“What would you do if your fellow expedition members exhibited violent tendencies?”
“Whatever I had to.”
“Would that include killing someone?”
“If it came down to that, I would have to.”
“Even if it was me?”
“Especially if it was you. Because these questions are so tedious.”
“More tedious than your job working with plastics?”
That sobers her up. “I don’t plan on killing anyone. I’ve never killed anyone. I plan on taking samples. I plan on learning as much as I can and circumventing anyone who doesn’t follow the mission parameters.” That hard edge again, the shoulder turned in toward you, to block you out. If this were a boxing match, the shoulder would be followed by an uppercut or body shot.
“And what if you turn out to be the threat?”
The biologist laughs at that question, and gives you a stare so direct you have to look away.
“If I’m the threat, then I won’t be able to stop myself, will I? If I’m the threat, then I guess Area X has won.”
“What about your husband?”
“What about my husband? He’s dead.”
“Do you hope to find out what happened to him in Area X?”
“I hope to find Area X in Area X. I hope to be of use.”
“Isn’t that heartless?”
She leans forward, fixes you again with that gaze, and it’s a struggle to maintain your composure. But that’s okay—antagonism is okay. In fact, anything helps you that helps her reject whatever traces of corruption you might have picked up, that might have adhered to you all unknowing.
She says, “It’s a fallacy for you, a total stranger, to project onto me the motives and emotions you think are appropriate. To think you can get inside my head.”
You can’t share with her that the other candidates have been easy to read. The surveyor will be the meat-and-potatoes backbone of the expedition, without a trace of passive-aggressiveness. The anthropologist will provide empathy and nuance, although you’re not sure whether her need to prove herself is a plus or a minus. She’ll push herself further, harder because of that, but what will Area X think of that? The linguist talks too much, has too little introspection, but is a recruit from within the Southern Reach and has demonstrated absolute loyalty on more than occasion. Lowry’s favorite, with all that entails.
Before the interview, you met with Whitby, who had rallied for this discussion, in your office, amid the increasing clutter. It was the biologist you talked about the most, the importance of keeping her paranoid and isolated and antisocial, how there’s a shift in the biochemistry of the brain, naturally arrived at, that might be what Lowry’s secret experiments are trying to induce artificially—and since her husband has already gone to Area X, “been read by it,” this represents a unique opportunity “metrics-wise” because of “that connection,” because “it’s never happened before.” That, in a sense, the biologist had forged a relationship with Area X before ever setting foot there. It might lead to what Whitby calls “a terroir precognition.”
An expedition into Area X with the biologist would be different than with Whitby. You wouldn’t lead, except in the way at the store as a teenager you sometimes walked ahead of your dad so you wouldn’t seem to be with him, but always with a look back at him, to see where he was going.
As the questioning continues, you’re more and more certain of what you feel in your gut. You are reminded of Area X somehow. The biologist reminds you of being in Area X.
The rest of the biologist’s file is breathtaking in its focus, its narrowness, and yet fecund despite that. You’re driving across the desert with her, in a tiny car, to check out the holes made by burrowing owls. You’re lost on a plateau above an untouched coastline, stalked by a cougar, a place where the grass is the color of gold and reaches up to your knees and the trees are blackened by fire, silver-gray with ash. You’re hiking up a mountain in scrubland, up huge blocks of stone, every muscle in your legs protesting even as you’re possessed by a wild giddiness that keeps you moving past exhaustion. You’re back with her during her first year of college, when she made a rare confession to a roommate that she wanted isolation and moved out the next day to her own apartment and walked the five miles from campus home in utter silence, receiving the world through a hole in her shoe.
You’re certain you’ll have to give up something to Lowry to keep him away from the biologist, but whatever the price you’ll pay it, you decide as you order a whiskey for a change at the bar at Chipper’s—order a whiskey for everyone at the bar, for a change, all four of them. Because it’s late, because it’s a weekday, because Chipper’s is getting long in the tooth and the clientele is getting older and older. Like you. The doctor’s told you cancer has blossomed in your ovaries and it’s going to spread to your liver before you can even blink, even get used to the idea. Another thing no one needs to know.
“And before we could even think about selling that house,” the Realtor’s telling you, “we had to pull ten layers of wallpaper off. All this woman had done for a decade was keep re-wallpapering her house. It was a hell of a lot of wallpaper, and garish, like she was putting up warning signals. Wrapping her house from the inside out. I tell you, I’ve never seen that before.”
You nod, smiling, with nothing to add, nothing to say, but happy to listen. Terminally interested.
It’s plain old normal cancer, nothing like the accelerated all-out assault experienced by the last eleventh. It’s just plain old life catching up with you, trying to kill you, and you can either take the aggressive chemo and leave the Southern Reach and die anyway, or you can hang on long enough to join the twelfth expedition and, with the biologist by your side, go across the border one last time. You’ve kept secrets before. What’s one final one?
