Chapter Text
With certain subjects, it is possible to call forth, by means of suggestion or intimation, a coherent group of associated ideas which install themselves in the mind in the fashion of a parasite, remain isolated from all the rest, and may be expressed outwardly by corresponding motor phenomena.
- Jean-Martin Charcot, 1889
Part One: Presence
XX01: Re-entry
“Jump,” said a voice in his head.
Control jumped.
#
He woke with lips pressed hard against his own, air forced into resistant lungs, then painful, rhythmic pressure collapsing his chest. Then he was on his side and coughing up salt water that burned every inch of his throat and nose. Slowly coming to himself, he stared out at the horizon, a distant lighthouse against a sky several shades too bright.
There was an unnerving sense of déjà vu.
The shadow kneeling over him consolidated into Ghost Bird watching with a worried expression. After a few moments, she hooked his arm around her shoulders and stood. He wanted to protest that he couldn’t feel his legs, his chest was on fire, and his head was still spinning except for where the lighthouse blazed in the center of his vision—but Ghost Bird was saying, “We’re not going there. We’re going to the island,” and there wasn’t much he could say to that.
Stray supplies floated in on the surf, wreckage of their messy underwater entrance into Area X. Ghost Bird had brought nothing but her gun when Control cornered her on that rocky outpost—whatever gear had aided her survival so remote from any civilization was far behind them now. Now, what they owned was the chaotic collection of objects that Control, inexperienced, had imagined could be useful for a wilderness situation. Some of it seemed so pointless now, if not an active risk in Area X, like the flashlight and batteries whose loyalties they could not be certain of, but others, like the axe and ropes, brought an expression of relief to Ghost Bird’s face. Control himself grew irrational happy when Whitby’s insane manuscript made its way to the shore, locked away in its plastic case.
They didn’t linger long before beginning to walk.
Silence between them gave room in Control’s head for the slow, awful realization of where they were. An enormity that came in dizzying waves, each image too much to handle beyond individual, isolated facts: Countless doomed expeditions sent one after another into an open, hungry maw. Video tapes full of endless screaming and impossible things. And the quality of the light meant Control could far too easily transpose those images onto the landscape that now curled around him on all sides.
Ghost Bird, of course, showed less concern. She walked with long strides across the damp, spongy dirt, though not with any particular haste or purpose. Her gait was self-assured, only varying in order to step around dips in the terrain or particularly thick patches of reeds. When Control caught a glimpse of her eyes, they were full of wonder.
And yet it was all so mundane. It was the Florida coast. Needlerush bordered them on one side; on the other, calm sea gently lapped against the shore. Small birds bounded from plant to plant—Control had expected to see monstrous things in them, too many eyes, malformed wings, but they were just birds, just birds. Inland, the horizon disappeared behind distant copses of trees.
The real, human world was already receding into an untouchable, incomprehensible past, and Control could make himself believe that they had been walking for much, much longer. His legs certainly complained as though they had.
A voice drifting into Control’s imagination: “Is your house in order?”
It was a script that might have made it all sensible, might have tamed this all into coherent knowledge if only someone told him the right things to think. Maybe putting it all in order within his own head would lead to something to tell Ghost Bird—though that impulse immediately felt ridiculous to him. What would she care? She was busy staring out into the rolling waves, her mind as inscrutable when Control watched her from behind one-way glass.
Not at all, Control answered.
“I see,” said Lowry—and it was Lowry’s voice, not the modulated buzz that had hypnotized Control every day for at least a week, likely longer. Or, at least, it was what he imagined the voice from the tapes would sound like thirty years later, harsh and grizzled, with a further dose of Control’s own disorientation and lethargy. “What happened?”
It shouldn’t have been a relief that, of all the guides his mind could have pulled from, it was Lowry. He wouldn’t be able to handle even the briefest thought of his mother. Not yet.
As tired as his body and mind were, Control was still shackled to the need to make sense of the past few weeks. So, he described it:
An attic filled with nightmarish imagery and cool breath on the back of his neck.
