Did she want to ally herself to such a lack, and did she have a choice?
* * *
From the window the low buildings were revealed as facades: bruised and ruined cinder-block houses with the roofs gone, vines bursting out, and the worn white paint of the sides that lay in grainy despondency, unable to contain the tangled green. In among that unintended terrarium: a row of little crosses stuck in the soil, fresh enough to have been bodies buried by Grace. Perhaps she’d lied and a handful of others had followed her over to the island, only to meet some fate Grace had avoided. She’d heard almost the entire conversation between Control and Grace, had been ready to intervene if Grace had not taken the gun from Control’s head. No one could drug her if her body didn’t want it done. She wasn’t built like that. Not anymore.
But she didn’t like the view, felt some kind of instinctual discomfort at the sight of the damaged road, the “scrapes” on the forested hills that looked less like clearings in the late-afternoon sun and more like a kind of violence. The seaward window looked out on calm seas and a mainland rendered normal and perhaps even ordinary. Yet the distance disguised the havoc wreaked on the convoy.
Behind her, Grace and Control talked, but Ghost Bird had disengaged. It was a circular discussion, a loop that Control was creating to trap himself inside of, to dig the trenches, the moat, that would keep things out. How is this possible, how is that possible, and why—agonizing over both what he knew or thought he knew and what he could never, ever know.
She knew where it would all lead, what it always led to in human beings—a decision about what to do. What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.
Even the biologist had done it, creating a pattern out of what might be random—correlating eccentric owl behavior with her lost husband. When it might have been the evidence of, the residue of, some other ritual entirely—and thus her account of the owl no more on target than her assertions about the S&SB. You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.
The allure of the island lay in its negation of why—both for the biologist and, Ghost Bird guessed, for Grace, who had lived here with this knowledge for almost three years, as it ate at her. Ate at her still, the relief of companions having done nothing to take the edge off, Ghost Bird observing her from the window and wondering if she still withheld some vital piece of information—that her watchfulness and the evidence that she didn’t sleep well provided the outline of a different, undisclosed why.
She felt so apart from both of them in that moment, as if the knowledge of how far they might be from Earth, of how time passed, ruthless, had pushed them away, and she was looking at them from the border—peering in through the shimmering door.
Control had started to return to safe ground of subjects like the lighthouse keeper, like Central. So there wouldn’t be galaxies bursting in his brain like fireworks and the Southern Reach become a redoubt of Area X and humans turning into creatures with a purpose known only to the stitching in the sky, perhaps.
“Central kept the island a secret all this time. Central buried it, buried the island, just kept sending expeditions out here, to this … this fucking ugly place, this place that isn’t really even where it’s supposed to be, this fucking place that just keeps killing people and doesn’t fucking even give you the chance to fight back because it’s always going to win anyway and the…” Control couldn’t stop. He wasn’t going to stop. All he might do is pause, trail off, and then take it up again.
So after a time, Ghost Bird stopped him. She knelt beside him, gently took the biologist’s letter and journal from him. She placed her arms around Control and held him, while Grace looked elsewhere in embarrassment, or a suppression of her own need for comfort. He thrashed in Ghost Bird’s arms, resisting, her feeling the preternatural warmth of him, and then eventually he subsided, stopped fighting, held her loosely, then held her tightly while she said not a word because to say anything—anything at all—would be to humiliate him, and she cared more about him than that. And it cost her nothing.
When he was still, she disengaged, stood, directed her attention to Grace. There was still a question to ask. With no sound from the querulous nesting birds or, indeed, much sound at all intruding beyond the waves and wind, their own breathing, and Grace rolling a can of beans back and forth with her foot.
“Where is the biologist now?” Ghost Bird asked.
“Not important,” Control said. “The least thing now. A fly or a bird or something. Or nothing. Dead?”
Grace laughed at that, in a way Ghost Bird didn’t like.
“Grace?” Not about to let her get out from under an answer.
“Yes, she is definitely still alive.”
“And where is she?”
“Somewhere out there.”
The sonorous sound now rising. The distant sense of weight and movement and bulk and substance and intent, and something in Ghost Bird’s mind linked to it, and no way to undo that.
“Not somewhere out there,” Ghost Bird said.
Grace, nodding now, frightened now. This thing she couldn’t tell them on top of all the impossible things she’d had to tell them.
“The biologist is coming here.” Coming back to where the owl had once roosted. Coming down to the place where her doppelgänger now stood. That sound. Louder now. The snapping of tree branches, of tree trunks.
The biologist was coming down the hillside.
In all her glory and monstrosity.
* * *
Ghost Bird saw it from the landing window. How the biologist coalesced out of the night, her body flickering and stitching its way into existence, in the midst of a shimmering wave that imposed itself on the reality of forested hillside. The vast bulk seething down the hill through the forest with a crack and splinter as trees fell to that gliding yet ponderous and muffled darkness, reduced to kindling by the muscle behind the emerald luminescence that glinted through the black. The smell that presaged the biologist: thick brine and oil and some sharp, crushed herb. The sound that it made: as if the wind and sea had been smashed together and in the aftershock there reverberated that same sonorous moan. A seeking. A questing. A communication or communion. That, Ghost Bird recognized; that, she understood.