Besides, other, more interesting, secrets are opening up, because Grace has finally found something on Jackie Severance. There’s been plenty of dirt, including the scandal involving her son—a blown assignment that resulted in a woman’s death—but nothing until now that made any real difference. On a top-secret list, not of Jackie’s open case files but Jack’s closed ones, which makes sense because Jack is a little easier: He’s retired, in his early seventies, and some of what he worked on exists only in paper form.
“Look at the fifth line item,” Grace says, up on the rooftop, after a quick sweep for bugs. You’ve never found any there, but it’s worth being cautious.
The line reads:
Payment request—SB, Project Serum Bliss
“Is there more?” It’s not quite what you expected, but you think you know what it is.
“No, that’s the only one. There might be more, but the rest of the files from the period are missing. This page wasn’t even supposed to be there.”
“What do you think ‘Serum Bliss’ means?”
“Protocol back then would’ve meant it wasn’t supposed to mean anything. Probably generated at random.”
“It’s flimsy,” you say. “That’s not even ‘S&SB.’”
“It’s fucking rice paper,” Grace says. “It might mean nothing, but …”
But if, somehow, the S&SB was on Central’s payroll—even just a little bit, a side project—and Jack ran the operation, and Jackie knew about it, and the S&SB had anything at all to do with the creation of Area X …
A lot of ifs. A lot of leaps. A lot more research on Grace’s plate.
Yet it’s enough for you to begin to have an idea of why Lowry’s new ally is Jackie Severance.
0021: The Lighthouse Keeper
… went back to the garden, [illegible], and kept the ax with me just in case. Unlikely, with black bears, but not unknown. Scrub jay, catbird, house sparrow, most humble of God’s creatures. I sat there and fed it bread crumbs, for it was a scrawny thing and in need. I shall bring them forth, they said …
Saul stayed on to the bitter end at the village bar, not sure if it was because he wanted to test Brad�
�s resolve or because he didn’t want to walk outside only to encounter Henry. Or because he was sad Charlie’d had to leave.
So he knocked back a couple more beers, put down the way the room swayed to the booze, and ordered some oysters and fish-and-chips. He had a hunger in him that was rare. Food didn’t interest him that much, but tonight he felt ravenous. The oysters were served in their own salt water, newly shucked and steamed, and he didn’t bother dipping them in sauce but just gulped them down. Then he tore into the fish, which came away in thick flakes in his hands, the heat rising along with the saliva-inducing smell of the grease. The wedge fries he drowned in ketchup and they soon joined the fish. He was frantic at his feast, aware he was gobbling, stuffing his face, his hands moving at a frenzied, unnatural pace, but he couldn’t stop.
He ordered another fish-and-chips. He ordered another round of oysters. Another beer.
After the last set, the musicians stuck around, but most of the others left, including Trudi. The black sea and sky outside the window peered in against the glass, smudged faces and the bottles of booze behind the bar reflected back at Saul. Now that it was just Old Jim at the piano, with the other musicians goofing around, and so few people he could just about hear the pulse of the sea again, could recognize it as a subtle message in the background. Or something was pulsing in his head. His sense of smell had intensified, the rotting sweetness that must be coming from the kitchen was like a perfume being sprayed in clouds throughout the room. A stitching beat beneath the striking of the piano keys twinned itself to the pulse.
Mundane details struck him as momentous. The worm of gray-white ash curling out of an ashtray on the table next to him, the individual flakes still fluming, fluttering, and at the buried core a pinprick of throbbing red that pulsed at him like a brake light. Beside the ash, the smudge of an old greasy thumbprint, immortalized by the gunk that had collected on the ashtray from hundreds of cigarette immolations. Beside the thumbprint, an attempt to etch something into the side of the ashtray, an effort that had ended after J and A.
The piano playing became discordant, or was he just hearing it better … or worse? On his stool against the wall, beer in hand, he contemplated that. Contemplated the way people’s voices were getting confused, as if they’d become mixed up, and the thrum rising under his skin, the thrum and hum and the ringing in his ears. It felt like something was coming toward him from very far away—toward and into him. His throat was dry and chalky. His beer tasted funny. He put it down, looked around the room.
Old Jim couldn’t stop playing the piano, although he did it so badly, fingers too hard against the keys, the keys smudged with his red blood as he now began to roar out a song Saul had never heard before, with lyrics that were incomprehensible. The other musicians, most of them seated around Old Jim, let their instruments fall from slack hands, and stared at one another as if shocked by something. What were they shocked by? Sadi was weeping and Brad was saying, “Why would you do that? Why in the hell would you be doing that?” But Brad’s voice was coming out of Sadi’s body, and blood was dripping out of Brad’s left ear, and the people slumped at the bar proper … had they been slumped that way a moment before? Were they drunk or dead?
Old Jim erupted out of his seat to stand, still playing. He was reaching a chaotic crescendo on his shouting, shrieking, yowling song, his fingers destroyed joint by joint as blood smashed out from the piano onto his lap and down onto the floor.
