* * *
Carnage followed him from the video screening, when he finally left, escorted by Grace back into the light, or a different kind of light. Carnage might follow him for a while. He wasn’t sure, was having difficulty putting things into words, had done little more than mumble and nod to Grace when she asked him if he was okay, while she held his arm as if she were holding him up. Yet he knew that her compassion came with a price, that he might pay for it later. So he extricated himself, insisted on leaving her behind and walking the rest of the way back in solitude.
He had a full day ahead of him still. He had to recover. Next was his scheduled time with the biologist, and then status meetings, and then … he forgot what was next. Stumbled, tripped, leaned on one knee, realized he was in the cafeteria area and its familiar green carpet with the arrow pattern pointing in from the courtyard. Caught by the light streaming from those broad, almost cathedral-like windows. It was sunny outside, but he could already see the angry gray in the middle of white clouds that signaled more afternoon showers.
In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth.
A lighthouse. A tower. An island. A lighthouse keeper. A border with a huge shimmering door. A director who might have gone AWOL across that border, through that door. A squashed mosquito on his windshield. Whitby’s anguished face. The swirling light of the border. The director’s phone in his satchel. Demonic videos housed in a memorial catafalque. Details were beginning to overwhelm him. Details were beginning to swallow him up. No chance yet to let them settle or to know which were significant, which trivial. He’d “hit the ground running” as his mother had wanted, and it wasn’t getting him very far. He was in danger of incoming information outstripping his prep work, the knowledge he’d brought with him. He’d exhausted so many memorized files, burned through tactics. And he’d have to dig into the director’s notes in earnest soon, and that would bring with it more mysteries, he was sure.
The screaming had gone on and on toward the end. The one holding the camera hadn’t seemed human. Wake up, he had pleaded with the members of the first expedition as he watched. Wake up and understand what is happening to you. But they never did. They couldn’t. They were miles away, and he was more than thirty years too late to warn them.
Control put his hand on the carpet, the green arrows up close composed of threads of a curling intertwined fabric almost like moss. He felt its roughness, how threadbare it had become over the years. Was it the original carpet, from thirty years ago? If so, every major player in those videos, in the files, had strode across it, had crisscrossed it hundreds and hundreds of times. Perhaps even Lowry, holding his camcorder, joking around before their expedition. It was as worn down as the Southern Reach, as the agency moved along its appointed grooves on this fun-house ride that was called Area X.
People were staring at him, too, as they crisscrossed the cafeteria. He had to get up.
From the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe.
* * *
Control went from bended knee to the interrogation room with the biologist—after a brief interlude in his office. He had needed some form of relief, some way to cleanse. He’d called up the information on Rock Bay, the biologist’s longest assignment before she’d joined the twelfth expedition. From her field notes and sketches, he could tell it was her favorite place. A rich, northern rain forest with a verdant ecosystem. She’d rented a cottage there, and in addition to photographs of the tidal pools she’d studied, he had shots of her living quarters—Central’s routine thorough follow-up. The cot-like bed, the comfortable kitchen, and the black stove in the corner that doubled as a fireplace, the long spout going up into a chimney. There were aspects of the wilderness that appealed to him, that calmed him, but so too did the simple domesticity of the cottage.
Once seated in the room, Control placed a bottle of water and her files between them. A gambit he was bored with, but nevertheless … His mother had always said the repetition of ritual made pointing to the thing that had been rendered invisible all the more dramatic. Someday soon he might point to the files and make an offer.
The fluorescent lights pulsed and flickered, something beginning to devolve in them. He didn’t care if Grace watched from behind the glass or not. Ghost Bird looked terrible today, not so much sick but like she had been crying, which was how he felt. There was a darkness around her eyes and a slump to her posture. Any recklessness or amusement had been burned away or gone into hiding.