Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Whitby, playing in the mud. Washing something? Strangling something? The level of concentration he displays, even at this distance, is of working on something that requires a jeweler’s precision.

  Instinct tells you to be silent, to walk slow, to take care with fallen branches and dead leaves. Whitby has been startled enough in the past, by the past, and you want your presence known by degrees. Halfway there, though, he turns long enough to acknowledge you and go back to what he’s doing, and you walk faster after that.

  The trees are as sullen as ever, looking like hunched-over priests with long beards of moss, or as Grace says, less respectfully, “Like a line of used-up old drug addicts.” The water carries only the small, patient ripples made by Whitby, and your reflection as you come close and lean over his shoulder is distorted by widening rings and wavery gray light.

  Whitby is washing a small brown mouse.

  He holds the mouse, careful but firm, between the thumb and index finger of his left hand, the mouse’s head and front legs circled by this fleshy restraint, the pale belly, back legs, and tail splayed out across his palm. The mouse seems hypnotized or for some other reason preternaturally calm while Whitby with his cupped right hand ladles water onto the mouse, then extends his little finger and rubs the water into the fur of the underbelly, the sides, then the furry cheeks, followed by anointment of the top of the head.

  Whitby has draped a little white towel across his left forearm; it is monogrammed with a large cursive W in gold thread. Brought from home? He pinches the towel from his forearm and, using a single corner, delicately daubs the top of the mouse’s head while its tiny black eyes stare off into the distance. There’s a kind of febrile extremity of care here, as Whitby proceeds to wipe off one pink-clawed paw and then the other, before moving to the back paws and the thin tail. Whitby’s hand is so pale and small that there is a sort of symmetry on display, an absurd yet somehow touching suggestion of a shared ancestry.

  It has been four months since the last member of the last eleventh expedition died of cancer, six weeks since you had them exhumed. It has been more than two years since you came back across the border with Whitby. Over the past seven or eight months, you have had a sense of Whitby recovering—fewer transfer requests, more engagement in status meetings, a revival of self-interest in his “combined theories document,” which he now calls “a thesis on terroir,” evoking a “comprehensive ecosystem” approach based on an advanced theory of wine production. There has been nothing in the execution of his duties to indicate anything more than his usual eccentricity. Even Cheney has, grudgingly, admitted this, and you don’t care that the man often uses Whitby as a wedge against you now. You don’t care about reasons so long as it brings Whitby back closer to the center of things.

  “What do you have there, Whitby?” Breaking the silence is sudden and intrusive. Nothing you say will sound like anything other than an adult talking to a child, but Whitby’s put you in that position.

  Whitby stops washing and drying the mouse, throws the towel over his left shoulder, stares at the mouse, examining it as if there might still be a spot of dirt here or there.

  “A mouse,” he says, as if it should be obvious.

  “Where did you find her?”

  “Him. In the attic. I found him in the attic.” His tone like someone about to be reprimanded, but defiant, too.

  “Oh—at home?” Bringing the safety of home to the dangerous place, the workplace, in physical form. You’re trying to suppress the psychologist in you, not overanalyze, but it’s difficult.

  “In the attic.”

  “Why did you bring him out here?”

  “To wash him.”

  You don’t mean for it to seem like an interrogation, but you’re sure it does. Is this a bad thing or a good thing in the progression of Whitby’s recovery? There is no base score assigned to owning a mouse or washing a mouse that can confer an automatic rating of fit or unfit for duty.

  “You couldn’t wash him inside?”

  Whitby gives you an upturned sideways glance. You’re still stooping. He’s still hunched. “That water’s contaminated.”

  “Contaminated.” An interesting choice of words. “But you use it, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do …” Relenting, giving in a little, relaxing so that you’re less concerned he’s going to strangle the mouse by accident. “But I thought maybe he’d like to be outside for a while. It’s a nice day.”

  Translation: Whitby needed a break. Just like you needed a break, pacing the courtyard tiles.

  “What’s his name?”

  “He doesn’t have a name.”

  “He doesn’t have a name?”

  “No.”

  Somehow this bothers you more than the washing, but it’s an unease you can’t put into words. “Well, he’s a handsome mouse.” Which sounds stupid even as you say it, but you’re at a loss.

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot,” he says. “I’m aware this looks strange, but think about some of the things you do for stress.”

  You’d gone across the border with this man. You’d sacrificed his peace of mind on the altar of your insatiable fascination, your curiosity, and your ambition. He doesn’t deserve condescension on top of that.

  “Sorry.” You awkwardly lower yourself in the dead leaves and half-dried mud next to him. The truth is you don’t want to go back inside yet, and Whitby doesn’t seem to want to, either. “The only excuse I’ve got is that it’s been a long day. Already.”

  “It’s okay,” Whitby says after a pause, and returns to cleaning his mouse. Then volunteers, “I’ve had him about five weeks. I had a dog and a cat growing up, but no pets since.”

  You’ve tried to imagine what Whitby’s house looks like, and failed. You can only imagine an endless white space with white, modern furniture, and a computer screen in the corner as the only spot of color. Which probably means Whitby’s house is an opulent, decadent free-for-all of styles and periods, all offered up in bright, saturated colors.

