Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

by Jeff VanderMeer

  He was still in shock from the bar, kept believing that if he went back it would prove to be some kind of waking vision or even a terrible joke. The smashing of Old Jim’s bloody fingers against the piano keys. Sadi’s look of being undone, betrayed by her own words. Brad, standing there, gaze locked on the wall as if someone had frozen him in place. Thank God Trudi had already left. What would he tell Gloria when he saw her again? What would he tell Charlie?

  Saul parked the truck, stumbled to the lighthouse, unlocked the door, slammed it behind him, and stood in the entrance breathing hard. He’d call the police, tell them to come to the bar, to check on poor Old Jim and the others. He’d call the police, and then he’d try to get hold of Charlie out at sea, and then call anyone else he could think of. Because something terrible must be happening here, something beyond his illness.

  But no one answered. No one answered. The phone was dead. He could run, but where to? The light had gone out. The light had gone out.

  Armed with a flare gun, Saul stumbled up the stairs, one hand against the wall to keep his balance. The splinter was an insect bite. Or an overture. An intruder. Or nothing, nothing to do with this, as he slipped and almost fell, some kind of moisture on the steps, a fuzziness on the wall that came away in his hands, that he had to brush off against his jeans. The Light Brigade. They’d given him an experimental drug or exposed him to radiation with their equipment. And the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive.

  Near the top, the wind whistled down briskly and he welcomed the chill, the way it told him a world existed outside of his mind, helped him deny these symptoms that had now crept back in. He felt a strong tidal pull, and a vibration that went with the pull, and he was burning up.

  Or was the lighthouse burning up? Because a glow awaited him at the top of the stairs, and not the faint green phosphorescence that now arose from the walls, the steps. No, this was a sharp light that knew its purpose, he could tell that already. But it was not the light from the lens, and he hesitated just below the lantern room for a moment. He sagged onto a step, not sure he wanted to see what new beacon had supplanted the old. His hands shook. He trembled. Could not get Old Jim’s fingers out of his head, nor the words of the sermon that still uncurled all unbidden from his mind. That he could neither resist nor keep out.

  But this was his place now, and he could not abandon it.

  He rose. He turned. He walked into the lantern room.

  The rug had been moved.

  The trapdoor lay open.

  A light shone out from that space. A light that circled and curved even as it had the discipline not to trickle across the floor, or refract off the ceiling, but instead mimicked a door, a wall, rising from the watch room.

  Quietly, flare gun held tight, Saul crept closer to the edge of the trapdoor and the source of the light, while the feeling increased that the stairs behind him had grown stranger still, that he should not look back. Bending at the knees, he peered down into the watch room, feeling the heat of that light crossing his face, his neck, singeing his beard.

  At first all he saw was a vast mound of papers and what looked like notebooks that now rose from the watch room, a great behemoth, a disheveled library of shadow and reflection that leaped into and out of focus—ghosts and figments, curling and questing, there but not quite there, a record that he did not understand because it did not yet exist.

  Then his eyes adjusted and the source of the light coalesced: a blossom. A pure white blossom with eight petals, which had unfurled from the top of a familiar plant, whose roots disappeared into the papers below. The plant that had enticed him on the lighthouse lawn, so long ago, to reach down, drawn by a glitter, a gleam.

  An almost holy intensity rose from somewhere within and filled Saul up, along with a dizziness. Light was leaking out of him now, too, coursing down through the trapdoor to communicate with what lay below, and there came the sensation of something pulling him close, holding him tight … of recognizing him.

  In rebellion against that, he rose from his crouch, arms out to the side for balance, teetering there on the edge of the trapdoor, staring down into that swirl of petals until he could resist no more, was falling into the pure white corona of a circle of fire, into a congregation of flames, a burning so pure that turning to ash was a kind of relief, engulfed by light that consecrated not just him but everything around him, anchoring receiver and received.

  There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.

