Annihilation

  In the moment, I did something that I regret now. I said, “There’s no reward in the risk of going back to the tower right now.”

  I thought I had been subtle in my intonation of one of the psychologist’s hypnotic cues, but a shudder passed over the surveyor’s face, a kind of temporary disorientation. When it cleared, the look that remained told me she understood what I had tried to do. It wasn’t even a look of surprise; more that in her mind I had confirmed an impression of me that had been slowly forming but was now set. Now, too, I had learned that hypnotic cues only worked for the psychologist.

  “You’d do anything, wouldn’t you, to get your way,” the surveyor said, but the fact was: She held the rifle. What weapon did I really have? And I told myself it was because I didn’t want the anthropologist’s death to be meaningless that I had suggested this course of action.

  When I did not reply, she sighed, then said, with weariness in her voice, “You know, I finally figured it out while I was developing those useless photographs. What bothered me the most. It’s not the thing in the tunnel or the way you conduct yourself or anything the psychologist did. It’s this rifle I’m holding. This damn rifle. I stripped it down to clean it and found it was made of thirty-year-old parts, cobbled together. Nothing we brought with us is from the present. Not our clothes, not our shoes. It’s all old junk. Restored crap. We’ve been living in the past this whole time. In some sort of reenactment. And why?” She made a derisive sound. “You don’t even know why.”

  It was as much as she’d ever said to me at one time. I wanted to say that this information registered as little more than the mildest of surprises in the hierarchy of what we had thus far discovered. But I didn’t. All I had left was to be succinct.

  “Will you remain here until I return?” I asked.

  This was now the essential question, and I didn’t like the speed of her reply, or its tone.

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Don’t say anything you can’t back up,” I said. I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.

  “Fuck off,” she said.

  So that’s how we left it—her leaning back in that rickety chair, holding her assault rifle, as I went off to discover the source of the light I had seen the night before. I had with me a knapsack full of food and water, along with two of the guns, equipment to take samples, and one of the microscopes. Somehow I felt safer taking a microscope with me. Some part of me, too, no matter how I had tried to convince the surveyor to come with me, welcomed the chance to explore alone, to not be dependent on, or worried about, anyone else.

  I looked back a couple of times before the trail twisted away, and the surveyor was still sitting there, staring at me like a distorted reflection of who I’d been just days before.

  03: IMMOLATION

  Now a strange mood took hold of me, as I walked silent and alone through the last of the pines and the cypress knees that seemed to float in the black water, the gray moss that coated everything. It was as if I traveled through the landscape with the sound of an expressive and intense aria playing in my ears. Everything was imbued with emotion, awash in it, and I was no longer a biologist but somehow the crest of a wave building and building but never crashing to shore. I saw with such new eyes the subtleties of the transition to the marsh, the salt flats. As the trail became a raised berm, dull, algae-choked lakes spread out to the right and a canal flanked it to the left. Rough channels of water meandered out in a maze through a forest of reeds on the canal side, and islands, oases of wind-contorted trees, appeared in the distance like sudden revelations. The stooped and blackened appearance of these trees was shocking against the vast and shimmering gold-brown of the reeds. The strange quality of the light upon this habitat, the stillness of it all, the sense of waiting, brought me halfway to a kind of ecstasy.

  Beyond, the lighthouse stood, and before that, I knew, the remains of a village, also marked on the map. But in front of me was the trail, strewn at times with oddly tortured-looking pieces of heavy white driftwood flung far inland from past hurricanes. Tiny red grasshoppers inhabited the long grass in legions, with only a few frogs present to feast on them, and flattened grass tunnels marked where the huge reptiles had, after bathing in the sun, slid back into the water. Above, raptors searched the ground below for prey, circling as if in geometric patterns so controlled was their flight.

  In that cocoon of timelessness, with the lighthouse seeming to remain distant no matter how long I walked, I had more time to think about the tower and our expedition. I felt that I had abdicated my responsibility to that point, which was to consider those elements found inside of the tower as part of a vast biological entity that might or might not be terrestrial. But contemplating the sheer enormity of that idea on a macro level would have broken my mood like an avalanche crashing into my body.

  So … what did I know? What were the specific details? An … organism … was writing living words along the interior walls of the tower, and may have been doing so for a very long time. Whole ecosystems had been born and now flourished among the words, dependent on them, before dying off as the words faded. But this was a side effect of creating the right conditions, a viable habitat. It was important only in that the adaptations of the creatures living in the words could tell me something about the tower. For example, the spores I had inhaled, which pointed to a truthful seeing.

  I was brought up short by this idea, the wind-lashed marsh reeds a wide, blurred ripple all around me. I had assumed the psychologist had hypnotized me into seeing the tower as a physical construction not a biological entity, and that an effect of the spores had made me resistant to this hypnotic suggestion. But what if the process had been more complex? What if, by whatever means, the tower emanated an effect, too—one that constituted a kind of defensive mimicry, and the spores had made me immune to that illusion?

