In the autumn of 1907, a county coroner in the hill country of North Georgia was called to a Catholic convent that had stood quietly on a wooded rise for nearly 70 years.
A sister had been found missing from her cell. The bed was made, the shoes placed under it, the habit folded on the chair. It was the fourth disappearance in six years.
The coroner, Thomas Holbrook, went up the wagon road expecting to find a woman who had walked off into the woods out of private grief. He came down three weeks later having read a locked book kept in a cupboard behind the altar.
He had stood in the chapel before dawn and listened to the sisters sing in the dark. He had come to understand that the convent on the hill was not a convent in the way he had been raised to understand the word.
It was a device kept running by the breath and voices of 240 women across 68 years. Its purpose was to keep something that lived under the chapel floor from coming up.
The sisters themselves did not know this. Only the Mother Superior knew, and before her the Mother Superior before her, back to a nun who had come from the mountains of Austria in the 1830s carrying a sealed letter and a plan drawn in her own hand.
The missing sisters were not called to heaven. They were the price of a lid that had slipped.
The hill was called Covenant Rise in county records. It stood in a bend of a small valley eight miles outside the end of the railroad line in Lumpkin County, Georgia.
The valley stretched north through farms, a Methodist church, a one-room school, a gristmill, and a tannery. Perhaps 300 people lived there in all.
The hill itself was low and broad and wooded, with a bare rounded crown of dry grass where the ground would not take trees. The convent sat on the crown, with the chapel at the center and cells arranged around it in a long single-story block.
The cellar of the chapel was cut into the dry crown. At a certain spot under the altar, the floor was not the honest red clay of the Georgia hills but a smooth pale stone flush with the clay.
The sisters had been told since the founding that the stone was holy, the oldest piece of the building, the altar of the first chapel. They were told it must be kept dry and swept and lit at all times with a lamp that never went out.
A sister had been kneeling beside it every hour of every day since 1839.
The Mother Superior who received the coroner was Mother Ignatia. She had been born Hanna Vogel in a Rhine Valley town and brought to Georgia at the age of 12.
She had knelt her own hours beside that stone for 40 years before being raised to the chair.
The oldest page in the locked book went back to orders in Austria, and before Austria in Bavaria, and before Bavaria in a part of what is now Switzerland, and before that in a place the book did not name.
The practice was simple. Twenty-four hours of every day, without a break, there was to be at least one sister on her knees beside the altar and at least four sisters in the choir stalls.
The divine office was to be sung continuously, hour by hour, day and night, year after year, with no gap.
The sisters understood this to be the special vocation of their order, a prayer offered without ceasing for the sins of the world. They did not know the lid.
The sisters called the practice the watch. They thought the word meant the kind of watch a mother keeps over a sick child.
The word meant the other thing.
The pale stone in the cellar was not an altar. It was a soft place in a floor that ran continuous and perfectly level and older than the hills around it.
Under the whole of North Georgia and far past it, a floor had been laid down before the mountains folded, before the Georgia red clay was laid on top of it like a wet sheet laid over a table.
At this one spot on the hill, the floor came up near the surface. At this one spot, there was a thinner place, a soft place, where the thing that lived under the floor could reach up through if nothing was pressing down on the lid.
The lid was not a physical object. The lid was the continuous bound sound of women singing the hours in strict unbroken shift directly above the soft place.
The chapel had been arranged by Mother Winifreda to focus and hold that sound over the exact spot where the stone was thinnest.
The locked book called it the cover. It said the cover was woven of three things: the breath of praying women, the words of a bound and willing promise, and the stillness of an unbroken watch.
No one of the three alone was enough. All three together held without a gap for as long as the house above the soft place still stood.
If the cover slipped, the thing below would wake slowly and groggily. It could be put back down again before it was fully awake if one acted at once and if one was willing to pay the price.
The price was always the same. The price was one of the women who had been part of the cover.
The thing below had been promised a certain weight of such women across time. A cover held tight paid that weight in slow drips across the centuries. A cover that slipped paid it in sudden bites.
The question that the Austrian book opened with was not the question of whether to pay. That question had been decided centuries earlier by men whose names the book no longer gave.
The question was how to pay the least.
The oldest convents had paid without choice. When the cover slipped, they took whoever was closest to the altar at the moment of the slip.
This had been reasonable for a great European house of 500 healthy women with new sisters coming in every month. But it had a defect.
The thing below developed a preference for who it took. It began to prefer the sisters who were most fully in the cover, the most devoted, the most willing, the most capable of long unbroken attention.
It ate the house's own backbone over time. The stronger sisters were the ones who were spent, and the weaker ones who remained could not hold the cover as tight.
Several great European houses had failed in exactly this way. The valleys around them had gone bad in ways written about in the chronicles of their regions as plagues and madnesses.
Mother Winifreda, as a young nun in a house in Styria, had been shown the chronicles of two such valleys. She had been made to understand that this was not a thing that could be allowed to happen in the new country she was being sent to.
