Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy) (12 page)

These bodies lay strewn across the grounds approaching the lighthouse. Visceral were their wounds, bright the red of their blood, loud the sound of their moans, as abrupt and useless as the violence they still visited upon one another. But Saul, as he walked among them, had the sense that they existed somewhere else, and it was only some hidden pull, like a celestial riptide, that drew them to manifest in that place, while the darkened tower of the lighthouse rose shrouded in a spiral of shadow and flame.

Out of this landscape Henry rose, too, at the lighthouse door, with a beatific smile on his face that kept growing larger until it curled off the edges of his jaw. Words erupted from him, but not aloud.
And God said, Let there be light. God said that, Saul, and He has come from so far away, and His home is gone, but His purpose remains. Would you deny Him His new kingdom?
There came with these words such a sense of sadness that Saul recoiled from them, from Henry. They spoke to all that he had put behind him.

Inside the lighthouse, Saul found not stairs leading up but a vast tunneling into the earth—an overwhelming spiral that wound down and down.

At his back, the moon had filled utterly with blood and was plummeting to the Earth, descending in the midst of a flame so hot he could feel it at his back. The dead and the dying had taken up the cry of approaching oblivion.

He slammed the door shut behind him, took that sudden path traveling down, his hand trailing against an ice-cold wall, and saw the steps so very far below him, so that he was either watching himself from a great height or his body had become as tall as the lighthouse, and each footfall occurred stories below him.

But Henry remained at his side, unwanted, and the stairs were also filling with water with a great rush and growl of fury, and soon most of him was submerged, Henry’s fine shirt billowing with water, while Saul still walked down, down, until his head was beneath water, taking no breath, teetering, and he opened his eyes to see the fiery green-gold of words on the wall, being wrought before his eyes by an invisible scribe.

Even as he knew the words came from him, had always come from him, and were being emitted soundlessly from his mouth. And that he had been speaking already for a very long time, and that each word had been unraveling his brain a little more, a little more, even as each word also offered relief from the pressure in his skull. While what lay below waited for his mind to peel away entirely. A blinding white light, a plant with leaves that formed a rough circle, a splinter that was not a splinter.

*   *   *

When he woke up, he was sitting in a chair outside the lighthouse, with no idea how he’d gotten there. The words still lived inside of him, a sermon now coming out whether he wanted it to or not. Whether it would destroy him or not.

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms.

0008: GHOST BIRD

Soon after the storm, the trail they followed wound back to the sea along a slope of staggered hills running parallel to the water. The wet ground, the memory of those dark rivulets, made the newly seeded soil seem almost mirthful. Ahead lay the green outline of the island, illumined by the dark gold light of late afternoon. Nothing had returned to haunt the sky, but now they walked through a world of broken things, of half-destroyed silhouettes against that gleaming horizon.

“What happened here?” Ghost Bird asked him, pretending it was his domain. Perhaps it was.

Control said nothing, had said nothing for quite some time, as if he didn’t trust words anymore. Or had begun to cherish the answers silence gave him.

But something bad had happened here.

Seeking a path down to the shore that didn’t require lacerating themselves on rushes and sticker cactus, they had no choice but to encounter the memory of carnage. An old tire rut filled with mud, an abandoned boot sticking out from it. Dull glint of an automatic rifle hidden by the moist grass. Evidence of fires started and then hastily put out, tents raised and struck, then smashed apart—clear that command and control had been shattered into pieces.

“The storm didn’t do this,” she said. “This is old. Who were they?”

Still no answer.

They came to the top of a slight rise. Below lay the remains of a truck; two jeeps, one burned down almost to the wheels; a rocket launcher in a state of advanced decomposition. All of it gently cupped by, submerged in, moss and weeds and vines. Disturbing hints of yellowing bones amid rags of faded green uniforms. The only scent was a faint sweet tang from purple-and-white wildflowers nodding furious in the wind.

It was peaceful. She felt at peace.

