Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “Interesting.” The only thing due west of Failure Island besides mosquito-infested inlets were a couple of small towns and the military base.

  Saul sat back, just staring at Charlie, with Charlie nodding at him like “I told you so,” although what he meant by that Saul didn’t know. Told you they were strange? Told you they were up to no good?

  The second song played out more like a traditional folk song, slow and deep, carrying along the baggage of a century or two of prior interpretations. The third was a rollicking but silly number, another original, this time about a crab that lost its shell and was traveling all over the place to find it. A few couples were dancing now. His ministry hadn’t been one of those that banned dancing or other “earthly pleasures,” but he’d never learned either. Dancing was Saul’s secret fantasy, something he thought he’d enjoy but had to file under “too late now.” Charlie’d never dance anyway, maybe not even in private.

  Sadi came by during a short break between songs. She worked in a bar in Hedley during the summers, and she always had funny stories about the customers, many of them coming off the river walk “drunk as a skunk.” Trudi came over, too, and they talked for a while, although not directly about Gloria. More about Gloria’s dad, during which Saul gathered that Gloria and her dad had made it back to his place by now. So that was all right.

  Then they mostly just listened, stealing moments between songs to talk or grab another beer. In scanning the room for people he knew, people he might give a nod to, claim a bond with, he’d felt for a while now not like the one watching but the one being watched. He put it down to some receding symptom of his non-condition, or to Charlie’s skittishness rubbing off on him. But then, through the murky welter of bodies, the rising tide of loud conversations, the frenetic playing of the band, he spied an unwelcome figure across the room, near the door.

  Henry.

  He stood perfectly still, watching, without even a drink in his hand. Henry wore that ridiculous silk shirt and pretentious slacks, pressed just so, and yet, curiously, he blended in against the wall, as if he belonged there. No one but Saul seemed to notice him. That Suzanne wasn’t with him struck Saul hard for some reason. It made him resist the urge to turn to Charlie and point Henry out to him. “That’s the man who broke into my lighthouse a few nights ago.”

  The whole time Saul stared at Henry, the edges of the room had been growing darker and darker, and the sickly sweet smell intensified, and everyone around Henry grew more and more insubstantial—vague, unknowable silhouettes—and all the light came to Henry and gathered around him, and spilled back out from him.

  A kind of vertigo washed over Saul, as if a vast pit had opened up beneath him and he was suspended above it, about to fall. There came back all of the old symptoms he’d thought were gone, as if they’d just been hiding. There was a comet dripping fire through his head, trailing flame down his back.

  While the band kept playing through the darkness, their sound curdling into a song sung far too slow, and before they could vanish into a darkly glinting spiral, before everything not-Henry could disappear, Saul gripped the table with both hands and looked away.

  The chatter, the rush and realignment of conversations came back, and the light came back, and the band sounded normal again, and Charlie was talking to him like nothing had happened, Saul’s sense of relief so palpable the blood within him was rushing too hard and he felt faint.

  When, after a stabilizing minute, he dared sneak a glance toward where Henry had stood, the man had vanished and someone else stood in his place. Someone Saul didn’t know, who raised his beer to Saul awkwardly so that he realized he’d been staring across the room for too long.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Charlie, in a voice loud enough to cut through the band. “Are you okay?” Reaching out to touch Saul’s wrist, which meant he was concerned and that Saul had been acting odd. Saul smiled and nodded.

  The song ended, and Charlie said, “It wasn’t the stuff about the boats and the island, was it? I wasn’t trying to worry you.”

  “No, not that. Nothing like that. I’m fine.” Touched, because it was the kind of thing that might’ve secretly bothered Charlie if their roles had been reversed.

  “And you’d tell me if you were feeling sick again.”

  “Of course I would.” Half lying, trying to process what he’d just experienced. And, serious, struck by some form of premonition: “But, Charlie, I hate to say it—you should probably leave now, or you’ll be late.”