So the sisters of Covenant Rise had been given a different rule. The sister chosen to pay the price when the cover slipped would not be the strongest sister in the house.
The sister chosen would be the sister who had, by her own private spiritual history, come most fully to the condition the book called readiness.
Readiness was a term the sisters themselves never heard. Only the Mother Superior and her two most senior counselors heard it, and only once each year at the Michaelmas Chapter.
They marked each sister with a letter in a private alphabet. There were six letters representing six grades.
A sister in the top grade was the sister whose private prayers had resolved toward a particular kind of settled yearning. A wanting to be done. A feeling that if her Lord called her home tonight, it would be a mercy.
This grade was not full of the house's strongest workers. It was full of older sisters nearing the end of their health, and sometimes younger sisters who had come to the house out of some grief and had quietly finished their business with being alive.
The Mother Superior and the counselors did not create readiness in anyone. They only noticed it and marked it.
When the cover slipped, the Mother Superior went to the choir and tapped on the shoulder of a sister in the top grade and said quietly, "Sister, I would like you to pray the next hour at the stone."
The sister went down the stairs under the altar and knelt at the pale stone. The Mother Superior shut the door above her and set the bar across it.
The next morning the cell of that sister was empty. The bed made, the shoes placed under it, the habit folded on the chair. The cover was tight again.
The locked book was not called the book of the dead. It was called the book of the covering.
On its first page, in the hand of Mother Winifreda, were four lines that every Mother Superior read on the night she took the office and never forgot.
"We do not sing because God is pleased by singing. We sing because the thing beneath this floor is held down by the sound of bound women speaking the same words at the same time in the same place for a very long while without stopping. If we stop, it rises. If we spend the right sister at the right moment when we have faulted, it goes back down."
The coroner found the book on the 11th day of his visit. The Mother Superior gave it to him herself.
She had decided within the first week that he was a man who would in the end believe her. She had also understood that he would not be able to do what she needed him to do, which was to leave the convent in peace and report the missing sister as a case of walking away in the night.
She decided to tell him the truth anyway. The alternative was to let him dig the ground out from under the chapel and loose a thing that would eat his county.
He read the book. At 4:00 in the morning he went down to the chapel and she showed him the stone.
After that he stayed another 10 days. When he went down the hill, he did not go home to his wife in Dahlonega.
He went to the Catholic bishop in Savannah, then to the Dean of Medicine at Emory College in Atlanta, then to a geologist named Rupert Breen in Chattanooga, and then back up the hill.
He spent the last four nights of his investigation there. After that he went home and sat for three months writing a long account of what he had found.
He sealed it and put it in his private safe with instructions that it was to be opened only by his son after his death.
The son, Dr. Howard Holbrook, opened the account in 1941 and sealed it again. He died with it in his own safe in 1968.
His daughter, Elizabeth Halbrook Maine, opened it in 2004. She spent 11 years tracing every name and every date and every outside reference it contained.
She found that every checkable fact in the account was correct. She wrote a book from which this account is drawn.
She did not publish it under her own name. The valley is still there. The hill is still there. The old convent is still there.
She does not know whether the lid that was put back on in 1907 is still on.
The beginning of the story is a letter written in Latin in a convent in Styria in the summer of 1784 by a dying abbess to her favorite novice.
The letter said, in the translation Mother Winifreda made for her successors, "My dear child, I'm going to die before this autumn and you will go to America as we have discussed. You are the inheritor of a line of women that goes back further than the church we both serve."
The line was once called the keepers of the soft places. In the days of the Caesars it was called by other names. In the days before Rome by names that are now lost.
The church had taken them in and given them habits and a Latin office and a saint's name for every house. The men of the church who were wise enough to look understood that the soft places were real and that the keeping was necessary.
"In the new country to which you are being sent there is a hill in the state of Georgia. And on that hill a soft place that has been minded since before the people the Spanish found there were there. The keepers who minded it were killed by a disease that the first Spanish brought. The soft place has been without a keeper for nearly 300 years and is now beginning to eat more than slowly."
Mother Winifreda arrived in the Georgia hills in 1836 at the age of 69 with four companions. She found the hill.
The settlers in the valley, mostly Scots-Irish Presbyterians, took them in politely because the women had money and did not seem to intend to preach at anyone.
The women bought the hill from a man named Everett Covenant, who had tried to farm the crown of it for 11 years and had buried two children on it and was glad to be rid of it.
Mother Winifreda walked the crown of the hill with her sketch in her hand and found the soft place by the method she had been taught in Styria, which was to carry a plumb bob on a short cord and watch the cord.
The cord leaned when she passed over the spot. She marked it with a stone and sat beside it for three nights running.
On the third night, she wrote in her field book that the thing below was still asleep but was no longer in the deep sleep her teacher had described. It had begun to turn in that sleep. There was no time to lose.