Living flesh where there had once been a door.
The old director, dead but impossibly full of life, walking with unthinking purpose into the Southern Reach building, trailing devastation and Area X behind her.
Nearly two weeks of panicked travel farther and farther north up the coast, searching, uncertain that his goal could change anything, avoiding thinking too much about the strange lights on the horizon behind him.
“And now you’re following the biologist to the island,” Lowry said, the longest sentence out of him yet.
Ghost Bird, Control corrected. But—yes. As good a destination as any, right?
“It really fucking isn’t.”
The surprisingly bitter reproach in Lowry’s voice, specific and directed, cut through the inchoate amorphous panic. Did Control harbor some hidden animosity towards the island locked up in his own head? He had hardly thought of it, would probably have overlooked it if asked to report all he knew about Area X. Then again, that itself could explain the reaction: This thing had sat at the edges of Central’s maps, not even present on the majority of them, unimportant and ignored, and so to call it worthwhile now would be to admit how thoroughly misguided Central’s—and Control’s—approach had been all along.
Or maybe it was a much more mundane, straightforward resentment at a loss of authority. Ghost Bird hadn’t even humored him with a debate about the destination, one which would doubtless end in her favor anyway. The lighthouse lingered in the corner of his eye no matter where he looked, a shimmering beacon that made it hard to even search for any shadow on the horizon that might indicate the island.
A conversation with a figment in his head wouldn’t solve anything. He shook off this imagined Lowry. Tried to instead orient towards the strange, unfamiliar birdsong filling the air.
#
Control had to carefully titrate Whitby’s writing. A limited resource to dole out, like their beans and granola bars, and Control tried not to think about what it would be like when they all ran dry—the food in another week or so, perhaps more if Ghost Bird supplemented with roots and berries Control had to trust weren’t poisonous; the manuscript, much sooner. The uncomfortable fact was that everything that had occurred up until this moment—the Southern Reach, the earlier expeditions, and even further back, all of Control’s field assignments, his education, his childhood—no longer mattered, and with them went any meaningful point of connection, of conversation, besides these insane words. It was a comfort, though, to thumb through them again and again and find the words unchanging—familiar in ways the world around him wasn’t.
Besides, it wasn’t always complete nonsense. Whitby had known things, had been touched by some long, thorny tendril of Area X and made to paint possibly prophetic monstrosities on attic walls. He had been a beacon, and there was communication in that. Maybe.
“I’m trying to separate out the pointless from the useful,” Control told Ghost Bird when she had again balked at a line from Whitby’s final testament. She took Whitby’s words much less seriously than he did. “I’m trying to make some progress as we trudge on over to the island.”
“Did any expedition ever make it to the island?” she asked. And like that, Whitby was exorcised from the conversation.
“If they did, nothing came back to the Southern Reach about it,” Control said, waving the island away with a flick of the manuscript. “It wasn’t a priority.”
She frowned. “Why all the focus on the lighthouse, the topographical anomaly, and not the island?”
“You’d have to ask the former director about that. Or you’d have to ask Lowry.”
After a few seconds of thought, she stated, “I never met Lowry.” As if it disproved his existence.
A sudden deep laughter exploded in Control’s head, so vivid that there was an unsettling moment where he believed it to be real. He jerked and spun towards the reeds next to them, expecting to see a human figure hidden there in the shadows, then stared, surprised by his own reaction, when it was nothing but grass.
Ghost Bird turned with him, looking at first alert and ready, then confused. “What is it?”
“She doesn’t know a goddamn thing, does she?” His guide again, Lowry.
His head was spinning with adrenaline. “Thought I heard something,” he said. “But—nothing. I guess it’s nothing.”
Ghost Bird eyed him, then shrugged, apparently to herself, and continued walking. Not too unusual a scene these past few days, to Control’s embarrassment. His normal vigilance had quickly become paranoid skittishness with the awful knowledge of what could lay within the trees or tall grasses. It wasn’t the first time he had flinched dramatically at absolutely nothing.
