Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The cameras were perhaps even less revealing. As if the abandoned rushes from an intense movie battle scene, they simply showed the haunches and the underside of the hind paws of desperately running rabbits and some herky-jerky landscape before everything went dark. There were no video reports from rabbits that had crossed over the border, although the escapees muddied the issue, the swamps on either side looking very similar. The Southern Reach had spent a good amount of time in the aftermath tracking down escapees to rule out that they were receiving footage from across the border.

  Nor had the next expedition to Area X, sent in a week after the rabbit experiment, found any evidence of white rabbits, dead or alive. Nor had any similar experiments, on a far smaller scale, produced any results whatsoever. Nor had Control missed a finicky note in one file by an ecologist about the event that read, “What the hell? This is an invasive species. They would have contaminated Area X.” Would they have? Would whatever had created Area X have allowed that? Control tried to push away a ridiculous image of Area X, years later, sending back a human-size rabbit that could not remember anything but its function. Most of the magicians were all snickering at inappropriate places anyway, as if showing him how they’d done their most notorious trick. But he’d heard nervous laughter before; he was sure that, even at such a remove, the video disturbed many of them.

  Some of the individuals responsible had been fired and others reassigned. But apparently adding the passage of time to a farce left you with an iconic image, because here was the noble remnant of the science division, showing him with marked enthusiasm what had been deemed an utter failure. They had more to show him—data and samples from Area X under glass—but it all amounted to nothing more than what was already in the files, information he could check later at his leisure.

  In a way, Control didn’t mind seeing this video. It was a relief considering what awaited him. The videos from the first expedition, the members of which had died, save one survivor, would have to be reviewed later in the week as primary evidence. But he also couldn’t shake the echo of a kind of frat-boy sensibility to the current presentation, the underlying howl of “Look at this shit we sent out into the border! Look at this stunt we pulled!” Pass the cheap beer. Do a shot every time you see a white rabbit.

  When Control left, they had all stood there in an awkward line, as if he were about to take a photograph, and shook his hand, one by one. Only after he and Whitby were back on the stairs, past the horrible black gloves, did he realize what was peculiar about that. They had all stood so straight, and their expressions had been so serious. They must have thought he was there to cull yet more from their department. That he was there to judge them. Later still, scooping up some of the bugs from his desk on his way to carry out a bad deed before calling the Voice, he wondered if instead they were afraid of something else entirely.

  Most of this Control told the Voice with a mounting sense of futility. Not a lot of it made much sense or would be news; he was just pushing words around to have something to say. He didn’t tell the Voice that some of the scientists had used the words environmental boon to describe Area X, with a disturbing and demoralizing subtext of “Should we be fighting this?” It was “pristine wilderness,” after all, human-made toxins now absent.

  “GODDAMMIT!” the Voice screamed near the end of Control’s science report, interrupting the Voice’s own persistent mutter in the background … and Control held the cell phone away from his ear for a moment, unsure of what had set that off, until he heard, “Sorry. I spilled coffee on myself. Continue.” Coffee somewhat spoiled the image of the megalodon in Control’s head, and it took him a moment to pick up the thread.

  When he was done, the Voice just dove forward, as if they were starting over: “What is your mental state at this moment? Is your house in order? What do you think it will take?”

  Which question to answer? “Optimistic? But until they have more direction, structure, and resources, I won’t know.”

  “What is your impression of the prior director?”

  A hoarder. An eccentric. An enigma. “It’s a complicated situation here and only my first full da—”

  “WHAT IS YOUR IMPRESSION OF THE PRIOR DIRECTOR?” A howl of a shout, as if the gravel had been lifted up into a storm raining down.

  Control felt his heart rate increase. He’d had bosses before who had anger-management issues, and the fact that this one was on the other end of a cell phone didn’t make it any better.

  It all spilled out, his nascent opinions. “She had lost all perspective. She had lost the thread. Her methods were eccentric toward the end, and it will take a while to unravel—”

  “ENOUGH!”

