So there she was again, a sturdy figure on the rocks, in her winter-weather gear—jeans, hooded jacket and sweater underneath, thick boots for wide feet—as he finished with the boat and brought compost around back in the wheelbarrow. She was talking to him. She was always talking to him, ever since she’d started coming by about a year ago.
“You know my ancestors lived here,” she said. “Mama says they lived right here, where the lighthouse is.” She had a deep and level voice for one so young, which sometimes startled him.
“So did mine, child,” Saul told her, upturning the wheelbarrow load into the compost pile. Although truth was, the other side of his family had been an odd combination of rumrunners and fanatics who he liked to say, down at the bar, “had come to this land fleeing religious freedom.”
After considering Saul’s assertion for a moment, Gloria said, “Not before mine.”
“Does it matter?” He noticed he’d missed some caulking on the boat.
The child frowned; he could feel her frown at his back, it was that powerful. “I don’t know.” He looked over at her, saw she’d stopped hopping between rocks, had decided that teetering on a dangerously sharp one made more sense. The sight made his stomach lurch, but he knew she never slipped, even though she seemed in danger of it many times, and as many times as he’d talked to her about it, she’d always ignored him.
“I think so,” she said, picking up the conversation. “I think it does.”
“I’m one-eighth Indian,” he said. “I was here, too. Part of me.” For what that was worth. A distant relative had told him about the lighthouse keeper’s job, it was true, but no one else had wanted it.
“So what,” she said, jumping to another sharp rock, balancing atop it, arms for a moment flailing and Saul taking a couple of steps closer to her out of fear.
She annoyed him much of the time, but he hadn’t yet been able to shake her loose. Her father lived in the middle of the country somewhere, and her mother worked two jobs from a bungalow up the coast. The mother had to drive to far-off Bleakersville at least once a week, and probably figured her kid could manage on her own every now and again. Especially if the lighthouse keeper was looking after her. And the lighthouse held a kind of fascination for Gloria that he hadn’t been able to break with his boring shed maintenance and wheelbarrow runs to the compost pile.
In the winter, too, she would be by herself a lot anyway—out on the mudflats just to the west, poking at fiddler crab holes with a stick or chasing after a half-domesticated doe, or peering at coyote or bear scat as if it held some secret. Whatever was on offer.
“Who’re those strange people, coming around here?” she asked.
That almost made him laugh. There were a lot of strange people hidden away on the forgotten coast, himself included. Some were hiding from the government, some from themselves, some from spouses. A few believed that they were creating their own sovereign states. A couple probably weren’t in the country legally. People asked questions out here, but they didn’t expect an honest answer. Just an inventive one.
“Who exactly do you mean?”
“The ones with the pipes?”
It took Saul a moment, during which he imagined Henry and Suzanne skipping along the beach, pipes in their mouths, smoking away furiously.
“Pipes. Oh, they weren’t pipes. They were something else.” More like huge translucent mosquito coils. He’d let the Light Brigade leave the coils in the back room on the ground floor for a few months last summer. How in the heck had she seen that, anyway?
“Who are they?” she persisted, as she balanced now on two rocks, which at least meant Saul could breathe again.
“They’re from the island up the coast.” Which was true—their base was still out on Failure Island, home to dozens of them, a regular warren. “Doing tests,” as the rumors went down at the village bar, where they did indeed like a good story. Private researchers with government approval to take readings. But the rumors also insinuated that the S&SB had some more sinister agenda. Was it the orderliness, the precision, of some of them or the disorganization of the others that led to this rumor? Or just a couple of bored, drunk retirees emerging from their mobile homes to spin stories?
The truth was he didn’t know what they were doing out on the island, or what they had planned to do with the equipment on the ground floor, or even what Henry and Suzanne were doing at the top of the lighthouse right now.
“They don’t like me,” she said. “And I don’t like them.”
That did make him chuckle, especially the brazen, arms-folded way she said it, like she’d decided they were her eternal enemy.
“Are you laughing at me?”
“No,” he said. “No, I’m not. You’re a curious person. You ask questions. That’s why they don’t like you. That’s all.” People who asked questions didn’t necessarily like being asked questions.
“What’s wrong with asking questions?”
“Nothing.” Everything. Once the questions snuck in, whatever had been certain became uncertain. Questions opened the way for doubt. His father had told him that. “Don’t let them ask questions. You’re already giving them the answers, even if they don’t know it.”
“But you’re curious, too,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“You guard the light. And light sees everything.”
The light might see everything, but he’d forgotten a few last tasks, a few last things that would keep him out of the lighthouse for longer than he liked. He moved the wheelbarrow onto the gravel next to the station wagon. He felt a vague urgency, as if he should check on Henry and Suzanne. What if they had found the trapdoor and done something stupid, like fallen in and broken their strange little necks? Staring up just then, he saw Henry staring down from the railing far above, and that made him feel foolish. Like he was being paranoid. Henry waved, or was it some other gesture? Dizzy, Saul looked away as he made a kind of wheeling turn, disoriented by the sun’s glare.