  Charlie took that in stride, already half off his stool because he didn’t like the music anyway.

  “See ya tomorrow sometime, then,” Charlie said, giving him a wink and a long last stare that wasn’t entirely innocent.

  Somehow Charlie looked so good in that moment, putting on his jacket. Saul clasped him tight before he could get away. The weight of the man in his arms. The feel of Charlie’s rough shave that he loved so much. The tart surprise of Charlie’s lip balm against his cheek. Held him for an extra moment, trying to preserve all of it, as a bulwark against whatever had just happened. Then, too soon, Charlie was gone, out the door, into the night, headed for the boat.

  0019: Control

  The night was full of white rabbits streaking across the sky, instead of the stars, the moon—and Control knew that was wrong in some fevered part of his mind, some compartment holding out against the inquisitive brightness. Were they white rabbits or were they smudges of black motion rendered as photo negatives impeding his vision? Because he didn’t want to see what was there. Because the biologist had unlocked something inside of him, and he returned now sometimes to the phantasmagorical art in Whitby’s strange room in the Southern Reach, and then to his theory that to disappear into the border was to enter some purgatory where you would find every lost and forgotten thing: all of the rabbits herded across that invisible barrier, every beached destroyer and truck from the night Area X had been created. The missing in action from the expeditions. The thought a kind of annihilating abyss. Yet there was also the light blossoming from the place below the Crawler, detailed in the biologist’s journal account. Where led that light?

  Trying to pick out from all of those pieces what might be a reasonable, even an honorable, choice. One that his father would have agreed with; he no longer thought much of his mother, or what she might think.

  Maybe I just wanted to be left alone. To remain in the little house on the hill in Hedley, with his cat Chorry and the chittering bats at night, not so far from where he had grown up, even if now so distant.

  “It wouldn’t have made a difference, Grace.”

  The three of them sleeping on the pine moss, the moist grass, less than a mile from the topographical anomaly, their final approach planned for the morning.

  “What wouldn’t?” Gentle, perhaps even kind. Which let him know the full manifestation of his distress. Kept seeing the biologist’s many eyes, which became stars, which became the leaping white lights. Which became a chessboard with his father’s last move frozen there. Along with Control’s own last move, still forthcoming.

  “If you had told me everything. Back at the Southern Reach.”

  “No. It wouldn’t have.”

  Ghost Bird slept beside him, and this, too, helped him chart his decline. She slept at his back, guarding him, and with her arms wrapped tight around him. He was secure there, safe, and he loved her more for allowing that now, when she had less and less reason to. Or no reason at all.

  The night had turned chilly and deep, and crowded at the edges with creatures staring in at them, just dark shapes silent and motionless. But he didn’t mind them.

  Things his dad had said to him stuck with him more clearly now, because they must’ve happened. His dad was saying to him, “If you don’t know your passion, it confuses your mind, not your heart.” In a moment of honesty after he had failed in the field and he could only talk to his dad in riddles about it, never tell him the truth: “Sometimes you need to know when to go on to th
e next thing—for the sake of other people.”

  The chill in that. The next thing. What was his next thing here? What was his passion? He didn’t know the answer to either question, knew only that there was comfort in the scratchiness of the pine needles against his face and the sleep-drenched, smoky smell of the dirt beneath him.

  Morning came, and he huddled in Ghost Bird’s arms until she stirred, disengaged from him in a way that felt too final. Among the reeds, endless marsh, and mud, there came a suggestion on the horizon of burning, and a popping and rattling that could’ve been gunfire or some lingering memory of past conflict playing out in his head.

  Yet still the blue heron in the estuary stalked tadpoles and tiny fish, the black vulture soared on the thermals high above. There came a thousand rustlings among the islands of trees. Behind them, on the horizon, the lighthouse could be seen, might always be seen, even through the fog that came with the dawn, here noncommittal and diffuse, there thick, rising like a natural defense where needed, a test and blessing against that landscape. To appreciate any of this was Ghost Bird’s gift to him, as if it had seeped into him through her touch.

