Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Because Henry was drawing them both to the railing. Because Henry had a firm grip on him and was drawing them both to the railing. Except Henry was saying to Saul, “What are you doing?” But Saul wasn’t doing it, Henry was and didn’t seem to realize it.

  “It’s you,” the albatross managed to say. “You’re doing it, not me.”

  “No, I’m not.” Henry beyond panic now, writhing and trying to get loose, but still leading them to the railing, fast now, and Henry begging him to stop what he could not stop. Yet Henry’s eyes did not send out the same message as his words.

  Henry hit the railing—hard—and Saul a second later, swung to the side by momentum, and then they both went over, and only then, when it was too late, did Henry let go, the wind ripping screams from his throat, and Saul plummeted beside him through the cold empty air—falling too fast, too far, while a part of him still looked down from above.

  The surf, like white flames surging and questing across the sand.

  I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?

  The awful thud and crack when he hit.

  0025: Control

  There came to Control in that moment of extremity—almost unable to move, unable to speak—an overwhelming feeling of connection, that nothing was truly apart in the same way that he had found even the most random scrawl in the director’s notes joined some greater pattern. And although the pressure was increasing and he was in a great deal of pain, the kind of pain that would not leave him soon, if ever, there arose a powerful music within him that he did not fully understand as he slipped and slid down the curving stairs, pulling himself at times, his left arm useless by his side, his father’s carving clenched in a fist he could no longer feel, the brightness welling up through his mouth, his eyes, and filling him at the same time, as if the Crawler had accelerated the process. He was slipping in part because he was changing, he knew that, could tell that he was no longer entirely human.

  Whitby was still with him, old friend, even if Lowry, too, chuckled and flailed somewhere in the background, and he clutched his father’s carving to him as best as he was able, the only talisman he had left. This machine or creature or some combination of both that can manipulate molecules, that can store energy where it will, that can hide the bulk of its intent and its machinations from us. That lives with angels within it and with the vestiges of its own terroir, the hints of its homeland, to which it can never return because it no longer exists.

  And yet the Crawler had used such a cheap trick: Control had seen his mother standing there, taken a grim and primal satisfaction in recognizing it as a delusion, one that held no dominion over him—a person he forgave because how could he not forgive her, finally, standing in such a place? Free, then, free even before the Crawler had struck, had hurt him so badly. And even in that hurting somehow Control knew that pain was incidental, not the Crawler’s intent, but nothing about language, about communication, could bridge the divide between human beings and Area X. That anything approaching a similarity would be some subset of Area X functioning at its most primitive level. A blade of grass. A blue heron. A velvet ant.

  He lost track of time and of the speed of his passage down, and of his transformation. He no longer knew whether he was still even a sliver of human by the time he—painfully, nauseated, crawling now, or was he loping?—came down the most ancient of steps, of stairs, to the blinding white light at the bottom shaped like the immortal plant, like a comet roaring there but stationary, and now his decision to push himself forward in the final extremity, to push through against that agony and that outward radiating command to turn back, and to enter … what? He did not know, except that the biologist had not made it this far, and he had. He had made it this far.

  Now “Control” fell away again. Now he was the son of a man who had been a sculptor and of a woman who lived in a byzantine realm of secrets.

  His father’s carving fell from his hand, clattered onto a step, came to a halt, there on the stairs, alongside the signs and symbols left by his predecessors. A scrawling on the walls. An empty boot.

  He sniffed the air, felt under his paws the burning and heat, the intensity.

  This was all that was left to him, and he would not now die on the steps; he would not suffer that final defeat.

  John Rodriguez elongated down the final stairs, jumped into the light.

  0026: The Director

  Two weeks before the twelfth expedition, the old battered cell phone comes home with you. You don’t remember bringing it. You don’t know why security didn’t question it. It’s just there, in your purse, and then on the kitchen counter. The usual suspects occur to you. Maybe Whitby’s even stranger than you think or Lowry’s having a laugh at your expense. But what does it matter? You’ll just bring it back in the morning.

