The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer

Author:Jeff VanderMeer [Jeff VanderMeer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

021: REPEATING

When Monday morning arrived, Control didn’t go into the Southern Reach right away. Instead he took a trip to the director’s house—grabbed the driving instructions from the Internet and holstered his gun and got on the highway. It had been on his list to do once the notes in his office were categorized, just to make sure Grace’s people had cleaned out the house as thoroughly as she claimed. The confirmation of the Voice’s/Lowry’s manipulation, and by extension his mother’s, remained a listless feeling, something buzzing around in the background. As answers went, Lowry got him no further, gave him no real leverage—he’d been manipulated by someone untouchable and ethereal. Lowry, shadowing himself as the Voice, haunting the Southern Reach from afar. Control now trying to merge them into one person, one intent.

There was also an impulse, once he was on his way, not to return to the Southern Reach at all—to bypass the director’s house, too—and detour onto a rural road, take it over to his father’s house, some fifty miles west.

But he resisted it. New owners, and no sculptures left in the backyard. After his dad’s death, they’d gone to good homes with aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, even if he’d felt as if the landscape of his formative years was being dismantled, piece by piece. So no solace there. No real history. Some of his relatives still lived in the area, but his father had been the bond between them, and he’d last known most of them as a teenager.

Bleakersville had a population of about twenty thousand—just big enough to have a few decent restaurants, a small arts center, and the three blocks of historic district. The director lived in a neighborhood with few white faces in evidence. Lots of overhanging pines, oaks, and magnolia trees, hung heavy with moss, sodden branches from the storms lying broken on the potholed road. Solid cedar or cement houses, some with brick accents, mostly brown and blue or gray, with one or two cars in gravel or pine-needle driveways. He drove past a couple of communal basketball hoops and some black and Latino kids on bicycles, who stopped and stared until he was gone. School had been out for a couple of weeks.

The director’s house lay at the end of a street named Standiford, at the top of a hill. Choosing caution, Control parked a block away, on the street below, then walked into the backyard, which slanted up the hill toward her house. The backyard was overgrown with untrimmed azalea bushes and massive wisteria vines, some of them wrapped tight around the pine trees. A couple of halfhearted compost islands languished behind circles of staked chicken wire. Much of the grass had yellowed and died over time, exposing tree roots.

Three cement semicircles served in lieu of a deck, covered over with leaves and what looked like rotted birdseed alongside a pie pan filled to the top with dirty water. The white French doors stained green with mold beyond them would be his entry point.

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