The wind came down from the hills on the third night of my return to Blackwater Castle and it was not cold exactly but wrong—the kind of wrong that makes a man stop in the middle of a corridor and turn around and tell himself there is nothing to be afraid of and know at the same time that there is everything to be afraid of and that the fear is not of anything that can be named because named things are manageable and this was not manageable this was the feeling of something being out of place the way a single wrong note ruins a chord the way a single crack in a lens ruins an image

I am Edgar Fairfax. I am fifty-two years old. I am a retired professor of celestial physics from Edinburgh University and I am a coward who fled London because the men who sat in leather chairs and smoked cigars and called my life's work occult mathematics because they were afraid of anything they could not fit into a syllabus and a curriculum and a department with a budget and a head and a career trajectory that led predictably from lecturer to senior lecturer to professor to retirement to obituary in the Times and I would not perform that predictable death on command and so they laughed and I left and I came back to this castle that has been in the Fairfax family for four hundred years and that every Fairfax who has lived in it has died in ways that are not convenient for the family history to record

the castle is vast and damp and full of rooms that have not been opened in decades and corridors that curve at angles that seem slight from the outside but inside create a sense of dislocation so that you walk what you believe is a straight line and find yourself in a different part of the building than the one you left because the castle does not follow the geometry of ordinary buildings because the castle was built on land that was already old when the Normans were still figuring out how to stack stones and the land has opinions about geometry and those opinions are encoded in the walls and the floors and the angles of the ceilings and if you spend too long inside the castle your own internal geometry begins to match the castle's geometry and then you are lost not in the building but in the way the building understands space which is different from the way ordinary people understand space and this is not superstition it is what happened to my grandfather who spent ten years in the west wing and emerged speaking in a language that Abigail—our housekeeper—did not understand and that I did not understand and that no linguist I consulted understood and then he died and his papers were full of equations that had no variables and no operators and no right sides only left sides infinite strings of symbols that meant something to whoever wrote them and nothing to anyone who read them

and now I am here and I have come for the same reason he came though I do not yet know what that reason is because the knowledge has not arrived yet and the knowledge arrives not as thought but as pressure not as idea but as sensation not as something you understand but as something that makes understanding impossible

the letter came on a Tuesday in the mail—ordinary mail, from the British Museum's manuscript department, about a donation someone had made of a collection of papers belonging to a Fairfax ancestor who had lived in the seventeenth century and the head curator wanted to know if I would be interested in viewing them because they contained references to Fairfax family astronomical observations that were unprecedented and possibly significant and possibly the work of an ancestor who had been studying the stars at a time when studying the stars was considered by many to be a form of witchcraft and I said yes because I have always said yes to things related to the stars and I always will because that is what we Fairfaxes do and it is what has killed every Fairfax man who has ever lived

I arrived at the museum three days later and I spent four hours in the reading room looking at papers that were four hundred years old and yellow and brittle and written in a hand that was careful and precise and then became something else something that was still precise but not careful anymore and the precision was the wrong kind—it was the precision of a man who is documenting something that he knows other people will not believe and so he is being as precise as possible in the hope that precision will substitute for believability and it never does but the man tried anyway and I admired him for it and I understood him because I am trying the same thing now with my mind and my instruments and my equations and the thing that I am documenting that I know people will not believe and am preparing to document with the same desperate precision

the manuscript mentioned three suns

not literally—there is no record of anyone in the seventeenth century claiming to have seen three suns—but the phrase appeared in a marginal note in a paper that was otherwise a routine astronomical observation log and the marginal note said in a hand that was different from the hand of the main text not dramatically different but different in a way that created a sensation in my chest when I read it a sensation that I have not felt since I was a boy and my father took me to the observatory dome for the first time and I looked through the telescope and saw Saturn and its rings and I understood that there was a world out there beyond the walls of Edinburgh beyond the hills beyond the sea beyond the atmosphere and that the world was vast and indifferent and beautiful and terrifying and that I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand a fraction of one percent of one thing that it contained and that I would fail and that the failing was the point

the marginal note said from the place of three suns comes the hunger and beneath it was a sketch not of a celestial body but of a shape that I cannot describe accurately because it does not have a shape in any sense that I understand because the shape is not a three-dimensional form it is a description of a four-dimensional form rendered in two dimensions the way a three-dimensional object can be projected onto a two-dimensional surface and appear as something that is not quite right the way a shadow is not the object that casts it and the shadow in the manuscript was a shadow of something that existed in more dimensions than the page could hold and looking at it made my eyes water and my stomach turn and my hands shake and I sat back in my chair in the British Museum reading room and I stared at the shadow of a four-dimensional object and I understood that whoever had written this note whoever had drawn this shadow had seen something and had tried to document it with the only tools available to him—pen and ink and a desperate need to communicate something that communication cannot carry

