Annihilation(41)

“No,” I lied.

“Very insightful—about you, especially.”

Was that a bluff? She’d certainly had enough time up in the lighthouse to find it, read it, and toss it back onto the pile.

It didn’t matter. The sky was darkening and encroaching, the waves deepening, the surf making the shorebirds scatter on their stilt legs and then regroup as it receded. The sand seemed suddenly more porous around us. The meandering paths of crabs and worms continued to be written into its surface. A whole community lived here, was going about its business, oblivious to our conversation. And where out there lay the seaward border? When I had asked the psychologist during training she had said only that no one had ever crossed it, and I had imagined expeditions that just evaporated into mist and light and distance.

A rattle had entered the psychologist’s breathing, which was now shallow and inconsistent.

“Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?” Relenting.

“Leave me here when I die,” she said. Now all her fear was visible. “Don’t bury me. Don’t take me anywhere. Leave me here where I belong.”

“Is there anything else you’re willing to tell me?”

“We should never have come here. I should never have come here.” The rawness in her tone hinted at a personal anguish that went beyond her physical condition.

“That’s all?”

“I’ve come to believe it is the one fundamental truth.”

I took her to mean that it was better to let the border advance, to ignore it, let it affect some other, more distant generation. I didn’t agree with her, but I said nothing. Later, I would come to believe she had meant something altogether different.

“Has anyone ever really come back from Area X?”

“Not for a long time now,” the psychologist said in a tired whisper. “Not really.” But I don’t know if she had heard the question.

Her head sagged downward and she lost consciousness, then came to again and stared out at the waves. She muttered a few words, one of which might have been “remote” or “demote” and another that might have been “hatching” or “watching.” But I could not be sure.

Soon dusk would descend. I gave her more water. It was hard to think of her as an adversary the closer she came to death, even though clearly she knew so much more than she had told me. Regardless, it didn’t bear much thought because she wasn’t going to divulge anything else. And maybe I had looked to her like a flame as I came near. Maybe that was the only way she could think of me now.

“Did you know about the pile of journals?” I asked. “Before we came here?”

But she did not answer.

* * *

There were things I had to do after she died, even though I was running short of daylight, even though I did not like doing them. If she wouldn’t answer my questions while alive, then she would have to answer some of them now. I took off the psychologist’s jacket and laid it to the side, discovering in the process that she had hidden her own journal in a zippered inside pocket, folded up. I put that to the side, too, under a stone, the pages flapping in the gusts of wind.

Then I took out my penknife and, with great care, cut away the left sleeve of her shirt. The sponginess of her shoulder had bothered me, and I saw I’d had good reason to be concerned. From her collarbone down to her elbow, her arm had been colonized by a fibrous green-gold fuzziness, which gave off a faint glow. From the indentations and long rift running down her triceps, it appeared to have spread from an initial wound—the wound she said she had received from the Crawler. Whatever had contaminated me, this different and more direct contact had spread faster and had more disastrous consequences. Certain parasites and fruiting bodies could cause not just paranoia but schizophrenia, all-too-realistic hallucinations, and thus promote delusional behavior. I had no doubt now that she had seen me as a flame approaching, that she had attributed her inability to shoot me to some exterior force, that she had been assailed by the fear of some approaching presence. If nothing else, the memory of the encounter with the Crawler would, I imagined, have unhinged her to some degree.

I cut a skin sample from her arm, along with some of the flesh beneath, and prodded it into a collection vial. Then I took another sample from her other arm. Once I got back to base camp, I would examine both.

I was shaking a little by then, so I took a break, turned my attention to the journal. It was devoted to transcribing the words on the wall of the Tower, was filled with so many new passages:

… but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive …