Faces stared back at him, along with the impression of vast shapes and some kind of writing.
Control almost dropped the flashlight.
He looked again.
Along the wall and part of the ceiling, someone had painted a vast phantasmagoria of grotesque monsters with human faces. More specifically, oils splotched and splashed in a primitive style, in rich, deep reds and blues and greens and yellows, to form approximations of bodies. The pixelated faces were blown-up security head shots of Southern Reach staff.
One image dominated, extending up the wall and with the head peering down with a peculiar three-dimensional quality from the slanted ceiling. The others formed constellations around this image, and then much-worried sentences and phrases existing in a rich patina of cross-outs and paint-overs and other markings, as if someone had been creating a compost of words. There was a border, too: a ring of red fire that transformed at the ends into a two-headed monster, and Area X in its belly.
Reluctantly Control pulled himself up into the space, keeping low to distribute his weight until he was sure the platform could hold him. But it seemed sturdy. He stood next to the shelves on the left side of the room and considered the art in front of him.
The body that dominated the murals or paintings or whatever word applied depicted a creature that had the form of a giant hog and a slug commingled, pale painted skin mottled with what was meant to be a kind of mangy light green moss. The swift, broad strokes of arms and legs suggested the limbs of a pig, but with three thick fingers at their ends. More appendages were positioned along the midsection.
The head, atop a too-small neck rendered in a kind of gauzy pink-white, was misshapen but anchored by the face pasted onto it, the glue glistening in the flashlight beam. The face Control recognized from the files: the psychologist from the final eleventh expedition, a man who, before his death from cancer, had said in the transcripts, “It was quite beautiful, quite peaceful in Area X.” And smiled in a vague way.
But here he had been portrayed as anything but peaceful. Using a pen, someone—Whitby? Whitby—had given the man a mask of utter, uncomprehending anguish, the mouth open in a perpetual O.
Arrayed to the right and left were more creatures—some private pantheon, some private significance—with more faces he recognized. The director had been rendered as a full-on boar, stuffed with vegetation; the assistant director as a kind of stout or ferret; Cheney as a jellyfish.
Then he found himself. Incomplete. His face taken from his recent serious-looking mug shot, and the vague body of not a white rabbit but a wild hare, the fur matted, curling, half penciled in. Around which Whitby had created the outlines of a gray-blue sea monster, a whalelike leviathan, with purple waves pushing out from it, and a huge circle of an eye that tunneled out from his face, making of him a cyclops. Radiating from the monster-body were not just the waves but also flurries of unreadable words in a cramped, crabby scrawl. As surprising and disturbing walls went, it beat the director’s office by quite a lot. It made his skin prickle with sudden chills. It made him realize that he still had been half relying on Whitby’s analysis to provide him with answers. But there were no answers here. Only proof that in Whitby’s head was something akin to a sedimentary layer of papers bound by a plant, a dead mouse, and an ancient cell phone.
On the floor opposite him, near the right-hand shelves, a trowel, a selection of paints, a stand that allowed Whitby to reach the ceiling. A few books. A portable stove. A sleeping bag, bundled up. Had Whitby been living here? Without anyone knowing about it? Or guessing but not wanting to really know? Instead, just foist off Whitby on the new director. Disinformation and obfuscation. Whitby had put this together over a fairly long period of time. He had patiently been working at it, adding to it, subtracting from it. Terroir.
Control had been standing there with his back to the shelves for only about a minute.
He had been standing there recognizing that there was a draft in the loft. He had been standing there without realizing that it wasn’t a draft.
Someone was breathing, behind him.
Someone was breathing on his neck. The knowledge froze him, froze the cry of “Jesus fuck!” in his throat.
He turned with incredible slowness, wishing he could seem like a statue in his turning. Then saw with alarm a large, pale, watery-blue eye that existed against a backdrop of darkness or dark rags shot through with pale flesh, and which resolved into Whitby.
Whitby, who had been there the entire time, crammed into the shelf right behind Control, at eye level, bent at the knees, on his side.
Breathing in shallow sharp bursts. Staring out.
Like something incubating. There, on the shelf.
At first, Control thought that Whitby must be sleeping with his eyes open. A waxwork corpse. A tailor’s dummy. Then he realized that Whitby was wide awake and staring at him, Whitby’s body shaking ever so slightly like a pile of leaves with something underneath it. Looking like something boneless, shoved into a too-small space.
So close that Control could have leaned over and bit his nose or kissed it.
Whitby continued to say nothing, and Control, terrified, somehow knew that there was a danger in speaking. That if he said anything that Whitby might lunge out of his hiding place, that the stiff shifting of the man’s jaw hid something more premeditated and deadly.
Their eyes locked, and there was no way around the fact that each had seen the other, but still Whitby did not speak, as if he too wanted to preserve the illusion.
Slowly Control managed to direct his flashlight away from Whitby, stifling a shudder, and with a gritting of teeth overrode his every instinct not to turn his back on the man. He could feel Whitby’s breath pluming out.
Then there was a slight movement and Whitby’s hand came to rest on the back of his head. Just resting there, palm flat against Control’s hair. The fingers spread like a starfish and slowly moved back and forth. Two strokes. Three. Petting Control’s head. Caressing it in a gentle, tentative way.
