Annihilation (12 page)

The darkness beyond, however, made me wary. I knew from the floor plan I had seen
during training that this bottom level of the lighthouse had three outer rooms, with
the stairs leading to the top somewhere to the left, and that to the right the rooms
opened up into a back area with at least one more larger space. Plenty of places for
someone to hide.

I picked up a stone and half threw, half rolled it onto the floor beyond those crushed
double doors. It clacked and spun across tile and disappeared from view. I heard no
other sound, no movement, no suggestion of breathing beyond my own. Gun still drawn,
I entered as quietly as I was able, sliding with my shoulder along the left-hand wall,
searching for the entry point to the stairs leading upward.

The outer rooms at the base of the lighthouse were empty. The sound of the wind was
muffled, the walls thick, and only two small windows toward the front brought any
light inside; I had to use my flashlight. As my eyes adjusted, the sense of devastation,
of loneliness, grew and grew. The purple flowering vine ended just inside, unable
to thrive in the darkness. There were no chairs. The tiles of the floor were covered
in dirt and debris. No personal effects remained in those outer rooms. In the middle
of a wide open space, I found the stairs. No one stood on those steps to watch me,
but I had the impression someone could have been there a moment before. I thought
about climbing to the top first rather than exploring the back rooms, but then decided
against it. Better to think like the surveyor, with her military training, and clear
the area now, even though someone could always come in the front door while I was
up there.

The back room told a different story than the front rooms did. My imagination could
only reconstruct what might have happened in the broadest, crudest terms. Here stout
oak tables had been overturned to form crude defensive barricades. Some of the tables
were full of bullet holes and others appeared half-melted or shredded by gunfire.
Beyond the remains of the tables, the dark splotches across the walls and pooled on
the floor told of unspeakable and sudden violence. Dust had settled over everything,
along with the cool, flat smell of slow decay, and I could see rat droppings and signs
of a cot or a bed having been placed in a corner at some later date … although who
could have slept among such reminders of a massacre? Someone, too, had carved their
initials into one of the tables: “R.S. was here.” The marks looked fresher than the
rest of it. Maybe you carved your initials when visiting a war monument, if you were
insensitive. Here it stank of bravado to drown out fear.

The stairs awaited, and to quell my rising nausea, I headed back to them and began
to climb. I had put my gun away by then, since I needed that hand for balance, but
I wished I had the surveyor’s assault rifle. I would have felt safer.

It was a strange ascent, in contrast to my descents into the Tower. The brackish quality
of the light against those graying interior walls was better than the phosphorescence
of the Tower, but what I found on these walls unnerved me just as much, if in a different
way. More bloodstains, mostly thick smudges as if several people had bled out while
trying to escape attackers from below. Sometimes dribbles of blood. Sometimes a spray.

Words had been written on these walls, but nothing like the words in the Tower. More
initials, but also little obscene pictures and a few phrases of a more personal nature.
Some longer hints of what might have transpired: “4 boxes of foodstuffs 3 boxes of
medical supplies and drinking water for 5 days if rationed; enough bullets for all
of us if necessary.” Confessions, too, which I won’t document here but that had the
sincerity and weight of having been written immediately before, or during, moments
when the individuals must have thought death was upon them. So many needing so much
to communicate what amounted to so little.

Things found on the stairs … a discarded shoe … a magazine from an automatic pistol …
a few moldy vials of samples long rotted or turned to rancid liquid … a crucifix that
looked like it had been dislodged from the wall … a clipboard, the wooden part soggy
and the metal part deep orange-red from rust … and, worst of all, a dilapidated toy
rabbit with ragged ears. Perhaps a good-luck symbol smuggled in on an expedition.
There had been no children in Area X since the border had come down, as far as I knew.

At roughly the halfway point, I came to a landing, which must have been where I had
first seen the flicker of light the night before. The silence still dominated, and
I had heard no hint of movement above me. The light was better because of the windows
to left and right. Here the blood spatter abruptly cut off, although bullet holes
riddled the walls. Bullet casings littered the floor, but someone had taken the time
to sweep them off to the sides, leaving the path to the stairs above clear. To the
left lay a stack of guns and rifles, some of them ancient, some of them not army-issue.
It was hard to tell if anyone had been at them recently. Thinking about what the surveyor
had said, I wondered when I would encounter a blunderbuss or some other terrible joke.

