Annihilation

As the biologist walks to the lighthouse, she observes the environment with new eyes: the marshes, the algae in the lakes, the oases of trees, the strange quality of light and the sense of waiting—which brings her “halfway to a kind of ecstasy.” She follows the path alongside driftwood, red grasshoppers, huge reptiles, walking for a long time without any sense of getting closer to the lighthouse.

The biologist thinks about what she found in the tower and the expedition overall. She knows an organism was writing living words along the tower, and whole ecosystems flourished among the words before dying off. The adaptation of the creatures led her to a “truthful seeing,” trying to tell her something about the tower. She has more questions: if the words mattered and where they came from, or if the organisms used words the way that birds incorporated whatever was on hand into their nest-building materials. Perhaps this is why the expeditions aren’t allowed technology in Area X, so that the organisms won’t be able to use it, either.

The biologist posits that the words are essential to the well-being of the Tower or the Crawler (the thing writing the words) or both. The Crawler and the Tower could be intelligent and could have free will. They may want to create ritual, or they actually might be communicating. Perhaps the Crawler is communicating to the Tower, but the biologist realizes that there are too many possibilities, and she only has a small piece of what is a frighteningly large puzzle. By the time she reaches the deserted village at the halfway point to the lighthouse, the sense of brightness and energy in her chest from the spores continues—a feeling that she doesn’t trust.

Prior to an Event 30 years earlier that locked Area X behind the border and began the inexplicable occurrences, the area had been part of a wilderness adjacent to a military base. People lived there on a wildlife refuge and quickly disappeared during the Event. When Area X first appeared, there was vagueness and confusion about it, and few people know that it exists: the public story is that it is a remnant of a localized environmental catastrophe, reported in stories in such a way that people didn’t notice it very much. Within a year or two, it was the province of many conspiracy theories.

During training, the biologist was told that the first expedition went in two years after the Event, setting up the base camp and providing a rough map. They discovered a pristine wilderness but felt a sense of being watched. Other members reported feelings of euphoria and extreme sexual desire. The biologist never saw their journals; she only heard recorded interviews. Some of their descriptions seemed inconsistent, like images of a village in a state of decay much longer than a few years old. The biologist is now convinced that she and the other members of the expeditions were given inconsistent information about Area X because their superiors knew that few, if any, of them would actually come back.

When the biologist reaches the deserted village—halfway to the lighthouse—she sees it has 12 or 13 houses. Few of them have roofs or exterior walls that remain, leaving open views of their interiors: chairs, tables, a child’s toys. There are eruptions of vegetation that form approximations of limbs and heads and torsos—one “standing” and several “sitting” in a living room with a coffee table and couch, all facing one direction. The biologist takes samples of everything she can.

As the biologist leaves the village, she sees something coming towards her in the nearby canal. She pulls out her gun until dolphins rise up out of the water. But when one swims close to her, she notices that the dolphin’s eyes seem “painfully human.” She only catches a glimpse as they submerge again, unsure of what she is seeing. She is shaken, worried that the natural world has become a kind of camouflage for something, and she continues toward the lighthouse.

The biologist reaches the lighthouse around noon, exhausted. She takes her gun out, leery of the little window halfway up and the large windows at the top. Up close it looks more like a fortress than a lighthouse, with outer fortifications that appear to have been built after the original construction. There are lines of sight for rifles placed in the walls, along with shards of glass attached and barbed wire forming a collar around the lighthouse for defense. 

The lighthouse is also in disrepair: an external wall on the landward side reflects years of neglect, and the door to the lighthouse is now only fragments of wood. Vines have started to “colonize” the walls. Warily, the biologist picks up a stone and rolls it through the front opening, but she hears no other sound. Gun still drawn, she enters silently, sliding against the wall.

The outer rooms at the lighthouse’s base are empty. It is dark inside, so the biologist uses her flashlight. In the front rooms, the floor is covered in debris, and oak tables have been overturned to form defensive barricades, full of bullet holes and half-melted. There are bloody splotches on the walls, and dust has settled over everything.

The biologist then ascends the stairs, finding more bloodstains on the walls, phrases that tracked remaining supplies, and confessions from people who must have thought they would die very soon. She finds discarded shoes, vials of samples, a crucifix, a clipboard, and a dilapidated toy—though the biologist didn’t think any children had come to Area X.

The biologist comes to another landing, which has seemingly been cleaned. Opposite a tiny window is a faded photograph with two men and a girl at the base of the lighthouse. A circle is drawn around one of the men, who is about 50 years old with a sharp eye and a thick beard. To the biologist, it seems like this man was the lighthouse keeper. In the photo, the lighthouse looks to be in good repair, and she wonders when the photograph was taken. She thinks that none of his work mattered in the end, before thinking that he could possibly still be there, waiting for her. She pockets the photograph, thinking that she was not the first to do so, nor would she be the last.

