Another dozen steps up, right where you could still have a slit of a view of the dead anthropologist, I found two sets of boot prints, facing each other. One set belonged to the anthropologist. The other was neither mine nor the surveyor’s.
Something clicked into place, and I could see it all in my head. In the middle of the night, the psychologist had woken the anthropologist, put her under hypnosis, and together they had come to the tower and climbed down this far. At this point, the psychologist had given the anthropologist an order, under hypnosis, one that she probably knew was suicidal, and the anthropologist had walked right up to the thing that was writing the words on the wall and tried to take a sample—and died trying, probably in agony. The psychologist had then fled; certainly, as I walked back down I could find no trace of her boot prints below that point.
Was it pity or empathy that I felt for the anthropologist? Weak, trapped, with no choice.
The surveyor waited for me, anxious. “What did you find?”
“Another person was here with the anthropologist.” I told the surveyor my theory.
“But why would the psychologist do that?” she asked me. “We were going to all come down here in the morning anyway.”
I felt as if I were observing the surveyor from a thousand miles away.
“I have no idea,” I said, “but she has been hypnotizing all of us, and not just to give us peace of mind. Perhaps this expedition had a different purpose than what we were told.”
“Hypnotism.” She said the word like it was meaningless. “How do you know that? How could you possibly know that?” The surveyor seemed resentful—of me or of the theory, I couldn’t tell which. But I could understand why.
“Because, somehow, I have become impervious to it,” I told her. “She hypnotized you before we came down here today, to make sure you would do your duty. I saw her do it.” I wanted to confess to the surveyor—to tell her how I had become impervious—but believed that that would be a mistake.
“And you did nothing? If this is even true.” At least she was considering the possibility of believing me. Perhaps some residue, some fuzziness, from the episode had stuck in her mind.
“I didn’t want the psychologist to know that she couldn’t hypnotize me.” And, I had wanted to come down here.
The surveyor stood there for a moment, considering.
“Believe me or don’t believe me,” I said. “But believe this: When we go up there, we need to be ready for anything. We may need to restrain or kill the psychologist because we don’t know what she’s planning.”
“Why would she be planning anything?” the surveyor asked. Was that disdain in her voice or just fear again?
“Because she must have different orders than the ones we got,” I said, as if explaining to a child.
When she did not reply, I took that as a sign that she was beginning to acclimate to the idea.
“I’ll need to go first, because she can’t affect me. And you’ll need to wear these. It might help you resist the hypnotic suggestion.” I gave her my extra set of earplugs.
She took them hesitantly. “No,” she said. “We’ll go up together, at the same time.”
“That isn’t wise,” I said.
“I don’t care what it is. You’re not going up top without me. I’m not waiting there in the dark for you to fix everything.”
I thought about that for a moment, then said, “Fine. But if I see that she is starting to coerce you, I’ll have to stop her.” Or at least try.
“If you’re right,” the surveyor said. “If you’re telling the truth.”
“I am.”
She ignored me, said, “What about the body?”
Did that mean we were agreed? I hoped so. Or maybe she would try to disarm me on the way up. Perhaps the psychologist had already prepared her in this regard.
“We leave the anthropologist here. We can’t be weighed down, and we also don’t know what contaminants we might bring with us.”
The surveyor nodded. At least she wasn’t sentimental. There was nothing left of the anthropologist in that body, and we both knew it. I was trying very hard not to think of the anthropologist’s last moments alive, of the terror she must have felt as she continued trying to perform a task that she had been willed to do by another, even though it meant her own death. What had she seen? What had she been looking at before it all went dark?
Before we turned back, I took one of the glass tubes strewn around the anthropologist. It contained just a trace of a thick, fleshlike substance that gleamed darkly golden. Perhaps she had gotten a useful sample after all, near the end.
* * *
As we ascended toward the light, I tried to distract myself. I kept reviewing my training over and over again, searching for a clue, for any scrap of information that might lead to some revelation about our discoveries. But I could find nothing, could only wonder at my own gullibility in thinking that I had been told anything at all of use. Always, the emphasis was on our own capabilities and knowledge base. Always, as I looked back, I could see that there had been an almost willful intent to obscure, to misdirect, disguised as concern that we not be frightened or overwhelmed.
The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible? Always, we were directed to the map, to memorizing the details on the map. Our instructor, who remained nameless to us, drilled us for six long months on the position of the lighthouse relative to the base camp, the number of miles from one ruined patch of houses to another. The number of miles of coastline we would be expected to explore. Almost always in the context of the lighthouse, not the base camp. We became so comfortable with that map, with the dimensions of it, and the thought of what it contained that it stopped us from asking why or even what.
Why this stretch of coast? What might lie inside the lighthouse? Why was the camp set back into the forest, far from the lighthouse but fairly close to the tower (which, of course, did not exist on the map)—and had the base camp always been there? What lay beyond the map? Now that I knew the extent of the hypnotic suggestion that had been used on us, I realized that the focus on the map might have itself been an embedded cue. That if we did not ask questions, it was because we were programmed not to ask questions. That the lighthouse, representative or actual, might have been a subconscious trigger for a hypnotic suggestion—and that it might also have been the epicenter of whatever had spread out to become Area X.
My briefing on the ecology of that place had had a similar blinkered focus. I had spent most of my time becoming familiar with the natural transitional ecosystems, with the flora and fauna and the cross-pollination I could expect to find. But I’d also had an intense refresher on fungi and lichen that, in light of the words on the wall, now stood out in my mind as being the true purpose of all of that study. If the map had been meant solely to distract, then the ecology research had been meant, after all, to truly prepare me. Unless I was being paranoid. But if I wasn’t, it meant they knew about the tower, perhaps had always known about the tower.
From there, my suspicions grew. They had put us through grueling survival and weapons training, so grueling that most evenings we went right to sleep in our separate quarters. Even on those few occasions when we trained together, we were training apart. They took away our names in the second month, stripped them from us. The only names applied to things in Area X, and only in terms of their most general label. This, too, a kind of distraction from asking certain questions that could only be reached through knowing specific details. But the right specific details, not, for example, that there were six species of poisonous snakes in Area X. A reach, yes, but I was not in the mood to set aside even the most unlikely scenarios.
By the time we were ready to cross the border, we knew everything … and we knew nothing.