She started setting up her equipment. This consisted of a digitizing panoramic viewer on a steadihold bracket, a compiler with an aural sensor on a short mast, and her laptop computer. I helped her into the web of counterbalanced steadihold straps, with the battery pack and the harness for the digitizer. I watched as she booted up the equipment, running the self-test, satisfying herself that she was ready to go.
‘I want to try to finish everything in one circuit,’ she said. ‘Unless you intend to be analysed with everything else you should stay out of range behind me.’
She took a few experimental lines with the digitizer, but the battery pack was in the way of her arm. She took this off and handed it to me.
She began a first circuit of the base of the tower, sidestepping around at an even distance from the masonry of the wall. I stayed with her, carrying the batteries. The ground was broken, with many stone pieces half buried, and in front of the tower there was a steep downward gradient. After she had stumbled a couple of times I held on to the harness at the back, guiding her.
Finally, she said she was ready. I stood close behind her, grasping the battery pack. We were close against the base of the tower and the feeling of unexplained terror was sharper in me than ever before. Alvasund looked pale, her hair blowing around her face.
She started recording, then moved around with a steady sideways step, holding the digitizer trained on the main wall. I shadowed her, warning her whenever a stone or some other obstruction was underfoot.
We completed the take at the first attempt. As she closed the activator a powerful feeling of relief swept over me, that we could soon leave this place.
I walked to the rest of the equipment to collect it up.
Alvasund said, ‘We can’t go until I’ve interpreted the image.’
‘How long will that take?’
‘Not long.’
She downloaded the material from the digitizer to the equalizer, then to the laptop. Nothing seemed to happen for a long time. She and I were standing beside the equipment, face to face, staring at each other. I could see the stress on her face, the anxiety to leave. I had never known anything like this before, a dread without any kind of focus or reason, a blank fright, an unknown terror.
‘Torm, there is something inside that place. I could detect it through the viewfinder.’ There was a kind of nervy tightness in her voice, newly there, that suddenly scared me.
‘What do you mean, something in there?’
‘Something alive. Inside the tower. It’s huge!’ She closed her eyes, shaking her head. ‘I want to get away from here. I’m terrified!’
She signalled helplessly towards the electronic equipment, where the online lights were still glittering faintly under the unremitting sunlight.
‘What is it? An animal?’
‘I can’t tell. It’s moving about all the time.’ Her voice was shrill. ‘But it can’t be an animal. It’s much too big for that.’
‘Too big? How big?’
‘It fills the whole place.’ She reached out a hand towards me, but for some reason I couldn’t identify I pulled back from her, not wanting her to touch me. She must have felt something of the same, because in the same instant she snatched her hand back. ‘It’s like an immense coil. Round and round. Against the walls, or inside them somehow.’
Not far from where we were standing was one of the gaps in the masonry at ground level. Through this it was possible to see some of the way inside. I could see a mass of broken stone, brickwork and rotting pieces of timber. Nothing alive was in there, or nothing visibly alive. No coil of anything.
Just then the interpreter completed its run, emitting a brief musical note, and we both turned with a feeling of relief. Alvasund grabbed the laptop.
‘Torm, look at this.’ She turned the screen around for me to see. ‘You can see it now. It’s there!’
The sunlight was too bright and I could see hardly anything at all on the monitor. Alvasund kept moving it around, first to put the thing where I could see it, then to move it back so she could. I stood beside her and raised part of my coat to throw a shadow on the display.
What was on the screen looked to me like an ultrasound scan: a monochrome image, slightly blurred, with no guide as to left or right, up or down.
‘That’s a trace of the wall,’ Alvasund said, indicating a large grey patch. ‘That jagged line is the broken bit there.’ I glanced up and could see how the display matched it. It was a kind of three dimensional X-ray of the interior of the tower ruin.
I looked more closely. There was a ghostly image behind the wall, grey and indistinct, but it was clearly moving. It rippled, a peristaltic thrusting from one side to another, a sort of immense pliable tube, compressing and expanding. There were several such movements, some higher up and only just visible at the top of the screen. The largest area of this horrific movement was close to the ground.
‘It’s a snake, a serpent!’ Alvasund cried. ‘Coiled around. In there!’
‘But there’s nothing. We can see that. It’s full of old rubble.’
‘No… it’s definitely in there! An immense snake!’
‘Something wrong with the software, then?’
‘This is what the program does – it picks up traces of viability. It’s detecting something viable in there. Look – the thing’s moving!’
She took a step back, suddenly, knocking the laptop against me. The trace had moved, upwards and across. I imagined a vast reptilian head, eyes and tongue and long fangs, rearing up to strike. I stepped back too, but there was still nothing visible through the small gap in the wall. Nothing there we could confirm with our eyes. Nothing visible, nothing real. My terror of it remained.
I was trying to think of an explanation: perhaps there was a cavity wall with something trapped inside. I was scared that if there was something in there that it would break out and come at us.
I took the laptop from Alvasund, turned away to get the best look I could get. I glanced back at her, but discovered that she was no longer standing beside me. Somehow she had moved away. I looked around, but I was alone.