  Telescoping out from this context, I had several questions and few answers. What role did the Crawler serve? (I had decided it was important to assign a name to the maker-of-words.) What was the purpose of the physical “recitation” of the words? Did the actual words matter, or would any words do? Where had the words come from? What was the interplay between the words and the tower-creature? Put another way: Were the words a form of symbiotic or parasitic communication between the Crawler and the Tower? Either the Crawler was an emissary of the Tower or the Crawler had originally existed independent from it and come into its orbit later. But without the damned missing sample of the Tower wall, I couldn’t really begin to guess.

  Which brought me back to the words. Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner … Wasps and birds and other nest-builders often used some core, irreplaceable substance or material to create their structures but would also incorporate whatever they could find in their immediate environment. This might explain the seemingly random nature of the words. It was just building material, and perhaps this explained why our superiors had forbidden high-tech being brought into Area X, because they knew it could be used in unknown and powerful ways by whatever occupied this place.

  Several new ideas detonated inside me as I watched a marsh hawk dive into the reeds and come up with a rabbit struggling in its talons. First, that the words—the line of them, their physicality—were absolutely essential to the well-being of either the Tower or the Crawler, or both. I had seen the faint skeletons of so many past lines of writing that one might assume some biological imperative for the Crawler’s work. This process might feed into the reproductive cycle of the Tower or the Crawler. Perhaps the Crawler depended upon it, and it had some subsidiary benefit to the Tower. Or vice versa. Perhaps words didn’t matter because it was a process of fertilization, only completed when the entire left-hand wall of the Tower had a line of words running along its length.

  Despite my attempt to sustain the aria in my head, I experienced a jarring return to reality as I worked through these possibilities. Sud
denly I was just a person trudging across a natural landscape of a type I had seen before. There were too many variables, not enough data, and I was making some base assumptions that might not be true. For one thing, in all of this I assumed that neither Crawler nor Tower was intelligent, in the sense of possessing free will. My procreation theory would still apply in such a widening context, but there were other possibilities. The role of ritual, for example, in certain cultures and societies. How I longed for access to the anthropologist’s mind now, even though in studying social insects I had gained some insight into the same areas of scientific endeavor.

  And if not ritual, I was back to the purposes of communication, this time in a conscious sense, not a biological one. What could the words on the wall communicate to the Tower? I had to assume, or thought I did, that the Crawler didn’t just live in the Tower—it went far afield to gather the words, and it had to assimilate them, even if it didn’t understand them, before it came back to the Tower. The Crawler had to in a sense memorize them, which was a form of absorption. The strings of sentences on the Tower’s walls could be evidence brought back by the Crawler to be analyzed by the Tower.

  But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan. I had to leave it there, compartmentalized, until I could write it all down, and seeing it on the page, begin to divine the true meaning. And now the lighthouse had finally gotten larger on the horizon. This presence weighed on me as I realized that the surveyor had been correct about at least one thing. Anyone within the lighthouse would see me coming for miles. Then, too, that other effect of the spores, the brightness in my chest, continued to sculpt me as I walked, and by the time I reached the deserted village that told me I was halfway to the lighthouse, I believed I could have run a marathon. I did not trust that feeling. I felt, in so many ways, that I was being lied to.

  * * *

  Having seen the preternatural calm of the members of the eleventh expedition, I had often thought during our training of the benign reporting from the first expedition. 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. People had still lived there, on what amounted to a wildlife refuge, but not many, and they tended to be the tight-lipped descendants of fisherfolk. Their disappearance might have seemed to some a simple intensifying of a process begun generations before.

  When Area X first appeared, there was vagueness and confusion, and it is still true that out in the world not many people know that it exists. The government’s version of events emphasized a localized environmental catastrophe stemming from experimental military research. This story leaked into the public sphere over a period of several months so that, like the proverbial frog in a hot pot, people found the news entering their consciousness gradually as part of the general daily noise of media oversaturation about ongoing ecological devastation. Within a year or two, it had become the province of conspiracy theorists and other fringe elements. By the time I volunteered and was given the security clearance to have a firm picture of the truth, the idea of an “Area X” lingered in many people’s minds like a dark fairy tale, something they did not want to think about too closely. If they thought about it at all. We had so many other problems.

  During training, we were told that the first expedition went in two years after the Event, after scientists found a way to breach the border. It was the first expedition that set up the base-camp perimeter and provided a rough map of Area X, confirming many of the landmarks. They discovered a pristine wilderness devoid of any human life. They found what some might call a preternatural silence.

  “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.”

  Others mentioned feelings of euphoria and extremes of sexual desire, for which there was no explanation and which, ultimately, their superiors found unimportant.