She hired masons from Dahlonega and gave them the pattern of the chapel she had carried in her head since Styria. They built it in two years.
She consecrated it in 1841 with the help of a priest from Savannah who was told nothing beyond that it was a convent chapel.
She and her four companions began the office of Vespers on the 6th of April in 1841. The office has not stopped since.
The oldest sister still living when the coroner came up in 1907 was a woman named Sister Gertrude. She had entered as a girl of 14 in 1852.
She told the coroner that in 66 years of her own life in the house she had never heard a full minute pass in which the chapel was silent.
In 1881, a lightning strike had killed two sisters in the choir and three others had fallen into a weeping fit that could not be stopped. Sister Gertrude had sung alone in the chapel for 48 hours.
She had done it because she had been told by Mother Agatha in one night and one hour, and never again, what the singing was for.
The coroner asked Sister Gertrude what she had decided to do with that knowledge. She said she had decided that she had been told something the Mother Superior had the right to tell her and that she did not have the right to tell anyone else.
She had told no one else in 26 years.
He asked her if she knew that sisters in the house had been given to the stone across the generations. She said she knew it and had always known it since the night she sang alone.
She had decided then that she was ready to be one of them if it ever came to that.
She was then one of the oldest sisters in the house. She was in the top grade. The Mother Superior had marked her so for seven consecutive Michaelmas chapters.
She bore the Mother no grudge for marking it. She had come to the readiness herself and been glad to come to it.
He asked her if she had ever wished in 66 years that the house had chosen some other work.
She said, "I have sometimes wished that the work had chosen some other house and I have sometimes wished that the book was a lie and that the stone was only a stone and that the sisters we had lost had been lost to ordinary deaths. But I have never since the night I knew wished that the house would stop."
"I grew up in that valley. My mother is buried in the Methodist cemetery 2 miles from here. I would sooner be given to the stone a hundred times than see what would come up out of this hill if the office ever broke."
The coroner wrote the whole of that conversation into his account. Then he wrote a line in his own voice.
"I have sat with dying men who were less certain of their faith than this woman is of her work and I do not know what to do with the fact that her work is the opposite of what she believes it to be."
The thing below the floor had no name. The oldest pages called it the sleeper. The English pages after 1841 called it either the thing below or, more carefully, the floor.
Mother Winifreda had taught her first successor that it was a mistake to think of the thing beneath Covenant Rise as a creature in the way an animal was a creature.
It had not been a creature once. It had been a part of the floor itself, and the floor was a built thing, laid down by hands that were not human hands in a time before the hills were folded up.
The thing was a function of the floor the way the sound of a bell is a function of a bell.
It had not been meant, in the first making of the floor, to eat anything. It had been meant to do a kind of weighing or counting or sorting that bore some relation to the lives that moved across the floor from above.
The makers had been gone for a very long while. The floor had been left running. It was functionally equivalent to eating.
The floor reached up through the soft spot. People lying still in the dark above the soft spot were drawn through. They did not come back.
Whatever happened to them on the other side was either a mercy or a horror or possibly both at once. No one as keeper claimed to know which.
The only responsible attitude for a keeper to take was to behave as if it were the horror and to prevent it from happening whenever one could.
When one could not prevent it, one made sure that the person who went through was a person who had freely come to a condition of readiness and who went down the stairs with a willing heart.
The method of the cover had three ingredients. The first ingredient was breath. The sound that pressed down on the soft place had to come out of living bodies in the room above.
A phonograph playing a recording of the office did not form the cover at all. The thing below ignored the recording.
The second ingredient was words, specifically the words of a bound promise. The divine office qualified because the sisters were bound by their vows to say it. Idle talk did not qualify.
A sister singing the office with her mind wandering did not qualify as fully as a sister singing it with her attention on the words.
The third ingredient was the stillness of an unbroken watch. At no moment could the condition in the room be nobody.
There had to be at least one sister in the choir stall at every second of every day for 68 years. And there was.
The schedule was called the watch roster. It was kept by the Mother Superior and was the single most complicated document in the house.
It had to anticipate every illness, every funeral, every bad weather day, every death, every arrival of a new novice, every visit from the bishop.
In 68 years and 3 months at the time of the coroner's visit, the watch roster had been broken four times. Each break had been immediately followed by a disappearance.
The book was explicit about the dates.
March 9th of 1857, when a tornado took the roof off the cell block and three choir sisters ran out to help without first thinking to call another sister into the choir.
September 22nd of 1873, when a sister in the choir fell forward in a sudden stroke and the two sisters nearest her carried her to the infirmary without first calling for a replacement.
August 14th of 1891, when a kitchen fire drew every sister to the back of the house and the choir sister about to begin Vespers was found weeping outside the chapel door because she had lost track of the hour.
And a fourth time on the night of January 7th of 1907.
Mother Francesca, who was then Mother Superior, had been in the chapel at the hour of Matins and had slumped forward in her stall. Sister Clement, assuming the Mother Superior was in prayer, had continued singing.
