Authority (28 page)

He believed that Central was in disarray, and that he’d been run by a faction, under
hypnotic control. Now the ceiling was no doubt falling in on the clandestine basement,
and the megalodon was feeling nervous within the cracked glass of its tank. Grace
had bloodied It. Him. And then Control had delivered a follow-up punch.

“Only Lowry had enough experience of the Southern Reach and Area X to be of use,”
his mother had told him, but fear leaked out of her words, too, and she went on and
on about Lowry while Control felt as if a historical figure had popped out from a
portrait alive to announce itself. A broken, erratic, rehabilitated historical figure
who claimed to remember little not already captured by the videos. Someone who had
leveraged a promotion, received due to a tangled knot of pity and remorse or some
other reason than competence.

“Lowry is an asshole.” To stop her talking about him. Just because you survived, just
because you were labeled a hero, didn’t mean you couldn’t also be an asshole. She
must have been desperate, had no choice. Rearing up behind that, whispers he remembered
now that might have come from Lowry’s direction: of shadow facilities, of things allied
with the hypnosis and conditioning efforts but more hideous still.

“I knew there might be things you’d tell him you wouldn’t tell me. We knew it might
be better if you didn’t know … some of the things we needed you to do.”

Anger had warred with satisfaction that he’d smoked them out, that at least one variable
had been removed. A need to know more balanced against already feeling overwhelmed.
While trying to ignore an unsettling new thought: that his mother’s power had boundaries.

“Is there anything you’re hiding from me?”

“No,” she said. “No. The mission is still the same: Focus on the biologist and the
missing director. Dig through the notes. Stabilize the Southern Reach. Find out what
has been going on that we don’t know about.”

Had that been the mission? That fragmented focus? Maybe the Voice’s mission, which
was his now, he supposed. He chose to take the lie that she had told him everything
at face value, thought perhaps the worst of it was now behind him. He’d shaken off
the chains. He’d taken everything Grace could throw at him. He’d seen the videos.

Control went into the kitchen and poured a whiskey, his only one of the day, and downed
it in one gulp, magical thinking behind the idea that it would help him sleep. As
he put the empty glass back on the counter, he noticed the director’s cell phone by
the landline. In its case, it still looked like a large black beetle.

A premonition came to him, and a memory of the scuttling on the roof earlier in the
week. He got a dish towel, picked up the phone, opened the back door with Chorry at
his heels, and tossed the phone deep into the gloom of the backyard. It hit a tree,
caromed off into the darkness of the long grass at the edge of the property. Fuck
you, phone. Don’t come back. It could join the Voice/Lowry phone in some phone afterlife.
He would rather feel paranoid or stupid than be compromised. He felt vindicated when
Chorry-Chorrykins refused to follow the phone, wanted to stay inside. A good choice.

021: REPEATING

When Monday morning arrived, Control didn’t go into the Southern Reach right away.
Instead he took a trip to the director’s house—grabbed the driving instructions from
the Internet and holstered his gun and got on the highway. It had been on his list
to do once the notes in his office were categorized, just to make sure Grace’s people
had cleaned out the house as thoroughly as she claimed. The confirmation of the Voice’s/Lowry’s
manipulation, and by extension his mother’s, remained a listless feeling, something
buzzing around in the background. As answers went, Lowry got him no further, gave
him no real leverage—he’d been manipulated by someone untouchable and ethereal. Lowry,
shadowing himself as the Voice, haunting the Southern Reach from afar. Control now
trying to merge them into one person, one intent.

There was also an impulse, once he was on his way, not to return to the Southern Reach
at all—to bypass the director’s house, too—and detour onto a rural road, take it over
to his father’s house, some fifty miles west.

But he resisted it. New owners, and no sculptures left in the backyard. After his
dad’s death, they’d gone to good homes with aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews,
even if he’d felt as if the landscape of his formative years was being dismantled,
piece by piece. So no solace there. No real history. Some of his relatives still lived
in the area, but his father had been the bond between them, and he’d last known most
of them as a teenager.

