Excerpt from Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My main indulgence was a huge purse that doubled as a satchel. Behind my back, my boss called it "Shovel Pig," which was another way of calling me shovel pig. Because I frightened him.

"So, what do you do?" the driver asked.

"Manager at a tech company," I said, because that was simple and the details were not.

I stared out the window as he began to tell me everything he knew about computers. I could tell his greatest need, or mine, was to sit alone in a park for an hour and be as silent as a stone.

The downtown fell away and, with it, skyscrapers and gentrified loft apartments, and then, after streets of counterculture, zoned haphazard and garish, the suburbs took over. The driver stopped talking. So many one-story houses with slanted roofs and flat lawns, gravel driveways glinting through thin snow. The mountain range like a premonition twisted free of gray mist, distant but gathering.

I hadn't done a search on the address. That felt too much like being at work. Didn't make my pulse quicken.

* * *

When we reached the gates with flaking gold paint, I knew why I had a key in addition to an address. Emblazoned over the gates, the legend "Imperial Storage Palace." Because I have to give you a name. It had seen better days, so call it "Better Days Storage Palace," if you like. I'm sure, by the time you found it, the sign was gone anyway.

We glided down a well-paved road lined with firs and free of holiday decoration, while the base of steep, pine-strewn foothills came close. The light darkened in that almost-tunnel. I could smell the fresh air, even through the stale cigarette smoke of the backseat. Anything could exist in the thick mist that covered the mountainside. A vast forest. A tech bro campus. But most likely a sad logged slope, a hell of old-growth stumps and gravel the farther up you went.

The lampposts in front of the entrance lent the road only a distracted sort of light. The vastness of the storage palace, that faux marble façade, collected weight and silence. The murk felt like a distracting trick. What was it covering up? The pretentious nature of the Doric columns? The black mold on the plastic grass that lined the stairs?

Nothing could disguise the exhaustion of the red carpet smothering the patio. The threadbare edges, the ways in which pine cone debris and squirrel passage had been smashed into the design.

Beyond the shadow of the two-story complex lay a wall of deep green, merging with ever-higher elevations. The pressure of that pressed against the car, quickened my pulse.

This was the middle of nowhere, and I almost didn't get out of the car. But it was too late. Like the ritual of accepting what is offered, once you reach your destination, you get out of the car.

Too late as well because the world was flypaper: you couldn't avoid getting stuck. Someone was already watching. Somewhere.

"Should I wait for you?" the driver asked.

I ignored that, lurched out of the backseat. I am six feet tall and two-thirty, never mistaken for a small woman any more than a mountain for a valley, a heavyweight boxer for a gymnast. I need time to get up and depart.

"Are you sure I can't wait?" he asked across the passenger seat out the half-opened window.

I leaned down, took his measure.

"Do you not understand the nature of your own business?"

The driver left me there, a little extra "pedal to the metal," as my grandfather would've said.

Sometimes I am just like him.

[2]

Inside, gold wallpaper had turned urine yellow. The red carpet perked up as it ran past two ornate antique chairs with lion paws for feet. Beyond that lay a fortress outpost in the cramped antechamber: a barred cage jutting out and a counter painted black, from behind which a woman watched me. Beyond that lay the storage units, through an archway. A legend on a sad banner overhead read "Protecting your valuable since 1972."

Excerpted from Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer. Copyright © 2021 by Jeff VanderMeer. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.