‘Alvasund?’
‘Torm!’
Her voice sounded faint, all but carried away on the wind. Then I saw her. She was inside the tower!
I could see her dimly through the gap at ground level. She was facing me, calling my name. But no time had passed. Had I blacked out for a few seconds?
I put the laptop roughly on the ground and scrambled across towards her, fighting back the intense feeling of fear. In a few seconds I was there by the gap. I went down on my haunches to squeeze through so I could reach the interior.
The way was blocked. Something hard, transparent, cold, like a pane of thick glass, had been placed over the aperture. Alvasund was there, an arm’s length away from me, but she was trapped behind this invisible barrier, inside the tower. She kept shouting my name. I pushed and banged against the glass, uselessly.
She kept on shouting. She had raised her arms, was shaking her head from side to side, and her mouth was turned down in a horrid inverse rictus of fear and pain.
As I watched helplessly, a swift and horrible transformation came over her.
She grew old. She aged before my eyes.
She lost height, gained weight. Instead of her lithe figure contained in bulky winter clothes I saw Alvasund overweight, sagging, unhealthy, thinly clad in some kind of shapeless nightgown. Her hair became grey, lank, greasy, pulled into an untidy plait that rested over one shoulder. Her face became pallid and swollen, with a rash across one cheek. Her eyes were sunk into their sockets, darksurrounded. Her lips were blue with cyanosis. Saliva smeared her chin, blood ran unabated from a nostril.
She was being held aloft by unseen hands. Her legs were dangling beneath her. She wore black stockings. They had slipped down to reveal blue bulging tangles of varicose veins on her scrawny, pallid calves.
Not understanding, I stumbled back from the gap in the stonework, tripped over one of t
he half-buried rocks, rolled to recover, then dived across to where the laptop lay on the ground. Almost not caring what happened, what the consequences might be, I pulled every cable out of it, then fumbled underneath, found the battery, snatched it out of its housing. The instrument died. No image remained on its screen.
I turned to disconnect the interpreter, but as I moved towards it Alvasund was already there! She was outside the tower again, frantically disconnecting cables from the device. I saw her familiar face, the thick windcheater, her warm trousers.
She turned and she saw me.
* * *
It was impossible to think of driving but we reached the car somehow, hauling the equipment any way we could. We threw the stuff carelessly on the rear seat, then scrambled in at the front, slamming and locking the doors. We held each other, shaking and trembling. Alvasund’s hair fell about her face, hiding her. I could still feel, almost taste, the terrible menace of whatever there was in that ruin.
Alvasund was crying, or so I thought, but when I looked closely at her I realized she was still shaking with fear, her breath coming in shallow gasps, her hands and arms and head trembling constantly. I put my arms around her, pulled her close to me and for a long time we were just there together, bulky and awkward in our outdoor clothes, trying to recover from whatever it was that had happened to us.
Through it all the constancy of the dark tower, the dead tower, looming over us.
At last I felt able to start the car’s engine, backed away slowly down the track until we were at a safe distance. The tower was out of sight beyond a spur of land.
‘What happened to you?’ Alvasund said. ‘You just vanished suddenly!’ Her voice still had the shrill edge I had heard earlier. ‘We were there together, and the next thing I knew was that you had somehow moved into the tower itself. I was left outside! I couldn’t reach you, or make you hear me!’
‘But it was you inside the tower,’ I said.
‘Don’t say that! You were in there. I thought you had died.’
The mountain wind was blustering against the side of the car. Eventually I was able to tell her what I had seen. Eventually she told me what she had seen.
We had had identical but opposite experiences. Each of us had seemed to appear before the other, transported somehow into the broken tower interior.
Alvasund said, ‘You suddenly looked old and ill, and – I couldn’t get to you.’
‘How old, how ill?’
‘I saw – I can’t say!’
Remembering her, remembering the image of her inside the tower, I said, ‘You thought I was about to die.’
‘You were already dead. It looked like, I don’t know, some horrible accident. I could see blood all over your head – I was trying to get in to help you, but there was a sheet of something in the way, a piece of thick glass or plastic blocking the gap. I couldn’t get past it. I turned around to get a stone or something. I was going to try to bash my way through. Then suddenly you were outside again.’
‘And suddenly you were outside.’
‘What the hell happened, Torm?’
I could not answer that and neither could she. The one certainty was that that psychic image of Alvasund in the final moments of her life would haunt me for ever.
* * *
We returned to Ørsknes.
Everything about us had changed because of what happened at the tower, although we did not admit it to each other. Suddenly it felt as if we had known each other for years. The urgency of learning about and of trying to attract each other had receded. We were still in the first days of our relationship together, a time when new lovers feel endlessly curious about each other, but our curiosity had died. We knew more than we should. The knowledge was awful. It was a subject which remained unspoken, unexamined. We simply understood it, and always found it too awful to put into words.
So the words were never said and the knowledge we had of each other was never admitted, but it did make us closer, it bound us with its terrible secret. The fearful memory of the tower loomed over us both.