The higher the biologist climbs, the more she thinks that someone must be living there—it smells like soap, and the walls are clean. She takes her gun out, but when she reaches the lantern room, no one is there: just chairs and a rickety table and a rug. The beacon itself is dormant, and she can see for miles—the village, the base camp, and the Tower. There is a kind of phosphorescent brightness emanating from the Tower, and she is frustrated that she is the only one who can see it and that she is the only one drawn to “that stirring of the inexplicable.”

The biologist searches the room. When she pulls back the rug, she finds a trap door. She opens it, pointing her gun, and she gasps at what she finds: a space 15 feet deep and 30 feet wide. The psychologist has been there, as her knapsack and other supplies are there, though she is not in the room. But there are also hundreds of journals like the one she was issued—many more than could have been filled by only 12 expeditions. She asks if the reader can imagine what it was like to see that, before commenting that they might be staring at that exact view now.

The biologist’s third field assignment out of college involved traveling to a remote location in a very cold climate, where forest had grown up around rock formations. Bears, panthers, and elks lived in the forest, and she lived in a village of about 300 people near the coast. She made no friends there, and neighbors seemed not to be friends either, except in the local pub. This was four years before she met her husband.

Every day, the biologist drove a dangerous winding road to a place called Rock Bay. It held complex tidal pools that she would photograph and take measurements of. She could lose hours there, grateful for the solitude. During the drives back, she grieved the end of this happiness, knowing that her research grant only covered two years. She gradually spent more and more time in the pub, and she would wake with a fuzziness, sometimes with a stranger.

The biologist thought, after a time, that she had become part of the community—the “old biologist” the locals saw out on the rocks, obsessed with the mussels, who’s been there for ages. Looking at the journals, the biologist feels that she has truly become that “old biologist,” the world “colonizing” her and forcing her to “live in its reality.”

At some point during their relationship, the biologist’s husband started calling her the “ghost bird,” as a way of teasing her for not being present in his life. If they went to bars with his friends, she wouldn’t talk much with them. All of her hobbies were bound up in her work, but she didn’t like to talk about her research and wasn’t interested in pop culture. She liked being out but existing apart. Her disengagement, however, ate into his enjoyment of talking to his friends. Observation has always meant more to her than interaction, like observing the pool, and she liked to observe the bar ecosystem rather than live within it.

The journals confront the biologist with her husband’s death all over again, knowing his account is likely there. Once, he asked her if she loved and needed him. She loved him, but she didn’t need him, and she felt that was the way it was supposed to be for her. Nothing could override the desire to understand the tides, seasons, and rhythms around her.

Some of the journals are turning to mulch in the bottoms of stacks, embodying the scraps of writing in the Tower: “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…” The biologist lays the table across the entrance to the stairwell, so that if the psychologist comes, the biologist will hear her. The biologist again feels a growing brightness inside her, and she lowers herself into the cool, dark space.

The biologist chooses journals at random, realizing that the dates—found in a journal from the “first expedition”—do not make sense with the information she was given. She wonders how many expeditions there have really been, and if those details are being hidden so as not to discourage volunteers. There is also an archive of audiocassettes and photos. She wonders how to go through it all, skimming journals before coming across horrible accounts of “unspeakable acts.”

Sometimes omissions are worse than inclusions. The biologist finds a journal in which the writer focused solely on a particular plant and never described a glimpse of base camp or his life. She perceives a “terrible presence hovering in the background of these entries,” like the Crawler, and wonders if the focus is a way of coping with that horror. She also notices that the Tower fits into this theory as well, because it is never directly referenced. She is relieved when the latter part of the book dissolves into ruined ink, because she could have read it for a long time, transfixed.

The biologist then finds a journal that isn’t the same type as her own. It dates back to before the first expedition and references building the lighthouse’s fortifications. She reads an entry about “repelling an attack,” though she doesn’t find information on the attackers, only that the attack left four people dead. Later, their desperation grows; their ammunition is low, and they can’t find rational explanations for all that has happened.

The biologist finds that, to the expeditions, the lighthouse is a symbol providing an illusion of safe refuge. But to survive Area X, she thinks, you have to fade into the landscape or pretend the danger (the “brightness” inside the biologist) isn’t there. At some point, the biologist starts to panic at the volume of the journals, becoming literally buried in the papers when she tries to sort through them.

The first sentence that the biologist found in the Tower appears in a surprising number of the journals, but the others find it just as mysterious as she does. She realizes she could search the pages for years and never understand the right secrets. She thinks that she has to either go back to base camp before nightfall or remain at the lighthouse. She doesn’t want to travel in the dark, and if she doesn’t return, the surveyor will likely leave without her.

The biologist decides on one last effort, climbing to the top of a pile to find more recent journals, including her husband’s. She dreads it, feeling as though she’s stealing a private diary, even though she knows he was always open and felt she was the one hiding things. She can’t bring herself to read it yet, but she takes it and a handful of others, along with two of the psychologist’s guns, and climbs out.

As the biologist emerges from the trapdoor and sees the sky and sea’s beauty around her, she realizes that she’s no longer fooled by it, after so many people have been sacrificed to the place. She wonders why the government keeps sending expeditions. Then, when she steps out onto the outer railing to get some air, she’s horrified to notice a body in the sand below her: the psychologist.