Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Somewhere in the fog, if he looked closely, he’d see Lowry and Whitby, wandering lost. Somewhere, too, the Séance & Science Brigade taking their measurements, and Saul Evans walking up the spiral steps of the lighthouse, with a girl, oblivious, playing on the rocks below. Perhaps even Grace, gathering the remnants of the Southern Reach around her.

  By midafternoon, he had reached the part of the coast where the land curved sharply, an inlet that led to the town of Rock Bay. What the biologist called “Rock Bay” was actually the tidal pools and reefs that lay about twenty miles north of town. But her former cottage had been right outside of the town. Or village, if you wanted to be specific. Because it only had about five hundred residents.

  The Living with Salt wasn’t the kind of boat that John could pull up onto the shore and hide under branches. But he wanted to do a recon of Rock Bay before moving on. He chanced going a little ways up the wide inlet, half-hidden by rock islands that jutted out from the water. Soon he spotted a rotten old pier where he could tie up. According to the maps it was close enough to the local wildlife refuge that he could walk from there and intersect a hiking trail, following it close to the town. He left behind his hat and pipe and, taking his raincoat, binoculars, and gun, made his way inland through scrubland and then forest. The smell of fresh cedar invigorated him. Soon enough, he was looking down from a bluff at the wooden bridge leading into town and the tiny main street beyond. He’d come across a roadblock manned by local police well before the bridge, but he’d seen nothing suspicious on the trails—just a jogger and a couple of teenagers clearly looking for a place to smoke pot. From his vantage now, looking down with his binoculars through the intense tree cover, though, he could see half a dozen black sedans and SUVs with tinted windows parked on the main street. The vehicles reeked of Central, as did the too-coiffed would-be lumberjacks who stood near the vehicles in bright plaid shirts and jeans and boots that looked too new to have yet been through a slog.

  If they had come in such small numbers, then either this location was one of many being searched or the biologist was by now only part of a much larger problem, Central fully occupied elsewhere. Somewhere in the south, perhaps.

  Depending on how well they knew the biologist’s habits, they might believe that she’d prefer to hide somewhere farther north, along the coastline. But they’d have to rule out the town and its environs first. All around was dense coastal scrubland or even denser rain forest, none of it easy to traverse. The kind of terroir even experienced locals could get lost in, once you went beyond the town, especially during the rainy season.

  On a hunch, he abandoned his position on the bluff and took a trail down and across the stream straddled by the wooden bridge, then up the opposite side back onto a rise that eventually led him over a series of moss-covered, cedar-rich hills, into a position near the water. Opposite him, across the narrow inlet, lay the cottage where the biologist had lived. He crept in hunched-over zigzag fashion through the breaks in the sharp bramble, lay among twisted black trees with thorny leaves at a good vantage point.

  The cottage was only a little larger than his boat, and just enough forest had been cleared for a tiny lawn in front and to let a dirt road curl up the rise to the left. Beyond that rise, hidden, lay a larger settlement: a main house, from which he could see a tendril of white smoke rising via an obscured chimney.

  But no smoke rose from the cottage. Nothing stirred around the cottage, either, in a way that he found unnatural. He kept scanning the woods to either side until after about an hour, after about fifty sweeps of the area, he realized that a patch of ground had moved: camouflage. Which, after a few moments, resolved into a man with a rifle and scope stretched out beneath a military-style blind, covering the cottage. Once he’d spotted one operative, others came clear to him: in trees, behind logs, even staring out in one uncareful moment from the cottage itself. He knew the biologist would not now come anywhere near the cottage, if she’d ever wanted to.

  So he retreated into the wilderness and made his way back to his boat by a circuitous and tiring route. He didn’t think he had been spotted, but he didn’t want to leave it to chance. Thankful, too, to be back at the boat. He’d exhausted his small store of rusty woodcraft and felt he had been lucky. Lucky, too, that his boat was still there and the area still seemed deserted.

  He ate a can of cold beans and cast off, hugging the coast until the last moment—and then making a calm and steady run across the mouth of the inlet, certain that somehow he would be uncovered from afar and Central would swoop down on him.

  Yet despite how wide the expanse seemed in those moments, there were only the seagulls and the pelicans, the cormorants and, high above, what he thought might be an albatross. Only the choppy waves and a distant foghorn and the dim shapes of boats closer in and farther out. Nothing that didn’t look local, no fishermen who looked newly minted.

  Easier, better, to go farther away from all of this. She would be in the most desolate, isolated place she could find, daring anyone to follow her.

  Either there or not. If not, it was all useless anyway.

  Pursuit felt like an intermittent pulse. It died away and then picked up again. Through binoculars he saw a speedboat far off curving fast toward him. He heard a helicopter, although he couldn’t see it, and spent a nervous twenty minutes in pointless fishing with his ripped, useless net, his formless hat pulled down over his forehead. Pretending with everything he had to be a fisherman. Then the sounds faded, the speedboat looped back down the coast. Everything was as before, for a very long time.