Bleakersville had a population of about twenty thousand—just big enough to have a
few decent restaurants, a small arts center, and the three blocks of historic district.
The director lived in a neighborhood with few white faces in evidence. Lots of overhanging
pines, oaks, and magnolia trees, hung heavy with moss, sodden branches from the storms
lying broken on the potholed road. Solid cedar or cement houses, some with brick accents,
mostly brown and blue or gray, with one or two cars in gravel or pine-needle driveways.
He drove past a couple of communal basketball hoops and some black and Latino kids
on bicycles, who stopped and stared until he was gone. School had been out for a couple
of weeks.

The director’s house lay at the end of a street named Standiford, at the top of a
hill. Choosing caution, Control parked a block away, on the street below, then walked
into the backyard, which slanted up the hill toward her house. The backyard was overgrown
with untrimmed azalea bushes and massive wisteria vines, some of them wrapped tight
around the pine trees. A couple of halfhearted compost islands languished behind circles
of staked chicken wire. Much of the grass had yellowed and died over time, exposing
tree roots.

Three cement semicircles served in lieu of a deck, covered over with leaves and what
looked like rotted birdseed alongside a pie pan filled to the top with dirty water.
The white French doors stained green with mold beyond them would be his entry point.
One problem—he would have to pick the lock, since he hadn’t put in a formal request
to visit. Except he wanted to pick the lock, he realized. Didn’t want to have a key.
As he worked on it with the tools he’d brought, the rain began to fall. Thick drops
that clacked and thunked against last winter’s fallen magnolia leaves.

He sensed he was being watched—some hint of movement from the corner of his eye, perhaps—just
as he’d managed to open the door. He stood up and turned to his left.

In the neighbor’s yard, well back from the chain-link fence, a black girl, maybe nine
or ten, with beaded cornrows, stared warily at him. She wore a sunflower dress and
white plastic sandals with Velcro straps.

Control smiled and waved. In some other universe, Control fled, abandoning his mission,
but not in this one.

The girl didn’t wave back, but she didn’t run away, either.

He took that as a sign and went inside.

*   *   *

No one had been here in months, but there was a kind of swirling movement to the air
that he wanted to attribute to a fan he couldn’t see, or an air-conditioning unit
that had just cut out. Except that Grace had had the electricity turned off until
the director returned, “to save money for her.” The rain was coming down hard enough
now that it added to the gloom, so he turned on his flashlight. No one would notice—he
was too far away from the windows, and the glass doors had a long dark curtain across
them. Most people would be at work anyway.

The director’s neighbors would have known her as a psychologist in private practice,
if they had known her at all. Was the photo in Grace’s office an anomaly, or did the
director often eat barbecue with a beer in her hand? Had Lowry, back in the day, come
over in a baseball cap, T-shirt, and torn jeans for hot dogs and fireworks on the
Fourth of July? People could double or triple themselves to become different in different
situations, but somehow he thought the director probably had been solitary. And it
was here, in her home, that the director, over time, against protocol, and in some
cases illegally, had brought Area X evidence and files, erasing the divide between
her personal and professional lives.

Seen through the tunnel of the flashlight beam, the small living room soon gave up
its secrets: a couch, three lounge chairs, a fireplace. What looked like a library
lay beyond it, behind a dividing wall and through worn saloon-style doors. The kitchen
was to the left and then a hallway; a massive refrigerator festooned with magnet-fixed
photos and old calendars guarded the corner. To the right of the living room was a
door leading to the garage, and beyond that probably the master bedroom. The entire
house was about 1,700 square feet.

Why had the director lived here? With her pay grade, she could have done much better;
Grace and Cheney both lived in Hedley in upper-middle-class subdivisions. Perhaps
there was debt he didn’t know about. He needed better intel. Somehow the lack of information
about the director seemed connected to her clandestine trip across the border, her
ability to keep her position for so long.

