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sharp once more. “Last question! Make it snappy.”
    “Who are you?
What
are you?”
    “Get in the Jeep. Start the engine. You know who are the Sovereign Military Order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon?”
    “Sure. The Knights Templar. They were wiped out in the Dark Ages.”
    “Gah! Only someone who learned his history from watching reruns of the Time Tunnel would call the Twelfth century the Dark Ages.”
    “They were tortured and killed by some French dude who wanted their money.”
    “Philip the Fair wanted more than that. He knew the Knights of the Temple had possession of the Ark of the Covenant.”
    “The Ark? You mean the magic box that melts Nazi faces?”
    “I mean the sacred vessel for carrying the tablets of Moses, the living rod of Aaron, and a jar of the bread of heaven. It also has power over the Twilight, and over the Dark of Uncreation. We used it to find and open a portcullis of twilight in the Forest of Broceliande, and fled from Philip the Fair to the only world the Dark Tower cannot destroy. Only the Visible Fellowship of the Templars was martyred. The Invisible Fellowship continues to this day. The Congregation and the Holy Father protected us.”
    “We? Us?”
    “I am in service to the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ of the commandry of Archbishop Alexander, assigned to the protection of pilgrims and wayfarers in the Ultramundane Realms, the
Outreterre
.”
    He held up the oversized and ornate high school ring he wears on his right hand, and he fiddled with the collet like he always does when he is nervous or contemplating something. This time it was not just a nervous habit, though. He was turning the collet of the ring the way he had just turned the dial of a safe.
    With a click, the face changed shape. I don’t mean the ring had a secret compartment, I mean the class ring
morphed
like a special effect on TV: the face changed shape and color and grew larger.
    Now it was no longer a class ring but a signet ring. The seal was white and gold, and engraved with two crusaders with shield on one horse and around them the legend written in raised letters:
Sigillum Militum Χρisti.
    He held it toward me so that I could see it.
    “As in ancient days, our mission is to protect pilgrims and fight the enemies of Christendom. I am one of those who can withstand the Twilight surrounding Uncreation. I am an Ostiary, a door-warden. Not far from here is the door I watch.”
    He passed his fingers over it, and I heard it click, and then it was a class ring again.
    The idea that there was a supernatural and inter-dimensional portal hidden in Tillamook, Oregon, made me snort, trying to smother a laugh. If I started laughing, I would probably never stop. I forced my wobbling brain to follow what Dad was saying.
    “You know about the prehistoric ossuary beneath the Monastery.”
    I did. My brothers and I, many a midnight when we were younger, tried to keep each other sleepless and terrified with speculations and ghost stories about it, or by pretending we heard scratching noises approaching the house. There were ancient chambers, walled and roofed with kiln-burnt brick, too small for a child to stand erect in, connected by narrow crawlspaces only a child could navigate, filled with clay pots full of bones.
    I knew there had been tribes of a darker, smaller people inhabiting North and South America long before the ancestors of the American Indians migrated across the Bering Strait and displaced and wiped them out. Northwest Indians hunted game and gathered nuts in woodlands that grew and swallowed up the pastures their predecessors had farmed.
    Before they vanished, these lost people erected monoliths and standing stones that measured the stars and seasons of their planting, and buried their priestesses and holy slaves alive in chambers beneath.
    Spanish explorers had discovered the bloodstained stones and skeletons below the rocks. A Mission, walled like a fortress, was