Only to see something glittering from the lawn—half hidden by a plant rising from a tuft of weeds near where he’d found a dead squirrel a couple of days ago. Glass? A key? The dark green leaves formed a rough circle, obscuring whatever lay at its base. He knelt, shielded his gaze, but the glinting thing was still hidden by the leaves of the plant, or was it part of a leaf? Whatever it was, it was delicate beyond measure, yet perversely reminded him of the four-ton lens far above his head.
The sun was a whispering corona at his back. The heat had risen, but there was a breeze that lifted the leaves of the palmettos in a rattling stir. The girl was somewhere behind him singing a nonsense song, having come back off the rocks earlier than he’d expected.
Nothing existed in that moment except for the plant and the gleam he could not identify.
He had gloves on still, so he knelt beside the plant and reached for the glittering thing, brushing up against the leaves. Was it a tiny shifting spiral of light? It reminded him of what you might see staring into a kaleidoscope, except an intense white. But whatever it was swirled and glinted and eluded his rough grasp, and he began to feel faint.
Alarmed, he started to pull back.
But it was too late. He felt a sliver enter his thumb. There was no pain, only a pressure and then numbness, but he still jumped up in surprise, yowling and waving his hand back and forth. He frantically tore off the glove, examined his thumb. Aware that Gloria was watching him, not sure what to make of him.
Nothing now glittered on the ground in front of him. No light at the base of the plant. No pain in his thumb.
Slowly, Saul relaxed. Nothing throbbed in his thumb. There was no entry point, no puncture. He picked up the glove, checked it, couldn’t find a tear.
“What’s wrong?” Gloria asked. “Did you get stung?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
He felt other eyes upon him then, turned, and there stood Henry. How had he gotten down the stairs so fast? Had more time passed than he’d
imagined?
“Yes—is something wrong, Saul?” Henry asked, but Saul could find no way to reconcile the concern expressed with any concern in the tone of his voice. Because there was none. Only a peculiar eagerness.
“Nothing is wrong,” he said, uneasy but not knowing why he should be. “Just pricked my thumb.”
“Through your gloves? That must have been quite the thorn.” Henry was scanning the ground like someone who had lost a favorite watch or a wallet full of money.
“I’m fine, Henry. Don’t worry about me.” Angry more at looking silly over nothing, but also wanting Henry to believe him. “Maybe it was an electric shock.”
“Maybe …” The gleam of the man’s eyes was the light of a cold beacon coming to Saul from far off, as if Henry were broadcasting some other message entirely.
“Nothing is wrong,” Saul said again.
Nothing was wrong.
Was it?
0002: Ghost Bird
On the third day in Area X, with Control as her sullen companion, Ghost Bird found a skeleton in the reeds. It was winter in Area X now, and this had become more apparent once the trail meandered away from the sea that had been their entry point. The wind was cold and pushed against their faces, their jackets, the sky a watchful gray-blue that held back some essential secret. The alligators and the otters and the muskrats had retreated into the mud, ghosts somewhere beneath the dull slap and gurgle of water.
Far above, where the sky became a deeper blue, she caught a hint of some reflective surface, identified it as a wheeling cone of storks, the sun glinting silver from their white-and-gray feathers as they spun up into the sky at a great distance and with a stern authority, headed … where? She could not tell if they were testing the confines of their prison, able to recognize that invisible border before they crossed it, or like every other trapped thing here, simply operating on half-remembered instinct.
She stopped walking, and Control stopped with her. A man with prominent cheekbones, large eyes, an unobtrusive nose, and light brown skin. He was dressed in jeans and a red flannel shirt, along with a black jacket and a brand of boots that wouldn’t have been her first choice for walking through the wilderness. The director of the Southern Reach. The man who had been her interrogator. An athlete’s build, perhaps, but as long as they’d been in Area X, he’d been stooped over, muttering, as he examined forever and always a few water-stained, wrinkled pages he’d saved from some useless Southern Reach report. Flotsam from the old world.
He barely noticed the interruption.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Birds.”
“Birds?” As if the word was foreign to him, or held no meaning. Or significance. But who knew what held significance here.
“Yes. Birds.” Further specificity might be lost on him.
She took up her binoculars, watched the way the storks turned this way and then that way but never lost their form: a kind of living, gliding vortex in the sky. The pattern reminded her of the circling school of fish into which they’d emerged in shock, their surprising entrance into Area X from the bottom of the ocean.
Staring down at her, did the storks recognize what they saw? Were they reporting back to someone or something? Two nights running, she had sensed animals gathering at the edge of their campfire, dull and remote sensors for Area X. Control wanted more urgency, as if a destination meant something, while she wanted more data.
There had already been some misunderstandings about their relationship since reaching the beach—especially about who was in charge—and in the aftermath he’d taken back his name, asked that she call him Control again rather than John, which she respected. Some animals’ shells were vital to their survival. Some animals couldn’t live for long without them.
His disorientation wasn’t helped by a fever and a sense, from her own accounts of “a brightness,” that he too was being assimilated and might soon be something not himself. So perhaps she understood why he buried himself in what he called “my terroir pages,” why he had lied about wanting to find solutions when it was so clear to her that he just needed something familiar to hold on to.
