* * *
I spent the rest of the afternoon looking at samples under the microscope, on the makeshift table outside of my tent. The surveyor busied herself with developing the photographs in the tent that doubled as a darkroom, a frustrating process for anyone used to digital uploads. Then, while the photos were resting, she went back through the remnants of maps and documents the prior expedition had left at the base camp.
My samples told a series of cryptic jokes with punch lines I didn’t understand. The cells of the biomass that made up the words on the wall had an unusual structure, but they still fell within an acceptable range. Or, those cells were doing a magnificent job of mimicking certain species of saprotrophic organisms. I made a mental note to take a sample of the wall from behind the words. I had no idea how deeply the filaments had taken root, or if there were nodes beneath and those filaments were only sentinels.
The tissue sample from the hand-shaped creature resisted any interpretation, and that was strange but told me nothing. By which I mean I found no cells in the sample, just a solid amber surface with air bubbles in it. At the time, I interpreted this as a contaminated sample or evidence that this organism decomposed quickly. Another thought came to me too late to test: that, having absorbed the organism’s spores, I was causing a reaction in the sample. I didn’t have the medical facilities to run the kinds of diagnostics that might have revealed any further changes to my body or mind since the encounter.
Then there was the sample from the anthropologist’s vial. I had left it for last for the obvious reasons. I had the surveyor take a section, put it on the slide, and write down what she saw through the microscope.
“Why?” she asked. “Why did you need me to do this?”
I hesitated. “Hypothetically … there could be contamination.”
Such a hard face, jaw tight. “Hypothetically, why would you be any more or less contaminated than me?”
I shrugged. “No particular reason. I was the first one to find the words on the wall, though.”
She looked at me as if I had spouted nonsense, laughed harshly. “We’re in so much deeper than that. Do you really think those masks we wore are going to keep us safe? From whatever’s going on here?” She was wrong—I thought she was wrong—but I didn’t correct her. People trivialize or simplify data for so many reasons.
There was nothing else to be said. She went back to her work as I squinted through the microscope at the sample from whatever had killed the anthropologist. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at because it was so unexpected. It was brain tissue—and not just any brain tissue. The cells were remarkably human, with some irregularities. My thought at the time was that the sample had been corrupted, but if so not by my presence: The surveyor’s notes perfectly described what I saw, and when she looked at the sample again later she confirmed its unchanged nature.
I kept squinting through the microscope lens, and raising my head, and squinting again, as if I couldn’t see the sample correctly. Then I settled down and stared at it until it became just a series of squiggles and circles. Was it really human? Was it pretending to be human? As I said, there were irregularities. And how had the anthropologist taken the sample? Just walked up to the thing with an ice-cream scoop and asked, “Can I take a biopsy of your brain?” No, the sample had to come from the margins, from the exterior. Which meant it couldn’t be brain tissue, which meant it was definitely not human. I felt unmoored, drifting, once again.
About then, the surveyor strode over and threw the developed photographs down on my table. “Useless,” she said.
Every photograph of the words on the wall was a riot of luminous, out-of-focus color. Every photograph of anything other than the words had come out as pure darkness. The few in-between photos were also out of focus. I knew this was probably because of the slow, steady breathing of the walls, which might also have been giving off some kind of heat or other agent of distortion. A thought that made me realize I had not taken a sample of the walls. I had recognized the words were organisms. I had known the walls were, too, but my brain had still registered walls as inert, part of a structure. Why sample them?
“I know,” the surveyor said, misunderstanding my cursing. “Any luck with the samples?”
“No. No luck at all,” I said, still staring at the photographs. “Anything in the maps and papers?”
The surveyor snorted. “Not a damn thing. Nothing. Except they all seem fixated on the lighthouse—watching the lighthouse, going to the lighthouse, living in the goddamn lighthouse.”
“So we have nothing.”
The surveyor ignored that, said, “What do we do now?” It was clear she hated asking the question.
“Eat dinner,” I said. “Take a little stroll along the perimeter to make sure the psychologist isn’t hiding in the bushes. Think about what we’re doing tomorrow.”
“I’ll tell you one thing we’re not doing tomorrow. We’re not going back into the tunnel.”
“Tower.”
She glared at me.
There was no point in arguing with her.
* * *
At dusk, the familiar moaning came to us from across the salt-marsh flats as we ate our dinner around the campfire. I hardly noticed it, intent on my meal. The food tasted so good, and I did not know why. I gobbled it up, had seconds, while the surveyor, baffled, just stared at me. We had little or nothing to say to each other. Talking would have meant planning, and nothing I wanted to plan would please her.
The wind picked up, and it began to rain. I saw each drop fall as a perfect, faceted liquid diamond, refracting light even in the gloom, and I could smell the sea and picture the roiling waves. The wind was like something alive; it entered every pore of me and it, too, had a smell, carrying with it the earthiness of the marsh reeds. I had tried to ignore the change in the confined space of the tower, but my senses still seemed too acute, too sharp. I was adapting to it, but at times like this, I remembered that just a day ago I had been someone else.
We took turns standing watch. Loss of sleep seemed less foolhardy than letting the psychologist sneak up on us unannounced; she knew the location of every perimeter trip wire and we had no time to disarm and reset them. I let the surveyor take the first watch as a gesture of good faith.
In the middle of the night, the surveyor came in to wake me up for the second shift, but I was already awake because of the thunder. Grumpily, she headed off to bed. I doubt she trusted me; I just think she couldn’t keep her eyes open a moment longer after the stresses of the day.
The rain renewed its intensity. I didn’t worry that we’d be blown away—these tents were army regulation and could withstand anything short of a hurricane—but if I was going to be awake anyway, I wanted to experience the storm. So I walked outside, into the welter of the stinging water, the gusting pockets of wind. I already could hear the surveyor snoring in her tent; she probably had slept through much worse. The dull emergency lights glowed from the edges of the camp, making the tents into triangles of shadow. Even the darkness seemed more alive to me, surrounding me like something physical. I can’t even say it was a sinister presence.
I felt in that moment as if it were all a dream—the training, my former life, the world I had left behind. None of that mattered anymore. Only this place mattered, only this moment, and not because the psychologist had hypnotized me. In the grip of that powerful emotion, I stared out toward the coast, through the jagged narrow spaces between the trees. There, a greater darkness gathered, the confluence of the night, the clouds, and the sea. Somewhere beyond, another border.
Then, through that darkness, I saw it: a flicker of orange light. Just a touch of illumination, too far up in the sky. This puzzled me, until I realized it must originate with the lighthouse. As I watched, the flicker moved to the left and up slightly before being snuffed out, then reappeared a few minutes later much higher, then was snuffed out for good. I waited for the light to return, but it never did. For some reason, the longer the light stayed out, the more restless I became, as if in this strange place a light—any sort of light—was a sign of civilization.