Annihilation (19 page)

I, too, knew that Area X ended abruptly not far past the lighthouse. How did I know
this? Our superiors had told us during training. So, in fact, I knew nothing at all.

They turned back finally because “behind us we saw strange cascading lights far distant
and, from the interior, more lights, and sounds that we could not identify. We became
concerned for the expedition members we had left behind.” At the point when they turned
back, they had come within sight of “a rocky island, the first island we have seen,”
which they “felt a powerful urge to explore, although there was no easy way to get
over to it.” The island “appeared to have been inhabited at one time—we saw stone
houses dotting a hill, and a dock below.”

The return trip to the lighthouse took four days, not seven, “as if the land had contracted.”
At the lighthouse, they found the psychologist gone and the bloody aftermath of a
shoot-out on the landing halfway up. A dying survivor, the archaeologist, “told us
that something ‘not of the world’ had come up the stairs and that it had killed the
psychologist and then withdrawn with his body. ‘But the psychologist came back later,’
the archaeologist raved. There were only two bodies, and neither was the psychologist.
He could not account for the absence. He also could not tell us why then they had
shot each other, except to say ‘we did not trust ourselves’ over and over again.”
My husband noted that “some of the wounds I saw were not from bullets, and even the
blood spatter on the walls did not correspond to what I knew of crime scenes. There
was a strange residue on the floor.”

The archaeologist “propped himself up in the corner of the landing and threatened
to shoot us if I came close enough to see to his wounds. Soon enough, though, he was
dead.” Afterward, they dragged the bodies from the landing and buried them high up
on the beach a little distance from the lighthouse. “It was difficult, ghost bird,
and I don’t know that we ever really recovered. Not really.”

This left the linguist and the biologist at the Tower. “The surveyor suggested either
going back up the coast past the lighthouse or following the beach down the coast.
But we both knew this was just an avoidance of the facts. What he was really saying
was that we should abandon the mission, that we should lose ourselves in the landscape.”

That landscape was impinging on them now. The temperature dipped and rose violently.
There were rumblings deep underground that manifested as slight tremors. The sun came
to them with a “greenish tinge” as if “somehow the border were distorting our vision.”
They also “saw flocks of birds headed inland—not of the same species, but hawks and
ducks, herons and eagles all grouped together as if in common cause.”

At the Tower, they ventured only a few levels down before coming back up. I noticed
no mention of words on the wall. “If the linguist and the biologist were inside, they
were much farther down, but we had no interest in following them.” They returned to
base camp, only to find the body of the biologist, stabbed several times. The linguist
had left a note that read simply, “Went to the tunnel. Do not look for me.” I felt
a strange pang of sympathy for a fallen colleague. No doubt the biologist had tried
to reason with the linguist. Or so I told myself. Perhaps he had tried to kill the
linguist. But the linguist had clearly already been ensnared by the Tower, by the
words of the Crawler. Knowing the meaning of the words on such intimate terms might
have been too much for anyone, I realize now.

The surveyor and my husband returned to the Tower at dusk. Why is not apparent from
the journal entries—there began to be breaks that corresponded to the passage of some
hours, with no recap. But during the night, they saw a ghastly procession heading
into the Tower: seven of the eight members of the eleventh expedition, including a
doppelgänger of my husband and the surveyor. “And there before me,
myself
. I walked so stiffly. I had such a blank look on my face. It was so clearly not me …
and yet it was me. A kind of shock froze both me and the surveyor. We did not try
to stop them. Somehow, it seemed impossible to try to stop
ourselves
—and I won’t lie, we were terrified. We could do nothing but watch until they had
descended. For a moment afterward, it all made sense to me, everything that had happened.
We
were dead. We were ghosts roaming a haunted landscape, and although we didn’t know
it, people lived normal lives here, everything was as it should be here … but we couldn’t
see it through the veil, the interference.”

