Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “The usual things, really, John. Although I’m not sure I like your tone.”

  “The usual things? Like hypnosis, maybe, backed up by conditioning beforehand at Central.” He was keeping his voice low, much as he wanted to lash out. He liked the coffee shop counter. He didn’t want to be asked to leave.

  A pause. “It might have come into play, yes, but only with strict rules and safeguards—and only in the subject’s absolute best interests.”

  “The subject might have preferred to have had the choice. The subject might’ve preferred not to be a drone.” The subject might prefer to know that his hopes and desires and impulses were all definitely his own hopes, desires, impulses.

  “The subject might not have had the intel or perspective to be involved in that decision. The subject might have needed an inoculation, a vaccine.”

  “Against what?”

  “Against any number of things. Although at the first sign of something serious happening, we would pull you out and send a team in.”

  “Like what? What would you consider serious?”

  “Whatever might happen.”

  Infuriatingly opaque, as always. Making decisions for him, as always. He was channeling his father’s irritation now as much as his own, the specters of so many arguments at the dinner table or in the living room. He decided to take the conversation onto the street after all, stood in the mouth of the alley just to the left of the coffee shop. Not many people were out walking around—most of them were probably still in church, or scoring drugs.

  “Jack used to say that if you don’t give an operative all the information they need, you might as well cut your own leg off,” he said. “Your operation is screwed.”

  “But your operation isn’t screwed, John,” she said, with some force. “You’re still there. You’re still in touch with us. Me. We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Good point, except I don’t think that ‘we’ means Central. I think you mean some faction within Central, and not an effective one. Your Voice made a mess trying to take the assistant director out of the mix. Give her another week and I’ll be Grace’s administrative assistant.” Or was the point to waste a lot of Grace’s time and attention?

  “There are no factions, just Central. The Voice is under a lot of stress, John. Even more now. We all are.”

  “The hell there aren’t factions.” Now he was Jack, hard to throw off topic. “The hell there aren’t.” “The hell there isn’t.” “The hell you say.”

  “You won’t believe me, John, but I’ve done you a favor placing you at the Southern Reach.”

  Everyone had forgotten the definition of favor. First Whitby, then Grace, now his mother. He didn’t trust himself to respond, so he didn’t.

  “A lot of people would’ve killed for that position,” she said.

  He had no answer for that, either. While they’d been talking, the woman had disappeared, and the storefront was deserted. Back in the day the liquor store had been a department store. Long before Hedley was built, there had been an indigenous settlement here, along the river—something his father had told him—and the remains of that, too, lay beneath the facade of the liquor store.

  Down below the store, too, a labyrinth of limestone cradling the aquifer, narrow caves and blind albino crawfish and luminescent freshwater fish. Surrounded by the crushed remains of so many creatures, loamed into the soil, pushed down by the foundations of the buildings. Would that be the biologist’s understanding of the street—what she would see? Perhaps she would see, too, one possible future of that space, the liquor store crumbling under an onslaught of vines and weather damage, becoming akin to the sunken, moss-covered hills near Area X. A loss she might not mourn. Or would she?

  “Are you there, John?”

  Where else would he be?

  For a long time now, Control had suspected his mother had taken someone else under her wing as a protégé—it seemed almost inevitable. Someone sculpted, trained, and deployed to correct the kinds of mistakes made by Control. The thought reoccurred whenever he was feeling particularly insecure or vulnerable, or sometimes just because it could be a useful mental exercise. Now he was trying to visualize the perfectly groomed protégé walking in and taking over the Southern Reach from him. What would this person have done differently? What would this person do right now?

  While his mother continued to talk, plunging ahead with what seemed like a lie.

  “But I was mostly calling for an update, to see if you think you’re making progress”—this his mother’s attempt to subvert his silence with an apology. Slight emphasis on progress.

  “You know exactly how it’s going.” The Voice would have told her everything It knew up to the point he had derailed It.

  “True, but I haven’t heard your side.”

  “My side? My side is that I’ve been dropped into a pit of snakes with a blindfold on and my hands tied behind my back.”

  “That’s just a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” said the streak of light.

  “Not as dramatic as whatever you did to me at Central. I’ve got missing hours, maybe a missing day.”