Otherwise, there was just the dust and the mold, and a tiny square window looking
down on the beach and the reeds. Opposite it, a faded photograph in a broken frame,
dangling from a nail. The smudged glass was cracked and half-covered in specks of
green mold. The black-and-white photograph showed two men standing at the base of
the lighthouse, with a girl off to the side. A circle had been drawn with a marker
around one of the men. He looked about fifty years old and wore a fisherman’s cap.
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. He didn’t smile, but he
didn’t frown, either. I’d had experience enough with lighthouse keepers to know one
when I saw one. But there was also some quality to him, perhaps just because of the
strange way the dust framed his face, that made me think of him as the lighthouse
keeper. Or perhaps I’d already spent too much time in that place, and my mind was
seeking any answer, even to simple questions.

The rounded bulk of the lighthouse behind the three was bright and sharp, the door
on the far right in good repair. Nothing like what I had encountered, and I wondered
when the photo had been taken. How many years between the photograph and the start
of it all. How many years had the lighthouse keeper kept to his schedule and his rituals,
lived in that community, gone to the local bar or pub. Perhaps he’d had a wife. Perhaps
the girl in the photo was his daughter. Perhaps he’d been a popular man. Or solitary.
Or a little of both. Regardless, none of it had mattered in the end.

I stared at him from across the years, trying to tell from the moldy photograph, from
the line of his jaw and the reflection of light in his eyes, how he might have reacted,
what his last hours might have been like. Perhaps he’d left in time, but probably
not. Perhaps he was even moldering on the ground floor in a forgotten corner. Or,
and I experienced a sudden shudder, maybe he was waiting for me above, at the top.
In some form. I took the photograph out of its frame, shoved it in my pocket. The
lighthouse keeper would come with me, although he hardly counted as a good-luck charm.
As I left the landing, I had the peculiar thought that I was not the first to pocket
the photo, that someone would always come behind to replace it, to circle the lighthouse
keeper again.

*   *   *

I continued to encounter additional signs of violence the higher I went, but no more
bodies. The closer I came to the top, the more I began to have the sense that someone
had lived here recently. The mustiness gave way to the scent of sweat, but also a
smell like soap. The stairs had less debris on them, and the walls were clean. By
the time I was bending over the last narrow stretch of steps out into the lantern
room, the ceiling grown suddenly close, I was sure I would emerge to find someone
staring at me.

So I took out my gun again. But, again, no one was there—just a few chairs, a rickety
table with a rug beneath it, and the surprise that the thick glass here was still
intact. The beacon glass itself lay dull and dormant in the center of the room. You
could see for miles to all sides. I stood there for a moment, looking back the way
I had come: at the trail that had brought me, at the shadow in the distance that might
have been the village, and then to the right, across the last of the marsh, the transition
to scrubland and the gnarled bushes punished by the wind off the sea. They, clinging
to the soil, stopped it from eroding and helped bulwark the dunes and the sea oats
that came next. It was a gentle slope from there to the glittering beach, the surf,
and the waves.

A second look, and from the direction of base camp amid the swamp and far distant
pines, I could see strands of black smoke, which could have meant anything. But I
also could see, from the location of the Tower, a kind of brightness of its own, a
sort of refracted phosphorescence, that did not bear thinking about. That I could
see it, that I had an affinity to it, agitated me. I was certain no one else left
here, not the surveyor, not the psychologist, could see that stirring of the inexplicable.

I turned my attention to the chairs, the table, searching for whatever might give
me insight into … anything. After about five minutes, I thought to pull back the rug.
A square trapdoor measuring about four feet per side lay hidden there. The latch was
set into the wood of the floor. I pushed the table out of the way with a terrible
rending sound that made me grit my teeth. Then, swiftly, in case someone waited down
there, I threw open the trapdoor, shouting out something inane like “I’ve got a gun!”
aiming my weapon with one hand and my flashlight with the other.

