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little success and much sacrifice of lives via the expeditions—sent
     in through the sole point of egress. Yet that loss of life was trifling compared to
     the possibility of some break in containment across a border that the scientists were
     still studying and trying to understand. The riddle of why equipment, when recovered,
     had been rendered nonfunctional, some of it decomposing at an incredibly fast rate.
     The teasing, inconsistent way in which some expeditions came back entirely unharmed
     that seemed almost more inexplicable.
    “It started earlier than the border coming down,” the assistant director told him
     after lunch in his new-old office. She was all business now, and Control chose to
     accept her at face value, to continue to put away, for now, his anger at her preemptive
     strike in banishing the anthropologist and the surveyor.
    Grace rolled out the map of Area X on a corner of his desk: the coastline, the lighthouse,
     the base camp, the trails, the lakes and rivers, the island many miles north that
     marked the farthest reach of the … Incursion? Invasion? Infestation? What word worked?
     The worst part of the map was the black dot hand-labeled by the director as “the tunnel”
     but known to most as “the topographical anomaly.” Worst part because not every expedition
     whose members had survived to report back had encountered it, even when they’d mapped
     the same area.
    Grace tossed files on top of the map. It still struck Control, with a kind of nostalgia
     rarely granted to his generation, how anachronistic it was to deal in paper. But the
     concern about sending modern technology across the border had infected the former
     director. She had forbidden certain forms of communication, required that all e-mails
     be printed out and the original, electronic versions regularly archived and purged,
     and had arcane and confusing protocols for using the Internet and other forms of electronic
     communication. Would he put an end to that? He didn’t know yet, had a kind of sympathy
     for the policy, impractical though it might be. He used the Internet solely for research
     and admin. He believed a kind of a fragmentation had crept into people’s minds in
     the modern era.
    “ It started earlier…”
    “How much earlier?”
    “Intel indicates that there may have been odd … activity occurring along that coast
     for at least a century before the border came down.” Before Area X had formed. A “pristine
     wilderness.” He’d never heard the word pristine used so many times before today.
    Idly, he wondered what they called it—whoever or whatever had created that pristine bubble that had killed so
     many people. Maybe they called it a holiday retreat. Maybe they called it a beachhead.
     Maybe “they” were so incomprehensible he’d never understand what they called it, or
     why. He’d asked the Voice if he needed access to the files on other major unexplained
     occurrences, and the Voice had made “No” sound like a granite cliff, with only flailing
     blue sky beyond it.
    Control had already seen at least some of the flotsam and jetsam now threatening to
     buckle the desk in the file summary. He knew that quite a bit of the information peeking
     out at him from the beige folders came from lighthouse journals and police records—and
     that the inexplicable in it had to be teased out from the edges, pushed forward into
     the light like the last bit of toothpaste in the dehydrated tube curled up on the
     edge of the bathroom sink. The kind of “strange doings” alluded to by hard-living
     bearded fishermen in old horror movies as they stared through haunted eyes at the
     unforgiving sea. Unsolved disappearances. Lights in the night. Stories of odd salvagers,
     and false beacons, and the hundred legends that accrete around a lonely coastline
     and a remote lighthouse.
    There had even been an informal group—the Séance & Science Brigade—dedicated to applying
     “empirical