Finally, Control spoke. “It couldn’t be personnel trapped in Area X when it expanded, unless Area X somehow sped up the rate of decay.”

She smiled, grateful to hear his voice.

“Yes, too old.” But she was more interested in another feature of the tableau spread out before them.

The beach and the land directly parallel had been subject to some catastrophic event, gouged and reworked, so that a huge rut on the shore had filled with deep water, and across the grass-fringed soil beyond lay what could be enormous drag marks or just the effects of an accelerated erosion. She had a vision of something monstrous pulling itself ashore to attack.

He pointed to the huge gouges. “What did that?”

“A tornado?”

“Something that came out of the sea. Or … what we saw in the sky?”

The wind whipped a little ragged orange flag stuck via a stake into the ground near the ruined tents.

“Something very angry, I’d say,” she said.

*   *   *

Curious. Down on the shore, they found a boat hidden against a rise of sea oats, a rowboat pulled up past the high-tide mark, complete with oars. It looked as if it had been there for a long time, waiting. A commingled sadness and nervousness came over Ghost Bird. Perhaps the boat had been left for the biologist to find, but instead they had found it. Or the biologist’s husband had never made it to the island and this boat was proof of that. But regardless, she could not really know what it meant, except that it offered a way across.

“We have just enough time,” she said.

“You want to cross now?” Control said, incredulous.

Perhaps it was foolish, but she didn’t want to wait. They might have another hour of real light and then that halo of shadows before true darkness dropped down upon them.

“Would you rather spend the night sleeping next to skeletons?”

She knew he didn’t much like sleeping at all anymore, had started having hallucinations. Shooting stars became white rabbits, the sky full of them, with smudges of darkness interrupting their leaping forms. Afraid his mind was playing tricks to disguise something even more disturbing that only she could see.

“What if whatever did this came from the island?”

Throwing it back at him: “What if whatever did this is somewhere behind us in the marshes? The boat’s seaworthy. And there’s time.”

“You don’t find it suspicious that a boat’s just waiting for us?”

“Maybe it’s the first piece of good luck we’ve had.”

“And if something erupts out of the water?”

“We row back—very fast.”

“Bold moves, Ghost Bird. Bold moves.”

But she was just as afraid, if not of the same things.

*   *   *

By the time they cast off, over that enormous scooped-out part of the shoreline, and then past a series of sandbars, the sun had begun to set. The water was a burnished dark gold. The sky above shone a deep pink, the blue-gray of dusk encroaching at the edges. Pelicans flew overhead, while terns carved the air into sharp mathematical equations and seagulls hovered, pushing against the wind.

The slap and spray of their rowing sent little whirlpools of golden water swirling off to disappear into the reflecting current. The prow of the boat had a blunt pragmatism to it that, set against all of that light, seemed serious to Ghost Bird, as if what they were doing had substance. Patterns could suffice as purpose, and the synchronicity of their rowing reassured her. They were
meant
to be rowing toward the island—to be here, in this place. The anxiety she felt about possibly finding the biologist and her husband on the island, of standing there and facing them, reversed or erased itself, lost, at least for a time, in the water.

The long, wide swathe of green that was the island at that distance was made irregular and disheveled-looking by the few tall oaks and pines that, along with the shattered spire of the lighthouse, broke through into the skyline. Trapped between: the calm motionless sky and the always restless sea, the island shimmering in the middle distance, surrounded by distortion as if it emanated heat. Sliding in between them from either side, rangy, scruffy islets with pine trees contorted low upon them, the silhouettes of these outposts extended by the rough gray-black line of oyster beds shot through with a startling iridescent white from dead shells pried open by birds.

They did not speak, even when they needed a course correction slightly to the west to avoid a sudden shallows, or when a surge in the current—waves breaking over the bow—required that they row with vigor. There was just the leaky roar of his grunting, her heavy breathing, in rhythm with the motion of her oar, the slight tapping of his oar against the frame as Control couldn’t match the fluidity of her strokes. There was in the smell of his sweat and the brine of the water, the sudden tangy smell, almost a flavor, a sense of honest effort. The tautness she felt in her triceps, her forearms as she put her back into it. The pleasing soreness that came after, letting her know this was effort, this was real.

