Annihilation (6 page)

As far as I was concerned—an only child, and an expert in the uses of solitude—my
observations of this miniature paradise could have continued forever. I even jury-rigged
a waterproof light to a waterproof camera and planned to submerge the contraption
beneath the dark surface, to snap pictures using a long wire attached to the camera
button. I have no idea if it would have worked, because suddenly I didn’t have the
luxury of time. Our luck ran out, and we couldn’t afford the rent anymore. We moved
to a tiny apartment, stuffed full of my mother’s paintings, which all resembled wallpaper
to me. One of the great traumas of my life was worrying about the pool. Would the
new owners see the beauty and the importance of leaving it as is, or would they destroy
it, create unthinking slaughter in honor of the pool’s real function?

I never found out—I couldn’t bear to go back, even if I also could never forget the
richness of that place. All I could do was look forward, apply what I had learned
from watching the inhabitants of the pool. And I never did look back, for better or
worse. If funding for a project ran out, or the area we studied was suddenly bought
for development, I never returned. There are certain kinds of deaths that one should
not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are
broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

As we descended into the tower, I felt again, for the first time in a long time, the
flush of discovery I had experienced as a child. But I also kept waiting for the snap.

*   *   *

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 …

The tower steps kept revealing themselves, those whitish steps like the spiraling
teeth of some unfathomable beast, and we kept descending because there seemed to be
no choice. I wished at times for the blinkered seeing of the surveyor. I knew now
why the psychologist had sheltered us, and I wondered how she withstood it, for she
had no one to shield her from … anything.

At first, there were “merely” the words, and that was enough. They occurred always
at roughly the same level against the left-hand side of the wall, and for a time I
tried to record them, but there were too many of them and the sense of them came and
went, so that to follow the meaning of the words was to follow a trail of deception.
That was one agreement the surveyor and I came to right away: that we would document
the physicality of the words, but that it would require a separate mission, another
day, to photograph that continuous, never-ending sentence.

… to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with
the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never
could be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen …

The sense of unease in ignoring the ominous quality of those words was palpable. It
infected our own sentences when we spoke, as we tried to catalogue the biological
reality of what we were
both
seeing. Either the psychologist wanted us to see the words and how they were written
or simply suppressing the physical reality of the tower’s walls was a monumental and
exhausting task.

These things, too, we experienced together during our initial descent into the darkness:
The air became cooler but also damp, and with the drop in temperature came a kind
of gentle sweetness, as of a muted nectar. We also both saw the tiny hand-shaped creatures
that lived among the words. The ceilings were higher than we would have guessed, and
by the light of our helmets as we looked up, the surveyor could see glints and whorls
as of the trails of snails or slugs. Little tufts of moss or lichen dotted that ceiling,
and, exhibiting great tensile strength, tiny long-limbed translucent creatures that
resembled cave shrimp stilt-walked there as well.

Things only I could see: That the walls minutely rose and fell with the tower’s breathing.
That the colors of the words shifted in a rippling effect, like the strobing of a
squid. That, with a variation of about three inches above the current words and three
inches below, there existed a ghosting of
prior words
, written in the same cursive script. Effectively, these layers of words formed a
watermark, for they were just an impression against the wall, a pale hint of green
or sometimes purple the only sign that once they might have been raised letters. Most
seemed to repeat the main thread, but some did not.

For a time, while the surveyor took photographic samples of the living words, I read
the phantom words to see how they might deviate. It was hard to read them—there were
several overlapping strands that started and stopped and started up again. I easily
lost track of individual words and phrases. The number of such ghost scripts faded
into the wall suggested this process had been ongoing for a long time. Although without
some sense of the length of each “cycle,” I could not give even a rough estimate in
years.

There was another element to the communications on the wall, too. One I wasn’t sure
if the surveyor could see or not. I decided to test her.

“Do you recognize this?” I asked the surveyor, pointing to a kind of interlocking
latticework that at first I hadn’t even realized was a pattern but that covered the
wall from just below the phantom scripts to just above them, the main strand roughly
in the middle. It vaguely resembled scorpions strung end-to-end arising, only to be
subsumed again. I didn’t even know if I was looking at a language, per se. It could
have been a decorative pattern for all I knew.

Much to my relief, she could see it. “No, I don’t recognize it,” she said. “But I’m
not an expert.”

I felt a surge of irritation, but it wasn’t directed at her. I had the wrong brain
for this task, and so did she; we needed a linguist. We could look at that latticework
script for ages and the most original thought I would have is that it resembled the
sharp branching of hard coral. To the surveyor it might resemble the rough tributaries
of a vast river.

Eventually, though, I was able to reconstruct fragments of a handful of some of the
variants:
Why should I rest when wickedness exists in the world … God’s love shines on anyone
who understands the limits of endurance, and allows forgiveness … Chosen for the service
of a higher power.
If the main thread formed a kind of dark, incomprehensible sermon, then the fragments
shared an affinity with that purpose without the heightened syntax.

Did they come from longer accounts of some sort, possibly from members of prior expeditions?
If so, for what purpose? And over how many years?