  By then the divide between work and home is long gone—you’ve brought files home, you’ve done work at home, scribbled things on scraps of paper and sometimes on leaves, the way you used to do as a kid. In part because you take delight in imagining Lowry receiving photographs of them in his reports; but also using those materials seems somehow safer, although you can’t say why, just a heightened sense of a “touch” roving among the files, a presence you can’t pin down or quantify. An irrational thought, an idea that just came into your mind one night, working late. Going into the bathroom every so often to throw up—a side effect of the medication you are taking for the cancer. Apologizing to the janitor and saying any foolish thing you could think of other than that you were sick: “I’m pregnant.” Pregnant with cancer. Pregnant with possibility. It makes you laugh sometimes. Dear alcoholic veteran at the end of the bar, do you think you’d like to be a father?

  It’s not a night for Chipper’s, not a night for garrulous Realtors and nodding drunks. You’re tired from the additional training, which has required more travel up north to Central to participate with the rest of the expedition and to receive your own training as expedition leader. To fully understand the use of hypnotic commands, to understand the importance—the specific details—of the black boxes with the red light that help to activate compliance.

  So instead of going out, you put on some music, then decide on television for a while because your brain is cooked. You hear a sound in the hallway, beyond the kitchen—just something settling in the attic, but it makes you nervous. When you go look, there’s nothing there, but you get your ax from where you keep it under the bed for home defense. Then return to the couch, to watch a thirty-year-old detective show filmed in the south. Lost places, locations that don’t exist now, that will never come back. A landscape haunting you from the past—so many things gone, no longer there. During the car chases, you’re watching the backgrounds like they’re family photos you’ve never seen before.

  You nod off. You come to. You nod off again. Then you hear something creeping low and soft across the tiles of the kitchen, just out of view. A kind of terrified lurching shudder burns through you. There’s a slow scuttle to the sound, so you can’t really identify it, get a sense of what has crept into your house. You don’t move for a very long time, waiting to hear more, not wanting to hear more. You think you might not ever get up, go to the kitchen, see what animal awaits you there. But it’s still moving, it’s still making noise, and you can’t sit there forever. You can’t just sit there.

  So you get up, you brandish the ax, you walk to the kitchen counter, lean on tiptoe to peer at the kitchen floor, but whatever it is has nudged up against the left side, out of view. You’re going to have to walk around and confront it directly.

  There, scuttling across the floor, blind and querulous, is the old cell phone—scrabbling and bulky, trying to get away from you. Or trying to burrow into the cabinets, to hide there. Except it isn’t moving now. It hasn’t moved the whole time you’ve been staring at it. You look at the phone in shock for so many moments. Maybe from the surprise of it or as a defense mechanism, all you can think is that your work has foll
owed you home. All you can think of is the monstrous breach. Either in reality or in your mind.

  With trembling hands, you retrieve the cell phone from the floor, ax held ready in your other hand. It feels warm, the melted nature of the leather against the phone creating the texture of skin. You get a metal box you use for tax receipts, toss them into a plastic bag, put the phone inside, lock it, put it on the kitchen counter. You resist the urge to toss the box into your backyard, or to drive with it to the river and fling it into the darkness.

  Instead you fumble for a cigar from the humidor buried underneath some clothes in your bedroom. The cigar you pull out is dry and flaking, but you don’t care. You light it, go into your home office, shove the notes you’ve brought home into a plastic bag. Every unsupportable theory. Every crazed journal rant rescued from old expedition accounts. Every incomprehensible scrawling. Shove them in there with a vengeance, for some reason shouting at Lowry as you do because he’s peering into your thoughts on some mission of his own. You hiss at him. Stay the fuck away! Don’t come in here. Except he already has, is the only person screwed up enough, knowing what he must know, to do this to you.

