Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  He found himself being swept along by her narrative. “How did the director get her own agenda through? In what ways?”

  “She became obsessed with metrics, with changing the context. If she could have her metrics, then Lowry could, grudgingly, have his expeditions, the conditioning and hypnosis he championed, although over time she came to understand why Lowry pushed the hypnosis.”

  Control kept seeing Lowry in the context of the camera flying through the air: Lowry crawling, the camera soaring, and the truth perhaps somewhere in the middle. And then Lowry making Control crawl and soar.

  None of this really spoke to the director’s secret mission across the border, though. Was Grace just tossing information at him to avoid talking about it? It was more than she’d ever said to him before.

  “What else?” he asked. “What else did she do?”

  She spread her hands as if for emphasis and the smile on her face was almost beatific. “She became obsessed with making it react.”

  “Area X?”

  “Yes. She felt that if she could make Area X react, then she would somehow throw it off course. Even though we didn’t know what course it was on.”

  “But it had reacted: It killed a lot of people.”

  “She believed that nothing we had done had pushed whatever is behind Area X. That it had handled anything we did too easily. Almost without thought. If thought could be said to be involved.”

  “So she went across the border to make Area X react.”

  “I will not confirm that I knew about her trip or helped in any way,” Grace said. “I will tell you my belief, based on what she said to me after she came back.”

  “It wasn’t the reaction she wanted,” Control said.

  “No. No, it was not. And she blamed herself. The director can be very harsh, but never harsher than with herself. When Central decided to go ahead with the last eleventh expedition, I am sure the director hoped that she had made a difference. And maybe she had. Instead of the usual, what came back were cancer-ridden ciphers.”

  “Which is why she forced herself onto the twelfth expedition.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is why her methods had become suspect.”

  “I would not agree with that assessment. But, yes, others would say that.”

  “Why did Central let her go on the twelfth expedition?”

  “For the same reason they reprimanded her after she went across by herself but did not fire her.”

  “Which was?”

  Grace smiled, triumphant. At knowing something he should have known? For some other reason?

  “Ask your mother. Your mother had a hand in both things, I believe.”

  “They had lost confidence in her anyway,” Grace said next, bitterness bleeding into her voice. “What did they care if she never came back? Maybe some of them at Central even thought it solved a problem.” Like Lowry.

  But Control was still stuck on Jackie Miranda Severance, Severance for short, Grandpa always “Jack.” His mother had placed him in the Southern Reach, in the middle of it all. She had worked for the Southern Reach briefly, when he was a teenager, to be close to him, she had said. Now, as he questioned Grace, he was trying to make the dates synch up, to get a sense of who had been at the Southern Reach and who had not, who had left by then and who was still incoming. The director—no. Grace—no. Whitby—yes. Lowry—yes, no? Where had his mother gone when she left? Had she kept ties? Clearly she had, if he were to believe Grace. And did her sudden appearance to him with a job offer correspond to knowing she had some kind of emergency on her hands? Or was it part of a more intricate plan? It could make you weary, untangling the lines. At least Grandpa had been more straightforward. Oh, look. There’s a gun. What a surprise. I want you to learn how to use a gun. Make everything do more than one thing. Sometimes you had to take shortcuts after all. Wink wink. But his mother never gave you the wink. Why should she? She didn’t want to be your friend, and if she couldn’t convince you in some more subtle way, she’d find someone she could convince. He might never know how much other residue he’d already encountered from her passage through Southern Reach.

  But the idea that the director might have reached out to others in the agency, and at Central, comforted Control. It made the director less an eccentric, less a “single-celled plot” as his mother put it, than someone genuinely trying to solve a problem.

  “What happened on her trip across the border?” Control, pressing again.

  “She never told me. She said it was for my own protection, in case the investigators subpoenaed me.” He made a note to return to that later.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Not a single thing.”

  “Did she give you any special instructions before she went on leave or after she came back?” From what Control could intuit from the files he’d read, Grace was more constrained by rules and regulations than the director, and the director might have felt slightly undermined by her assistant director’s adherence to them. Or perhaps that was the point: that Grace had kept her grounded. In which case, Grace would almost certainly have been in charge of operational details.

  Grace hesitated, and Control didn’t know if that meant she was debating telling him more or was about to feed him a line of bullshit.

  “Cynthia asked me to reopen an investigation into the so-called S&S Brigade, and to assign someone to report in more detail on the lighthouse.”

  “And who did the research?”

  “Whitby.” Whitby the loon. It figured.

  “What happened to this research?” He couldn’t recall seeing this information in the files he had been given before he’d come to the Southern Reach.

  “Cynthia held on to it, asked for a hard copy and for the electronic copies not to be entered into the record … Are you planning to go down the same rabbit holes?”

  “So you thought it was a waste of time?”

  “For us, not necessarily for Cynthia. It seemed irrelevant to me, but nothing we gathered would make much sense without knowing what was in the director’s mind. And we did not always know what was in the director’s mind.”

