Against the awful pressure of that light, as if the entire weight of Area X were concentrated here, I changed tactics, tried to focus just on the creation of the words on the wall, the impression of a head or a helmet or … what?… somewhere above the arm. A cascade of sparks that I knew were living organisms. A new word upon the wall. And me still not seeing, and the brightness coiled within me assumed an almost hushed quality, as if we were in a cathedral.
The enormity of this experience combined with the heartbeat and the crescendo of sound from its ceaseless writing to fill me up until I had no room left. This moment, which I might have been waiting for my entire life all unknowing—this moment of an encounter with the most beautiful, the most terrible thing I might ever experience—was beyond me. What inadequate recording equipment I had brought with me and what an inadequate name I had chosen for it—the Crawler. Time elongated, was nothing but fuel for the words this thing had created on the wall for who knew how many years for who knew what purpose.
I don’t know how long I stood at the threshold, watching the Crawler, frozen. I might have watched it forever and never noticed the awful passage of the years.
But then what?
What occurs after revelation and paralysis?
Either death or a slow and certain thawing. A returning to the physical world. It is not that I became used to the Crawler’s presence but that I reached a point—a single infinitesimal moment—when I once again recognized that the Crawler was an organism. A complex, unique, intricate, awe-inspiring, dangerous organism. It might be inexplicable. It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect—but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.
With an effort I could feel in the groan of my limbs, a dislocation in my bones, I managed to turn my back on the Crawler.
Just that simple, wrenching act was such a relief, as I hugged the far wall in all its cool roughness. I closed my eyes—why did I need vision when all it did was keep betraying me?—and started to crab-walk my way back, still feeling the light upon my back. Feeling the music from the words. The gun I had forgotten all about digging into my hip. The very idea of gun now seemed as pathetic and useless as the word sample. Both implied aiming at something. What was there to aim at?
I had only made it a step or two when I felt a rising sense of heat and weight and a kind of licking, lapping wetness, as if the thick light was transforming into the sea itself. I had thought perhaps I was about to escape, but it wasn’t true. With just one more step away, as I began to choke, I realized that the light had become a sea.
Somehow, even though I was not truly underwater, I was drowning.
The franticness that rose within me was the awful formless panic of a child who had fallen into a fountain and known, for the first time, as her lungs filled with water, that she could die. There was no end to it, no way to get past it. I was awash in a brothy green-blue ocean alight with sparks. And I just kept on drowning and struggling against the drowning, until some part of me realized I would keep drowning forever. I imagined tumbling from the rocks, falling, battered by the surf. Washing up thousands of miles from where I was, unrecognizable, in some other form, but still retaining the awful memory of this moment.
Then I felt the impression from behind me of hundreds of eyes beginning to turn in my direction, staring at me. I was a thing in a swimming pool being observed by a monstrous little girl. I was a mouse in an empty lot being tracked by a fox. I was the prey the starfish had reached up and pulled down into the tidal pool.
In some watertight compartment, the brightness told me I had to accept that I would not survive that moment. I wanted to live—I really did. But I couldn’t any longer. I couldn’t even breathe any longer. So I opened my mouth and welcomed the water, welcomed the torrent. Except it wasn’t really water. And the eyes upon me were not eyes, and I was pinned there now by the Crawler, had let it in, I realized, so that its full regard was upon me and I could not move, could not think, was helpless and alone.
A raging waterfall crashed down on my mind, but the water was comprised of fingers, a hundred fingers, probing and pressing down into the skin of my neck, and then punching up through the bone of the back of my skull and into my brain … and then the pressure eased even though the impression of unlimited force did not let up and for a time, still drowning, an icy calm came over me, and through the calm bled a kind of monumental blue-green light. I smelled a burning inside my own head and there came a moment when I screamed, my skull crushed to dust and reassembled, mote by mote.
There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.
It was the most agony I have ever been in, as if a metal rod had been repeatedly thrust into me and then the pain distributed like a second skin inside the contours of my outline. Everything became tinged with the red. I blacked out. I came to. I blacked out, came to, blacked out, still perpetually gasping for breath, knees buckling, scrabbling at the wall for support. My mouth opened so wide from the shrieking that something popped in my jaw. I think I stopped breathing for a minute but the brightness inside experienced no such interruption. It just kept oxygenating my blood.
