He begins where every one of them begins: in an archive, at a desk, entirely safe, reading.
The house on Benefit Street has an unremarkable exterior and a bad reputation, and the deeds and the parish records and the burial lists say why — the tenants sicken, and the ones who sicken longest begin, near the end, to talk in a language nobody in the family ever spoke. Two hundred years of it, catalogued. A clerk's tidy horror. Nothing in that cellar but earth and saltpetre and a pale patch on the floor shaped roughly, if you are the sort of man who notices such things, like a doubled-up human figure.
Out at the harbour the fishing has been extraordinary for a hundred years while every other port up the coast starves, and nobody local will discuss it, and the men on the dock at dusk do not blink as often as they ought.
And in the photograph on the desk, the one from the expedition, there is a wall of fitted stone in a place no one has ever built anything, with the blocks cut too large and the angles going the wrong way — obtuse where they should be square, meeting where they should not meet. Cyclopean, the antiquarians call it. A wall that would take a hundred men to raise one course of.
He looks at it a long while. Then he writes to the university and asks whether anyone is going back.