  “The plant bloomed,” Whitby says into the middle of your musings.

  The sentence has no meaning at first. But when it takes on meaning, you sit up straighter.

  Whitby looks over at you. “There’s no emergency. It’s already over.”

  You’re quelling the impulse to pull Whitby to his feet and march him back inside to show you what no emergency means.

  “Explain,” you say, putting just enough pressure on the word to hold it there like an egg about to crack. “Be specific.”

  “It happened in the middle of the night. Last night,” he says. “Everyone else had left. I work very late sometimes, and I like to spend time in the storage cathedral.” He looks away, continues as if you’ve asked him something: “I just like it in there. It calms me down.”

  “And?”

  “And last night, I came in and I just decided to check on the plant”—said too casually, as if he always checked on the plant—“and there was a flower. The plant was blooming. But it’s gone now. It all happened very fast.”

  It’s important to just keep talking, to keep Whitby calm and answering your questions.

  “How long?”

  “Maybe an hour. If I had thought it would disintegrate, I would have called someone.”

  “What did the blossom look like?”

  “Like an ordinary flower, with seven or eight petals. Translucent, almost white.”

  “Did you take any photographs? Any video?”

  “No,” he says. “I thought it would still be there for a while. I didn’t tell anyone because it’s gone.” Or because, with no evidence, it would be more evidence against him, against his state of mind, his suitability, when he is just now getting out from under that reputation.

  “What did you do then?”

  He shrugs, the mouse’s tail twitching, as he transfers the animal to his right hand. “I scheduled a purification. Just to be sure. And I left.”

  “You were in a suit the whole ti
me, right?”

  “Sure. Yes. Of course.”

  “No strange readings after?”

  “No, no strange readings. I checked.”

  “And nothing else I need to know?” Like, the possible connection between the plant having bloomed and Whitby, the next day, coming out here with his mouse.

  “Nothing you don’t already know.”

  A shade defiant again, a lifting of his gaze to tell you he’s thinking about the trip into Area X, the one he can’t tell anyone about, the one that made him unreliable to the rest of the staff. How to evaluate hallucinations that might be real? A paranoia that might be justified? Right after you came back, you remember Whitby saying wistfully to himself, as if something had been lost, “They didn’t notice us at first. But, then, gradually, they began to peer in at us … because we just couldn’t stop.”

  You get to your feet, look down at Whitby, say, “Give me a more extensive report on the plant—for my eyes only. And you cannot keep sneaking a mouse into the building, Whitby. For one thing, security will catch you eventually. Take it home.”

  Whitby and the mouse are both looking up at you now, Whitby harder to read than the mouse, which just wants to get out of Whitby’s grasp and be on its way.

  “I’ll keep him in the attic,” Whitby says.

  “Do that.”

  Back inside, you visit the storage cathedral, putting on a purification suit so you don’t contaminate that environment or it doesn’t contaminate you. You find the plant, which has a false tag that designates it as belonging to the first eighth expedition. You examine the plant, the area around it, the floor, searching for any evidence of a dried-up flower. You find none, just a residue beside it that later comes back from testing as pine resin from some other sample that had sat there previously.

  You look at those test results in your office and you wonder if the plant had only blossomed in Whitby’s mind, and, if so, what that meant. Wonder for a good long while, before the thought becomes buried in the memos and the meeting minutes and the phone calls and a million minor emergencies. Should you ask Whitby if the mouse came with him into the storage cathedral? Perhaps. But what you do instead is put the immortal plant under round-the-clock surveillance, even though both Cheney and Grace give you grief about it.

  Whitby just needs a companion. Whitby needs someone who won’t judge or interrogate him, someone or something that depends on him. And as long as Whitby keeps the creature at home, in the attic, you won’t tell anyone about the breach—have recognized by now that just as Lowry’s tethered to you, you’re chained to Whitby.

  Playing pool with the Realtor and the veteran on an expedition to the Star Lanes a week later, you’re listening to the Realtor describe some couple that had been squatting in a model home and refused to give her their names when you think again about Whitby not naming the mouse. As if he’d been following Southern Reach protocol for expeditions.

  “They thought that so long as I didn’t know their names, I couldn’t call the police. Peering out from behind the curtains like ghosts. There was so much fail in that, not that I felt good about kicking them out. Except I have to sell the place—I’m not running a charity. I give to charities, sure, but why do they have homeless shelters anyway? And if I let them stay then someone else might get the same idea. Turns out the police had a file on them, so I made the right decision.”

  Waiting there back on your desk at the Southern Reach you already have the files of candidates for a twelfth expedition. Right on top is the most promising, to your mind: an antisocial biologist whose husband went on the last eleventh.

  0018: The Lighthouse Keeper

  Secured the lighthouse. Worked on the [illegible]. Fixed things. And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Came then the crying call of a curlew, and at dawn, too, I heard the hooting of an owl, the yap of foxes. Just a little ways up from the lighthouse, where I strayed for a bit, a bear cub poked its head out of the underbrush, looking around like any child might. And the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive.

