Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer

Sedge

The short bushes lining the fence around the pool lunged up to obscure the chain link.

Bullfrogs moved in, the wriggling malformed dots of their tadpoles always present.

Despite a strong and well-founded fear of drowning, I had always loved being around bodies of water.

Inside the house, my parents did whatever banal, messy things people in the human world usually did, some of it loudly. But I could easily lose myself in the microworld of the pool.

Inevitably my focus netted from my parents useless lectures of worry over my chronic introversion, as if by doing so they could convince me they were still in charge.

So we proceeded, locked into our separate imperatives.

I liked most of all pretending to be a biologist, and pretending often leads to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic, even if only from a distance.

In all of this, I eschewed books on ecology or biology. I wanted to discover the information on my own first.

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that …

The tower steps kept revealing themselves, those whitish steps like the spiraling teeth of some unfathomable beast, and we kept descending because there seemed to be no choice.

blinkered

so that to follow the meaning of the words was to follow a trail of deception.

… to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen …

The sense of unease in ignoring the ominous quality of those words was palpable. It infected our own sentences when we spoke,

We also both saw the tiny hand-shaped creatures that lived among the words.

tensile

Why should I rest when wickedness exists in the world … God’s love shines on anyone who understands the limits of endurance, and allows forgiveness … Chosen for the service of a higher power.

unnerve:… in the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth …

Sometimes you get a sense of when the truth of things will not be revealed by microscopes.

This premonition of violence made little rational sense, and yet it came to me too easily, almost as if placed in my mind by outside forces.

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

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.

But holding the gun made me feel clumsy and odd, as if it were the wrong reaction to what might confront us.

We were charged with the nervous energy of knowing there might be some answer below us. A living, breathing answer.

But every time I noticed her becoming more panicky, I found it made me calmer.

cilia.

simple by comparison but vaguely similar.

There was an odd calm about him, punctured only by moments of remote panic

The whole time he was inside me he looked up at my face with an expression that told me he did remember me but only through a kind of fog.

Whatever had happened in Area X, he had not come back. Not really.

It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe.

mire

“There’s something down there,” she whispered in my ear. “Something like a body or a person.” I didn’t point out that a body could be a person.

All I could have said was I don’t know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.

… the shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear …

A biologist is not a detective, but I began to think like a detective.

the thing—and no matter what the surveyor might hope, I could not think of it as human—

Perhaps if there had been something to shoot she would have been calmer, but we were left with only what lingered in our imaginations.

could only wonder at my own gullibility in thinking that I had been told anything at all of use.

Always, the emphasis was on our own capabilities and knowledge base. Always, as I looked back, I could see that there had been an almost willful intent to obscure, to misdirect, disguised as concern that we not be frightened or overwhelmed.

The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and...

We became so comfortable with that map, with the dimensions of it, and the thought of what it contained that it stopped us from asking why or even what.

That the lighthouse, representative or actual, might have been a subconscious trigger for a hypnotic suggestion—and that it might also have been the epicenter of whatever had spread out to become Area X.

How what we had seen below could coexist with the mundane was baffling.

The horror of what had happened to her was still hitting me. To be coerced into your own death.

saprotrophic

The wind picked up, and it began to rain. I saw each drop fall as a perfect, faceted liquid diamond, refracting light even in the gloom, and I could smell the sea and picture the roiling waves. The wind was like something alive; it entered every pore of me and it, too, had a smell, carrying with it the earthiness of the marsh reeds. I had tried to ignore the change in the confined space of the tower, but my senses still seemed too acute, too sharp. I was adapting to it, but at times like this, I remembered that just a day ago I had been someone else.

I walked outside, into the welter of the stinging water, the gusting pockets of wind.