I had the distant sense of the weight of my gun dropping to the floor, my flashlight
shaking in my hand, though somehow I held on to it. I could not believe what I was
staring down at, and I felt lost. The trapdoor opened onto a space about fifteen feet
deep and thirty feet wide. The psychologist had clearly been here, for her knapsack,
several weapons, bottles of water, and a large flashlight lay off to the left side.
But of the psychologist herself there was no sign.

No, what had me gasping for breath, what felt like a punch in the stomach as I dropped
to my knees, was the huge mound that dominated the space, a kind of insane midden.
I was looking at a pile of papers with hundreds of journals on top of it—just like
the ones we had been issued to record our observations of Area X. Each with a job
title written on the front. Each, as it turned out, filled with writing. Many, many
more than could possibly have been filed by only twelve expeditions.

Can you really imagine what it was like in those first moments, peering down into
that dark space, and
seeing that
? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you’re staring at it now.

*   *   *

My third and best field assignment out of college required that I travel to a remote
location on the western coast, to a curled hook of land at the farthest extremity
from civilization, in an area that teetered between temperate and arctic climates.
Here the earth had disgorged huge rock formations and old-growth rain forest had sprouted
up around them. This world was always moist, the annual rainfall more than seventy
inches a year, and not seeing droplets of water on leaves was an extraordinary event.
The air was so amazingly clean and the vegetation so dense, so richly green, that
every spiral of fern seemed designed to make me feel at peace with the world. Bears
and panthers and elk lived in those forests, along with a multitude of bird species.
The fish in the streams were mercury-free and enormous.

I lived in a village of about three hundred souls near the coast. I had rented a cottage
next to a house at the top of a hill that had belonged to five generations of fisherfolk.
A husband and wife, childless, owned the property, and they had the kind of severely
laconic quality common to the area. I made no friends there, and I wasn’t sure that
even long-standing neighbors were friends, either. Only in the local pub that everyone
frequented, after a few pints, would you see signs of friendliness and camaraderie.
But violence lived in the pub, too, and I kept away most of the time. I was four years
away from meeting my future husband, and at the time I wasn’t looking for much of
anything from anyone.

I had plenty to keep me busy. Every day I drove the hellish winding road, rutted and
treacherous even when dry, that led me to the place they called simply Rock Bay. There,
sheets of magma that lay beyond the rough beaches had been worn smooth over millions
of years and become pitted with tidal pools. At low tide in the morning, I would photograph
those tidal pools, take measurements, and catalogue the life found within them, sometimes
staying through part of high tide, wading in my rubber boots, the spray from the waves
that smashed over the lip of the ledge drenching me.

A species of mussels found nowhere else lived in those tidal pools, in a symbiotic
relationship with a fish called a gartner, after its discoverer. Several species of
marine snails and sea anemones lurked there, too, and a tough little squid I nicknamed
Saint Pugnacious, eschewing its scientific name, because the danger music of its white-flashing
luminescence made its mantle look like a pope’s hat.

I could easily lose hours there, observing the hidden life of tidal pools, and sometimes
I marveled at the fact that I had been given such a gift: not just to lose myself
in the present moment so utterly but also to have such solitude, which was all I had
ever craved during my studies, my practice to reach this point.

Even then, though, during the drives back, I was grieving the anticipated end of this
happiness. Because I knew it had to end eventually. The research grant was only for
two years, and who really would care about mussels longer than that, and it’s true
my research methods could be eccentric. These were the kinds of thoughts I’d have
as the expiration date came nearer and the prospects looked dimmer and dimmer for
renewal. Against my better judgment, I began to spend more and more time in the pub.
I’d wake in the morning, my head fuzzy, sometimes with someone I knew but who was
a stranger just leaving, and realize I was one day closer to the end of it all. Running
through it, too, was a sense of relief, not as strong as the sadness, but the thought,
counter to everything else I felt, that this way I would not become that person the
locals saw out on the rocks and still thought of as an outsider.
Oh, that’s just the old biologist. She’s been here for ages, going crazy studying
those mussels. She talks to herself, mutters to herself at the bar, and if you say
a kind word …