What was unusual, though, was why any part of his mind would have such a strong reaction to Ghost Bird’s words. Internally, he found himself asking, What do you mean?
“We’ve met,” explained Lowry. “Or, I guess, the real one. During her training. She was a goddamn freak even then.”
Oh. Control wasn’t sure how to take this—information? That didn’t seem like the right word. Mere extrapolation from what he had been told about the expeditions’ preparations: The latest rounds had been sent to some perverse reproduction of Area X hundreds of miles away in Virginia—land owned by none other than James Lowry. The name hadn’t meant anything to Control at the time.
Ghost Bird walked slowly, unhurried, so it didn’t take more than a few seconds for Control to catch up.
A short time passed in the deceptive silence that characterized most of Control’s time now before Lowry’s voice spoke up again. “Why are you following her?”
As if there’s a choice, Control replied. A vague resentment had solidified over the past few days, small but irksome, like a splinter risking infection. Resentment that Ghost Bird had still yet to discuss their options. Resentment that he wouldn’t last five minutes if he set off on his own.
The previous day, they had come across a massive skeleton. Something like an elephant’s, but twisted and wrong in several ways: two sets of ribs, one resting within the other, but perhaps more unnerving, a long stretch of spine up to a skull undeniably human, the front of which had been covered by some sort of bony plate with a dark imprint of a face. In it, Control saw Whitby’s macabre paintings: the psychologist from the last eleventh expedition, just as Whitby had prophesied. The awful moaning expression was identical.
“This was a person, once,” Control had said. It wasn’t a question, but some part of him had nevertheless hoped Ghost Bird would deny it and tell him once again that he was misreading the situation. She said nothing.
The more Control stared, the more impossible the skeleton became. There were strange, stunted outgrowths of bone, not quite limbs, out of the sides of certain vertebrae, analogous to no animals Control was familiar with. Had the transformation come all at once, or had there been stages?
“Will I end up like this?” Control asked. “Some version of me?”
“We all end up like this, Control. Eventually.”
But some sooner than others, and him sooner than her. That night, while he struggled to conjure fire from waterlogged matches, she effortlessly produced a healthy campfire from, it seemed, nothing but some twigs and leaves. It was not at all difficult to imagine her disappearing into the landscape the way she had by the Rock Bay coasts. She made it look so natural.
“Because she’s not human, you know,” said Lowry.
Control frowned. This was not the direction he wanted his thoughts to go, knew it to be a dangerous path. Ghost Bird seemed human—even felt infuriatingly human during the nights they huddled together against the late winter chill. To allow those thoughts to sink in would leave Control entirely adrift at sea.
He hastily pushed the sentiment aside, but found it rising up again in Lowry’s voice. “Area X created her. How can you trust something like that?” When Control refused to entertain the idea further, the voice grew louder, bordering on hallucinatory. “What are you doing, John? Why are you still following her?”
“Shut up,” Control muttered under his breath.
Ghost Bird looked at him, opened her mouth to speak, but before Control could respond with some joke about talking to Area X, a flash of pain tore his skull open. The worst of it centered on a spot just above his left eye and pierced through his head, like a bullet wound he could feel every screaming edge of. Control yelled out, stumbled over some rock or depression in the earth and fell to his knees.
In his head, Lowry was yelling, “YOU DON’T FUCKING TALK TO ME THAT WAY!”
Something was tearing, stretching, pushing and pulsing. Gunshots firing behind his eyes again and again. The sharp pain leaking out into the vibrating air around him, like the space itself was quivering in agony. Just burst, he managed to think through the flashing lights covering his vision, burst and be done with this, stop stop—
And it did, all at once, disappearing as quickly as it had assaulted him. Ghost Bird was next to him, hand on his shoulder, saying his name, asking what happened, was he okay, though her voice felt distant over the ghostly echoes and afterimages of pain.
Control was breathing hard. Lowry?
He wasn’t sure what he expected from that heavy something in his mind. There was, at first, nothing. Then, quietly, Lowry’s voice returned. “Yes, John?”
