* * *
Control just stared at her for a moment, the interrogator’s creepy prerogative, usually meant to intimidate. But Ghost Bird met his stare with those sharp green eyes until he looked away. It continued to nag at him that she was different today. What had changed in the past twenty-four hours? Her routine was the same, and surveillance hadn’t revealed anything different about her mental state. They’d offered her a carefully monitored phone call with her parents, but she’d had nothing to say to them. Boredom from being cooped up with nothing but a DVD player and a censored selection of movies and novels could not account for it. The food she ate was from the cafeteria, so Control could commiserate with her there, but this still did not provide a reason.
“Perhaps this will jog your memory.” Or stop you lying. He began to read summaries of accounts from prior expeditions.
“An endless pit burrowing into the ground. We could never get to the bottom of it. We could never stop falling.”
“A tower that had fallen into the earth that gave off a feeling of intense unease. None of us wanted to go inside, but we did. Some of us. Some of us came back.”
“There was no entrance. Just a circle of pulsing stone. Just a sense of great depth.”
Only two members of that expedition had returned, but they had brought their colleagues’ journals. Which were filled with drawings of a tower, a tunnel, a pit, a cyclone, a series of stairs. Where they were not filled with images of more mundane things. No two journals the same.
Control did not continue for long. He had begun the recitations aware that the selected readings might contaminate the edges of her amnesia … if she actually suffered from memory loss … and that feeling had quickly intensified. But it was mostly his own sense of unease that made him pause, and then stop. His feeling that in making the tower-pit more real in his imagination, he was also making it more real in fact.
But Ghost Bird either had not or had picked up on his tiny moment of distress, because she said, “Why did you stop?”
He ignored her, switched one tower for another. “What about the lighthouse?”
“What about the lighthouse?” First thought: She’s mimicking me. Which brought back a middle school memory of humiliation from bullies before the transformation in high school as he’d put his efforts into football and tried to think of himself as a spy in the world of jocks. Realized that the words on the wall had thrown him off. Not by much, but just enough.
“Do you remember it?”
“I do,” she said, surprising him.
Still, he had to pull it out of her: “What do you remember?”
“Approaching it from the trail through the reeds. Looking in the doorway.”
“And what did you see?”
“The inside.”
It went that way for a while, with Control beginning to lose track of her answers. Moving on to the next thing she said she couldn’t remember, letting the conversation fall into a rhythm, one that she might find comfortable. He told himself he was trying to get a sense of her nervous tics, of anything that might give away her real state of mind or her real agenda. It wasn’t actually dangerous to stare at her. It wasn’t dangerous at all. He was Control, and he was in control.
* * *
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear … And on and on it went, so that Control had the impression that if the director hadn’t run out of space, hadn’t added a map of Area X, she wouldn’t have run out of words, either.
At first he had thought the wall beyond the door was covered in a dark design. But no, someone had obliterated it with a series of odd sentences written with a remarkably thick black pen. Some words had been underlined in red and others boxed in by green. The weight of them had made him take a step back, then just stand there, frowning.
Initial theory, abandoned as ridiculous: The words were the director’s psychotic ode to the plant in her desk drawer. Then he was drawn to the slight similarities between the cadence of the words and some of the more religious anti-government militias he had monitored during his career. Then he thought he detected a faint murmur of the tone of the kinds of sloth-like yet finicky lunatics who stuck newspaper articles and Internet printouts to the walls of their mothers’ basements. Creating—glue stick by glue stick and thumbtack by thumbtack—their own single-use universes. But such tracts, such philosophies, rarely seemed as melancholy or as earthy yet ethereal as these sentences.