Page 16 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

After I hooked up with the main path to campus, I crested a hill and came upon a curious sight.

Fields of switch grass, horseweed, and silver grass were growing shoulder height, sprinkled with lovely blue flowers I couldn’t identify.

Curving paths cut through this sun-drenched field full of insect life, each one lined with paper lanterns.

It was an extraordinary sight that made me feel immediately that I’d been transported to somewhere distant and fictional—a fairy tale of sorts.

I set off along one of the paths. It led me down and around a small hill and then up along a slope that led to something in the distance I couldn’t quite make sense of.

A jagged oak loomed against the backdrop of the woods, and around it stood what looked like colorful little houses.

I’d never seen anything quite like it and hadn’t the slightest idea what to make of it.

I headed toward it, and as I approached, I saw that indeed the tableau was composed of twelve brightly colored miniature houses.

Lifted off the ground a few inches, they resembled elevated beach cottages.

Each intricately carved house had a slanted roof and was painted a different brilliant color.

A figure was moving among them wearing what appeared to be some kind of veil.

As I neared, I began to understand. The figure was Finn, and the veil was protective headgear.

I’d wandered out to what must be the apiary.

My curiosity satisfied, I decided to head back, but Finn had already spotted me and was waving me over. He met me just outside the marked-off area.

“We meet again,” I said.

“Are you stalking me?” he asked with a cocky laugh.

“Nice bees,” I said because I lacked the requisite nomenclature to compliment an apiary.

“You can come have a look, if you want.” He pointed to a small shed. “We can suit you up.”

“I’m allergic.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Really? Then maybe you should think twice before barging into an apiary.”

“I’m not barging.”

“Sorry. Force of habit. Isabelle used to steal my honey,” he said almost wistfully.

“Why?”

“I think just to mess with me,” he said, shrugging.

“Hey,” I said, pointing toward the woods, “I noticed a tree out there with a red X on it. What does that mean?”

He held my gaze, and for an instant, I thought he was going to challenge me. By mentioning the tree, I’d just given myself away. I could tell from the look in his eye that there were no such trees visible from the trails. But if he knew this, he didn’t press the matter.

“Root rot,” he said. “It’s tagged for removal.”

“Ah. I see,” I said, shoving my hands into my pockets. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. I’m gonna head back.”

He tilted his head. “I’ll walk you back. Give me a minute.”

I didn’t agree to an escort, but as I watched him jog back to drop off his gear, I found that I wasn’t moving, either. He returned, and together we started toward the main part of campus.

“Do apiaries always look like that, like little houses?”

“No,” he said with a sheepish grin. “That’s all me. I thought it would be cute. They remind me of the colored houses on the shores of Greenland.”

“Are you an entomologist? I thought you said you did something with systems.”

“Yeah, I do systems science. The bees are just my hobby. My one true love, if you will.”

“I’m embarrassed to say I don’t really know much about systems science.”

“It’s basically the study of the relationship between structure and behavior,” he said as we walked back along the lantern-lined path through the switch grass.

“If we can understand that relationship, we can understand why a system might function poorly or well, and if we can identify a place of weakness, we can step in and intervene to improve it. Like, for instance, do you know what a feedback loop is?”

“Like homeostasis?”

“That’s a great example. It’s the mechanism that allows us to change the relationship between, say, the inflow and outflow of a system. In the case of homeostasis, if a biological process in the body gets out of whack, we have feedback loops that help us return to normal.”

We shifted onto a trail I hadn’t been on yet, a slightly overgrown one, but I could tell we were getting close to campus.

“A major mistake humans make,” he continued, pushing aside a branch, “is that when we deal with a complex system, we tend to take out balancing feedback loops that only really kick into gear in emergency situations. These feedback loops might be expensive or difficult to maintain, so the tendency is to think that because they are rarely used, they aren’t important.

But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Sometimes these feedback loops are so key to the functioning of the system that if you remove them, and something goes wrong that should trigger the loops to kick into gear and they’re not there, the entire system will collapse.

