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The island was a desolate place, fit to be little more than a roost for seabirds, but the
views of the city and the Golden Gate (both the bridge and the landform) were stunning,
and must have been heartbreaking for the inmates when this was a working prison. B
led her up the stairs from the dock to the gatehouse—he’d been here before, and had a
sense of where they were supposed to go now. He took her into one of the damp, gray
cell-blocks, past rows of windowless cells. “We’re going to one of the solitaryconfinement
cells,” he said, whispering, and Marla felt his whisper was appropriate.
There was a presence here, or just past here, located a short distance away in a
dimension she couldn’t quite comprehend. In addition to that there were ghostly
fragments of dead prisoners, and somewhere a wailing little-girl ghost that Marla
assumed had been one of the Indian occupiers, or else one of the Native Americans
from before the Europeans came, or possibly a tourist who’d had a tragic accident of
some kind. She wondered if B could hear them, but upon reflection, she supposed he
could sense them more clearly than she could herself. He’d shown his great acuity time
and again, after all. She admired his calm and his attention to the task at hand all the
more after realizing that.
He led her into a tiny cell with a toilet and a sink, the bunk long since gone. B took her
hand, and they shut their eyes, then turned slowly together, three times, all the way
around. They took a step forward in unison, then another, then another.
And another. And five more. The sound of the floor beneath Marla’s boots changed
from heavy stone to something creakier. “Can we look yet?” she said.
“I think so,” B said. “We’ve walked past where the wall should be.”
Marla opened her eyes. They were in a long, dim corridor with a wooden floor and
wooden walls, extending forward into darkness. Marla glanced toward a narrow arrowslit
of a window, and the faint, silvery light that came through it, but she stopped herself
from stepping closer and looking through the aperture. She didn’t look behind her,
either. It was better, in places like this, to keep your eyes on the path. “Forward?” she
said.
“Onward,” B said. He didn’t let go of her hand as they continued. The corridor turned
left at a sharp right angle, then extended forward again for another hundred yards or so.
Then another sharp turn, this time to the right. Once, they passed a door, with a brass
knob, heavily tarnished. B looked at the door, then shook his head, and led Marla on.
She wondered what was behind the door, and realized, not for the first time, that there
were mysteries piled upon mysteries, and that even an adept and initiate such as herself
only saw a tiny fraction of the deeper world that existed behind and above the known
world. The corridor eventually reached an ornate wrought-iron spiral staircase. “We’re
supposed to go up there,” B said. The corridor continued on, leading to who-knew-what
inner mysteries, but Marla only nodded and followed B up the spiral staircase, which
passed through a rough-edged square hewn in the roof of the wooden corridor, into
something like an elevator shaft. The walls of the shaft were still dark wood, though,
and Marla was comforted that they weren’t ascending through pure formless void.
The top of the staircase ended at a seemingly unsupported pier of wood, a walkway no
more than an inch thick and barely two feet across, with darkness on all sides. B stepped