* * *
When he got home Sunday night, he checked his recording of the conversation with his mother, felt an overload of relief when there were no gaps, no evidence that his mother, too, was deceiving him.
He believed that Central was in disarray, and that he’d been run by a faction, under hypnotic control. Now the ceiling was no doubt falling in on the clandestine basement, and the megalodon was feeling nervous within the cracked glass of its tank. Grace had bloodied It. Him. And then Control had delivered a follow-up punch.
“Only Lowry had enough experience of the Southern Reach and Area X to be of use,” his mother had told him, but fear leaked out of her words, too, and she went on and on about Lowry while Control felt as if a historical figure had popped out from a portrait alive to announce itself. A broken, erratic, rehabilitated historical figure who claimed to remember little not already captured by the videos. Someone who had leveraged a promotion, received due to a tangled knot of pity and remorse or some other reason than competence.
“Lowry is an asshole.” To stop her talking about him. Just because you survived, just because you were labeled a hero, didn’t mean you couldn’t also be an asshole. She must have been desperate, had no choice. Rearing up behind that, whispers he remembered now that might have come from Lowry’s direction: of shadow facilities, of things allied with the hypnosis and conditioning efforts but more hideous still.
“I knew there might be things you’d tell him you wouldn’t tell me. We knew it might be better if you didn’t know … some of the things we needed you to do.”
Anger had warred with satisfaction that he’d smoked them out, that at least one variable had been removed. A need to know more balanced against already feeling overwhelmed. While trying to ignore an unsettling new thought: that his mother’s power had boundaries.
“Is there anything you’re hiding from me?”
“No,” she said. “No. The mission is still the same: Focus on the biologist and the missing director. Dig through the notes. Stabilize the Southern Reach. Find out what has been going on that we don’t know about.”
Had that been the mission? That fragmented focus? Maybe the Voice’s mission, which was his now, he supposed. He chose to take the lie that she had told him everything at face value, thought perhaps the worst of it was now behind him. He’d shaken off the chains. He’d taken everything Grace could throw at him. He’d seen the videos.
Control went into the kitchen and poured a whiskey, his only one of the day, and downed it in one gulp, magical thinking behind the idea that it would help him sleep. As he put the empty glass back on the counter, he noticed the director’s cell phone by the landline. In its case, it still looked like a large black beetle.
A premonition came to him, and a memory of the scuttling on the roof earlier in the week. He got a dish towel, picked up the phone, opened the back door with Chorry at his heels, and tossed the phone deep into the gloom of the backyard. It hit a tree, caromed off into the darkness of the long grass at the edge of the property. Fuck you, phone. Don’t come back. It could join the Voice/Lowry phone in some phone afterlife. He would rather feel paranoid or stupid than be compromised. He felt vindicated when Chorry-Chorrykins refused to follow the phone, wanted to stay inside. A good choice.
021: REPEATING
When Monday morning arrived, Control didn’t go into the Southern Reach right away. Instead he took a trip to the director’s house—grabbed the driving instructions from the Internet and holstered his gun and got on the highway. It had been on his list to do once the notes in his office were categorized, just to make sure Grace’s people had cleaned out the house as thoroughly as she claimed. The confirmation of the Voice’s/Lowry’s manipulation, and by extension his mother’s, remained a listless feeling, something buzzing around in the background. As answers went, Lowry got him no further, gave him no real leverage—he’d been manipulated by someone untouchable and ethereal. Lowry, shadowing himself as the Voice, haunting the Southern Reach from afar. Control now trying to merge them into one person, one intent.
There was also an impulse, once he was on his way, not to return to the Southern Reach at all—to bypass the director’s house, too—and detour onto a rural road, take it over to his father’s house, some fifty miles west.
But he resisted it. New owners, and no sculptures left in the backyard. After his dad’s death, they’d gone to good homes with aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, even if he’d felt as if the landscape of his formative years was being dismantled, piece by piece. So no solace there. No real history. Some of his relatives still lived in the area, but his father had been the bond between them, and he’d last known most of them as a teenager.
Bleakersville had a population of about twenty thousand—just big enough to have a few decent restaurants, a small arts center, and the three blocks of historic district. The director lived in a neighborhood with few white faces in evidence. Lots of overhanging pines, oaks, and magnolia trees, hung heavy with moss, sodden branches from the storms lying broken on the potholed road. Solid cedar or cement houses, some with brick accents, mostly brown and blue or gray, with one or two cars in gravel or pine-needle driveways. He drove past a couple of communal basketball hoops and some black and Latino kids on bicycles, who stopped and stared until he was gone. School had been out for a couple of weeks.
The director’s house lay at the end of a street named Standiford, at the top of a hill. Choosing caution, Control parked a block away, on the street below, then walked into the backyard, which slanted up the hill toward her house. The backyard was overgrown with untrimmed azalea bushes and massive wisteria vines, some of them wrapped tight around the pine trees. A couple of halfhearted compost islands languished behind circles of staked chicken wire. Much of the grass had yellowed and died over time, exposing tree roots.
