Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  But that’s not what makes your legs ropy, a rush of blood surging through your brain.

  A figure sits hunched along the side of the left-hand wall, staring down the steps.

  A figure with head bowed, turned away from you.

  A prickling engulfs your head under your mask, a kind of smooth, seamless insertion of a million cold, painless needles, ever so subtle, ever so invisible, so that you can pretend it is just a spreading heat against your skin, a taut feeling across the sides of your nose, around your eyes, the quiet soft entry of needles into a pincushion, the return of something always meant to be there.

  You tell yourself this is no less or more real than bowling at Chipper’s, than the hippo with the red paint under the skin, than living in Bleakersville, working at the Southern Reach. That this moment is the same as every other moment, that it makes no difference to the atoms, to the air, to the creature whose walls breathe all around you. That you gave up the right to call anything impossible when you decided to enter Area X.

  You come closer, drawn by this impossible thing, sit on the step next to him.

  His eyes are shut. His face is illuminated by a dark blue glow that emanates from within, as if his skin has been taken over, and he is as porous as volcanic rock. He’s fused to the wall, or jutting out from it, like an extension of the wall, something that protrudes but might be retracted at any moment.

  “Are you real?” you ask, but he says nothing in reply.

  Reaching out to him, extending a trembling hand, awestruck by this apparition, wanting to know what that skin feels like, even as you’re afraid your touch will turn him to powder. Your fingers graze his forehead, a rough, moist feel, like touching sandpaper under a thick layer of water.

  “Do you remember me?”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Saul Evans says under his breath. His eyes are closed; he cannot see you, and yet you know he sees you. “You need to get off the rocks. The tide’s coming in.”

  You don’t know what to say. You won’t know what to say for a long time. Your reply was so many years ago.

  Now you can hear the vast, all-consuming hum of some mighty engine from below, the swift revolving of strange orbits, and the light below, that impossible flowering light, is fluctuating, shifting, turning into something else.

  His eyes snap open, white against the darkness. He’s no different than when you last saw him, has not aged, and you’re nine again and the light below is coming up toward you, coursing up the steps toward you, fast, and from above you can hear the distant echo of Whitby screaming, from the top of the tower, as if he’s screaming for both of you.

  0004: The Lighthouse Keeper

  Armadillos ruining the garden, but don’t really want to put out poison. Sea grape bushes must be pruned back. Will make a list of maintenance issues by tomorrow. Fire on Failure Island, but already reported and not major. Sighted: albatross, unidentified terns, bobcat (peering out of the palmetto grove to the east, staring at a hiker who didn’t see him), flycatcher of some kind, pod of dolphins headed east in a frenzy as they chased a school of mullet through the sea grass in the shallows.

  Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn’t see it, because they had no other choice.

  “That’s bullshit,” Charlie said during the night, when Saul expressed something similar to him, after they’d had sex. “Don’t ever become a poet.” For once, Saul had convinced Charlie to come to the lighthouse, a rare event because Charlie still had a skittish, flighty quality to him. Beaten by his father and kicked out by his family, and in the twenty years since he’d not entirely come out of his shell. So this was a halting step forward—something that made Saul happy, that he could provide a small sense of security.

  “An idea in one of my father’s sermons. The best he ever gave.” Flexing his hand, trying to sense any residual discomfort from the incident with the plant. None to be found.

  “Ever miss it? Being a preacher?” Charlie asked.

  “No, I’m just working out something about the Light Brigade,” he said. They still elicited in him a distant but sharp alarm. What were they projecting that he couldn’t see?

  “Oh, them, huh?” Charlie said with a simulated yawn as he turned over on his back. “You can’t leave those Brigaders alone, can you? Bunch of crackpots. You, too.” But said with affection.

  Later, when he was drifting off, Charlie murmured, “It’s not stupid. The beacon thing. It’s kind of a nice thought. Maybe.”

  Maybe. Saul found it hard to tell when Charlie was sincere about such things. Sometimes their life between the sheets seemed mysterious, to have no relationship to life out in the world.

  Sometimes, too, other people gave you their light, and could seem to flicker, to be hardly visible at all, if no one took care of them. Because they’d given you too much and had nothing left for themselves.

  At the end, with his church, he’d felt like a beacon that had been drained of light, except for some guttering glimmer in the heart of him—the way the words shone out from his mouth, and it almost didn’t matter what light they created, not to his congregation, because they were looking at him, not listening. At best, anyway, his ministry had been an odd assortment, attracting hippies and the straitlaced alike, because he’d pulled from the Old Testament and from deism, and the esoteric books available to him in his father’s house. Something his father hadn’t planned on: the bookshelves leading Saul to places the old man would rather he’d never gone. His father’s library had been more liberal than the man himself.

  The shock of going from being the center of attention to being out of it entirely—that still pulled at Saul at unexpected times. But there had been no drama to his collapsed ministry in the north, no shocking revelation, beyond the way he would be preaching one thing and thinking another, mistaking that conflict, for the longest time, as a manifestation of his guilt for sins both real and imagined. And one awful day he’d realized, betrayed by his passion, that he was becoming the message.

