Annihilation (20 page)

The words on the wall here were so freshly formed that they appeared to drip, and
the hand-shaped creatures were less numerous, and those that did manifest formed closed
fists, as if not yet quite awake and alive.
That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten
and reanimated shall walk the world in a bliss of not-knowing …

I spiraled around one more set of stairs, and then as I came into the narrow straightaway
before the next curve … I saw
light
. The edges of a sharp, golden light that emanated from a place beyond my vision,
hidden by the wall, and the brightness within me throbbed and thrilled to it. The
buzzing sound again intensified until it was so jagged and hissing that I felt as
if blood might trickle from my ears. The heartbeat overtop boomed into every part
of me. I did not feel as if I were a person but simply a receiving station for a series
of overwhelming transmissions. I could feel the brightness spewing from my mouth in
a half-invisible spray, meeting the resistance of the mask, and I tore it off with
a gasp.
Give back to that which gave to you
, came the thought, not knowing what I might be feeding, or what it meant for the
collection of cells and thoughts that comprised me.

You understand, I could no more have turned back than have gone back in time. My free
will was compromised, if only by the severe temptation of the unknown. To have quit
that place, to have returned to the surface, without rounding that corner … my imagination
would have tormented me forever. In that moment, I had convinced myself I would rather
die knowing … something,
anything
.

I passed the threshold. I descended into the light.

*   *   *

One night during the last months at Rock Bay I found myself intensely restless. This
was after I had confirmed that my grant wouldn’t be renewed and before I had any prospects
of a new job. I had brought another stranger I knew back from the bar to try to distract
myself from my situation, but he had left hours ago. I had a wakefulness that I could
not shake, and I was still drunk. It was stupid and dangerous, but I decided to get
in my truck and drive out to the tidal pools. I wanted to creep up on all of that
hidden life and try to surprise it somehow. I had gotten it into my mind that the
tidal pools changed during the night when no one watched. This is what happens, perhaps,
if you have been studying something so long that you can tell one sea anemone from
another in an instant, could have picked out any denizen of those tidal pools from
a lineup if it had committed a crime.

So I parked the truck, took the winding trail down to the grainy beach, making my
way with the aid of a tiny flashlight attached to my key chain. Then I sloshed through
the shallows and climbed up onto the sheet of rock. I really wanted to lose myself.
People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been
the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.

That night, even though I had come up with a thousand excuses to blame others, I knew
I had screwed up. Not filing reports. Not sticking to the focus of the job. Recording
odd data from the periphery. Nothing that might satisfy the organization that had
provided the grant. I was the queen of the tidal pools, and what I said was the law,
and what I reported was what I had wanted to report. I had gotten sidetracked, like
I always did, because I melted into my surroundings, could not remain
separate from
,
apart from
, objectivity a foreign land to me.

I went to tidal pool after tidal pool with my pathetic flashlight, losing my balance
half a dozen times and almost falling. If anyone had been observing—and who is to
say now that they were not?—they would have seen a cursing, half-drunk, reckless biologist
who had lost all perspective, who was out in the middle of nowhere for the second
straight year and feeling vulnerable and lonely, even though she’d promised herself
she would never get lonely.
The things she had done and said that society labeled antisocial or selfish.
Seeking something in the tidal pools that night even though what she found during
the day was miraculous enough. She might even have been shouting, screaming, whirling
about on those slippery rocks as if the best boots in the world couldn’t fail you,
send you falling to crack your skull, give you a forehead full of limpets and barnacles
and blood.

But the fact is, even though I didn’t deserve it—did I deserve it? and had I really
just been looking for something familiar?—I found something miraculous, something
that uncovered itself with its own light. I spied a glinting, wavery promise of illumination
coming from one of the larger tidal pools, and it gave me pause. Did I really want
a sign? Did I really want to discover something or did I just think I did? Well, I
decided I did want to discover something, because I walked toward it, suddenly sobered
up enough to watch my steps, to shuffle along so I wouldn’t crack my skull before
I saw whatever it was in that pool.

What I found when I finally stood there, hands on bent knees, peering down into that
tidal pool, was a rare species of colossal starfish, six-armed, larger than a saucepan,
that bled a dark gold color into the still water as if it were on fire. Most of us
professionals eschewed its scientific name for the more apt “destroyer of worlds.”
It was covered in thick spines, and along the edges I could just see, fringed with
emerald green, the most delicate of transparent cilia, thousands of them, propelling
it along upon its appointed route as it searched for its prey: other, lesser starfish.
I had never seen a destroyer of worlds before, even in an aquarium, and it was so
unexpected that I forgot about the slippery rock and, shifting my balance, almost
fell, steadying myself with one arm propped against the edge of the tidal pool.

But the longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became. The more
it became something alien to me, the more I had a sense that I knew nothing at all—about
nature, about ecosystems. There was something about my mood and its dark glow that
eclipsed sense, that made me see this creature, which had indeed been assigned a place
in the taxonomy—catalogued, studied, and described—irreducible down to any of that.
And if I kept looking, I knew that ultimately I would have to admit I knew less than
nothing about myself as well, whether that was a lie or the truth.

When I finally wrenched my gaze from the starfish and stood again, I could not tell
where the sky met the sea, whether I faced the water or the shore. I was completely
adrift, and dislocated, and all I had to navigate by in that moment was the glowing
beacon below me.