At one point on the first day, she had asked him, “What would I be to you back in the world—you at one of your old jobs, me at my old job?” He had not had an answer, but she thought she knew: She would be a suspect, an enemy of the right and the true. So what were they to each other here? Sometime soon she would have to force a real conversation, provoke conflict.
But for now, she was more interested in something off in the reeds to their left. A flash of orange? Like a flag?
She must have stiffened, or something in her demeanor gave her away, because Control asked, “What’s wrong? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing, probably,” she said.
After a moment, she found the orange again—a scrap, a tattered rag tied to a reed, bending back and forth in the wind. About three hundred feet out in the reed-ocean, that treacherous marsh of sucking mud. There seemed to be a shadow or depression just beyond it, the reeds giving way to something that couldn’t be seen from their vantage.
She loaned him the binoculars. “See it?”
“Yes. It’s a … a surveyor’s mark,” he said, unimpressed.
“Because that’s likely,” she said, then regretted it.
“Okay. Then it’s ‘like’ a surveyor’s mark.” He handed back the binoculars. “We should stay on the trail, get to the island.” A sincere utterance of island for once, proportional to his dislike of the unspoken idea that they investigate the rag.
“You can stay here,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t. Knowing she would have preferred he remain behind so she could be alone in Area X for a few moments.
Except: Was anyone ever truly alone out here?
For a long time after she had woken in the empty lot, then been taken to the Southern Reach for processing, Ghost Bird had thought she was dead, that she was in purgatory, even though she didn’t believe in an afterlife. This feeling hadn’t abated even when she’d figured out that she had come back across the border into the real world by unknown means … that she wasn’t even the original biologist from the twelfth expedition but a copy.
She had admitted as much to Control during the interrogation sessions: “It was quiet and so empty … I waited there, afraid to leave, afraid there might be some reason I was meant to be there.”
But this didn’t encompass the full arc of her thoughts, of her analysis. There was not just the question of whether she was really alive but, if so, who she was, made oblique by her seclusion in her quarters at the Southern Reach. Then, examining the sense that her memories were not her own, that they came to her secondhand and that she could not be sure whether this was because of some experiment by the Southern Reach or an effect caused by Area X. Even through the intricacies of her escape on the way to Central, there was a sense of projection, of it happening to someone else, that she was only the interim solution, and perhaps that distance had aided her in avoiding capture, added a layer of absolute calm to her actions. When she’d reached the remote Rock Bay, so familiar to the biologist who had been there before her, she’d had peace for a while, let the landscape subsume her in a different way—let it break her down so she could be built up again.
But only when they had burst through into Area X had she truly gained the upper hand on her unease, her purposelessness. She had panicked for a second as the water pressed in on her, surrounded her, evoked her own drowning. But then something had turned on, or had come back, and raging against her own death, she had exulted in the sensation of the sea, welcomed having to fight her way to the surface—bursting through such a joyful hysteria of biomass—as a sort of proof that she was not the biologist, that she was some new thing that could, wanting to survive, cast out her fear of drowning as belonging to another.
In the aftermath, even resuscitating Control on the beach had seemed undeniable proof of her own sovereignty. As had her insistence on heading for the island, n
ot the lighthouse. “Wherever the biologist would have gone, that is where I will go.” The truth, the rightness, in that had given her hope, despite the sense that everything she remembered she had observed through a window opening onto another person’s life. Not truly experienced. Or not experienced yet. “You want a lived-in life because you don’t have one,” Control had said to her, but that was a crude way to put it.
There had been little new to experience since. Nothing monstrous or unusual had yet erupted from the horizon in almost three full days of walking. Nothing unnatural, except for this hyperreal aspect to the landscape, these processes working beneath the surface. At dusk, sometimes, too, an image of the biologist’s starfish came to her, dimly shining, like a compass in her head that drew her on, and she realized again that Control couldn’t feel what she felt here. He couldn’t navigate the dangers, recognize the opportunities. The brightness had left her, but something else had stepped in to replace it.
“Counter-shading,” she’d said when he’d confessed his confusion that Area X looked so normal. “You can know a thing and not know a thing. A grebe’s markings from above are obvious. You cannot miss a grebe from above. Seen from below, though, as it floats in the water, it is practically invisible.”
“Grebe?”
“A bird.” Another bird.
“All of this is a disguise?” He said it with a kind of disbelief, as if the reality were strange enough.
Ghost Bird had relented, because it wasn’t his fault. “You’ve never walked through an ecosystem that wasn’t compromised or dysfunctional, have you? You may think you have, but you haven’t. So you might mistake what’s right for what’s wrong anyway.”
That might not be true, but she wanted to hold on to the idea of authority—didn’t want another argument about their destination. Insisting on heading for the island was protecting not just her life but his, too, she believed. She had no interest in last chances, last desperate charges into the guns of the enemy, and something in Control’s affect made her believe he might be working toward that kind of solution. Whereas she was not yet committed to anything other than wanting to know—herself and Area X.
Area X Three Book Bundle Page 47
