“Jim, this is evidence of contact. Finding this particular cell phone in Area X.” That it indicates recognition and understanding of some kind.

“No—random. Random. Random.”

“It wants to talk to you, Jim. Area X wants to talk to you. It wants to ask you a question, doesn’t it?” You don’t know if this is true, but you’re sure it’ll scare the shit out of Lowry.

You have the sense of a time delay in Lowry, a gap or distance between the two of you that is very, very wide. Something ancient shines out of his eyes, peers out at you.

“I won’t go back,” he says.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Yes, it’s my phone. It’s my fucking phone.”

Are you seeing Lowry as he was right after coming back from the first expedition? How long could a person hold to a pattern, a process, despite being fundamentally damaged? Whitby telling you, “I think this is an asylum. But so is the rest of the world.”

“Don’t you get tired after a while?” you ask him. “Of always moving forward but never reaching the end? Of never being able to tell the truth to anyone?”

“You know, Gloria,” he says, “you’ll never really understand what it was like that first time, going out through that door in the border, coming back. Not if you cross the border a thousand times. We were offered up and we were lost. We were passing through a door of ghosts, into a place of spirits. And asked to deal with that. For the rest of our lives.”

“And what if Area X comes looking for you?”

There’s still that remoteness to Lowry’s gaze, as if he’s not really there, standing in front of you, but he’s done, pushed to his limit, stalks off without even a glance back.

You will never see him again, ever, and that temporary relief puts juice in your step as the sun returns, as the otter returns, and you sit by the shore and watch the animal cavort and frolic for a few minutes that you hope will never end.

0024: THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER

… bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness … Heard during the night: screech owl, nighthawk, a few foxes. A blessing. A relief.

At the lighthouse, the beacon was dark. The beacon was dark, and something was trying to spill out of him, or course through him on its way to somewhere else. 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, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit.

He was still in shock from the bar, kept believing that if he went back it would prove to be some kind of waking vision or even a terrible joke. The smashing of Old Jim’s bloody fingers against the piano keys. Sadi’s look of being undone, betrayed by her own words. Brad, standing there, gaze locked on the wall as if someone had frozen him in place. Thank God Trudi had already left. What would he tell Gloria when he saw her again? What would he tell Charlie?