Since the last time Red visited the land, those young stalks have grown swiftly and exponentially. They form a ring approximately a hundred yards in diameter, and though the team has yet to excavate and study what lies below, the radial height of each stalk appears to be six hundred feet or so. Their conical caps are porous and ridged, and though it’s difficult to see from the ground, drone footage indeed reveals something resembling a face in each, like some version of the Easter Island monoliths.

The scientists speak of glucose, yeast nitrogen base, incubation, optimal growth, rhizopus spores, conidia commencement, germination, hyphae elongation rates, and possible growth curves for the filamentous fungi.

But there is only one person here who has an answer that reaches beyond the data. And he is also the only one present who doesn’t wear a hazmat suit. Isaac Peaches.

He positions himself at the center of the formation, with Director Ricketts standing attentively beside him. He breathes in the chill loamy air, while she breathes through a hissing filter. “Ready?” she says. He nods, and she unclips a walkie-talkie from her belt and says, “Clear the circle.”

The command is repeated dozens of times all around them as everyone marches away and escapes their range of view and he and Director Ricketts are left with only the Christmas trees and the swirling porridge of fog.

“Better?” she says. And he says, “Much.”

He unlaces his shoes, peels off his socks, and tidily places them aside. Then he digs his pale pink feet into the black dirt of the forest floor and closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

There is a sound that follows, like the sudden turning of many earthworms. His feet tickle as the soles open—and filaments tongue out of his flesh and burrow downward. With his eyes closed, other senses take over. A conversation with rock and dirt and plant, with ant and fungus. The understory of the forest. The information flows from root to root like nerve impulses travel from neuron to neuron in the brain. His intelligence becomes collective. Five minutes pass or maybe fifty. A moth lands in his hair. Spiders scuttle up his ankles and into his pants. When he opens his eyes again, they are threaded with red and green capillaries. He can see this reflected in the plastic of Director Ricketts’s face shield. She is watching him. Her carefully penciled eyebrows rise and her head inclines as she awaits his response. “Yes?”

“It’s a door,” he finally says. “A gray door.”

She was never Annabelle to him, only Director Ricketts. She has kissed him only once. It happened the day Dr. Gunn locked him in the cell.