  There are notes you weren’t sure you remembered writing, that you couldn’t be sure had been there before. Were there too many notes? And if so, who has written the others? Did Whitby sneak into your office and create them, trying to help you? Forging your handwriting? You resist the urge to take the notes out of the bag, sort through them again, be pulled down by that horrible weight. You take the bag of crazy outside with a glass of red wine, stand there on the stone patio smoking while you turn on the grill even though a storm’s coming, even though you can feel the first raindrops, wait a minute or two, then with a snarl upend the bag onto the flames.

  You’re a large, authoritative woman, standing in her backyard, burning a crapload of secret papers, of receipts and other things that reflect the totality, the banality of your life—transformed into “evidence” by what you’ve scrawled there. Squirt lighter fluid over it to make it worse or better, toss this ceaseless, inane, stupid, ridiculous, pathetic detritus on top of it, light a match, watch it all go up in billowing, eye-watering, bile-like smoke. Curling and blackened, meaningless. It doesn’t matter because there’s still a flickering light in your head that you can’t snuff out, a wavering candle distant in the darkness of a tunnel that was really a tower that was a topographical anomaly that was you reaching out to touch Saul Evans’s face. It is all too much. You slump alongside the wall, watch as the flames rise up and then bank, and are gone. It isn’t enough. There’re still more inside—on the side table by the couch, on the kitchen counter, on the mantel in the bedroom; you’re awash in them, drowning in them.

  Down the slant of your backyard, the windows are lit up and a television is on. A man, a woman, and a boy and a girl on a couch seem sublimely calm, just sitting there, watching sports. Not talking. Not doing anything but watching. Definitely not wanting to look in your direction, as the raindrops thicken, proliferate, and your burning papers sizzle.

  What if you go back in, open that box, and the cell phone isn’t a cell phone? What if containment is a joke? You can hardly contain yourself. What if you bring the cell phone back in and have it tested and nothing is out of the ordinary, again? What if you go back in, the cell phone isn’t ordinary, and you report that to Lowry and he laughs and calls you crazy—or you tell Severance instead, and the cell phone is just sitting there, inert, and you’re the compromised director of an agency that hasn’t yet solved the central mystery around which its existence revolves? What if your cancer rises up and devours you before you get a chance to cross the border? Before you can escort the biologist across.

  You with your cigar and your glass of wine and the music on the phonograph you turn up real loud, something you don’t even remember buying, and the idea that somehow any of that will keep out the darkness, keep out the thoughts that churn through your head—the cold regard that holds you as if God herself had through some electrified beatific gaze pinned you like a butterfly in a collector’s display case of mediocrity.

  The storm comes on and you toss your cigar, stand there thinking about the invisible border and all the ceaseless hypotheses that amount to some psychotic religion … and you drink your wine, hell, get the whole bottle, and it’s still not doing it, and you still don’t want to go inside to face … anything.

  “Tell me something I don’t know! Tell me something I don’t fucking know!” you scream at the darkness, and throw your glass into the night, and without meaning to you’re on your knees in the rain and the lightning and the mud, and you don’t know if this is an act of defiance or an act of pain or just some selfish reflexive grace note. You truly don’t know, any more than you know if that cell phone in there had actually moved, been alive.

  The burned notes are sopping now, falling in wet, stuck-together ash clumps off the edge of the overflowing grill. A few last sparks float in the air, winking out one by one.

  That’s when you rise, finally. You rise out of the mud, in the rain, and you go back inside and suddenly everything gets really cold and calm. The answer doesn’t lie in your backyard because no one is going to come and save you even if you beg them to. Especially if you beg them to. You’re on your own, like you’ve always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can’t go forward anymore.

  You have to hang on. You’re almost there. You can make it to the end.

  You stop investigating the S&SB. You stop investigating the lighthouse. You leave the notes that remain in your office, which you’re well aware are legion, many more than what you burned at home in your pointless effort at catharsis.

