Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “So we give up. We live on the island, make ourselves hats out of leaves, take bounty from the sea.” Build a house from the ribs of one of the leviathans from his dreams. Listen to homemade dance music while drinking moonshine distilled from poisonous weeds. Turn away from the real world because it doesn’t exist anymore.

  Ignoring him, she said: “A whale can injure another whale with its sonar. A whale can speak to another whale across sixty miles of ocean. A whale is as intelligent as we are, just in a way we can’t quite measure or understand. Because we’re these incredibly blunt instruments.” That idea again. “Or at least, you are.” Maybe she hadn’t muttered that under her breath, he’d only imagined it.

  “You sympathize with It,” he said. “You like It.” A cheap shot that he couldn’t help.

  Too often over the past four days, he had felt like he was crossing one of the dioramas from the natural history museum he had loved so much—intriguing, fascinating, but not quite real, or not quite real to him. Even if the effects had not yet manifested, he was being invaded, infected, remade. Was it his fate to become a moaning creature in the reeds and then food for worms?

  “There was a lot about fakes in Whitby’s notes,” he said a little later, slyly, to test her. Especially as her attention seemed elsewhere, always glued to the sky. To perhaps see just how dispassionate she could be about her own condition. With, he knew, just a sliver of payback in there, too, which he couldn’t help. Because it made no sense to go to the island.

  When she said nothing, he made up a quote, feeling guilty even as the words left his mouth: “‘The sense in which the perfect fake becomes the thing it mimics, and this through some strange yet static process reveals some truth about the world. Even as it can’t, by definition, be original.’”

  Still no response. “No? How about ‘When you meet yourself and see a double that is you, would you feel sympathy, or would the impulse be to destroy the copy? To judge it unreal and to tear it down like any cardboard construct?’” Another fake, because Whitby hadn’t discussed doubles—not once in the whole damn document.

  She stopped walking, faced him. As ever, he had trouble not looking away.

  “Is that what you’re afraid of, Control?” She said it with no particular cruelty or passion. “Because I could use hypnosis on you.”

  “You might be susceptible, too,” he said, wanting to warn her off, even as he knew there might come a time when he would need her to use hypnosis just as she had in the tunnel leading into Area X. Take my hand. Close your eyes. It had felt as if he were continually crawling out of the mouth of a vast inky-black snake, that he could “see” a rasping sound from deep in its throat, and from all sides, through the infinite dark bruise that encircled him, leviathans stared in at him.

  “I’m not.”

  “But you’re the double—the copy,” he said, pressing. “Maybe the copy doesn’t have the same defenses. And you still don’t know why.” This much she had told him.

  “Test me,” she said, a snarl from deep in her throat. She stopped, faced him, threw down her pack. “Go ahead and test me. Say it. Say the words you think will destroy me.”

  “I don’t want to destroy you,” he said quietly, looking away.

  “Are you sure?” she said, coming very close. He could smell her sweat, see the rise of her shoulders, the half-curled left hand. “Are you sure?” she repeated. “Why not inoculate me, if you’re unsure? You’re already caught between wanting me and not being sure I’m all human, is that it? Made by the enemy. Must be the enemy. But can’t help yourself anyway.”

  “I helped you back at the Southern Reach,” he said.

  “Don’t thank people for doing what they’re supposed to. You told me that.”

  He took a stumbling step back. “I’m out here, Ghost Bird, traveling to a place I didn’t want to go. Having followed someone I’m not sure I know.” A beacon to him still, and he resented that, didn’t want it. Couldn’t help it.

  “That’s bullshit. You know exactly who I am—or you should have. You’re afraid, just like me,” she said, and he knew that he was. Had no defenses out here, for anything.

  “I don’t think you’re with the enemy,” he said, enemy sounding harsh and unreasonable now. “And I don’t think of you as a copy. Not really.”