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Being bold now that Grace was finally opening up to him.

  A sympathetic expression, guided or pushed his way. “Do you smoke?”

  “Sometimes.” This past weekend. Banishing demons and voices.

  “Then let’s go out to the courtyard and have a smoke.”

  It sounded like a good idea. If he was completely honest with himself, it sounded like bliss.

  They reconvened out at the edge of the courtyard, nearest the swamp. The short jaunt from room to open air had not been without revelation: He’d finally seen the janitor, a wizened little white guy with huge glasses who wore light green overalls and held a mop. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. Control resisted the urge to break ranks with Grace to tell him to switch cleaners.

  Grace in the courtyard seemed even more relaxed than inside, despite the humidity and the annoying chorus of insect voices rising from the undergrowth. He was already sweating.

  She offered him a cigarette. “Take one.”

  Yes, he would take one, had been missing them ever since his weekend binge. The harsh, sharp taste of her unfiltered menthols as he lit up was like a spike through the eyeball to cure a headache.

  “Do you like the swamp?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I like the quiet out here, sometimes. It can be peaceful.” She gave him a wry smile. “If I stand with my back to the building, I can pretend it isn’t there.”

  He nodded, was silent for a moment, then said, “What would you do if the director came back and she was like the anthropologist or the surveyor?” Just adding to the light conversation. Just a gaffe, he realized as soon as he’d said it.

  Grace remained unfazed. “She won’t.”

  “How can you be so sure?” He almost broke his promise to his mother then and told Grace about the writing on th
e wall in the director’s house.

  “I have to tell you something,” Grace said, changing direction on him. “It will be a shock, but I don’t mean it to be that way.”

  Somehow, even though it was too late, he could see the hit coming before the impact, almost as if it were in slow-motion. It still knocked him off his feet.

  “Here’s what you should know: Central took the biologist away late Friday evening. She’s been gone the whole weekend. So you must have been talking to a ghost, because I know you would not lie to me, John. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” Her look was serious, as if there were a bond between them.

  Control wondered if the woman in the military jacket was back in front of the liquor store. He wondered if the skateboarder was in the process of dumping another can of dog food on the sidewalk, the plastic-bag man about to pop up to shout at passersby. He wondered if he should go join them. There was within him a generous affection for all of them, matched by a wide and growing sadness. A shed out back. Christmas lights wound around a pine. Wood storks.

  No, he had not talked to the biologist that morning. Yes, he had thought she was still at the Southern Reach, had depended on that fact. He had already planned his next session in detail. It would be back in the interrogation room, not outside. She would sit there, maybe in a different mood from the other times but perhaps not, waiting for his now-familiar questions. But he wouldn’t ask any questions. Time to change the paradigm, the hell with procedures.

  He would have pushed her file over to her, said, “This is everything we know about you. About your husband. About your past jobs and relationships. Including a transcript of your initial interview sessions with the psychologist.” This wouldn’t be an easy thing for him to do: Afterward, she might become a different person than he knew; he might be letting Area X farther into the world, in some odd way. He might be betraying his mother.

  She would make some remark about having outlasted him already, and he would reply that he didn’t want to play games anymore, that Lowry’s games had already made him weary. She would repeat the same line he had said to her out by the holding pond: “Don’t thank people for giving you what you should already have.” “I’m not looking for thanks,” he would reply. “Of course you are,” she would say, without reproach. “It’s the way human beings are built.”

  “You had her sent away?” Said so quietly that Grace asked him to repeat it.

  “You had formed too much of an attachment. You were losing your perspective.”

  “That wasn’t your call!”

  “I am not the one who sent her away.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ask your supervisor, Control. Ask your cabal at Central.”

  “It’s not my cabal,” he said. Cabal versus faction. Which was worse? This was a record for not-fixing. A record for being sent in only to be shut out. He wondered what kind of bloodbath had to be occurring at Central right now.

  He took a long drag on the cigarette, stared out at the god-awful swamp, heard from a distance Grace asking him if he was all right, his reply of “Give me a second.”

  Was he all right? In the long line of things he could legitimately be not all right about, this ranked right up there. He felt as if something had been severed far too prematurely, that there had been much more to say. He tamped down the impulse to walk back inside and call his mother, because, of course, she must already know and would just give him an amplified echo of what Grace had said, no matter how much this could be seen as Lowry punishing him: “You were getting too close to her in too short a time. You went from an interrogation scenario to having conversations with her in her cell to chewing on sedge weeds while you gave her a guided tour of the outside of the building—in just four days. What would have come next, John? A birthday party? A conga line? Her own private suite at the Hilton? Perhaps a little voice inside starts to say, ‘Give her her files,’ hmm?”