Fifteen minutes passed before she went to the mother and found that she was dead. In her distress, Sister Clement had run from the chapel for perhaps 3 minutes before another sister took her place.
In the morning, Sister Helene, age 61, was found gone from her cell. The bed made, shoes placed under it, habit folded on the chair. The cover was tight again.
Mother Francesca had died of a stroke honestly and naturally. The second councilor, Sister Beatrice, made the deductions a councilor of 12 years experience is trained to make.
She took the book up to the cell of the senior councilor, Mother Ignatia, and said, "Mother, you are the mother now and this is the book you must keep."
Mother Ignatia took the book and the office with it. She read Sister Beatrice's entry and sat for an hour with the book closed on her knees.
Then she wrote beneath Sister Beatrice's entry in her own hand: "Received. Sister Helene in readiness will be prayed for at every hour of my life. God forgive us all."
This is what the coroner read on the 11th night of his visit. He came down the stairs after reading and found Mother Ignatia standing in the chapel beside the open trapdoor to the cellar with a lamp in her hand.
She said, "You have read it. Come and see."
He went down the stairs behind her into the cellar, which was cold and dry and smelled of lamp oil and old stone.
She took him across the cellar to the pale stone. She knelt down beside it and set the lamp on the clay floor and put her hand flat on the stone and said, "Doctor, put your hand on it."
He knelt down and put his hand on the stone. It was cold with a cold that did not come out of the ground around it.
The ground around the stone was the ordinary cool of a Georgia cellar in autumn. The stone itself was the kind of cold that his medical training had taught him belonged to the inside of a corpse.
A cold that drew the warmth out of his palm faster than air could carry it. That kept drawing and did not warm up to his hand after a minute as any natural object would have done.
He kept his hand there longer than was comfortable because he was a careful man and he wanted to be sure. The stone kept drawing.
He took his hand away finally and looked at Mother Ignatia and said, "It is very cold."
She said, "Yes."
He said, "It is drawing."
She said, "Yes, that is what it does all the time. The lamp above it is for us to see by and the song above it is to tell it that we are here and the sister at the altar is to know when it reaches up."
He said, "When it reaches up?"
She said, "When the song falters or when something in the chapel is wrong, the stone grows colder in a way we have learned to feel. The sister at the altar who has been trained to feel it raises her hand in the choir and the Mother Superior comes and puts her hand on the stone and feels how cold it is. And if it is cold in a certain way, then she knows the cover is about to slip."
He said, "And then?"
She said, "And then she chooses."
He said, "She chooses the sister."
"Yes."
He said, "And the sister goes down."
"The sister goes down."
He said, "Alive?"
"Yes," she said. "Alive. That is the whole of it. It does not take the dead. It does not take the dying. It takes the living who are willing to go and we have never in 68 years and 3 months given it a sister who was not willing."
He said, "And you have given it."
She said, "I have given it three."
He said, "Three?"
She said, "Sister Helene the night of my accession. Sister Maude in the autumn of 1903. Sister Eleanor in the spring of 1906. Each in the top grade. Each marked by me and by the councilors for years running."
He said, "And the fourth?"
She looked at him. She said, "There has been no fourth yet."
He said, "Yet?"
She said, "The cover slipped last Tuesday night after a run of three cold years in which it did not slip at all. I have four sisters in the top grade and I have been praying for a week over which of them to choose, and I had not chosen when you came up the hill asking why Sister Martha did not come home."
He said, "Sister Martha?"
She said, "Yes, you came for Sister Martha."
He said, "She has been missing 3 weeks."
"Yes."
He said, "And you know where she is?"
"I know," she said, "and I will not tell you, and I will not lie to you and say that I do not know. I gave Sister Martha to the stone 3 weeks ago on the night the cover slipped a fifth time."
She had kept it out of the book because she was no longer certain that readiness was coming at the rate the cover was slipping.
"If the cover is slipping faster than readiness is coming, then the method of this house is failing, and that is a thing a Mother Superior cannot write down until she is sure of it."
He understood at that moment, kneeling on the floor of the cellar beside her, that he was not being asked to arrest her or to report her to the bishop or to publish what he had learned.
He was being asked to help.
He was being asked by a woman who had spent her entire adult life in the keeping of a thing she believed was keeping her valley from being eaten, and who had come to the point where the arithmetic was no longer adding up.
She was asking him because he was the first outsider let into the whole of the thing in 40 years.
The previous outsider, a Jesuit from New Orleans sent up by the bishop in 1867, had read a part of the book and been shown a part of the stone, and had been so broken by it that he had gone home and taken his own life within a year.
He stayed another 10 days. In those 10 days, he went through every page of the book of the covering twice with the Mother Superior sitting across the parlor table from him.
He read the records of the four acknowledged slips of the cover and the 16 other names of sisters taken at times when the cover had thinned, a slower kind of giving the book called the paying of the fixed tithe.
