Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)(14)

In the dark, as the tower’s heartbeat still throbbed against my eardrums, the letters, the words, swayed as the walls trembled with their breathing, and I saw that indeed the words seemed more active, the colors brighter, the strobing more intense than I remembered it from levels above. It was an even more noticeable effect than if the words had been written in ink with a fountain pen. The bright, wet slickness of the new.

Standing there in that impossible place, I said it before the surveyor could, to own it.

“Something below us is writing this script. Something below us may still be in the process of writing this script.” We were exploring an organism that might contain a mysterious second organism, which was itself using yet other organisms to write words on the wall. It made the overgrown pool of my youth seem simplistic, one-dimensional.

We turned our lights back on. I saw fear in the surveyor’s eyes, but also a strange determination. I have no idea what she saw in me.

“Why did you say something?” she asked.

I didn’t understand.

“Why did you say ‘something’ rather than ‘someone’? Why can’t it be ‘someone’?”

I just shrugged.

“Get out your gun,” the surveyor said, a hint of disgust in her voice masking some deeper emotion.

I did as I was told because it didn’t really matter to me. But holding the gun made me feel clumsy and odd, as if it were the wrong reaction to what might confront us.

Whereas I had taken the lead to this point, now it seemed as if we had switched roles, and the nature of our exploration changed as a result. Apparently, we had just established a new protocol. We stopped documenting the words and organisms on the wall. We walked much more swiftly, our attention focused on interpreting the darkness in front of us. We spoke in whispers, as if we might be overheard. I went first, with the surveyor covering me from behind until the curves, where she went first and I followed. At no point did we speak of turning back. The psychologist watching over us might as well have been thousands of miles away. We were charged with the nervous energy of knowing there might be some answer below us. A living, breathing answer.

At least, the surveyor may have thought of it in those terms. She couldn’t feel or hear the beating of the walls. But as we progressed, even I could not see the writer of those words in my mind. All I could see was what I had seen when I had stared back at the border on our way to base camp: a fuzzy white blankness. Yet still I knew it could not be human.

Why? For a very good reason—one the surveyor finally noticed another twenty minutes into our descent.

“There’s something on the floor,” she said.

Yes, there was something on the floor. For a long time now, the steps had been covered in a kind of residue. I hadn’t stopped to examine it because I hadn’t wanted to unnerve the surveyor, uncertain if she would ever come to see it. The residue covered a distance from the edge of the left wall to about two feet from the right wall. This meant it filled a space on the steps about eight or nine feet wide.

“Let me take a look,” I said, ignoring her quivering finger. I knelt, turning to train my helmet light on the upper steps behind me. The surveyor walked up to stare over my shoulder. The residue sparkled with a kind of subdued golden shimmer shot through with flakes red like dried blood. It seemed partially reflective. I probed it with a pen.

“It’s slightly viscous, like slime,” I said. “And about half an inch deep over the steps.”

The overall impression was of something sliding down the stairs.

“What about those marks?” the surveyor asked, leaning forward to point again. She was whispering, which seemed useless to me, and her voice had a catch in it. But every time I noticed her becoming more panicky, I found it made me calmer.

I studied the marks for a moment. Sliding, perhaps, or dragged, but slowly enough to reveal much more in the residue left behind. The marks she had pointed to were oval, and about a foot long by half a foot wide. Six of them were splayed over the steps, in two rows. A flurry of indentations inside these shapes resembled the marks left by cilia. About ten inches outside of these tracks, encircling them, were two lines. This irregular double circle undulated out and then in again, almost like the hem of a skirt. Beyond this “hem” were faint indicators of further “waves,” as of some force emanating from a central body that had left a mark. It resembled most closely the lines left in sand as the surf recedes during low tide. Except that something had blurred the lines and made them fuzzy, like charcoal drawings.

This discovery fascinated me. I could not stop staring at the trail, the cilia marks. I imagined such a creature might correct for the slant of the stairs much like a geo-stabilizing camera would correct for bumps in a track.

“Have you ever seen anything like that?” the surveyor asked.

“No,” I replied. With an effort, I bit back a more caustic response. “No, I never have.” Certain trilobites, snails, and worms left trails simple by comparison but vaguely similar. I was confident no one back in the world had ever seen a trail this complex or this large.

“What about that?” The surveyor indicated a step a little farther up.

I trained a light on it and saw a suggestion of a boot print in the residue. “Just one of our own boots.” So mundane in comparison. So boring.

The light on her helmet shuddered from side to side as she shook her head. “No. See.”