Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer
“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.
The glass crunch, the crunch glass, and its source beyond the wall, exploring inward, held his full attention. Boot? Shoe? Foot? No. Claws? Hooves? Cilia? Fins? Suppressed a shudder. Could he reach his knife? No. If he could have reached his knife in time, if his knife had been any help, it wouldn’t have happened like this, except, yes, it was always going to be like this. Border breach, but there was no border here. It had all been moving so slow, like a journey that meant something, and now so fast. Too fast. Like breath that had become light, gone from mist to a ray, slashing out toward the horizon but not taking him with it. On the other side of the half-demolished wall, a new thing? An old thing? But not a mistake. Was there anything in it now of what he’d once known through its surrogate? Because he recognized its eyes.
Some part of it enveloped him, held him there, against the floor, while he screamed. Something like an eclipse in his head, a thick, tactile eclipse, pushing out his own intent. Questing through his mind for something else entirely, making him turn inward to see the things Lowry had put there, the terrible, irrevocable things, and how his mother must have helped Lowry. “Check the seats for loose change,” Grandpa Jack had said, or had he? The heavy shape of the gun in his hands, Grandpa Jack’s greedy gaze, and yet even that childhood memory seemed as hazy as smoke curling up from the cigarette of someone who stood in shadow at the far end of a long, darkened room.
Those thousands of eyes regarding him, reading him from across a vast expanse of space, as if the biologist existed simultaneously halfway across the universe. The sensation of being seen and then relief and a stabbing disappointment as it withdrew, spit him out. Rejected him.
There came a sound like a weight leaving the sky, a plunging toward the waves, and the awful weight of a pushing against the air lessened, and the restless agony in his bones receded, and he was just a dirty, spent figure weeping on the floor of a ruined lighthouse. With words like collateral damage and containment and counterattacks blossoming like old spells, incantations that worked in other, far distant, lands but not her
Silence then. An absence into which the brightness again took up sentinel duty, swung around with ever-greater confidence to peer at him like the leviathans from his dreams. Perhaps unaware of what it protected, what it lived within.
Except he would never forget now.
* * *
Later, much later, familiar steps, and a familiar voice—Grace, extending a hand.
“Can you walk?”
Could he walk? He felt like an old man leveled by a blow from an invisible fist. He had fallen into a deep, dark, narrow fissure and now had to crawl up out of it.
“Yes, I can walk.”
Grace handing him his father’s carving, him taking it.
“Let’s go back up to the landing.”
There was a huge hole in the side of the first-floor wall. The night peered in from it. But the lighthouse had held.
“Yes, the landing.”
He would be safe there.
He wouldn’t be safe there.
* * *
Control lay there, back on the landing, sprawled across a blanket, looking up at the paint-peeled ceiling mottled by candlelight. Everything seemed so far away. Such an overwhelming psychic sense of their distance from Earth, that there might not now be astronomers, might never be astronomers who, all-knowing, could even make out the speck that was the star around which they must revolve. He found it hard to breathe, kept calling forth another passage from the pages of Whitby where the man almost waxed poetic: “Area X has been created by an organism left behind by a civilization so advanced and so ancient and so alien to us and our own intent and our own thought processes that it has long since left us behind, left everything behind.”
Wondering, too, because of all that the biologist’s intrusion had knocked loose in his head … if there was any evidence he’d ever sat in the backseat of his grandfather’s muscle car—if somewhere at Central you would find black-and-white photos shot from farther down the street, through the windshield of a car or a van. An investment. A divestment. The start of it all. He’d had dreams of cliffs and leviathans and falling into the sea. But what if the leviathans were back at Central? The shadowy forms mere outlines of memories he could not quite recall, overlaid with those that he should not remember because they had never occurred. Jump, a voice had said, and he had jumped. Two days lost at Central before he came to the Southern Reach, and only his mother’s word for it that he was being paranoid … But it was such a weight, so exhausting to analyze, as if the Southern Reach and Area X both interrogated him.
Hello, John, said some version of Lowry in his head. Surprise.
Fuck you.
Seriously, John? And here I thought you knew all along, the game we were playing. The game we’ve always been playing.
His lungs felt heavy, thick, as Grace checked him out, bandaged his elbow, told him, “You’ve bruised some ribs and your hip is bruised, too, but you seem able to move everything.”
“The biologist … she’s really gone?” This leviathan that has taken the terroir of a place and made it its own. Every moment that passed, the gospel of Whitby made more and less sense to him. Such an inconsistent heartbeat. Such simplicity to concentrate on those three pages, to focus on the parts so smudged he had to interpret the words or to smooth out a curled corner, than on the fact that the sun should not be shining above, that the sky could peel back to reveal a celestial landscape perhaps never dreamed of by humankind, the weight of that oppressive, a beast bearing down on the very center, which must be protected from that which did not bear contemplating.
“She’s been gone for a while,” Grace said. “You’ve been a little gone, for a while.”
