Whitby was still with him, old friend, even if Lowry, too, chuckled and flailed somewhere in the background, and he clutched his father’s carving to him as best as he was able, the only talisman he had left. This machine or creature or some combination of both that can manipulate molecules, that can store energy where it will, that can hide the bulk of its intent and its machinations from us. That lives with angels within it and with the vestiges of its own terroir, the hints of its homeland, to which it can never return because it no longer exists.
And yet the Crawler had used such a cheap trick: Control had seen his mother standing there, taken a grim and primal satisfaction in recognizing it as a delusion, one that held no dominion over him—a person he forgave because how could he not forgive her, finally, standing in such a place? Free, then, free even before the Crawler had struck, had hurt him so badly. And even in that hurting somehow Control knew that pain was incidental, not the Crawler’s intent, but nothing about language, about communication, could bridge the divide between human beings and Area X. That anything approaching a similarity would be some subset of Area X functioning at its most primitive level. A blade of grass. A blue heron. A velvet ant.
He lost track of time and of the speed of his passage down, and of his transformation. He no longer knew whether he was still even a sliver of human by the time he—painfully, nauseated, crawling now, or was he loping?—came down the most ancient of steps, of stairs, to the blinding white light at the bottom shaped like the immortal plant, like a comet roaring there but stationary, and now his decision to push himself forward in the final extremity, to push through against that agony and that outward radiating command to turn back, and to enter … what? He did not know, except that the biologist had not made it this far, and he had. He had made it this far.
Now “Control” fell away again. Now he was the son of a man who had been a sculptor and of a woman who lived in a byzantine realm of secrets.
His father’s carving fell from his hand, clattered onto a step, came to a halt, there on the stairs, alongside the signs and symbols left by his predecessors. A scrawling on the walls. An empty boot.
* * *
He sniffed the air, felt under his paws the burning and heat, the intensity.
This was all that was left to him, and he would not now die on the steps; he would not suffer that final defeat.
John Rodriguez elongated down the final stairs, jumped into the light.
0026: THE DIRECTOR
Two weeks before the twelfth expedition, the old battered cell phone comes home with you. You don’t remember bringing it. You don’t know why security didn’t question it. It’s just there, in your purse, and then on the kitchen counter. The usual suspects occur to you. Maybe Whitby’s even stranger than you think or Lowry’s having a laugh at your expense. But what does it matter? You’ll just bring it back in the morning.
By then the divide between work and home is long gone—you’ve brought files home, you’ve done work at home, scribbled things on scraps of paper and sometimes on leaves, the way you used to do as a kid. In part because you take delight in imagining Lowry receiving photographs of them in his reports; but also using those materials seems somehow safer, although you can’t say why, just a heightened sense of a “touch” roving among the files, a presence you can’t pin down or quantify. An irrational thought, an idea that just came into your mind one night, working late. Going into the bathroom every so often to throw up—a side effect of the medication you are taking for the cancer. Apologizing to the janitor and saying any foolish thing you could think of other than that you were sick: “I’m pregnant.” Pregnant with cancer. Pregnant with possibility. It makes you laugh sometimes. Dear alcoholic veteran at the end of the bar, do you think you’d like to be a father?
It’s not a night for Chipper’s, not a night for garrulous Realtors and nodding drunks. You’re tired from the additional training, which has required more travel up north to Central to participate with the rest of the expedition and to receive your own training as expedition leader. To fully understand the use of hypnotic commands, to understand the importance—the specific details—of the black boxes with the red light that help to activate compliance.
So instead of going out, you put on some music, then decide on television for a while because your brain is cooked. You hear a sound in the hallway, beyond the kitchen—just something settling in the attic, but it makes you nervous. When you go look, there’s nothing there, but you get your ax from where you keep it under the bed for home defense. Then return to the couch, to watch a thirty-year-old detective show filmed in the south. Lost places, locations that don’t exist now, that will never come back. A landscape haunting you from the past—so many things gone, no longer there. During the car chases, you’re watching the backgrounds like they’re family photos you’ve never seen before.