“John Rodriguez, if you come with me, I won’t be able to spare you. You’ll have to see everything. Your eyes will have to be open.”

She could not deny him his name, here, at the end of it all. She could not deny him the right to die if it came to that. There was nothing left to say.

Trailing memory, trailing Control, Ghost Bird descended toward the light.

The Crawler was huge, seemed to rise and keep rising, to spread to the sides until it filled Ghost Bird’s vision. There was none of the remembered distortion, no throwing back at her of her own fears or desires. It simply lay revealed before her, so immense, so shockingly concrete.

The surface of its roughly bell-shaped body was translucent but with a strange texture, like ice when it has frozen from flowing water into fingerlike polyps. Underneath a second surface slowly revolved, and across this centrifuge she could see patterns floating along, as if it had an interior skin, and the material on top of that might be some kind of soft armor.

There was a mesmerizing quality to that movement, distant cousin to the director’s hypnotism, and she didn’t dare let her gaze linger for long.

The Crawler had no discernible features, no discernible face. It moved so slowly as it perfected the letters on the wall that there was a strange impression of the delicate, the mysteries of its locomotion hidden beneath the fringe of flesh that extended to the ground. The left arm, the only arm, located halfway up its body, moved with unfailing precision, constant blurred motion, to create the message on the wall, more like a wielder than a writer—with a crash of sparks she knew was stray tissue igniting. Its arm was the agent of the message, and from that instrument flowed the letters. Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead. If ever it had been human, then that thick-scrawling arm, obscured by loam or moss, was all that was left of its humanity.

Three rings orbited the Crawler, circling clockwise, and at times waves and surges of energy discharged between them, rippled across the Crawler’s body. The first ring spun in drunken dreamlike revolutions just below the arm: an irregular row of half-moons. They resembled delicate jellyfish, with feathery white tendrils descending that continually writhed in a wandering search for something never found. The second ring, spinning faster right above the writing arm, resembled a broad belt of tiny black stones grouped close together, but these stones, as they bumped into one another, gave with a sponginess that made her think of soft tadpoles and of the creatures that had rained from the sky on the way to the island. What function these entities performed, whether they were part of the Crawler’s anatomy or a symbiotic species, she could not fathom. All she knew was that both rings were in their way reassuringly corporeal.