The Curious Arts

For eleven years, the bag never ran out.
Deep in the Pennsylvania timber, in a county the highway signs call God's Country, Gideon Marsh keeps a camp where people come to and fro for two things: a revelation, and whatever he is carrying in an old canvas satchel he bought from a stranger in Amsterdam and has never once restocked.
They call him Merlin. He is good at it. The words he gives them are true - they arrive from somewhere above and behind his own thinking, and they go through a person like a wire - and he hands them a small paper bag in the same breath.
Then the government comes up that hollow at five in the morning. He runs. He hides the bag in a rock house on a ridge above Bell Run, and he does two years for what they could find without it.
He goes back for it the week he gets out.
It is exactly as he left it - two winters in a hole in a hillside, and not one thread of mold. But there is a man standing in the mouth of that cave with a sword already drawn, and he does not raise it, and he does not need to. He tells Gideon Marsh that it is not the will of the Lord that he do so wickedly. That if he desires to live, and live long - very long - in the doing of God's will, he must stop today. That his own soul is in peril, and that God could curse him and cast him into the pit and no one in heaven would call it hard dealing. And that the men and women who climb that hollow hungry for the living God are learning from him that there is nothing at the top of the ladder but a merchant.
They wrestle until daybreak. Gideon never lets go of the strap.
And then he walks down off that mountain with it anyway.
What follows is a traffic stop he mistakes for a blessing. Ten days in a folding chair without food, without sleep, with the bag on the floor in front of him. A hole dug in the dark behind a hardware store. And one command he cannot obey, because obeying it means there is no way out and nothing under him at all:
Burn it.
Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. - Acts 19:19
THE CURIOUS ARTS is a novel about the difference between quitting and repenting. About the mercy that stops a man, and the harder mercy that lets him go and follows him. About stubbornness as the sin of witchcraft, and buried things that are not dead things - and about what God hands back to a man who finally does the one thing he was told.
For readers who want their redemption stories with the cost left in.