  This new landscape above the Rock Bay inlet was even more foreign to him, and colder—and a relief, as if Area X were just a climate, a type of vegetation, a simple terroir, even if he knew this wasn’t true. So many shades and tones of gray—the gray that shone down from the sky, a ceaseless and endless gray that was so still. The mottled matte gray of the water, before the rain, broken by the curls of wavelets, the gray of the rain itself, prickles and ripples against the ocean’s surface. The silver gray of the real waves farther out, which came in and hit the bow as he guided the boat into them, rocking and the engine whining. The gray of something large and ponderous passing underneath him and making the boat rise as he tried to keep it still and motorless for those moments, holding his breath, life too close to dream for him to exhale.

  He understood why the biologist liked this part of the world, how you could lose yourself here in a hundred ways. How you could even become someone very different from who you thought you were. His thoughts became still for hours of his search. The frenetic need to analyze, to atomize the day or the week fell away from him—and with it the weight and buzz of human interaction and interference, which could no longer dwell inside his skull.

  He thought about the silence of fishing on the lake as a child, the long pauses, what his grandpa might say to him in a hushed tone, as if they were in a kind of church. He wondered what he would do if he couldn’t find her. Would he go back, or would he melt into this landscape, become part of what he found here, try to forget what had happened before and become no more or less than the spray against the bow, the foam against the shore, the wind against his face? There was a comfort to this idea almost as strong as the urge to find her, a comfort he had not known for a very long time, and many things receded into the distance behind him, seemed ridiculous or fantastical, or both. Were, at their core, unimportant.

  During the nights of his journey farther north, tied up as best he could where the coastline allowed it—the lee of a rock island large enough to shield him, the bottom able to hold the anchor despite slippery kelp—he began to see strange lights far behind him. They rose and fell and glided across the sea and the sky, some white and some green or purple-tinged. He could not tell if they were searching or defined a purpose less purposeful. But the lights broke the spell and he turned on the radio that night, holding it to his ear to keep the volume down as he huddled in his sleeping bag. But he only heard a few unintelligible
words until static set in, and he did not know if this was because of some catastrophe or the remoteness of his location.

  The stars above were large and fixed. They existed against a fabric of night as vast and deep as his sleep, his dream. He was tired now, and hungry for something beyond cans and protein bars. He was sick of the sound of the waves and the sound of his boat’s engine. It had been three days since leaving Rock Bay, and he had caught no sign of her along the coast, would soon come to the most remote part of the area. He had long since passed the point where anything inland could be reached by road, but only by hiking trail or helicopter or boat. The very edge of anything that could be called Rock Bay.

  If he kept conserving food and water, he had enough to last another week before he had to turn back.

  The morning of another day. In a lull, drifting, he rowed into an inlet surrounded by black rocks as sharp as shark fins, as craggy as any mountainside. He’d decided to get close because it looked similar to the coastline sketched in the biologist’s field entries.

  The rocks were covered in limpets and starfish, and in the shallows the hundred bristling dark shapes of sea urchins like miniature submerged mines. He had seen no one for two days. His arms were sore and aching from rowing. He wanted a hot meal, a bath, some landmark to tell him for certain where he was. The boat had begun to take on water; he spent some time now bailing, his fear of moving even a little ways from shore greater than that of running aground on something jagged.

  The rocks formed a rough line or ridge all the way back to shore, and it was hard to navigate around them. A swell carried him too close, and he rammed up against them, felt the jarring in his bones. He put out an oar to push off; it slid off smoothly at first, and he had to try again, then frantically rowed until he was a safe distance from the suck and roll.

  It took him a moment to realize why his oar had slid, why there had been no usual grinding crunch. Someone had been eating the limpets and mussels. The rock had been almost bare except for some kelp. He looked through his binoculars, saw that rocks a little farther in were bare, too, and closer to shore, a few showed pale circular marks where the limpets had resisted their picking.

  No sign of a fire or of habitation nearby, but someone or something had been grazing on them. If a person, he knew it could have been anyone. Yet it was more than he’d had to go on yesterday. Trepidation and relief and a certain indecisiveness warred within him. If a person, whoever it was might have already seen the boat. He thought to make landfall there, then reversed himself and rowed back the way he’d come, back down the coast by just one cove, hidden by another of the huge rocks that rose from the ocean to form an inhospitable island.

  By then, the boat had taken on more water and he realized that he was going to spend most of his time bailing, not rowing, or worrying about sinking, not rowing. So he brought the boat up close to shore, dropped anchor, and waded to a little black sand beach sheltered by overhanging trees, sat there gasping for long minutes. This was his last chance. He could try to fix the boat. He could try to turn back, limp back down the coast to Rock Bay. Be done with this, be done with the idea of this forever. Leave the vision of the biologist in his head, never manifesting in front of him, and then just face whatever had been growing there, behind him. He wondered what his mother was doing in that moment, where she was. Then a flash of Whitby reaching out a hand from the shelf struck him sideways, and of Grace at the door, waiting for the director.

  He went back out to the boat, took everything useful he could fit into the backpack, including Whitby’s terroir manuscript. Staggering a little under the weight of that, he began to make his way back toward the line of black rocks, trying to stay concealed by the tree line. Soon the boat was just a memory, something that had once existed but not any longer.