Then the terrible invasiveness was gone, ripped away, and with it the sensation of drowning and the thick sea that had surrounded me. There came a push, and the Crawler tossed me aside, down the steps beyond it. I washed up there, bruised and crumpled. With nothing to lean against, I fell like a sack, crumbling before something that was never meant to be, something never meant to invade me. I sucked in air in great shuddering gasps.
But I couldn’t stay there, still within the range of its regard. I had no choice now. Throat raw, my insides feeling eviscerated, I flung myself down into the greater dark below the Crawler, on my hands and knees at first, scrabbling to escape, taken over by a blind, panicked impulse to get out of the sight of it.
Only when the light behind me had faded, only when I felt safe, did I drop to the floor again. I lay there for a long time. Apparently, I was recognizable to the Crawler now. Apparently, I was words it could understand, unlike the anthropologist. I wondered if my cells would long be able to hide their transformation from me. I wondered if this was the beginning of the end. But mostly I felt the utter relief of having passed a gauntlet, if barely. The brightness deep within was curled up, traumatized.
* * *
Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable. I don’t know when I managed to stand again, to continue on, legs rubbery. I don’t know how long that took, but eventually I got up.
Soon the spiral stairs straightened out, and with this straightening, the stifling humidity abruptly lessened and the tiny creatures that lived on the wall were no longer to be seen, and the sounds from the Crawler above took on a more muffled texture. Though I still saw the ghosts of past scrawlings on the wall, even my own luminescence became muted here. I was wary of that tracery of words, as if somehow they could hurt me as surely as the Crawler, and yet there was some comfort in following them. Here the variations were more legible and now made more sense to me. And it came for me. And it cast out all else. Retraced again and again. Were the words more naked down here, or did I just possess more knowledge now?
I couldn’t help but notice that these new steps shared the depth and width of the lighthouse steps almost exactly. Above me, the unbroken surface of the ceiling had changed so that now a profusion of deep, curving grooves crisscrossed it.
I stopped to drink water. I stopped to catch my breath. The aftershock of the encounter with the Crawler was still washing over me in waves. When I continued, it was with a kind of numbed awareness that there might be more revelations still to absorb, that I had to prepare myself. Somehow.
A few minutes later, a tiny rectangular block of fuzzy white light began to take form, shape, far below. As I descended, it became larger with a reluctance I can only call hesitation. After another half hour, I thought it must be a kind of door, but the haziness remained, almost as if it were obscuring itself.
The closer I got, and with it still distant, the more I was also certain that this door bore an uncanny resemblance to the door I had seen in my glance back after having crossed the border on our way to base camp. The very vagueness of it triggered this response because it was a specific kind of vagueness.
In the next half hour after that, I began to feel an instinctual urge to turn back, which I overrode by telling myself I could not yet face the return journey and the Crawler again. But the grooves in the ceiling hurt to look at, as if they ran across the outside of my own skull, continually being remade there. They had become lines of some repelling force. An hour later, as that shimmering white rectangle became larger but no more distinct, I was filled with such a feeling of wrongness that I suffered nausea. The idea of a trap grew in my mind, that this floating light in the darkness was not a door at all but the maw of some beast, and if I entered through it to the other side, it would devour me.
Finally I came to a halt. The words continued, unrelenting, downward, and I estimated the door lay no more than another five or six hundred steps below me. It blazed in my vision now; I could feel a rawness to my skin as if I were getting a sunburn from looking at it. I wanted to continue on, but I could not continue on. I could not will my legs to do it, could not force my mind to overcome the fear and uneasiness. Even the temporary absence of the brightness, as if hiding, counseled against further progress.
I remained there, sitting on the steps, watching the door, for some time. I worried that this sensation was residual hypnotic compulsion, that even from beyond death the psychologist had found a way to manipulate me. Perhaps there had been some encoded order or directive my infection had not been able to circumvent or override. Was I in the end stages of some prolonged form of annihilation?
The reason didn’t matter, though. I knew I would never reach the door. I would become so sick I wouldn’t be able to move, and I would never make it back to the surface, eyes cut and blinded by the grooves in the ceiling. I would be stuck on the steps, just like the anthropologist, and almost as much of a failure as she and the psychologist had been at recognizing the impossible. So I turned around, and, in a great deal of pain, feeling as if I had left part of myself there, I began to trudge back up those steps, the image of a hazy door of light as large in my imagination as the immensity of the Crawler.
I remember the sensation in that moment of turning away that something was now peering out at me from the door below, but when I glanced over my shoulder, only the familiar hazy white brilliance greeted me.