  By the time Saul woke up, Charlie was gone, without even a note. But, then, a note might have seemed sentimental, and Charlie was the kind of beacon that wouldn’t allow that kind of light.

  In the afternoon, he saw Gloria walking up the beach, waved to her, wasn’t sure she’d seen him until she corrected her course to slowly tack closer. It wouldn’t do to seem too interested in talking to him, he knew. Might violate some girl code.

  He was filling in holes from armadillos that had been rooting around in the garden. The holes, which roughly matched the shape of their snouts, amused him. He couldn’t say why. But the work made him happy in a formless, motiveless way. Even better, the twins, Henry and Suzanne, were very late.

  It had become a stunning day after a cloudy start. The sea had an aquamarine sheen to it, vibrant against the dull shadows of submerged seaweed. At the very edge of a seamless, ever-deepening blue sky, the contrail of an airplane, showing its disdain for denizens of the forgotten coast. Much closer to home, he tried to ignore rocks slick with the white shit of cormorants.

  “Why don’t you do something about those armadillos?” Gloria asked when she’d finally reached the lighthouse grounds. She must have meandered, distracted by the treasures to be found in the seaweed washed up on the beach.

  “I like armadillos,” he told her.

  “Old Jim says they’re pests.”

  Old Jim. Sometimes he thought she made up a reference to Old Jim every time she wanted to get her way. Old Jim lived down one of the dozens of dirt roads, at the end of a maze of them, in a glorified shack near an illegal drop site for barrels of chemical waste. No one knew what he’d done before he’d washed up on the forgotten coast, but now he served a
s the ad hoc proprietor of the on-again, off-again village bar.

  “Is that what Jim says, huh?” Making sure to pack the soil tight, even though he was already feeling strangely tired. Another storm and he’d have eroded divots all over instead.

  “They are armored rats.”

  “Like seagulls are winged rats?”

  “What? You know, you could set traps.”

  “They’re much too smart for traps.”

  Slowly, staring at him sideways: “I don’t think that’s true, Saul.”

  When she called him Saul, he knew he might be in trouble. So why not get in a lot of trouble. Besides, he needed a break, was sweating too much.

  “One day,” he said, leaning on the shovel, “they got in through the kitchen window by standing on top of each other and jiggling the latch.”

  “Armadillo pyramid!” Then, recovering her youthful caution: “I don’t think that’s true, either.”

  Truth was, he did like the armadillos. He found them funny—bumbling yet sincere. He’d read in a nature guide that armadillos “swam” by walking across the bottoms of rivers and holding their breath, a detail that had captivated him.

  “They can be a nuisance,” he admitted. “So you’re probably right.” He knew if he didn’t make some small concession, she’d drive the point into the ground.

  “Old Jim said you were crazy because you saw a kangaroo around here.”

  “Maybe you need to stop hanging out with Old Jim.”

  “I wasn’t. He lives in a dump. He came to see my mother.”

  Ah—gone to see the doctor. A sense of relief came over him, or maybe it was just the cold sweat of his exertion. Not that there was anything wrong with Jim, but the thought of her roving so widely and boldly bothered him. Even though Charlie had told Saul more than once that Gloria knew the area better than he did.

  “So did you see a kangaroo?”

  My God, is this what it would’ve been like having kids?

  “Not exactly. I saw something that looked like a kangaroo.” The locals still joked about it, but he swore he’d seen it, just a glimpse that first year, exhilarated from the rush of exploring so many new and unfamiliar hiking trails.

  “Oh, but I forgot. I came over here for a reason,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Old Jim said he heard on his radio that the island’s on fire, and I wanted to see it better from the top of the lighthouse. The telescope?”

  “What?” Dropping his shovel. “What do you mean the island’s on fire?” No one was over there now except members of the Light Brigade, as far as he knew, but part of his job was reporting incidents like fires.

  “Not the whole thing,” she said, “just part of it. Let me take a look. There’s smoke and everything.”

  So up they went, Saul insisting she take his hand, her grip strong and clammy, telling her to be careful on the steps, while wondering if he should have called someone about the fire before he confirmed it.

  At the top, after pulling back the lens curtain and peering through the telescope, mostly meant for stargazing, Saul discovered that she was right: The island was on fire. Or, rather, the top of the ruined lighthouse was in flames—several miles away, but clear through the telescope’s eye. A hint of red, but mostly dark smoke. Like a funeral pyre.

  “Do you think anyone died?”

  “No one’s over there.” Except the “strange people,” as Gloria had put it.

  “Then who set the fire?”

  “No one had to set it. It might have just happened.” But he didn’t believe that. He could see what looked like bonfires, too, black smoke rising from them. Was that part of a controlled burn?

  “Can I look some more?”

  “Sure.”

  Even after he had let Gloria take his position at the telescope, Saul thought he could still see the thin fractures of smoke tendrils on the horizon, but that had to be an illusion.

  Strangeness was nothing new for Failure Island. If you listened to Old Jim, or some of the other locals, the myths of the forgotten coast had always included that island, even before the latest in a series of attempts at settlement had failed. The rough, unfinished stone and wood of the town’s buildings, the island’s isolation, the way the sea lanes had already begun to change while the lighthouse was under construction so long ago had seemed to presage its ultimate fate.