Something was hovering above Saul. Something was emanating out of him, was broadcasting through him, on frequencies too high to hear.
“What are you doing to me?”
“Why are you staring at me?”
“Stop doing that.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
Someone was crawling across the floor, or pulling themselves across the floor because their legs didn’t work. Someone was bashing their head against the dark glass near the front door. Sadi spun and twitched and twisted on the floor, slamming into chairs and table legs, beginning to come to pieces.
Outside, utter night reigned. There was no light. There was no light. Saul got up. Saul walked to the door, the spray of Old Jim’s incomprehensible song less a roar than a trickling scream.
What lay beyond the door he did not know, mistrusted the utter darkness as much as what lay behind him, but he could not stay there in the bar, whether it was all real or something he was hallucinating. He had to leave.
He turned the knob, went out into the cooling nighttime air of the parking lot.
Everything was in its rightful place, as normal as it could be, with no one in sight. But everything behind him, in there, was awry, wrong, too irrevocable to be fixed by anyone. The din had become worse, and now others were screaming, too, making sounds not capable of being made by human mouths. He managed to find his pickup truck. He managed to get his key in the ignition, put it in reverse, then drive out of the parking lot. The sanctuary of the lighthouse was only half a mile away.
He did not look in his rearview mirror, did not want to see anything that might spill out into the night. The stars were so distant and yet so close in the dark sky above.
0022: Ghost Bird
During much of the descent, the strong feeling of a return to what was already known came to Ghost Bird, even if experienced by another—a memory of drowning, of endless drowning and, at the remove of those unreliable words from the biologist’s journal, the end of what she had encountered, what she had suffered, what she had recovered. And Ghost Bird wanted none of it—didn’t want Control, either, following behind. He wasn’t suited for this, had not been meant to experience this. You couldn’t martyr yourself to Area X; you could only disappear trying, and not even be sure of that.
If the biologist had not leaned in to stare at those words so long ago, the doppelgänger might not exist in this way: full of memories and sneaking down into the depths. She might have returned with a mind wiped clean, her difference not expressed through her role as the mirror of the biologist but instead as a function of the right time or the wrong place, the right place or the wrong time.
Such strange comfort: that the words on the wall were the same, the method of their expression the same, if now she might interpret it as a nostalgic hint of an alien ecosystem, an approach or stance that the Crawler and the tower, in concert, had failed to inflict upon Earth. Because it wasn’t viable? Because that was not its purpose—and thus giving them instead these slim signs of where it came from, what it stood for, what it thought?
She had rejected a mask filter, and with it the idea that somehow Area X was only concentrated here, in this cramped space, on these stairs, in the phosphorescent words with which she had become too familiar. Area X was all around them; Area X was contained in no one place or figure. It was the dysfunction in the sky, it was the plant Control had spoken of. It was the heavens and earth. It could interrogate you from any position or no position at all, and you might not even recognize its actions as a form of questioning.
Ghost Bird did not feel powerful as they descended through the luminescent light, hugging the right-hand wall, but she was unafraid.
There came the overlay, in memory and in the moment, of the harsh revolution of a mighty engine or heartbeat, and she knew even Control could hear it, could guess at its identity. From there, they moved swiftly to that point from which there was no real return: the moment when they would see the monster and take its measure. It lay, all too soon, right around the corner.
“I want you to stay here,” she said to Control, to John.
“No,” he said, as she’d know he would. “No, I won’t.” An unexpected sweetness in his expression. A kind of weary resolve in the words.
“John Rodriguez, if you come with me, I won’t be able to spare you. You’ll have to see everything. Your eyes will have to be open.”
She could not deny him his name, here, at the end of it all. She could not deny him the right to die if it came to that. There was nothing left to say.
The Crawler was huge, seemed to rise and keep rising, to spread to the sides until it filled Ghost Bird’s vision. There was none of the remembered distortion, no throwing back at her of her own fears or desires. It simply lay revealed before her, so immense, so shockingly concrete.
The surface of its roughly bell-shaped body was translucent but with a strange texture, like ice when it has frozen from flowing water into fingerlike polyps. Underneath a second surface slowly revolved, and across this centrifuge she could see patterns floating along, as if it had an interior skin, and the material on top of that might be some kind of soft armor.
There was a mesmerizing quality to that movement, distant cousin to the director’s hypnotism, and she didn’t dare let her gaze linger for long.
The Crawler had no discernible features, no discernible face. It moved so slowly as it perfected the letters on the wall that there was a strange impression of the delicate, the mysteries of its locomotion hidden beneath the fringe of flesh that extended to the ground. The left arm, the only arm, located halfway up its body, moved with unfailing precision, constant blurred motion, to create the message on the wall, more like a wielder than a writer—with a crash of sparks she knew was stray tissue igniting. Its arm was the agent of the message, and from that instrument flowed the letters. Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead. If ever it had been human, then that thick-scrawling arm, obscured by loam or moss, was all that was left of its humanity.
Area X Three Book Bundle Page 67