He read the correspondence of 1874 between Mother Agatha and the abbess of a surviving sister house in the Austrian Alps.
The abbess's answer included the phrase: "We have found over four centuries that the method depends upon the house above the floor being inhabited by women who do not know. If they know, half of them will leave, which is their right, and half of those who remain will come to the altar out of pride or guilt, and will offer themselves in a condition that is not readiness."
"In two generations your house will have exhausted its ordinary readiness and you will have only this prideful kind and the floor will take it and the cover will fail and the valley will go."
"Tell them," the letter said, "that they are praying for the souls of the dying. In a strict sense this is not false."
He read that letter and looked up at Mother Ignatia across the table and said, "She is telling you to lie."
Mother Ignatia said she was telling them to let the sisters keep the belief their vows were given in.
He said, "Which is a lie."
She said, "Which is a withholding of a knowledge they did not sign up to carry."
She told him that if she told the chapel tonight what the office was for, half the house would leave by morning and the other half would walk down into the cellar one after another before noon.
By nightfall the chapel would be empty and the cover would be off and the valley would begin to lose people within a week.
The sister house in Styria, which was ancient and great and had 500 nuns, told its sisters what they were doing in the year 1603. They lost them all within 3 months. The house was burned by the emperor's soldiers after the surrounding countryside went mad.
"If there is a sin in this house, it is my own sin and the sin of the mothers before me and not the sin of the sisters who do not know. If there is a damnation for this, it is mine and I have made my peace with that long ago."
"I ask you Dr. Holbrook not to make me stop, not until you can tell me what to do instead."
He could not tell her.
He spent the 10 days trying. He borrowed a horse from the livery and rode the valley end to end and looked at the farms and the Methodist church and the school and the 300 people in them.
He tried to imagine the valley with a floor underneath it that was no longer being covered.
The book had described in an appendix in Mother Winifreda's own hand what had happened in a valley in the Bavarian Alps in the year 1586 when the convent above a soft place had been dissolved and the office had stopped.
In 6 weeks the villages below the convent had begun to lose people in the night. In 6 months the villages had emptied. In 2 years the whole valley was a place that pilgrims rode around rather than through.
The thing did not reach up into the air of the world. It reached up through floors and through the clay under floors and through the stone under the clay.
The only sign that it was reaching was that at night the children of the valley began to climb out of their beds and walk down into the cellars of their houses smiling and lie down on the cold flagstones with their eyes open and go cold and be found that way in the morning.
He rode back from his ride through the Georgia valley with that appendix in his head and the 300 people in his eyes.
He understood that the valley he had just ridden through would, in the absence of the cover, do what the Bavarian valley had done.
He understood that he could not be the man who ordered the cover taken off.
So he turned to the other direction. He asked her on the 13th evening if there was any way to end the cover, not by taking it off, but by taking the floor out from under it.
She looked at him with a tiredness so deep that he thought for a moment she was going to put her head down on the table and sleep.
She said, "Dr. Holbrook, if you can think of a way to take the floor out, I will give you the keys of this house."
Mother Winifreda had tried for 40 years. She tried four methods.
The first was to pile stone upon the pale stone, which only put the soft place further from the eye and did not change its reaching.
The second was to pour concrete over it, which the thing drank cold down through until the concrete was a kind of long cold channel and nothing more.
The third was to drill it, which the drill would not take.
The fourth was prayer alone without the office. It produced no change she could detect.
The makers of the floor were not addressable by prayer in any language she had been taught to pray in. They were not God and they were not devils and they were not angels. Prayer in the church's languages went past them like wind past a stone.
He said, "And nothing since."
She said, "Nothing since. There is no way to take the floor out. There is only to cover it or not."
He said, "Then there is a third thing, a third way of keeping it covered that costs less than this."
He said, "The breath of praying women in the room above, and the words of bound promises, and the stillness of the unbroken watch. If these three things in combination hold the lid, then the lid is held by the condition the three things create, not by the women themselves. Could the condition be created some other way?"
She said, "I do not know."
He said, "Mother Agatha tried a phonograph, and it did not work because the breath was not in the room. Could the breath be in the room without being the breath of your sisters? Could you train lay women? Could you train men? Could you train children?"
She said, "Dr. Holbrook, I will tell you what I know. Lay women have never been used in any sister house in the 400 years of our records. Men have never been used. Children have never been used because the orders would not use them."
"We have never in this house tried to vary the method because the method works. If you are asking me whether I will try, I will tell you honestly, I will not. I will not experiment with the cover of this hill with my sisters' lives as the material of the experiment."
"If you can go away from this hill, and in the rest of your life find out whether some other method works, and come back and tell me, I will listen with a glad heart. But I will not take the cover off tonight."
He said, "I am not asking you to."
She said, "I know you are not."
He said, "I am going home."
She said, "Yes."
He said, "I am going to take the account of this to my son, and put it in a safe and tell him it is to be opened only in a time when he thinks there is no other way."