As the light faded and the sea shed its golden glitter, the rough charcoal shadow of the boat merged with the deeper blue overtaking the waves, the stained and streaked purple of the sky. With dusk, something loosened in her chest, and her rowing became even more relaxed and powerful, so that Control glanced over with a frown. She felt his gaze upon her in little appraising glances, and sometimes she turned to blunt it or neutralize it.

The shattered lighthouse grew as the light deepened still further into night. Even ruined and ravaged and torn at by wind and erosion and storms, it was a beacon to them, had a sense of life she could not ignore. There was something almost noble about it, something about the cold and the shadows of the trees and yet this place still existing that made her both sad and proud—an unexpected feeling. Had the biologist felt this way, if she had come here? Ghost Bird didn’t think so. The biologist would have seen everything that surrounded it first.

The lesser darkness between the lines of the island and sea had resolved into the wreckage of the dock, at a slight raised angle from the sea so the right half of it lay submerged, the shore to either side a human-made welter of broken concrete pilings and rocks. There was no hint of a beach, until a dull off-white grin became visible along the curve of the shore farther to the west.

No light came from the lighthouse, but raucous clusters of birds settling in for the night on the trees competed with the waves, their rude cries coming to her now over the wind. The trajectories of bats in the sky above seemed like something planned by a drunk navigator, their bodies obliterating stars in haphazard and unpredictable fashion.

“Do you feel like someone is watching us?” she whispered.

“No, I don’t.” His voice was hoarse, as if he’d been talking to her the whole time, some effect of the wind and the salt air.

“
I
feel like someone is watching us.”

“Birds. Bats. Trees.” But said with too much dismissal. He didn’t believe it was just birds, bats, trees, either.

*   *   *

The gulping slosh under the dock as they lashed the rowboat to the pier, the lap-licking wash and retreat over the rocks below, the creak of the planks as they came up the causeway. The anonymous birds in the trees fell silent, but a throbbing series of croaks continued from various parts of the overgrown grounds of the lighthouse. Somewhere beyond that the deliberate footfalls of some medium-size mammal making its way through the underbrush. While above them the pale, almost luminous jagged spire of the lighthouse rose, framed by the dark sky and the stars arrayed around it as if it was the center of the universe.

“We’ll spend the night in the lighthouse, and then forage in the morning.” It was warmer here than on the sea, but still cold.

She knew it could not have escaped his notice—the worn little path through the long weeds, visible by the starlight. Only regular traffic or maintenance would cause the weeds not to grow there.

Control nodded, face unreadable in the darkness, and stooped to pick up a stick, brandished it. They had no guns—had long ago discarded their few modern supplies, acknowledgment of Area X’s strange effects, keeping just one flashlight. Turning on that flashlight now would have felt unwise and foolish. But she had a gutting knife, and she took that out.

The lighthouse door lay on the landward side, and the path led right to it. The original door was missing, but in its place leaned a massive wooden barricade that she slowly realized was the door from a stable or something similar. With some effort, they moved it to the side, stood in the threshold. The inside smelled of decay and driftwood. It smelled fresher than she’d expected.

She lit a match, saw, obscured by shadows surging against the walls, that the central spiral staircase lay naked, like a giant stone corkscrew, in the middle of the ground floor, and that it ascended into a giant hole above. Unstable at best. At worst, all of it about to come down.

As if reading her thoughts, Control said, “It could probably still hold our weight. They built it in such a way that the supporting walls take most of the burden. But that’s pretty raw.”

She nodded, could see the steel rods running through it now, a skeleton that inspired a little more confidence.

The match went out. She lit another.

The ground floor was covered in dead leaves and a smattering of branches, a catacomb of smaller rooms hidden from view at the back. A bare concrete floor, with the scars to show that someone had ripped up the floorboards.