Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(25)

The biologist said nothing.

“Improbable,” he said, as if she had denied it again. “So many other expeditions have encountered this topographical anomaly.” A mouthful, topographical anomaly.

“Even so,” she said, “I don’t remember a tower.”

Tower. Not tunnel or pit or cave or hole in the ground.

“Why do you call it a tower?” he asked, pouncing. Too eager, he realized a moment later.

A grin appeared on Ghost Bird’s face, and a kind of remote affection. For him? Because of some thought that his words had triggered?

“Did you know,” she replied, “that the phorus snail attaches the empty shells of other snails onto its own shell. As a result, the saltwater phorus snail is very clumsy. It staggers and tumbles about because of these empty shells, which offer camouflage, but at a price.”

The deep well of secret mirth behind the answer stung him.

* * *

Perhaps, too, he had wanted her to share his disdain for the term topographical anomaly. It had come up during his initial briefing with Grace and other members of the staff. As some “topographical anomaly” expert had droned on about its non-aspects, basically creating an outline for what they didn’t know, Control had felt a heat rising. A whole monologue rising with it. Channeling Grandpa Jack, who could work himself into a mighty rage when he wanted to, especially when confronted by the stupidities of the world. His grandpa would have stood and said something like, “Topological anomaly? Topological anomaly? Don’t you mean witchcraft? Don’t you mean the end of civilization? Don’t you mean some kind of spooky thing that we know nothing, absolutely f*cking nothing about, to go with everything else we don’t know?” Just a shadow on a blurred photo, a curling nightmare expressed by the notes of a few unreliable witnesses—made more unreliable through hypnosis, perhaps, no matter Central’s protestations. A spiraling thread gone astray that might or might not be made of something else entirely—not even as scrutable in its eccentricity as a house-squatter of a snail that stumbled around like a drunk. No hope of knowing what it was, or even just blasting it to hell because that’s what intelligent apes do. Just some thing in the ground, mentioned as casually, as matter-of-factly, as manhole cover or water faucet or steak knives. Topographical anomaly.

But he had said most of this to the bookshelves in his office on Tuesday—to the ghost of the director while at a snail’s pace beginning to sort through her notes. To Grace and the rest of them, he had said, in a calm voice, “Is there anything else you can tell me about it?” But they couldn’t.

Any more, apparently, than could the biologist.

* * *

Control just stared at her for a moment, the interrogator’s creepy prerogative, usually meant to intimidate. But Ghost Bird met his stare with those sharp green eyes until he looked away. It continued to nag at him that she was different today. What had changed in the past twenty-four hours? Her routine was the same, and surveillance hadn’t revealed anything different about her mental state. They’d offered her a carefully monitored phone call with her parents, but she’d had nothing to say to them. Boredom from being cooped up with nothing but a DVD player and a censored selection of movies and novels could not account for it. The food she ate was from the cafeteria, so Control could commiserate with her there, but this still did not provide a reason.

“Perhaps this will jog your memory.” Or stop you lying. He began to read summaries of accounts from prior expeditions.

“An endless pit burrowing into the ground. We could never get to the bottom of it. We could never stop falling.”

“A tower that had fallen into the earth that gave off a feeling of intense unease. None of us wanted to go inside, but we did. Some of us. Some of us came back.”

“There was no entrance. Just a circle of pulsing stone. Just a sense of great depth.”

Only two members of that expedition had returned, but they had brought their colleagues’ journals. Which were filled with drawings of a tower, a tunnel, a pit, a cyclone, a series of stairs. Where they were not filled with images of more mundane things. No two journals the same.

Control did not continue for long. He had begun the recitations aware that the selected readings might contaminate the edges of her amnesia … if she actually suffered from memory loss … and that feeling had quickly intensified. But it was mostly his own sense of unease that made him pause, and then stop. His feeling that in making the tower-pit more real in his imagination, he was also making it more real in fact.

But Ghost Bird either had not or had picked up on his tiny moment of distress, because she said, “Why did you stop?”

He ignored her, switched one tower for another. “What about the lighthouse?”

“What about the lighthouse?” First thought: She’s mimicking me. Which brought back a middle school memory of humiliation from bullies before the transformation in high school as he’d put his efforts into football and tried to think of himself as a spy in the world of jocks. Realized that the words on the wall had thrown him off. Not by much, but just enough.

“Do you remember it?”

“I do,” she said, surprising him.

Still, he had to pull it out of her: “What do you remember?”

“Approaching it from the trail through the reeds. Looking in the doorway.”