Annihilation (16 page)

“I’ve had a kind of dream for a while now,” he confessed to me the night he told me
he had agreed to join the eleventh expedition. “A new one, and not really a nightmare
this time.”

In these dreams, he floated over a pristine wilderness as if from the vantage point
of a marsh hawk, and the feeling of freedom “is indescribable. It’s as if you took
everything from my nightmares and reversed it.” As the dreams progressed and repeated,
they varied in their intensity and their viewpoint. Some nights he swam through the
marsh canals. Others, he became a tree or a drop of water. Everything he experienced
refreshed him. Everything he experienced made him want to go to Area X.

Although he couldn’t tell me much, he confessed that he already had met several times
with people who recruited for the expeditions. That he had talked to them for hours,
that he knew this was the right decision. It was an honor. Not everyone was taken—some
were rejected and others lost the thread along the way. Still others, I pointed out
to him, must have wondered what they had done, after it was too late. All I understood
of what he called Area X at the time came from the vague official story of environmental
catastrophe, along with rumors and sideways whispers. Danger? I’m not sure this crossed
my mind so much as the idea that my husband had just told me he wanted to leave me
and had withheld the information for weeks. I was not yet privy to the idea of hypnosis
or reconditioning, so it did not occur to me that he might have been
made suggestible
during his meetings.

My response was a profound silence as he searched my face for what he thought he hoped
to find there. He turned away, sat on the couch, while I poured myself a very large
glass of wine and took the chair opposite him. We remained that way for a long time.

A little later, he started to talk again—about what he knew of Area X, about how his
work right now wasn’t fulfilling, how he needed more of a challenge. But I wasn’t
really listening. I was thinking about my mundane job. I was thinking about the wilderness.
I was wondering why I hadn’t done something like he was doing now: dreaming of another
place, and how to get there. In that moment, I couldn’t blame him, not really. Didn’t
I sometimes go off on field trips for my job? I might not be gone for months, but
in principle it was the same thing.

The arguing came later, when it became real to me. But never pleading. I never begged
him to stay. I couldn’t do that. Perhaps he even thought that going away would save
our marriage, that somehow it would bring us closer together. I don’t know. I have
no clue. Some things I will never be good at.

But as I stood beside the psychologist’s body looking out to sea, I knew that my husband’s
journal waited for me, that soon I would know what sort of nightmare he had encountered
here. And I knew, too, that I still blamed him fiercely for his decision … and yet
even so, somewhere in the heart of me I had begun to believe there was no place I
would rather be than in Area X.

*   *   *

I had lingered too long and would have to travel through the dark to make it back
to base camp. If I kept up a steady pace, I might make it back by midnight. There
was some advantage in arriving at an unexpected hour, given how I had left things
with the surveyor. Something also warned me against staying at the lighthouse overnight.
Perhaps it was just the unease from seeing the strangeness of the psychologist’s wound
or perhaps I still felt as if a presence inhabited that place, but regardless I set
out soon after gathering up my knapsack full of supplies and my husband’s journal.
Behind me lay the increasingly solemn silhouette of what was no longer really a lighthouse
but instead a kind of reliquary. As I stared back, I saw a thin green fountain of
light gushing up, framed by the curve of the dunes, and felt even more resolve to
put miles between us. It was the psychologist’s wound, from where she lay on the beach,
glowing more brightly than before. The suggestion of some sped-up form of life burning
fiercely did not bear close scrutiny. Another phrase I had seen copied in her journal
came to mind:
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.

Within the hour, the lighthouse had disappeared into the night, and with it the beacon
the psychologist had become. The wind picked up, the darkness intensified. The ever-more
distant sound of waves was like eavesdropping on a sinister, whispering conversation.
I walked as quietly as possible through the ruined village under just a sliver of
moon, unwilling to risk my flashlight. The shapes in the exposed remains of rooms
had gathered a darkness about them that stood out against the night and in their utter
stillness I sensed an unnerving suggestion of movement. I was glad to soon be past
them and onto the part of the trail where the reeds choked both the canal on the seaward
side and the little lakes to the left. In a while, I would encounter the black water
and cypress trees, vanguard for the sturdy utility of the pines.

A few minutes later, the moaning started. For a moment I thought it was in my head.
Then I stopped abruptly, stood there listening. Whatever we had heard every night
at dusk was at it again, and in my eagerness to leave the lighthouse I had forgotten
it lived in the reeds. This close the sound was more guttural, filled with confused
anguish and rage. It seemed so utterly human and inhuman, that, for the second time
since entering Area X, I considered the supernatural. The sound came from ahead of
me and from the landward side, through the thick reeds that kept the water away from
the sides of the trail. It seemed unlikely I could pass by without it hearing me.
And what then?

Finally I decided to forge ahead. I took out the smaller of my two flashlights and
crouched as I turned it on so the beam couldn’t easily be seen above the reeds. In
this awkward way, I walked forward, gun drawn in my other hand, alert to the direction
of the sound. Soon I could hear it closer, if still distant, pushing through the reeds
as it continued its horrible moaning.

A few minutes passed, and I made good progress. Then, abruptly, something nudged against
my boot, flopped over. I aimed my flashlight at the ground—and leapt back, gasping.
Incredibly, a human face seemed to be rising out of the earth. But when after a moment
nothing further happened, I shone my light on it again and saw it was a kind of tan
mask made of skin, half-transparent, resembling in its way the discarded shell of
a horseshoe crab. A wide face, with a hint of pockmarks across the left cheek. The
eyes were blank, sightless, staring. I felt as if I should recognize these features—that
it was very important—but with them disembodied in this way, I could not.

