Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  When he looked over at Henry, Saul could see even in the dull darkness that the man was still alive, that distant stare as locked and fixed on him as the stars above. That stare coming to Saul from across the centuries, across vast, unconquerable distances. Beatific and yet deadly. A scruffy assassin. A fallen angel ravaged by time.

  Saul didn’t want that gaze upon him, walked a short distance away from Henry, down the beach, closer to the water. Charlie was somewhere out there in the sea, night fishing. He wanted Charlie close now but also wanted him thrust far away, cast out, so that whatever had possessed him might not possess Charlie.

  He made his way to the ridge of rocks that Gloria liked to explore, to the tidal pools, and sat there, silent, recovering his sense of self.

  Out in the sea, he thought he could see the rippling backs of leviathans as they breached and then returned to the depths. There came the stench of oil and gasoline and chemicals, the sea coming almost up to his feet now. He could see that the beach was strewn with plastic and garbage and tarred bits of metal, barrels and culverts clotted with seaweed and barnacles. The remains of ships rising, too. Detritus that had never touched this coast but was here now.

  Above, the stars seemed to be moving at a tremendous rate, through a moonless sky, and he could hear the thunderous screams of their passage—streaking faster and faster until the dark was dissolving into ribbons and streamers of light.

  Henry, like an awkward shadow, appeared at his side. But Saul wasn’t frightened of Henry.

  “Am I dead?” he asked Henry.

  Henry said nothing.

  Then, after a moment, “You’re not really Henry anymore, are you?”

  No answer.

  “Who are you?”

  Henry looked over at Saul, looked away again.

  Charlie, in a boat, offshore, night fishing, far away from whatever this was, this sensation pushing out of him like a live thing. Pushing harder and harder and harder.

  “Will I ever see Charlie again?”

  Henry turned away from Saul, began to walk down the beach, broken and stumbling. After a couple of steps, something further broke inside of him and he fell to the sand, crawling for a few feet before he lay still. 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.

  Something was about to crest like a wave. Something was about to come out of him. He felt weak and invincible all at once. Was this how it happened? Was this one of the ways God came for you?

  He did not want to leave the world, and yet he knew now that he was leaving it, or that it was leaving him.

  Saul managed to get into his pickup truck, could feel the sickness overflowing, knew that whatever was about to happen he would be unable to control, was beyond anyone’s ability to control. He did not want it to happen there, on the coast, next to his lighthouse. Didn’t want it to happen at all, but knew the choice was not up to him. There were comets erupting in his head and a vision of a terrible door and what had come out of it. So he drove—down the rutted path, careening wildly at times, trying to escape himself even though that was impossible. Through the sleeping village. Past dirt road after dirt road. Charlie out at sea. Thankfully not here. Head pounding. The shadows begetting shadows, and the words trying to erupt from his mouth now, urgent to come out of his mouth, a code he couldn’t decipher. Feeling as if something had its attention upon him. Unable to escape the sensation of interference and transmittal, a communication pressing in on the edges of his brain.

  Until he couldn’t drive anymore, there in the most remote part of the forgotten coast—the parts of the pine forest no one claimed or wanted or lived in. Stopped, stumbled out, the shapes of the dark trees, the sound of owls, innumerable rustlings, a fox pausing to stare at him, unafraid, the stars above still swirling and streaking.

  Stumbling in the dark, scraping up against palmettos and tough scrub, pushing past the uprising of this undergrowth, a foot into black water and out again. The sharp scent of fox piss, the suggestion of an animal or animals watching him. Trying now to hold his balance. Trying to hold on to his wits. But a universe was opening up in his head, filled with images he didn’t, couldn’t understand.

  A flowering plant that could never die.

  A rain of white rabbits, cut off in mid-leap.

  A woman reaching down to touch a starfish in a tidal pool.

  Green dust from a corpse blowing away in the wind.

  Henry, standing atop the lighthouse, jerking and twitching, receiving a signal from very, very far away.

  A man stumbling through the forgotten coast in army fatigues, all of his comrades dead.

  And a light that found him from above, pinning him there, some vital transaction complete.

  The feel of wet dead leaves. The smell of a bonfire burning. The sound of a dog, distant, barking. The taste of dirt. And overhead, the interlocking branches of the pines.

  There were strange ruined cities rising from his head, and with them a sliver that promised salvation. And God said it was good. And God said, “Don’t fight it.” Except that all he wanted to do was fight it. Holding on to Charlie, to Gloria, even to his father. His father, preaching, that inner glow, as of being taken up by something greater than himself, which language could not express.

  Finally, in that wilderness, Saul could go no farther, he was done, and he knew it, and he wept as he fell, as he felt the thing within anchor him to the ground, as alien as any sensation he’d ever felt and yet as familiar as if it had happened a hundred times before. It was just a tiny thing. A splinter. And yet it was as large as entire worlds, and he was never going to understand it, even as it took him over. His last thoughts before the thoughts that were not his, that were never going to be his: Perhaps there is no shame in this, perhaps I can bear this, fight this. To give in but not give up. And projected back out behind him, toward the sea, Saul unable to say the name, just three simple words that seemed so inadequate, and yet they were all he had left to use.