  * * *

  When he regained consciousness, he was lying on the floor of the watch room, on his back, looking up. There was no mound of notebooks. There was no impossible flower.

  Just the bodies of Henry and Suzanne, with no apparent wounds upon them, expressions blank and more haunting because of it. He recoiled from them, crawled away from them, staring. In the shadows there might have been what looked like the limp, desiccated remains of a plant, but he had no desire other than to leave that space.

  He clambered up the ladder.

  A figure in silhouette stood in front of the open door to the railing. A figure with a gun.

  Impossibly, it was Henry.

  “I thought you’d be gone longer, Saul,” Henry said, in a distant tone. “I thought you might not even come back tonight. That maybe you’d go over to Charlie’s, except Charlie is out fishing—and Gloria’s staying with her father. Not that she would be out this late anyway, or be of much help to you. But just so you know where we stand.”

  “You killed Suzanne,” Saul said, unbelieving even now.

  “She wanted to kill me. She didn’t believe in what I found. None of them believed. Not even you.”

  “You killed yourself.” Your twin. Knowing that even if it made a difference, he couldn’t reach the flare gun in time, or even make it two steps into a headlong flight down the stairs before Henry would shoot him, too.

  “A strange thing,” Henry said. Where before he had been indistinct, hurting, in need of succor, now he had snapped back into focus. “A strange thing to kill yourself. I thought maybe it was a kind of wraith. But maybe Suzanne was right instead.”

  “Who are you?”

  Ignoring him: “I found it, Saul, like I said I would. Or it found me. Only, it wasn’t what I thought. Do you know what it is, Saul?” Almost pleading.

  There was no good answer to Henry’s question.

  He took two steps toward Henry, as if he were watching someone else do it. He was an albatross, floating motionless in a high-above trough of air, gliding beneath the clouds with their dark underbellies, a coordinate of shadow and light that kept moving, a roving latitude and longitude, and far, far below, stood Saul and Henry, in the lantern room.

  Saul took a third step, the plant a beacon in his head.

  A fourth step and Henry shot him in the shoulder. The bullet penetrated and passed through, and Saul didn’t feel a thing. Saul was still floating far above, intent on navigation, on riding thermals, an animal that hardly ever came down to land but just kept flying and flying.

  Saul rushed Henry, rammed his bleeding shoulder into Henry’s chest, and the two of them staggered, grappling out the door and toward the railing, Henry’s gun spinning out of his hand and across the floor. So close, staring into Henry’s eyes, Saul had the sense of the man being at a remove, a time delay—a gap or distance between receipt, acknowledgment, and response: a message coming to him from very far away. As if Henry were dealing with some other, completely different situation … while on some level still able to appraise him, to judge him. When you hide your face, they are terrified; when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust.

  Because Henry was drawing them both to the railing. Because Henry had a firm grip on him and was drawing them both to the railing. Except Henry was saying to Saul, “What are you doing?” But Saul wasn’t doing it, Henry was
and didn’t seem to realize it.

  “It’s you,” the albatross managed to say. “You’re doing it, not me.”

  “No, I’m not.” Henry beyond panic now, writhing and trying to get loose, but still leading them to the railing, fast now, and Henry begging him to stop what he could not stop. Yet Henry’s eyes did not send out the same message as his words.

  Henry hit the railing—hard—and Saul a second later, swung to the side by momentum, and then they both went over, and only then, when it was too late, did Henry let go, the wind ripping screams from his throat, and Saul plummeted beside him through the cold empty air—falling too fast, too far, while a part of him still looked down from above.

  The surf, like white flames surging and questing across the sand.

  I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?

  The awful thud and crack when he hit.

