Annihilation (3 page)

I found the psychologist’s faith in measurements and her rationalization for the tower’s
absence from maps oddly … endearing? Perhaps she meant merely to reassure us, but
I would like to believe she was trying to reassure herself. Her position, to lead
and possibly to know more than us, must have been difficult and lonely.

“I hope it’s only about six feet deep so we can continue mapping,” the surveyor said,
trying to be lighthearted, but then she, and we, all recognized the term “six feet
under” ghosting through her syntax and a silence settled over us.

“I want you to know that I cannot stop thinking of it as a
tower
,” I confessed. “I can’t see it as a tunnel.” It seemed important to make the distinction
before our descent, even if it influenced their evaluation of my mental state. I saw
a tower, plunging into the ground. The thought that we stood at its summit made me
a little dizzy.

All three stared at me then, as if I were the strange cry at dusk, and after a moment
the psychologist said, grudgingly, “If that helps make you more comfortable, then
I don’t see the harm.”

A silence came over us again, there under the canopy of trees. A beetle spiraled up
toward the branches, trailing dust motes. I think we all realized that only now had
we truly entered Area X.

“I’ll go first and see what’s down there,” the surveyor said, finally, and we were
happy to defer to her.

The initial stairwell curved steeply downward and the steps were narrow, so the surveyor
would have to back her way into the tower. We used sticks to clear the spiderwebs
as she lowered herself into position on the stairwell. She teetered there, weapon
slung across her back, looking up at us. She had tied her hair back and it made the
lines of her face seem tight and drawn. Was this the moment when we were supposed
to stop her? To come up with some other plan? If so, none of us had the nerve.

With a strange smirk, almost as if judging us, the surveyor descended until we could
only see her face framed in the gloom below, and then not even that. She left an empty
space that was shocking to me, as if the reverse had actually happened: as if a face
had suddenly floated into view out of the darkness. I gasped, which drew a stare from
the psychologist. The anthropologist was too busy staring down into the stairwell
to notice any of it.

“Is everything okay?” the psychologist called out to the surveyor. Everything had
been fine just a second before. Why would anything be different now?

The surveyor made a sharp grunt in answer, as if agreeing with me. For a few moments
more, we could still hear the surveyor struggling on those short steps. Then came
silence, and then another movement, at a different rhythm, which for a terrifying
moment seemed like it might come from a second source.

But then the surveyor called up to us. “Clear to this level!”
This level
. Something within me thrilled to the fact that my vision of a
tower
was not yet disproven.

That was the signal for me to descend with the anthropologist, while the psychologist
stood watch. “Time to go,” the psychologist said, as perfunctorily as if we were in
school and a class was letting out.

An emotion that I could not quite identify surged through me, and for a moment I saw
dark spots in my field of vision. I followed the anthropologist so eagerly down through
the remains of webs and the embalmed husks of insects into the cool brackishness of
that place that I almost tripped her. My last view of the world above: the psychologist
peering down at me with a slight frown, and behind her the trees, the blue of the
sky almost blinding against the darkness of the sides of the stairwell.

Below, shadows spread across the walls. The temperature dropped and sound became muffled,
the soft steps absorbing our tread. Approximately twenty feet beneath the surface,
the structure opened out into a lower level. The ceiling was about eight feet high,
which meant a good twelve feet of stone lay above us. The flashlight of the surveyor’s
assault rifle illuminated the space, but she was faced away from us, surveying the
walls, which were an off-white and devoid of any adornment. A few cracks indicated
either the passage of time or some sudden stressor. The level appeared to be the same
circumference as the exposed top, which again supported the idea of a single solid
structure buried in the earth.

“It goes farther,” the surveyor said, and pointed with her rifle to the far corner,
directly opposite the opening where we had come out onto that level. A rounded archway
stood there, and a darkness that suggested downward steps. A tower, which made this
level not so much a floor as a landing or part of the turret. She started to walk
toward the archway while I was still engrossed in examining the walls with my flashlight.
Their very blankness mesmerized me. I tried to imagine the builder of this place but
could not.

I thought again of the silhouette of the lighthouse, as I had seen it during the late
afternoon of our first day at base camp. We assumed that the structure in question
was a lighthouse because the map showed a lighthouse at that location and because
everyone immediately recognized what a lighthouse
should
look like. In fact, the surveyor and anthropologist had both expressed a kind of
relief
when they had seen the lighthouse. Its appearance on both the map and in reality
reassured them, anchored them. Being familiar with its function further reassured
them.

With the tower, we knew none of these things. We could not intuit its full outline.
We had no sense of its purpose. And now that we had begun to descend into it, the
tower
still
failed to reveal any hint of these things. The psychologist might recite the measurements
of the “top” of the tower, but those numbers meant nothing, had no wider context.
Without context, clinging to those numbers was a form of madness.

“There is a regularity to the circle, seen from the inside walls, that suggests precision
in the creation of the building,” the anthropologist said.
The building.
Already she had begun to abandon the idea of it being a tunnel.

All of my thoughts came spilling out of my mouth, some final discharge from the state
that had overtaken me above. “But what is its
purpose
? And is it believable that it would not be on the maps? Could one of the prior expeditions
have built it and hidden it?” I asked all of this and more, not expecting an answer.
Even though no threat had revealed itself, it seemed important to eliminate any possible
moment of silence. As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and
that something might appear in the spaces between our words if we were not careful.
Had I expressed this anxiety to the psychologist, she would have been worried, I know.
But I was more attuned to solitude than any of us, and I would have characterized
that place in that moment of our exploration as watchful.

A gasp from the surveyor cut me off in mid-question, no doubt much to the anthropologist’s
relief.