Slowly my husband shook off this feeling. They waited hidden in the trees beyond the
Tower for several hours, to see if the doppelgängers would return. They argued about
what they would do if that happened. The surveyor wanted to kill them. My husband
wanted to interrogate them. In their residual shock, neither of them made much of
the fact that the psychologist was not among their number. At one point, a sound like
hissing steam emanated from the Tower and a beam of light shot out into the sky, then
abruptly cut off. But still no one emerged, and eventually the two men returned to
base camp.

It was at this point that they decided to go their separate ways. The surveyor had
seen all he cared to see and planned to return down the trail from base camp to the
border immediately. My husband refused because he suspected from some of the readings
in the journal that “this idea of return through the same means as our entry might
in fact be a trap.” My husband had, over the course of time, having encountered no
obstacle to travel farther north, “grown suspicious of the entire idea of borders,”
although he could not yet synthesize “the intensity of this feeling” into a coherent
theory.

Interspersed with this direct account of what had happened to the expedition were
more personal observations, most of which I am reluctant to summarize here. Except
there is one passage that pertains to Area X and to our relationship, too:

Seeing all of this, experiencing all of it, even when it’s bad, I wish you were here.
I wish we had volunteered together. I would have understood you better here, on the
trek north. We wouldn’t have needed to say anything if you didn’t want to. It wouldn’t
have bothered me. Not at all. And we wouldn’t have turned back. We would have kept
going until we couldn’t go farther.

Slowly, painfully, I realized what I had been reading from the very first words of
his journal. My husband had had an inner life that went beyond his gregarious exterior,
and if I had known enough to let him inside my guard, I might have understood this
fact. Except I hadn’t, of course. I had let tidal pools and fungi that could devour
plastic inside my guard, but not him. Of all the aspects of the journal, this ate
at me the most. He had created his share of our problems—by pushing me too hard, by
wanting too much, by trying to see something in me that didn’t exist. But I could
have met him partway and retained my sovereignty. And now it was too late.

His personal observations included many grace notes. A description in the margin of
a tidal pool in the rocks down the coast just beyond the lighthouse. A lengthy observation
of the atypical use of an outcropping of oysters at low tide by a skimmer seeking
to kill a large fish. Photographs of the tidal pool had been stuck in a sleeve in
the back. Placed carefully in the sleeve, too, were pressed wildflowers, a slender
seedpod, a few unusual leaves. My husband would have cared little for any of this;
even the focus to observe the skimmer and write a page of notes would have required
great concentration from him. I knew these elements were intended for me and me alone.
There were no endearments, but I understood in part because of this restraint. He
knew how much I hated words like
love
.

The last entry, written upon his return to the lighthouse, read, “I am going back
up the coast. But not on foot. There was a boat in the ruined village. Staved in,
rotting, but I have enough wood from the wall outside the lighthouse to fix it. I’ll
follow the shoreline as far as I can go. To the island, and perhaps beyond. If you
ever read this, that is where I am going. That is where I will be.” Could there be,
even within all of these transitional ecosystems, one still more transitional—at the
limits of the Tower’s influence but not yet under the border’s influence?

After reading the journal, I was left with the comfort of that essential recurring
image of my husband putting out to sea in a boat he had rebuilt, out through the crashing
surf to the calm just beyond. Of him following the coastline north, alone, seeking
in that experience the joy of small moments remembered from happier days. It made
me fiercely proud of him. It showed resolve. It showed bravery. It bound him to me
in a more intimate way than we had ever seemed to have while together.

In glimmers, in shreds of thought, in the aftermath of my reading, I wondered if he
kept a journal still, or if the dolphin’s eye had been familiar for a reason other
than that it was so human. But soon enough I banished this nonsense; some questions
will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.

