate. I do not. And until you have begun that which I will relate to you, you will never understand, as I do, what forever means.

These are the tenets of the Odd Fellow: Relieve the distressed. Visit the sick. Bury the dead and educate the orphan.

These things may seem extreme to you and disperate. Like a madman casting about at random ideas or a holy zealot pontificating wildly. No. I use no extremes at all. These ideas are hard in stone and related quite directly. I make no hyperbole.

Bury the dead and educate the orphan.

When you've learned what I have for you to know, you'll make of these one act, one bright flourish in time when you'll bury the dead and educate the orphan at once.

Do you know of the sublime? The sublime is the sense one feels upon a precipice. It is both the extremity of height, and the depth of the impending fall. To comprehend at once the height of a mountain's zenith and the terrible depth of the cavernous pit at its base. That is the sense you must inherit, the sense of the sublime. You must learn to comprehend life backwards, as one whose life begins anew7 and has no end. For the trudging lot that will pass by you into their graves, life has an impending end without escape. It is accepted among them that it has no beginning. They came out of blathering incomprehension into their dim consciousness, and cannot recall the beginning of their lives. It is backwards from the way you will see life once you have begun.

Before was only time, but after has been life and life and life. Without end. All of it so precious and sweet, so faithfully sublime compared to the forgotten, worthless time before, so ever long ago.

I care not to think of any time before. I care not to think of time, but only life, that can be strung together in an infinite line of lifetimes like a glimmering string of opalescent pearls, each sublime in its haphazard beauty. The answers are all here. I give them to you freely, the method exacting and precise.

The Odd Fellows Way.