  0025: CONTROL

  There came to Control in that moment of extremity—almost unable to move, unable to speak—an overwhelming feeling of connection, that nothing was truly apart in the same way that he had found even the most random scrawl in the director’s notes joined some greater pattern. And although the pressure was increasing and he was in a great deal of pain, the kind of pain that would not leave him soon, if ever, there arose a powerful music within him that he did not fully understand as he slipped and slid down the curving stairs, pulling himself at times, his left arm useless by his side, his father’s carving clenched in a fist he could no longer feel, the brightness welling up through his mouth, his eyes, and filling him at the same time, as if the Crawler had accelerated the process. He was slipping in part because he was changing, he knew that, could tell that he was no longer entirely human.

  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.

  You nod off. You come to. You nod off again. Then you hear something creeping low and soft across the tiles of the kitchen, just out of view. A kind of terrified lurching shudder burns through you. There’s a slow scuttle to the sound, so you can’t really identify it, get a sense of what has crept into your house. You don’t move for a very long time, waiting to hear more, not wanting to hear more. You think you might not ever get up, go to the kitchen, see what animal awaits you there. But it’s still moving, it’s still making noise, and you can’t sit there forever. You can’t just sit there.

  So you get up, you brandish the ax, you walk to the kitchen counter, lean on tiptoe to peer at the kitchen floor, but whatever it is has nudged up against the left side, out of view. You’re going to have to walk around and confront it directly.

  There, scuttling across the floor, blind and querulous, is the old cell phone—scrabbling and bulky, trying to get away from you. Or trying to burrow into the cabinets, to hide there. Except it isn’t moving now. It hasn’t moved the whole time you’ve been staring at it. You look at the phone in shock for so many moments. Maybe from the surprise of it or as a defense mechanism, all you can think is that your work has followed you home. All you can think of is the monstrous breach. Either in reality or in your mind.

  With trembling hands, you retrieve the cell phone from the floor, ax held ready in your other hand. It feels
warm, the melted nature of the leather against the phone creating the texture of skin. You get a metal box you use for tax receipts, toss them into a plastic bag, put the phone inside, lock it, put it on the kitchen counter. You resist the urge to toss the box into your backyard, or to drive with it to the river and fling it into the darkness.

  Instead you fumble for a cigar from the humidor buried underneath some clothes in your bedroom. The cigar you pull out is dry and flaking, but you don’t care. You light it, go into your home office, shove the notes you’ve brought home into a plastic bag. Every unsupportable theory. Every crazed journal rant rescued from old expedition accounts. Every incomprehensible scrawling. Shove them in there with a vengeance, for some reason shouting at Lowry as you do because he’s peering into your thoughts on some mission of his own. You hiss at him. Stay the fuck away! Don’t come in here. Except he already has, is the only person screwed up enough, knowing what he must know, to do this to you.

  There are notes you weren’t sure you remembered writing, that you couldn’t be sure had been there before. Were there too many notes? And if so, who has written the others? Did Whitby sneak into your office and create them, trying to help you? Forging your handwriting? You resist the urge to take the notes out of the bag, sort through them again, be pulled down by that horrible weight. You take the bag of crazy outside with a glass of red wine, stand there on the stone patio smoking while you turn on the grill even though a storm’s coming, even though you can feel the first raindrops, wait a minute or two, then with a snarl upend the bag onto the flames.

  You’re a large, authoritative woman, standing in her backyard, burning a crapload of secret papers, of receipts and other things that reflect the totality, the banality of your life—transformed into “evidence” by what you’ve scrawled there. Squirt lighter fluid over it to make it worse or better, toss this ceaseless, inane, stupid, ridiculous, pathetic detritus on top of it, light a match, watch it all go up in billowing, eye-watering, bile-like smoke. Curling and blackened, meaningless. It doesn’t matter because there’s still a flickering light in your head that you can’t snuff out, a wavering candle distant in the darkness of a tunnel that was really a tower that was a topographical anomaly that was you reaching out to touch Saul Evans’s face. It is all too much. You slump alongside the wall, watch as the flames rise up and then bank, and are gone. It isn’t enough. There’re still more inside—on the side table by the couch, on the kitchen counter, on the mantel in the bedroom; you’re awash in them, drowning in them.