* * *
A short period of inertia followed. We were uncertain whether we should return to Goorn Town, or stay on in Ørsknes until Alvasund received a response of some kind. She had gone ahead and sent in her notes with the recorded results of the test, but there was no reply from either the Authority or Marse. Marse himself appeared not to be in Ørsknes any more. When he made no contact after Alvasund emailed him, we tried to find him in the town. He had said he worked in the Authority office, but we had never seen such a place. We traced it to one of the buildings near the wharves. There were no lights on and the door was closed and locked.
It was tempting to return home, but Alvasund said that if she was appointed she wanted to take up the job straight away. Goorn Town was at the wrong end of the island for ferries to Jethra.
Outside, the spring thaw commenced, the little town sprucing itself up for the summer. We saw more people walking through the streets, and winter shutters and shelters were put away. Alvasund and I concentrated on each other, saying nothing but doing what we could.
Then came news of Alvasund’s appointment.
* * *
It was six days after our experience at the tower, in mid-evening. We were both sleepy and we were planning to go to bed early. When I had taken my shower and I climbed up to the sleeping loft, Alvasund was sitting on the mattress before her laptop, her legs crossed, apparently reading something online. She said nothing, so I lay on the bed beside her.
‘I’ve been offered the job,’ she said at last, and turned the screen around so that I could see it.
She scrolled the display. It was a formal letter from the Intercession Authority, based in the city of Jethra on the Faiand mainland. The writer said they had examined carefully all current applications for the vacant position of perspective viability modeller. Alvasund’s qualifications closely matched their requirements. As they urgently needed to fill the vacancy, they were prepared to offer her a probationary appointment at fifty per cent of the advertised salary, provided she accepted immediately. If her work was satisfactory, the position would be made permanent and her salary would be topped up and backdated to the full amount.
‘Congratulations!’ I said. ‘I assume you still want the job?’
‘Oh yes. But read the rest and tell me what you think.’
The writer insisted that she must read again the original prospectus, and also read the conditions of employment below. There was a reminder that the work could be hazardous, that they would provide all statutory liability insurance, accident and interment insurance, and a guarantee. All these details required her assent.
‘You’re going to go through with this?’ I said.
‘I need the money, and the work is what I’m good at.’
‘But after what happened?’
‘Have you any idea what that was?’
‘No.’
‘The whole rationale of this job is that it’s the first properly funded scientific investigation into what’s inside those towers.’
‘Are you sure you want to know?’
She stared at me for a moment, with a familiar forthrightness.
‘I’ll never get another chance like this again.’
‘Doesn’t it worry you, what happened when we went to the tower?’
‘Yes.’ She looked disturbed by my questions, or irritated, and for a moment she shrugged her shoulder up and against me, half turning away. ‘Maybe it’s different on Seevl,’ she said, but unconvincingly. She scrolled the image on the screen again. ‘I had only read the first two pages before you came upstairs.’
I moved so that I squatted beside her. Together we read through all the material the Authority had sent.
Alvasund indicated a paragraph at the end. Here was a claim about recent developments. It said that it had become possible for researchers to approach the towers in much greater safety than before, enabling them to be protected from the psychic activi
ty that appeared to emanate from within the tower. There was also an effective physical defence.
‘If it’s as safe as all that,’ I said, ‘why do they make all the other warnings about hazard?’
‘They’re just trying to cover themselves. They must know what the risks are, and they have come up with a way of protecting against them.’
‘Yes, but they don’t say how.’
I was thinking about the ‘psychic activity’, in the words of the document, that had ‘appeared to emanate’ from within the tower we had been to. Like a remembered feeling of pain, it was hard to imagine later how bad it had been, but the relief that I was away from it was like a gift of freedom. I could not imagine ever willingly surrendering to it again.
We read on.
The final document was an illustrated history of the towers on Seevl, and what investigations of them had been made in the past. According to what we read, there were more than two hundred towers still standing. All were approximately the same age and all had been damaged in the past, presumably by islanders trying to demolish them. None of the towers was undamaged, and there had never been any attempt to restore them. There were a few sites where a tower had once stood, but had been successfully brought down.
All the remaining towers were dangerous to approach and the ordinary people of Seevl never went near them. Many myths and superstitions had grown up, the towers widely regarded as supernatural in origin. They were often used as symbols of dread or repression in Seevl literature and art. There were countless folkloric accounts of giants, mysterious paw-prints, nighttime visitations, loud screams, lights in the sky and alleged sightings of large or slithering beasts.
Past scientific investigations had invariably failed to produce reliable information, but out of the almost invariably hectic accounts that followed contact a consensus had emerged. Each tower appeared to be occupied by, or at least was a habitat of, some kind of living being or intelligence. No one had ever seen what it was. No one had any idea how such a being might survive, feed or reproduce. The sense of morbid fear, endured by all researchers, suggested a form of defensive or even entrapping psychic emanation, emitted by whatever was inside.
The Islanders Page 29
