Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  As Grace had noted, the beacon interested the director the most: a first-order lens that constituted not just a remarkable engineering feat but also a work of art. More than two thousand separate lenses and prisms had been mounted inside a brass framework. The light from at first a lamp and then a lightbulb was reflected and refracted by the lenses and prisms to be cast seaward.

  The entire apparatus could be disassembled and shipped in sections. The “light characteristics” could be manipulated in almost every conceivable way. Bent, straightened, sent bouncing off surfaces in a recursive loop so that it never reached the outside. Sent sideways. Sent down onto the spiraling steps leading up to the top. Beamed into outer space. Slanted past the open trapdoor, where lay so many journal accounts from so many expeditions.

  An alarming note that Control dismissed because he had no room left in his brain for harmful speculation, x-ed out and crumpled on the back of a ticket for a local Bleakersville production of some atrocity called Hamlet Unbound: “More journals exist than accounted for by expedition members.” He hadn’t seen anywhere a report on the number of journals, no count on that.

  The Séance & Science Brigade, which had operated along that coast since the fifties, had been obsessed with the twin lighthouses. And as if the S&SB had shared something personally with her, the director had zeroed in on the beacon’s history, even though the Southern Reach as an institution had already ruled it out as “evidence pertaining to the creation of Area X.” The number of ripped-out pages and circled passages in a book entitled Famous Lighthouses noted that the beacon had been shipped over just prior to the states dissolving into civil war, from a manufacturer whose name had been lost along the way. The “mysterious history” included the beacon being buried in the sand to keep it away from one side or another, then sent up north, then appearing down south, and eventually popping up at Island X on the forgotten coast. Control didn’t find the history mysterious so much as hectic, overbusy, thinking of the amount of effort that had gone into carting and dragging this beacon, even in its constituent pieces, all over the country. The number of miles the beacon had traveled before finding a permanent home—that was really the only mystery, along with why anyone had thought to describe the fog signal as sounding like “two large bulls hung up by their tails.”

  Yet this had captivated the director, or seemed to have, roughly around the time of the planning for the twelfth expedition, if he could trust the dates on the article excerpts. Which did not interest Control as much as the fact that the director kept annotating, amending, adding data and fragments of accounts from sources she did not accredit—these sources maddeningly not in Grace’s DMP archive and not alluded to in any of the notes he had looked through. This frustrated him. The banality of it, too, as if ceaselessly reviewing what she already knew for something she felt she had missed. Was the message coming down to Control from the director that he should resurrect old lines of inquiry, or that the Southern Reach had run out of ideas, had begun to endlessly recycle, feeding on itself?

  How Control hated his own imagination, wished it would just shrivel up and turn brown and fall out of him. He was more willing to believe that something was staring out at him from the notes, something hidden looking at him, than to accept that the director had been pursuing dead ends. And yet he couldn’t see it; he could still only see her searching, and wonder why she was searching so hard.

  On impulse, he took down all of the framed images on the far wall and searched them for anything hidden—took off the back mats, disassembled them entirely. But he found nothing. Just the reeds, the lighthouse, the lighthouse keeper, his assistant, and the girl staring out at him from more than thirty years ago.

  In the afternoon, he turned to Grace’s DMP file, crosschecking it against the piles of notes. Which, because it was a proprietary program, meant that he was clicking Ctrl to go from page to page. Ctrl was beginning to seem the only control he actually had. Ctrl only had one role, and it performed that role stoically and without complaint. He hit Ctrl with ever more malice and force, even though every hour that he looked at the notes rather than dealt with Whitby seemed a kind of blessing. Every hour that Whitby didn’t show his face, even though his car remained in the parking lot. Did Whitby want help? Did he know he needed help? Someone needed to tell Whitby what he had become. Could Grace tell him? Could Cheney? No. They had not told him yet.

