“How do you feel about being part of a team?”
“Just fine. I’ve often been part of teams.” And by “part of,” I mean off to the side.
“You were let go from a number of your field jobs. Do you want to tell me why?”
She knew why, so, again, I shrugged and said nothing.
“Are you only agreeing to join this expedition because of your husband?”
“How close were you and your husband?”
“How often did you fight? Why did you fight?”
“Why didn’t you call the authorities the moment he returned to your house?”
These sessions clearly frustrated the psychologist on a professional level, on the level of her ingrained training, which was predicated on drawing personal information out of patients in order to establish trust and then delve into deeper issues. But on another level I could never quite grasp, she seemed to approve of my answers. “You’re very self-contained,” she said once, but not as a pejorative. It was only as we walked for a second day from the border toward base camp that it struck me that perhaps the very qualities she might disapprove of from a psychiatric point of view made me suitable for the expedition.
Now she sat propped up against a mound of sand, sheltered by the shadow of the wall, in a kind of broken pile, one leg straight out, the other trapped beneath her. She was alone. I could see from her condition and the shape of the impact that she had jumped or been pushed from the top of the lighthouse. She probably hadn’t quite cleared the wall, been hurt by it on the way down. While I, in my methodical way, had spent hours going through the journals, she had been lying here the whole time. What I couldn’t understand was why she was still alive.
Her jacket and shirt were covered in blood, but she was breathing and her eyes were open, looking out toward the ocean as I knelt beside her. She had a gun in her left hand, left arm outstretched, and I gently took the weapon from her, tossed it to the side, just in case.
The psychologist did not seem to register my presence. I touched her gently on one broad shoulder, and then she screamed, lunged away, falling over as I recoiled.
“Annihilation!” she shrieked at me, flailing in confusion. “Annihilation! Annihilation!” The word seemed more meaningless the more she repeated it, like the cry of a bird with a broken wing.
“It’s just me, the biologist,” I said in a calm voice, even though she had rattled me.
“Just you,” she said with a wheezing chuckle, as if I’d said something funny. “Just you.”
As I propped her up again, I heard a kind of creaking groan and realized she had probably broken most of her ribs. Her left arm and shoulder felt spongy under her jacket. Dark blood was seeping out around her stomach, beneath the hand she had instinctively pressed down on that spot. I could smell that she had pissed herself.
“You’re still here,” she said, surprise in her voice. “But I killed you, didn’t I?” The voice of someone waking from dream or falling into dream.
“Not even a little bit.”
A rough wheeze again, and the film of confusion leaving her eyes. “Did you bring water? I’m thirsty.”
“I did,” and I pressed my canteen to her mouth so she could swallow a few gulps. Drops of blood glistened on her chin.
“Where is the surveyor?” the psychologist asked in a gasp.
“Back at the base camp.”
“Wouldn’t come with you?”
“No.” The wind was blowing back the curls of her hair, revealing a slashing wound on her forehead, possibly from impact with the wall above.
“Didn’t like your company?” the psychologist asked. “Didn’t like what you’ve become?”
A chill came over me. “I’m the same as always.”
The psychologist’s gaze drifted out to sea again. “I saw you, you know, coming down the trail toward the lighthouse. That’s how I knew for sure you had changed.”
“What did you see?” I asked, to humor her.
A cough, accompanied by red spittle. “You were a flame,” she said, and I had a brief vision of my brightness, made manifest. “You were a flame, scorching my gaze. A flame drifting across the salt flats, through the ruined village. A slow-burning flame, a will-o’-the-wisp, floating across the marsh and the dunes, floating and floating, like nothing human but something free and floating …”
From the shift in her tone, I recognized that even now she was trying to hypnotize me.
“It won’t work,” I said. “I’m immune to hypnosis now.”
Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “Of course you are. You were always difficult,” she said, as if talking to a child. Was that an odd sense of pride in her voice?
Perhaps I should have left the psychologist alone, let her die without providing any answers, but I could not find that level of grace within me.
A thought occurred, if I had looked so inhuman: “Why didn’t you shoot me dead as I approached?”
An unintentional leer as she swiveled her head to stare at me, unable to control all of the muscles in her face. “My arm, my hand, wouldn’t let me pull the trigger.”
That sounded delusional to me, and I had seen no sign of an abandoned rifle beside the beacon. I tried again. “And your fall? Pushed or an accident or on purpose?”
A frown appeared, a true perplexity expressed through the network of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, as if the memory were only coming through in fragments. “I thought … I thought something was after me. I tried to shoot you, and couldn’t and then you were inside. Then I thought I saw something behind me, coming toward me from the stairs, and I felt such an overwhelming fear I had to get away from it. So I jumped out over the railing. I jumped.” As if she couldn’t believe she had done such a thing.
“What did the thing coming after you look like?”