The hillside come alive and sliding down to the ruined lighthouse, at a steady pace like a lava flow. This intrusion. These darknesses that re-formed into a mighty shape against the darkness of the night sky, lightened by the reflections of clouds and the greater shadow of the tree line and the forests.
It bore down on the lighthouse, that strange weight, that leviathan, still somehow half here and half not, and Ghost Bird just stood at the window waiting for it, while Grace and Control screamed at her to come away, to get away, but she would not come, would not let them pull her from the window, and stood there like the captain of a ship facing a monumental storm, the waves rising huge against the window. Grace and Control gone, running down the stairs, and then that great bulk was shoved up against the window and smashing into the doorway below in a crack and crumble of stone and brick. Leaning against the lighthouse, and the lighthouse resisting, but only just.
The song had grown so loud as to be almost unbearable. Now like deep cello strings, now like guttural clicking, now eerie and mournful.
The great slope of its wideness was spread out before Ghost Bird, the edges wavery, blurred, sliding off into some other place. The mountain that was the biologist came up almost to the windowsill, so close she could have jumped down onto what served as its back. The suggestion of a flat, broad head plunging directly into torso. The suggestion, far to the east, already overshooting the lighthouse, of a vast curve and curl of the mouth, and the flanks carved by dark ridges like a whale’s, and the dried seaweed, the kelp, that clung there, and the overwhelming ocean smell that c
ame with it. The green-and-white stars of barnacles on its back in the hundreds of miniature craters, of tidal pools from time spent motionless in deep water, time lost inside that enormous brain. The scars of conflict with other monsters pale and dull against the biologist’s skin.
It had many, many glowing eyes that were also like flowers or sea anemones spread open, the blossoming of many eyes—normal, parietal, and simple—all across its body, a living constellation ripped from the night sky. Her eyes. Ghost Bird’s eyes. Staring up at her in a vast and unblinking array.
As it smashed into the lower floor, seeking something.
As it sang and moaned and hollered.
Ghost Bird leaned out the window, reached out and pushed through the shimmering layer, so like breaking the surface of a tidal pool to touch what lay within … and her hands found purchase on that slick, thick skin, among all of those eyes, her eyes, staring up at her. She buried both hands there, felt the touch of thick, tough lashes, felt the curved, smooth surfaces and the rough, craggy ones. All of those eyes. In the multiplicity of that regard, Ghost Bird saw what they saw. She saw herself, standing there, looking down. She saw that the biologist now existed across locations and landscapes, those other horizons gathering in a blurred and rising wave. There passed between the two something wordless but deep. She understood the biologist in that moment, in a way she had not before, despite their shared memories. She might be stranded on a planet far from home. She might be observing an incarnation of herself she could not quite comprehend, and yet … there was connection, there was recognition.
Nothing monstrous existed here—only beauty, only the glory of good design, of intricate planning, from the lungs that allowed this creature to live on land or at sea, to the huge gill slits hinted at along the sides, shut tightly now, but which would open to breathe deeply of seawater when the biologist once again headed for the ocean. All of those eyes, all of those temporary tidal pools, the pockmarks and the ridges, the thick, sturdy quality of the skin. An animal, an organism that had never existed before or that might belong to an alien ecology. That could transition not just from land to water but from one remote place to another, with no need for a door in a border.
Staring up at her with her own eyes.
Seeing her.
0012: THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER
Repainted black daymark, seaward side; ladder may need to be replaced, rickety. Tended to the garden most of the day, ran errands. Went on a hike late in the day. Sighted: a muskrat, possum, raccoons, red foxes up a tree at dusk, resting in crooks like crooks. Downy woodpecker. Redheaded woodpecker.
A thousand lighthouses burned to columns of ash along the coastline of an endless island. A thousand blackened candles trailing white smoke from atop the broad, broken head of a monster rising from the sea. A thousand dark cormorants, wings awash in crimson flames, taking flight from the waves, eyes reflecting the wrath of their own extinction. Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire.
Saul woke coughing in the darkness, sweating from a thin, flat heat that flared up in wings across the bridge of his nose and over his eyes. Leaning forward through his skull to kiss that heat came the now-familiar pressure, which he’d described to the doctor in Bleakersville a couple of days ago as “dull but intense, somehow like a second skin on the inside.” That sounded bizarre, wasn’t accurate, but he couldn’t find the right words. The doctor had looked at him for a moment, almost as if Saul had said something offensive, and then diagnosed his condition as “an atypical cold, with a sinus infection,” sent him on his way with useless medicine to “clear up your sinus cavity.” His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones.
There came a whispering again, and instinctually he reached a hand out to find his lover’s shoulder, chest, but gripped only the sheets. Charlie wasn’t there, wouldn’t be back from his night gig for another week at the earliest. Unable to tell him the truth: that he still didn’t feel right, not a sickness in the normal way, not what the doctor had diagnosed, but something hiding inside, waiting for its moment. A paranoid thought, Saul knew. It was a cold, or maybe a sinus infection, like the doctor had said. A winter cold, like he’d had in the past, just with night sweats, nightmares, and verse spilling out of him, this strange sermon that spiraled up into his thoughts when he wasn’t vigilant, was coiled there now. 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.