“Look!” the surveyor said, training her flashlight down into the archway. We hurried
over and stared past her, adding our own illumination.

A stairway did indeed lead down, this time at a gentle curve with much broader steps,
but still made of the same materials. At about shoulder height, perhaps five feet
high, clinging to the inner wall of the tower, I saw what I first took to be dimly
sparkling green vines progressing down into the darkness. I had a sudden absurd memory
of the floral wallpaper treatment that had lined the bathroom of my house when I had
shared it with my husband. Then, as I stared, the “vines” resolved further, and I
saw that they were words, in cursive, the letters raised about six inches off the
wall.

“Hold the light,” I said, and pushed past them down the first few steps. Blood was
rushing through my head again, a roaring confusion in my ears. It was an act of supreme
control to walk those few paces. I couldn’t tell you what impulse drove me, except
that I was the biologist and this looked oddly organic. If the linguist had been there,
perhaps I would have deferred to her.

“Don’t touch it, whatever it is,” the anthropologist warned.

I nodded, but I was too enthralled with the discovery. If I’d had the impulse to touch
the words on the wall, I would not have been able to stop myself.

As I came close, did it surprise me that I could understand the language the words
were written in? Yes. Did it fill me with a kind of elation and dread intertwined?
Yes. I tried to suppress the thousand new questions rising up inside of me. In as
calm a voice as I could manage, aware of the importance of that moment, I read from
the beginning, aloud: “
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring
forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that…”

Then the darkness took it.

“Words? Words?” the anthropologist said.

Yes, words.

“What are they made of?” the surveyor asked. Did they need to be made of anything?

The illumination cast on the continuing sentence quavered and shook.
Where lies the strangling fruit
became bathed in shadow and in light, as if a battle raged for its meaning.

“Give me a moment. I need to get closer.” Did I? Yes, I needed to get closer.

What are they made of
?

I hadn’t even thought of this, though I should have; I was still trying to parse the
lingual meaning, had not transitioned to the idea of taking a physical sample. But
what relief at the question! Because it helped me fight the compulsion to keep reading,
to descend into the greater darkness and keep descending until I had read all there
was to read. Already those initial phrases were infiltrating my mind in unexpected
ways, finding fertile ground.

So I stepped closer, peered at
Where lies the strangling fruit
. I saw that the letters, connected by their cursive script, were made from what would
have looked to the layperson like rich green fernlike moss but in fact was probably
a type of fungi or other eukaryotic organism. The curling filaments were all packed
very close together and rising out from the wall. A loamy smell came from the words
along with an underlying hint of rotting honey. This miniature forest
swayed
, almost imperceptibly, like sea grass in a gentle ocean current.

Other things existed in this miniature ecosystem. Half-hidden by the green filaments,
most of these creatures were translucent and shaped like tiny hands embedded by the
base of the palm. Golden nodules capped the fingers on these “hands.” I leaned in
closer, like a fool, like someone who had not had months of survival training or ever
studied biology. Someone tricked into thinking that words should be read.

I was unlucky—or was I lucky? Triggered by a disturbance in the flow of air, a nodule
in the
W
chose that moment to burst open and a tiny spray of golden spores spewed out. I pulled
back, but I thought I had felt something enter my nose, experienced a pinprick of
escalation in the smell of rotting honey.

Unnerved, I stepped back even farther, borrowing some of the surveyor’s best curses,
but only in my head. My natural instinct was always for concealment. Already I was
imagining the psychologist’s reaction to my contamination, if revealed to the group.

“Some sort of fungi,” I said finally, taking a deep breath so I could control my voice.
“The letters are made from fruiting bodies.” Who knew if it were actually true? It
was just the closest thing to an answer.

My voice must have seemed calmer than my actual thoughts because there was no hesitation
in their response. No hint in their tone of having seen the spores erupt into my face.
I had been so close. The spores had been so tiny, so insignificant.
I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.

“Words? Made of fungi?” the surveyor said, stupidly echoing me.

“There is no recorded human language that uses this method of writing,” the anthropologist
said. “Is there any animal that communicates in this way?”

I had to laugh. “No, there is no animal that communicates in this way.” Or, if there
were, I could not recall its name, and never did later, either.

“Are you joking? This is a joke, right?” the surveyor said. She looked poised to come
down and prove me wrong, but didn’t move from her position.

“Fruiting bodies,” I replied, almost as if in a trance. “Forming words.”

A calm had settled over me. A competing sensation, as if I couldn’t breathe, or didn’t
want to, was clearly psychological not physiological. I had noticed no physical changes,
and on some level it didn’t matter. I knew it was unlikely we had an antidote to something
so unknown waiting back at the camp.

More than anything, the information I was trying to process immobilized me. The words
were composed of symbiotic fruiting bodies from a species unknown to me. Second, the
dusting of spores on the words meant that the farther down into the tower we explored,
the more the air would be full of potential contaminants. Was there any reason to
relay this information to the others when it would only alarm them? No, I decided,
perhaps selfishly. It was more important to make sure they were not directly exposed
until we could come back with the proper equipment. Any other evaluation depended
on environmental and biological factors about which I was increasingly convinced I
had inadequate data.

I came back up the stairs to the landing. The surveyor and the anthropologist looked
expectant, as if I could tell them more. The anthropologist in particular was on edge;
her gaze couldn’t alight on any one thing but kept moving and moving. Perhaps I could
have fabricated information that would have stopped that incessant search. But what
could I tell them about the words on the wall except that they were either impossible
or insane, or both? I would have preferred the words be written in an
unknown
language; this would have presented less of a mystery for us to solve, in a way.