And then the snout lifted, a flash of white crystalline teeth, a dangling black tongue. Since when do statues have tongues? And the legs moving past me, one two three four, all different lengths, in the shape of an X, so that it should have moved clumsily or at least unevenly, but it picked its way through the rubble and was gone.
I lay there, unmoving, listened for it to leave. It was a long time before the sound of its footsteps finally moved off. Perhaps as much as an hour. And other sounds… finishing off survivors. The choked-off gurgle, a hastily-ended scream. A bluish shimmer, as of a sudden reflection, like someone closing a car door. And then darkness again.
I awoke this morning with my heart pounding, clutching my chest. I slept in my jacket (the jacket of a dead man!). Maybe it opened something inside me, let something out. That memory, I had forgotten about that.
V. fussed over me when I came back in the middle of the night, and I let him. I was so tired. I had carried everything I could, painfully, step by step, often retreating into buildings, stopping to touch my bloodless head.
What was it? he said.
I don’t know, I told him.
I couldn’t remember. But now I do.
It’s not just that, as we said in those first days, They’re something that we hadn’t discovered before. The ocean is full of strange things, people said stubbornly. Or maybe They beamed down from a superior civilization.
But close to, I felt the true explanation was neither of those things. Nothing so prosaic as something that evolved, that lived in a place and made a place its home. I felt intensely, if inaccurately, seeing that thing up close, that They are not from here, in any sense, any, that a human mind would understand as ‘here.’ Nowhere is ‘here’ for Them. Or everywhere is here. They stepped through from somewhere else, I am sure of it.
And maybe that’s why my mind knocked me out again, trying to protect me before I thought the inevitable next thing, because there it was: We cannot live with these things. We cannot fight Them. We are not on the same level as these things. Maybe They are not all-knowing, or all-powerful, but They are similar enough to gods that we are doomed. We, as not just humans but mortals, are doomed. There will be no resistance except in our minds. And maybe They can see that too, and will root it out and end it.
We will never know Them because we cannot know Them.
I hear thin screams sometimes, in different neighbourhoods. And I rush to empty buildings, warehouses, schools, expecting to find—what? A room full of captive children? But I know the cries of children and how they differ from adults, and I know I’m hearing them. What can I do, where are they? I am torn between giving up looking for them and thus losing what few shreds of sanity I have left, and enlisting the entire city in the search.
It has occurred to me (O cynical Eva!) that They have learned to mimic the cries of children, the way the ravens near my work used to imitate the coughs of smokers outside, and are… what? Luring me into a trap?
No, V. would say, if he were here. They’re like wasps.
But some wasps are intelligent, you know. I read it somewhere. I don’t know. If we’re talking about intent, that statue with the little boy, it had intent. Or even Intent, capital I. And it is a war. And terrible things happen to children in war.
Give up? Press on?
CAN’T SLEEP, CAN’T sleep, can’t work, can’t sleep.
A strange thing. The camera film I found in the museum, a single dropped roll in the corner by the door, buried in a little snowdrift of dirt and broken glass, was confirmed by my scanner to be intact and undeveloped. And precious, of course—by the time the Invasion occurred, practically nobody was using film cameras. But someone at this museum had one. I’m sure it’s nothing more than shots of the statues and the grounds outside. But I checked it again this morning and the film is corrupted, blurred, as if some kind of… fungus or spore has grown on it. Just in the couple of days. I’m stunned, horrified. Maybe once I get it back to the university lab I will be able to recover it.
But I wonder now: Are there lingering effects in these siege cities? Is there something still here, like an echo, screwing things up? Maybe it’s the film. Maybe it’s the scanner. Maybe it’s both. I should see if the others are experiencing anything like that.
Early this morning I sleepwalked and sort of got fixated on the constellations over us, before the sun came up, and nearly fell off my concrete block, which I was barely aware I had climbed. Winnie rescued me. I said, “What are you doing here?” and she said “I can’t remember.” We stared at each other for a minute. So awkward.
Even now I think: That can’t be what Eva meant, that ‘pull,’ can it? God. What have we gotten ourselves into? That’s never happened at any of my other research sites.
Under Darian’s quiet, relentless pressure, every day now I debate changing my research route, rewriting my project plan. Something harder. More scientific. What kind of thesis am I going to have at the end of this? A fluffy romance novel, like Darian says. Maybe I should surrender the diary to someone else so they can work with it when I get back. I mean, it’s only a once in a lifetime chance, with limited funding, in an area that surprisingly few places are willing to sponsor, that’s all. I might never be able to come back here and check all the details. That’s all. If people are figuring out what happened to the world, of course they need numbers, measurements, graphs, charts, statistical analyses, and those horrible black-and-white photos of broken metal that Darian takes with his laser ruler that give me a headache to look at.
I’ll never be able to come back here and maybe that’s for the best. Let that money go to the others, I don’t know.
I’m concerned at the mention of ‘joining.’ Will Eva or V. knuckle under? I suppose I shouldn’t care. Whoever they are, they died a long time ago.
And yet, I do care, I can’t help it. It’s torture to not know. What would I have done? I ask myself, but it’s an unanswerable question; the world we live in is not the world they, or They, lived in.
I find myself sick with the suspicion that they both died before the end of the Setback. And they never even knew it was so close. That all they had to survive was about another year.
The Army did abandon them, of course; I secretly dug in Darian’s data and found a ton of drone flight data over the sunflower fields outside the walls, and buried military detritus. Some of it is so close that if we leave out one side of the city we could walk for five minutes and climb directly into a tank. But I’m not doing that on my own. Anyway, it would require me to admit I’ve been snooping. Absolutely not.
I looked up the whole poem that Eva referenced this morning and now I find myself on a rooftop, sitting alone, while the others poke and scrape below on their various pursuits. These people, we know in our heads that they were real, and whole, and had hopes and dreams and goals and visions. But how cruel of us, how thoughtless, to not see them as real people, and not just primary sources, till we find something like this. I wish I could find the flat with the blood on the wall, but it would take forever to search.
Winnie and I fight about this sometimes. Her methods are mostly noninvasive, and leave everything in the ground after the scan, but sometimes she digs up bones and puts them in jars, and we look at each other defiantly. Those bones are going for analysis. They won’t come back here for burial. We rob the dead, and we say, “Well, that’s research for you,” but… the husband’s death, that lacy shawl of blood on the wall. Nothing was left for Eva to bury.