‘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 activity 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.
‘Are you certain you want this job?’ I said.
‘Yes. It terrifies me, but — why does it worry you?’
‘I’ll be there with you.’
She was in my arms, suddenly. I had sensed that the appointment, if she accepted it, would cause us to split up. They wanted an instant decision, which meant by tomorrow morning at the latest. If I did not commit to her, she would travel to Seevl, I would return to Goorn Town, and from there, eventually, to Ia. We should probably not see each other again. This felt like a parting forced on us by circumstance, not choice. We were still too new to each other to feel a sense of emotional momentum that would carry us through a separation. I did not want to lose her.