*   *   *

My injuries had receded into a constant but manageable ache when I breathed. Not coincidentally,
by nightfall, the brightness was thrushing up through my lungs and into my throat
again so that I imagined wisps of it misting from my mouth. I shuddered at the thought
of the psychologist’s plume, seen from afar, like a distress signal. I couldn’t wait
for morning, even if this was just a premonition of a far-distant future. I would
return to the Tower
now
. It was the only place for me to go. I left behind the assault rifle and all but
one gun. I left my knife. I left my knapsack, affixed a water canteen to my belt.
I took my camera, but then thought better of it and abandoned it by a rock halfway
to the Tower. It would just distract, this impulse to record, and photographs mattered
no more than samples. I had decades of journals waiting for me in the lighthouse.
I had generations of expeditions that had ghosted on ahead of me. The pointlessness
of that, the pressure of that, almost got to me again. The waste of it all.

I had brought a flashlight but found I could see well enough by the green glow that
emanated from my own body. I crept quickly through the dark, along the path leading
to the Tower. The black sky, free of clouds, framed by the tall narrow lines formed
by pine trees, reflected the full immensity of the heavens. No borders, no artificial
light to obscure the thousands of glinting pinpricks. I could see everything. As a
child, I had stared up at the night sky and searched for shooting stars like everyone
else. As an adult, sitting on the roof of my cottage near the bay, and later, haunting
the empty lot, I looked not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I would try
to imagine what kind of life lived in those celestial tidal pools so far from us.
The stars I saw now looked strange, strewn across the dark in chaotic new patterns,
where just the night before I had taken comfort in their familiarity. Was I only now
seeing them clearly? Was I perhaps even farther from home than I had thought? There
shouldn’t have been a grim sort of satisfaction in the thought.

*   *   *

The heartbeat came to me more distantly as I entered the Tower, my mask tied tightly
in place over my nose and mouth. I did not know if I was keeping further contamination
out or just trying to contain my brightness. The bioluminescence of the words on the
wall had intensified, and the glow from my exposed skin seemed to respond in kind,
lighting my way. Otherwise, I sensed no difference as I descended past the first levels.
If these upper reaches had become familiar that feeling was balanced by the sobering
fact that this was my first time alone in the Tower. With each new curve of those
walls down into further darkness, dispelled only by the grainy, green light, I came
more and more to expect something to erupt out of the shadows to attack me. I missed
the surveyor in those moments and had to tamp down my guilt. And, despite my concentration,
I found I was drawn to the words on the wall, that even as I tried to concentrate
on the greater depths, those words kept bringing me back.
There shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy that shall bloom
dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an
age …

Sooner than expected, I came to the place where we had found the anthropologist dead.
Somehow it surprised me that she still lay there, surrounded by the debris of her
passage—scraps of cloth, her empty knapsack, a couple of broken vials, her head forming
a broken outline. She was covered with a moving carpet of pale organisms that, as
I stooped close, I discovered were the tiny hand-shaped parasites that lived among
the words on the wall. It was impossible to tell if they were protecting her, changing
her, or breaking her body down—just as I could not know whether some version of the
anthropologist had indeed appeared to the surveyor near base camp after I had left
for the lighthouse …

I did not linger but continued farther down.

Now the Tower’s heartbeat began to echo and become louder. Now the words on the wall
once again became fresher, as if only just “dried” after creation. I became aware
of a hum under the heartbeat, almost a staticky buzzing sound. The brittle mustiness
of that space ceded to something more tropical and cloying. I found that I was sweating.
Most important, the track of the Crawler beneath my boots became fresher, stickier,
and I tried to favor the right-hand wall to avoid the substance. That right-hand wall
had changed, too, in that a thin layer of moss or lichen covered it. I did not like
having to press my back up against it to avoid the substance on the floor, but I had
no choice.

After about two hours of slowed progress, the heartbeat of the Tower had risen to
a point where it seemed to shake the stairs, and the underlying hum splintered into
a fresh crackling. My ears rang with it, my body vibrated with it, and I was sweating
through my clothes due to the humidity, the stuffiness almost making me want to take
off my mask in an attempt to gulp down air. But I resisted the temptation. I was close.
I knew I was close … to what, I had no idea.