Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Somewhere across the river and off to the left lay Area X—many miles away but still visible somehow as a weight, a shadow, a glimmering. Expeditions would have been coming back or not coming back while he was still in high school. The psychologist would have been transitioning to director at some point as well. A whole secret history had been playing out while he and his friends drove into Hedley, intent on scoring some beers and finding a party, not necessarily in that order.

  He’d had a phone call with his mother the day before he’d boarded the plane, headed for the Southern Reach. They’d talked a little bit about his connection to Hedley. She’d said, “I only knew the area because you were there. But you don’t remember that.” No, he didn’t. Nor had he known that she had worked briefly for the Southern Reach, a fact that both did and didn’t surprise him. “I worked there to be closer to you,” she said, and something in his heart loosened, even as he wasn’t sure whether to believe her.

  Because it was so hard to tell. At that time he would have been receiving her time-lapse stories from earlier assignments. He tried to fast-forward, figure out when, if ever, she’d told him a disguised version of the Southern Reach. He couldn’t find the point, or his memory just didn’t want to give it to him. “What did you do there?” he’d asked, and the only word back had been a wall: “Classified.”

  He turned off his music, stood there listening to the croaking of frogs, the lap and splash of water against the side of the speedboat as a breeze rippled across the river. The dark was more complete here, and the stars seemed closer. The flow of the river had been faster back in the day, but the runoff from agribusiness had generated silt that slowed it, stilled it, and changed what lived in it and where. Hidden by the darkness of the opposite shore lay paper mills and the ruins of earlier factories, still polluting the groundwater. All of it coursing into seas ever-more acidic.

  There came a distant shout across the river, and an even-more distant reply. Something small snuffled and quorked its way through the reeds to his right. A deep breath of fresh air was limned by a faint but sharp marsh smell. It was the kind of place where he and his father would have gone canoeing when he was a teenager. It wasn’t true wilderness, was comfortingly close to civilization, but existed just enough apart to create a boundary. This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn’t want the fearful unknown of a “pristine wilderness.” They didn’t want a soulless artificial life, either.

  Now he was John Rodriguez again, “Control” falling away. John Rodriguez, son of a sculptor whose parents had come to this country looking for a better life. Son of a woman who lived in a byzantine realm of secrets.

  By the time he started back up the hill, he was thinking about whether he should just pursue an exit strategy now. Load everything in the car and leave, not have to face the assistant director again, or any of it.

  It always started well.

  It might not end well.

  But he knew that when morning came, he would rise as Control and that he would go back to the Southern Reach.

  Rites

  005: The First Breach

  What is it? Is it on me? Where is it on me? Is it on me? Where on me? Can you see it on me? Can you see it? Where is it on me?”

  Morning, after a night filled with dreams from atop the cliff, staring down. Control stood in the parking lot of a diner with his to-go cup of coffee and his breakfast biscuit, staring from two cars away at a thirtysomething white woman in a purple business suit. Even gyrating to find the velvet ant that had crawled onto her, she looked like a real estate agent, with careful makeup and blond hair in a short pageboy cut. But her suit didn’t fit well, and her fingernails were uneven, her red nail polish eroded, and he felt her distress extended well back beyond the ant.

  The ant was poised on the back of her neck, unmoving for a moment. If he’d told her, she would have smacked it dead. Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn’t do the first thing that came into their heads.

  “Hold still,” he told her as he set his coffee and biscuit atop the trunk of his car. “It’s harmless, and I’ll get it off you.” Because no one else seemed of any use. Most were ignoring her, while some, as they got into or out of their cars and SUVs, were laughing at her. But Control wasn’t laughing. He didn’t find it amusing. He didn’t know where Area X was on him, either, and all the questions in his head seemed in that moment as frenetic and useless as the woman’s questions.

  “Okay, okay,” she said, still upset as he curled around and brought his hand down level with the ant, which, after a bit of gentle prodding, climbed on board. It had been struggling to progress across the field of golden hairs on the woman’s neck. Red-banded and soft yet prickly, it roamed across his hand in an aimless fashion.

  The woman shook her head, craned her neck as if trying to see behind her, gave him a hesitant smile, and said, “Thanks.” Then bolted for her car as if late for an appointment, or afraid of him, the strange man who had touched her neck.

  Control took the ant into the fringe of vegetation lining the parking lot and let it crawl from his thumb onto the wood chips there. The ant quickly got its bearings and walked off with purpose toward the green strip of trees that lay between the parking lot and the highway, governed by some sense of where it was and where it needed to be that was beyond Control’s understanding.

  “So long as you don’t tell people you don’t know something, they’ll probably think you know it.” That from his father, not his mother, surprisingly. Or perhaps not. His mother knew so much that maybe she thought she didn’t need to pretend.

  Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?

