Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Three rings orbited the Crawler, circling clockwise, and at times waves and surges of energy discharged between them, rippled across the Crawler’s body. The first ring spun in drunken dreamlike revolutions just below the arm: an irregular row of half-moons. They resembled delicate jellyfish, with feathery white tendrils descending that continually writhed in a wandering search for something never found. The second ring, spinning faster right above the writing arm, resembled a broad belt of tiny black stones grouped close together, but these stones, as they bumped into one another, gave with a sponginess that made her think of soft tadpoles and of the creatures that had rained from the sky on the way to the island. What function these entities performed, whether they were part of the Crawler’s anatomy or a symbiotic species, she could not fathom. All she knew was that both rings were in their way reassuringly corporeal.

  But the third ring, the halolike ring above the Crawler, did not reassure her at all. The swift-moving globes of gold numbered ten to twelve, appeared to be both lighter than air and yet heavier, too. They spun with a ferocious velocity, so that at first she almost could not tell what they were. But she knew that they were dangerous, that words like defense and aggression might apply.

  Perhaps the lighthouse keeper had always been a delusion, a lie written by Area X and conveyed back to the biologist. Yet she distrusted, too, this avatar, this monster costume, this rubber suit meant for a scientist’s consumption: so precise, so specific. Or perhaps the truth, for it did not fluctuate in its aspect, morph into other forms.

  “Nothing but a horror show,” Ghost Bird said to Control, so still and silent behind her, absorbing or being absorbed.

  What else was she to do? She stepped forward, into the gravitational field of its orbits. This close, the translucent layer was more like a microscope slide of certain kinds of long, irregularly shaped cells. The patterns beneath, on the second layer, she could almost read, but remained obscured, as if in shallows disturbed by wide ripples.

  She reached out a hand, felt a delicate fluttering against her fingers as though encountering a porous layer, a veil.

  Was this first contact, or last contact?

  Her touch triggered a response.

  The halo far above dissolved to allow one of its constituent parts to peel off like a drooping golden pearl as large as her head—and down it came to a halt in front of her, hovering there to assess her. Reading her, with a kind of warmth that felt like sunburn. Yet still she was not afraid. She would not be afraid. Area X had made her. Area X must have expected her.

  Ghost Bird reached out and plucked the golden pearl from the air, held it warm and tender in her hand.

  A brilliant gold-green light erupted from the globe and plunged into the heart of her and an icy calm came over her, and through the calm bled a kind of monumental light and in that light she could see all that could be revealed even as Area X peered in at her.

  She saw or felt, deep within, the cataclysm like a rain of comets that had annihilated an entire biosphere remote from Earth. Witnessed how one made organism had fragmented and dispersed, each minute part undertaking a long and perilous passage through spaces between, black and formless, punctuated by sudden light as they came to rest, scattered and lost—emerging only to be buried, inert, in the glass of a lighthouse lens. And how, when brought out of dormancy, the wire tripped, how it had, best as it could, regenerated, begun to perform a vast and preordained function, one compromised by time and context, by the terrible truth that the species that had given Area X its purpose was gone. She saw the membranes of Area X, this machine, this creature, saw the white rabbits leaping into the border, disappearing, and coming out into another place, the leviathans, the ghosts, watching from beyond. All of this in fragments through taste or smell or senses she didn’t entirely understand.

  While the Crawler continued in its writing as if she did not even exist, the words ablaze with a richer and more meaningful light than she had ever seen, and worlds shone out from them. So many worlds. So much light. That only she could see. Each word a world, a world bleeding through from some other place, a conduit and an entry point, if you only knew how to use them, the coordinates the biologist now used in her far journeying. Each sentence a merciless healing, a ruthless rebuilding that could not be denied.

  Should she now say, “Stop!” Should she now plead for people she had never met who lived in her head, who the biologist had known? Should she somehow think that what came next would destroy the planet or save it? In its recognition of her, Ghost Bird knew that something would survive, that she would survive.

  What could she do? Nothing. Nor did she want to. There was a choice in not making a choice. She released the sphere, let it hover there in the air.

  She sensed Grace on the stairs behind them, sensed that Grace meant harm, and didn’t care. It wasn’t Grace’s fault. Grace could not possibly understand what she was seeing, was seeing something else—something from back at the lighthouse or the island or her life before.

  Grace shot Ghost Bird through the back. The bullet came out of her chest, lodged in the wall. The halo above the Crawler spun more furiously. Ghost Bird turned, shouted at her with the full force of the brightness. For she was not injured, had felt nothing, did not want Grace hurt.

  Grace frozen there in the half-light, rifle poised, and now in her eyes the knowledge that this was futile, that this had always been futile, that there was no turning back, that there could be no return.

  “Go back, Grace,” Ghost Bird said, and Grace disappeared up the steps, as if she’d never been there.

  Then Ghost Bird realized, too late, that Control was no longer there, had either gone back up or had snuck past, down the stairs, headed for the blinding white light far below.

  0023: The Director

  You return to what you knew, or thought you knew: the lighthouse and the Séance & Science Brigade, reinvigorated due to the line item linking the S&SB and Jack Severance. You comb through every file three or four times, force yourself to once again review the history of the lighthouse and its ruined sister on the island.