A coughing fit, words dribbling out around the edges: “I never saw it. It was never there. Or I saw it too many times. It was inside me. Inside you. I was trying to get away. From what’s inside me.”
I didn’t believe any part of that fragmented explanation at the time, which seemed to imply something had followed her from the Tower. I interpreted the frenzy of her disassociation as part of a need for control. She had lost control of the expedition, and so she had to find someone or something to blame her failure on, no matter how improbable.
I tried a different approach: “Why did you take the anthropologist down into the ‘tunnel’ in the middle of the night? What happened there?”
She hesitated, but I couldn’t tell if it was from caution or because something inside her body was breaking down. Then she said, “A miscalculation. Impatience. I needed intel before we risked the whole mission. I needed to know where we stood.”
“You mean, the progress of the Crawler?”
She smiled wickedly. “Is that what you call it? The Crawler?”
“What happened?” I asked.
“What do you think happened? It all went wrong. The anthropologist got too close.” Translation: The psychologist had forced her to get close. “The thing reacted. It killed her, wounded me.”
“Which is why you looked so shaken the next morning.”
“Yes. And because I could tell that you were already changing.”
“I’m not changing!” I shouted it, an unexpected rage rising inside of me.
A wet chuckle, a mocking tone. “Of course you’re not. You’re just becoming more of what you’ve always been. And I’m not changing, either. None of us are changing. Everything is fine. Let’s have a picnic.”
“Shut up. Why did you abandon us?”
“The expedition had been compromised.”
“That isn’t an explanation.”
“Did you ever give me a proper explanation, during training?”
“We hadn’t been compromised, not enough to abandon the mission.”
“Sixth day after reaching base camp and one person is dead, two already changing, the fourth wavering? I would call that a disa
ster.”
“If it was a disaster, you helped create it.” I realized that as much as I mistrusted the psychologist personally, I had come to rely on her to lead the expedition. On some level, I was furious that she had betrayed us, furious that she might be leaving me now. “You just panicked, and you gave up.”
The psychologist nodded. “That, too. I did. I did. I should have recognized earlier that you had changed. I should have sent you back to the border. I shouldn’t have gone down there with the anthropologist. But here we are.” She grimaced, coughed out a thick wetness.
I ignored the jab, changed the line of questioning. “What does the border look like?”
That smile again. “I’ll tell you when I get there.”
“What really happens when we cross over?”
“Not what you might expect.”
“Tell me! What do we cross through?” I felt as if I were getting lost. Again.
There was a gleam in her eye now that I did not like, that promised damage. “I want you to think about something. You might be immune to hypnosis—you might—but what about the veil already in place? What if I removed that veil so you could access your own memories of crossing the border?” the psychologist asked. “Would you like that, Little Flame? Would you like it or would you go mad?”
“If you try to do anything to me, I’ll kill you,” I said—and meant it. The thought of hypnosis in general, and the conditioning behind it, had been difficult for me, an invasive price to be paid in return for access to Area X. The thought of further tampering was intolerable.
“How many of your memories do you think are implanted?” the psychologist asked. “How many of your memories of the world beyond the border are verifiable?”
“That won’t work on me,” I told her. “I am sure of the here and now, this moment, and the next. I am sure of my past.” That was ghost bird’s castle keep, and it was inviolate. It might have been punctured by the hypnosis during training, but it had not been breached. Of this I was certain, and would continue to be certain, because I had no choice.
“I’m sure your husband felt the same way before the end,” the psychologist said.
I sat back on my haunches, staring at her. I wanted to leave her before she poisoned me, but I couldn’t.
“Let’s stick to your own hallucinations,” I said. “Describe the Crawler to me.”
“There are things you must see with your own eyes. You might get closer. You might be more familiar to it.” Her lack of regard for the anthropologist’s fate was hideous, but so was mine.
“What did you hide from us about Area X?”
“Too general a question.” I think it amused the psychologist, even dying, for me to so desperately need answers from her.
“Okay, then: What do the black boxes measure?”
“Nothing. They don’t measure anything. It’s just a psychological ploy to keep the expedition calm: no red light, no danger.”
“What is the secret behind the Tower?”
“The tunnel? If we knew, do you think we would keep sending in expeditions?”
“They’re scared. The Southern Reach.”
“That is my impression.”
“Then they have no answers.”
“I’ll give you this scrap: The border is advancing. For now, slowly, a little bit more every year. In ways you wouldn’t expect. But maybe soon it’ll eat a mile or two at a time.”
The thought of that silenced me for a long moment. When you are too close to the center of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire. The black boxes might do nothing but in my mind they were all blinking red.
“How many expeditions have there been?”
“Ah, the journals,” she said. “There are quite a lot of them, aren’t there?”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Maybe I don’t know the answer. Maybe I just don’t want to tell you.”
It was going to continue this way, to the end, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
“What did the ‘first’ expedition really find?”