  That night, he noticed lights in the sky, again distant but coming nearer. He imagined he could hear the sound of a ship’s engine, but the lights faded, the sound faded, and he went to sleep to the hush and whisper of the surf.

  At dusk of the next day, John saw a movement on the rocks, and he trained his binoculars on it. He wanted to believe that the figure was the biologist, that he knew her outline against the worn sky, the way that she moved, but he had only seen her captive. Inert. Deactivated. Different.

  The first time, he lost her almost immediately from his vantage some distance from the rocks, couldn’t tell if she was coming back in or going farther out. Rocks and form merged and blurred, and then it was night. He waited for the appearance of a light or a fire, but saw neither. If it was the biologist, she was in full survivalist mode.

  Another day passed, and he saw nothing except seagulls and a gray fox that came to an abrupt halt when it saw him and then evaporated into the mist that coated everything for far too long. He worried that whoever he had seen had passed on, that this wasn’t an outpost but just another marker on a longer journey. He ate another can of beans, drank sparingly from the water canteen. Huddled, shivering, beneath deep cover. He was reaching the edge of his woodcraft again, was made more for back roads and small-town surveillance than for living out in the wild. He thought he’d probably lost about five pounds. He kept taking in deep breaths of cedar and every green, living thing as a temporary antidote.

  The figure came out at dusk again, crawling and hopping across the sheets of black rock with an expertise John knew would be beyond him. As he identified her as the biologist through the binoculars, his heart leapt and his blood stirred and the little hairs on his arms rose. A flood of emotion came over him, and he stifled tears—of relief or of something deeper? He had been existing inside himself for long enough now that he wasn’t sure. But he righted himself immediately. He knew that if she got back to shore, she’d disappear into the rain forest. He did not like his odds of tracking her there.

  If she saw him clambering after her, though, and he didn’t get a chance to confront her, she’d slip through his fingers and he’d never see her again. This, too, he knew.

  The tide had begun to come in. The light was dull and flat and gray. Again. The wind had become harsh. Out at sea, there was nothing to indicate human beings existed except for the rising and falling figure of the biologist, and a deep vein of black smoke opening up into the sky from some vessel so far out at sea that it wasn’t visible even with the binoculars.

  He waited until she was more than halfway out, wondering if she’d lost some natural caution because it was still easier to cut her off than it should have been. Then he snuck along the other side of the ridge of rock, hunched over, trying to keep his silhouette off her horizon, although he’d be framed by forest, not the fading light. He had brought the knapsack with him out of paranoia that she or someone else might steal it while he was gone. Although he had stripped it down somewhat, it threw off his balance, made it harder to hold his gun and climb the rocks. He could have left Whitby’s manuscript behind, but this had seemed more and more important to keep in view at all times.

  He tried to keep his steps short and to bend his knees, but even so slipped many times on the uneven rocks, slick with seaweed and rough and sharp from the edges of the shells of limpets and clams and mussels. Had to reach out to keep his balance and cut himself despite the cloth he’d tied over his palms. Very soon his ankles and knees felt weak.

  By the time he was halfway out, the ridge of rocks had narrowed, and he had no choice but to clamber atop them. When he looked up from that vantage for the first time, the biologist was nowhere to be seen. Which meant she had either found some miraculous way back to shore, or she was hidden somewhere ahead of him.

  No matter how he hunched and bent, she was going to have a clear line of sight at him. He didn’t know what options she had—rock, knife, homemade spear?—if she wasn’t glad to see him. He took off his hat, shoved it in the pocket of his raincoat, hoping that if she was watching she would at least recognize that it was him. That this recognition might mean more to her than “interrogator” or “captor.” That it might make her he
sitate should she be lying in wait.

  Three-quarters of the way and he wondered if he should just head back. His legs were rubbery, matched the feel of the rocks where the kelp swelled over them. The waves to either side struck with more force, and although he could still see now—the sun a quiver of red against the far horizon, illuminating the distant smoke—he’d have to use his flashlight going back. Which would alert anyone on the shore to his presence; he hadn’t come all this way just to betray her to others. So he continued on with a sense of fatalism. He’d sacrificed all his pawns, his knights, bishops, and rooks. Abuela and Abuelo were facing an onslaught from the other side of the board.

  In the tiring, repetitious work of climbing on, of continuing on and not going back, a grim satisfaction spread in a last surge of energy through his body. He had pursued this line of inquiry to the end. He had come very far, this thought mixed with sadness for what lay behind, so many people with whom he’d forged such slight connections. So many people that, as he neared the end of the rocks, he wished he had known better, tried to know better. His caring for his father now seemed not like a selfless effort but something that had been for him, too, to show him what it meant to be close to someone.

  At the end of the ridge, he came upon a deep lagoon of ever-rippling encircled water, roughly cradled by the rocks. Lagoon was perhaps too gentle a word for it—a gurgling deep hole, whose sharp and irregular sides could cut hand or head easily. The bottom could not be seen.

  Beyond, just the endless ocean, frothing to get in, smashing against the closed fist of the rocks so that spray flecked his face and the force of the wind buffeted him. But in the lagoon, all was calm, if unknowable in its dark reflection.