Three cement semicircles served in lieu of a deck, covered over with leaves and what looked like rotted birdseed alongside a pie pan filled to the top with dirty water. The white French doors stained green with mold beyond them would be his entry point. One problem—he would have to pick the lock, since he hadn’t put in a formal request to visit. Except he wanted to pick the lock, he realized. Didn’t want to have a key. As he worked on it with the tools he’d brought, the rain began to fall. Thick drops that clacked and thunked against last winter’s fallen magnolia leaves.
He sensed he was being watched—some hint of movement from the corner of his eye, perhaps—just as he’d managed to open the door. He stood up and turned to his left.
In the neighbor’s yard, well back from the chain-link fence, a black girl, maybe nine or ten, with beaded cornrows, stared warily at him. She wore a sunflower dress and white plastic sandals with Velcro straps.
Control smiled and waved. In some other universe, Control fled, abandoning his mission, but not in this one.
The girl didn’t wave back, but she didn’t run away, either.
He took that as a sign and went inside.
* * *
No one had been here in months, but there was a kind of swirling movement to the air that he wanted to attribute to a fan he couldn’t see, or an air-conditioning unit that had just cut out. Except that Grace had had the electricity turned off until the director returned, “to save money for her.” The rain was coming down hard enough now that it added to the gloom, so he turned on his flashlight. No one would notice—he was too far away from the windows, and the glass doors had a long dark curtain across them. Most people would be at work anyway.
The director’s neighbors would have known her as a psychologist in private practice, if they had known her at all. Was the photo in Grace’s office an anomaly, or did the director often eat barbecue with a beer in her hand? Had Lowry, back in the day, come over in a baseball cap, T-shirt, and torn jeans for hot dogs and fireworks on the Fourth of July? People could double or triple themselves to become different in different situations, but somehow he thought the director probably had been solitary. And it was here, in her home, that the director, over time, against protocol, and in some cases illegally, had brought Area X evidence and files, erasing the divide between her personal and professional lives.
Seen through the tunnel of the flashlight beam, the small living room soon gave up its secrets: a couch, three lounge chairs, a fireplace. What looked like a library lay beyond it, behind a dividing wall and through worn saloon-style doors. The kitchen was to the left and then a hallway; a massive refrigerator festooned with magnet-fixed photos and old calendars guarded the corner. To the right of the living room was a door leading to the garage, and beyond that probably the master bedroom. The entire house was about 1,700 square feet.
Why had the director lived here? With her pay grade, she could have done much better; Grace and Cheney both lived in Hedley in upper-middle-class subdivisions. Perhaps there was debt he didn’t know about. He needed better intel. Somehow the lack of information about the director seemed connected to her clandestine trip across the border, her ability to keep her position for so long.
No one had lived here for over a year. No one except Central had come in. No one was here now. And yet the emptiness made him uneasy. His breath came shallow, his heartbeat elevated. Perhaps it was just the reliance on the flashlight, the unsettling way it reduced anything not under its bright gaze to a pack of shadows. Maybe it was some part of him acknowledging that this was as close to a field assignment as he’d had in years.
A half-empty water glass stood by the sink, reflecting his light as a circle of fire. A few dishes lay in the sink, along with forks and knives. The director had left this clutter the day she’d gotten in her car and driven to the Southern Reach to lead the twelfth expedition. Central apparently had not been instructed to clean up after the director—nor after themselves. The living-room carpet showed signs of boot prints as well as tracked-in leaves and dirt. It was like a diorama from a museum devoted to the secret history of the Southern Reach.
Grace might have had Central come here and retrieve anything classified, but in terms of the director’s property theirs had been a light touch. Nothing looked disturbed even though Control knew they had removed five or six boxes of material. It just looked cluttered, which was no doubt the way they’d found it, if the office he’d inherited was any indication. Paintings and prints covered the walls above a few crowded CD stands, a dusty flat-screen television, and a cheap-looking stereo system on which had been stacked dozens of rare old-timey records. None of the paintings or photographs seemed personal in nature.
An elegant gold-and-blue couch stood against the wall dividing the living room from the library, a pile of magazines taking up one cushion, while the antique rosewood coffee table in front of the couch looked as if it had been requisitioned as another desk: books and magazines covered its entire surface—same as the beautifully refinished kitchen table to the left. Had she done most of her work in these rooms? It was homier than he’d thought it would be, with good furniture, and he couldn’t quite figure out why that bothered him. Did it come with the house, or was it an inheritance? Did she have a connection to Bleakersville? A theory was forming in his head, like a musical composition he could hum from vague memories but not quite yet name or play.
