Acceptance(85)

She sensed Grace on the stairs behind them, sensed that Grace meant harm, and didn’t care. It wasn’t Grace’s fault. Grace could not possibly understand what she was seeing, was seeing something else—something from back at the lighthouse or the island or her life before.

Grace shot Ghost Bird through the back. The bullet came out of her chest, lodged in the wall. The halo above the Crawler spun more furiously. Ghost Bird turned, shouted at her with the full force of the brightness. For she was not injured, had felt nothing, did not want Grace hurt.

Grace frozen there in the half-light, rifle poised, and now in her eyes the knowledge that this was futile, that this had always been futile, that there was no turning back, that there could be no return.

“Go back, Grace,” Ghost Bird said, and Grace disappeared up the steps, as if she’d never been there.

Then Ghost Bird realized, too late, that Control was no longer there, had either gone back up or had snuck past, down the stairs, headed for the blinding white light far below.





0023: THE DIRECTOR

You return to what you knew, or thought you knew: the lighthouse and the Séance & Science Brigade, reinvigorated due to the line item linking the S&SB and Jack Severance. You comb through every file three or four times, force yourself to once again review the history of the lighthouse and its ruined sister on the island.

At odd moments, you see Henry’s face, a pale circle from a great distance, moving closer and closer until you can catalog every unsavory detail. You don’t know what he means, know only that Henry is not someone to be cast aside too quickly. He nags at you like an unopened letter that everyone has, with overconfidence, predicted will contain something banal.

Your antipathy toward them made you dismissive as a child. You hadn’t been looking for ways to emblazon them in your memory, to capture details, but instead to banish them, edit them out, make them go away. This annoyance, this presence that you could tell made Saul uncomfortable, even uneasy. But what about them had made Saul feel that way?

No Henry, no Suzanne that looked like them appeared on the lists of the S&SB members, no stray photos with members unidentified leaped out to reveal either of them. Prior investigations had tracked down the names and addresses of any member assigned to the forgotten coast, and exhaustive interviews had been conducted. The answers were the same: S&SB had been conducting standard research—the usual mix of the scientific and the preternatural. Anyone who knew anything else had been trapped inside and disappeared long before the first expedition stumbled through the corridor into Area X.

Worse, no further hint of Severance, Jack or Jackie, the latter also making herself scarce in the flesh, as if something new has caught her attention or she knows you want to question her, with each phone call fading into the backdrop, further subsumed by Central. So that you redouble your efforts to find her influence in the files, but if Lowry haunts you, Severance is the kind of ghost that’s too smart to materialize.

Once again you watch the video from the first expedition, again study the background, the things out of focus, at the lighthouse. Through a flickering time lapse and sequencing, you review a kind of evolution and devolution of the lighthouse from inception through the last photograph taken by an expedition.

To the point that Grace takes you aside one day and says, “This is enough. You need to run this agency. Other people can review these files.”

“What other people? What other people are you talking about?” you snap at her, and then instantly regret it.

But there are no “other people,” and time is running out. You have to remember that, on some level, the entire Southern Reach has become a long con, and if you forget that you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

“Maybe you need time off, some rest,” Grace tells you. “Maybe you need to get some perspective.”

“You can’t have my job.”

“I do not want your fucking job.” She’s simmering, she’s about to boil over, and some part of you wants to see that, wants to know what Grace is like when she’s totally lost it. But if you push her to that, she’ll have lost you, too.

Later you go up to the rooftop with a bottle of bourbon, and Grace is already there, in one of the deck chairs. The Southern Reach building is nothing but a big, ponderous ship, and you don’t know where the helm has gotten to, can’t even lash yourself to the wheel.

“I don’t mean anything I’m saying most of the time,” you tell her. “Just remember I don’t mean anything I say.”

A dismissive sound, but also arms unfolding, grim frown loosening up. “This place is a fucking nuthouse.” Grace rarely swears anywhere but on the roof.