Control remained still. It took an effort.
After a time, the hand withdrew, with a kind of reluctance. Control took two steps forward, then another. Another. Whitby did not erupt out of his space. Whitby did not make some inhuman sound. Whitby did not try to pull him back into the shelves.
He reached the trapdoor without succumbing to a shudder, lowered himself legs-first into that space, found the ladder with his feet. Slowly pulled the door closed, not looking toward the shelves, even in the dark. Felt such relief with it closed, then scrambled down the ladder. Hesitated, then took the time to lower and fold away the ladder. Forced himself to listen at the door before he left the room, leaving the flashlight in there. Then walked out into the bright, bright corridor, squinting, and took in a huge breath that had him seeing dark spots, a convulsion he could not control and wanted no one to see.
After about fifty steps, Control realized that Whitby had been up in the space without using the ladder. Imagined Whitby crawling through the air ducts. His white face. His white hands. Reaching out.
In the parking lot, Control bumped into a jovial apparition who said, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!” He asked this apparition if he had heard anything strange in the building over the years, or seen anything out of the ordinary. Inserted it as small talk, as breathing space, in what he hoped was just a curious or joking way. But Cheney flunked the question, said, “Well, it’s the high ceilings, isn’t it? Makes you see things that aren’t there. Makes the things you do see look like other things. A bird can be a bat. A bat can be a piece of floating plastic bag. Way of the world. To see things as other things. Bird-leafs. Bat-birds. Shadows made of lights. Sounds that are incidental but seem more significant. Never going to seem any different wherever you go.”
A bird can be a bat. A bat can be a piece of floating plastic bag. But could it?
It struck Control—hard—that he might not have Cheney any more sussed out than Whitby—a hastily prepared facad
e that was receding across the parking lot, walking backward to speak a few more words at him, none of which Control really heard.
Then, starting the engine and released past the security gate, almost without a memory of the drive, or of parking along the river walk, Control was mercifully free of the Southern Reach and found himself down by the Hedley pier. He explored the river walk for a while, so far inside his head he didn’t really see the shops or people or the water beyond.
His trance, his bubble of no-thought, was punctured by a little girl shouting, “You’re getting here too late!” Relief when he realized she wasn’t talking to him, her father walking past him then to claim her.
Where he wound up was little better than a dive bar, but dark and spacious, with pool tables in the back. Somewhere nearby was the pontoon dock from his Tuesday jog. Up a hill lay his house, but he wasn’t ready to go back yet. Control ordered a whiskey neat, once the bartender had finished being hit on by a good old boy who looked a little like an aging version of the first-string quarterback from high school.
“He was a smooth talker, but way too many neck folds,” Control said, and she laughed, although he’d said it with venom.
“I couldn’t hear what he was saying—the wattles were too loud,” she said.
He chuckled, drawn out of his thoughts for a moment. “What’re you doin’ tonight, honey? Am I right that you’re doin’ it with me?” Imitating the man’s terrible pickup line.
“I’m sleeping tonight. Falling asleep now.”
“Me, too,” he said, still chuckling. But he could feel her gaze on him, curious, as she turned back to washing glasses. Their conversation hadn’t been any longer than the ones he’d had with Rachel McCarthy, so many years ago. Or about anything more substantial.
The TV was on low, showing the aftermath of massive floods and a school massacre in between commercials for a big basketball series. Behind him he could hear a group of women talking. “I’m going to believe you for now … because I don’t have any better theories.” “What do we do now?” “I’m not ready to go back. Not yet.” “You prefer this place, you really do, don’t you?” He couldn’t have said why their chatter bothered him, but he moved farther down the bar. The divide between their understanding of the world and his, perhaps already wide, had grown exponentially in the last week.
He knew if he went home, he’d start thinking about Whitby the Deranged, except he couldn’t stop thinking about Whitby anyway, because he had to do something about Whitby tomorrow. It was just a matter of how to handle it.
Whitby had been at the Southern Reach for so long. Whitby had not hurt anyone at any point during his service for the Southern Reach. Service preamble to thinking about how to say “Thank you for your service, for your many years. Now take your weird art and get the fuck out.”
Even as he had so many other things to do, and still no call from his mother about the director’s house. Even as he nursed the wound of losing the biologist. The Voice had said Whitby was unimportant, and remembering, that Control felt that Lowry had said it with a kind of familiarity, like how you’d dismiss someone you’d worked with for a length of time.
Before leaving the Southern Reach for Hedley, he had taken a closer look at Whitby’s document on terroir. Found that when you did that—trained an eye that did not skim—it began to fall apart. That the normal-sounding subsection titles and the preambles that cited other sources hid a core where the imagination became unhinged, unconcerned with the words that had tried to fence it in, to guide it along. Monsters peered out with a regularity that seemed earned given the video from the first expedition, but perhaps not earned in the right direction. He stopped reading at a certain point. It was at a section where Whitby described the border as “invisible skin,” and those who tried to pass through it without using the door trapped forever in a vast stretch of otherwhere hundreds of miles wide. Even though the steps by which Whitby had gotten to this point had seemed, for a time, sobering and deliberate.
