Annihilation (7 page)

“Have you ever seen anything like that?” the surveyor asked.

“No,” I replied. With an effort, I bit back a more caustic response. “No, I never
have.” Certain trilobites, snails, and worms left trails simple by comparison but
vaguely similar. I was confident no one back in the world had ever seen a trail this
complex or this large.

“What about
that
?” The surveyor indicated a step a little farther up.

I trained a light on it and saw a suggestion of a boot print in the residue. “Just
one of our own boots.” So mundane in comparison. So boring.

The light on her helmet shuddered from side to side as she shook her head. “No. See.”

She pointed out my boot prints and hers. This imprint was from a third set, and headed
back up the steps.

“You’re right,” I said. “That’s another person, down here not long ago.”

The surveyor started cursing.

At the time, we didn’t think to look for more sets of boot prints.

*   *   *

According to the records we had been shown, the first expedition reported nothing
unusual in Area X, just pristine, empty wilderness. After the second and third expeditions
did not return, and their fate became known, the expeditions were shut down for a
time. When they began again, it was using carefully chosen volunteers who might at
least know a measure of the full risk. Since then, some expeditions had been more
successful than others.

The eleventh expedition in particular had been difficult—and personally difficult
for me with regard to a fact about which I have not been entirely honest thus far.

My husband was on the eleventh expedition as a medic. He had never wanted to be a
doctor, had always wanted to be in first response or working in trauma. “A triage
nurse in the field,” as he put it. He had been recruited for Area X by a friend, who
remembered him from when they had both worked for the navy, before he switched over
to ambulance service. At first he hadn’t said yes, had been unsure, but over time
they convinced him. It caused a lot of strife between us, although we already had
many difficulties.

I know this information might not be hard for anyone to find out, but I have hoped
that in reading this account, you might find me a credible, objective witness. Not
someone who volunteered for Area X because of some other event unconnected to the
purpose of the expeditions. And, in a sense, this is still true, and my husband’s
status as a member of an expedition is in many ways irrelevant to why I signed up.

But how could I not be affected by Area X, if only through him? One night, about a
year after he had headed for the border, as I lay alone in bed, I heard someone in
the kitchen. Armed with a baseball bat, I left the bedroom and turned on all the lights
in the house. I found my husband next to the refrigerator, still dressed in his expedition
clothes, drinking milk until it flowed down his chin and neck. Eating leftovers furiously.

I was speechless. I could only stare at him as if he were a mirage and if I moved
or said anything he would dissipate into nothing, or less than nothing.

We sat in the living room, him on the sofa and me in a chair opposite. I needed some
distance from this sudden apparition. He did not remember how he had left Area X,
did not remember the journey home at all. He had only the vaguest recollection of
the expedition itself. There was an odd calm about him, punctured only by moments
of remote panic when, in asking him what had happened, he recognized that his amnesia
was unnatural. Gone from him, too, seemed to be any memory of how our marriage had
begun to disintegrate well before our arguments over his leaving for Area X. He contained
within him now the very distance he had in so many subtle and not so subtle ways accused
me of in the past.

After a time, I couldn’t take it any longer. I took off his clothes, made him shower,
then led him into the bedroom and made love to him with me on top. I was trying to
reclaim remnants of the man I remembered, the one who, so unlike me, was outgoing
and impetuous and always wanted to be of use. The man who had been a passionate recreational
sailor, and for two weeks out of the year went with friends to the coast to go boating.
I could find none of that in him now.

The whole time he was inside me he looked up at my face with an expression that told
me he did remember me but only through a kind of fog. It helped for a while, though.
It made him more real, allowed me to pretend.

But only for a while. I only had him in my life again for about twenty-four hours.
They came for him the next evening, and once I went through the long, drawn-out process
of receiving security clearance, I visited him in the observation facility right up
until the end. That antiseptic place where they tested him and tried without success
to break through both his calm and his amnesia. He would greet me like an old friend—an
anchor of sorts, to make sense of his existence—but not like a lover. I confess I
went because I had hopes that there remained some spark of the man I’d once known.
But I never really found it. Even the day I was told he had been diagnosed with inoperable,
systemic cancer, my husband stared at me with a slightly puzzled expression on his
face.

He died six months later. During all that time, I could never get beyond the mask,
could never find the man I had known inside of him. Not through my personal interactions
with him, not through eventually watching the interviews with him and the other members
of the expedition, all of whom died of cancer as well.

Whatever had happened in Area X, he had not come back. Not really.

*   *   *

Ever farther down into the darkness we went, and I had to ask myself if any of this
had been experienced by my husband. I did not know how my infection changed things.
Was I on the same journey, or had he found something completely different? If similar,
how had his reactions been different, and how had that changed what happened next?

The path of slime grew thicker and we could now tell that the red flecks were living
organisms discharged by whatever lay below, for they wriggled in the viscous layer.
The color of the substance had intensified so that it resembled a sparkling golden
carpet set out for us to tread upon on our way to some strange yet magnificent banquet.

“Should we go back?” the surveyor would say, or I would say.

And the other would say, “Just around the next corner. Just a little farther, and
then we will go back.” It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity
and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred
to be ignorant or unsafe. The feel of our boots as we advanced step by careful step
through that viscous discharge, the way in which the stickiness seemed to mire us
even as we managed to keep moving, would eventually end in inertia, we knew. If we
pushed it too far.

But then the surveyor rounded a corner ahead of me and recoiled into me, shoved me
back up the steps, and I let her.

“There’s something down there,” she whispered in my ear. “Something like a body or
a person.”

I didn’t point out that a body could be a person. “Is it writing words on the wall?”

