Then I examined the samples from the village: moss from the “forehead” of one of the eruptions, splinters of wood, a dead fox, a rat. The wood was indeed wood. The rat was indeed a rat. The moss and the fox … were composed of modified human cells. Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead …
I suppose I should have reared back from the microscope in shock, but I was beyond such reactions to anything that instrument might show me. Instead, I contented myself with quiet cursing. The boar on the way to base camp, the strange dolphins, the tormented beast in the reeds. Even the idea that replicas of members of the eleventh expedition had crossed back over. All supported the evidence of my microscope. Transformations were taking place here, and as much as I had felt part of a “natural” landscape on my trek to the lighthouse, I could not deny that these habitats were transitional in a deeply unnatural way. A perverse sense of relief overtook me; at least now I had proof of something strange happening, along with the brain tissue the anthropologist had taken from the skin of the Crawler.
By then, though, I’d had enough of samples. I ate lunch and decided against putting more effort into cleaning up the camp; most of that task would have to fall to the next expedition. It was another brilliant, blinding afternoon of stunning blue sky allied with a comfortable heat. I sat for a time, watched the dragonflies skimming the long grass, the dipping, looping flight of a redheaded woodpecker. I was just putting off the inevitable, my return to the Tower, and yet still I wasted time.
When I finally picked up my husband’s journal and started to read, the brightness washed over me in unending waves and connected me to the earth, the water, the trees, the air, as I opened up and kept on opening.
* * *
Nothing about my husband’s journal was expected. Except for some terse, hastily scribbled exceptions, he had addressed most of the entries to me. I did not want this, and as soon as it became apparent I had to resist the need to throw the journal away from me as if it were poison. My reaction had nothing to do with love or lack of love but was more out of a sense of guilt. He had meant to share this journal with me, and now he was either truly dead or existed in a state beyond any possible way for me to communicate with him, to reciprocate.
The eleventh expedition had consisted of eight members, all male: a psychologist, two medics (including my husband), a linguist, a surveyor, a biologist, an anthropologist, and an archaeologist. They had come to Area X in the winter, when the trees had lost most of their leaves and the reeds had turned darker and thicker. The flowering bushes “became sullen” and seemed to “huddle” along the path, as he put it. “Fewer birds than indicated in reports,” he wrote. “But where do they go? Only the ghost bird knows.” The sky frequently clouded over, and the water level in the cypress swamps was low. “No rain the entire time we’ve been here,” he wrote at the end of the first week.
They, too, discovered what only I call the Tower on their fifth or sixth day—I was ever more certain that the location of the base camp had been chosen to trigger that discovery—but their surveyor’s opinion that they must continue mapping the wider area meant they followed a different course than ours. “None of us were eager to climb down in there,” my husband wrote. “Me least of all.” My husband had claustrophobia, sometimes even had to leave our bed in the middle of the night to go sleep on the deck.
For whatever reason, the psychologist did not in this case coerce the expedition to go down into the Tower. They explored farther, past the ruined village, to the lighthouse and beyond. Of the lighthouse, my husband noted their horror at discovering the signs of carnage, but of being “too respectful of the dead to put things right,” by which I suppose he meant the overturned tables on the ground level. He did not mention the photograph of the lighthouse keeper on the wall of the landing, which disappointed me.
Like me, they had discovered the pile of journals at the top of the lighthouse, been shaken by it. “We had an intense argument about what to do. I wanted to abort the mission and return home because clearly we had been lied to.” But it was at this point that the psychologist apparently reestablished control, if of a tenuous sort. One of the directives for Area X was for each expedition to remain a unit. But in the very next entry the expedition had decided to split up, as if to salvage the mission by catering solely to each person’s will, and thus ensuring that no one would try to return to the border. The other medic, the anthropologist, the archaeologist, and the psychologist stayed in the lighthouse to read the journals and investigate the area around the lighthouse. The linguist and the biologist went back to explore the Tower. My husband and the surveyor continued on past the lighthouse.