On the way up the hill he saw a monk in full costume standing in a rowboat scattering chunks of bread on the still water of a pond. The monk, who was dressed in a long brown burlap robe tied around the waist by what looked like a frayed electrical cord, was a short, fat, bald man with rimless spectacles and a smile as goofy as a five-year-old with a puppy. Cas didn’t know what to make of it, but then Cas didn’t know what to make of much of anything these days and so he closed his eyes and walked on by. It might have been a hallucination or a dream or a miracle, or it might have been real. Cas was having a hard time telling the difference. He was unripe, you might say, a green snigger on the tail of a dying star, and his world was ending when strictly and technically speaking it hadn’t really started. That kind of thing is bound to depress a person. It gives one an overwhelming urge to approach perfect strangers and ask in a quivering voice “Are you God?” prepared to believe any answer they give you. Or at least that’s how it affected Cas.
Which helps explain (though not really) what he was doing on a long, winding road to the summit of a Berkshire mountain on which a small town called Wilbur sat like a cat dozing in the sun with one eye cracked for attacking butterflies: some insane belief that he could hide there from the voices in his head and the doubts in his heart. Not very smart, since everybody knows the worst place in the world to hide from Those Things is in a slow, tiny, unemployed town full of people who have nothing better to do than devote their lives to digging out Those Things and parading them down Main Street during Old Home Days for the general amusement of the idle. Of course, the answer to the riddle is obvious – Cas wasn’t very smart. Not yet, anyway.
Or very observant. For instance, he completely missed the phaser stare with which the monk followed him as he walked away up the road, a stare that could have melted glass, a stare that saw everything or nothing and understood how little difference there was between them, the kind of stare that was hard to miss even when it came from behind. Cas, dulled by confusion, missed it anyway. Good thing, too.
