Plot
Dead Town
Twenty years before Area X, a group of biologists succumb to an unexpected fate.
Spoilers
Old Jim, an operative of Central, reviews the files describing the events that happened in Dead Town two decades before Area X. The biologists have been sent by the government without a clear mission or explanation offered to the locals.
As their first action, the biologists released four alligators taken from 100 miles away into the waters of the Forgotten Coast. The largest was called the Tyrant. During the alligator release procedure, the biologists behaved erratically.
A man, referred to as the Rogue in the notes, began to frequent the Village Bar. Central identified him as "one who knows [them] but is not [them]." A possible threat.
The biologists got a new generator after establishing themselves in an area called "Dead Town."
A woman that Old Jim calls "the Mudder" went out collecting samples. Along the banks, she saw a white rabbit with a camera around its neck eating fiddler crabs. Frightened, she tried to run away and twisted her ankle. Others are suspicious of her claims.
Other anomalies occur. One night, the Rogue may have said something to the Mudder in the Village Bar.
Hundreds of white rabbits appeared in Dead Town. They all ate fiddler crabs, and they all bore cameras around their necks. There were so many rabbits that it was hard for the biologists to continue their work. After the rabbits arrived, the Rogue no longer appeared at the bar.
The biologists attempted to get rid of the rabbits.
Content warning: animal death
The biologists used flamethrowers to kill every rabbit they could, all of them. Or, at least they tried. The next morning, they awoke to see a new wave of rabbits feasting on the charred remains of their fallen comrades.
As the biologists tried to remove more rabbits, a figure burst out across the meadow and ran toward them. Old Jim believes the figure to be the Rogue. The Rogue shouted and screamed and sang words, words, words at them. He came toward them with a wave of rain and light and words.
Their heads were filled with wild things and evil things. Their heads were filled with nails and pus. Their heads were filled. They would never remember the words the Rogue used. They said the words sounded "familiar." They had heard the words before, but not in that combination. They had heard the words but not in the same context or intonation or the same kind of light or darkness or they could not recall what was different, why it was different, and yet the same, no they could not, please stop asking the question. "Please stop asking. Please stop asking," Please. Stop.
The Rogue passed through them, and the remaining rabbits and cameras disappeared. The Tyrant slithered its way behind him through the fallen bodies of the biologists. After the Rogue vanished, most of the biologists returned back to their yurts to find the generator destroyed. Missing are the Medic, the Mudder, Team Leader 1, and Team Leader 2. The remaining biologists, over the following days, succumbed to frantic and confused acts of mutilation and violence, and they all died.
The False Daughter
Old Jim investigates the Forgotten Coast with the help of his "daughter," eighteen months before Area X.
Spoilers
One Saturday, Old Jim, a seasoned spy with an eidetic memory, finds a note from his daughter Cass telling him, "Don't follow me. Don't try to find me. Don't contact me. Sincerely, Cass." Destroyed by grief, he spends the next few months drunkenly trying to find her. All the while, he writes her letters he can never send. Eventually, Jackie Severance, daughter of Jack Severance, finds Old Jim and tells him to come back to Central for a new mission.
Old Jim undergoes intense psychological conditioning from Central, led by Jack Severance, in preparation for a field mission on the Forgotten Coast. He also picks up playing the piano again.
He didn't see his handler, his boss, his friend, Jack Severance, for ages, while his body was unspooled into some other form that made his head full of nails and then full of cotton candy and then, roughly, back on his shoulders more or less the right way.
After arriving in the Forgotten Coast, Jackie briefs Old Jim about his new life in the field: he's a part-time owner and bartender of the Village Bar. She forbids him from going to Failure Island, where the Séance and Science Brigade (S&SB), manipulated by Central, conducts their business in operation "Serum Bliss." She also promises him a "present."
The "present" arrives: Cass. His daughter. Except, she's not his daughter. She's another spy from Central who looks nearly exactly like his daughter.
The leather jacket over a T-shirt for a punk rock band. The gold earrings in a spiral pattern. The faded blue jeans, the black boots. She smelled of the same breath mints Cass had used to cover clove cigarettes. In all the details of the false daughter in front of him, Old Jim realized that Central, on some level, knew his true daughter better than he had. That the fake made the real sharper, more in focus. But wasn't that a lie, too, because weren't his memories the important parts?