and I took copies of the manuscript home to Blackwater Castle and I locked it in my study and I did not show it to Claire—my sister, who has managed this house in my absence for twenty years and who has kept the roof from collapsing and the servants from leaving and the bank from foreclosing through a combination of iron will and needlepoint and I love her for it and I would not let her see the shadow because I knew that seeing it would change her the way seeing it changed me and change is not always desirable and sometimes change is the thing you are most afraid of

the hunger came on a Friday night

it was not a sound and it was not a sight it was a presence a pressure a wrongness in the air that made Abigail come into my study at midnight and stand in the doorway and say in her eighty-year-old voice that sounded like dry leaves on stone Master Edgar there is something in the loch and I said what is in the loch and she said something black and it was not a rock and it was not driftwood and it was not anything that floats and it was not anything that sinks and it was just there in the middle of the loch in the middle of the night in the middle of the fog that had come down from the hills like a curtain and it was black and it was in the loch and it was not of this understanding

I went to the loch in the morning with my instruments—a spectrometer I had brought from London and a light meter and a sound recorder and a thermometer and a collection of glass vials for water samples and I walked around the loch in the dawn light and the fog was lifting and the loch was gray and ordinary and there was nothing in it and then there was

it was floating in the center of the loch about fifty yards from the shore and it was black—the blackest thing I have ever seen—not the black of a shadow or the black of a dark room or the black of ink on paper but the black of something that absorbs light the way a sponge absorbs water not reflecting it not scattering it just absorbing it completely and the light from the morning sun that fell upon it was simply gone and the absence of light created a hole in the visual field the way a hole in a photograph creates an absence of image and I stood on the shore and I looked at the hole in the world and my instruments went mad

the spectrometer showed nothing because there was no light to spectrum the thing absorbed all light and the spectrometer had nothing to measure the light meter showed negative values which is impossible and I understand what impossible means because I have spent forty years as a professor of physics and I know that negative light does not exist and yet the meter showed negative values and the thermometer showed that the air around the thing was colder than the surrounding air and the water around the thing was colder than the surrounding water and the sound recorder showed silence not the silence of absence but the silence of consumption the thing was absorbing sound the way it absorbed light and in the consuming it created a void a hole in the sensory field the way the visual hole was a hole in the visual field and I stood on the shore of the loch at Blackwater Castle on a morning in the early autumn of the year of our Lord eighteen ninety-three and I looked at something that was absorbing light and sound and perhaps other things I did not yet understand and I understood that this was not a rock and not driftwood and not anything that floats or sinks because this was not sitting on the water and it was not under the water it was in a relationship with the water that I could not describe and it was in a relationship with the light that I could not describe and it was in a relationship with reality that I could not describe and the not describing was the point because the thing existed in a way that reality does not normally allow and my instruments and my eyes and my mind were all failing to capture it because the thing was not failing my instruments were failing reality was failing my understanding was failing

and I knew then what the seventeenth-century Fairfax had known and what my grandfather had known and what my father had known and what every Fairfax man who has ever lived has known at some point in his life the knowledge that runs in our blood the way the madness runs in our blood the way the astronomy runs in our blood and the madness and the astronomy are not separate things because to look at the sky is to look at something that is so vast and so indifferent and so alien that the looking itself is a form of madness and the madness is a form of looking and you cannot tell them apart and you do not want to tell them apart because they are the same thing seen from different angles the way a shadow is the same object seen from a different dimension

I brought Dr. Samuel Morse from London because he is the best chemical analyst I know and because I needed someone to look at the thing and tell me what it was made of and Samuel looked and could not tell me what it was made of because it was not made of anything in the sense that ordinary matter is made of atoms and molecules and elements on the periodic table it was made of something else and the something else absorbed Samuel's analytical instruments the way it absorbed light and sound and his understanding and Samuel returned to London three days later and did not speak to me for the first two days of the journey and when he did speak he said only one thing and he said it with the flat voice of a man who has seen something that has broken something inside him that cannot be fixed and said it looking out the window of the train at the Scottish landscape passing by in the gray light and said it without looking at me and has never looked at me in the eyes since and said it in a voice that I will hear until I die: Edgar it eats the light.