She said, "That is a wise thing."
He said, "I am going to say in the Dahlonega report that Sister Martha walked away from her vocation in the night and the convent does not know where she has gone."
She said, "That is kind."
He went down the hill in the full morning with a wagon driver from Dahlonega and he did not look back.
He wrote the account over the next 3 months and put it in his safe.
The convent on Covenant Rise is still there. The office has not stopped since the night of January 7th of 1907 when it was broken for 3 minutes and Sister Helene went down the stairs and did not come up.
No sister has been taken in the 22 years between the fifth slip and the writing of Dr. Halbrook's account.
Nor, Elizabeth Halbrook Maine says in a careful footnote, in the 87 years between the writing of the account and the compiling of her book, in so far as the Catholic Diocese records to which she had access can be trusted.
The things Dr. Halbrook did not write down for his son were, mainly, three.
The first was a passage in the book of the covering in a hand he did not know. An unnamed Mother Superior of an Austrian house had written out the account of a single night in her own house in the year 1683.
The cover had slipped during a sickness that had thinned her choir to two sisters. Before she had been able to choose a sister in readiness, the thing below had sent its reaching up through the clay and up the hill into the village half a mile from the convent.
It went into the house of a cottager whose youngest daughter, a child of six, had climbed from her bed in the night smiling and walked down into the family's root cellar and lain on the cold earth floor and gone cold.
She had been found by her mother at dawn and buried the next day without a priest because the family believed the devil had come for her.
The Mother Superior wrote that the child had not been able to come to readiness because she was six years old and had been drawn down into a condition no six-year-old had the furniture of soul to meet.
The passage was marked in the margin in Mother Ignatia's hand with the words, "I have thought of this entry every day of my office."
The second thing he kept back was that Mother Ignatia, on his 18th evening in the house, had told him in a quiet voice that she had begun to feel the cover becoming thinner.
She suspected that the presence in the house of a mind as awake as his, reading what he was reading and understanding it, was somehow a pressure on the cover that had not been there before.
The cover had been designed in a world in which the mind that understood what was happening in the chapel was always the mind of the Mother Superior and the two counselors. Three minds was the cover's calibration.
Perhaps a fourth mind understanding fully was unbalancing it.
He had asked her whether she wished him to leave.
She had said, "No, I wish you to finish. If you leave now with the thing half understood, you will be of no use to anyone. And if the cover slips because you are here, then I will give the sister I have already chosen in my private prayers because I have no one else to leave the understanding of this house with."
He had asked her who the sister was.
She had said, "That is not a thing I will tell you. I have made my choice. If I am asked to give her, I will give her. If I am not asked, I will carry the choice to my grave with me."
He wrote in the margin of his private notes in a hand that his granddaughter said shook. "She told me a sister had been chosen. I did not ask again. I do not know if she was given after I left. I do not know her name. God forgive me if she was given because I came up the hill."
The third thing Dr. Holbrook kept out of his son's account was the most important thing he saw in the entire 18 days he spent on Covenant Rise.
On the 14th night, the night after the Mother Superior told him she had chosen a sister, he could not sleep. He got up at 2:00 in the morning and walked in his stockinged feet down the corridor to the chapel.
The chapel was lit only by the sanctuary lamp above the altar and by two candles on the music stand of the one sister then in the choir, Sister Odile, a woman of about 50.
She was singing one of the Psalms of the vigil in a plain, careful alto with her eyes on the page. She did not look up when he came in and sat down in the back pew in the dark.
He sat for perhaps 10 minutes and listened.
The chapel was cold. The sanctuary lamp burned steadily. The air had the smell of beeswax and lamp oil and cold stone and old wood.
Under those smells, in a way he had not noticed before, there was a very faint other smell. The smell of a cellar in a very old house in a very cold winter. A kind of mineral cold smell that did not belong in a chapel at 2:00 in the morning in autumn in Georgia.
He noticed that his hands were cold and that the cold was not the ordinary cold of a chilly room. It was a cold that was coming from the floor beneath his feet.
He noticed that Sister Odile's voice had taken on a very slight tightness, as if she were having to lean a little harder into each phrase than before.
He noticed that the sanctuary lamp above the altar had the smallest tremor in its flame.
He noticed that his breath, when he exhaled, was fogging in the air of the chapel, which it had not been when he came in.
He understood then, in the back pew of the chapel at perhaps 10 minutes past 2:00 in the morning of the 14th night of his visit, that he was watching the cover thin.
He watched it. He did not move. Sister Odile sang.
The thinning went on for perhaps 3 or 4 minutes, during which the cold in the floor rose up to the level of his knees. The smell of the old cellar grew distinct. The tremor in the sanctuary lamp became clearly a tremor.
The voice of Sister Odile, with no change in her face or in the position of her hands, took on a quality of effort he had never heard in any singer in his life.
