They’re coming for me. They’ve had their fun—now they’ll finish me. To my mother: I have always tried to be your obedient son. To my illegitimate son and his mother: I have always loved you, although I didn’t always know it. To the world that may read this: know that I was a decent man, that I meant no harm, that I lived a life far less pious than I should have, but far better than many. May God have mercy on my soul.

And yet, apparently, they did not “finish” him, for another 150 pages of writing follow this entry. Of these 150 pages, the first two are full of weird scribbles punctuated by a few coherent passages, all written using the strange purple ink described by Abrasis as having been distilled from fungus. These pages provide damning evidence of a mind gone rapidly deranged, and yet they are followed by 148 lucid pages of essays on Truffidian religious rituals, broken infrequently by glimpses into Tonsure’s captivity.

The essays have proven invaluable to present-day Truffidians who wish to read an “eyewitness” account of the early church, but baffle those of us who naturally want answers to the mysteries inherent in the Silence and the journal itself. The most obvious question is, why did the mushroom dwellers suffer Tonsure to live? On this subject, Tonsure at least provides his own theory, the explanation inserted into the middle of a paragraph on the Truffidian position on circumcision:

Gradually, as they come to me time after time and rub my bald head, it has struck me why I have been spared. It is such a simple thing that it makes me laugh even to contemplate it: I look like a mushroom. Quick! Alert the authorities! I must send a message aboveground—tell them all to shave their heads! I can hardly contain my laughter even now, which startles my captors and makes it hard to write legibly.

Later, stuck between a discussion on the divine properties of frogs and a diatribe against interspecies marriages, Tonsure provides us with another glimpse into the mushroom dwellers’ world that entices the reader like a flash of gold: