Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Those thousands of eyes regarding him, reading him from across a vast expanse of space, as if the biologist existed simultaneously halfway across the universe. The sensation of being seen and then relief and a stabbing disappointment as it withdrew, spit him out. Rejected him.

  There came a sound like a weight leaving the sky, a plunging toward the waves, and the awful weight of a pushing against the air lessened, and the restless agony in his bones receded, and he was just a dirty, spent figure weeping on the floor of a ruined lighthouse. With words like collateral damage and containment and counterattacks blossoming like old spells, incantations that worked in other, far distant, lands but not here. He was back in control, but control was meaningless. His father’s sculptures in his old backyard were tipping over, one after the other. The chess moves between them in those last days before his father had died. The pressure of the piece between his fingers as he moved it, and the empty air as he let go.

  Silence then. An absence into which the brightness again took up sentinel duty, swung around with ever-greater confidence to peer at him like the leviathans from his dreams. Perhaps unaware of what it protected, what it lived within.

  Except he would never forget now.

  Later, much later, familiar steps, and a familiar voice—Grace, extending a hand.

  “Can you walk?”

  Could he walk? He felt like an old man leveled by a blow from an invisible fist. He had fallen into a deep, dark, narrow fissure and now had to crawl up out of it.

  “Yes, I can walk.”

  Grace handing him his father’s carving, him taking it.

  “Let’s go back up to the landing.”

  There was a huge hole in the side of the first-floor wall. The night peered in from it. But the lighthouse had held.

  “Yes, the landing.”

  He would be safe there.

  He wouldn’t be safe there.

  Control lay there, back on the landing, sprawled across a blanket, looking up at the paint-peeled ceiling mottled by candlelight. Everything seemed so far away. Such an overwhelming psychic sense of their distance from Earth, that there might not now be astronomers, might never be astronomers who, all-knowing, could even make out the speck that was the star around which they must revolve. He found it hard to breathe, kept calling forth another passage from the pages of Whitby where the man almost waxed poetic: “Area X has been created by an organism left behind by a civilization so advanced and so ancient and so alien to us and our own intent and our own thought processes that it has long since left us behind, left everything behind.”

  Wondering, too, because of all that the biologist’s intrusion had knocked loose in his head … if there was any evidence he’d ever sat in the backseat of his grandfather’s muscle car—if somewhere at Central you would find black-and-white photos shot from farther down the street, through the windshield of a car or a van. An investment. A divestment. The start of it all. He’d had dreams of cliffs and leviathans and falling into the sea. But what if the leviathans were back at Central? The shadowy forms mere outlines of memories he could not quite recall, overlaid with those that he should not remember because they had never occurred. Jump, a voice had said, and he had jumped. Two days lost at Central before he came to the Southern Reach, and only his mother’s word for it that he was being paranoid … But it was such a weight, so exhausting to analyze, as if the Southern Reach and Area X both interrogated him.

  Hello, John, said some version of Lowry in his head. Surprise.

  Fuck you.

  Seriously, John? And here I thought you knew all along, the game we were playing. The game we’ve always been playing.

  His lungs felt heavy, thick, as Grace checked him out, bandaged his elbow, told him, “You’ve bruised some ribs and your hip is bruised, too, but you seem able to move everything.”

  “The biologist … she’s really gone?” This leviathan that has taken the terroir of a place and made it its own. Every moment that passed, the gospel of Whitby made more and less sense to him. Such an inconsistent heartbeat. Such simplicity to concentrate on those three pages, to focus on the parts so smudged he had to interpret the words or to smooth out a curled corner, than on the fact that the sun should not be shining above, that the sky could peel back to reveal a celestial landscape perhaps never dreamed of by humankind, the weight of that oppressive, a beast bearing down on the very center, which must be protected from that which did not bear contemplating.

  “She’s been gone for a while,” Grace said. “You’ve been a little gone, for a while.”

  She stood next to the seaward window, along with Ghost Bird. Ghost Bird had her back to Control, staring out at the night. Was she charting her original’s progress? Was that vast form now in open water, seeking depth and distance? Or had she departed for someplace stranger and more remote? He didn’t want to know.

  When Ghost Bird finally turned, the shadows made of her face an impression of a fading smile and wide, curious eyes.

  “What did it share with you?” Control asked. “What did it take?” More caustic than he’d meant, but he was still in a kind of shock, knew that on some level. Wanted his experience to be the common one.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  What side are you on? Lowry asked.

  “What side are you on?” he asked.

  “Enough!” Grace said. “Enough! Just shut the fuck up. That’s not helping.”

  But he couldn’t shut up. “No wonder you’re on edge,” he said. “No wonder you didn’t tell us.”

  “The biologist took out the convoy,” Ghost Bird said.

  “Yes, she did,” Grace admitted. “But I have been careful and quiet and not provoked her. I know when to stay away from the lighthouse or the shore. I know when to fade into the forest. Sometimes there’s a kind of foreshadowing in the air. Sometimes she will make landfall where she found the owl, then push on through the interior, headed here. As if she remembers. Most times, I can avoid her. Most times, she isn’t here.”

  “Remembers what? This place?”