  The lens in his lighthouse had previously graced the ruined tower on the island. In some people’s eyes that meant some essential misfortune had followed the lens to the mainland, perhaps because of the epic story of moving the four-ton lens, with a sudden storm come up and lightning breaking the sky, how the lens had almost sunk the ship that carried it, run aground carrying the light that might have saved it.

  While Gloria was still glued to the telescope, Saul noticed something odd on the floor near the base of the lens, on the side facing away from the sea. A tiny pile of glass flakes glinted against the dark wood planks. What the heck? Had the Light Brigade broken a bulb up here or something? Then another thought occurred, and stooping a bit, Saul pulled up the lens bag directly above the glass shavings. Sure enough, he found a fissure where the glass met the mount. It was almost like what he imagined the hole from a bullet might look like, except smaller. He examined the “exit wound,” as he thought of it. The hairline cracks pushing out from that space resembled the roots of a plant. He saw no other damage to that smooth fractal surface.

  He didn’t know whether he should be angry or just add it to the list of repairs, since it wouldn’t harm the functioning of the lens. Had Henry and Suzanne done this, deliberately or through some clumsiness or mistake? Unable to shake the irrational feeling of hidden connections, the sense that something had escaped from that space.

  The reverberation of steps below him, the sound of voices—two sets of footsteps, two voices. The Light Brigade, Henry and Suzanne. On impulse, he pulled down the lens bag, dispersed the glass flakes with his boot, which made him feel oddly complicit.

  When they finally appeared, Saul couldn’t blame Gloria for the way she looked at them—staring like a feral cat with hackles up from her position at the telescope. He felt the same way.

  Henry was again dressed like he was going out on the town. Suzanne looked tense, perhaps because this time she was carrying the bulk of the equipment.

  “You’re late,” he said, unable to keep an edge of disapproval out of his voice. Henry held the handle of what looked like a metal tool kit in his left hand, was rocking it gently back and forth. “And what’s that?” Saul hadn’t seen it before.

  “Oh, nothing, Saul,” Henry said, smile as big as ever. “Just some tools. Screwdrivers, that kind of thing. Like a handyman.” Or someone taking samples from a first-order lens that had managed to escape vandalism for more than a century.

  Apparently noting Gloria’s hostility, Suzanne put down the suitcase and cardboard box she was carrying, leaned over the telescope as she said, “You’re such a sweet kid. Would you like a lollipop?” Which she produced as if by magic from Gloria’s ear with the over-flourish of an amateur magician.

  An appraising, hostile stare from Gloria. “No. We’re watching the island burn.” She dismissively put her eye to the telescope again.

  “There’s a fire, yes,” Henry said, unperturbed, as Suzanne returned to his side. A tinny rattle as he set his tool kit next to the other equipment.

  “What do you know about it?” Saul asked, although so many other questions now rose up.

  “What would I know about it? An unfortunate accident. I guess we never got the right badges in the Boy Scouts, yes? No one has been hurt, luckily, on this glorious day, and we’ll be gone from there very soon anyway.”

  “Gone?” Saul suddenly hopeful. “Closing up shop?”

  Henry’s expression was less friendly than it had been a moment ago. “Just on the island. What we’re looking for isn’t there.”

  Smug, like he enjoyed holding on to a secret that he wasn’t going to share
with Saul. Which rubbed Saul the wrong way, and then he was angry.

  “What are you looking for? Something that would make you damage the lens?” His directness made Suzanne wince. She wouldn’t meet Saul’s gaze.

  “We haven’t touched the lens,” Henry said. “You haven’t, have you, Suzanne?”

  “No, we’d never touch the lens,” Suzanne said, in a horrified tone of voice. The thought occurred that Suzanne was protesting too much.

  Saul hesitated. Should he show them the spot on the lens that had been damaged? He didn’t really want to. If they’d done it, they’d just lie again. If they hadn’t done it, he’d be drawing their attention to it. Nor did he want to get into an argument with Gloria around. So he relented and with difficulty tore Gloria away from the telescope, knowing she’d been listening the whole time.

  Down below, in his kitchen, he called the fire department in Bleakersville, who told him they already knew about the fire on the island, it wasn’t a threat to anything, and making him feel a little stupid in the process because that’s how they treated people from the forgotten coast. Or they were just terminally bored.

  Gloria was sitting in a chair at the table, absentmindedly gnawing on a candy bar he’d given her. He figured she probably had wanted the lollipop.

  “Go home. Once you’ve finished.” He couldn’t put words to it, but he wanted her far away from the lighthouse right now. Charlie would’ve called him irrational, emotional, said he wasn’t thinking straight. But in the confluence of the fire, the lens damage, and Suzanne’s strange mood … he just didn’t want Gloria there.

  But Gloria held on to her stubbornness, like it was a kind of gift she’d been given along with the candy bar.

  “Saul, you’re my friend,” she said, “but you’re not the boss of me.” Matter-of-fact, like something he should’ve already known, that didn’t need to be said.