But all such questions would be for later, in the light of the surface. Mechanically,
like a golem, I just took photographs of key phrases—even as the surveyor thought
I was clicking pictures of blank wall, or off-center shots of the main fungal words—to
put some distance between myself and whatever I might think about these variants.
While the main scrawl continued, and continued to unnerve:…
in the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe
and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation
of the fatal softness in the earth …

Those words defeated me somehow. I took samples as we went, but halfheartedly. All
of these tiny remnants I was stuffing into glass tubes with tweezers … what would
they tell me? Not much, I felt. Sometimes you get a sense of when the truth of things
will not be revealed by microscopes. Soon, too, the sound of the heartbeat through
the walls became so loud to me I stopped to put in earplugs to muffle its beat, choosing
a moment while the surveyor’s attention lay elsewhere. Be-masked, half-deaf for different
reasons, we continued our descent.

*   *   *

It should have been me who noticed the change, not her. But after an hour of downward
progress, the surveyor stopped on the steps below me.

“Do you think the words on the wall are becoming … fresher?”

“Fresher?”

“More recent.”

I just stared at her for a moment. I had become acclimated to the situation, had done
my best to pretend to be the kind of impartial observer who simply catalogues details.
But I felt all of that hard-won distance slipping away.

“Turn off your light?” I suggested, as I did the same.

The surveyor hesitated. After my show of impulsiveness earlier, it would be some time
before she trusted me again. Not the kind of trust that responded unthinkingly to
a request to plunge us into darkness. But she did it. The truth was, I had purposefully
left my gun in its belt holster and she could have extinguished me in a moment with
her assault rifle, with one fluid motion pulling on the strap and freeing it from
her shoulder. This premonition of violence made little rational sense, and yet it
came to me too easily, almost as if placed in my mind by outside forces.

In the dark, as the tower’s heartbeat still throbbed against my eardrums, the letters,
the words, swayed as the walls trembled with their breathing, and I saw that indeed
the words seemed more active, the colors brighter, the strobing more intense than
I remembered it from levels above. It was an even more noticeable effect than if the
words had been written in ink with a fountain pen.
The bright, wet slickness of the new.

Standing there in that impossible place, I said it before the surveyor could, to own
it.

“Something below us is writing this script. Something below us may still be in the
process of writing this script.” We were exploring an organism that might contain
a mysterious second organism, which was itself using yet other organisms to write
words on the wall. It made the overgrown pool of my youth seem simplistic, one-dimensional.

We turned our lights back on. I saw fear in the surveyor’s eyes, but also a strange
determination. I have no idea what she saw in me.

“Why did you say something?” she asked.

I didn’t understand.

“Why did you say ‘something’ rather than ‘someone’? Why can’t it be ‘someone’?”

I just shrugged.

“Get out your gun,” the surveyor said, a hint of disgust in her voice masking some
deeper emotion.

I did as I was told because it didn’t really matter to me. But holding the gun made
me feel clumsy and odd, as if it were the wrong reaction to what might confront us.

Whereas I had taken the lead to this point, now it seemed as if we had switched roles,
and the nature of our exploration changed as a result. Apparently, we had just established
a new protocol. We stopped documenting the words and organisms on the wall. We walked
much more swiftly, our attention focused on interpreting the darkness in front of
us. We spoke in whispers, as if we might be overheard. I went first, with the surveyor
covering me from behind until the curves, where she went first and I followed. At
no point did we speak of turning back. The psychologist watching over us might as
well have been thousands of miles away. We were charged with the nervous energy of
knowing there might be some answer below us. A living, breathing answer.

At least, the surveyor
may
have thought of it in those terms. She couldn’t feel or hear the beating of the walls.
But as we progressed, even I could not see the writer of those words in my mind. All
I could see was what I had seen when I had stared back at the border on our way to
base camp: a fuzzy white blankness. Yet still I knew it could not be human.

Why? For a very good reason—one the surveyor finally noticed another twenty minutes
into our descent.

“There’s something on the floor,” she said.

Yes, there was something on the floor. For a long time now, the steps had been covered
in a kind of residue. I hadn’t stopped to examine it because I hadn’t wanted to unnerve
the surveyor, uncertain if she would ever come to see it. The residue covered a distance
from the edge of the left wall to about two feet from the right wall. This meant it
filled a space on the steps about eight or nine feet wide.

“Let me take a look,” I said, ignoring her quivering finger. I knelt, turning to train
my helmet light on the upper steps behind me. The surveyor walked up to stare over
my shoulder. The residue sparkled with a kind of subdued golden shimmer shot through
with flakes red like dried blood. It seemed partially reflective. I probed it with
a pen.

“It’s slightly viscous, like slime,” I said. “And about half an inch deep over the
steps.”

The overall impression was of something
sliding
down the stairs.

“What about those marks?” the surveyor asked, leaning forward to point again. She
was whispering, which seemed useless to me, and her voice had a catch in it. But every
time I noticed her becoming more panicky, I found it made me calmer.

I studied the marks for a moment. Sliding, perhaps, or
dragged
, but slowly enough to reveal much more in the residue left behind. The marks she
had pointed to were oval, and about a foot long by half a foot wide. Six of them were
splayed over the steps, in two rows. A flurry of indentations inside these shapes
resembled the marks left by cilia. About ten inches outside of these tracks, encircling
them, were two lines. This irregular double circle undulated out and then in again,
almost like the hem of a skirt. Beyond this “hem” were faint indicators of further
“waves,” as of some force emanating from a central body that had left a mark. It resembled
most closely the lines left in sand as the surf recedes during low tide. Except that
something had blurred the lines and made them fuzzy, like charcoal drawings.

This discovery fascinated me. I could not stop staring at the trail, the cilia marks.
I imagined such a creature might correct for the slant of the stairs much like a geo-stabilizing
camera would correct for bumps in a track.