  Exasperation, even as she was relenting, or he thought she was: “I am a copy, John. But not a perfect one. I’m not her. She’s not me. Do you know what I’d say if I came face-to-face with her?”

  “What?”

  “I’d tell her, ‘You made a lot of fucking mistakes. You made a lot of mistakes, and yet I love you. You’re a mess and a revelation, but I can’t be any of that. All I can do is work out things myself.’ And then, knowing her, she’d probably look at me funny and take a tissue sample from me.”

  A roaring laughter came out of him at that. He banged his hand on his knee. “You’re right. You’re probably right. She’d do exactly that.” He sat on the ground, while she remained where she was, stiff as a sentinel. “I’m beyond my skill set out here. I’m totally fucked. Even if we’d gone to the light house.”

  “Totally fucked,” she said, smiling.

  “Strange, isn’t it? A strange place to be.” Being drawn out of himself, even though he didn’t want to be. Suddenly calmer than he’d been since he’d gotten here, all of his failures muffled and indistinct behind another kind of border.

  She stared at him, appraising him.

  “We should keep going,” she said. “But you can keep reading.”

  She offered him a hand up, the strength of her grip as he got to his feet a greater reassurance than any words.

  “But it’s a fucking disaster,” he said. “I’m reading you the last will and testament of a fool.”

  “What other entertainment do we have out here?”

  “True.”

  Control hadn’t told her about Whitby’s strange room or his suspicions about Whitby as a conduit for Area X. He hadn’t told her about those last desperate moments at the Southern Reach as the border shifted. And in not telling Ghost Bird these things, he had come to understand his mother’s lies better. She had wanted to cover up the core of her decisions by hiding facts or watering them down. But she must have been wise enough to realize, no matter her motivations, no matter the labyrinth, every omission left some sign of its presence.

  “ ‘How does It renew Itself if not through our actions? Our lives?’” Whitby asked, living on through Control when the man himself was probably dead or worse.

  But she wasn’t listening; something in the sky had caught her attention again, something he knew couldn’t be storks, and he had the binoculars this time, scrambled to find what she was staring at. When he found it, he adjusted the focus a few times, not sure he’d seen correctly.

  But he had.

  Across the deepening blue, high up, something drifted that resembled ripped and tattered streamers. Long and wide and alien. Its progress so far up, so far away … Control thought of an invisible shredded plastic bag, eviscerated to elongate and drift through the sky … except it was thicker than that and part of the sky, too. The texture of it, the way it existed and didn’t exist, made him recoil, made his hand twitch, become numb, skin cold, remembering a wall that was not a wall. A wall that had been breathing under his touch.

  “Get down!” Ghost Bird said, and forced him to his knees beside her in a stand of reeds. He could feel the brightness in him now—tight, taut, pulling like it was his skin being pulled, drawn toward the sky that wasn’t just the sky anymore. Drawn to it so much that he would have gotten up if Ghost Bird hadn’t forced him down again. He lay there grateful for her weight beside him, grateful he wasn’t out here alone.

  Stitching through the sky, in a terrifying way—rippling, diving, rising again, and there came a terrible whispering that pierced not his ears but all of him, as if small particles of something physical had shot through him. He cursed, frozen there, watching, afraid. “The wavery lines
that are there and not there.” A line from Whitby’s report he hadn’t shared because he hadn’t understood it. Images from the video of the first expedition coming back to him.

  “Stay still,” Ghost Bird whispered in his ear. “Stay still.” She was sheltering his body with hers, she was trying to make it seem as if he wasn’t there.

  He tried not even to breathe, to become so motionless that he was no longer alive. As it curled in and through the sky, he could hear it rippling, diving, rising again, like traces of a sail until, as he risked a look, he saw some impact in the air freeze it in place, and for a moment it was stretched as taut as skin, almost brittle, unyielding.

  Then, with a final plunge and ascent, coming far too close, the presence winked out of existence, or slipped out of the air, and the sky was the same as before.

