Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(52)

Finally, though, Control could no longer fool himself. The famous twenty-second clip had come up, which the file indicated had been shot by Lowry, who had served as both the team’s anthropologist and its military expert. Dusk of the second day, with a lisp of sunset. Dull dark tower of the lighthouse in the middle distance. In their innocence, they had not seen the harm in splitting up, and Lowry’s group had decided to bivouac on the trail, among the remains of an abandoned series of houses about halfway to the lighthouse. It had hardly been enough to constitute a village, with no name on the maps, but had been the largest population center in the area.

A rustling sound Control associated with sea oats and the wind off the beach, but faint. The wreckage of the old walls formed deeper shadows against the sky, and he could just see the wide line that was the stone path running through. In the clip, Lowry shook a bit holding the camera. In the foreground, a woman, the expedition leader, was shouting, “Get her to stop!” Her face was made a mask by the light from the recorder and the way it formed such severe shadows around her eyes and mouth. Opposite, across a kind of crude picnic table that appeared fire-burned, a woman, the expedition leader, shouted, “Get her to stop! Please stop! Please stop!” A lurk and spin of the camera and then the camera steadied, presumably with Lowry still holding it. Lowry began to hyperventilate, and Control recognized that the sound he had heard before was a kind of whispered breathing with a shallow rattle threading through it. Not the wind at all. He could also just hear urgent, sharp voices from off-camera, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. The woman on the left of the screen then stopped shouting and stared into the camera. The woman on the right also stopped shouting, stared into the camera. An identical fear and pleading and confusion radiated from the masks of their faces toward him, from so far away, from so many years away. He could not distinguish between the two manifestations, not in that murky light.

Then, sitting bolt upright, even knowing what was to come, Control realized it was not dusk that had robbed the setting behind them of any hint of color. It was more as if something had interceded on the landscape, something so incredibly large that its edges were well beyond the camera’s lens. In the last second of the videotape, the two women still frozen and staring, the background seemed to shift and keep shifting … followed by a clip even more chilling to Control: Lowry in front of the camera this time, goofing off on the beach the next morning, and whoever was behind the camera laughing. No mention of the expedition leader. No sign of her on any of the subsequent video footage, he knew. No explanation from Lowry. It was as if she had been erased from their memories, or as if they had all suffered some vast, unimaginable trauma while off-camera that night.

But the dissolution continued despite their seeming happiness and ease. For Lowry was saying words that had no meaning and the person holding the camera responded as if she could understand him, her own speech not yet deformed.

* * *

Carnage followed him from the video screening, when he finally left, escorted by Grace back into the light, or a different kind of light. Carnage might follow him for a while. He wasn’t sure, was having difficulty putting things into words, had done little more than mumble and nod to Grace when she asked him if he was okay, while she held his arm as if she were holding him up. Yet he knew that her compassion came with a price, that he might pay for it later. So he extricated himself, insisted on leaving her behind and walking the rest of the way back in solitude.

He had a full day ahead of him still. He had to recover. Next was his scheduled time with the biologist, and then status meetings, and then … he forgot what was next. Stumbled, tripped, leaned on one knee, realized he was in the cafeteria area and its familiar green carpet with the arrow pattern pointing in from the courtyard. Caught by the light streaming from those broad, almost cathedral-like windows. It was sunny outside, but he could already see the angry gray in the middle of white clouds that signaled more afternoon showers.

In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth.

A lighthouse. A tower. An island. A lighthouse keeper. A border with a huge shimmering door. A director who might have gone AWOL across that border, through that door. A squashed mosquito on his windshield. Whitby’s anguished face. The swirling light of the border. The director’s phone in his satchel. Demonic videos housed in a memorial catafalque. Details were beginning to overwhelm him. Details were beginning to swallow him up. No chance yet to let them settle or to know which were significant, which trivial. He’d “hit the ground running” as his mother had wanted, and it wasn’t getting him very far. He was in danger of incoming information outstripping his prep work, the knowledge he’d brought with him. He’d exhausted so many memorized files, burned through tactics. And he’d have to dig into the director’s notes in earnest soon, and that would bring with it more mysteries, he was sure.

The screaming had gone on and on toward the end. The one holding the camera hadn’t seemed human. Wake up, he had pleaded with the members of the first expedition as he watched. Wake up and understand what is happening to you. But they never did. They couldn’t. They were miles away, and he was more than thirty years too late to warn them.

Control put his hand on the carpet, the green arrows up close composed of threads of a curling intertwined fabric almost like moss. He felt its roughness, how threadbare it had become over the years. Was it the original carpet, from thirty years ago? If so, every major player in those videos, in the files, had strode across it, had crisscrossed it hundreds and hundreds of times. Perhaps even Lowry, holding his camcorder, joking around before their expedition. It was as worn down as the Southern Reach, as the agency moved along its appointed grooves on this fun-house ride that was called Area X.