  “I don’t know what she remembers or doesn’t remember,” Grace said. “I just know your presence here attracted her, made her curious.” Not Control’s presence, that much he knew. Ghost Bird’s presence. The biologist was drawn to her as surely as he had been drawn to her.

  “We could be just like the biologist,” Control said. “Stay here. Wait it out. Wait her out. Just give in.” Goading them.

  But it was Ghost Bird who answered: “She earned the right to choose her fate. She earned the right.”

  “We’re not her,” Grace said. “I don’t want to become her, or anything like her.”

  “Isn’t that all you’ve been doing? Waiting?” Wanting to see just how well Grace had adjusted to living on an island with a monster.

  “Not exactly. But what do you want me to do? Tell me what I should do, and I will do it!” Shouting now. “Do you think I want to wait here, die here? Do you think I like it?” The thought occurred that Grace had made use of the biologist’s list of pain-inducers, that her thinness, the hollowed-out quality to her face, wasn’t just about being haunted by a monster.

  “You need a way out,” Ghost Bird said.

  “Through a hole in the sea that may not be there?”

  “No. Another way out.”

  Control propped himself up with a groan. His side was on fire. “Are you sure the ribs are just bruised?”

  “I can’t be sure without an X-ray.”

  Another impossible thing. Yet another moment in his decline. A wall changing to the touch of his hand, the touch of the biologist in his head. Enough of this. Enough.

  He took up Whitby’s pages, began to read by candlelight even as he began to tear the corners off. Slowly.

  We must trust our thoughts while we sleep. We must trust our hunches. We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical
, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy. Brilliance and bullshit both. A binary trapped in its single-minded focus on solutions.

  “What?” he asked. He could feel the other two staring at him.

  Ghost Bird said, “You need to rest.”

  “What I’d suggest isn’t going to be popular anyway,” he said. Tearing one full page into shreds. Letting the pieces fall to the floor. It felt good to tear something apart.

  “Say it.” Challenging him.

  A pause, preparing himself. Aware of the conflicting voices in his head.

  “What you call the Crawler—we have to try. We have to go back down into the tower and find some way to neutralize it.”

  Ghost Bird: “Have you been paying attention? Have you been listening?”

  “Or we stay here.”

  “Staying here isn’t going to work,” Grace admitted. “Either the biologist will get us, or Area X will.”

  “There’s a lot of open, vulnerable space for us between here and the tower,” Ghost Bird said.

  “There’s a lot of everything between here and there.”

  “Control,” Ghost Bird said, and he didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want to see those eyes that now reminded him of the creature the biologist had become. “Control, there’s no reset. There’s never going to be a reset. That’s a suicide mission.” Unspoken, that she thought it was a suicide mission for them. Who knew what it might be for her?

  “But the director thought you could change its direction,” he said. “That you could change it, if you tried hard enough.” A halting kind of hope. A childish thrashing against the dictates of the real. If you wished upon a star. He was thinking of the light at the bottom of the tower, this new thing he hadn’t known about before entering Area X. He was thinking about being sick, and now sicker, and what that meant. At least they were all out in the open now, clear to him. The brightness, Lowry, all of it. Everything in the mix, including the core he still thought of as John Rodriguez. The Rodriguez who didn’t belong to anyone. Who clasped his father’s carving tight in his pocket. Who remembered something beyond the wreck and ruin of all this.

  “It’s true we have one thing no one else had,” Grace said.

  “What?” Ghost Bird asked in a skeptical, doubting tone.

  “You,” Grace said. “The only photocopy of the director’s last plan.”

  0014: The Director

  When, eventually, you return to the Southern Reach, you find a gift waiting for you: a framed black-and-white photograph of the lighthouse keeper, his assistant, and a little girl playing on the rocks—head down, jacket hood disguising her features. The blood rushes to your head, and you almost black out, seeing that this photo you didn’t know still existed.

  “It’s for your office,” reads the pointed note that comes with it. “You should hang it on the wall there. In fact, you must keep it on the wall. As a reminder of how far you’ve come. For your years of service and for your loyalty. Love and Kisses, Jimmy Boy.”

  That’s when you realize there is something very much more wrong with Lowry than you’d ever thought before. That he creates ever more spectacular and grandiose dysfunctions to test what the system might bear before it finds him out. He seems, year after year, to revel in his clandestine operations not because they are secret but for those tantalizing moments when, either by his own hand or by fate, the edges of them almost become known.

  But where had the photograph come from?

  “Pull everything we have on Jackie Severance,” you tell Grace. “Pull every file that mentions Jack Severance. And the son—John Rodriguez. Even if it takes a year. We’re looking for something that connects Severance—any Severance—to Lowry.” You’ve got a sense of an unholy alliance, a devilish foundation. An inkling of bad faith. Something hidden in the grout between the stones.

  Meanwhile, you have a plant and a cell phone, very early model, to deal with—all you have to show for your journey. Other than a new sense of being separate, remote, set apart from the staff.

