Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(69)

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.”





022: GAMBIT

Late morning. An attempt to regain … control. The old familiar debriefing room whose deficiencies he had become oblivious to, expecting a call from his mother with a report about the director’s house that couldn’t possibly come until hours from now.