  He had no words for it, Whitby’s or his own. This was no dead diorama. This was no beastly skeleton of a man he’d never known. Anything now seemed possible. Anything could happen. He clutched the carving of Chorry tight. So tight he almost punctured his skin.

  They remained that way until a storm slipped across a sky Control now thought of as treacherous, and through the dark gray light there came lightning, thunder, and in amongst the raindrops that drenched them, dark, slippery tadpole-like things hurtled down and disappeared into the soil all around them while they tried to take shelter as best they could, soaked under a gnarled, blackened copse of trees with leaves like daggers. The tadpole things were more like living rivulets, about the size of his little finger. He could not help thinking of them as coming from the stitching in the sky, that somehow it had disintegrated into a million tiny pieces, and this, too, was somehow part of the ecosystem of Area X.

  “What do you think that will become?” he asked her.

  “Whatever everything else is becoming here,” she said, and that was no answer at all.

  When the storm passed, the marsh came alive with birdsong and the gurgle of water in the canals, nothing at all amiss. Perhaps the reeds seemed more vibrant, the trees greener, but this was just the quality of the light, from a sun that seemed as distant as the rest of the world.

  After a time, they stood. After a time, in silence, they continued on, walking closer together than before.

  0006: The Director

  There’s a place that as a kid you called the farthestmost point—the most distant you could get, the place that when you stood there you could pretend you were the only person in the world. Being there made you wary, but it also put a kind of peace into you, a sense of security. Beyond that point, in either direction, you were always returning, and are returning still. But for that moment, even now with Whitby by your side, you’re so remote that there’s nothing for miles—and you feel that. You feel it strongly. You’ve gone from being a little on edge to being a little tired, and you’ve come out on this perfectly still scene where the scrublands turn to wetlands, with a freshwater canal serving as a buffer to the salt marsh and, ultimately, the sea. Where once you saw otters, heard the call of curlews. You take a deep breath and relax into the landscape, walk along the shore of this lower heaven rejuvenated by its perfect stillness. Your legs are for a time no longer tired and you are afraid of nothing, not even Area X, and you have no room for memory or thought or anything except this moment, and this one, and the next.

  Soon enough, though, that feeling falls away again, and you and Whitby—survivors of the topographical anomaly—stand in the remains of your mother’s cottage. It’s just a floor and a couple of supporting walls with the wallpaper so faded you can’t figure out the pattern. On the sunken splintered deck, a battered and smashed rot of wide planks that used to be the walkway leads to the dunes, and from there to a metallic-blue sea that tosses up whitecaps and drags them down again. Perhaps you shouldn’t have come here, but you needed something like normalcy, some evocation of those days before it all went wrong—days that had seemed so ordinary at the time.

  “Don’t forget me,” Saul had said back then, as if speaking not just for him but for your mother, too, and the rest of the forgotten coast. Now truly forgotten, Whitby standing at one end and you at the other, needing the space. He’s unsure of you, and you’re definitely unsure of him. Whitby wanted to abort the mission after the tower, but at no point did you think you should just leave. This was your home, and Whitby isn’t going to stop you, though he might protest, though he might whimper and try to get free, though he might plead with you to return across the border immediately.

  “Where’s your optimism now?” you want to ask, but wherever he’s wound up he’s still not in your world.

  Long ago, a fire or two was kindled on the cottage floor, in what used to be the living room, under the shelter of one sagging wall. Blackened splotches left behind provide the evidence, tell you that even after Area X, people lived here for a time. Did your mother make those fires?

  Dead beetles litter the floor, crushed into glossy emerald pieces, teal moss and thick vines creating a chaotic green sea. Wrens and warblers hop through the underbrush outside, settle on the gaping window frame that looks out landward, then are gone again. The window you’d look through when expecting your dad to come for visits, driveway outside erased by a proliferation of bushes and weeds.