Somehow the sight of this mask restored to me a measure of the calm that I had lost
during my conversation with the psychologist. No matter how strange, a discarded exoskeleton,
even if part of it resembled a human face, represented a kind of solvable mystery.
One that, for the moment at least, pushed back the disturbing image of an expanding
border and the countless lies told by the Southern Reach.

When I bent at the knees and shone my flashlight ahead, I saw more detritus from a
kind of molting: a long trail of skin-like debris, husks, and sloughings. Clearly
I might soon meet what had shed this material, and just as clearly the moaning creature
was, or had once been, human.

I recalled the deserted village, the strange eyes of the dolphins. A question existed
there that I might in time answer in too personal a way. But the most important question
in that moment was whether just after molting the thing became sluggish or more active.
It depended on the species, and I was not an expert on this one. Nor did I have much
stamina left for a new encounter, even though it was too late to retreat.

Continuing on, I came to a place on the left where the reeds had been flattened, veering
off to form a path about three feet wide. The moltings, if that’s what they were,
veered off, too. Shining my flashlight down the path, I could see it curved sharply
right after less than a hundred feet. This meant that the creature was already ahead
of me, out in the reeds, and could possibly circle back and emerge to block my path
back to base camp.

The dragging sounds had intensified, almost equal to the moaning. A thick musk clung
to the air.

I still had no desire to return to the lighthouse, so I picked up my pace. Now the
darkness was so complete I could only see a few feet ahead of me, the flashlight revealing
little or nothing. I felt as if I were moving through an encircling tunnel. The moaning
grew still louder, but I could not determine its direction. The smell became a special
kind of stench. The ground began to sag a little under my weight, and I knew water
must be close.

There came the moaning again, as close as I’d ever heard it, but now mixed with a
loud thrashing sound. I stopped and stood on tiptoe to shine my flashlight over the
reeds to my left in time to see a great disrupting wave of motion ahead at a right
angle to the trail, and closing fast. A dislocation of the reeds, a fast smashing
that made them fall as if machine-threshed. The thing was trying to outflank me, and
the brightness within surged to cover my panic.

I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, after having
heard it for so many days. Was it the remnants of the scientist in me, trying to regroup,
trying to apply logic when all that mattered was survival?

If so, it was a very small part.

I ran. It surprised me how fast I could run—I’d never had to run that fast before.
Down the tunnel of blackness lined with reeds, raked by them and not caring, willing
the brightness to propel me forward. To get past the beast before it cut me off. I
could feel the thudding vibration of its passage, the rasping clack of the reeds beneath
its tread, and there was a kind of expectant tone to its moaning now that sickened
me with the urgency of its seeking.

From out of the darkness there came an impression of a great weight, aimed at me from
my left. A suggestion of the side of a tortured, pale visage and a great, ponderous
bulk behind it. Barreling toward a point ahead of me, and me with no choice but to
let it keep coming, lunging forward like a sprinter at the finish line, so I could
be past it and free.

It was coming so fast, too fast. I could tell I wasn’t going to make it, couldn’t
possibly make it, not at that angle, but I was committed now.

The crucial moment came. I thought I felt its hot breath on my side, flinched and
cried out even as I ran. But then the way was clear, and from almost right behind
I heard a high keening, and the feeling of the space, the air, suddenly
filled
, and the sound of something massive trying to brake, trying to change direction,
and being pulled into the reeds on the opposite side of the trail by its own momentum.
An almost plaintive keening, a lonely sound in that place, called out to me. And kept
calling, pleading with me to return, to see it entire, to acknowledge its existence.

I did not look back. I kept running.

*   *   *

Eventually, gasping for air, I stopped. On rubbery legs I walked until the trail opened
up into forest lands, far enough to find a large oak I could climb, and spent the
night in an uncomfortable position wedged into a crook of the tree. If the moaning
creature had followed me there, I don’t know what I would have done. I could still
hear it, though far distant again. I did not want to think about it, but I could not
stop thinking about it.

I drifted in and out of sleep, one watchful eye on the ground. Once, something large
and snuffling paused at the base of the tree, but then went on its way. Another time,
I had the sense of vague shapes moving in the middle distance, but nothing came of
it. They seemed to stop for a moment, luminous eyes floating in the dark, but I sensed
no threat from them. I held my husband’s journal to my chest like a talisman to ward
off the night, still refusing to open it. My fears about what it might contain had
only grown.

Sometime before morning, I woke again to find that my brightness had become literal:
My skin gave off a faint phosphorescence against the darkness, and I tried to hide
my hands in my sleeves, draw my collar up high, so I would be less visible, then drifted
off again. Part of me just wanted to sleep forever, through the rest of anything that
might occur.

But I did remember one thing, now: where I had seen the molted mask before—the psychologist
from the eleventh expedition, a man I had seen interviewed after his return across
the border. A man who had said, in a calm and even tone, “It was quite beautiful,
quite peaceful in Area X. We saw nothing unusual. Nothing at all.” And then had smiled
in a vague way.

Death, as I was beginning to understand it, was not the same thing here as back across
the border.

*   *   *

The next morning my head was still full of the moans of the creature as I reentered
the part of Area X where the trail rose to a steep incline, and on either side the
swampy black water was littered with the deceptively dead-seeming cypress knees. The
water stole all sound, and its unmoving surface reflected back only gray moss and
tree limbs. I loved this part of the trail as I loved no other. Here the world had
a watchfulness matched only by a sense of peaceful solitude. The stillness was simultaneously
an invitation to let down your guard and a rebuke against letting down your guard.
Base camp was a mile away, and I was lazy with the light and the hum of insects in
the tall grass. I was already rehearsing what I would say to the surveyor, what I
would tell her and what I would withhold.

The brightness within me flared up. I had time to take a half step to the right.