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The first, clearly a major concern of the book, is the proper relationship of humans to nature.
the fact that so many animals flee at the sight of us has allowed us to indulge in a sense of our own primacy. We are used to being seen. We are used to seeing ourselves as powerful. We are used to feeling that we are above rather than inside the natural world. In Area X, none of this will work. This is a landscape that refuses to indulge in anyone’s pretensions.
A second essential issue in the book lies in its pervasive uncertainty.
The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
Starting at due north, a rectangular opening set into the surface of the block revealed stairs spiraling down into darkness. The entrance was obscured by the webs of banana spiders and debris from storms, but a cool draft came from below.
We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.
I was continuing to watch through the binoculars, and as the boar came closer, its face became stranger and stranger. Its features were somehow contorted, as if the beast was dealing with an extreme of inner torment. Nothing about its muzzle or broad, long face looked at all extraordinary, and yet I had the startling impression of some presence in the way its gaze seemed turned inward and its head willfully pulled to the left as if there were an invisible bridle. A kind of electricity sparked in its eyes that I could not credit as real.
We knew that members of the second expedition to Area X had committed suicide by gunshot and members of the third had shot each other.
Oh!
“I hope it’s only about six feet deep so we can continue mapping,” the surveyor said, trying to be lighthearted, but then she, and we, all recognized the term “six feet under” ghosting through her syntax and a silence settled over us.
“I want you to know that I cannot stop thinking of it as a tower,” I confessed. “I can’t see it as a tunnel.”
The psychologist might recite the measurements of the “top” of the tower, but those numbers meant nothing, had no wider context. Without context, clinging to those numbers was a form of madness.
Then, as I stared, the “vines” resolved further, and I saw that they were words, in cursive, the letters raised about six inches off the wall.
“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that…”
It was a feeling I often had when out in the wilderness: that things were not quite what they seemed, and I had to fight against the sensation because it could overwhelm my scientific objectivity.
Then she abruptly stood and said three words: “Consolidation of authority.” Immediately the surveyor and the anthropologist beside me went slack, their eyes unfocused. I was shocked, but I mimicked them, hoping that the psychologist had not noticed the lag.
Wtf
What did she mean by saying that we would continue to think of the tower as made of coquina and stone?
Yeah fr
“There’s no reward in the risk of all of us going down,” the psychologist said, and from the inflection I recognized a hypnotic command.
The tower breathed, and the walls when I went to touch them carried the echo of a heartbeat … and they were not made of stone but of living tissue.
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that …
Things only I could see: That the walls minutely rose and fell with the tower’s breathing. That the colors of the words shifted in a rippling effect, like the strobing of a squid. That, with a variation of about three inches above the current words and three inches below, there existed a ghosting of prior words, written in the same cursive script.
Why should I rest when wickedness exists in the world … God’s love shines on anyone who understands the limits of endurance, and allows forgiveness … Chosen for the service of a higher power.
Did they come from longer accounts of some sort, possibly from members of prior expeditions? If so, for what purpose? And over how many years?
in the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth …
“Something below us is writing this script. Something below us may still be in the process of writing this script.”
“You’re right,” I said. “That’s another person, down here not long ago.”
Whatever had happened in Area X, he had not come back. Not really.
It was the body of the anthropologist, slumped against the left-hand wall, her hands in her lap, her head down as if in prayer, something green spilling out from her mouth.
the shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear
The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?
We became so comfortable with that map, with the dimensions of it, and the thought of what it contained that it stopped us from asking why or even what.
“I am walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time…”
We’ve been living in the past this whole time. In some sort of reenactment. And why?”
the spores I had inhaled, which pointed to a truthful seeing.
The strings of sentences on the Tower’s walls could be evidence brought back by the Crawler to be analyzed by the Tower.
Area X, before the ill-defined Event that locked it behind the border thirty years ago and made it subject to so many inexplicable occurrences, had been part of a wilderness that lay adjacent to a military base.
“I felt as if I were both freer than ever before and more constrained,” one member of the expedition said. “I felt as if I could do anything as long as I did not mind being watched.”
I am convinced now that I and the rest of the expedition were given access to these records for the simple reason that, for certain kinds of classified information, it did not matter what we knew or didn’t know. There was only one logical conclusion: Experience told our superiors that few if any of us would be coming back.
I was looking at a pile of papers with hundreds of journals on top of it—just like the ones we had been issued to record our observations of Area X.
I loved the late-night slow burn of being out, my mind turning over some problem, some piece of data, while able to appear sociable but still existing apart.
“Ghost bird, do you love me?” he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his expedition training, even though he was the ghost. “Ghost bird, do you need me?” I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. A ghost bird might be a hawk in one place, a crow in another, depending on the context. The sparrow that shot up into the blue sky one morning might transform mid-flight into an osprey the next. This was the way of things here.
Slowly the history of exploring Area X could be said to be turning into Area X.
There had been a proto–Area X.
“Annihilation!” she shrieked at me, flailing in confusion. “Annihilation! Annihilation!”
“I never saw it. It was never there. Or I saw it too many times. It was inside me. Inside you. I was trying to get away. From what’s inside me.”
The word “Annihilation” was followed by “help induce immediate suicide.”
There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.
But regardless, the cypress trees formed a kind of cathedral over her as she went deeper and deeper.
if members of the eleventh expedition had been able to return without our noticing, couldn’t other things have already gotten through?
Feed Area X but do not antagonize it, and perhaps someone will, through luck or mere repetition, hit upon some explanation, some solution, before the world becomes Area X.
he had addressed most of the entries to me.
