Free Authority by Jeff VanderMeer Page A

usually they didn’t
     even try. You lose the impetus or something else intercedes, becomes more crucial
     and you don’t even realize it. Until it’s too late.”
    Which gave Control an uncomfortable image of someone or something in Area X entering
     the lighthouse and sitting atop a pile of journals and reading them for the Southern Reach. Or writing them.
    “I can show you something interesting in one of the rooms near the science division
     that pertains to this,” Whitby said in a dreamy tone, still following the path of
     the bird. “Would you like to see it?” His disconnected gaze clicked into hard focus
     and settled on Control, who had a sudden jarring impression of there being two Whitbys,
     one lurking inside the other. Or even three, nestled inside one another.
    “Why don’t you just tell me about it?”
    “No. I have to show you. It’s a little strange. You have to see it to understand it.”
     Whitby now gave the impression of not caring if Control saw the odd room, and yet
     caring entirely too much at the same time.
    Control laughed. Various people had been showing him bat-shit crazy things since his
     days working in domestic terrorism. People had said bat-shit crazy things to him today.
    “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll see it tomorrow.” Or not. No surprises. No satisfaction
     for the keepers of strange secrets. No strangeness before its time. He had truly had
     enough for one day, would gird his loins overnight for a return encounter. The thing
     about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting
     you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the
     Look or the Reaction, and they didn’t care what it was so long as it inflicted some
     kind of discomfort. He wondered if Grace had put Whitby up to this after their conversation,
     whether it was some odd practical joke and he’d been meant to stick his hand into
     a space only to find his hand covered in earthworms, or open a box only for a plastic
     snake to spring out.
    The bird now swooped down in an erratic way, hard to make out in the late-afternoon
     light.
    “You should see it now,” Whitby said, in a kind of wistfully hurt tone. “Better late
     than never.”
    But Control had already turned his back on Whitby and was headed for the entrance
     and then the (blessed) parking lot.
    Late? Just how late did Whitby think he was?

 
    004: REENTRY
    The car offered a little breathing room, a chance to decompress and transform from
     one thing to another. The town of Hedley was a forty-minute drive from the Southern
     Reach. It lay against the banks of a river that, just twenty miles later, fed into
     the ocean. Hedley was large enough to have some character and culture without being
     a tourist trap. People moved there even though it fell just short of being “a good
     town to raise a family in.” Between the sputtering shops huddled at one end of the
     short river walk and the canopy roads, there were hints of a certain quality of life
     obscured in part by the strip malls that radiated outward from the edges of the city.
     It had a small private college, with a performing arts center. You could jog along
     the river or hike greenways. Still, though, Hedley also partook of a certain languor
     that, especially in the summers, could turn from charming to tepid overnight. A stillness
     when the breeze off the river died signaled a shift in mood, and some of the bars
     just off the waterfront had long been notorious for sudden, senseless violence—places
     you didn’t go unless you could pass for white, or maybe not even then. A town that
     seemed trapped in time, not much different from when Control had been a teenager.
    Hedley’s location worked for Control. He wanted to be close to the sea but not on
     the coast. Something about the uncertainty of Area X had created an insistence inside
     of him on that point. His dream in a way forbid it. His dream told him he