* * *
According to the records we had been shown, the first expedition reported nothing unusual in Area X, just pristine, empty wilderness. After the second and third expeditions did not return, and their fate became known, the expeditions were shut down for a time. When they began again, it was using carefully chosen volunteers who might at least know a measure of the full risk. Since then, some expeditions had been more successful than others.
The eleventh expedition in particular had been difficult—and personally difficult for me with regard to a fact about which I have not been entirely honest thus far.
My husband was on the eleventh expedition as a medic. He had never wanted to be a doctor, had always wanted to be in first response or working in trauma. “A triage nurse in the field,” as he put it. He had been recruited for Area X by a friend, who remembered him from when they had both worked for the navy, before he switched over to ambulance service. At first he hadn’t said yes, had been unsure, but over time they convinced him. It caused a lot of strife between us, although we already had many difficulties.
I know this information might not be hard for anyone to find out, but I have hoped that in reading this account, you might find me a credible, objective witness. Not someone who volunteered for Area X because of some other event unconnected to the purpose of the expeditions. And, in a sense, this is still true, and my husband’s status as a member of an expedition is in many ways irrelevant to why I signed up.
But how could I not be affected by Area X, if only through him? One night, about a year after he had headed for the border, as I lay alone in bed, I heard someone in the kitchen. Armed with a baseball bat, I left the bedroom and turned on all the lights in the house. I found my husband next to the refrigerator, still dressed in his expedition clothes, drinking milk until it flowed down his chin and neck. Eating leftovers furiously.
I was speechless. I could only stare at him as if he were a mirage and if I moved or said anything he would dissipate into nothing, or less than nothing.
We sat in the living room, him on the sofa and me in a chair opposite. I needed some distance from this sudden apparition. He did not remember how he had left Area X, did not remember the journey home at all. He had only the vaguest recollection of the expedition itself. There was an odd calm about him, punctured only by moments of remote panic when, in asking him what had happened, he recognized that his amnesia was unnatural. Gone from him, too, seemed to be any memory of how our marriage had begun to disintegrate well before our arguments over his leaving for Area X. He contained within him now the very distance he had in so many subtle and not so subtle ways accused me of in the past.
After a time, I couldn’t take it any longer. I took off his clothes, made him shower, then led him into the bedroom and made love to him with me on top. I was trying to reclaim remnants of the man I remembered, the one who, so unlike me, was outgoing and impetuous and always wanted to be of use. The man who had been a passionate recreational sailor, and for two weeks out of the year went with friends to the coast to go boating. I could find none of that in him now.
The whole time he was inside me he looked up at my face with an expression that told me he did remember me but only through a kind of fog. It helped for a while, though. It made him more real, allowed me to pretend.
But only for a while. I only had him in my life again for about twenty-four hours. They came for him the next evening, and once I went through the long, drawn-out process of receiving security clearance, I visited him in the observation facility right up until the end. That antiseptic place where they tested him and tried without success to break through both his calm and his amnesia. He would greet me like an old friend—an anchor of sorts, to make sense of his existence—but not like a lover. I confess I went because I had hopes that there remained some spark of the man I’d once known. But I never really found it. Even the day I was told he had been diagnosed with inoperable, systemic cancer, my husband stared at me with a slightly puzzled expression on his face.
He died six months later. During all that time, I could never get beyond the mask, could never find the man I had known inside of him. Not through my personal interactions with him, not through eventually watching the interviews with him and the other members of the expedition, all of whom died of cancer as well.
Whatever had happened in Area X, he had not come back. Not really.
* * *
Ever farther down into the darkness we went, and I had to ask myself if any of this had been experienced by my husband. I did not know how my infection changed things. Was I on the same journey, or had he found something completely different? If similar, how had his reactions been different, and how had that changed what happened next?
The path of slime grew thicker and we could now tell that the red flecks were living organisms discharged by whatever lay below, for they wriggled in the viscous layer. The color of the substance had intensified so that it resembled a sparkling golden carpet set out for us to tread upon on our way to some strange yet magnificent banquet.
“Should we go back?” the surveyor would say, or I would say.
And the other would say, “Just around the next corner. Just a little farther, and then we will go back.” It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe. The feel of our boots as we advanced step by careful step through that viscous discharge, the way in which the stickiness seemed to mire us even as we managed to keep moving, would eventually end in inertia, we knew. If we pushed it too far.
But then the surveyor rounded a corner ahead of me and recoiled into me, shoved me back up the steps, and I let her.
“There’s something down there,” she whispered in my ear. “Something like a body or a person.”
I didn’t point out that a body could be a person. “Is it writing words on the wall?”
