The lighthouse rose from fog and reflections like a mirror of itself, the beach gray and cold, the sand rasping against the hull of the boat as they abandoned it in the shallows. The waves came in small and half curling like the froth of malformed questions. The lighthouse did not resemble Ghost Bird’s memory of it, for its sides had been scoured by fire. Discoloration extended all the way to the top, where the lens, the light within, lay extinguished. The fire had erupted from the landing windows as well, and in combination with the bits of broken glass, and all of the other talismans human beings had rendered up to it over the years, gave the lighthouse the appearance of something shamanistic. Reduced now to a daymark for their boat, the simplest of its functions, the one task that, unperformed, made a lighthouse no longer of use to anyone. Made it into a narrow, haunted redoubt.
“Burned by the border commander,” Grace had told them. “Burned because they didn’t understand it—and the journals with it.”
But Ghost Bird caught the hesitation in Grace’s voice, how she still would not tell them exactly what had happened within the lighthouse, what slaughter and deception consisted of, any detailed accounting of what had come at them from the seaward side.
All Grace could offer in its place was a localized pathology—the origin of the orange flags. The doing of the border commander, a cataloging of all that was unknowable to her. Perhaps the commander had been trying to keep separate the real from the imagined. If so, she had failed. Even common thistles had been so marked. Given more time, the commander might have marked the entire world.
Ghost Bird had a vision of the journals impervious, still up there, reconstituted, were they now to enter, walk up into the lantern room, undo the trapdoor, stare down as had the biologist, as had she, so many years ago. Would the reflected light from those frozen accounts irradiate their thoughts, contaminate their dreams, forever trap them? Or was there just a mountain of ashes in there now? Ghost Bird did not want to find out.
It was late afternoon already. They had left the island in the early morning, in a bigger boat Grace had hidden out of sight of the pier. The biologist had not reappeared, although Control had searched those waters with a kind of nervous anxiety. Ghost Bird would have sensed her presence long before there was any danger. She could not tell him, for his own sake, that the oceans through which the biologist now traveled were wider and deeper than the one that led them to the lighthouse.
They trudged up the beach toward the lighthouse, taking a path that minimized the possibility of sniper fire from above. Grace believed everyone was dead, or long since had moved on, but there was always the chance. Nothing arose from the seaward side, ghostlike or otherwise. Things came out of the sea, things like the biologist, but less kind.
From the lip of the dunes, they came up to the level ground next to the lighthouse without incident, lingered at the edge of the overgrown, long-wild lawn beside it. Where nettle weed and snarls of blackberry plants grew: a thorny thicket for them, but a natural shelter for the wrens and sparrows that darted betwixt, between, their cheerful song a discordant element against the overcast quality of the light. The ever-present thistles looked to Ghost Bird like some kind of natural microphone, the stickery domes there to pick up and transmit sound instead of disseminate seeds.
A broken door yawned, beckoned to them with darkness, while the gray sky above, the way it could glint or waver at odd moments, made Control in particular jittery. He could not stand still, did not want Ghost Bird or Grace standing still, either. Ghost Bird could see the brightness flaring out from him like a halo of jagged knives, wondered if he would still be himself by the time they reached the tower. Perhaps he would, if nothing preternatural stitched its way through that sky.
“No point in going up,” Grace said.
“Not even the least bit curious?”
“Do you like walking through charnel houses and cemeteries, too?”
Still evaluating her, and Ghost Bird unable to tell what she was thinking. Had Grace thrown in her lot with them, hoping Ghost Bird was indeed a secret weapon, or for some other purpose? What she did know was that with Grace there she’d had little time to talk to Control in private—any conversations were of necessity between the three of them. This disturbed her, because she knew Grace even less than she knew Control.
“I don’t want to go up,” Control said. “I don’t. I want to cover the open ground as fast as possible. Get to where we’re going as fast as possible.”
“At least no one appears to be here,” Grace said. “At least it appears as if Area X may have thinned out the opposition.”
Yes, that was good, if a cold thing to say, but the look Control gave Grace indicated he could not jettison some essential sentimentality that was of no use here, some mechanism that belonged to the world outside.
