Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy) (21 page)

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 have 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—”

“Just
get the hell out
,” Saul said, and wrenched the ax free, although it cost him. Held it high on the handle, because in such close quarters it would be no use to him otherwise. There was such a terror in him now—that they wouldn’t go, that he couldn’t make them
get the hell out
. While still in his head a thousand lighthouses burned.

But Henry just shrugged, said, “Suit yourself.”

Staunch though he felt weak, to fill the silence they kept leaving like a trap: “You’re done here. I’m calling the police if I ever see you here again.” Curious, the words that came out of his mouth, that he meant them and yet was examining them already for their truth.

“But it is going to be a beautiful morning,” Suzanne said, the words hurled at him with a knife’s blade of sarcasm?

Henry almost contorted himself to avoid brushing against Saul as they passed by, as if Saul were made of the most delicate crystal. The woman gave him a mysterious smile as she turned into the spiral leading down, a smile full of teeth.

Then they disappeared down the steps.

*   *   *

When he was sure they weren’t coming back, Saul leaned over to switch on the lens. It would need some time to warm up, and then he would have to go through the checklist of tests to ensure Henry and his acolytes hadn’t changed the direction of the main reflective surfaces within the lens. In the meantime, still holding the ax, he decided he would go downstairs to make sure the odd three hadn’t lingered.

When he reached the bottom, he found no sign of them. Opening the front door, he expected to see them walking across the lighthouse grounds or getting into a car. But even when he turned on the lawn lights, there was no sign of them or of a vehicle. Not enough time had passed. Had they run part of the way and disappeared into the hazy gloom of the beach? Or scattered into the pines, hidden in the marshes, become one with the shadows there?

Then he heard the faint sound of a motorboat over the waves. A boat that must be running without lights. The only illumination now besides the moon and stars came from the faint red dot still pulsing from the island.

*   *   *

Back at the front door, though, a shadow waited for him. Henry.

“Don’t worry, it’s just me,” Henry said. “The other two are gone.”

Saul sighed, leaned on his ax. “Will you never just leave, Henry? Will you continue to be
such
a burden?” But he was relieved Suzanne and the unknown woman hadn’t remained behind.

“A burden? I’m a kind of gift, Saul. Because
I understand
. I know what’s going on.”

“I’ve told you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Saul,
I
made the hole in the lens, while Suzanne was away. I’m the one.”

Saul almost laughed. “And that’s why I should listen to you? Because you vandalized my lighthouse?”

“I did it because I knew something must be in there. Because there was this one spot where none of my equipment registered … anything.”

“So what?” Didn’t that just mean that trying to find strange things with uncertain instruments was a losing game?

“Saul, why would you look so haunted if this place wasn’t haunted also? You know, just as I know. Even if no one else believes.”

“Henry…” Should he launch into an explanation of why faith in a God did not automatically mean a faith in spirits?

“You don’t need to say anything. But you know the truth—and I’ll track it down, too. I’ll find it.”

The eagerness in Henry, the way he fairly thrummed with it, shocked Saul. It was as if Henry had thrown aside a disguise, laid bare his soul, and beneath that guarded exterior Saul had discovered one of the more virulently rigid of his flock from back north. The chosen ones who would never be dissuaded, the “Séance” side of their little brigade. He didn’t want a follower.

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.” Obstinate, because he didn’t want to be dragged into this, because he felt so ill. Because a few strange dreams did not add up to what Henry wanted them to add up to.

Henry ignored him, said, “Suzanne thinks the catalyst was something
they
brought with
them
. But that’s not true, even if I can’t tell you what combination of steps or processes brought us to this point. And yet, it happened. After we’ve spent so many years of searching in so many places with so little to show for it.”

Against his better judgment, because more and more Henry looked like a victim to him, Saul said, “Do you need help? Tell me what’s going on, and maybe I can help you. Tell me who that woman was.”

“Forget you saw her, Saul. You’ll never see her again. She doesn’t care about the supernatural world or getting to the truth, not really.”

Then Henry smiled and walked away, toward what destination Saul had no idea.

0013: CONTROL

Half the wall exploded and a thousand eyes peered in as Control sprawled from the impact in the dust and debris. His head throbbed and there was pain in his side and his left leg, but he forced himself to lie still. He was playing dead just to keep his head. He was playing dead to keep his head. A line from a book about monsters his father had read to him as a child. Rising out of a place long forgotten like a flare shot into the sky. Knocked into his brain, it kept looping. Playing dead to keep his head. The brick dust settling now, those eyes still an awful pressure. Even as the crunch of glass—the obliterating sound of that, the questing horror of that—sounded near his ear, and then the weight shifting near his legs. He fought the impulse to open his eyes, because he had to play dead to keep his head. Somewhere to his right, the knife he’d dropped, and his father’s carving falling out of his pocket. Even sprawled as he was sprawled, seeking it with a trembling hand, reflexively. He was shivering, he was shaking, the reverberations of the creature’s passage creating a pain like cracks and fissures in his bones, the brightness trying to escape, the part of him that was lonely, that wanted to reach out. Playing dead. To keep his head.