  At odd moments, you see Henry’s face, a pale circle from a great distance, moving closer and closer until you can catalog every unsavory detail. You don’t know what he means, know only that Henry is not someone to be cast aside too quickly. He nags at you like an unopened letter that everyone has, with overconfidence, predicted will contain something banal.

  Your antipathy toward them made you dismissive as a child. You hadn’t been looking for ways to emblazon them in your memory, to capture details, but instead to banish them, edit them out, make them go away. This annoyance, this presence that you could tell made Saul uncomfortable, even uneasy. But what about them had made Saul feel that way?

  No Henry, no Suzanne that looked like them appeared on the lists of the S&SB members, no stray photos with members unidentified leaped out to reveal either of them. Prior investigations had tracked down the names and addresses of any member assigned to the forgotten coast, and exhaustive interviews had been conducted. The answers were the same: S&SB had been conducting standard research—the usual mix of the scientific and the preternatural. Anyone who knew anything else had been trapped inside and disappeared long before the first expedition stumbled through the corridor into Area X.

  Worse, no further hint of Severance, Jack or Jackie, the latter also making herself scarce in the flesh, as if something new has caught her attention or she knows you want to question her, with each phone call fading into the backdrop, further subsumed by Central. So that you redouble your efforts to find her influence in the files, but if Lowry haunts you, Severance is the kind of ghost that’s too smart to materialize.

  Once again you watch the video from the first expedition, again study the background, the things out of focus, at the lighthouse. Through a flickering time lapse and sequencing, you review a kind of evolution and devolution of the lighthouse from inception through the last photograph taken by an expedition.

&n
bsp; To the point that Grace takes you aside one day and says, “This is enough. You need to run this agency. Other people can review these files.”

  “What other people? What other people are you talking about?” you snap at her, and then instantly regret it.

  But there are no “other people,” and time is running out. You have to remember that, on some level, the entire Southern Reach has become a long con, and if you forget that you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

  “Maybe you need time off, some rest,” Grace tells you. “Maybe you need to get some perspective.”

  “You can’t have my job.”

  “I do not want your fucking job.” She’s simmering, she’s about to boil over, and some part of you wants to see that, wants to know what Grace is like when she’s totally lost it. But if you push her to that, she’ll have lost you, too.

  Later you go up to the rooftop with a bottle of bourbon, and Grace is already there, in one of the deck chairs. The Southern Reach building is nothing but a big, ponderous ship, and you don’t know where the helm has gotten to, can’t even lash yourself to the wheel.

  “I don’t mean anything I’m saying most of the time,” you tell her. “Just remember I don’t mean anything I say.”

  A dismissive sound, but also arms unfolding, grim frown loosening up. “This place is a fucking nuthouse.” Grace rarely swears anywhere but on the roof.

  “A nut job.” Paraphrasing Cheney’s latest puzzled, hurt soliloquy about lack of good data: “Even a falling acorn tells us something about where it fell from, Newton would tell us, wouldn’t you say. There’d be a trajectory, for heck’s sake, and then you’d backtrack, even if theoretical, find some point on the tree that acorn came from, or near enough.” You can’t say you’ve ever understood more than a third of his ellipticals.

  “A White Tits nut job,” Grace says, referring to the frozen white tents of the Southern Reach border command and control.

  “Our White Tits nut job,” you say sternly, wagging a finger. “But at least not nut jobs like the water-feature crew.”

  After Cheney’s outburst, you went over yet another pointless, nonproductive report from the “water-feature crew,” the agency studying radio waves for signals from extraterrestrial life. Central has suggested more than once that you “team up with” them. They listen for messages from the stars—across a sliver of two microwave regions unencumbered by radio waves from natural sources. These frequencies they call the water hole because they correspond to hydrogen and hydroxyl wavelengths. A fool’s chance, to assume that other intelligent species would automatically gravitate to the “watering hole” as they called it.

  “While what they were looking for snuck in the back door—”

  “Set up the back door and walked through it—”

  “You’re looking up and meanwhile something walks by and steals your wallet,” Grace says, cackling.

  “Water feature built for nothing; they prefer the servants’ entrance, thank you very much,” you say grandly, passing the bourbon. “You don’t just turn on the sprinklers and pump up the Slip ‘N Slide.”

  You truly don’t know what you’re saying anymore, but Grace bursts into laughter, and then things are all right again with Grace, for a while, and you can go back to Henry and Suzanne, the talking mannequins, the deathly dull or just deathly twins.

  But at some point that same week, Grace finds you throwing file folders against the far wall, and you’ve no excuse for it except a shrug. Bad day at the doctor’s. Bad day prepping for the expedition. Bad day doing research. Just a bad day in a succession of bad days.

  So you do something about it.

  You fly out to Lowry’s headquarters about one month before the twelfth expedition. Even though it’s your idea, you’re unhappy you have to travel, had hoped to lure Lowry to the Southern Reach one last time. Everything around you—your office, the conversation in the corridors, the view from Beyond Reach—has acquired a kind of compelling sheen to it, a clarity that comes from knowing you will soon be gone.