  Cans of food, long since rusted and rotted, along with a thick layer of soil erupting out of the corners, through the insect-chewed floorboards, what’s left of them. The anomaly of cracked, ancient dishes barely recognizable, and stacked in a sink that has fallen in on itself and been transformed by mold and lichen, the cupboards below rotted away.

  There’s a regret in you, a kind of daymark you’ve let become obscured. The expeditions are never told that people had lived here, worked here, got drunk here, and played music here. People who lived in mobile homes and bungalows and lighthouses. Better not to think of people living here, of it being empty … and yet now you want someone to remember, to understand what was lost, even if it was little enough.

  Whitby stands there like an intruder as you explore, knows you’re hiding something from him about the cottage. The flat, grim line of his mouth, the resentment in his gaze—is it natural, or is Area X already turning him against you? When you burst out of the tower, escaping whatever had risen up with such speed, you found him still screaming, babbling about something that had attacked him. “There wasn’t any sound. Nothing. Then … a wall behind me, running through me. Then it was gone.” But since then he hasn’t said more, nor have you shared what you saw right before you leapt up those last steps into the light. Perhaps neither thinks the other would believe. Perhaps you both just want to be back in the world first.

  No bodies here in the cottage, but what did you think? That you would find her huddled inside this place, cocooned from disaster somehow as the world changed around her? That was never your mother’s nature. If there had been something to fight, she would have fought it. If there had been someone to help, she would have helped them. If she could have struck out for safety, she would have. In your daydreams, she held on, like you have held on, hoping for rescue.

  Sitting there at the Star Lanes Lounge, scribbling, you found the cottage coming back to you at odd moments, along with the lighthouse. Always that riptide compulsion dragging you down into the water, that need to know overriding the fear. The sound of the midnight waves at high tide, how from the window of your room in your mother’s bungalow back then you could see the surf under the moonlight as a series of metallic-blue lines, dark water squeezed between them. Sometimes those lines had been broken by her figure as she walked the beach late at night, kept awake by thoughts she never shared, her face turned away from you. As if searching even then for the answer you seek now.

  “What is this place?” Whitby asks, again. “Why are we here?” His voice giving away his stress.

  You ignore him. You want to say, “This is where I grew up,” but he’s endured one shock too many already, and you still have to deal with Lowry, with the Southern Reach, when you get
back. If you get back.

  “That vine-strewn shadow there—that was my room,” you would tell him if you could. “My parents divorced when I was two. My dad left—he’s kind of a small-time crook—and my mom raised me, except I spent the winter holidays with him every year. Until I stayed with him for good because I couldn’t go home anymore. And he lied to me about the reason why until I was older, which was probably the right thing to do. And I’ve been wondering my whole life what it would be like to come back here, to this place. Wondered what I would feel, what I would do. Sometimes even imagined there would be some message, something my mom had had the foresight to put in a metal box or under a rock. Some sign, because even now I need a message, a sign.”

  But there is nothing in the cottage, nothing you didn’t already know, and there’s the lighthouse at your back—laughing at you, saying, “I told you so.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll go home soon,” you say. “Just the lighthouse, and we’ll go home.” Saving the best for last, or the worst for last? How much of a childhood can be destroyed or twisted before the overlay replaces the memories?

  You push past Whitby—abruptly—because you don’t want him to see that you’re upset, that Area X is closing in on you all over again.

  The few remaining floorboards of the cottage creak and sigh, making a rough music. The birds chirp urgently in the bushes, chasing each other, spiraling up into the sky. It will rain soon, the horizon like a scowling forehead, a battering ram headed for the coast. Could they see it coming, even Henry? Was it visible? Did it sweep over them? All you could process as a child was that your mother was dead; it had taken you years to think of her death in other ways.

  All you can see is the expression on Saul’s face the last time you saw him as a child—and your last long look at the forgotten coast through the dusty back window of the car as you turned off the dirt road onto a paved state road, and the distant ripple of the sea passed from view.