  “Ever had anyone try to burn a house down?” you ask the Realtor later that night, ducking in for a quick drink, a couple of cocktails that’ll put you to sleep and then wake you up again, restless and turning endlessly in your bed in the middle of the night.

  The lights are dim, the TV a silent glow, a distant hum, the stars in the ceiling glinting on and off from the roving flash of spotlights on the bowling lanes. Someone’s playing a dark country-western song on the jukebox, but it sounds distant, so far away: Something’s moving through my heart. Sometimes I just have to play the part.

  “Oh, sure,” the Realtor says, “warming to her task” as the veteran, suddenly a wit, puts it. “The usual kind of thing, with arson for the insurance. Sometimes it’s an ex trying to burn down the wife’s house once her new boyfriend has moved in. But more times than you might think, you don’t find any reason for it at all. I had one guy who got the urge to start a fire one day, and he let it all go up in smoke, and just stood there watching. Afterward he was crying and wondering why he’d done it. He didn’t know. There must have been a reason why he did it, though, I’ve always thought. Something he couldn’t admit to himself, or something that he just didn’t know.”

  Anger tries to thrash its way free of you, manifests as a suspicion you’ve had for a while.

  “You’re not a Realtor,” you tell the woman. “You’re not really a Realtor at all.” She’s a touch on some notes, she’s a cell phone that won’t sit still.

  You need some air, walk outside, stand there in the gravel parking lot, under the uncertain illumination of a cracked streetlamp. You can still hear the music blaring from inside. The streetlamp’s shining down on you and the solid bulk of the hippo on the edge of the miniature golf course, its enormous shape casting a wide, oblong shadow. The hippo’s eyes are blank glass, its gaping mouth a fathomless space you wouldn’t put your hand into for all the free games Chipper’s could give you.

  The veteran comes outside.

  “You’re right—she’s not a Realtor,” he tells you. “She got fired. She hasn’t had a job for more than a year.”

  “That’s okay,” you say. “I’m not a long-haul trucker, either.”

  Tragically, he asks if you want to go back inside and dance. No, you don’t want to dance. But it’s okay if he leans ag
ainst the hippo with you to talk for a while. About nothing in particular. About the ordinary, everyday things that elude you.

  The plant remains in the storage cathedral. Whitby’s mouse remains in his attic for the most part. The last few days before the twelfth expedition, the phone migrates to your desk as a secret memento. You don’t know whether you’re more concerned when it is with you or when it is out of your sight.

  0027: The Lighthouse Keeper

  Saul woke on his back beneath the lighthouse, covered in sand, Henry crumpled beside him. It was still night, the sky a deep, rich blue bleeding into black, but full of stars against that vast expanse. He must be dying, he knew, must be broken in a hundred places, but he didn’t feel broken. Instead, all he felt was a kind of restlessness, growing a hundredfold now and nothing else behind it. No agony from the fall, from the searing pain of what must be several broken bones. None of that. Was he in shock?

  But still there was the rising brightness and the night staring down with thousands of glistening eyes, the comforting husk and hush of the surf, and as he turned on his side to face the sea, the faint dark shadows of night herons, with their distinctive raised crests, stabbing at the tiny silver fish writhing in the wet sand.

  With a groan, anticipating a collapse that never came, Saul rose without a stagger or a swoon, a dreadful strength coursing through him. Even his shoulder felt fine. Uninjured, or so badly injured and disoriented that he was nearing the end. Whatever was coming into his head was being translated into words, his distress expressed as language, and he clamped down on it again, because he knew somehow that to let it out was to give in, and that he might not have much time left.

  He looked up at the lantern room of the lighthouse, imagining again that fall. Something inside had saved him, protected him. By the time he’d hit the ground, he hadn’t been himself—the plummet become a descent so gentle, so light, that it’d been like a cocoon tenderly plummeting, kissing the sand. Come to rest as if locking into a position preordained for him.