  Some time later, he woke up. That winter morning, the wind was cold against the collar of his coat as he trudged down the trail toward the lighthouse. There had been a storm the night before, and down and to his left, the ocean lay gray and roiling against the dull blue of the sky, seen through the rustle and sway of the sea oats. Driftwood and bottles and faded white buoys and a dead hammerhead shark had washed up in the aftermath, tangled among snarls of seaweed, but no real damage either here or in the village.

  At his feet lay bramble and the thick gray of thistles that would bloom purple in the spring and summer. To his right, the ponds were dark with the muttering complaints of grebes and buffleheads. Blackbirds plunged the thin branches of trees down, exploded upward in panic at his passage, settled back into garrulous communities. The brisk, fresh salt smell to the air had an edge of flame: a burning smell from some nearby house or still-smoldering bonfire.

  0028: Ghost Bird

  The Crawler was behind them. The words were behind them. It was just a submerged tunnel on a warm day. It was just a forest. It was just a place they were walking out of.

  Ghost Bird and Grace did not talk much as they walked. There wasn’t much to say, such a world lay between them now. She knew that Grace did not consider her quite human, yet something about her must reassure the woman enough to keep traveling with her, to trust her when she said that something had changed beyond the climate, that they should head for the border and see what that something was. The scent of pine pollen clung to the air, rich and golden and ripe. The wrens and yellow warblers chased each other through the bushes and trees.

  They encountered no one and the animals while not tame seemed somehow unwary. Not wary of them, anyway. Ghost Bird thought of Control, back there, in the tunnel. What had he found down below? Had he found the true Area X, or had his death been the catalyst for the change she had felt, that manifested all around them? Even now she could not see Control clearly, knew only that his absence was a loss, a sadn
ess, to her. He had been there almost her entire life—the real, lived-in life she had now, not the one she had inherited. That still meant something.

  At the moment he had gone through the door so far below, she had seen him and had felt the Crawler’s seekers fall away, the entire apparatus receding into the darkness after him. There had come a shuddering miniature earthquake, as the sides of the tunnel convulsed once, twice, and then were again still. Known that although nothing could be reversed, the director had been right: It could be changed, it could change, and that Control had added or subtracted something from an equation that was too complex for anyone to see the whole of. Perhaps the director had been right about the biologist, just not in the way she’d thought. The words from the wall still blazed across her thoughts, wrapped themselves around her like a shield.

  Ghost Bird had walked up into the light to find Grace staring at her with fear, with suspicion, and she had smiled at Grace, had told her not to be afraid. Not to be afraid. Why be afraid of what you could not prevent? Did not want to prevent. Were they not evidence of survival? Were they not evidence of some kind? Both of them. There was nothing to warn anyone about. The world went on, even as it fell apart, changed irrevocably, became something strange and different.

  They walked. They camped for the night. They walked again at first light, the world ablaze with sunrise and the awakening of the landscape around them. There were no soldiers, no suggestion of a ribbon stitching through the sky. The winter weather had lifted and it was hot, it was summer now in Area X.

  The present moments elongated, once past still ponds and into the final miles. She lived in the present by dint of blistered feet and chafed ankles and biting flies drawn to the sweat on her ears or forehead and the parched feeling in her throat despite drinking water from her canteen. The sun had decided to lodge itself behind her eyes and shine out so that the inside of her head felt burned. Every beautiful thing that lay ahead she knew she had seen at least once behind her. Eternity found in the repetition of Grace’s steps, her sometimes halting steps, and the constant way the light gripped the ground and sent its heat back up at her.

  “Do you think the checkpoints are still manned?” Grace asked.

  Ghost Bird did not reply. The question made no sense, but enough humanity remained to her that she didn’t want to argue. The hegemony of what was real had been altered, or broken, forever. She would always know now the biologist’s position, near or far, a beacon somewhere in her mind, a connection never closed.

  In the final miles to the old position of the border, the sun was so bright and hot that she felt a little delirious, even though she knew it was a mirage—she had water and was still hobbling through blisters and petty aches. How could the sun be so oppressive and yet the scene so unbearably beautiful?

  “If we do make it through, what do we tell them?”

  Ghost Bird doubted there would be a “them” to tell. She longed now for Rock Bay, wished to see it through the eyes of Area X, wondered how it might have changed, how it might have remained the same. This was really her only goal: to return to a place that had been like the island was to the biologist.

  They reached where the old border had been, on the lip of the giant sinkhole. The white tents of the Southern Reach had turned dark green with mold and other organisms. The brick of the army outpost was half pulled down and sunken in as if some giant creature had attacked it. There were no soldiers, there were no checkpoints.

  She bent down to tighten the laces on her boots, a velvet ant beside her foot. From what seemed like a great distance, she heard a scrambling huff from the lush vegetation of the sinkhole. For an instant, some odd, broad-shouldered marmot pushed its face through the reeds. Then saw her and hurriedly disappeared with a plop into the creek behind it—while she rose, amused.

