The Castle looming on its knoll...it's something you gaze at a while trying to comprehend. A vision of ages dark and long gone. An air of knights and steeds and squires, princesses and chivalry, conjuring and bloodletting. A magnificent whimsical structure of river rock and mortar, granite-framed windows and red-tile pinnacles, looking as out of place in this neighborhood of old frame houses as an aircraft carrier amid a fleet of houseboats. Opium and cocaine are rumored to have played a part in its materialization. Mining heir and mystic Lucifer Cheevers started the Castle in 1907; he and a long list of craftsmen completed it in 1921. The Castle is shaped something like a shoe box, with a turret defining each of the four corners. Granite battlements form the top of the turrets, and the two front turrets are capped with red-tile pinnacles supported by four columns of mortared dimensional stone. Columns of that same style front the limestone-slab portico stretching across half the Castle's facade.

I crossed the street and locked the Jetta. The sidewalk has been humped and cracked by the roots of big locust trees that are now just graying stumps along the curb. Enclosing the front yard of the Castle is a chest-high fence made of vertical slate slabs with a rounded cap of rough cindery lava. The fence almost looks as if it grew there. The spring-loaded iron gate swings smoothly on heavy hinges, and closes with a clank. The graded flagstone walk and two flights of stairs take you twenty feet higher than the level of the sidewalk and fifty feet from the street before you reach the granite front steps. I took a deep breath and walked across the porch. I made a fist to knock on the iron door...then pulled the chain hanging along the granite door jamb. I heard a faint ring of bells. Whizzer was busy in the Watchtower, doing squealing pigs again before taking up the song that made the Suwanee River famous: "Old folks at Home".

I heard a dead bolt clunk. The door opened slowly.

"Angela?"

"Hello Jim," she said. "Come in."

A lovely silkscreen of Earthrise as seen from lunar orbit graced her sweatshirt. Dirt was ground into the thin knees of her blue jeans. Whiffs of baking bread spilled through the doorway. I had a strange feeling I was stepping back into the middle ages. She shut the door and threw the dead bolt.