  By the time Saul made it to the village bar, everyone had already crammed inside, anticipating music by a few locals who called themselves the Monkey’s Elbow. The deck, with its great view of the darkening ocean, was empty—it was too cold, for one thing—and he hurried inside with anticipation. He’d felt better with each day since the hallucination on the beach, and no one from the Light Brigade had returned to plague him. His temperature had receded, along with the pressure in his head, and with it the urge to burden Charlie with his problems. He hadn’t dreamed for three nights. Even his hearing was fine, the moment his ears had popped like getting a jolt to his system: more energetic in every way. So everything seemed normal, as if he’d worried over nothing—and all he missed was the familiar sight of Gloria coming down the beach toward the lighthouse, or climbing on the rocks, or loitering near the shed.

  Charlie had even promised to meet him at the bar for a short while before he went out night fishing again; despite the rough schedule, he seemed happy to be making money, but they’d hardly seen each other in several days.

  Old Jim, with his ruddy beacon of a face and fuzzy white mutton-chop sideburns, had commandeered the rickety upright piano in the far corner of the main room. Monkey’s Elbow was warming up around him, a discordant ramble of violin, accordion, acoustic guitar, and tambourine. The piano, a sea salvage, had been restored to its former undrowned glory—mother-of-pearl inlay preserved on the lid—but still retained a wheezy-tinny tone from its baptism, “sagging and soggy” on some of the keys, according to Old Jim.

  The place smelled comfortingly of cigarettes and greasy fried fish, and some underlying hint of too-sweet honey. The oysters were fresh-caught, and the beers, served out of a cooler, were cheap. Saul always forgot the downside real quick. There was good cheer to be found here, if sometimes grudgingly given. Any prayers he offered up came from knowing that no health inspector had ever journeyed to the tiny kitchen or the grill out back where the seagulls gathered with irrepressible hope.

  Charlie was already there, had gotten them a little round table with two stools that hugged the wall opposite the piano. Saul pushed through the press of bodies—maybe sixty people, practically a mob by forgotten-coast standards—and gave Charlie a squeeze of the shoulder before sitting.

  “Hello there, stranger,” Saul said, making it sound like an even worse pickup line than it would’ve been.

  “Someone’s in a better mood, jack,” Charlie said. Then caught himself. “I mean—”

  “I don’t know any jack, unless you mean jack shit,” Saul said. “No, I know what you mean. And I am. I feel a lot better.” First evidence from Charlie that he had been dragged down by Saul’s condition, which just deepened his affection for Charlie. He’d not complained once during all of Saul’s moaning about his lethargy and symptoms, had only tried to help. Maybe they could get back to normal, once this night-fishing expedition came to its end.

  “Good, good,” Charlie said, smiling and looking around, still a little extra stutter-step of awkwardness from him when out in public.

  “How was the fishing yesterday?” Charlie’d said something about a good catch, but they hadn’t talked long.

  “Best haul so far,” Charlie said, his face lit up. “A lot of skates and rays and flounder. Some mullet and bass.” Charlie got paid a flat rate per hour, but a bonus for catches over a certain weight.

  “Anything odd?” A question Saul always asked. He liked hearing about strange sea creatures. Lately, thinking about what Henry had said, he took a special interest in the answer.

  “Only a couple of things. Threw them both back ‘cause they were so ugly. Some weird fish and a kind of sea squirt that looked like it was spewing blood.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You look a lot better, you know. Calm at the lighthouse?” Which was Charlie’s way of sayi
ng “Tell me why on the phone you said ‘not a lot of fun around here recently.’”

  Saul was about to launch into the story of his final confrontation with Henry and the Light Brigade when the piano cut off and Old Jim got up and introduced Monkey’s Elbow, even though everybody already knew them. The band members were Sadi Dawkins, Betsey Pepine, and his erstwhile lighthouse volunteer, Brad. They all worked at the village bar on and off. Trudi, Gloria’s mother, was on tambourine, the guest spot. Saul’s turn would come someday.

  Monkey’s Elbow lurched into some sad thick song, the sea’s bounty on display in its lyrics, and two ill-fated lovers, and a tragic hill overlooking a secret cove. The usual, but not so much chantey as influenced by what Charlie called “sand-encrusted sea-hippies,” who had popularized a laid-back listener-friendly kind of folk-pop. Saul liked it live, even if Brad tended to ham it up a bit. But Charlie stared at his drink with a kind of pursed-lipped frown, then rolled his eyes secretively at Saul, while Saul shook his head in mock disapproval. Sure, they weren’t great, but any performance took guts. He used to throw up before sermons, which might’ve been a sign from God, now that he thought about it. The worst nights, Saul had done push-ups beforehand and jumping jacks to sweat out the fear of performance.

  Charlie leaned in, and Saul met him halfway. Charlie said in his ear, “You know that fire on the island?”

  “Yeah?”

  “A friend of mine was out there fishing that day, and he saw bonfires. People burning papers, for hours, like you said. But when he came back around, they’d loaded a bunch of boxes into motorboats. You want to know where those boats headed?”

  “Out to sea?”

  “No. Due west, hugging the coast.”