Control felt nauseous for reasons beyond the pain. His worst fears, confirmed: This wasn’t his internal self-talk imitating those around him. The answer was obvious: Some lasting influence of Lowry’s remained with him despite the attempted expulsion. He had never found out the full extent of the hypnotic technologies used against him—what Lowry might still be capable of even across the barrier to Area X. There might have been countless routines and programs still running, intractable, through his head. Perhaps a wave of pain because Control had thought to talk back. That seemed characteristic of his old boss.
“You should tell her that you’re okay,” said Lowry.
“I’m okay,” his mouth said.
“Are you serious?” asked Ghost Bird.
Control couldn’t come up with a plausible excuse. Not when he didn’t have any real explanation himself. Not when any answer would involve describing traitorous parts of him acting beyond the reach of his consciousness.
“I’m okay,” he said again.
“John,” she said in a voice that made Control’s chest hurt. “If there’s something going on—” Her gaze snapped upwards, and Control followed it up to what appeared to be nothing but gray clouds. Nevertheless, when she yelled, “Get down!” and pulled him into the grasses, he dropped.
When he looked up again, he saw what had caused the alarm.
A section of sky was opening, twisting, shuddering, rippling, visible primarily in the way that it warped the clouds behind it. It lifted and dropped just above them, like some massive plastic bag or piece of clingfilm had decided to take flight, sharp motions that insinuated searching or hunting. Everything in Control ground to a halt with the sheer effort of comprehending, his visual cortex screaming out what it was seeing while the rest of his brain refused to process the thing, too alien to exist anywhere outside of strange scifi flicks but undoubtedly right there above them.
Someone was screaming, Control dimly realized. Not him and not Ghost Bird, though. There was terror and—gunfire? A wave of emotions so powerful that they hardly felt like they belonged to Control at all: an impulse to grab a gun he no longer carried and fire up at it; to shout for any others to get down and hide.
Ghost Bird held him down with a hand on his shoulder, her body leaning over him as if that would at all shield him against the thing in the sky. Her presence only felt claustrophobic, a danger in itself that Control wanted to shove away.
Fortunately, awfully, he was too frozen to act on that.
It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before the thing folded, winked, blinked away and left nothing but a vast, empty expanse. Control, however, couldn’t quite convince his muscles to start moving again, was still largely somewhere else. The thing wasn’t gone, not really. It return a moment later, twisting itself around a human body like a shawl and then twisting further, each ripple of space shearing through flesh like nothing, the edges of reality itself become a knife hacking off limbs until it again winked away, taking the gory remains with it.
Why did that imagery come so naturally?
“Control,” Ghost Bird said in a harsh whisper. “Control, breathe.”
Only then did Control realize that his chest was moving in short, staccato bursts. Ghost Bird kept them crouched down with a hand on his back, now changing to small, awkward rubs in some attempt at comfort. When he finally convinced air into his lungs, it came out in shivering gasps. Not quite crying—he could never bring himself to cry around others, anyway—but still a bizarre outburst of inappropriate emotion that made him turn his head away while trying to compose himself. His hands were shaking.
“What the fuck was that?” he choked out, referring both to the impossible thing in the sky as well as—and maybe more so—his own overreaction.
Ghost Bird didn’t say anything, didn’t give any response. They remained crouched, silent, just in case.
Finally, the clouds that had been foretelling rain all morning made good on their promise, except that, following the lead of the rippling tear in reality, it wasn’t wholly rain. Testing the drops with a hand, Control recoiled when what landed was more like a tadpole: a small slippery thing with a rounded head and an inch or so of fat tail. Yet it was also water, perfectly transparent, and as Control shook it off him, it scattered into several smaller droplets that fell to and were absorbed by the earth.
It forced Control and Ghost Bird under some trees while Control worked to rub that awful slimy, crawling feeling off him, tried to assure himself that none had slid their way under his clothes.
“This place,” he muttered under his breath. “This goddamn fucking place.”