IT WAS DARK WHEN BEN GOT UP, DARK WHEN HE SHOWERED, DARK when he pulled his wool hat on. He braced himself for the cold and pushed out the door. You’d get busted if you were caught out of your dorm at two a.m., but Ben wondered at what time of morning it became not against expectations to be outside—six a.m.? Five? He walked out along the main road to the chapel. The melting snow and the overcast sky formed a single field of gray that the dark buildings and trees stood against.

His footfalls scraped quietly on the grit. The bracken on the banks of the Lower Pond waterfall bobbed under the falling water, and the branches were no longer frozen into long bright arcs.

Ben passed the front of the PO and moved under the trees that lined the road, then came up to the vast chapel lawn. He stopped even though the slush was starting to soak through his cared-for Sauconys. The black chapel had the proportions of a sitting sphinx, its spired head triumphant over its paws in front.

The air that morning had just the slightest swaddling texture against his face. Ben could sense the trees gathering their strength to push new buds out into the world.

Ben kept walking to the chapel’s front entrance. The wind started to gust, and with gloveless hands Ben pulled back on the main door’s giant iron hoop and stepped inside.

The door closed behind him, and the long echoing of wood against wood gave the immense dimensions of the space. He walked without ceremony to the little door at the back of the ante-chapel, slipped the key in, and after the key wouldn’t turn, he pulled it out slightly and tried again. Still it stuck, and he endured a moment of supreme disappointment, but then he slid it in again, not as far as before, and the key turned surely. Ben pushed the door back and smelled the colder air of the chapel-tower staircase.

He stepped inside. The bottom step was so close to the threshold that he almost tripped. He climbed the first stair and pulled the door closed behind him. It was almost totally black. There was a weak glow from a slit window in the stairwell above, enough for him to barely make out the curving walls around him. The stairwell turned inside the circumference of a very large Hula-Hoop.