  But the unnatural world intruded, as it always did, so long as will and purpose existed, and for a moment he resented that. Ghost Bird and Grace were debating what to do if they encountered any remnants of the border commander’s troops. Debating what to do when they reached the tower.

  “You and I go down,” Grace said. “And Control can guard the entrance.” This last stand, this hopeless task.

  “I should go down alone,” Ghost Bird said, “and you should both stand guard above.”

  “That would be against expedition protocols,” Grace said.

  “That’s what you want to invoke here? Now?”

  “What’s left to invoke?” Grace asked.

  “I go down alone,” Ghost Bird said, and Grace gave her no answer.

  Tactical not strategic, a phrase rising out of his back catalog of favorites. It seemed as obsolete as any of the rest, like the enormous frame of an old-fashioned bicycle.

  He kept glancing up at that murky sky, waiting for the heavens to fall away and reveal their true position. But the mimicry remained in place, most convincing. What if the biologist had been wrong? What if the biologist in her writings had been a calmly raving lunatic? And then just a monster? What then?

  They broke camp, used a stand of swamp trees as initial cover and surveyed the marsh, stared across the water of the estuaries. The smoke now billowed up at a sharp sixty-degree angle to add its own ash-silver roiling to the fog and form a heavier, weighted blankness. This alliance obscured the last of the blue sky and accentuated the crackling line of fire at the horizon parallel to them: waves of orange thrust upward from golden centers.

  The pewter stillness of the channel of water in the foreground reflected the lines of the flames and the billowing of the smoke—reflected the nearest reeds, too, and doubled by reflection also the island that at its highest point showcased island oaks and palmetto trees, their trunks white lines lost in patches of fog.

  There came shouting and screaming and gunfire—all too near, all from the island of trees, or, perhaps, something Lowry had placed in his head. Something that had happened here long ago only now coming to the surface. Control kept his eyes on the reflection, where men and women in military uniforms attacked one another while some impossible thing watched from the watery sky. At such a remove, distorted, it did not seem so harsh, so visceral.

  “They are already somewhere else,” Control said, although he knew Grace and Ghost Bird wouldn’t understand. They were already in the reflection, through which an alligator now swam. Where swooped through the trees, oblivious, a flicker.

  So they continued on, him with his sickness that he no longer wanted diagnosed, Grace with her limp, and Ghost Bird keeping her own counsel.

  There was nothing to be done, and no reason to: their path would skirt the fire.

  In Control’s imagination, the entrance to the topographical anomaly was enormous, mixed with the biologist’s vast bulk in his thoughts so that he had expected a kind of immense ziggurat upside down in the earth. But no, it was what it had always been: a little over sixty feet in diameter, circular, located in the middle of a small clearing. The entrance lay there open for them, as it had for so many others. No soldiers here, nothing more unusual than the thing itself.

  On the threshold, he told them what would happen next. There was in his voice only the shadow of the authority of a director of the Southern Reach, but within that shadow a kind of resistance.

  “Grace, you will stay here at the top, standing guard with the rifles. There are any number of dangers, and we do not want to be trapped down there. Ghost Bird, you will come with me, and you will lead the way. I’ll follow at a little distance behind you. Grace, if we are down there longer than three hours”—the maximum time recorded by prior expeditions—“you are released of any responsibility for us.” Because if there were a world to return to, the person to survive should be someone with something to return to.

  They stared at him. They stared, and he thought they would object, would override him, and then he would be lost. Would be left out here, at the top.

  But that moment never came and an almost debilitating relief settled over him as Grace nodded and said to be careful, rattled off advice he barely heard.

  Ghost Bird stood off to the side, a curious expression on her face. Down there, she would experience the ultimate doubling of experience with the biologist, and he couldn’t protect her from that.