  “But, I—”

  “Don’t disparage the dead.” This time a pebbled whisper. Even with the filter, a sense of mourning came through, or perhaps Control was just projecting.

  “Yes, sorry, it’s just that—”

  “Next time,” the Voice said, “I expect you to have something more interesting to tell me. Something I don’t know. Ask the assistant director about the biologist. For example. The director’s plan for the biologist.”

  “Yes, that makes sense,” Control agreed, but really just hoping to get off the line soon. Then a thought occurred. “Oh—speaking of the assistant director …” He outlined the issue that morning with sending the anthropologist and surveyor away, the problem of Grace seeming to have contacts at Central that could cause trouble.

  The Voice said, “I’ll look into it. I’ll handle it,” and then launched into something that sounded prerecorded because it was faintly repetitious: “And remember, I am always watching. So really think about what it might be that I don’t know.”

  Click.

  _______

  One thing the scientists told him had been useful and unexpected, but he hadn’t told the Voice because it seemed to qualify as Common Secret Knowledge.

  In trying to redirect away from the failed white rabbits experiment, Control had asked for their current theories about the border, no matter how outrageous.

  Cheney had coughed once or twice, looked around, and then spoken up. “I wish I could be more definite about this, but, you know, we argue about it a lot, because there are so many unknowns … but, well, I personally don’t believe that the border necessarily comes from the same source as whatever is transforming Area X.”

  “What?”

  Cheney grimaced. “A common response, I don’t blame you. But what I mean is—there’s no evidence that the … presence … in Area X also generated the border.”

  “I understood that, but …”

  Davidson had spoken up then: “We haven’t been able to test the border in the same way as the samples taken from inside Area X. But we have been able to take readings, and without boring you with the data, the border is different enough in composition to support that theory. It may be that one Event occurred to create Area X and then a second Event occurred to create the invisible border, but that—”

  “They aren’t related?” Control interrupted, incredulous.

  Cheney shook his head. “Well, only in that Event Two is almost certainly a reaction to Event One. But maybe someone else”—Control noted, once again, the reluctance to say “alien” or “something”—“created the border.”

  “Which means,” Control said, “that it’s possible this second entity was trying to contain the fallout from Event One?”

  “Exactly,” Cheney said.

  Control again suppressed a strong impulse to just get up and leave, to walk out through the front doors and never come back.

  “And,” he said, drawing out the word, working through it, “what about the way into Area X, through the border? How did you create that?”

  Cheney frowned, gave his colleagues a helpless glance, then retreated into the X of his own face when none of them stepped into the breach. “We didn’t create that. We found it. One day, it was just … there.”

  An anger rose in Control then. In
part because Grace’s initial briefing had been too vague, or he’d made too many assumptions. But mostly because the Southern Reach had sent expedition after expedition in through a door they hadn’t created, into God knew what—hoping that everything would be all right, that they would come home, that those white rabbits hadn’t just evaporated into their constituent atoms, possibly returned to their most primeval state in agonizing pain.

  “Entity One or Entity Two?” he asked Cheney, wishing there were some way the biologist could have sat in on this conversation, already thinking of new questions for her.

  “What?”

  “Which Event creator opened a door in the border, do you think?”

  Cheney shrugged. “Well, that’s impossible to say, I’m afraid. Because we don’t know if its main purpose was to let something in or to allow something out.”

  Or both. Or Cheney didn’t know what he was talking about.

  _______

  Control caught up with the assistant director while navigating his way through one of the many corridors he hadn’t quite connected one to the other. He was trying to find HR to file paperwork but still couldn’t see the map of the building entire in his head and remained a little off-balance from the phone call with the Voice.

  The scraps of overheard conversation in the hallways didn’t help, pointing as they did to evidence for which he as yet had no context. “How deep do you think it goes down?” “No, I don’t recognize it. But I’m not an expert.” “Believe me or don’t believe me.” Grace didn’t help, either. As soon as he came up beside her, she began to crowd him, perhaps to make the point that she was as strong and tall as him. She smelled of some synthetic lavender perfume that made him stifle a sneeze.

