Annihilation - Jeff Vandermeer Page 0,38

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.

A second look, and from the direction of base camp amid the swamp and far distant pines, I could see strands of black smoke, which could have meant anything. But I also could see, from the location of the Tower, a kind of brightness of its own, a sort of refracted phosphorescence, that did not bear thinking about. That I could see it, that I had an affinity to it, agitated me. I was certain no one else left here, not the surveyor, not the psychologist, could see that stirring of the inexplicable.

I turned my attention to the chairs, the table, searching for whatever might give me insight into … anything. After about five minutes, I thought to pull back the rug. A square trapdoor measuring about four feet per side lay hidden there. The latch was set into the wood of the floor. I pushed the table out of the way with a terrible rending sound that made me grit my teeth. Then, swiftly, in case someone waited down there, I threw open the trapdoor, shouting out something inane like “I’ve got a gun!” aiming my weapon with one hand and my flashlight with the other.

I had the distant sense of the weight of my gun dropping to the floor, my flashlight shaking in my hand, though somehow I held on to it. I could not believe what I was staring down at, and I felt lost. The trapdoor opened onto a space about fifteen feet deep and thirty feet wide. The psychologist had clearly been here, for her knapsack, several weapons, bottles of water, and a large flashlight lay off to the left side. But of the psychologist herself there was no sign.

No, what had me gasping for breath, what felt like a punch in the stomach as I dropped to my knees, was the huge mound that dominated the space, a kind of insane midden. I was looking at a pile of papers with hundreds of journals on top of it—just like the ones we had been issued to record our observations of Area X. Each with a job title written on the front. Each, as it turned out, filled with writing. Many, many more than could possibly have been filed by only twelve expeditions.

Can you really imagine what it was like in those first moments, peering down into that dark space, and seeing that? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you’re staring at it now.

* * *

My third and best field assignment out of college required that I travel to a remote location on the western coast, to a curled hook of land at the farthest extremity from civilization, in an area that teetered between temperate and arctic climates. Here the earth had disgorged huge rock formations and old-growth rain forest had sprouted up around them. This world was always moist, the annual rainfall more than seventy inches a year, and not seeing droplets of water on leaves was an extraordinary event. The air was so amazingly clean and the vegetation so dense, so richly green, that every spiral of fern seemed designed to make me feel at peace with the world. Bears and panthers and elk lived in those forests, along with a multitude of bird species. The fish in the streams were mercury-free and enormous.

I lived in a village of about three hundred souls near the coast. I had rented a cottage next to a house at the top of a hill that had belonged to five generations of fisherfolk. A husband and wife, childless, owned the property, and they had the kind of severely laconic quality common to the area. I made no friends there, and I wasn’t sure that even long-standing neighbors were friends, either. Only in the local pub that everyone frequented, after a few pints, would you see signs of friendliness and camaraderie. But violence lived in the pub, too, and I kept away most of the time. I was