He walked through the hallway beside the kitchen, encountered another fact that seemed odd for no particular reason. Every door had been closed. He had to keep opening them as if going through a series of air locks. Each time, even though there was no prickle of threat, Control prepared to jump back. He discovered an office, a room with some filing cabinets and an exercise bike and free weights, and a guest bedroom with a bathroom opposite it. There were a lot of doors for such a small house, as if the director or Central had been trying to contain something, or almost as if he were traveling between different compartments of the director’s brain. Any and all of these thoughts spooked him, and after the third door, he just said the hell with it and entered each with a hand on Grandpa in its holster.
He circled around into the library area and looked out one of the front windows. Saw a branch-strewn overgrown lawn, a battered green mailbox at the end of a cement walkway, and nothing suspicious. No one lurking in a black sedan with tinted windows, for example.
Then back through the living room, through the other hallway, past the garage door, and into the master bedroom on the left.
At first, he thought the bedroom had been flooded and all of the furniture had washed up against the nearest walls. Chairs were stacked atop the dressers and armoire. The bed had come to rest against the dressers. About seven pairs of shoes—from heels to trainers—had been tossed as flotsam on top of the bed. The covers were pulled up, but sloppily. On the far side of the room, in the flashlight’s gleam, a mirror shone crazily from beyond a bathroom door.
He took out Grandpa, released the safety, aimed wherever his flashlight roved. From the dressers now over the bed, now to the wall against which the bed had previously rested, which was covered in thick purple curtains. Cautious, he pulled them back, revealing all-too-familiar words beneath a high horizontal window that let in a stagnant light.
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.
Written in thick dark marker, the same wall of text, with the same map beside it that he had painted over in his office. As if the moment he had rid himself of it, it had appeared in the director’s bedroom. Irrational sight. Irrational thought. Now a hundred Controls were running from the room and back to the car in a hundred pocket universes.
But it had been here for a while. It had to have been. Sloppy of Grace’s people not to remove it. Too sloppy.
He turned toward the bathroom. “If anyone’s there, come out,” he said. “I have a gun.” Now his heart was beating so fast and his hand was so tight on the flashlight he didn’t think it could be pried loose.
But no one came out.
No one was there, as he confirmed by forcing himself to breathe more slowly. By forcing himself to check every corner, including a small closet that seemed more cavernous the farther he progressed into it. In the bathroom, he found the usual things—shampoo, soap, a prescription for blood pressure drugs, a few magazines. Brown hair dye and a hairbrush with gray strands snarled in it. So the director had felt self-conscious about reaching middle age. The brush gleamed when his flashlight struck it, seemed to want to communicate, akin to the scribbled-on receipts and torn magazine pages that had laid bare parts of her life to him, more meaningful to him than his own.
He returned to the bedroom and played the flashlight beam over the wall again. No, not the exact same tableau. The same words, the exact same words. But no height marks. And the map—it was different, too. This version showed the island and its ruined lighthouse, along with the topographical anomaly and the lighthouse on the coast. This version also showed the Southern Reach. A line had been drawn between the ruined and functional lighthouses and the topographical anomaly. That line had then been extended to the Southern Reach. They looked very much like outposts on a border, like on ancient maps of empires.
Control backed away and then down the hall into the living room, feeling cold, feeling distant. He could not think of a scenario in which Central had seen those words, that map, and not removed it.
Which meant that it had been created after they had searched the house. Which meant … which probably meant …
He didn’t allow himself the thought. Instead, he went to the front door to confirm a sudden suspicion.
The knob turned easily in his hand. Unlocked.
Which meant nothing.
Yet now his foremost idea, his only real idea, was to get out of the house. But he still had the presence of mind to lock the front door and return to the back.
Pushed open the French doors, out into the rain.
Walked-ran back to the car.
* * *
Not until he was parked well away, on Bleakersville’s main street, did he call his mother, tell her what he had found, and ask her to send a team in to investigate. If he’d done it from the site, they’d have kept him there for far too long. As they talked, Control tried to convince himself of benign interpretations, almost as much as his mother did. “Don’t make leaps, John, and don’t tell Grace because she’ll overreact,” which was correct. Anyone from the Southern Reach could have drawn that on the wall—Whitby as prime suspect other than the former director. Pushing against that relative comfort: A disturbing vision of the director wandering through neighborhoods and parks, across fields, into forests. Revisiting old haunts.
“But, John, there is something I need to tell you.”
“Tell me, then.” Had she given up Lowry’s identity as the Voice so she could hide something else?
“You know the places where we picked up the anthropologist and the surveyor?”
“A front porch, the back of a medical practice.”
“We’ve noticed some … inconsistencies in those places. The readings are different.”
“How? How are they different?”
“We’re still sorting through the data, but we’ve quarantined the areas, even though it’s difficult.”
“But not in the empty lot? Not where the biologist was?”
“No.”