The night was full of white rabbits streaking across the sky, instead of the stars, the moon—and Control knew that was wrong in some fevered part of his mind, some compartment holding out against the inquisitive brightness. Were they white rabbits or were they smudges of black motion rendered as photo negatives impeding his vision? Because he didn’t want to see what was there. Because the biologist had unlocked something inside of him, and he returned now sometimes to the phantasmagorical art in Whitby’s strange room in the Southern Reach, and then to his theory that to disappear into the border was to enter some purgatory where you would find every lost and forgotten thing: all of the rabbits herded across that invisible barrier, every beached destroyer and truck from the night Area X had been created. The missing in action from the expeditions. The thought a kind of annihilating abyss. Yet there was also the light blossoming from the place below the Crawler, detailed in the biologist’s journal account. Where led that light?
Trying to pick out from all of those pieces what might be a reasonable, even an honorable, choice. One that his father would have agreed with; he no longer thought much of his mother, or what she might think.
Maybe I just wanted to be left alone. To remain in the little house on the hill in Hedley, with his cat Chorry and the chittering bats at night, not so far from where he had grown up, even if now so distant.
“It wouldn’t have made a difference, Grace.”
The three of them sleeping on the pine moss, the moist grass, less than a mile from the topographical anomaly, their final approach planned for the morning.
“What wouldn’t?” Gentle, perhaps even kind. Which let him know the full manifestation of his distress. Kept seeing the biologist’s many eyes, which became stars, which became the leaping white lights. Which became a chessboard with his father’s last move frozen there. Along with Control’s own last move, still forthcoming.
“If you had told me everything. Back at the Southern Reach.”
“No. It wouldn’t have.”
Ghost Bird slept beside him, and this, too, helped him chart his decline. She slept at his back, guarding him, and with her arms wrapped tight around him. He was secure there, safe, and he loved her more for allowing that now, when she had less and less reason to. Or no reason at all.
The night had turned chilly and deep, and crowded at the edges with creatures staring in at them, just dark shapes silent and motionless. But he didn’t mind them.
Things his dad had said to him stuck with him more clearly now, because they must’ve happened. His dad was saying to him, “If you don’t know your passion, it confuses your mind, not your heart.” In a moment of honesty after he had failed in the field and he could only talk to his dad in riddles about it, never tell him the truth: “Sometimes you need to know when to go on to the next thing—for the sake of other people.”
The chill in that. The next thing. What was his next thing here? What was his passion? He didn’t know the answer to either question, knew only that there was comfort in the scratchiness of the pine needles against his face and the sleep-drenched, smoky smell of the dirt beneath him.
Morning came, and he huddled in Ghost Bird’s arms until she stirred, disengaged from him in a way that felt too final. Among the reeds, endless marsh, and mud, there came a suggestion on the horizon of burning, and a popping and rattling that could’ve been gunfire or some lingering memory of past conflict playing out in his head.
Yet still the blue heron in the estuary stalked tadpoles and tiny fish, the black vulture soared on the thermals high above. There came a thousand rustlings among the islands of trees. Behind them, on the horizon, the lighthouse could be seen, might always be seen, even through the fog that came with the dawn, here noncommittal and diffuse, there thick, rising like a natural defense where needed, a test and blessing against that landscape. To appreciate any of this was Ghost Bird’s gift to him, as if it had seeped into him through her touch.
But the unnatural world intruded, as it always did, so long as will and purpose existed, and for a moment he resented that. Ghost Bird and Grace were debating what to do if they encountered any remnants of the border commander’s troops. Debating what to do when they reached the tower.
“You and I go down,” Grace said. “And Control can guard the entrance.” This last stand, this hopeless task.
“I should go down alone,” Ghost Bird said, “and you should both stand guard above.”
“That would be against expedition protocols,” Grace said.
“That’s what you want to invoke here? Now?”
“What’s left to invoke?” Grace asked.
“I go down alone,” Ghost Bird said, and Grace gave her no answer.
Tactical not strategic, a phrase rising out of his back catalog of favorites. It seemed as obsolete as any of the rest, like the enormous frame of an old-fashioned bicycle.
He kept glancing up at that murky sky, waiting for the heavens to fall away and reveal their true position. But the mimicry remained in place, most convincing. What if the biologist had been wrong? What if the biologist in her writings had been a calmly raving lunatic? And then just a monster? What then?
They broke camp, used a stand of swamp trees as initial cover and surveyed the marsh, stared across the water of the estuaries. The smoke now billowed up at a sharp sixty-degree angle to add its own ash-silver roiling to the fog and form a heavier, weighted blankness. This alliance obscured the last of the blue sky and accentuated the crackling line of fire at the horizon parallel to them: waves of orange thrust upward from golden centers.
The pewter stillness of the channel of water in the foreground reflected the lines of the flames and the billowing of the smoke—reflected the nearest reeds, too, and doubled by reflection also the island that at its highest point showcased island oaks and palmetto trees, their trunks white lines lost in patches of fog.
There came shouting and screaming and gunfire—all too near, all from the island of trees, or, perhaps, something Lowry had placed in his head. Something that had happened here long ago only now coming to the surface. Control kept his eyes on the reflection, where men and women in military uniforms attacked one another while some impossible thing watched from the watery sky. At such a remove, distorted, it did not seem so harsh, so visceral.
“They are already somewhere else,” Control said, although he knew Grace and Ghost Bird wouldn’t understand. They were already in the reflection, through which an alligator now swam. Where swooped through the trees, oblivious, a flicker.
So they continued on, him with his sickness that he no longer wanted diagnosed, Grace with her limp, and Ghost Bird keeping her own counsel.
There was nothing to be done, and no reason to: their path would skirt the fire.
In Control’s imagination, the entrance to the topographical anomaly was enormous, mixed with the biologist’s vast bulk in his thoughts so that he had expected a kind of immense ziggurat upside down in the earth. But no, it was what it had always been: a little over sixty feet in diameter, circular, located in the middle of a small clearing. The entrance lay there open for them, as it had for so many others. No soldiers here, nothing more unusual than the thing itself.
On the threshold, he told them what would happen next. There was in his voice only the shadow of the authority of a director of the Southern Reach, but within that shadow a kind of resistance.
“Grace, you will stay here at the top, standing guard with the rifles. There are any number of dangers, and we do not want to be trapped down there. Ghost Bird, you will come with me, and you will lead the way. I’ll follow at a little distance behind you. Grace, if we are down there longer than three hours”—the maximum time recorded by prior expeditions—“you are released of any responsibility for us.” Because if there were a world to return to, the person to survive should be someone with something to return to.
They stared at him. They stared, and he thought they would object, would override him, and then he would be lost. Would be left out here, at the top.
But that moment never came and an almost debilitating relief settled over him as Grace nodded and said to be careful, rattled off advice he barely heard.
Ghost Bird stood off to the side, a curious expression on her face. Down there, she would experience the ultimate doubling of experience with the biologist, and he couldn’t protect her from that.
“Whatever you have in your head now, hold on to it,” Grace said. “Because there may be nothing left of it when you go down below.”
What was coiled within his head, and how would it affect the outcome? Because his goal was not to reach the Crawler. Because he wondered what else might lie within the brightness that had come with him.
They descended into the tower.