She stood next to the seaward window, along with Ghost Bird. Ghost Bird had her back to Control, staring out at the night. Was she charting her original’s progress? Was that vast form now in open water, seeking depth and distance? Or had she departed for someplace stranger and more remote? He didn’t want to know.
When Ghost Bird finally turned, the shadows made of her face an impression of a fading smile and wide, curious eyes.
“What did it share with you?” Control asked. “What did it take?” More caustic than he’d meant, but he was still in a kind of shock, knew that on some level. Wanted his experience to be the common one.
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
What side are you on? Lowry asked.
“What side are you on?” he asked.
“Enough!” Grace said. “Enough! Just shut the fuck up. That’s not helping.”
But he couldn’t shut up. “No wonder you’re on edge,” he said. “No wonder you didn’t tell us.”
“The biologist took out the convoy,” Ghost Bird said.
“Yes, she did,” Grace admitted. “But I have been careful and quiet and not provoked her. I know when to stay away from the lighthouse or the shore. I know when to fade into the forest. Sometimes there’s a kind of foreshadowing in the air. Sometimes she will make landfall where she found the owl, then push on through the interior, headed here. As if she remembers. Most times, I can avoid her. Most times, she isn’t here.”
“Remembers what? This place?”
“I don’t know what she remembers or doesn’t remember,” Grace said. “I just know your presence here attracted her, made her curious.” Not Control’s presence, that much he knew. Ghost Bird’s presence. The biologist was drawn to her as surely as he had been drawn to her.
“We could be just like the biologist,” Control said. “Stay here. Wait it out. Wait her out. Just give in.” Goading them.
But it was Ghost Bird who answered: “She earned the right to choose her fate. She earned the right.”
“We’re not her,” Grace said. “I don’t want to become her, or anything like her.”
“Isn’t that all you’ve been doing? Waiting?” Wanting to see just how well Grace had adjusted to living on an island with a monster.
“Not exactly. But what do you want me to do? Tell me what I should do, and I will do it!” Shouting now. “Do you think I want to wait here, die here? Do you think I like it?” The thought occurred that Grace had made use of the biologist’s list of pain-inducers, that her thinness, the hollowed-out quality to her face, wasn’t just about being haunted by a monster.
“You need a way out,” Ghost Bird said.
“Through a hole in the sea that may not be there?”
“No. Another way out.”
Control propped himself up with a groan. His side was on fire. “Are you sure the ribs are just bruised?”
“I can’t be sure without an X-ray.”
Another impossible thing. Yet another moment in his decline. A wall changing to the touch of his hand, the touch of the biologist in his head. Enough of this. Enough.
He took up Whitby’s pages, began to read by candlelight even as he began to tear the corners off. Slowly.
We must trust our thoughts while we sleep. We must trust our hunches. We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy. Brilliance and bullshit both. A binary trapped in its single-minded focus on solutions.
“What?” he asked. He could feel the other two staring at him.
Ghost Bird said, “You need to rest.”
“What I’d suggest isn’t going to be popular anyway,” he said. Tearing one full page into shreds. Letting the pieces fall to the floor. It felt good to tear something apart.
“Say it.” Challenging him.
A pause, preparing himself. Aware of the conflicting voices in his head.
“What you call t
Ghost Bird: “Have you been paying attention? Have you been listening?”
“Or we stay here.”
“Staying here isn’t going to work,” Grace admitted. “Either the biologist will get us, or Area X will.”
“There’s a lot of open, vulnerable space for us between here and the tower,” Ghost Bird said.
“There’s a lot of everything between here and there.”
“Control,” Ghost Bird said, and he didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want to see those eyes that now reminded him of the creature the biologist had become. “Control, there’s no reset. There’s never going to be a reset. That’s a suicide mission.” Unspoken, that she thought it was a suicide mission for them. Who knew what it might be for her?
“But the director thought you could change its direction,” he said. “That you could change it, if you tried hard enough.” A halting kind of hope. A childish thrashing against the dictates of the real. If you wished upon a star. He was thinking of the light at the bottom of the tower, this new thing he hadn’t known about before entering Area X. He was thinking about being sick, and now sicker, and what that meant. At least they were all out in the open now, clear to him. The brightness, Lowry, all of it. Everything in the mix, including the core he still thought of as John Rodriguez. The Rodriguez who didn’t belong to anyone. Who clasped his father’s carving tight in his pocket. Who remembered something beyond the wreck and ruin of all this.
“It’s true we have one thing no one else had,” Grace said.
“What?” Ghost Bird asked in a skeptical, doubting tone.
“You,” Grace said. “The only photocopy of the director’s last plan.”
0014: THE DIRECTOR
When, eventually, you return to the Southern Reach, you find a gift waiting for you: a framed black-and-white photograph of the lighthouse keeper, his assistant, and a little girl playing on the rocks—head down, jacket hood disguising her features. The blood rushes to your head, and you almost black out, seeing that this photo you didn’t know still existed.