  Control spent the first fifteen minutes of his morning searching for the key to the locked desk drawer. He wanted to solve that mystery before his appointment with the greater mystery posed by the biologist. His stale breakfast biscuit, cooling cup of coffee, and satchel lay graceless to the side of his computer. He didn’t feel particularly hungry anyway; the rancid cleaning smell had invaded his office.

  When he found the key, he sat there for a moment, staring at it, and then at the locked drawer and the earthy stain across the bottom left corner. As he turned the key in the lock, he suppressed the ridiculous thought that he should have someone else present, Whitby perhaps, when he opened it.

  There was something dead inside—and something living.

  A plant grew in the drawer, had been growing there in the dark this whole time, crimson roots attached to a nodule of dirt. As if the director had pulled it out of the ground and then, for whatever reason, placed it in the drawer. Eight slender leaves, a deep almost luminous green, protruded from the ridged stem at irregular intervals to form a pleasing circular pattern when viewed from above. From the side, though, the plant had the look of a creature trying to escape, with a couple of limbs, finally freed, reflexively curled over the edge of the drawer.

  At the base, half-embedded in the clump of dirt, lay the desiccated corpse of a small brown mouse. Control couldn’t be certain the plant hadn’t been feeding on it somehow. Next to the plant lay an old first-generation cell phone in a battered black leather case, and underneath both plant and phone he found stacked sedimentary layers of water-damaged file folders. Almost as if someone had, bizarrely, come in and watered the plant from time to time. With the director gone, who had been doing that? Who had done that rather than remove the plant, the mouse?

  Control stared at the mouse corpse for a moment, and then reluctantly reached beside it to rescue the phone—the case looked a little melted—and, with the tip of a pen, teased open the edges of a file or two. These weren’t official files, from what he could tell, but instead were full of handwritten notes, scraps of newspaper, and other secondary materials. He caught glimpses of words that alarmed him, let the pages fall back into place.

  The effect was oddly as if the director had been creating a compost pile for the plant. One full of ec
centric intel. Or some ridiculous science project: “mouse-powered irrigation system for data relay and biosphere maintenance.” He’d seen weirder things at high-school science fairs, although his own lack of science acumen meant that when extra credit had been dangled in front of him, he’d stuck to time-honored classics, like miniature volcanoes or growing potatoes from other potatoes.

  Perhaps, Control conceded as he rummaged a bit more, the assistant director had been correct. Perhaps he would have been better off taking a different office. Sidling out from behind his desk, he looked for something to put the plant in, found a pot behind a stack of books. Maybe the director had been searching for it, too.

  Using a few random pages from the piles stacked around his desk—if they held the secret to Area X, so be it—Control carefully removed the mouse from the dirt and tossed it in the garbage. Then he lifted the plant into the pot and set it on the edge of his desk, as far away from him as possible.

  Now what? He’d de-bugged and de-moused the office. All that was left beyond the herculean task of cleaning up the stacks and going through them was the closed second door that led nowhere.

  Fortifying himself with a sip of bitter coffee, Control went over to the door. It took a few minutes to clear the books and other detritus from in front of it.

  Right. Last mystery about to be revealed. He hesitated for a moment, irritated by the thought that all of these little peculiarities would have to be reported to the Voice.

  He opened the door.

  He stared for several minutes.

  After a while, he closed it again.

  006: Typographical Anomalies

  Same interrogation room. Same worn chairs. Same uncertain light. Same Ghost Bird. Or was it? The residue of an unfamiliar gleam or glint in her eyes or her expression, he couldn’t figure out which. Something he hadn’t caught during their first session. She seemed both softer and harder-edged than before. “If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.” A warning from his mother, once upon a time, delivered as if she’d upended a box of spy-advice fortune cookies and chosen one at random.

  Control casually set the pot on the table to his left, placed her file between them as the ever-present carrot. Was that a slightly raised eyebrow in response to the pot? He couldn’t be sure. But she said nothing, even though a normal person might have been curious. On a whim, Control had retrieved the mouse from the trash and placed it in the pot with the plant. In that depressing place it looked like trash.

  Control sat. He favored her with a thin smile, but still received no response. He had already decided not to pick up where they had left off, with the drowning, even though that meant he had to fight off his own sudden need to be direct. The words Control had found scrawled on the wall beyond the door kept curling through his head in an unpleasant way. Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead … A plant. A dead mouse. Some kind of insane rant. Or some kind of prank or joke. Or continued evidence of a downward spiral, a leap off the cliff into an ocean filled with monsters. Maybe at the end, before she shoehorned herself into the twelfth expedition, the director had been practicing for some perverse form of Scrabble.

  Nor could the assistant director be entirely innocent of this devolution. Another reason Control was happy she wouldn’t be watching from behind the one-way glass. Stealing a trick he’d learned from a colleague who had done it to him at his last job, Control had given Grace an afternoon time for the session. Then he had walked down to the expedition holding area, spoken to the security guard, and had the biologist brought to the debriefing room.