  After fielding an inquiry about the visit with the scientists, Control turned and bore down on her before she could veer off. “Why didn’t you want the biologist on the twelfth expedition?”

  She stopped, put some space between them to look askance at him. Good—at least she was willing to engage.

  “What was on your mind back then? Why didn’t you want the biologist on that expedition?”

  Personnel were passing by them on either side. Grace lowered her voice, said, “She did not have the right qualifications. She had been fired from half a dozen jobs. She had some raw talent, some kind of spark, yes, but she was not qualified. Her husband’s position on the prior expedition—that compromised her, too.”

  “The director didn’t agree.”

  “How is Whitby working out, anyway?” she asked by way of reply, and he knew his expression had confirmed his source. Forgive me, Whitby, for giving you up. Yet this also told him Grace was concerned about Whitby talking to him. Did that mean Whitby was Cheney’s creature?

  He pressed forward: “But the director didn’t agree.”

  “No,” she admitted. Control wondered what kind of betrayal that had been. “She did not. She thought these were all pluses, that we were too concerned about the usual measurements of suitability. So we deferred to her.”

  “Even though she had the bodies of the prior expedition disinterred and reexamined?”

  “Where did you hear that?” she asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Wouldn’t that speak to the director’s own suitability?”

  But Grace’s surprise had already ossified back into resistance, which meant she was on the move again as she said curtly, “No. No, it would not.”

  “She suspected something, didn’t she?” Control asked, catching up to her again. Central thought the files suggested that even if the unique mind-wiped condition of the prior expedition didn’t signal a kind of shift in the situation in Area X, it might have signaled a shift in the director.

  Grace sighed, as if tired of trying to shake him. “She suspected that they might have … changed since the autopsies. But if you’re asking, you know already.”

  “And had they? Had they changed?” Disappeared. Been resurrected. Flown off into the sky.

  “No. They had decomposed a little more rapidly than might be expected, but no, they hadn’t changed.”

  Control wondered how much that had cost the director in respect and in favors. He wondered if by the time the director had told them she was attaching herself to the twelfth expedition some of the staff might have felt not alarm or concern but a strange sort of guilty relief.

  He had another question, but Grace was done, had already pivoted to veer off down a different corridor in the maze.

  There followed some futile, halfhearted efforts to rearrange his office, along with a review of some basic reports Grace had thrown at him, probably to slow his progress. He learned that the Southern Reach had its own props design department, tasked with creating equipment for the expeditions that didn’t violate protocols. In other words, fabrication of antiquated technology. He learned that the security on the facilities that housed returning expedition members was undergoing an upgrade; the outdated brand of surveillance camera they’d been using had suffered a systemic meltdown. He’d even thrown out a DVD given to him by a “life-cycle biologist” that showed a computer-generated cross section of the forgotten coast’s ecosystem. The images had been created as a series of topographical lines in a rainbow of colors. It was very pretty but the wrong level of detail for him.

  At day’s end, on his way out, he ran into Whitby again, in the cafeteria around which the man seemed to hover, almost as if he didn’t want to be down in the dungeon with the rest of the scientists. Or as if they sent him on perpetual errands to keep him away. A little dark bird had become trapped inside, and Whitby was staring up at where it flew among the skylights.

  Control asked Whitby the question he’d wanted to ask Grace before her maze-pivot.

  “Whitby, why are there so few returning journals from the expeditions?” Far, far fewer than returnees.

  Whitby was still mesmerized by the flight of the bird, his head turning the way a cat’s does to follow every movement. There was an intensity to his gaze that Control found disconcerting.

  “Incomplete data,” Whitby said. “Too incomplete to be sure. But most returnees tell us they just don’t think to bring them back. They don’t believe it’s important, or don’t feel the need to. Feeling is the important part. You lose the need or impetus to divulge, to communicate, a bit like astronauts lose muscle mass. Most of the journals seem to turn up in the lighthouse anyway, though. It hasn’t been a priority for a while, but when we did ask later expeditions to retrieve them, 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 lit
tle 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.