The psychologist grimaced, and not from her pain this time, but more as if she were remembering something that caused her shame. “There’s video from that expedition … of a sort. The main reason no advanced tech was allowed after that.”
Video. Somehow, after searching through the mound of journals, that information didn’t startle me. I kept moving forward.
“What orders didn’t you reveal to us?”
“You’re beginning to bore me. And I’m beginning to fade a little … Sometimes we tell you more, sometimes less. They have their metrics and their reasons.” Somehow the “they” felt made of cardboard, as if she didn’t quite believe in “them.”
Reluctantly, I returned to the personal. “What do you know about my husband?”
“Nothing more than you’ll find out from reading his journal. Have you found it yet?”
“No,” I lied.
“Very insightful—about you, especially.”
Was that a bluff? She’d certainly had enough time up in the lighthouse to find it, read it, and toss it back onto the pile.
It didn’t matter. The sky was darkening and encroaching, the waves deepening, the surf making the shorebirds scatter on their stilt legs and then regroup as it receded. The sand seemed suddenly more porous around us. The meandering paths of crabs and worms continued to be written into its surface. A whole community lived here, was going about its business, oblivious to our conversation. And where out there lay the seaward border? When I had asked the psychologist during training she had said only that no one had ever crossed it, and I had imagined expeditions that just evaporated into mist and light and distance.
A rattle had entered the psychologist’s breathing, which was now shallow and inconsistent.
“Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?” Relenting.
“Leave me here when I die,” she said. Now all her fear was visible. “Don’t bury me. Don’t take me anywhere. Leave me here where I belong.”
“Is there anything else you’re willing to tell me?”
“We should never have come here. I should never have come here.” The rawness in her tone hinted at a personal anguish that went beyond her physical condition.
“That’s all?”
“I’ve come to believe it is the one fundamental truth.”
I took her to mean that it was better to let the border advance, to ignore it, let it affect some other, more distant generation. I didn’t agree with her, but I said nothing. Later, I would come to believe she had meant something altogether different.
“Has anyone ever really come back from Area X?”
“Not for a long time now,” the psychologist said in a tired whisper. “Not really.” But I don’t know if she had heard the question.
Her head sagged downward and she lost consciousness, then came to again and stared out at the waves. She muttered a few words, one of which might have been “remote” or “demote” and another that might have been “hatching” or “watching.” But I could not be sure.
Soon dusk would descend. I gave her more water. It was hard to think of her as an adversary the closer she came to death, even though clearly she knew so much more than she had told me. Regardless, it didn’t bear much thought because she wasn’t going to divulge anything else. And maybe I had looked to her like a flame as I came near. Maybe that was the only way she could think of me now.
“Did you know about the pile of journals?” I asked. “Before we came here?”
But she did not answer.
There were things I had to do after she died, even though I was running short of daylight, even though I did not like doing them. If she wouldn’t answer my questions while alive, then she would have to answer some of them now. I took off the psychologist’s jacket and laid it to the side, discovering in the process that she had hidden her own journal in a zippered inside pocket, folded up. I put that t
o the side, too, under a stone, the pages flapping in the gusts of wind.
Then I took out my penknife and, with great care, cut away the left sleeve of her shirt. The sponginess of her shoulder had bothered me, and I saw I’d had good reason to be concerned. From her collarbone down to her elbow, her arm had been colonized by a fibrous green-gold fuzziness, which gave off a faint glow. From the indentations and long rift running down her triceps, it appeared to have spread from an initial wound—the wound she said she had received from the Crawler. Whatever had contaminated me, this different and more direct contact had spread faster and had more disastrous consequences. Certain parasites and fruiting bodies could cause not just paranoia but schizophrenia, all-too-realistic hallucinations, and thus promote delusional behavior. I had no doubt now that she had seen me as a flame approaching, that she had attributed her inability to shoot me to some exterior force, that she had been assailed by the fear of some approaching presence. If nothing else, the memory of the encounter with the Crawler would, I imagined, have unhinged her to some degree.
I cut a skin sample from her arm, along with some of the flesh beneath, and prodded it into a collection vial. Then I took another sample from her other arm. Once I got back to base camp, I would examine both.
I was shaking a little by then, so I took a break, turned my attention to the journal. It was devoted to transcribing the words on the wall of the Tower, was filled with so many new passages:
… but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive …
There were a few notes scribbled in the margins. One read “lighthouse keeper,” which made me wonder if she’d circled the man in the photograph. Another read “North?” and a third “island.” I had no clue what these notes meant—or what it said about the psychologist’s state of mind that her journal was devoted to this text. I felt only a simple, uncomplicated relief that someone had completed a task for me that would have been laborious and difficult otherwise. My only question was whether she had gotten the text from the walls of the Tower, from journals within the lighthouse, or from some other source entirely. I still don’t know.
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