  Lowry’s in the final stages of his pre-expedition performance, has been exporting the less invasive of his techniques to Central. He enjoys impersonating an instructor for the benefit of expedition members, according to Severance. The biologist, she reassures you, has suffered “minimal meddling.” The only thing you want ratcheted up in the biologist is her sense of alienation from other people. All you want is that she become as attuned inward to Area X as possible. You’re not even sure she really needs your push in that regard, from all reports. No one in the history of the program has so willingly given up the use of her name.

  Light hypnotic suggestion, conditioning that’s more about Area X survival than any of Lowry’s dubious “value adds,” his claims to have found a way around the need, on some level, for the subject to want to perform the suggested action—“a kind of trickery and substitution.” The stages you’ve seen described are identification, indoctrination, reinforcement, and deployment, but Grace has seen other documents that borrow the semiotics of the supernatural: “manifestation, infestation, oppression, and possession.”

  Most of Lowry’s attention has accreted around the linguist, a volunteer with radicalized ideas about the value of free will. You wonder if Lowry prefers it when there’s more or less resistance. So you absorb the brunt of his briefing, his report on progress, his teasing taunt about whether you’ve reconsidered his offer of hypnosis, of conditioning, with the hint behind it that you couldn’t stop him if you tried.

  Honestly, you don’t give a shit about his briefing.

  At some point, you steer Lowry toward the idea of a walk—down by the fake lighthouse. It’s early summer, the weather still balmy, and there’s no reason to sit there in Lowry’s command-and-control lounge. You cajole him into it by appealing to his pride, asking for the full tour, taking just one thin file folder you’ve brought with you.

  So he gives you the not-so-grand tour, through this miniaturized world of ever-decreasing wonder. There’s the strange kitschy quality of piped-in music through speakers hidden around the grounds. A distant but cheery tune—not pop, not jazz, not classical, but something all the more menacing for being jaunty.

  At the top of the quaint little lighthouse—what would Saul think of it?—he points out that the daymark is accurate, as well as “the fucking glass shards somebody added later.” When he pulls the trapdoor open at the top, what’s revealed in the room below are piles and piles of empty journals and loose, blank pages, as if he’s bought a stationery store as a side business. The lens isn’t functional, either, but as if by way of apology, you get a history lesson: “Back in the day—way back in the day—they used to just shove a big fucking fatty bird onto a stake and light it on fire for a beacon.”

  That “goddamn hole in the ground,” as Lowry puts it, is the least accurate part—an old gunnery position with the gun unit ripped out, leaving the granite-lined dark circle that leads down a ladder to a tunnel that then doubles back to the hill behind you that houses most of Lowry’s installations. You climb down only a little ways, enough to see, framed on the dank walls, Lowry’s art gallery: the blurry, out-of-focus photographs, blown up, brought back by various expeditions. A kind of meta version of the tunnel brought to the faux tunnel, displaying with confidence something unknowable. Thinking of Saul on the steps of the real tunnel, turning toward you, and feeling such an acute contempt for Lowry that you have to remain there, looking down, for long moments, afraid it will show on your face.

  After you’ve made the right noises about how impressive it all is, you suggest continuing along the shore, “fresh air and nature,” and Lowry acquiesces, defeated by your tactic of asking a question about each new thing ahead because he just cannot shut up about his own cleverness. You take a side path that leads north along the water. There are geese nesting on a nearby rocky point that give you both the stink eye, an otter in the sea in the middle distance, shadowing you.

  Eve
ntually, you turn the conversation to the S&SB. You pull out a piece of paper—the line item linked to “Jack Severance.” You point it out to him even though it’s highlighted in hot pink. You present it as this funny thing, this thing Lowry must have known about, too. Given his secret debriefing of your childhood experiences when you first joined the Southern Reach.

  “Is that the reason you and Jackie are working together?” you ask. “That the S&SB had a link to Central—through Jack?”

  Lowry considers that question, a kind of smirk on his craggy face. A smirk, and a look down at the ground and back up at you.

  “Is that all we’re out here for? For that? Jesus, I might’ve given you that in a fucking phone call.”

  “Not much, I guess,” you say. Sheepish smile, offered up to a raging wolf of a narcissist. “But I’d like to know.” Before you cross the border.

  A hesitation, a sideways glance that’s appraising you hard for some hidden motivation or some next move that maybe he can’t see.

  Prodding: “A side project? The S&SB a side project of Central, or …?”

  “Sure, why not,” Lowry says, relaxing. “The usual kind of dependent clause that could be excised at any time, no harm done.”

  But sometimes the ancillary infected the primary. Sometimes the host and the parasite got confused about their roles, as the biologist might have put it.

  “It’s how you got the photograph of me at the lighthouse.” Not a question.

  “Very good!” he says, genuinely delighted. “Too fucking true! I was on a mission to find evidence to make sure you stayed true … and then I wondered how come that was in Central’s files in the first place, and not over at the Southern Reach. Wondered where it originated—and then I found that very same line item.” Except Lowry had a higher security clearance, could access information you and Grace couldn’t get your hands on.