No one had lived here for over a year. No one except Central had come in. No one was
here now. And yet the emptiness made him uneasy. His breath came shallow, his heartbeat
elevated. Perhaps it was just the reliance on the flashlight, the unsettling way it
reduced anything not under its bright gaze to a pack of shadows. Maybe it was some
part of him acknowledging that this was as close to a field assignment as he’d had
in years.

A half-empty water glass stood by the sink, reflecting his light as a circle of fire.
A few dishes lay in the sink, along with forks and knives. The director had left this
clutter the day she’d gotten in her car and driven to the Southern Reach to lead the
twelfth expedition. Central apparently had not been instructed to clean up after the
director—nor after themselves. The living-room carpet showed signs of boot prints
as well as tracked-in leaves and dirt. It was like a diorama from a museum devoted
to the secret history of the Southern Reach.

Grace might have had Central come here and retrieve anything classified, but in terms
of the director’s property theirs had been a light touch. Nothing
looked
disturbed even though Control knew they had removed five or six boxes of material.
It just looked cluttered, which was no doubt the way they’d found it, if the office
he’d inherited was any indication. Paintings and prints covered the walls above a
few crowded CD stands, a dusty flat-screen television, and a cheap-looking stereo
system on which had been stacked dozens of rare old-timey records. None of the paintings
or photographs seemed personal in nature.

An elegant gold-and-blue couch stood against the wall dividing the living room from
the library, a pile of magazines taking up one cushion, while the antique rosewood
coffee table in front of the couch looked as if it had been requisitioned as another
desk: books and magazines covered its entire surface—same as the beautifully refinished
kitchen table to the left. Had she done most of her work in these rooms? It was homier
than he’d thought it would be, with good furniture, and he couldn’t quite figure out
why that bothered him. Did it come with the house, or was it an inheritance? Did she
have a connection to Bleakersville? A theory was forming in his head, like a musical
composition he could hum from vague memories but not quite yet name or play.

He walked through the hallway beside the kitchen, encountered another fact that seemed
odd for no particular reason. Every door had been closed. He had to keep opening them
as if going through a series of air locks. Each time, even though there was no prickle
of threat, Control prepared to jump back. He discovered an office, a room with some
filing cabinets and an exercise bike and free weights, and a guest bedroom with a
bathroom opposite it. There were a lot of doors for such a small house, as if the
director or Central had been trying to contain something, or almost as if he were
traveling between different compartments of the director’s brain. Any and all of these
thoughts spooked him, and after the third door, he just said the hell with it and
entered each with a hand on Grandpa in its holster.

He circled around into the library area and looked out one of the front windows. Saw
a branch-strewn overgrown lawn, a battered green mailbox at the end of a cement walkway,
and nothing suspicious. No one lurking in a black sedan with tinted windows, for example.

Then back through the living room, through the other hallway, past the garage door,
and into the master bedroom on the left.

At first, he thought the bedroom had been flooded and all of the furniture had washed
up against the nearest walls. Chairs were stacked atop the dressers and armoire. The
bed had come to rest against the dressers. About seven pairs of shoes—from heels to
trainers—had been tossed as flotsam on top of the bed. The covers were pulled up,
but sloppily. On the far side of the room, in the flashlight’s gleam, a mirror shone
crazily from beyond a bathroom door.

He took out Grandpa, released the safety, aimed wherever his flashlight roved. From
the dressers now over the bed, now to the wall against which the bed had previously
rested, which was covered in thick purple curtains. Cautious, he pulled them back,
revealing all-too-familiar words beneath a high horizontal window that let in a stagnant
light.

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

Written in thick dark marker, the same wall of text, with the same map beside it that
he had painted over in his office. As if the moment he had rid himself of it, it had
appeared in the director’s bedroom. Irrational sight. Irrational thought. Now a hundred
Controls were running from the room and back to the car in a hundred pocket universes.