Some part of it enveloped him, held him there, against the floor, while he screamed. Something like an eclipse in his head, a thick, tactile eclipse, pushing out his own intent. Questing through his mind for something else entirely, making him turn inward to see the things Lowry had put there, the terrible, irrevocable things, and how his mother must have helped Lowry. “Check the seats for loose change,” Grandpa Jack had said, or had he? The heavy shape of the gun in his hands, Grandpa Jack’s greedy gaze, and yet even that childhood memory seemed as hazy as smoke curling up from the cigarette of someone who stood in shadow at the far end of a long, darkened room.
Those thousands of eyes regarding him, reading him from across a vast expanse of space, as if the biologist existed simultaneously halfway across the universe. The sensation of being seen and then relief and a stabbing disappointment as it withdrew, spit him out. Rejected him.
There came a sound like a weight leaving the sky, a plunging toward the waves, and the awful weight of a pushing against the air lessened, and the restless agony in his bones receded, and he was just a dirty, spent figure weeping on the floor of a ruined lighthouse. With words like collateral damage and containment and counterattacks blossoming like old spells, incantations that worked in other, far distant, lands but not here. He was back in control, but control was meaningless. His father’s sculptures in his old backyard were tipping over, one after the other. The chess moves between them in those last days before his father had died. The pressure of the piece between his fingers as he moved it, and the empty air as he let go.
Silence then. An absence into which the brightness again took up sentinel duty, swung around with ever-greater confidence to peer at him like the leviathans from his dreams. Perhaps unaware of what it protected, what it lived within.
Except he would never forget now.
* * *
Later, much later, familiar steps, and a familiar voice—Grace, extending a hand.
“Can you walk?”
Could he walk? He felt like an old man leveled by a blow from an invisible fist. He had fallen into a deep, dark, narrow fissure and now had to crawl up out of it.
“Yes, I can walk.”
Grace handing him his father’s carving, him taking it.
“Let’s go back up to the landing.”
There was a huge hole in the side of the first-floor wall. The night peered in from it. But the lighthouse had held.
“Yes, the landing.”
He would be safe there.
He wouldn’t be safe there.
* * *
Control lay there, back on the landing, sprawled across a blanket, looking up at the paint-peeled ceiling mottled by candlelight. Everything seemed so far away. Such an overwhelming psychic sense of their distance from Earth, that there might not now be astronomers, might never be astronomers who, all-knowing, could even make out the speck that was the star around which they must revolve. He found it hard to breathe, kept calling forth another passage from the pages of Whitby where the man almost waxed poetic: “Area X has been created by an organism left behind by a civilization so advanced and so ancient and so alien to us and our own intent and our own thought processes that it has long since left us behind, left everything behind.”
Wondering, too, because of all that the biologist’s intrusion had knocked loose in his head … if there was any evidence he’d ever sat in the backseat of his grandfather’s muscle car—if somewhere at Central you would find black-and-white photos shot from farther down the street, through the windshield of a car or a van. An investment. A divestment. The start of it all. He’d had dreams of cliffs and leviathans and falling into the sea. But what if the leviathans were back at Central? The shadowy forms mere outlines of memories he could not quite recall, overlaid with those that he should not remember because they had never occurred. Jump, a voice had said, and he had jumped. Two days lost at Central before he came to the Southern Reach, and only his mother’s word for it that he was being paranoid … But it was such a weight, so exhausting to analyze, as if the Southern Reach and Area X both interrogated him.
Hello, John, said some version of Lowry in his head. Surprise.
Fuck you.
Seriously, John? And here I thought you knew all along, the game we were playing. The game we’ve always been playing.
His lungs felt heavy, thick, as Grace checked him out, bandaged his elbow, told him, “You’ve bruised some ribs and your hip is bruised, too, but you seem able to move everything.”
“The biologist … she’s really gone?” This leviathan that has taken the terroir of a place and made it its own. Every moment that passed, the gospel of Whitby made more and less sense to him. Such an inconsistent heartbeat. Such simplicity to concentrate on those three pages, to focus on the parts so smudged he had to interpret the words or to smooth out a curled corner, than on the fact that the sun should not be shining above, that the sky could peel back to reveal a celestial landscape perhaps never dreamed of by humankind, the weight of that oppressive, a beast bearing down on the very center, which must be protected from that which did not bear contemplating.