  Ctrl Ctrl Ctrl. Always too many pages. Ctrl this. Ctrl that. Ctrl crescendos and arias. Ctrl always clicking past information, because the information he found on the screen seemed to lead nowhere anyway, while the vast expanse of clutter that spread out in waves from his desk to the far wall contained too much.

  His office began to close in on him. Listless pushing around of files and pretend efforts to straighten bookshelves had given way to further Internet searches on the places the biologist had worked before joining the twelfth expedition. This activity had proven more calming, each vista of wilderness more beautiful than the last. But eventually the parallels to the pristine landscape of Area X had begun to encroach and the bird’s-eye view of some of the photographs reminded him of that final video clip.

  He took a break around five, then went back to his office for a while, after short, friendly conversations with Hsyu and Cheney in the corridor. Although Hsyu seemed flushed, talking a bit too fast for some reason, her aspect ratio skewed. Cheney’s big catcher’s mitt of a hand had rested on Control’s shoulder for an uncomfortable second or two, as the man said, “A second week! Which is a good sign, surely? We hope you find it all to your liking. We’re open to change. We’re open to changes, if you know what I mean, once you’ve heard what we have to say. And how we say it.” The words almost made sense, but somehow Cheney was off today, too. Control had had days like that.

  That left only the problem of Whitby; he hadn’t seen him the whole afternoon, and Whitby hadn’t responded to e-mails, either. It felt important to get it over with, not to let it slide into Wednesday. The how had become clear to him, along with what was fair and what wasn’t fair. He would do it in front of Cheney in the science division, and leave Grace out of it. This had become his responsibility, his mess, and Cheney would just have to go along with his decision. Whitby would be forced to accept a leave of absence and psychiatric counseling, and with any luck the strange little man would never return.

  It was late, already after six. He had lost track of time, or it had lost track of him. The office was still a mess corresponding to the contours of the director’s brain, Grace’s DMP files not changing those contours in any useful way.

  He took Whitby’s terroir manuscript with him, feeling that perhaps selective readings from it would convince Whitby of the problem. He again crossed the wide expanse of the cafeteria. The huge cafeteria windows gathered up the gray of the sky and pushed it down onto the tables, the chairs; it would rain again before long. The tables were empty. The little dark bird or bat had stopped flying and sat perched high up on a steel beam near the windows. “There’s something on the floor.” “Have you ever seen anything like that?” Fragments of conversation as he passed by the door to the kitchen, and then a kind of sharp but faint weeping sound. For a moment, it puzzled Control. Then he realized it must come from some machine being operated by the cafeteria staff.

  Something else had been gnawing at Control for much longer, as if he’d forgotten his wallet or other essential item when he’d left the house. But it now resolved, the weeping sound pushing it into his conscious mind. An absence. The rotting honey smell was gone. In fact, he realized he hadn’t smelled rotting honey the entire day, no matter where he had been. Had Grace at least passed on that recommendation?

  He turned the corner into the corridor leading to the science division, kept walking under the fluorescent lights, immersed in a rehearsal of what he would say to Whitby, anticipating what Whitby might say back, or not say, feeling the weight of the man’s insane manuscript.

  Control reached out for the large double doors
. Reached for the handle, missed it, tried again.

  But there were no doors where there had always been doors before. Only wall.

  And the wall was soft and breathing under the touch of his hand.

  He was screaming, he thought, but from somewhere deep beneath the sea.

  Afterlife

  Control, at the heart of a different tragedy, could see nothing but Rachel McCarthy with a bullet in her head, falling endlessly into the quarry. The sense of nothing being real during that time. That the room they had put him in, and the investigator assigned to him, were both constructs, and if he just kept holding on to that thought eventually the investigator would dissolve into nothing and the walls of his cell would fall away, and he would walk out into a world that was real. Then and only then would he wake up to continue with his life, which would follow the path it had followed to that point.