After the two get off to a rocky start, Old Jim and Cass catch up on the stories of what happens to people on the Forgotten Coast, including the antics of the members of the S&SB, which Cass is directly managing under Jackie's guidance. There's Helen, a Central operative and psychic, who cuts off her own foot after stepping on a house centipede because she thought her foot was calling out to her: "help me help me help me." The man who Old Jim replaced imploded in a submarine doing experiments in distance messaging (reading the thoughts of others from far away). Old Jim identifies the Medic from Dead Town as part of the current S&SB lineup and requests an interview. Together, they note that Henry Kage, a civilian psychic in the S&SB, needs special attention. Henry has a history of violence, and he's sent Cass a warning indicating that he suspects both of them.
Henry is a lover of liminal spaces. He believes he can speak to spirits inside of lighthouse lenses, get them to refract. Jack appointed him, but Henry has no Central training.
Man Boy Slim doesn't buy Old Jim's story, but Old Jim turns it around on him and begins interrogating him about Drunk Boat's death. Man Boy Slim reveals that he captured the rabbit the Mudder had seen and taken the camera. They watched the footage several times, but it changed. The Mudder saw something she didn't like. Man Boy Slim saw an army fighting and a green light between two mountains. They showed the footage to Drunk Boat, who saw his own death. When they tried to destroy the camera with bleach, it backfired, reacting somehow with the liquid, and Drunk Boat died and Man Boy Slim was injured. After Old Jim gets all the facts, he tells Man Boy Slim to have the Mudder call him.
The Medic answers Old Jim's questions and gives him some more information about the Dead Town incident. The Medic killed the "missing" biologist because he found out that the generator was issuing subliminal messages. There had been 25 biologists, not 24, but the Tyrant had eaten one of them when they tried a mind control technique on the biologists during the release. He didn't know that the Mudder had escaped. Old Jim is disquieted by the Medic's unwavering and unquestioning dedication to Central's orders.
Old Jim and Cass go to see what Jack's given them after Old Jim asked for more information about Dead Town. No linguistic analyses of the journals that Jack alluded to. No contact with Team Leaders 1 or 2. Just a smelly old town-silo in a parking lot full of potholes like tidepools. They went back to the truck to get handkerchiefs to cover their mouths and noses to deal with the smell. While they're gone, a group of local men came out with rifles and shot at the silo, which Old Jim believes was meant to scare them rather than kill them. But after the men leave, they enter the silo and come face-to-face with decades-old biological specimens acquired in the operation at Dead Town. Beetles, butterflies, and bats. Leaking preservation fluids. Barrels and jars. Fiddler crabs misidentified, and a shiny red thing: the bobber of an alligator tracker.
The Mudder calls Old Jim and tries to answer his questions. One night, at the bar, the Rogue told her: "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. It should be different already. But it isn't, so I'm doing my best." She didn't see him the night of the wave, where the biologists crumbled at the sight and sound of him, but she saw him later with binoculars with Man Boy Slim. They saw the Rogue "shucking cameras like oysters." Spitting on them, shucking them, dropping some of their material in a bucket until smoke billowed like dry ice. The other material was tossed into the Tyrant's waiting mouth, like feeding a pet.
After talking with the Mudder, Old Jim goes to read her journal that he took from Central's archives. Except, the pages were all slashed with an X-Acto knife. Then, he got a hit on the old alligator tracker. First in Dead Town. Then in a marsh in the middle of nowhere. And then the little red dot moving rapidly toward his location. He throws the tracker out into the yard.
Monkey's Elbow, the local band, plays at the Village Bar. The band has a quirk where, for one night, twice a year, they'll get a new singer who they call "Commander Thistle." The performance and busy night wears on Old Jim so he steps outside, but is followed by Henry and his half-sister Suzanne. Henry wants money to pay for his "critical" experiments, and he believes Old Jim to be the "Night Commander" who might be in charge enough to get him those funds. Before the confrontation escalates, strangers pour out of the bar, and Henry and Suzanne leave.
Once alone, Old Jim stays outside for a minute longer to collect himself, but he sees a figure.
Whispering at Old Jim, whispering and whispering like a
floating flame over the mud flats. Whispering and
whispering, intent on the whispering, like some psychic,
like some phantom, like something ancient and yet New.
The Rogue.
...
... the
Rogue's words were slamming into him now, slamming into him
and drawing him close, reeling him in and drawing him out,
until he was as thin as taut twine and nothing at all was
left of him. Nothing at all, like it was always meant to be.