  When you see Whitby in the hallway now, sometimes you meet his gaze and nod and there is a sense of a secret shared. Other times, you must look away, stare at that worn green carpet that meanders through everything. Make some polite comment in the cafeteria, try to immerse yourself in meetings as they prep another expedition. Try to pretend everything is normal. Is Whitby broken? His smile flickers back into place at times. His old confident stance, the wit in Whitby, will reappear but not for long, and then a light winks out in his eyes and darkness comes back in.

  There’s nothing you could say to Whitby except “I’m sorry,” but you can’t even say that. You can’t change the moments that changed him except in your memory, and even in memory that attempt is obscured by the fast-rising thing from below, the thing that terrified you so much you abandoned Saul there, on the tunnel steps. Said to yourself afterward that Saul wasn’t real, couldn’t be real, so you hadn’t abandoned anyone. “Don’t forget about me,” he’d said, so long ago, and you won’t ever forget him, but you might have to leave him behind. That apparition. The hallucination that, as you sit at the bar in Chipper’s Star Lanes or debate policy with Grace on the Southern Reach rooftop, you still try to rationalize as not a hallucination at all.

  In part because you came back with the plant. For a time, obsessed with each dark green leaf, the way looking at it from above it forms a kind of fanlike circle, but from the side the effect fades completely. If you focus on the plant, maybe you can forget Lowry, waiting out there, for a while. Maybe Saul won’t matter. Maybe you can salvage something out of … nothing.

  The plant will not die.

  No parasites will touch the plant.

  The plant will not die.

  No extremes of temperature will affect it. Freeze it, it will thaw. Burn it, it will regenerate.

  The plant will not die.

  No matter what you try, no matter the experiments performed on it in the sterile, the blinding white environs of the storage cathedral … the plant won’t die. It’s not that you mean to order its execution, but that in the course of the samples taken, the researchers inform you that the plant refuses to die. That cutting—you could chop it up into five dozen tiny pieces, put those in a measuring cup, sprinkle it on a steak for seasoning … and in theory it would grow inside of you, eventually burst forth seeking sunlight.

  So, relenting, you let samples be whisked away to Central, so that experts can solve the mystery of this simple, ordinary plant that looks like any number of temperate-climate perennials. Samples, too, to Lowry’s secret headquarters, perhaps to reside next to cages in experimental bunkers, although none of their findings ever come back to you. All of this in the midst of a frenzied slicing and dicing of other specimens in the storage cathedral, just to make sure there hasn’t been some domino effect, or something’s been missed. But nothing has been missed.

  “I don’t think we’re looking at a plant,” Whitby says, tentative, at one status meeting, risking his new relationship with the science division, which he has embraced as a kind of sanctuary.

  “Then why are we seeing a plant, Whitby?” Cheney, managing to convey an all-consuming exasperation. “Why are we seeing a plant that looks like a plant being a plant. Doing plant things, like photosynthesis and drawing water up through its roots. Why? That’s not a tough question, is it, really? Or is it? Maybe it is a tough question, I don’t know, for reasons beyond me. But that’s going to be a problem, don’t you think? Having to reassert that things we think are the things they are actually are in fact the things they are and not some other thing entirely. Just think of all the fucking things we will have to reevaluate if you’re right, Whitby—starting with you!” Cheney’s blistered, reddening expression bears down on Whitby as if he were the receptacle of every evil thing that has ever afflicted Cheney since the day he was born. “Because,” Cheney says, lowering his voice, “if that’s a tough question, don’t we have to reclassify all the
really tough questions?”

  Later Whitby will regale you with information on how quantum mechanics impacts photosynthesis, which is all about “antenna receiving light and antenna can be hacked,” about how “one organism might peer out from another organism but not live there,” of how plants “talk” to one another, how communication can occur in chemical form and through processes so invisible to human beings that the sudden visibility of it would be “an irreparable shock to the system.”

  For the Southern Reach? For humanity?

  But Whitby’s close-lipped about that, changes the subject. Abruptly.

  You’re less obsessed with the cell phone, which has been living with the techs down in the hardware department, the ones who have the right security clearance. But the techs can’t make it work, are confused by it, perhaps even unnnerved. Nothing about it indicates a malfunction. It should work. It just doesn’t. It should reveal who owned it. It just doesn’t.

  “As if it’s not really made of the parts it should be made of. But it looks exactly that way—like a normal phone. Really old, though.”

  A bulky veteran of a phone, scarred and scraped and worn. It looks like you feel sometimes.

  You offer it to Lowry during one of your calls, as a kind of sacrifice of a pawn. Give Lowry an exclusive, let him worry at it like a dog with a new bone, so the old bone can get some rest. But he doesn’t want it—insists you keep it.

  Something an expedition member had snuck in with them or inadvertently brought along? Something perhaps from a recent expedition that someone had thought was old enough not to disturb Area X’s slumber? During the cycles that predated Lowry’s intervention, your stewardship, techniques primitive and untested.

  Recalling the very earliest photographs and video—of Lowry and the others in what amounted to deep-sea diving outfits to traverse the border, before they realized it was unnecessary. Lowry, returned, disoriented, babbling on videotape, words he would later recant, about how nothing would ever come out of the passage in the border, nothing, because they were waiting for ghosts, for something long dead, Area X a memorial, a gravestone.