  “Nothing much,” she said in a bland tone that let him know she was bored with the topic. “Nothing much. Prepared you, stiffened your resolve, that’s all. Made you see some things more clearly and others less so.”

  “Like introduce fake memories or—”

  “No. That kind of thing would make you such an expensive model that no one here could afford you. Or afford to send you to the Southern Reach.”

  Because everyone would kill for this position.

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “You’d better hope not,” she said with an in-rushing verve, “because I’m all you’ve got now—by your own actions. Besides, you’ll never really know for sure. You’ve always been the kind of person who peels away the layers, even when there are no layers left. So just take it at face value, from your poor long-suffering mother.”

  “I can see you, Mother. I can see your reflection in the glass. You’re right around the corner, watching, aren’t you? It’s not just your proxies. You’re in town, too.”

  “Yes, John. That’s why there’s that kind of tinny echo. That’s why my words seem to be falling on deaf ears, because you’re hearing them twice. I’m interrupting myself, apparently.”

  A kind of rippling effect spread through him. He felt elongated and stretched, and his throat was dry. “Can I trust you?” he asked, sick of the sparring.

  Something sincere and open in his voice must have reached her, because she dropped the distant tone and said, “Of course you can, John. You can’t trust how I’ll get somewhere, but you have to trust I know where I’m going. I always know where I’m going.”

  That didn’t help him at all. “You want me to trust you? Then tell me, Mother. Tell me who the Voice was.” If she wouldn’t, the impulse in him to just disappear into the underbelly of Hedley, to fade into that landscape and not come back, might return. Might be too strong to suppress.

  She hesitated, and her hesitation scared him. It felt real, not staged.

  Then: “Lowry. God’s honest truth, John. Lowry was the Voice.”

  Not thirty years distant at all. But breathing in Control’s ear.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  Banished and yet returned via the videos that would play forever in his head. Haunting him still.

  Lowry.

  “Go ahead and check the seats for change, John.” Grandpa Jack staring at him as he held the gun.

  There had come a sharp rapping at the window. It was his mother, leaning over to look in the window. Even through the condensation, Control could tell when she saw the gun on his lap. The door was wrenched open. The gun suddenly vanished, and Jack, on the other side, was out on his ear, Mother standing over him while he sat on the curb in front of the car. Control took the risk of lowering the left rear window a bit, then leaned forward so he could observe them better through the front windshield. She was
talking quietly to Grandpa while she stood in front of him, arms folded and her gaze straight ahead, as if he stood at eye level. Control couldn’t see where the gun had gone.

  A sense of menace radiated out from his mother that he had never seen in such a concentrated form before. Her voice might be low, and he couldn’t hear most of what she was saying, but the tone and quickness of it was like a sharpened butcher knife slicing, effortless, through raw meat. His grandpa gave a peculiar nod in response, one that was almost more like he was being pushed back by some invisible force or like she was shoving him.

  She unfolded her arms and lowered her head to look at Grandpa, and Control heard, “Not this way! Not this way. You can’t force him into it.” For some reason, he wondered if she was talking about the gun or Grandpa’s secret plan to take him to the lingerie show.

  Then she walked back to the car to collect him, and Grandpa got in and drove off slowly. Relief swept over Control as they went back inside the house. He didn’t have to go to the lingerie show. He might be able to go next door later.

  Mother only talked about the incident once, when they got back in the house. They took off their coats, went into the living room. She took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. With her big, wavy hair and her slight features and her white blouse, red scarf, crisp black pants, and high heels she looked like a magazine model, smoking. An agitated model. Now he had experienced another unknown thing beyond the fact that she could fight fiercely for him: He hadn’t known she was a smoker.

  Except, she’d turned it back on him, as if he had been responsible. “What the hell were you thinking, John? What the hell were you thinking?”

  But he hadn’t been. He’d seen his grandpa’s wink when he mentioned the department-store show, had liked that the man who could be stern or even disapproving was confiding in him, trusting him to keep a secret from his mother.

  “Don’t touch guns, John,” she said, pacing back and forth. “And don’t do every stupid thing your grandpa tells you to do.” Later he decided to abide by the second commandment but to ignore the first, which he doubted she had meant—even nicknamed his various guns “Gramps” or “Grandpa.” He used guns, but he didn’t like them and didn’t like relying on them. They smelled like their perspective.

