A day went by, with the expedition spreading outward in waves from the base camp, with Control trying not to become attached to any of them. Not swayed by the charm of their frequent joking. Nor by the evident seriousness and competence of them, some of the best minds the Southern Reach could find. The clouds stretched long across the sky. A sobering moment when they encountered the sunken remains of a line of military trucks and tanks sent in before the border went down. The equipment had already been covered over in loam and vines. By the time of the fourth expedition, Control knew, all traces of it would be gone. Area X would have requisitioned it for its own purposes, privilege of the victor. But there were no human remains to disturb the first expedition, although Control could see frowns on some faces. By then, too, if you listened carefully, you could begin to hear the disruption of transmissions on the walkie-talkies issued to the expedition members, more and more queries of “Come in” and “Are you there” followed by static.
Another evening, the dawn of another day, and Control felt as if he were moving along at a rapid clip, almost able to relax into the closed vessel formed by each innocuous moment and to live there in blissful ignorance of the rest. Even though by now the disruption had spread, so that queries via walkie-talkie had become verbal miscues and misunderstandings. Listener and listened-to had begun to be colonized by some outside force but had not yet realized it. Or, at least, not voiced concerns for the camera. Control chose not to rewind these instances. They sent a prickling shiver across the back of his neck, gave him a faint sensation of nausea, increased the destabilizing sense of vertigo and claustrophobia.
Finally, though, Control could no longer fool himself. The famous twenty-second clip had come up, which the file indicated had been shot by Lowry, who had served as both the team’s anthropologist and its military expert. Dusk of the second day, with a lisp of sunset. Dull dark tower of the lighthouse in the middle distance. In their innocence, they had not seen the harm in splitting up, and Lowry’s group had decided to bivouac on the trail, among the remains of an abandoned series of houses about halfway to the lighthouse. It had hardly been enough to constitute a village, with no name on the maps, but had been the largest population center in the area.
A rustling sound Control associated with sea oats and the wind off the beach, but faint. The wreckage of the old walls formed deeper shadows against the sky, and he could just see the wide line that was the stone path running through. In the clip, Lowry shook a bit holding the camera. In the foreground, a woman, the expedition leader, was shouting, “Get her to stop!” Her face was made a mask by the light from the recorder and the way it formed such severe shadows around her eyes and mouth. Opposite, across a kind of crude picnic table that appeared fire-burned, a woman, the expedition leader, shouted, “Get her to stop! Please stop! Please stop!” A lurk and spin of the camera and then the camera steadied, presumably with Lowry still holding it. Lowry began to hyperventilate, and Control recognized that the sound he had heard before was a kind of whispered breathing with a shallow rattle threading through it. Not the wind at all. He could also just hear urgent, sharp voices from off-camera, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. The woman on the left of the screen then stopped shouting and stared into the camera. The woman on the right also stopped shouting, stared into the camera. An identical fear and pleading and confusion radiated from the masks of their faces toward him, from so far away, from so many years away. He could not distinguish between the two manifestations, not in that murky light.
Then, sitting bolt upright, even knowing what was to come, Control realized it was not dusk that had robbed the setting behind them of any hint of color. It was more as if something had interceded on the landscape, something so incredibly large that its edges were well beyond the camera’s lens. In the last second of the videotape, the two women still frozen and staring, the background seemed to shift and keep shifting … followed by a clip even more chilling to Control: Lowry in front of the camera this time, goofing off on the beach the next morning, and whoever was behind the camera laughing. No mention of the expedition leader. No sign of her on any of the subsequent video footage, he knew. No explanation from Lowry. It was as if she had been erased from their memories, or as if they had all suffered some vast, unimaginable trauma while off-camera that night.
But the dissolution continued despite their seeming happiness and ease. For Lowry was saying words that had no meaning and the person holding the camera responded as if she could understand him, her own speech not yet deformed.