Many of the buildings had fallen right into themselves and others were nothing but weedy frameworks. The walls of houses were honeycombed with bryozoans, fingers of seaweed growing out of missing windows and doors. There were even cars parked at the curbs, rusted out hulks, skeletal and thick with spiny urchins and moss. Schools of squid abandoned the shell of a church, brittle stars were scattered over rooftops. Many of the houses were gone, nothing but foundations left, basements filled with mud and sea grasses and debris. There were no trees or bushes of the usual sort, but plenty of banks of kelp and seaweed, brilliantly green and red and orange, moving with channels of current like wind through a wheat field.

“Find the anomaly,” Orr told them. “It’s a mirage, just ignore it.”

Bell almost laughed at that. Ignore it? How the hell were they supposed to do that? As they moved over the top of it, the ruined town seemed to go on and on. He saw children’s sandboxes filled with scuttling crabs. Porch swings that were swollen with some kind of weird red fungus like puffballs about to spore. Silvery eel-like fish swam through gaping holes in the walls of houses. Sea slugs inched over the furry tops of picnic tables.

“That’s…Jesus, that’s Haymarket,” Murphy said as they passed the ulcerated steeple of a church that looked like a broken, leprous finger. “That’s my hometown…that’s Haymarket, Wisconsin.”

Of course it is, Bell thought then. The aliens pulled it from his mind because they knew the town of his youth disturbed him. So they recreated it here in the weeds…they brought it to life the way Murphy had always envisioned it: a rotting, stagnant corpse.

“Proceed,” Orr said. “I don’t want you looking at that place.”

“He’s right,” Javonivic said. “The longer you look at it, the more real it’s going to become.”

Bell was going to object, and on what grounds he was not exactly sure, but that’s when he began to realize that they were right. The longer you looked, the more real it did become. But not in the way they thought. Because at first the town was rough-looking, decayed, abandoned…now it was overgrown with weeds and marine animals so that the houses and buildings were beginning to look almost like Chia pets. The longer they looked, the more it began to resemble some waterlogged corpse on a seabed.

And that’s when he saw something else.

There were people down there.