Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(67)
“Lowry is an *.” 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 *. 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.