Annihilation(32)

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.