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“They would walk out into the mist,” Mikhail said, staring at the wall. “We tried to stop them. We locked them in their rooms. Tied them up. They fought. Broke their bones to escape the ropes. Clawed the walls until their fingernails tore. And even if we stopped them, they died. And so we stopped trying to keep them. We let them go.”
“Whatever the Six-Wing is looking for, I have always thought it requires a child,” Mrs. Popova said. “A very particular child.” The look she gave me was sharp-edged.
“And now you know the truth,” Mikhail said. “You know, and so you can leave.”
“No, we can’t,” I said. “I still don’t know what happened to my mother.”
“She’s gone, Sophia,” Mrs. Popova said. “Let her go, and leave. While you still can.”
But I couldn’t. I had to know what happened. I had to know who I was. What I was.
Even if it killed me.
VIDEO EVIDENCE
Recorded by Joy Novak
AUGUST 14, 2003, TIME UNKNOWN
The group descends deeper into the bunker. The stairs creak and groan beneath them, and Novak has a particularly hard time navigating them. When Carreau offers the girls his hands to help them down, they shy away from him, sticking to Novak’s side. Hardcastle hangs behind briefly to wrangle the camera settings, and then edges past the rest of the queue to take the lead. The stairs lead down and down and farther still.
KAPOOR: I think I can almost make out the words. We must be getting closer.
NOVAK: It’s not really that I can make them out, it’s more like I’m starting to understand them.
Hardcastle reaches the bottom of the stairs. He looks in on the round room. It is similar to the chamber in which Sophiawill find Liam, over a decade from now, but its walls are not adorned in paint.
They cross the room cautiously, and the tunnel leading out comes into sight. In this video it is wider, and arched smoothly, crafted with intention and skill. The tunnel beyond seems manmade, wide enough for two people to walk side by side, if a bit uncomfortably.
HARDCASTLE: Only one way forward.
They proceed into the tunnel. No one speaks. No one questions the decision to press onward—and downward, as the tunnel slopes, curves, spirals slowly in on itself. As it has before, the camera cuts out now and again. It is especially difficult to guess how long these intervals might be as there is no difference between one section of video and the next. A slightly different wrinkle in the rock around them, a crack in the floor, a discolored bit of stone—nothing substantial. The video comprises at least fifteen minutes, but they may have been walking for many more by the time they come to the door.
It is identical to the door into the bunker: metal, rectangular, windowless. Hardcastle looks back at the others, turning the camera. They watch him expectantly. There is no question that he will open the door, and he does, grunting with the effort.
The door opens onto the island. Onto the same patch of ground they came into the bunker from. Here, there is no mist. No grass either; only bare rock. Hardcastle points the camera up toward the sky—but there is no sky. Only a reflection ofthe island and the ocean, hanging above them.
KAPOOR: I should be terrified, but I’m just... empty.
She looks up. Her expression is slack, but tears track down her cheeks.
KAPOOR: We aren’t getting out of here.
CARREAU: Stranger things have happened, Vanya dearest. Stranger things.
NOVAK: Down there.
She points. Just offshore, a large wooden vessel is mired against the rocks. Even translated into the medium of film, it is a mind-bending sight—it seems, impossibly, to be eternally breaking apart. An optical illusion, perhaps, for there is no beginning nor end to the way the wooden beams crack against the rocks, splitting open. Black liquid gushes from the crack like a wound—a wound that is forever in the process of being rent open.
HARDCASTLE: Is that where we need to go?
KAPOOR: No. I think that is.
She points along the side of the slope and downward—toward the town. Hardcastle steps to where he can angle the camera to follow her pointing hand.
Where the town should be there is only an empty field. Except for the church. It has doubled in size, gained spires that twist in nauseating geometry. Terns swarm around its roof in eerie silence, and where its door should be, the camera captures only random visual glitches and flashes of light.
CARREAU: No sense in wasting time.