  Then he would have lied and said that wasn’t true or fair and she’d have fallen back on Grandpa Jack’s offensive old-school line about fair being “for losers and pussies,” and he wouldn’t be talking about Chorry. Control would claim she was interfering with his ability to do the job she had sent him to do and she’d counter with the idea of getting him transcripts of any subsequent interviews, which would be “just as good.” After which he might say, lamely, that’s not the point. That he needed the support, and then he’d trail off awkwardly because he was on thin ice talking about support, and she wouldn’t help him out, and he’d be stuck. They never spoke about Rachel McCarthy, but it was always there.

  “So we should talk about division of duties,” Grace said.

  “Yes, we should.” Because they both knew she now had the upper hand.

  But his mind was elsewhere the whole time that Grace was massacring his troops, before she left the courtyard. Grace would run most things going forward, with John Rodriguez abdicating responsibility for all but figurehead duties at the most important status meetings. He would resubmit his recommendations through Grace, leaving out the pointless ones, and she would decide which to implement and which not to implement. They would coordinate so that eventually his working hours and Grace’s working hours overlapped as little as possible. Grace would assist him in making sense of the director’s notes, and as he acclimated himself to the new arrangements, that would be his major responsibility, although in no way did Grace acknowledge that the director might be dead or have gone completely off the tracks and hurtled through the underbrush over a cliff in her last days at the Southern Reach. Even as she did acknowledge that mouse-and-plant were eccentric, and also accepted the ex post facto reality that he had already painted over the director’s wall beyond the door.

  None of which in this rout—this retreat that had no vanguard or rearguard, but was just a group of desperate men hacking at the muck and mire of a swamp with outdated swords while Cossacks waited for them on the plain—went completely against Control’s true wishes anyway, but this was not how he had seen it coming, with Grace dictating the terms of his surrender. And none of which saved him from a kind of grieving not at the power he was losing but at the person he had lost.

  Still out there, smoking, after Grace had left, with a pat on his shoulder that was meant as sympathy but felt like failure. Even as he now counted her a colleague if not quite a friend. Trying to resurrect the idea of the biologist, the image of her, the sound of her voice.

  “What should I do now?”

  “I’m the prisoner,” the biologist said to him from her cot, facing the wall. “Why should I tell you anything?”

  “Because I’m trying to help you.”

  “Are you? Or are you just trying to help yourself?”

  He had no answer to that.

  “A normal person might give up. That would be very normal.”

  “Would you?” he asked.

  “No. But I’m not normal.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “Where we’ve always been.”

  But it didn’t. Something had occurred to him, finally seeing the janitor. Something about a ladder and a lightbulb.

  023: Break Down

  Control found a flashlight, tested it out. Then he walked past the cafeteria that had by now become an irritating repetition, as if he had navigated across the same airport terminal for several days while chewing the same piece of gum. At the door to the storage room, he made sure the corridor was clear then quickly ducked inside.

  It was dark. He fumbled for the lightbulb cord, pulled it. The light came on but didn’t help much. As he’d remembered, the metal shade above the bulb and its low position, just an inch or so above his head, meant all you could see were the lower shelves. The only shelves the janitor could reach anyway. The only shelves that weren’t empty, as the shadows revealed as his eyes adjusted.

  He had a feeling that Whitby had been lying. That this was the special room Whitby had offered to show him. If he could
solve no other mystery, he would solve this one. A puzzle. A diversion. Had Lowry’s magical interference hastened this moment or postponed it?

  Slowly the beam of his flashlight panned across the top of the shelves, then onto the ceiling, maybe nine feet above him. It had an unfinished feeling, that ceiling. Irregular and exposed, of different shades, the wooden planks were crossed by an X of two beams, and appeared to have been built around the shelves. The shelves continued to rise, empty, all the way up to the ceiling and then beyond. He could just see the gap where the next row of shelves continued, beyond the ceiling. After a moment more of inspection, Control noticed a thin, nearly invisible cut along the two beams that formed a square. A trapdoor? In the ceiling.

  Control considered that. It could just lead to an air duct or more storage space, but in trying to imagine where this room existed in the layout of the building, he had to take into account that it lay just opposite Whitby’s favorite spot in the cafeteria, and that this meant, if the stairs to the third level lay between them, that there could be considerable space up above, tucked in under the stairs.

  He went to work looking for the ladder, found it, retractable, hidden in a back corner, under a tarp. He hit the bulb as he moved the ladder into position, dislodging dust, and the space came alive with a wild and flickering light.

  At the top of the ladder, he turned on his flashlight again and, awkwardly, with his other hand, pushed against the ceiling at the center of the half-hidden square. This high, he could see that the “ceiling” was clearly a platform fitted around the shelves.

  The door gave with a creak. He exhaled deeply, felt apprehensive, the ladder rungs a little slippery. He opened the door. It fell back on its coil hinges smoothly, without a sound, as if just oiled. Control shone his flashlight across the floor, then up to the shelves that rose another eight feet to either side. No one was there. He returned to the central space: the far wall and then the slant of a true ceiling.