It’s like a fire extinguisher. It might be annoying to keep.

It’s unwieldy, it takes up space, and we almost never use it.

But when we do need it … we really need it.

In my opinion, people don’t think enough about complex systems. We like to think things are simple, but for the most part, they aren’t.

Yes and no, black and white, these tend to be oversimplifications, because in reality, everything is bound up with and affects a plethora of other things. ”

“This sounds more like philosophy than science.”

“In some ways the two fields are related, but then often the way we make distinctions between fields of study can feel arbitrary. Even in the biological sciences the way we categorize things is essentially just an agreed-upon taxonomy. Take entomology, for instance. There are many insects that we have yet to fully understand, and we will put them into one category, only to decide later that they fit better into another. But it doesn’t make that earlier categorization untrue exactly.

It’s just a reflection of the way our understanding of the natural world evolves. ”

“Do you have a specialty within your field?”

He nodded. “Game theory, mathematical models, that kind of thing.”

As we neared campus, we diverged onto an arterial path—a shorter one that led us back toward the lake. As we passed an ornate wrought-iron bench flanked by juvenile orange trees, I stopped suddenly.

“I’ve seen this before,” I said.

“It’s in some of the promotional materials.”

“No … it’s the strangest feeling. Déjà vu, I guess.”

We continued down a stone path and through a garden alive with the fluttering of gossamer-winged insects.

Suddenly the path opened directly onto the shore of that magnificently cornflower-blue lake.

The lake almost seemed to glow. The surface appeared incredibly still, and yet it lapped gently against the shore.

In that moment, I thought the sound of lake water breaking against smooth stone must be the most beautiful sound in the world.

I walked closer to the water, breathing in its clean, crisp scent.

Staring out at the island, I felt oddly at peace, almost sedated.

“There’s a scientific explanation for déjà vu, you know,” he said.

“I think I read something about that. Something with neurotransmitters and synapses.”

He winced. “Yeah, kind of. But you could say that about almost anything even remotely related to the process of perception.”

“Jesus, has anyone ever told you that you can be a know-it-all?”

“No, but I imagine you probably get that a lot, long-winded, witch-cult-hypothesis lady.”

“I am not long-winded.”

“Oh, trust me. You are. Anyway, most people experience déjà vu, but what’s really weird is jamais vu. Do you know what that is?”

“‘Never saw’?” I said, translating.

“Yeah. Never seen. It’s when you look at something you should recognize, but don’t.”

Behind us, someone cleared her throat, and when I turned around, I saw Lexi standing there, appearing somewhat edgy.

“What are you guys doing down here?”

“Talking about feedback loops and déjà vu,” Finn said.

“Oh.” She shrugged. “Boring. Finn, Dorian sent me to find you. He wants to talk to you about the harvest.”

Arms crossed and head held high like an ancient queen, Lexi turned back toward the path and disappeared between the trees. Finn followed her, and suddenly I was left alone, staring out across the lake.

Something about Lexi’s choice of words had hit me wrong, had made me uneasy.

Maybe it was the sense of isolation, maybe it was the campus itself—so ancient-feeling—or maybe it was something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

Maybe there was just something vaguely sinister about the way she had talked about a harvest, but there shouldn’t be, should there?

Harvests weren’t innately sinister. So why, I wondered as I stared out at the island, was I shivering?

Trying to shake off the feeling, I let my mind flow to the island.

It really was extraordinarily beautiful.

Although I doubted it could have anything to do with the relic, I had a gnawing compulsion to go investigate it.

My gaze drifted to the pier, to the phantom rope marks.

At one time there had been a boat. Someone used to go to that island, so why had they stopped?

The next morning, I awoke suddenly just before dawn.

After a few failed attempts to get back to sleep, I gave up and started making coffee.

I still couldn’t shake the feeling I’d had in the clearing with the yew tree, the feeling that the earth there was somehow unquiet.

Grabbing my computer, I started researching locations that were said to be cursed.