Except, Old Jim's mouth was opening wide and
wider still to vomit words, to erupt words toward the Rogue.
Words in patterns he had never learned, words meant to harm,
and he heard the Rogue shriek as if he'd been dealt a
physical blow.
After the confrontation with the Rogue, Old Jim passes out. Cass takes him into her apartment. It takes him three days to recover. In that time, Cass shot at the person who attacked him, possibly hitting him in the chest; the silo with the specimens was torched; and the S&SB found an alligator harness using distance messaging. Cass found one surviving thing in the silo: a rabbit camera. She sent it to Central without looking at it further. Old Jim suspects that it had been left by Man Boy Slim, who had acted funny the night of the confrontation.
Old Jim and Cass go to Dead Town. They find evidence of someone and an alligator in one of the buildings. Old Jim sees the lyrics to Winter Journey, the song he liked to play on the piano, written on the wall, but they were mutated. Wrong. He also sees his real name written there.
He disappears into the meadow where the rabbits and then the biologists died. Scared, frenzied, he lies in the mud until Cass finds him. He recovers enough to go home.
Commander Thistle, under Jack's orders, kidnaps Old Jim, intending to stuff him into a barrel and kill him. Other occupants of barrels are members of Central factions who Jack disliked. Old Jim, strangely unaffected by Central's hypnotic suggestions after his encounter with the Rogue, kills him.
"But quick! The water slows, / its surface turns to
glass."
Commander Thistle lay awkward on his side,
dead, the blood of the ruptures from the knife bubbling up
pure, unhindered.
"The stars start to glow / and
the sun shines its last."
Jackie goes to Old Jim's house and admits that she's being called in by Central to answer questions about what's been going on. The S&SB have psychics in comas, they lit their own submersibles on fire, and there was another fire that destroyed even more. She also sent Cass away.
While cleaning up the crime scene with Commander Thistle, Old Jim discovered evidence that Jack has far more sinister and organized plans for Serum Bliss and the S&SB, including trafficking money and killing more people he doesn't like. Later that day, he learns that Cass called the Village Bar and asked for him to "feed her pet frogs for her."
In Cass's apartment, he found a note that read "92544". It lead to her secret apartment, Unit 4, apartment 4529. There, he finds evidence she left behind for him: proof that the Winter Journey lyrics he loved so much were codified hypnotic programs created by Central, that even having him review the old tapes about Dead Town had been part of his conditioning; that the potholes by the silo had been where Central had dumped the evidence of Dead Town and the biologists; and that there was a secret door in the building they'd searched that may lead to the Rogue's lair.
Before he can set out to the lair, Old Jim is attacked by Henry, upset about all the damage done to the S&SB that's preventing him from his work. Old Jim lies that there's money buried at the old silo, but he didn't know that the Medic was with him, too.
The medic, dressed the same as at the lighthouse, smelling of boot polish, whispered in Old Jim's ear as he came close, "You pushed me into the sea, sir. Jack said to tell you, 'You should've gotten in the barrel.' Like a good boy. Sir."
Old Jim tells them that the money is in the potholes by the silo. Henry tries to dig into one, and hits something hard, but as he reaches in he realizes it's only a cement block. However, Henry becomes stuck.
The way his long sleeve runneled downward like black wax
into the hole.
How the sides of him rippled as
they liquefied and fell splashing and thick in streams and
pools of nothing like flesh, to feed the holes, which
throbbed and hummed green now, come alive in a way that made
them seem like too-regular tidal pools on a sheet of rock
next to the sea.
Old Jim pushes the Medic into Henry and they both dissolve, messily, until there is nothing left.
He goes to Dead Town and finds the Rogue's secret room. Names and notes litter the walls about differences between what had been and what was. In the corner of the room, out of a sudden appearance of deep water, the Tyrant emerges, grasps Old Jim's body in her jaws, and takes him away.
The Tyrant takes him to the Rogue's dead-alive body and watches him into oblivion. She exhales golden dust. Old Jim sees visions of the future, where the Rogue was from. Then, the Tyrant leads Old Jim back to where he had been, singing him songs, leaving him with no candle or flame, only vessel. She fills him with secret instructions he is happy to fulfill.
He finds the road back to the Village, and he sees Henry, alive, with Suzanne.
He plays the piano in the Village Bar.