Then from the side door of the chapel, the door that led from the Mother Superior's cell, Mother Ignatia came out, barefoot in her habit with a shawl around her shoulders as if she had been waiting for the exact moment.
She walked down the side aisle to the altar steps and knelt beside the pale stone and put her hand flat on the floor and bowed her head.
She said in a voice just loud enough for Dr. Holbrook in the back pew to hear: "We are here. We are singing. I am keeping the hour with my sister. There is no slip. We are here."
She said these words four times with the small variations of a woman who was speaking plainly and not reciting a formula.
On the fourth time the cold in the floor began to recede. The smell of the old cellar faded. The tremor in the lamp settled. His breath stopped fogging.
Sister Odile's voice slipped back into its ordinary careful register and the vigil continued.
Mother Ignatia knelt beside the stone for another perhaps 20 minutes long after everything in the room had returned to normal. Then she rose and bowed to the altar and walked back up the side aisle and out through the door she had come in by.
Sister Odile did not acknowledge in any way that any of this had happened.
In the morning Dr. Holbrook asked Mother Ignatia in the parlor how often this happened.
She said, "It depends on the week. Sometimes once a month, sometimes twice a week. In certain seasons for a reason none of us understand more often."
He said, "And what you said to it?"
She said, "It is what my teacher taught me to say and her teacher before her. It is a reminder. It is to tell the thing below that we are still here and are still keeping the hour. It does not always work. It worked last night because the thinning had not gone far. If it had gone further I would have had to call for a sister to come down and kneel at the stone. And if it had gone further still, I would have had to choose. Last night, I did not have to choose."
He said, "If I had not been there, would it have thinned at all?"
She looked at him for a long moment and said, "I do not know. I think probably it would not have thinned as much. I think the fact of your sitting in the back pew, understanding what you were listening to, was part of what thinned it. I am not certain."
He said, "Then I am leaving tomorrow."
She said, "Yes."
He said, "And after I am gone, the cover will be tighter."
She said, "Perhaps."
He said, "I am sorry I came."
She said, "Dr. Holbrook, I asked you to come. I had Sister Martha reported as missing in a particular way to a particular coroner because I had read your name in a Dahlonega newspaper 2 years ago in connection with a case where you had treated a very poor family with great gentleness."
"I had decided then that if a slip ever came that I did not know how to handle, I would try to bring you up to the house. I have given it a sister and I have grieved her and I will grieve her every day of my life. But I have also used the slip to bring you to the hill because I needed a mind not in this house to look at the whole of the method."
"You have looked at it and you have agreed that the method must continue and that is the gift you give me, the only one I asked you for. And now you must go home and keep the gift of your knowing in a safe and I will keep the house and that will be the whole of it."
He went home the next morning.
Elizabeth Halbrook Maine, writing in 2015, says she has read her grandfather's account perhaps 30 times. She has walked up to the ruin of the Styrian sister house twice, and up to the surviving German one once.
She has walked up the wagon road to Covenant Rise exactly once, in the spring of 2008.
That is the only part of her research she regrets.
She walked up expecting to find a quiet old convent in gentle disrepair, with perhaps three or four old sisters keeping the office more as a devotion than as a working practice.
She found instead a convent whose grounds were trimmed, whose chapel windows were lit at 11:00 in the morning on a Tuesday, and whose office could be heard from the gate in a clear chorus of nine or 10 women's voices.
The mother superior, a woman in her 60s with a Georgia accent who introduced herself as Mother Rose, declined politely but firmly to let her come inside.
She asked her, in a voice so quiet and familiar that Elizabeth Halbrook Maine said in her book she almost wept, "Are you by any chance a relation of a Dr. Thomas Holbrook who visited this house many years ago?"
She said she was his granddaughter.
Mother Rose smiled and said, "Then I will tell you two things. The first is that his gift was received, and that we have kept it in the way he asked. The second is that I will ask you with all the kindness I can to go home now and to publish what you have decided to publish only after your own death, and to come no closer to this hill than this gate for the rest of your life."
She shook Mother Rose's hand through the bars of the gate and went down the wagon road, and she did not look back.
The account she drew from this encounter is a single page in a book of hundreds.
The page says only: "I came home from Georgia in April of 2008. I will not publish this book in my lifetime. I know now that the office is still being sung and that it was being sung on the Tuesday I walked up the hill and that the cover is still being kept."
"Women who do not know what the office is for are still kneeling beside a stone that draws the warmth out of a hand and that a woman who knows is still watching them."
"The valley at the foot of the hill, which now has nearly a thousand people in it instead of the 300 my grandfather saw, is being kept safe by a method he could not endorse and could not condemn and could not improve upon."
"Nothing in the world I live in has given me any better method to offer them in the 100 years since he climbed down this road. If I were a stronger woman I would spend the rest of my life finding one. I am not that woman. I do not know who is."
"May God, if he is listening in a way the pale stone cannot hear, forgive us all."