Father Morris came a week later and he looked at the loch and he crossed himself and he said it is the devil and I said Father the devil is a theological concept and this is a physical phenomenon and we Fairfaxes deal in phenomena not concepts and he said concepts are what create phenomena in his sixty-year-old voice that had spent four decades telling people that the world was created in six days and that I should be ashamed of myself for studying the stars instead of the scriptures and I said nothing because there was nothing to say to a man who has decided what the world is before he has looked at it and the not saying is a form of courtesy and a form of surrender and a form of cowardice all at once

and Claire—my sister—the most practical and capable and grounded person I have ever known began to change the way my grandfather changed she began to spend hours in the gallery that has not been used since 1888 when Arthur—my nephew—went up to the gallery at midnight and did not come down for three days and when they found him he was sitting on the floor with his notebook open and his pen in his hand and he was writing the same equation over and over and over and over and over and when I asked him what he was writing he said I am writing what I see and I cannot write it fast enough and he was twenty-six years old and he was an intelligent man and he died two years later of a fever that no physician could diagnose and that no medicine could treat and that killed him in eleven days and in those eleven days he spoke only three words and they were the same three words over and over and over and over and over and they were getting darker

and now Claire is going up to the gallery at night and I hear her footsteps on the stairs at two in the morning and I call up to her and she does not answer and Abigail tells me with her seventy-year-old eyes that are not seventy—they are older—they are as old as this castle and as the land and as the sky and as the hunger that is coming from the loch that Claire is not sleeping and that she is writing and that she will not stop writing and that the writing is not in English and is not in any language Abigail has ever heard and that sometimes Abigail hears Claire whispering and the whispering is not words but sounds that are not sounds and that the whispering is getting louder and I go up to the gallery in the mornings and I look at what Claire has written and it is not English and it is not mathematics and it is not anything that I can read and it is not anything that I can understand and it is the most beautiful and terrifying thing I have ever seen because it is the record of a human mind trying to document something that documentation cannot carry the way the seventeenth-century Fairfax tried to document a four-dimensional shadow in two-dimensional ink and failed and the failing was the documentation the failing was understanding the failing was being human in the presence of something that is not human and will never be human and does not care that you are human and does not care that you exist and does not care that you are afraid and does not care that you are trying

and the hunger is growing

the thing in the loch is growing and it is not growing in the ordinary sense of getting bigger it is growing in the sense of becoming more present more real more integrated into the fabric of the space around it the way a stain spreads through fabric not by expanding outward but by changing the nature of the fabric it touches and the loch is changing the water is darker and colder and quieter and the fog around it is thicker and heavier and the birds will not fly over it and the deer will not approach it and the sheep in the field above the loch have stopped grazing and stand at the edge of the field and look at the thing and do not move and do not eat and do not drink and do not leave and I think they understand something that we do not understand and understanding is not always a gift

and Abigail says the family secret is coming and I say there is no family secret and she says yes there is Master Edgar every Fairfax who has ever lived has come here to look at the sky and every Fairfax who has looked at the sky has seen something and every Fairfax who has seen something has never been the same and some of them have not lived through the seeing and she is eighty years old and she has seen four Fairfaxes see things and three of them have not survived and I say Abigail you are speaking nonsense and she says yes Master Edgar I am speaking nonsense because the truth is too large for ordinary language and I am a simple woman and I do not have the vocabulary for the truth so I speak nonsense and the nonsense is truer than the truth

and I know she is right and I am afraid and I am not afraid of the thing in the loch I am afraid of what the thing in the loch means because I am a man of science and I have spent my life believing that the universe operates according to rules and that the rules are discoverable and that discovery is a form of salvation and I am discovering now that the rules may not exist and that the discovery may not be salvation and that the universe may not operate according to rules at all and that the rules we have discovered are not rules but habits and that habits can change and when they change the universe will not be hostile it will not be friendly it will simply be different and we will not be able to understand it and understanding was always our illusion and the illusion is ending and I am ending with it

and the gallery is full of writing now Claire's writing and Abigail's writing and my own writing and the writing of every Fairfax who has ever come here to look at the sky and the writing is not language and it is not mathematics and it is the record of a species trying to document something that cannot be documented by a species and the trying is the point the trying is the only thing that exists between us and the dark between us and the hunger between us and the thing in the loch that absorbs light and sound and understanding and the darkness that is not darkness but something else entirely something that exists in more dimensions than we can perceive and is leaking into our dimensions the way water leaks through a crack in a dam the way hunger leaks through the walls of a house the way madness leaks through the mind of a man who has looked too long at too vast and too indifferent a sky and the leaking is growing and the castle is full of it and the loch is full of it and the hills are full of it and the fog is full of it and the wind is full of it and the air is full of it and the writing is full of it and I am full of it and I do not know if I am the man who was full or the thing that is filling and I do not know if the difference between the man and the thing matters and I do not know if knowing would help and I do not know anything except that the hunger is growing and the writing is growing and the darkness is growing and the thing in the loch is growing and the gallery is full of Fairfaxes who saw and could not unsee and could not unwrite and could not leave and I am a Fairfax and I looked and I am writing and I will not leave and I will not unsee and the hunger is growing and the castle is full of it and the loch is full of it and the hills are full of it and the fog is full of it and the wind is full of it and the air is full of it and I am full of it and it is growing and it is growing and it is growing