Annihilation (21 page)

I had only made it a step or two when I felt a rising sense of heat and weight and
a kind of licking, lapping wetness, as if the thick light was transforming into the
sea itself. I had thought perhaps I was about to escape, but it wasn’t true. With
just one more step away, as I began to choke, I realized that the light
had
become a sea.

Somehow, even though I was not truly underwater, I was drowning.

The franticness that rose within me was the awful formless panic of a child who had
fallen into a fountain and known, for the first time, as her lungs filled with water,
that she could die. There was no end to it, no way to get past it. I was awash in
a brothy green-blue ocean alight with sparks. And I just kept on drowning and struggling
against the drowning, until some part of me realized I would keep drowning forever.
I imagined tumbling from the rocks, falling, battered by the surf. Washing up thousands
of miles from where I was, unrecognizable, in some other form, but still retaining
the awful memory of this moment.

Then I felt the impression from behind me of hundreds of eyes beginning to turn in
my direction, staring at me. I was a thing in a swimming pool being observed by a
monstrous little girl. I was a mouse in an empty lot being tracked by a fox. I was
the prey the starfish had reached up and pulled down into the tidal pool.

In some watertight compartment, the brightness told me I had to accept that I would
not survive that moment. I wanted to live—I really did. But I couldn’t any longer.
I couldn’t even breathe any longer. So I opened my mouth and welcomed the water, welcomed
the torrent. Except it wasn’t really water. And the eyes upon me were not eyes, and
I was pinned there now by the Crawler, had let it in, I realized, so that its full
regard was upon me and I could not move, could not think, was helpless and alone.

A raging waterfall crashed down on my mind, but the water was comprised of fingers,
a hundred fingers, probing and pressing down into the skin of my neck, and then punching
up through the bone of the back of my skull and into my brain … and then the pressure
eased even though the impression of unlimited force did not let up and for a time,
still drowning, an icy calm came over me, and through the calm bled a kind of monumental
blue-green light. I smelled a burning inside my own head and there came a moment when
I screamed, my skull crushed to dust and reassembled, mote by mote.

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
.

It was the most agony I have ever been in, as if a metal rod had been repeatedly thrust
into me and then the pain distributed like a second skin inside the contours of my
outline. Everything became tinged with the red. I blacked out. I came to. I blacked
out, came to, blacked out, still perpetually gasping for breath, knees buckling, scrabbling
at the wall for support. My mouth opened so wide from the shrieking that something
popped in my jaw. I think I stopped breathing for a minute but the brightness inside
experienced no such interruption. It just kept oxygenating my blood.

Then the terrible invasiveness was gone, ripped away, and with it the sensation of
drowning and the thick sea that had surrounded me. There came a
push
, and the Crawler tossed me aside, down the steps beyond it. I washed up there, bruised
and crumpled. With nothing to lean against, I fell like a sack, crumbling before something
that was never meant to be, something never meant to invade me. I sucked in air in
great shuddering gasps.

But I couldn’t stay there, still within the range of its regard. I had no choice now.
Throat raw, my insides feeling eviscerated, I flung myself down into the greater dark
below the Crawler, on my hands and knees at first, scrabbling to escape, taken over
by a blind, panicked impulse to get out of the sight of it.

Only when the light behind me had faded, only when I felt safe, did I drop to the
floor again. I lay there for a long time. Apparently, I was recognizable to the Crawler
now. Apparently, I was words it could understand, unlike the anthropologist. I wondered
if my cells would long be able to hide their transformation from me. I wondered if
this was the beginning of the end. But mostly I felt the utter relief of having passed
a gauntlet, if barely. The brightness deep within was curled up, traumatized.

*   *   *

Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable.
I don’t know when I managed to stand again, to continue on, legs rubbery. I don’t
know how long that took, but eventually I got up.

Soon the spiral stairs straightened out, and with this straightening, the stifling
humidity abruptly lessened and the tiny creatures that lived on the wall were no longer
to be seen, and the sounds from the Crawler above took on a more muffled texture.
Though I still saw the ghosts of past scrawlings on the wall, even my own luminescence
became muted here. I was wary of that tracery of words, as if somehow they could hurt
me as surely as the Crawler, and yet there was some comfort in following them. Here
the variations were more legible and now made more sense to me.
And it came for me. And it cast out all else.
Retraced again and again. Were the words more naked down here, or did I just possess
more knowledge now?

I couldn’t help but notice that these new steps shared the depth and width of the
lighthouse steps almost exactly. Above me, the unbroken surface of the ceiling had
changed so that now a profusion of deep, curving grooves crisscrossed it.

I stopped to drink water. I stopped to catch my breath. The aftershock of the encounter
with the Crawler was still washing over me in waves. When I continued, it was with
a kind of numbed awareness that there might be more revelations still to absorb, that
I had to prepare myself. Somehow.

A few minutes later, a tiny rectangular block of fuzzy white light began to take form,
shape, far below. As I descended, it became larger with a reluctance I can only call
hesitation. After another half hour, I thought it must be a kind of door, but the
haziness remained, almost as if it were obscuring itself.

The closer I got, and with it still distant, the more I was also certain that this
door bore an uncanny resemblance to the door I had seen in my glance back after having
crossed the border on our way to base camp. The very vagueness of it triggered this
response because it was a specific kind of vagueness.

In the next half hour after that, I began to feel an instinctual urge to turn back,
which I overrode by telling myself I could not yet face the return journey and the
Crawler again. But the grooves in the ceiling hurt to look at, as if they ran across
the outside of my own skull, continually being remade there. They had become lines
of some repelling force. An hour later, as that shimmering white rectangle became
larger but no more distinct, I was filled with such a feeling of
wrongness
that I suffered nausea. The idea of a
trap
grew in my mind, that this floating light in the darkness was not a door at all but
the maw of some beast, and if I entered through it to the other side, it would devour
me.

