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the sleep that nests on stillness. He should get up and move about. He should put out the lamp perhaps. But he does neither. The sitting is intolerable prison now, but he cannot escape it. He considers it would be weakness and fault to move now. He must offer it. The old Apostle may be in communion such as he himself has never known. He it was, after all, who came upon John years earlier in their banishment, when the lightning had passed and the Apostle lay collapsed on the great stone. Prochorus had thought him struck by lightning in the temple of his head. His eyes were blind and he was speaking quickly, so quickly that at first it seemed he spoke in no language the scribe understood. Prochorus asked him if he had been out in the storm, if he been struck, for the rock was blackened. John did not answer but continued as if in tongues. His hand he reached on to Prochorus's shoulder, and the younger disciple led him to this cave nearby as their shelter. It was there, in the days and nights ahead, in fevered fits and starts, in long streams of words, and longer pauses, in a voice loud and strong and often angry — his hands flying out into the air about him, his blind face to the cave roof— that the Apostle dictated his revelation and Prochorus wrote it down.
    It is the event of Prochorus's life. It is as close as he has come to the presence. Though years later he does not forget an instant of it. Not the hairs that stood on the back of his neck as he wrote, nor the chill in his blood, nor the sense he had as his stylus moved on the papyrus that the words would last the lifetime of the earth. He believed.
    He knows it by heart. In the small hours of night, to keep awake now he mutely recites verses. Beside him, John is as before.
    Some moonlight is uncovered by the wind-dragging clouds and falls at the entrance. Prochorus looks; he wonders what it might be to be visited just then by seraphim. Would he give his eyes for such? Would the dazzlement singe his brain? Although not an ancient, he is already an old man himself now. Perhaps there is nothing more for him. He wonders how each is chosen. How as if from a great constellation a hand sweeps through stars and selects one. He wonders at the destiny God has chosen for him, and if perhaps again, now, this bitter night, the Apostle will catch fire and speak.
    'Let it descend' is his prayer. 'Let it come again, now, Lord.'
    The wind whips up from the shore where Papias crouches to his knees over the stones. His head sings. His eyes blur with sudden tears. He feels struck in the pit of his stomach and retches violent, vacant gulps. The sea wind salts his face. From the corner of his mouth it pulls aslant a thin drool. He cries out a sound none hears. He stands upright and looks back at the widow Marina's dwelling, where the rough door opens and bangs with invisible traffic.
    When he collects himself, Papias goes back inside. The scene is unchanged: the widow and the infants motionless upon her. The door opens and closes the light so she appears as in a series of identical portraits, each painted a grievous grey, each with a wild, implacable suffering.
    'The children must be buried,' Papias says, softly. 'They are gone to the Lord.'
    The widow shows no sign of understanding. Her eyes stare, as if across the room she keeps demons at bay.
    Gently Papias leans down and places his hands on one of the children. The flesh is cold and scaled with something rough he cannot see. He goes to lift the child off the mother, and the moment the weight shifts she lets out a scream and grasps the infant to her.
    'The children must be buried,' he says again. But the mother will not let go the child and shakes her head back and forth, and would be weeping if she had not wept herself away already, and so instead makes a kind of moaning crying and clings to the dead. Papias pleads with her. He tells her he will pray over the children. He tries to lift the first from her again, a girl it is, but the