All the ways he was being released into the world and the
world released into him. The simple relief of that even as
his fingers came apart at the piano, the wound in the world
that kept attracting the candle, the flame, the vessel. The
way he could be in all three places at once now--the present
that had annihilated him, the past that had never left him,
the future that held him still and trembling like a bird
caught in a biologist's net.
... or that's how
it seemed to him, as if he had risen above the bar, the
marsh, and was leaving that behind because there was no
world now. And there had never really been, and Old Jim was
just someone Central had pulled apart and remade.
And yet, in some way, some human way, he had
still been himself, a self, underneath it all. Underneath it
all, he had survived, somehow.
The First and the Last
One year after the Border comes down, the first expedition goes inside Active Area X.
Lowry is leaving to cross the border into Area X. Jack
Severance has appointed him as "an extra set of
hypervigilant eyes 'from [Jack's] perspective'." He's
leaving behind Whitby, who promises to be there in spirit.
His mission, along with 23 other people, is to find the "off
switch" for the "foreign entity." Among their ranks are
anthropologists, military people, psychologists, surveyors,
biologists, medics, and psychics. He's sleeping with Sky,
the leader of their mission. He's jealous of Winters for
being second in command. Hargraves is annoyingly competent,
and she humors him too much. His secret mission, meant only
for him, is to find evidence of Old Jim. Jack suspects Old
Jim might be alive in Area X, and he tells Lowry to look in
particular for a "secret room in Dead Town."
Lowry doesn't like the suit they have to wear to cross the
border.
It felt to Lowry—and apparently only to him—like wearing
the skin of another human being and then putting over that
a fucking constricting fucking tight turtleneck sweater
made of rubber... that covered his entire body. And then,
over that, a fucking deep-sea diver's suit—of the kind
popular in old silent films, where the air line to the
surface or air fuck pipe or air fuck tube air something
gets tangled or cut and years later at the bottom of the
fucking sea "they" find your jellified, algaed,
nutrient-rich corpse, still constrained, still being
destroyed by the goddamn suit.
They cross the Border. Rodgers never makes it to the other
side. Erlickson's body fuses with the suit, the helmet tight
against his face and leaving him unable to breathe. Lowry
shouts that it's the suits! and sheds his before the rest do
the same. 22 living members of the expedition in their trail
clothes now.
The expedition members begin to see things. To some, the
lighthouse is a sea anemone. To Lowry, it's an erection,
which he admits out loud to other others. Sky tells him that
he's behaving "unhinged or dissociative... strange."
Some mission members, led by Hargraves, go on a side-mission
to secure the Village. Binder is eaten by an alligator.
Lowry wants to review the files on Old Jim. He'd read them
already: about the old man with "mad skills" who Central
could control with specific words. His wife had been with
him on a mission and died in a Humvee accident. He lost most
of his memory, and Central left him for admin work until he
got assigned a special mission off the books. Lowry is
unable to find a trace of the "real" daughter Cass ever
existing.
Had they implanted a daughter in Old Jim's head like an
angel on the head of a pin embedded in his fucking brain—a
brain already full of Central's rusty nails? All those
nasty psychewitches down in Central's holding ponds, their
basements, their rough-hewn caves.
But Old Jim had cost Jack some money, and he needs it back.
That night, after everyone hangs out and drinks a little,
Hinojosa disappears.
The next morning, Sky tries to contact the village advance
team and hears disturbing audio from the walkie-talkies.
Lowry suspects that "they" (Jack's foreign entities) are
surveilling them and using psyops on them after hearing a
snippet from yesterday in the walkie-talkies, but Sky
informs him that the audio is real-time, not recorded.
They turn off all the walkie-talkies, but audio still seeps
out of them. They place all the walkie-talkies in a box, and
the audio congeals into one voice. They throw the box into
the estuary, but the box is there the next morning. So they
shoot it up with their automatic weapons.
They lose time. They're always at the campfire. A living
wall surrounds them, bears down on them. Singer disappears
into it. Lowry can't take it anymore.
He turned and lunged into the backdrop, jumped right into
that hell of skin and flesh screaming his own name over
and over. He pulled it to him with his arms, bit down hard
on that rubbery fucking manta ray, that fucking monster
that had been a thing in a jar in his head grown as wide
and large as the world.
The wall backs away, disappears. They dance and get drunk.