  Even though the chair for the long hours of questioning cut into the back of his thigh and left a mark. Even though he smelled the bitter cigarette smoke on the investigator’s jacket, and heard the hiccupping whir of the tape in the recorder the man had brought in as a backup for the room’s video recording.

  Even though the texture of the wall felt like a manta ray from the aquarium: firm and smooth, with a serrated roughness but with more give, and behind it the sense of something vast, breathing in and out. A rupture into the world of the rotted honey smell, fading fast but hard to forget. Like the swirling flourish of a line of balsamic on a chef’s plate. The line of dark blood leading to a corpse on a cop show.

  His parents had read “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright” to him as a child. They had collaborated on a social studies project with him, his mother on research and his father on cut-and-paste. They had taught him how to ride a bike. The pathetic little Christmas tree next to the shed linked forever now to the first holiday season he could remember. Standing on the pier in Hedley, looking across the river led to the lake by the cottage where he would fish with his grandpa. Naming the sculptures in his father’s backyard became a chess set on the mantel. The wall was still breathing, though, no matter what he did. The impact of a long-ago linebacker’s helmet to the chest during a scrimmage, surfacing only now so that he had trouble breathing, all the air knocked out of his lungs.

  Control didn’t remember leaving the corridor but had recovered himself in mid-sprint toward the cafeteria. Whitby’s terroir manuscript clenched in a viselike grip. He meant to retrieve some other things from his office. He meant to go into his office and retrieve some other things. His office. His other things.

  He was pulling every fire alarm he passed. He was shouting over the klaxon at people who weren’t there to leave. Disbelief. Shock. Trapped inside his head the way some were trapped in the science division.

  But in the cafeteria he was running so fast he slipped and fell. When he got up, he saw Grace, holding open the door leading to the courtyard. Someone to tell. Someone to tell. There was only wall. There was only wall.

  He shouted her name, but Grace did not turn, and as he came up on her, he saw that she stared at someone slowly walking up from the edge of the courtyard through a thick rain, against the burnt umber of the singed edges of the swamp beyond. A tall, dark outline lit by the late-afternoon sun, shining through the downpour. He would recognize her anywhere by now. Still in her expedition clothes. So close to a gnarled tree behind her that at first she had merged with it in the gray of the rain. And she was still making her way to Grace. And Grace, in three-quarter profile there in front of her, smiling, body taut with anticipation. This false return, this corrupted reunion. This end of everything.

  For the director trailed plumes of emerald dust and behind her the nature of the world was changing, filling with a brightness, the rain losing its depth, its darkness. The thickness of the layers of the rain getting lost, taken away, no longer there.

  The border was coming to the Southern Reach.

  In the parking lot, shoving the key into the ignition, office forgotten, not wanting to look back. Not wanting to see if an invisible wave was about to overtake him. Still cars in the parking lot, still people inside, but he didn’t care. He was leaving. He was done. A scrabbling, broken-nail panic at the thought of being trapped there. Forever. Shouting at the car to start after it had already started.

  He raced for the gates—open, no security, no sound from behind him at all. Just a vast silence, snuffing out thought. His hands were curled, clawlike, fingernails dragging into his palms as he clutched the wheel.

  Speeding, not caring about anything but making it to Hedley, even though he knew that might not be any kind of choice at all. Pulling out his phone, dropping it, but not stopping, groping for it as he reached the highway, screeched onto the on-ramp, relieved to see normal traffic. He stifled a dozen impulses—to stop the car and use it to block off the exit, to roll down his window in the rain and shout out a warning to the other motorists. Stifled any impulse that impeded the deep and impervious instinct to get away.

  Two fighter jets roared overhead, but he couldn’t see them.

  He kept changing the radio channels to current news reports. Not sure what would be reported, but wanting something to be reported even though it was still happening, hadn’t finished yet. Nothing. No one. Kept trying to get the feel of the wall off his hand, wiping it against the seats, the steering wheel, his pants. Would have plunged it into dog shit to get the feeling off.