“No—slumped down by the side of the wall. I only caught a glimpse.” Her breathing came quick and shallow against her mask.
“A man or a woman?” I asked.
“I thought it was a person,” she said, ignoring my question. “I thought it was a person. I thought it was.” Bodies were one thing; no amount of training could prepare you for encountering a monster.
But we could not climb back out of the tower without first investigating this new mystery. We could not. I grabbed her by the shoulders, made her look at me. “You said it’s like a person sitting down against the side of the wall. That’s not whatever we’ve been tracking. This has to do with the other boot print. You know that. We can risk taking a look at whatever this is, and then we will go back up. This is as far as we go, no matter what we find, I promise.”
The surveyor nodded. The idea of this being the extent of it, of not going farther down, was enough to steady her. Just get through this last thing, and you’ll see the sunlight soon.
We started back down. The steps seemed particularly slippery now, even though it might have been our jitters, and we walked slowly, using the blank slate of the right wall to keep our balance. The tower was silent, holding its breath, its heartbeat suddenly slow and far more distant than before, or perhaps I could only hear the blood rushing through my head.
Turning the corner, I saw the figure and shone my helmet light on it. If I’d hesitated a second longer, I never would have had the nerve. It was the body of the anthropologist, slumped against the left-hand wall, her hands in her lap, her head down as if in prayer, something green spilling out from her mouth. Her clothing seemed oddly fuzzy, indistinct. A faint golden glow arose from her body, almost imperceptible; I imagined the surveyor could not see it at all. In no scenario could I imagine the anthropologist alive. All I could think was, The psychologist lied to us, and suddenly the pressure of her presence far above, guarding the entrance, was pressing down on me in an intolerable way.
I put out a palm to the surveyor, indicating that she should stay where she was, behind me, and I stepped forward, light pointed down into the darkness. I walked past the body far enough to confirm the stairs below were empty, then hurried back up.
“Keep watch while I take a look at the body,” I said. I didn’t tell her I had sensed a faint, echoing suggestion of something much farther below, moving slowly.
“It is a body?” the surveyor said. Perhaps she had expected something far stranger. Perhaps she thought the figure was just sleeping.
“It’s the anthropologist,” I said, and saw that information register in the tensing of her shoulders. Without another word, she brushed past me to take up a position just beyond the body, assault rifle aimed into the darkness.
Gently, I knelt beside the anthropologist. There wasn’t much left of her face, and odd burn marks were all over the remaining skin. Spilling out from her broken jaw, which looked as though someone had wrenched it open in a single act of brutality, was a torrent of green ash that sat on her chest in a mound. Her hands, palms up in her lap, had no skin left on them, only a kind of gauzy filament and more burn marks. Her legs seemed fused together and half-melted, one boot missing and one flung against the wall. Strewn around the anthropologist were some of the same sample tubes I had brought with me. Her black box, crushed, lay several feet from her body.
“What happened to her?” the surveyor whispered. She kept taking quick, nervous glances back at me as she stood guard, almost as if whatever had happened wasn’t over. As if she expected the anthropologist to come back to horrifying life.
I didn’t answer her. All I could have said was I don’t know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.
I shone my light on the wall above the anthropologist. For several feet, the script on the wall became erratic, leaping up and dipping down, before regaining its equilibrium.
… 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 …
“I think she interrupted the creator of the script on the wall,” I said.
“And it did that to her?” She was pleading with me to find some other explanation.
I didn’t have one, so I didn’t reply, just went back to observing as she stood there, watching me.
A biologist is not a detective, but I began to think like a detective. I surveyed the ground to all sides, identifying first my own boot prints on the steps and then the surveyor’s. We had obscured the original tracks, but you could still see traces. First of all, the thing—and no matter what the surveyor might hope, I could not think of it as human—had clearly turned in a frenzy. Instead of the smooth sliding tracks, the slime residue formed a kind of clockwise swirl, the marks of the “feet,” as I thought of them, elongated and narrowed by the sudden change. But on top of this swirl, I could also see boot prints. I retrieved the one boot, being careful to walk around the edges of the evidence of the encounter. The boot prints in the middle of the swirl were indeed from the anthropologist—and I could follow partial imprints back up the right-hand side of the wall, as if she had been hugging it.
An image began to form in my mind, of the anthropologist creeping down in the dark to observe the creator of the script. The glittering glass tubes strewn around her body made me think that she had hoped to take a sample. But how insane or oblivious! Such a risk, and the anthropologist had never struck me as impulsive or brave. I stood there for a moment, and then backtracked even farther up the stairs as I motioned to the surveyor, much to her distress, to hold her position. Perhaps if there had been something to shoot she would have been calmer, but we were left with only what lingered in our imaginations.