Finally I came to a halt. The words continued, unrelenting, downward, and I estimated
the door lay no more than another five or six hundred steps below me. It blazed in
my vision now; I could feel a rawness to my skin as if I were getting a sunburn from
looking at it. I wanted to continue on, but I could not continue on. I could not will
my legs to do it, could not force my mind to overcome the fear and uneasiness. Even
the temporary absence of the brightness, as if hiding, counseled against further progress.

I remained there, sitting on the steps, watching the door, for some time. I worried
that this sensation was residual hypnotic compulsion, that even from beyond death
the psychologist had found a way to manipulate me. Perhaps there had been some encoded
order or directive my infection had not been able to circumvent or override. Was I
in the end stages of some prolonged form of annihilation?

The reason didn’t matter, though. I knew I would never reach the door. I would become
so sick I wouldn’t be able to move, and I would never make it back to the surface,
eyes cut and blinded by the grooves in the ceiling. I would be stuck on the steps,
just like the anthropologist, and almost as much of a failure as she and the psychologist
had been at recognizing the impossible. So I turned around, and, in a great deal of
pain, feeling as if I had left part of myself there, I began to trudge back up those
steps, the image of a hazy door of light as large in my imagination as the immensity
of the Crawler.

I remember the sensation in that moment of turning away that something was now peering
out at me from the door below, but when I glanced over my shoulder, only the familiar
hazy white brilliance greeted me.

*   *   *

I wish I could say that the rest of the journey was a blur, as if I were indeed the
flame the psychologist had seen, and I was staring out through my own burning. I wish
that what came next was sunlight and the surface. But, although I had earned the right
for it to be over … it was not over.

I remember every painful, scary step back up, every moment of it. I remember halting
before I turned the corner where again lay the Crawler, still busy and incomprehensible
in its task. Unsure if I could endure the excavation of my mind once more. Unsure
if I would go mad from the sensation of drowning this time, no matter how much reason
told me it was an illusion. But also knowing that the weaker I became, the more my
mind would betray me. Soon it would be easy to retreat into the shadows, to become
some
shell
haunting the lower steps. I might never have more strength or resolve to summon than
in that moment.

I let go of Rock Bay, of the starfish in its pool. I thought instead about my husband’s
journal. I thought about my husband, in a boat, somewhere to the north. I thought
about how everything lay above, and nothing now below.

So, I hugged the wall again. So, I closed my eyes again. So, I endured the light again,
and flinched and moaned, expecting the rush of the sea into my mouth, and my head
cracked open … but none of that happened. None of it, and I don’t know why, except
that having scanned and sampled me, and having, based on some unknown criteria, released
me once, the Crawler no longer displayed any interest in me.

I was almost out of sight above it, rounding the corner, when some stubborn part of
me insisted on risking a single glance back. One last ill-advised, defiant glance
at something I might never understand.

Staring back at me amid that profusion of selves generated by the Crawler, I saw,
barely visible, the face of a man, hooded in shadow and orbited by indescribable things
I could think of only as his jailers.

The man’s expression displayed such a complex and naked extremity of emotion that
it transfixed me. I saw on those features the endurance of an unending pain and sorrow,
yes, but shining through as well a kind of grim satisfaction and
ecstasy
. I had never seen such an expression before, but I recognized that face. I had seen
it in a photograph.
A sharp, eagle’s eye gleamed out from a heavy face, the left eye lost to his squint.
A thick beard hid all but a hint of a firm chin under it.

Trapped within the Crawler, the last lighthouse keeper stared out at me, so it seemed,
not just across a vast, unbridgeable gulf but also out across the years. For, though
thinner—his eyes receded in their orbits, his jawline more pronounced—the lighthouse
keeper had not aged a day since that photograph was taken more than thirty years ago.
This man who now existed in a place none of us could comprehend.

Did he know what he had become or had he gone mad long ago? Could he even really see
me?

I do not know how long he had been looking at me, observing me, before I had turned
to see him. Or if he had even existed before I saw him. But he was real to me, even
though I held his gaze for such a short time, too short a time, and I cannot say anything
passed between us. How long would have been enough? There was
nothing
I could do for him, and I had no room left in me for anything but my own survival.

There might be far worse things than drowning. I could not tell what he had lost,
or what he might have gained, over the past thirty years, but I envied him that journey
not at all.

*   *   *

I never dreamed before Area X, or at least I never remembered my dreams. My husband
found this strange and told me once that maybe this meant I lived in a continuous
dream from which I had never woken up. Perhaps he meant it as a joke, perhaps not.
He had, after all, been haunted by a nightmare for years, had been shaped by it, until
it had all fallen away from him, revealed as a facade.
A house and a basement and the awful crimes that had occurred there.

But I’d had an exhausting day at work and took it seriously. Especially because it
was the last week before he left on the expedition.

“We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because
something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken
as reality.”

“Am I a pinprick then, disturbing the edges of your reality, ghost bird?” he asked,
and this time I caught the desperation of his mood.

“Oh, is it bait-the-ghost-bird time again?” I said, arching an eyebrow. I didn’t feel
that relaxed. I felt sick to my stomach, but it seemed important to be normal for
him. When he later came back and I saw what normal could be, I wished I’d been abnormal,
that I’d shouted, that I’d done anything but be banal.

“Perhaps I’m a figment of your reality,” he said. “Perhaps I don’t exist except to
do your bidding.”