“Well, let me add to the collection,” Grace said, and tossed the biologist’s island account and her journal through the open front door.
Control stared into that darkness as if she had committed a terrible act that he was thinking of setting right. But Ghost Bird knew that Grace was just trying to set them free.
“Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.” A sentence Ghost Bird remembered from a college text, one that had lingered with the biologist after her transition to the city, come back to her as she stood in the empty lot, following the silent launch of a sugar glider from one telephone pole to another. The text had been referring to urban landscapes, but the biologist had interpreted it as applying to the natural world, or at least what could be interpreted as wilderness, even though human beings had so transformed the world that even Area X had not been able to completely reduce those signs and symbols. The shrubs and trees that constituted invasive species were only one part of that; the other, how even the faint outline of a human-made path changed the topography of a place. “The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse.” A sentence the biologist had excised from her thesis, but one that had burned bright in her mind, and now in Ghost Bird’s, where, even analyzed and kept at arm’s length like all received memories, it had a kind of power. In the presence of the memory of a thousand eyes staring up at her.
As they headed inland, the larger things fell away, revealing the indelible: the dark line of a marsh hawk flying low over the water, the delicate fractures in the water where a water moccasin swam, the strangely satisfying long grass that cascaded like hair from the ground.
She was content with silence, but Grace and Control were less so.
“I miss hot showers,” Control said. “I miss not itching all over.”
“Boil water,” Grace said, as if it provided the solution to both problems. As if Control’s misses were wishes, and he should think bigger.
“Not the same thing.”
“I miss standing on the roof of the Southern Reach and looking out over the forest,” Grace said.
“You used to do that? How did you get up there?”
“The janitor let us go up. The director and me. We would stand up there and make our plans.”
That catch in Grace’s throat, that invisible connection, Ghost Bird contemplated it. What did she miss? There had been so little time to miss anything. Their conversation existed so apart from her that she wondered again what she might do when she met the Crawler. What if she was a sleeper cell for a cause much older than either the Southern Reach or Area X? Did her allegiance lie with the former director, or the director as a child, playing on those black rocks near the lighthouse? And what master did the lighthouse keeper serve? It would have been better if she could have thought of each person in the equation as just one thing, but none of them were that simple.
Perhaps the biologist’s final response was the only response that mattered, and her entire letter a sop to expectations, to the reaction human beings were hardwired to have. A kind of final delay before she had come to embody that correct answer? Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection, for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite. Even as the Crawler wrote out its terrible message.
Back on the island, there had been one last, unanswerable question, and the weight of it had settled over each of them in different ways. If they now traversed a landscape transplanted from somewhere far remote, then what existed within the coordinates of the real Area X, back on Earth?
Grace had put forward the idea, had clearly been thinking about it, possibly for years now, haunted and frustrated by it.
“We are,” Control had replied—distant, coming to her from afar with an unfocused stare. “We are. That’s where we are.” Although he wasn’t stupid, must know Grace was right.
“If you go through the door, you come to Area X,” Grace said. “If you walk across the border, you go to the other place. Whatever it is.”
Grace’s tone did not admit to doubt, or that she cared whether they believed her or not, an essential indifference to questions, as if Area X had worn her down. A pragmatism that meant she knew the conclusions she had reached would please no one.
But Ghost Bird knew what she had seen in the corridor leading into Area X, the detritus and trash she had seen there, the bodies, and wondered if it might be real and not summoned from her mind. Wondered what might have come through the twenty-foot door that Control had described to her, the door lost to them. What might still come through such a door? And her thought: Nothing, because if so, it would have happened long ago.
The marsh lakes had become such a deep, perfect blue in that uncertain light that the reflections of the surrounding scrub forest on that surface seemed as real as their root-bound doppelgängers. Their mud-encrusted boots churned up amid the rich sediment and plant roots a smell almost like crisp hay.
Control leaned against Ghost Bird more than once to keep his balance, almost pulling her down in the process. Ahead of them now came the smell of burning, and from above something the others could not see stitched its way through the overcast sky, and Ghost Bird was not surprised.