The last thing to say in this account is a thing Dr. Holbrook wrote in a late addendum to his safe copy in 1923, 16 years after his visit to Covenant Rise.
He was 68 years old and had been thinking about the house every day of the intervening years.
With the aid of a quiet correspondence with Rupert Breen in Chattanooga and with a librarian at the Vatican to whom he had written a very carefully worded letter in 1915, he had formed at least a partial answer to the one question the book of the covering had not been able to answer.
The question was what the floor beneath Covenant Rise and the floor beneath the Styrian house and the floor beneath every other known sister house in the world actually was.
The partial answer was this: the floor was a single thing continuous under every continent and every ocean, laid down before any mountain the world now contained had risen.
The floor was not dead. The floor was running in the sense that a machine very long abandoned is running when its last gear is still turning in oil that has lasted longer than its makers expected.
The floor had a nature which was to reach up through the places where the ground above it was thinnest and to draw into itself the living warmth of whatever was moving slowly or lying still over those places.
Whether the drawing was the floor's original purpose or whether it was what a left running machine does to anything in reach, Dr. Holbrook in 1923 confessed he no longer thought it mattered to decide.
The practical point was that the drawing happened and that it had been going on under every settled country in the world for a time so long that human communities had, in every settled country, developed methods for keeping it from happening in the places where the people lived.
The methods were old enough to predate every church and every state and every written language the world now contained.
The methods had been in every culture handed to the women because the method requires patience and continuity across generations and the willingness to spend one's life on a work whose results are measured in centuries.
The method was always the same in its essentials: to put a group of bound women in a room above the soft place and keep them there singing until they could not sing anymore and then put another group there and keep that going without a break for as long as the thing above the floor was going to be lived in.
The various churches had absorbed the method in the places where they rose, had put their habits on the women and their Latin on the words and their saints on the houses.
They had been glad to call the practice a devotion of the religious life and had in the person of their highest officers in every generation known the truth and kept it.
They had considered, by a logic Dr. Holbrook said he could not refute but also could not quite endorse, that the keeping of the truth was itself part of the method.
The Vatican librarian had written in his careful reply that it was not possible to run the method with women who understood its purpose. No attempt to run it so had ever been sustained for more than a human generation before the house in question had collapsed and the valley below it had emptied.
Dr. Holbrook wrote that this had over 16 years of thinking about it come to seem to him both a great wisdom and a great evil.
He had formed and discarded a dozen plans for making the knowledge of the method general and had in the end decided to seal the account and leave the decision to his son.
He had never been able to answer the one question that the whole system rested on.
If you tell the women what they are doing, half of them will leave and the cover will slip for want of hands.
If you keep telling them a story about why they are singing that is not the real reason, you have taken from them the right of adult persons to make a free choice about the use of their lives.
If you abandon the method, the valley empties.
He wrote: "I have not solved this. I do not believe anyone alive today will solve it. I write this at 68 years of age and I am going to put the account back in the safe tonight."
"I hope only that whoever next reads this account will be gentler with Mother Ignatia than my own first impulse was to be when I rode up the hill in October of 1907 thinking I was going to find a woman who had failed in the ordinary way and found instead a woman who was holding the floor of a valley on her shoulders by a method she had not devised and could not improve and could not stop."
"She was in the fullness of the only honest account I have been able to give of her, one of the bravest women I have ever met and one of the loneliest."
Elizabeth Halbrook Maine, in the final chapter of her book, says that if you have ever walked past a stone walled compound in old woods where a bell rings on the hour and candles burn in a chapel window at odd times of the night and the gate is kept shut, remember her grandfather's account.
Remember what the useful purpose is.
Remember that the women inside do not know what you now know.
Let them continue not to know.
Do not stop at the gate. Do not ring the bell. Do not ask any questions.
The method requires the believing. The believing keeps the cover. The cover keeps the thing beneath the floor down.
The thing beneath the floor is why you have never in any night of your life had reason to wake up and wonder why your child was not in bed or why your husband was not beside you or why the house was so cold on the floor.
Pray for the women who are singing. Pray harder for the women who know.
And if in a very bad night of your own life, you ever hear a sweet reasonable voice in your own head suggesting that you lie down on a cold flagstone in some cellar or basement or low place and rest because the rest will be sweet and the stone will be cool and the quiet will be welcome and the sleep will be long, do not do it.
Get up. Turn on every light in the house. Go into the kitchen and put the kettle on.
Call another person, any other person, and keep that person on the line until the voice is gone.
The thing beneath the floor cannot reach you through a lit kitchen with another voice on the line and a kettle boiling on the stove.
It can only reach you through a cold still floor in the dark.
Do not give it one.
Keep the lights on. Keep the voices going. Keep the kettle on.
And in the morning when the sun comes up and the house is warm again and you can hardly remember why you were frightened, remember the sisters on the hill in Lumpkin County who have kept the lights on and the voices going and the kettle on in their own particular way every hour of every day for more than 120 years.
They are the reason your morning came.