Ferreira admits that he brought a bomb to blow up the
lighthouse, but the next morning he's dead of a gunshot to
the head. No one heard a gunshot. They can't find the bomb.
Sky shows Lowry the playback of his tussle with Area X, and
it plays differently than he remembers.
... Lowry was jumping into that alien flesh, was kissing
it, was dry humping it, while the others looked on in
horror, but Lowry knew that was fucking false. That the
vid was wrong. That this was all wrong, and he'd been
biting it, stabbing it. That he'd not been enveloped in
it, stuck in, hadn't rubbed his head up against that soft,
velvety expanse and nuzzled it and cooed like a fucking
lamb or something. He'd been aggro incarnate. He'd been
telling Area X to fuck off.
They move out in pursuit of the lighthouse the next morning.
Past a line of dead trucks, they encounter "a line of
slurping goo people." Lowry shouts at the forms and shoots
at them with all he's got. The shapes reform into the
visages of their dead expedition members with loopy joints
and bulging eyes.
Eels and flatworms came into his thoughts
un-fucking-bidden as the doppelgängers began to seethe
toward them, to seethe and then retreat, and once again
seethe, each time in this sidewinder method coming closer
across the marshes, and no fucking evidence at all of feet
or stumbling or anything other than this gliding
freak-circus act, atrocity.
The doubles smile, scream, turn into ribbons as bullets
puncture and pierce them, and reform. Lowry's weapon turns
to flesh and animal, and he orders them all to drop their
weapons. Sky and Winters do, but it's too late for most of
the others: their flesh melds with their gun-creatures, and
they are toppled, screaming, into the reeds.
Lowry, Sky, and Winters, the last survivors, encounter a
beach made of bones. Out in the water is a destroyer ship
cut in half from the Border coming down. Sky says she sees
people out there, and they find a rowboat. Sky and Winters
sail away, leaving Lowry alone to wait on the beach. By dusk
the next day, the rowboat returns, empty.
Lowry investigates "Cass's" apartment and finds nothing. He
investigates Old Jim's house and finds nothing. He
investigates where Commander Thistle took Old Jim and finds
dead bodies in barrels. He goes to Dead Town and finds the
secret room with all the notes and names that Old Jim saw,
including his own. He also finds a jacket? Some raincoat
tatters? Molted skin... and a piece of paper that says "DO
NOT EAT."
Lowry eats Whitby's molt.
He leaves Dead Town, sure that Jack's mission is doomed to
failure. Winters returns and tells Lowry that he's got
scales turning into eyes all over his body. Lowry pushes
Winters off of a cliff, and the body breaks too easily.
As if Whitby's face had disagreed with him, and as he
breathed now, a sparkle of golden dust pressed out of him
and forayed out from the pores, so that he was expressing
the molt, releasing it as it released him, so that he
became a kind of vessel, but also a candle and a flame.
He goes to the lighthouse and sees it stuffed with hundreds
of copies of Henry's dead body. In the Village Bar, he finds
Old Jim's letters to Cass.
Hargraves is there. She survived the side-mission. She says
she does well "in here." She pulls a gun on Lowry and says
she knows where Old Jim is. She's figured him out, because
she's his false daughter, and even though she wasn't there
for him when the Border came down, she knew what she could
do to make up for it. In his pockets was a note that said
"Kill Lowry." So she shoots him.
Lowry escapes, and Hargraves does not follow. Lowry finds
Landry, and they have a lovely conversation, until "Landry"
tries to attack Lowry. He escapes that, too, and finds his
way to the corridor to leave. His suit is waiting for him.
"Anyone else pass through?"Spoilers
The wall of Area X felt
tremulous, vulnerable, surprisingly delicate. It made him
want to protect it, not destroy it. But he'd not have a
thing in a jar best him, not now. So he bit down hard and
Area X tasted like sour juice, like fresh hail sucked on
before it became water, with some acid rain in there and
grace notes of fucking merlot for all he could guess. Just
gnawing and he was going to fucking eat Area X before it
ate him.
"I told
you—Hargraves. She made it through."
"Got any
of the good drugs left?"
"Yeah, in my suit."
"But
you're all suit."
"Ain't that right."
...
"I
just need to sit for a bit, suit," Lowry said, "and then
we'll cross over."
... And the suit nodded at
him, and they watched the sun set over that beautiful
fucking place together, propped up against a log, and it
was all right and fucking good, even.
For a
time.