  If one could spot anomalies in their reports, these anomalies lay at the fringes. For one thing, we never saw their journals; instead, they offered up their accounts in long recorded interviews. This, to me, hinted at some avoidance of their direct experience, although at the time I also thought perhaps I was being paranoid, in a nonclinical sense.

  Some of them offered descriptions of the abandoned village that seemed inconsistent to me. The warping and level of ruination depicted a place abandoned for much longer than a few years. But if someone had caught this strangeness earlier, any such observation had been stricken from the record.

  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.

  * * *

  The deserted village had so sunk into the natural landscape of the coast that I did not see it until I was upon it. The trail dipped into a depression of sorts, and there lay the village, fringed by more stunted trees. Only a few roofs remained on the twelve or thirteen houses, and the trail through had crumbled into porous rubble. Some outer walls still stood, dark rotting wood splotched with lichen, but for the most part these walls had fallen away and left me with a peculiar glimpse of the interiors: the remains of chairs and tables, a child’s toys, rotted clothing, ceiling beams brought to earth, covered in moss and vines. There was a sharp smell of chemicals in that place, and more than one dead animal, decomposing into the mulch. Some of the houses had, over time, slid into the canal to the left and looked in their skeletal remains like creatures struggling to leave the water. It all seemed like something that had happened a century ago, and what was left were just vague recollections of the event.

  But in what had been kitchens or living rooms or bedrooms, I also saw a few peculiar eruptions of moss or lichen, rising four, five, feet tall, misshapen, the vegetative matter forming an approximation of limbs and heads and torsos. As if there had been runoff from the material, too heavy for gravity, that had congregated at the foot of these objects. Or perhaps I imagined this effect.

  One particular tableau struck me in an almost emotional way. Four such eruptions, one “standing” and three decomposed to the point of “sitting” in what once must have been a living room with a coffee table and a couch—all facing some point at the far end of the room where lay only the crumbling soft brick remains of a fireplace and chimney. The smell of lime and mint unexpectedly arose, cutting through the must, the loam.

  I did not want to speculate on that tableau, its meaning, or what element of the past it represented. No sense of peace emanated from that place, only a feeling of something left unresolved or still in progress. I wanted to move on, but first I took samples. I had a need to document what I had found, and a photograph didn’t seem sufficient, given how the others had turned out. I cut a piece of the moss from the “forehead” of one of the eruptions. I took splinters of the wood. I even scraped the flesh of the dead animals—a stricken fox, curled up and dry, along with a kind of rat that must have died only a day or two before.

  It was just after I had left the village that a peculiar thing happened. I was startled to see a sudden double line coming down the canal toward me, cutting through the water. My binoculars were no use as the water was opaque from the glare of the sun. Otters? Fish? Something else? I pulled out my gun.

  Then the dolphins breached, and it was almost as vivid a dislocation as that first descent into the Tower. I knew that the dolphins here sometimes ventured in from the sea, had adapted to the freshwater. But when the mind expects a certain range of possibilities, any explanation that falls outside of that expectation
can surprise. Then something more wrenching occurred. As they slid by, the nearest one rolled slightly to the side, and it stared at me with an eye that did not, in that brief flash, resemble a dolphin eye to me. It was painfully human, almost familiar. In an instant that glimpse was gone and they had submerged again, and I had no way to verify what I had seen. I stood there, watched those twinned lines disappear up the canal, back toward the deserted village. I had the unsettling thought that the natural world around me had become a kind of camouflage.

  A little shaken, I continued toward the lighthouse, which now loomed larger, almost heavy, its black-and-white stripes topped with red making it somehow authoritarian. I would have no further shelter before I reached my destination. I would stand out to whoever or whatever watched from that vantage as something unnatural in that landscape, something that was foreign. Perhaps even a threat.

  * * *

  It was almost noon by the time I reached the lighthouse. I had been careful to drink water and have a snack on my journey, but I still arrived weary; perhaps the lack of sleep had caught up with me. But then, too, the last three hundred yards to reach the lighthouse were tension-filled, as I kept remembering the surveyor’s warning. I had a gun out, held down by my side, for all the good it would do against a high-powered rifle. I kept looking at the little window halfway up its swirled black-and-white surface, and then to the large panoramic windows at the top, alert for any movement.

  The lighthouse was positioned just before a natural crest of the dunes that resembled a curled wave facing the ocean, the beach spread out beyond. Up close it gave the strong appearance of having been converted into a fortress, a fact conveniently left out of our training. This only confirmed the impression I had formed from farther out, because although the grass was still long, no trees at all grew along the trail from about a quarter mile out; I had found only old stumps. When within an eighth mile, I had taken a look with my binoculars and noticed an approximately ten-foot circular wall rising from the landward side of the lighthouse that had clearly not been part of the original construction.