The Crying in the Shed

I was on the island four days before I understood the fence, and the understanding came through my ears. It came at night, the way the worst things do.

The Station slept early. By nine the lights were down and the wind had the place to itself, moving through the eucalyptus with a sound like a crowd shifting its weight. I had taken to walking the compound after dark, because the cottage was too small to hold me and the dark was less strange than the daylight. On the second night I found the building.

It sat at the end of a graded road, below the administration block, a low concrete shed with a steel door and no windows and a power line running into it like a vein. I had passed it in daylight and taken it for a utility building, a pump house. At night it announced itself. From inside came a sound that stopped me on the road with my hands out like a man walking blind.

It was not a scream, not exactly. It was a cry, and it had a throat behind it, and the throat was being used past its limit. The sound would rise for ten or twelve seconds, hold, and drop, and then rise again, and in the pauses I could hear something smaller and worse: a whimpering that kept time with a machine. Something electrical ran in there with a rhythm, and between the machine's beats the cry went on, patient, methodical, as if the pain were a job being done correctly.

I stood there longer than I should have. I stood there until the crying stopped and a different sound began, a wet, regular sound like a careful worker cleaning up, and then I walked back to the cottage and did not sleep, and in the morning I found Corbett in the mess hall and asked him what was in the shed.

He did not pretend not to know which shed I meant. He set his coffee down and looked at the table for a while, the way he did when the truth was going to cost him something.

"Research," he said. "That's what happens here."

"What kind of research cries like that?"

"The kind the Warden does." He said it flat, and then he did something I did not expect: he looked at me, properly, and lowered his voice. "Owen. Nine days. You asked for a ride back, and you have one. Whatever you heard, it isn't your business, and whatever you see in the next week, it isn't your business either. You're a guest with a boarding pass. The people who make it their business don't leave the island."

"Don't leave, or don't get to leave?"

He looked at me a long time. "Don't leave," he said. "Watch your step, and I'll get you off at the run."

I believed him, and I believed him less with every hour, because that afternoon I met the creature from the boat.

She was in a pen behind the shed, in shade, and I came on her by accident while following a path that dead-ended at the fence. The pen was chain-link, eight feet high, with a concrete floor and a hose racked beside the gate, and in it was the largest cat I have ever seen outside a zoo, a cougar with a coat the color of old gold, and she was not what the pen was built to contain.

The pen was built for her, but she was no longer only a cougar. Her forelegs were wrong. They ended in hands, or the idea of hands, long and pale and knobbed at the joints, and she held them up against the fence and worked them like a person trying to remember how to use hers. Her face was wrong in a way I did not want to study: the flat golden mask had been pushed and gathered into something almost human, a brow, a jawline, an arrangement of features that looked like a signature written in a language the animal did not know. She looked at me with eyes that were entirely cougar, and they were the worst thing about her, because they understood. The rest of her had been made, but the eyes were still hers, and hers were asking.

I backed away from the pen and walked into the fence, and the fence gave and sprang back, and I stood against it for a long time with the wire pressed into my back, watching the creature watch me. She sat down, slowly, on a haunch that was not shaped for sitting, and she made the crying sound, the one from the shed, the one I had heard through a steel door at night, and she did it now in daylight, at me, as if I were the machine whose rhythm she had learned to keep.

I did not go back to the cottage. I went to the administration block and asked to see Dr. Voss, and when they told me he was in the field I sat in the mess hall until dark, because the mess hall had windows and the pen did not, and I needed to be somewhere the light could find me.

Corbett found me there at eight, with a tray he did not set down.

"She's his newest subject," he said, without being asked. "Six months on the table. He says she's the closest he's ever come to staying made."

"To what?"

Corbett looked at the window, at the dark, at anywhere but me. "To making it stay," he said.