  “Whatever you have in your head now, hold on to it,” Grace said. “Because there may be nothing left of it when you go down below.”

  What was coiled within his head, and how would it affect the outcome? Because his goal was not to reach the Crawler. Because he wondered what else might lie within the brightness that had come with him.

  They descended into the tower.

  0020: The Director

  Whitby’s worthless report on the blossom is on your desk by the time you go off to another pre-expedition interview of the biologist, the possible candidates for the twelfth whittled down to ten, and you and Grace, you and Lowry, pushing for your favorites, with members of the science department shadowboxing in the background as they whisper their own choices at you. Severance seems terminally uninterested in the question.

  It’s not a good time to interview anyone but you don’t have a choice. The plant is blossoming again in your mind as you conduct the interview in a cramped little office in the biologist’s town—a place you’ve borrowed and can pretend is your own, with all of the appropriate psychological and psychiatric texts on the bookshelves. The diplomas and family pictures of the room’s true occupant have been removed. In a concession to Lowry, for his studies, you’ve allowed his people to swap out chairs, light fixtures, and other elements of the room, as if in redecorating and changing the color scheme from placid blues and greens to red, orange, and gray or silver there’s some answer to a larger question.

  Lowry claims his arrangements and recombinations can have a “subliminal or instinctual” effect on the candidates.

  “To make them feel secure and at ease?” you asked, a rare moment of poking the beast with a stick, but he ignored you, and in your head he was saying, “To make them do what we want.”

  There’s the smell of water damage still, from a burst pipe in the basement. There’s a water stain in the corner, hidden by a little table, as if you need to cover up some crime. The only giveaway that it’s not your office: you’re cramped, stuffed into your chair.

  The plant is blossoming in your mind, and each time it does there’s less time to work with, less you can do. Is the plant a challenge or an invitation or a worthless distraction? A message? And if so, what did it mean, assuming Whitby didn’t imagine it? The light at the bottom of a topographical anomaly, from a door into Area X, on the tarot card used by the Séance & Science Brigade. The blossoming light of an MRI body
scan, the one you endured last week.

  In the middle of all that blossoming in your brain, the kind of thing that would elicit a joke from Grace if only you could tell her, there, bestriding the world: the biologist, a talisman arriving just as everything is closing in again and your time has become more limited.

  “State your name for the record.”

  “I did that last time.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  The biologist looks at you like you’re an opponent, not the person who can send her where she so obviously wants to go. You note again not just the musculature of this woman but the fact that she’s willing to complicate even the simple business of stating her name. That she has a kind of self-possession that comes not just from knowing who she is but from knowing that, if it comes down to it, she needs no one. Some professionals might diagnose that as a disorder, but in the biologist it comes across as an absolute and unbending clarity.

  “Tell me about your parents.”

  “What are your earliest memories?”

  “Did you have a happy childhood?”

  All of the usual, boring questions, and her terse answers boring, too, in a way. But, after that, the more interesting ones.

  “Do you ever have violent thoughts or tendencies?” you ask.

  “What do you consider a violent act?” she replies. An attempt to evade, or genuine interest? You’d bet on the former.

  “Harm toward other people or animals. Extreme property damage, like arson.” The Realtor at Star Lanes has dozens of stories about violence against houses, relates them all with an edge to her voice. The biologist would probably classify the Realtor as an alien species.

  “People are animals.”

  “Harm toward animals, then?”

  “Only toward human animals.”

  She’s trying to entangle you or provoke you, but the usual cross-referencing and analysis of intel turned up something interesting, something you can’t confirm. While a grad student on the West Coast, she had worked as an intern at a forest ranger station in a national park. Her two years there had roughly coincided with a series of what some might call “tree-hugger terrorism.” In the worst case, three men had been badly beaten by “an assailant wearing a mask.” The motive, according to the police: “The victims had been tormenting an injured owl by poking at it with a stick and trying to light its wing on fire.” No suspect had ever been identified, no arrest made.