  When he’d turned away from Grace, he’d seen that Whitby occupied his usual seat in the back of the cafeteria, under the photograph of the old days. But Whitby came in only intermittently now, the transmission garbled. Some of the words in tone and texture still recalled human speech. Others recalled the video from the first expedition. Whitby had failed some fundamental test, had crossed some Rubicon and now sat there, jaw oddly elongated as he tried to get words out, alone, beyond Control’s help. He realized then, or at some point later, that maybe Whitby wasn’t just crazy. That Whitby had become a breach, a leak, a door into Area X, expressed as an elongated equation over time … and if the director had now come back to the Southern Reach, it wasn’t because of or for Grace, it was because Whitby had been calling out to her like a human beacon. This version of her that had returned.

  Trapped by his thoughts. That the Southern Reach hadn’t been a redoubt but instead some kind of slow incubator. That finding Whitby’s shrine might have triggered something. That placing trust in a word like border had been a mistake, a trap. A slow unraveling of terms unrecognized until too late.

  Whitby’s gaze had followed him in his flight toward the front entrance, and Control had run almost sideways to make sure Whitby never left his view until the corner took him. He could see the leviathans from his dream clearly now, staring at him, seeing him with an awful clarity. He had not escaped their attention.

  Calling his mother. Hypnotize me. Hypnotize this out of me. Unable to reach her. Leaving messages shouted out, half-coherent.

  The corridor leading into Hedley in the banality of rush-hour traffic. The mundane quality of the rain coming down, feeling the pressure behind him. Tried to control his breathing. Every bit of advice his mother had ever given him had gotten knocked out of his head.

  Had it stopped? Had the director stopped? Or was it still onrushing?

  Was an invisible blot now seeping out across the world?

  Already reviewing in his mind, as he began to recover, began to function, what he could have done differently. What, if anything, might have made a difference, or if it was always going to happen like this. In this universe. On this day.

  “I’m sorry,” he said inside the car—to no one, to Grace, to Cheney, even to Whitby. “I’m sorry.” But for what? What was his role in this?

  As he reached the bottom of the hill, leading up to his house, the radio reports began to reflect his reality in slivers and glints of light. Something had occurred at the military base, perhaps related to the “continuing environmental cleanup efforts.” There had been an
odd glow and odd sounds and gunfire. But no one knew anything. Not for sure.

  Except that Control now knew the thing that had been eluding him, hiding in the deeper waters for him to recognize it. Revealed now, too late to do any good. For, in the stooped shoulders and the tilt of the director’s head—there, approaching, in the flesh—Control had finally realized that the girl in the photograph with the lighthouse keeper was the director as a child. There was a kind of slouch or lurch to the shoulders that, despite the different perspectives and the difference in years, was unmistakable if you were looking for it. Now that he could see it, he couldn’t unsee it. There, hiding in plain sight in the photograph from the director’s wall, was a photograph of the director as a child, taken by the S&S Brigade, standing side by side with Saul Evans, whose words decorated the wall of the topographical anomaly in living tissue. She had looked at that photo every day in her office. She had chosen to place that photograph there. She had chosen to live in Bleakersville, in a house full of heirlooms probably owned by someone on her mother’s side of the family. Who at the Southern Reach had known? Or had this been another conspiracy of one, and the director had hidden that connection all on her own?

  Assuming he was right, she had been at the lighthouse right before the Event. She had gotten out before the border came down. She knew the forgotten coast like she knew herself. There were things that she’d never had to put down on paper, just because of who she was, where she came from.

  For all Control knew, the director had been one of the last people to see Saul Evans alive.

  He pulled up in front of the house, sat there a moment, feeling beat-up, drained, unable to process what was happening. Sweat dripped off him, his shirt drenched, his blazer lost, back at the Southern Reach. He got out of the car, searched the hidden horizon beyond the river. Was that a faint flare-up of light? Was that the muffled echo of explosions, or his imagination?