And then there was Lowry. He’d asked Cheney about Lowry in the parking lot, too, Cheney giving Control a rare frown. “Lowry? Come back here? Not now. Not ever, I would think.” Why? A pause, like questing static on the line. “Well, he’s damaged. Saw things that none of us will hopefully ever see. Can’t get close to it, can’t escape it. He’s found his appropriate distance, you could say.” Lowry, creating a web of incantations, spells, whatever, could create more of a shield between himself and Area X, because he couldn’t ever forget, either. Needing to see, but too afraid to look, passing his fear on to others. Whitby’s distance much closer, his spells of a more visceral nature.
By contrast, all of the ceaseless, restless notes from the director were staid, practical, stolid, and yet in the end—ordering a boilermaker after his shot, to make his next shot go down easy—they were probably meaningless, as useless as Whitby’s terroir that would never explain a goddamn thing, that amounted to a kind of religion, because even with all of her additional context, the director still had not found the answer as far as he could tell.
He rasped out a request for another drink.
That would probably be his fate: to catalogue the notes of others and create his own, ceaselessly and without effect. He would develop a paunch and marry some local woman who had already been married once. They would raise a family in Hedley, a son and a daughter, and on weekends he would be fully present with his family, work a distant memory that lay across the border known as Monday. They would grow old in Hedley, while he worked at the Southern Reach, putting in his hours and counting the years, the months, the days until retirement. They would give him a gold watch and a few pats on the back and by then his knees would be shot from all the jogging so he would be sitting down, and he’d be balding a little.
And he still wouldn’t know what to do about Whitby. And he would still miss the biologist. And he might still not know what was going on in Area X.
The drunk man came up and shook him out of his thoughts with a slap on his back. “You look like I know you. You look kinda familiar. What’s your name, pardner?”
“Rat Poison,” Control said.
The truth was, if the man who looked like the high school quarterback had responded by turning into something monstrous and torn him out into the night, part of Control wouldn’t have minded because he would have been closer to the truth about Area X, and even if the truth was a fucking maw, a fanged maw that stank like a cave full of putrefying corpses, that was still closer than he was now.
00X
When Control left the house on Tuesday morning, the director’s beetle-phone lay on his welcome mat. It had returned to him. Looking down at it, hand on the half-open front door, he could not help seeing it as a sign … but a sign of what?
Chorry jumped past him and into the bushes while Control squatted down to get a closer look. Days and nights out in the yard hadn’t helped it much. The grotesquery of the thing … some animal had gnawed at the casing and it was smeared with dirt and grass stains. Now it looked more like something alive than it had before. It looked like something that had gone exploring or burrowing and come back to report in.
Under the phone, thankfully, was a note from the landlord. In a quivering scrawl she had written, “The lawn man found this yesterday. Please dispose of phones in the garbage if you are done with them.”
He tossed it into the bushes.
In the morning light, during that ever-longer walk through the doors and down the corridor to his office, Control’s recollection of Whitby on the rack, stuffed into a shelf, the disturbing art on the wall, took on a slightly changed, more forgivable texture: a long-term disintegration whose discovery had urgency to him personally but for the Southern Reach was just one symptom of many seeking ways to take Whitby out of the “sinister” file and place him under “needs our help.”
Still, in his office, he wrestled with what to do about Whitby—did the man fall under his jurisdiction or Grace’s? Would she be resistant, slough it off, s
ay something like “Oh, that Whitby”? Maybe together, he and Grace would go up into Whitby’s secret room and have a good laugh about the grotesqueries to be found there, and then jointly paint it all white again. Then they’d go have lunch with Cheney and Hsyu and play board games and share their mutual love of water polo. Hsyu would say, as if he’d already disagreed with her, “We shouldn’t take the meaning of words for granted!” and he would shout back, “You mean a word like border?” and she would reply, “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean! You get it! You understand!” Followed by an impromptu square dance, dissolving into a chaos of thousands of glowing green ferns and black glittering mayflies gusting across their path.
Or not.
_______
With a snarl of frustration, Control put aside the question of Whitby and buried himself again in the director’s notes, kept Grace’s intel about the director’s focus in mind while trying to divine from those dried entrails more than they might actually contain. From Whitby, he wanted for the moment only distance and time so that there would be no hand reaching out to him.
He returned to the lighthouse, based on what Grace had told him. What was the purpose of a lighthouse? To warn of danger, to guide coastal vessels, and to provide landfall for ships. What did it mean to the Southern Reach, to the director?
Among the layers in the locked drawer, the most prominent concerned the lighthouse, and that included pages he had confirmed with Grace came from an investigation that was inextricably tied to the history of the island to the north. That island had had numerous names, as if none would stick, until now it was simply known as Island X at the Southern Reach, although some called it “Island Y,” as in “Why are we bothering to research this?”
What did fascinate—even resonate—was the fact that the beacon in the lighthouse on the coast had originally been placed in a lighthouse built on Island X. But shipping lanes had shifted and no one needed a lighthouse that helped ships navigate the shallows. The old lighthouse fell into ruin, but its eye had been removed long before.
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