Annihilation

As she walks alone to the lighthouse, the biologist reflects on what she discovered inside the tower. She thinks about “the spores I had inhaled, which pointed to a truthful seeing” (90). She continues to feel a brightness in her chest, which she believes is an effect of the spores, and notes, “I believed I could have run a marathon” (93). She reaches a deserted village halfway to the lighthouse. There, she observes, “Only a few roofs remained on the twelve or thirteen houses, and the trail through had crumbled into porous rubble” (96). In the remains of the houses, she sees strange growths of lichen or moss that resemble human forms. She collects samples from these figures, as well as of dead animals nearby. As she leaves the village, she sees movement in the water of the canal. Some dolphins breach. One of them looks at her with an eye that is “painfully human, almost familiar” (97).

The narrator approaches the lighthouse, aware that she is visible to anyone who might be watching her from there. She notices walls and fortifications surrounding the tower, including on the sea-facing side. Shards of glass are attached to the sides of the lighthouse to keep out intruders. The front door of the lighthouse “had exploded inward and only fragments of wood clung to the rusted hinges” (100). The narrator enters the ground floor of the lighthouse with her gun drawn. The rooms she finds are empty. She finds stairs in an open space. After exploring the back room, which shows signs of “unspeakable and sudden violence” (101), the narrator begins to climb the stairs. She finds more bloodstains and signs of violence on the walls, as well as scribbled phrases and words. On the stairs she sees objects like shoes and a clipboard. At a landing around halfway up, she finds “a stack of guns and rifles, some of them ancient, some of them not army-issue” (103).

The narrator finds a photo nailed to a wall. It depicts two men standing at the base of the lighthouse. A circle is drawn around one of the men. He is “about fifty years old and wore a fisherman’s cap. A sharp eagle’s eye gleamed out from a heavy face, the left eye lost to his squint” (103). The narrator believes he was the lighthouse keeper. She puts the photo in her pocket. She reaches the lantern room at the top of the steps but finds no one there. She can see for miles in all directions. In the direction of the base camp, she sees black smoke, and in the direction of the tower, she observes “a kind of brightness of its own, a sort of refracted phosphorescence” (105).

The narrator finds a trapdoor beneath a rug. She opens it and finds a wide space that shows signs of the psychologist having been there recently. She also sees an enormous mound of papers and journals belonging to previous members of Area X expeditions: “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” (106). The pile of journals and materials is “about twelve feet high and sixteen feet wide” (111). The narrator begins to pick up and read them at random. She wonders how many expeditions there were before the 12 she knows of. One journal describes an attack on the lighthouse coming from the sea, but without identifying who the attackers were. She finds references to the words in the tower in many journals. She notes that journals from some expeditions are missing.

The narrator finds the journal of her husband near the top of the pile. Rather than reading it, she decides to take it back to base camp with her, along with some other journals and two of the psychologist’s guns. While looking out from a ledge at the top of the lighthouse, she spots “a foot and the end of a leg, amid a flurry of disrupted sand” (119). She recognizes the pant leg and boot as belonging to the psychologist.