“No—
slumped down
by the side of the wall. I only caught a glimpse.” Her breathing came quick and shallow
against her mask.

“A man or a woman?” I asked.

“I
thought
it was a person,” she said, ignoring my question. “I thought it was a person. I thought
it was.” Bodies were one thing; no amount of training could prepare you for encountering
a monster.

But we could not climb back out of the tower without first investigating this new
mystery. We could not. I grabbed her by the shoulders, made her look at me. “You said
it’s like a person sitting down against the side of the wall. That’s
not
whatever we’ve been tracking. This has to do with the
other boot print
. You know that. We can risk taking a look at whatever this is, and then we will go
back up. This is as far as we go
,
no matter what we find, I promise.”

The surveyor nodded. The idea of this being the extent of it, of not going farther
down, was enough to steady her.
Just get through this last thing, and you’ll see the sunlight soon.

We started back down. The steps seemed particularly slippery now, even though it might
have been our jitters, and we walked slowly, using the blank slate of the right wall
to keep our balance. The tower was silent, holding its breath, its heartbeat suddenly
slow and far more distant than before, or perhaps I could only hear the blood rushing
through my head.

Turning the corner, I saw the figure and shone my helmet light on it. If I’d hesitated
a second longer, I never would have had the nerve. It was the body of the anthropologist,
slumped against the left-hand wall, her hands in her lap, her head down as if in prayer,
something green spilling out from her mouth. Her clothing seemed oddly fuzzy, indistinct.
A faint golden glow arose from her body, almost imperceptible; I imagined the surveyor
could not see it at all. In no scenario could I imagine the anthropologist alive.
All I could think was,
The psychologist lied to us
, and suddenly the pressure of her presence far above, guarding the entrance, was
pressing down on me in an intolerable way.

I put out a palm to the surveyor, indicating that she should stay where she was, behind
me, and I stepped forward, light pointed down into the darkness. I walked past the
body far enough to confirm the stairs below were empty, then hurried back up.

“Keep watch while I take a look at the body,” I said. I didn’t tell her I had sensed
a faint, echoing suggestion of
something
much farther below, moving slowly.

“It
is
a body?” the surveyor said. Perhaps she had expected something far stranger. Perhaps
she thought the figure was just sleeping.

“It’s the anthropologist,” I said, and saw that information register in the tensing
of her shoulders. Without another word, she brushed past me to take up a position
just beyond the body, assault rifle aimed into the darkness.

Gently, I knelt beside the anthropologist. There wasn’t much left of her face, and
odd burn marks were all over the remaining skin. Spilling out from her broken jaw,
which looked as though someone had wrenched it open in a single act of brutality,
was a torrent of green ash that sat on her chest in a mound. Her hands, palms up in
her lap, had no skin left on them, only a kind of gauzy filament and more burn marks.
Her legs seemed fused together and half-melted, one boot missing and one flung against
the wall. Strewn around the anthropologist were some of the same sample tubes I had
brought with me. Her black box, crushed, lay several feet from her body.

“What happened to her?” the surveyor whispered. She kept taking quick, nervous glances
back at me as she stood guard, almost as if whatever had happened wasn’t over. As
if she expected the anthropologist to come back to horrifying life.

I didn’t answer her. All I could have said was
I don’t know
, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence.
Or both.

I shone my light on the wall above the anthropologist. For several feet, the script
on the wall became erratic, leaping up and dipping down, before regaining its equilibrium.

… the shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom
within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear …

“I think she interrupted the creator of the script on the wall,” I said.

“And it did that to her?” She was pleading with me to find some other explanation.

I didn’t have one, so I didn’t reply, just went back to observing as she stood there,
watching me.

A biologist is not a detective, but I began to think like a detective. I surveyed
the ground to all sides, identifying first my own boot prints on the steps and then
the surveyor’s. We had obscured the original tracks, but you could still see traces.
First of all, the
thing
—and no matter what the surveyor might hope, I could not think of it as human—had
clearly turned in a frenzy. Instead of the smooth sliding tracks, the slime residue
formed a kind of clockwise swirl, the marks of the “feet,” as I thought of them, elongated
and narrowed by the sudden change. But on top of this swirl, I could also see boot
prints. I retrieved the one boot, being careful to walk around the edges of the evidence
of the encounter. The boot prints in the middle of the swirl were indeed from the
anthropologist—and I could follow partial imprints back up the right-hand side of
the wall, as if she had been hugging it.

An image began to form in my mind, of the anthropologist creeping down in the dark
to observe the creator of the script. The glittering glass tubes strewn around her
body made me think that she had hoped to take a sample. But how insane or oblivious!
Such a risk, and the anthropologist had never struck me as impulsive or brave. I stood
there for a moment, and then backtracked even farther up the stairs as I motioned
to the surveyor, much to her distress, to hold her position. Perhaps if there had
been something to shoot she would have been calmer, but we were left with only what
lingered in our imaginations.

Another dozen steps up, right where you could still have a slit of a view of the dead
anthropologist, I found two sets of boot prints, facing each other. One set belonged
to the anthropologist. The other was neither mine nor the surveyor’s.

Something clicked into place, and I could see it all in my head. In the middle of
the night, the psychologist had woken the anthropologist, put her under hypnosis,
and together they had come to the tower and climbed down this far. At this point,
the psychologist had given the anthropologist an order, under hypnosis, one that she
probably knew was suicidal, and the anthropologist had walked right up to the thing
that was writing the words on the wall and tried to take a sample—and died trying,
probably in agony. The psychologist had then fled; certainly, as I walked back down
I could find no trace of her boot prints below that point.