He sat up abruptly in bed, stifled another cough.
Someone was in his lighthouse. More than one person. Whispering. Or maybe even shouting, the sound by the time it infiltrated the brick and stone, the wood and steel, brought to him through a distance, a time, that he couldn’t know. The irrational thought that he was hearing the ghosts of dozens of lighthouse keepers all at once, in a kind of threnody, the condensed chorus of a century. Another phantom sound?
The whispering, the mumbling, continued in a matter-of-fact way, without emotion, and this convinced him to investigate. He roused himself from bed, put on jeans and a sweater, and taking up the ax on the wall—a monstrous and unwieldy pendulum—he padded up the stairs in his bare feet.
The steps were cold and the spiral dark, but he didn’t want to risk turning on the lights in case a real intruder waited above. At the landing, the moon shone in at an angle, making the chairs there, the table, look like angular creatures frozen by its glow. He paused, listening. The waves below, their soft hush, stitched through with the sudden chatter of bats, close and then gone, as their echolocation pushed them away from the lighthouse walls. There should have been a hum in the background, too, a kind of purr from above, but he could not hear it. Which meant no light shot out across twenty miles to guide the ships.
He continued up as fast as he could, fueled by an anger that cut through the haze of his sickness, wanted confrontation. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.
When he barged into the lantern room, it was to the sight of the blue-black sky filled with stars—and to three figures, two standing, one bent over in front of the extinguished lens. All three holding tiny flashlights, the pinpricks of that illumination only intensifying his sense of their guilt, their complicity, but in what?
All three were staring at him.
He raised his ax in a threatening way and hit the switch, flooding the room with light.
Suzanne and a woman he didn’t know stood by the door to the railing, dressed all in black, with Henry on his knees in front of them, almost as if he’s been dealt a blow. Suzanne looked offended, as if he’d burst in on them in their own home. But the stranger hardly acknowledged his presence, stood there with arms crossed, oddly relaxed. Her hair was long and coiffed. She was dressed in an overcoat, dark slacks, and a long red scarf. Taller and older than Suzanne, she had a way of staring at him that made him concentrate on Henry instead.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Their calm faced by a man with an ax baffled him, took some of the ire out of him, this delay between accusatory question and any response. Even Henry had composed himself, gone from a look almost of fear to a thin smile.
“Why don’t you go back to sleep, Saul,” Henry said, unmoving. “Why don’t you go back to bed and let us finish up. We won’t be long now.”
Finish up with what? Henry’s ritual humiliation? His usually perfect hair was mussed, his left eye twitching. Something had happened here, right before Saul had burst in. The condescension hit Saul hard, turned bewilderment and concern back into anger.
“The hell I will. You’re trespassing. You broke in. You turned off the light. And who is this?” What was the woman to Suzanne and Henry? She did not seem to even belong to the same universe. He was more than sure that the bulge under her overcoat was a gun.
But he wasn’t going to get an answer.
“We have a key, Saul,” Henry said in a cloying tone, as if trying to soothe Saul. “We hav
e a permit, Saul.” Head turned a little to the side. Appraising. Quizzical. Telling Saul that he was the unreasonable one—the one interrupting Henry in his important studies.
“No, you broke in,” he said, retreating to an even safer position, confused by Henry’s inability to admit this basic fact, confused by the way the strange woman now regarded him with a kind of gunslinger’s sangfroid. “You turned off the light, for Chrissake! And your permit says nothing about sneaking around at night while I’m asleep. Or bringing … guests…”
Henry ignored all of that, got up, and, with a quick glance at the woman and Suzanne, came closer than Saul wanted. If Saul took even two steps back he’d be stumbling down the stairwell.
“Go back to sleep.” An urgency there, a whispered quality to the words, almost as if Henry was pleading with him, as if he didn’t want the woman or Suzanne to see the concern on his face.
“You know, Saul,” Suzanne said, “you really don’t look well. You are sick and need to rest. You are sick and you want to put down that very heavy ax, this ax that just looks so heavy and hard to hold on to, and you want to put it down, this ax, and take a deep breath and relax, and turn around and go back to sleep, go to sleep…”
A sense of drifting, of sleepiness, began to overtake Saul. He panicked, took a step back, swung the ax over his head, and, as Henry brought his hands up to protect himself, buried the axhead in the floorboards. The impact reverberated through his hands, jamming one of his wrists.
“Get out. Now. All of you.” Get out of the lighthouse. Get out of my head. In the darkness of that which is golden, the fruit shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth.
Another long silence spread, and the stranger seemed to grow taller and straighter and somehow more serious, as if he had her full attention. Her coldness, her calm, scared the shit out of him.
“We’re studying something unique, Saul,” Henry said finally. “So perhaps you can forgive our eagerness, our need to go the extra mile—”