  Control never told his father about the incident, for fear it would be used against his mother. Nor did he recognize until later that the whole trip had actually been about the gun, or about finding the gun. That, perhaps, it had been evolving into a kind of test.

  Sitting there in the coffee shop after his mother hung up the thought crept in that perhaps his mother’s anger about the gun had itself been a tableau, a terroir, with Jack and Jackie complicit, actors in a scene meant already, at that young age, to somehow influence him or correct his course. To begin a kind of indoctrination in the family empire.

  He wasn’t sure he knew the difference anymore between what he was meant to find and what he’d dug up on his own. A tower could become a pit. Questioning a biologist could become a trap. An expedition member might even return thirty years later in the form of a voice whispering strange nothings in his ear.

  When he got home Sunday night, he checked his recording of the conversation with his mother, felt an overload of relief when there were no gaps, no evidence that his mother, too, was deceiving him.

  He believed that Central was in disarray, and that he’d been run by a faction, under hypnotic control. Now the ceiling was no doubt falling in on the clandestine basement, and the megalodon was feeling nervous within the cracked glass of its tank. Grace had bloodied It. Him. And then Control had delivered a follow-up punch.

  “Only Lowry had enough experience of the Southern Reach and Area X to be of use,” his mother had told him, but fear leaked out of her words, too, and she went on and on about Lowry while Control felt as if a historical figure had popped out from a portrait alive to announce itself. A broken, erratic, rehabilitated historical figure who claimed to remember little not already captured by the videos. Someone who had leveraged a promotion, received due to a tangled knot of pity and remorse or some other reason than competence.

  “Lowry is an asshole.” To stop her talking about him. Just because you survived, just because you were labeled a hero, didn’t mean you couldn’t also be an asshole. She must have been desperate, had no choice. Rearing up behind that, whispers he remembered now that might have come from Lowry’s direction: of shadow facilities, of things allied with the hypnosis and conditioning efforts but more hideous still.

  “I knew there might be things you’d tell him you wouldn’t tell me. We knew it might be better if you didn’t know … some of the things we needed you to do.”

  Anger had warred with satisfaction that he’d smoked them out, that at least one variable had been removed. A need to know more balanced against already feeling overwhelmed. While trying to ignore an unsettling new thought: that his mother’s power had boundaries.

  “Is there anything you’re hiding from me?”

  “No,” she said. “No. The mission is still the same: Focus on the biologist and the missing director. Dig through the notes. Stabilize the Southern Reach. Find out what has been going on that we don’t know about.”

  Had that been the mission? That fragmented focus? Maybe the Voice’s mission, which was his now, he supposed. He chose to take the lie that she had told him everything at face value, thought perhaps the worst of it was now behind him. He’d shaken off the chains. He’d taken everything Grace could throw at him. He’d seen the videos.

  Control went into the kitchen and poured a whiskey, his only one of the day, and downed it in one gulp, magical thinking behind the idea that it would help him sleep. As he put the empty glass back on the counter, he noticed the director’s cell phone by the landline. In its case, it still looked like a large black beetle.

  A premonition came to him, and a memory of the scuttling on the roof earlier in the week. He got a dish towel, picked up the phone, opened the back door with Chorry at his heels, and tossed the phone deep into the gloom of the backyard. It hit a tree, caromed off into the darkness of the long grass at the edge of the property. Fuck you, phone. Don’t come back. It could join the Voice/Lowry phone in some phone afterlife. He would rather feel paranoid or stupid than be compromised. He felt vindicated when Chorry-Chorrykins refused to follow the phone, wanted to stay inside. A good choice.

  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 direct
or 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. One problem—he would have to pick the lock, since he hadn’t put in a formal request to visit. Except he wanted to pick the lock, he realized. Didn’t want to have a key. As he worked on it with the tools he’d brought, the rain began to fall. Thick drops that clacked and thunked against last winter’s fallen magnolia leaves.

  He sensed he was being watched—some hint of movement from the corner of his eye, perhaps—just as he’d managed to open the door. He stood up and turned to his left.

  In the neighbor’s yard, well back from the chain-link fence, a black girl, maybe nine or ten, with beaded cornrows, stared warily at him. She wore a sunflower dress and white plastic sandals with Velcro straps.