Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(79)

He took Whitby’s terroir manuscript with him, feeling that perhaps selective readings from it would convince Whitby of the problem. He again crossed the wide expanse of the cafeteria. The huge cafeteria windows gathered up the gray of the sky and pushed it down onto the tables, the chairs; it would rain again before long. The tables were empty. The little dark bird or bat had stopped flying and sat perched high up on a steel beam near the windows. “There’s something on the floor.” “Have you ever seen anything like that?” Fragments of conversation as he passed by the door to the kitchen, and then a kind of sharp but faint weeping sound. For a moment, it puzzled Control. Then he realized it must come from some machine being operated by the cafeteria staff.

Something else had been gnawing at Control for much longer, as if he’d forgotten his wallet or other essential item when he’d left the house. But it now resolved, the weeping sound pushing it into his conscious mind. An absence. The rotting honey smell was gone. In fact, he realized he hadn’t smelled rotting honey the entire day, no matter where he had been. Had Grace at least passed on that recommendation?

He turned the corner into the corridor leading to the science division, kept walking under the fluorescent lights, immersed in a rehearsal of what he would say to Whitby, anticipating what Whitby might say back, or not say, feeling the weight of the man’s insane manuscript.

Control reached out for the large double doors. Reached for the handle, missed it, tried again.

But there were no doors where there had always been doors before. Only wall.

And the wall was soft and breathing under the touch of his hand.

He was screaming, he thought, but from somewhere deep beneath the sea.





AFTERLIFE





Control, at the heart of a different tragedy, could see nothing but Rachel McCarthy with a bullet in her head, falling endlessly into the quarry. The sense of nothing being real during that time. That the room they had put him in, and the investigator assigned to him, were both constructs, and if he just kept holding on to that thought eventually the investigator would dissolve into nothing and the walls of his cell would fall away, and he would walk out into a world that was real. Then and only then would he wake up to continue with his life, which would follow the path it had followed to that point.

Even though the chair for the long hours of questioning cut into the back of his thigh and left a mark. Even though he smelled the bitter cigarette smoke on the investigator’s jacket, and heard the hiccupping whir of the tape in the recorder the man had brought in as a backup for the room’s video recording.

Even though the texture of the wall felt like a manta ray from the aquarium: firm and smooth, with a serrated roughness but with more give, and behind it the sense of something vast, breathing in and out. A rupture into the world of the rotted honey smell, fading fast but hard to forget. Like the swirling flourish of a line of balsamic on a chef’s plate. The line of dark blood leading to a corpse on a cop show.

His parents had read “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright” to him as a child. They had collaborated on a social studies project with him, his mother on research and his father on cut-and-paste. They had taught him how to ride a bike. The pathetic little Christmas tree next to the shed linked forever now to the first holiday season he could remember. Standing on the pier in Hedley, looking across the river led to the lake by the cottage where he would fish with his grandpa. Naming the sculptures in his father’s backyard became a chess set on the mantel. The wall was still breathing, though, no matter what he did. The impact of a long-ago linebacker’s helmet to the chest during a scrimmage, surfacing only now so that he had trouble breathing, all the air knocked out of his lungs.

* * *

Control didn’t remember leaving the corridor but had recovered himself in mid-sprint toward the cafeteria. Whitby’s terroir manuscript clenched in a viselike grip. He meant to retrieve some other things from his office. He meant to go into his office and retrieve some other things. His office. His other things.

He was pulling every fire alarm he passed. He was shouting over the klaxon at people who weren’t there to leave. Disbelief. Shock. Trapped inside his head the way some were trapped in the science division.

But in the cafeteria he was running so fast he slipped and fell. When he got up, he saw Grace, holding open the door leading to the courtyard. Someone to tell. Someone to tell. There was only wall. There was only wall.

He shouted her name, but Grace did not turn, and as he came up on her, he saw that she stared at someone slowly walking up from the edge of the courtyard through a thick rain, against the burnt umber of the singed edges of the swamp beyond. A tall, dark outline lit by the late-afternoon sun, shining through the downpour. He would recognize her anywhere by now. Still in her expedition clothes. So close to a gnarled tree behind her that at first she had merged with it in the gray of the rain. And she was still making her way to Grace. And Grace, in three-quarter profile there in front of her, smiling, body taut with anticipation. This false return, this corrupted reunion. This end of everything.

For the director trailed plumes of emerald dust and behind her the nature of the world was changing, filling with a brightness, the rain losing its depth, its darkness. The thickness of the layers of the rain getting lost, taken away, no longer there.

The border was coming to the Southern Reach.

* * *

In the parking lot, shoving the key into the ignition, office forgotten, not wanting to look back. Not wanting to see if an invisible wave was about to overtake him. Still cars in the parking lot, still people inside, but he didn’t care. He was leaving. He was done. A scrabbling, broken-nail panic at the thought of being trapped there. Forever. Shouting at the car to start after it had already started.