Turning that corner, encountering the Crawler for the first time, was a similar experience
at a thousand times the magnitude. If on those rocks those many years ago I could
not tell sea from shore, here I could not tell stairs from ceiling, and even though
I steadied myself with an arm against the wall, the wall seemed to cave in before
my touch, and I struggled to keep from falling through it.

There, in the depths of the Tower, I could not begin to understand what I was looking
at and even now I have to work hard to pull it together from fragments. It is difficult
to tell what blanks my mind might be filling in just to remove the weight of so many
unknowns.

Did I say I had seen golden light? As soon as I turned that corner entire, it was
no longer golden but blue-green, and the blue-green light was like nothing I had experienced
before. It surged out, blinding and bleeding and thick and layered and absorbing.
It so overwhelmed my ability to comprehend shapes within it that I forced myself to
switch from sight, to focus at first on reports from other senses.

The sound that came to me now was like a crescendo of ice or ice crystals shattering
to form an unearthly noise that I had mistaken earlier for buzzing, and which began
to take on an intense melody and rhythm that filled my brain. Vaguely, from some far-off
place, I realized that the words on the wall were being infused with sound as well,
but that I had not had the capacity to hear it before. The vibration had a texture
and a weight, and with it came a burning smell, as of late fall leaves or like some
vast and distant engine close to overheating. The taste on my tongue was like brine
set ablaze.

No words can … no photographs could …

As I adjusted to the light, the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to
mock my ability to comprehend it. It was a figure within a series of refracted panes
of glass. It was a series of layers in the shape of an archway. It was a great sluglike
monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star. My
eyes kept glancing off of it as if an optic nerve was not enough.

Then it became an overwhelming
hugeness
in my battered vision, seeming to rise and keep rising as it leapt toward me. The
shape spread until it was even where it was not, or
should not have been
. It seemed now more like a kind of obstacle or wall or thick closed door blocking
the stairs. Not a wall of light—gold, blue, green, existing in some other spectrum—but
a wall of flesh that
resembled
light, with sharp, curving elements within it and textures like ice when it has frozen
from flowing water. An impression of living things lazily floating in the air around
it like soft tadpoles, but at the limits of my vision so I could not tell if this
was akin to those floating dark motes that are tricks of the eye, that do not exist.

Within this fractured mass, within all of these different impressions of the Crawler—half-blinded
but still triangulating through my other senses—I thought I saw a darker shadow of
an arm or a kind of
echo
of an arm in constant blurring motion, continuously imparting to the left-hand wall
a repetition of depth and signal that made its progress laboriously slow—its message,
its code of change, of recalibrations and adjustments, of transformations. And, perhaps,
another dark shadow, vaguely head-shaped, above the arm—but as indistinct as if I
had been swimming in murky water and seen in the distance a shape obscured by thick
seaweed.

I tried to pull back now, to creep back up the steps. But I couldn’t. Whether because
the Crawler had trapped me or my brain had betrayed me, I could not move.

The Crawler changed or I was beginning to black out repeatedly and come back to consciousness.
It would appear as if nothing was there, nothing at all, as if the words wrote themselves,
and then the Crawler would tremble into being and then wink out again, and all that
remained constant was a suggestion of an arm and the impression of the words being
written.

What can you do when your five senses are not enough? Because I still couldn’t truly
see
it here, any more than I had seen it under the microscope, and that’s what scared
me the most. Why couldn’t I
see
it? In my mind, I stood over the starfish at Rock Bay, and the starfish grew and
grew until it was not just the tidal pool but the world, and I was teetering on its
rough, luminous surface, staring up at the night sky again, while the light of it
flowed up and through me.

Against the awful pressure of that light, as if the entire weight of Area X were concentrated
here, I changed tactics, tried to focus just on the creation of the words on the wall,
the impression of a head or a helmet or … what?… somewhere above the arm. A cascade
of sparks that I knew were living organisms. A new word upon the wall. And me still
not seeing, and the brightness coiled within me assumed an almost hushed quality,
as if we were in a cathedral.

The enormity of this experience combined with the heartbeat and the crescendo of sound
from its ceaseless writing to fill me up until I had no room left.
This
moment, which I might have been waiting for my entire life all unknowing—this moment
of an encounter with the most beautiful, the most terrible thing I might ever experience—was
beyond me. What inadequate recording equipment I had brought with me and what an inadequate
name I had chosen for it—the Crawler. Time elongated, was nothing but fuel for the
words this thing had created on the wall for who knew how many years for who knew
what purpose.

I don’t know how long I stood at the threshold, watching the Crawler, frozen. I might
have watched it forever and never noticed the awful passage of the years.

But then what?

What occurs after revelation and paralysis?

Either death or a slow and certain thawing. A returning to the physical world. It
is not that I became used to the Crawler’s presence but that I reached a point—a single
infinitesimal moment—when I once again recognized that the Crawler was an organism.
A complex, unique, intricate, awe-inspiring, dangerous organism. It might be inexplicable.
It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect—but
I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced
mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling
these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me,
as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left
in me.

With an effort I could feel in the groan of my limbs, a dislocation in my bones, I
managed to turn my back on the Crawler.

Just that simple, wrenching act was such a relief, as I hugged the far wall in all
its cool roughness. I closed my eyes—why did I need vision when all it did was keep
betraying me?—and started to crab-walk my way back, still feeling the light upon my
back. Feeling the music from the words. The gun I had forgotten all about digging
into my hip. The very idea of
gun
now seemed as pathetic and useless as the word
sample
. Both implied aiming at something. What was there to aim at?