Annihilation (11 page)

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. Suddenly 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.

On the seaward side, another wall, an even stouter-looking fortification high on the
crumbling dune, topped with broken glass and, as I drew near, I could see crenellations
that created lines of sight for rifles. It was all in danger of falling down the slope
onto the beach below. But for it not to have done so already, whoever had built it
must have dug its foundations deep. It appeared that some past defenders of the lighthouse
had been at war with the sea. I did not like this wall because it provided evidence
of a very specific kind of insanity.

At some point, too, someone had taken the time and effort to rappel down the sides
of the lighthouse and attach jagged shards of glass with some strong glue or other
adhesive. These glass daggers started about one-third of the way up and continued
to the penultimate level, just below the glass-enclosed beacon. At that point, a kind
of metal collar extended out a good two or three feet, and this defensive element
had been enhanced with rusty barbed wire.

Someone had tried very hard to keep others out. I thought of the Crawler and the words
on the wall. I thought of the fixation with the lighthouse in the fragments of notes
left by the last expedition. But despite these discordant elements, I was glad to
reach the shadow of that cool, dank wall around the landward side of the lighthouse.
From that angle, no one could shoot at me from the top, or the window in the middle.
I had passed through the first gauntlet. If the psychologist was inside, she had decided
against violence for now.

The defensive wall on the landward side had reached a level of disrepair that reflected
years of neglect. A large, irregular hole led to the lighthouse’s front door. That
door had exploded inward and only fragments of wood clung to the rusted hinges. A
purple flowering vine had colonized the lighthouse wall and curled itself around the
remains of the door on its left side. There was comfort in that, for whatever had
happened with such violence must have occurred long ago.