  “What is it?” Grace asked from behind her.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Then she was walking again, laughing a bit, and everything was pressed out of her except a yearning for water and a clean shirt. Inexplicably, unaccountably happy, grinning even.

  A day later, they reached the Southern Reach building. The swamp had crept up to the courtyard and seeped across the tiles, pushed up against the concrete steps leading inside. Storks and ibises had built nests on a roof that looked half caved in. The evidence of a fire that had burned itself out inside the building, somewhere near the science department, showed in scorch marks on the outer walls. From afar, they could see no signs of human life. No shadow of the people Grace had known there. Behind them lay the holding pond and the scrawny pine strung with lights, now two feet taller than when Ghost Bird had last seen it.

  By mutual unspoken decision, they halted at the edge of the building. From there, a gash in the side showed them three floors of empty, debris-strewn rooms, and a greater darkness within. They stood for a moment, hidden by the trees, and peered at those remains.

  Grace could not sense the way the building slowly took one breath and then another, the way it sighed. She could not sense the echo at the heart of the Southern Reach that told Ghost Bird that this place had built its own ecology, its own biosphere. To disturb that, to enter, would be a mistake. The time for expeditions was over.

  They did not linger, look for survivors, or do any of the other usual or perhaps foolish things that they could have done.

  But now came the crucible, now came the test.

  “What if there is no world out there? Not as we know it? Or no way out to the world?” Grace saying this, while existing in that moment in a world that was so rich and full.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Ghost Bird said, and took Grace’s hand for a moment, squeezed it.

  Something in Ghost Bird’s expression must have calmed her, for Grace smiled, said, “Yes, we will. We’ll know.” Between them, they might know more than any person still living on Earth.

  It was just an ordinary day. Another ordinary summer day.

  So they walked forward, throwing pebbles as they went, throwing pebbles to find the invisible outline of a border that might not exist anymore.

  They walked for a long time, throwing pebbles at the air.

  000X: The Director

  You sit in the dark at your desk in the Southern Reach in the minutes before leaving for the twelfth expedition, your backpack beside you, the guns tucked into the outer mesh, safeties on, not loaded. You will leave it all a mess. The bookshelves have become overgrown, your notes nothing anyone would recognize as an organized pattern. So many things that make no sense, or only make sense to you. Like a plant and a battered cell phone. Like a photograph on the wall from when you knew Saul Evans.

  Your letter to him is in your pocket. It feels awkward to you. It feels like trying to say something that needed to be said without words, to someone who may no longer be able to read it. But perhaps, too, it is like the script on the walls of the tower: The words aren’t important but what’s channeled through them is. Maybe the important thing is getting it out on the page so it can be there in your mind.

  You agonize for the thousandth time that your course of action is poorly thought out. You have a choice. You can let it all go on as it has before. Or … you can do this thing that in just a short while will take you out of the dark, out of the silence, and on a path from which you cannot come back. Even if you make it back.

  You have already said all the things to Grace that you had to say to make it seem like it would be all right. All the things said to the beloved mark, to reassure her. To keep up morale. And you almost believe she believed it, for your sake. When I get back. When we solve this. When we …

  A pale, curious head peers in, turned at an angle: Whitby, the mouse peeking out from his shirt pocket, all ears and black little eyes and fragile handlike paws.

  You feel suddenly old and helpless and everything seems very far from you—the chair, the door beyond, the hall, and Whitby a canyon yawning wide miles and miles away. You let out a little sob, a little attempt to draw in br
eath. Reeling there in momentary panic in the garbage heap of your notes. And yet, under that, a core that must not yield.

  “Help me up, Whitby,” you tell him, and he does, the man stronger than he looks, holding you up even as you lean into him, looming over his slight frame.

  You sway there, looking down. Whitby has to stay behind, even as it all falls apart. As Whitby falls apart, because no one can withstand that vision for months, for years. But you have to ask it of him. You have no choice. Grace will run the agency. Whitby will be its recording, its witness.

  “You have to write down whatever you see, your observations. It might still be important.”

  You can hear the surf in your ears. You can see the lighthouse. The words on the wall in the tower.

  Whitby says nothing, just stares with his large eyes, but he doesn’t need to. The fact that he stands there, silent, by your side, is enough.

  When you take the first steps toward the door, you feel the weight on your back and the weight of your decision. But you ignore it. You walk into the hallway. It is very late. The fluorescent lights seem dim but a sickly heat comes off them, or from the vents, passing across the top of your head like a whisper. An unrecoverable reality.

  The night will be cool and there might be the scent of honeysuckle in the air, even a half-remembered hint of salt spray, and it will seem to take no time at all, the familiar ride there, under the clear half-moon, and through the dark, submerged shapes of ruined buildings. With the other members of the twelfth expedition.

  At the border, you enter the white tents of the Southern Reach mission control, and the linguist, the surveyor, the biologist, the anthropologist are escorted to their separate rooms for the final decontamination and conditioning process. Before long you will be at the border, will be headed with as much grace as your tall, broad shape can manage toward the luminescence of the enormous door.