  As he dove in, without preamble this time, Control ignored the water stains on the ceiling that resembled variously an ear and a giant subaqueous eye staring down.

  “There’s a topographical anomaly in Area X, fairly near base camp. Did you or any members of your expedition find this topographical anomaly? If so, did you go inside?” In actual fact, most of those who encountered it called it a tower or a tunnel or even a pit, but he stuck with “topographical anomaly” in hopes she would give it a more specific name on her own.

  “I don’t remember.”

  Her constant use of those words had begun to grate, or perhaps it was the words on the wall that grated, and the consistency of her stance was just pushing that irritation forward.

  “Are you sure?” Of course she was sure.

  “I think I would remember forgetting that.”

  When Control met her gaze now, it was always to the slightly upraised corners of her mouth, eyes that had a light in them so different from the last session. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, that frustrated him. This was not the same person. Was it?

  “This isn’t a joke,” he said, deciding to see how she would react if he seemed irritated. Except he really was irritated.

  “I do not remember. What else can I say?” Each word said as if he were a bit slow and hadn’t understood her the first time.

  A vision of his couch in his new home, of Chorry curled up on his lap, of music playing, of a book in hand. A better place than here.

  “That you do remember. That you are holding something back.” Pushing. Some people wanted to please their questioners. Others didn’t care or deliberately wanted to obstruct. The thought had occurred, from the first session and the transcripts of three other sessions before he’d arrived, that the biologist might float back and forth between these extremes, not know her own mind or be severely conflicted. What could he do to convince her? A potted mouse had not moved her. A change of topic hadn’t, either.

  The biologist said nothing.

  “Improbable,” he said, as if she had denied it again. “So many other expeditions have encountered this topographical anomaly.” A mouthful, topographical anomaly.

  “Even so,” she said, “I don’t remember a tower.”

  Tower. Not tunnel or pit or cave or hole in the ground.

  “Why do you call it a tower?” he asked, pouncing. Too eager, he realized a moment later.

  A grin appeared on Ghost Bird’s face, and a kind of remote affection. For him? Because of some thought that his words had triggered?

  “Did you know,” she replied, “that the phorus snail attaches the empty shells of other snails onto its own shell. As a result, the saltwater phorus snail is very clumsy. It staggers and tumbles about because of these empty shells, which offer camouflage, but at a price.”

  The deep well of secret mirth behind the answer stung him.

  _______

  Perhaps, too, he had wanted her to share his disdain for the term topographical anomaly. It had come up during his initial briefing with Grace and other members of the staff. As some “topographical anomaly” expert had droned on about its non-aspects, basically creating an outline for what they didn’t know, Control had felt a heat rising. A whole monologue rising with it. Channeling Grandpa Jack, who could work himself into a mighty rage when he wanted to, especially when confronted by the stupidities of the world. His grandpa would have stood and said something like, “Topological anomaly? Topological anomaly? Don’t you mean witchcraft? Don’t you mean the end of civilization? Don’t you mean some kind of spooky thing that we know nothing, absolutely fucking nothing about, to go with everything else we don’t know?” Just a shadow on a blurred photo, a curling nightmare expressed by the notes of a few unreliable witnesses—made more unreliable through hypnosis, perhaps, no matter Central’s protestations. A spiraling thread gone astray that might or might not be made of something else entirely—not even as scrutable in its eccentricity as a house-squatter of a snail that stumbled around like a drunk. No hope of knowing what it was, or even just blasting it to hell because that’s what intelligent apes do. Just some thing in the ground, mentioned as casually, as matter-of-factly, as manhole cover or water faucet or steak knives. Topographical anomaly.

  But he had said most of this to the bookshelves in his office on Tuesda
y—to the ghost of the director while at a snail’s pace beginning to sort through her notes. To Grace and the rest of them, he had said, in a calm voice, “Is there anything else you can tell me about it?” But they couldn’t.

  Any more, apparently, than could the biologist.

  Control just stared at her for a moment, the interrogator’s creepy prerogative, usually meant to intimidate. But Ghost Bird met his stare with those sharp green eyes until he looked away. It continued to nag at him that she was different today. What had changed in the past twenty-four hours? Her routine was the same, and surveillance hadn’t revealed anything different about her mental state. They’d offered her a carefully monitored phone call with her parents, but she’d had nothing to say to them. Boredom from being cooped up with nothing but a DVD player and a censored selection of movies and novels could not account for it. The food she ate was from the cafeteria, so Control could commiserate with her there, but this still did not provide a reason.

  “Perhaps this will jog your memory.” Or stop you lying. He began to read summaries of accounts from prior expeditions.

  “An endless pit burrowing into the ground. We could never get to the bottom of it. We could never stop falling.”

  “A tower that had fallen into the earth that gave off a feeling of intense unease. None of us wanted to go inside, but we did. Some of us. Some of us came back.”

  “There was no entrance. Just a circle of pulsing stone. Just a sense of great depth.”