Annihilation(35)

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The journals and other materials formed a moldering pile about twelve feet high and sixteen feet wide that in places near the bottom had clearly turned to compost, the paper rotting away. Beetles and silverfish tended to those archives, and tiny black cockroaches with always moving antennae. Toward the base, and spilling out at the edges, I saw the remains of photographs and dozens of ruined cassette tapes mixed in with the mulch of pages. There, too, I saw evidence of rats. I would have to lower myself down into the midden by means of the ladder nailed to the lip of the trapdoor and trudge through a collapsing garbage hill of disintegrating pulp to uncover anything at all. The scene obliquely embodied the scrap of writing I had encountered on the Tower wall:… the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives …

I overturned the table and laid it across the narrow entrance to the stairwell. I had no idea where the psychologist had gotten to, but I didn’t want her or anyone else surprising me. If someone tried to move the table from below, I would hear it and have time to climb up to greet them with my gun. I also had a sensation I can in hindsight attribute to the brightness growing within me: of a presence pressing up from below, impinging on the edges of my senses. A prickling crept across my skin at unexpected times, for no good reason.

I didn’t like that the psychologist had stashed all of her gear down with the journals, including what appeared to be most or all of her weapons. For the moment, though, I had to put the puzzle of that out of my mind, along with the still-reverberating tremors from the certain knowledge that most of the training the Southern Reach had given us had been based on a lie. As I lowered myself into that cool, dark, sheltered space beneath, I felt the pull of the brightness within me even more acutely. That was harder to ignore, since I didn’t know what it meant.

My flashlight, along with the natural light from the open trapdoor, revealed that the walls of the room were rife with striations of mold, some of which formed dull stripes of red and green. From below, the way the midden spilled out in ripples and hillocks of paper became more apparent. Torn pages, crushed pages, journal covers warped and damp. Slowly the history of exploring Area X could be said to be turning into Area X.

I picked around the edges at first, chose journals at random. Most, at a glance, depicted quite ordinary events, such as those described by the first expedition … which could not have been the first expedition. Some were extraordinary only because the dates did not make sense. How many expeditions had really come across the border? Just how much information had been doctored and suppressed, and for how long? Did “twelve” expeditions refer only to the latest iteration of a longer effort, the omission of the rest necessary to quell the doubts of those approached to be volunteers?

What I would call pre-expedition accounts, documented in a variety of forms, also existed in that place. This was the underlying archive of audiocassettes, chewed-at photographs, and decomposing folders full of papers that I had first glimpsed from above—all of it oppressed by the weight of the journals on top. All of it suffused by a dull, damp smell that contained within it a masked sharp stench of decay, which revealed itself in some places and not others. A bewildering confusion of typewritten, printed, and handwritten words piled up in my head alongside half-seen images like a mental facsimile of the midden itself. The clutter at times brought me close to becoming frozen, even without factoring in the contradictions. I became aware of the weight of the photograph in my pocket.

I made some initial rules, as if that would help. I ignored journals that appeared to be written in a shorthand and did not try to decipher those that appeared to be in code. I also started out reading some journals straight through and then decided to force myself to skim. But sampling was sometimes worse. I came across pages that described unspeakable acts that I still cannot bring myself to set down in words. Entries that mentioned periods of “remission” and “cessation” followed by “flare-ups” and “horrible manifestations.” No matter how long Area X had existed, and how many expeditions had come here, I could tell from these accounts that for years before there had ever been a border, strange things had happened along this coast. There had been a proto–Area X.

Some types of omissions made my mind itch as much as more explicit offerings. One journal, half-destroyed by the damp, focused solely on the qualities of a kind of thistle with a lavender blossom that grew in the hinterlands between forest and swamp. Page after page described encountering first one specimen of this thistle and then another, along with minute details about the insects and other creatures that occupied that microhabitat. In no instance did the observer stray more than a foot or two from a particular plant, and at no point, either, did the observer pull back to provide a glimpse of base camp or their own life. After a while, a kind of unease came over me as I began to perceive a terrible presence hovering in the background of these entries. I saw the Crawler or some surrogate approaching in that space just beyond the thistle, and the single focus of the journal keeper a way of coping with that horror. An absence is not a presence, but still with each new depiction of a thistle, a shiver worked deeper and deeper into my spine. When the latter part of the book dissolved into ruined ink and moist pulp, I was almost relieved to be rid of that unnerving repetition, for there had been a hypnotic, trancelike quality to the accounts. If there had been an endless number of pages, I feared that I would have stood there reading for an eternity, until I fell to the floor and died of thirst or starvation.