Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer

… to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives …

We were all in the dark, scrabbling at the pile of journals, and if ever I felt the weight of my

predecessors, it was there and then, l...

I could search those pages for years and perhaps never uncover the right secrets,

All I really thought I knew was that the journals from certain expeditions and certain individual expedition members were missing, that the record was incomplete.

Stuck to the back of another journal by dried blood or some other substance, I found it more easily than I’d imagined: my husband’s journal, written in the confident, bold handwriting I knew from birthday cards, notes on the refrigerator, and shopping lists.

The ghost bird had found his ghost, on an inexplicable pile of other ghosts.

rather than looking forward to reading that account, I felt as if I were stealing a private diary that had been locked by his death. A stupid feeling, I know. All he’d ever wanted was for me to open up to him, and as a result he had always been there for the taking. Now, though, I would have to take him as I foun...

the sky taking on the deep amber hue that marked the beginning of late afternoon.

The sea was ablaze with light, but nothing beautiful here fooled me anymore. Human lives had poured into

this place over time, volunteered to become party to exile and worse. Under everything lay the ghastly presence of countless desperate struggles. Why did they keep sending us? Why did we keep goin...

That sense of impending doom occupying the car.

These sessions clearly frustrated the psychologist on a professional level,

predicated

pejorative.

it struck me that perhaps the very qualities she might disapprove of from a psychiatric point of view made me suitable for the expedition.

“You’re still here,” she said, surprise in her voice. “But I killed you, didn’t I?” The voice of someone waking from dream or falling into dream. “Not even a little bit.”

“Didn’t like your company?” the psychologist asked. “Didn’t like what you’ve become?”

“What did the thing coming after you look like?” A coughing fit, words dribbling out around the edges: “I never saw it. It was never there. Or I saw it too many times. It was inside me. Inside you. I was trying to get away. From what’s inside me.”

She hesitated, but I couldn’t tell if it was from caution or because something inside her body was breaking down.

“I’m not changing!” I shouted it, an unexpected rage rising inside of me. A wet chuckle, a mocking tone. “Of course you’re not. You’re just becoming more of what you’ve always been. And I’m not changing, either. None of us are changing. Everything is fine. Let’s have a picnic.”

“If it was a disaster, you helped create it.”

coughed out a thick wetness.

There was a gleam in her eye now that I did not like, that promised damage.

“Would you like that, Little Flame? Would you like it or would you go mad?”

“If you try to do anything to me, I’ll kill you,” I said—and meant it.

The thought of hypnosis in general, and the conditioning behind it, had been difficult for me, an invasive price to be pa...

Her lack of regard for the anthropologist’s fate was hideous, but so was mine.

I think it amused the psychologist, even dying, for me to so desperately need answers from her.

When you are too close to the center of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire.

The sky was darkening and encroaching, the waves deepening, the surf making the shorebirds scatter on their stilt legs and then regroup as it receded. The sand seemed suddenly more porous around us. The meandering paths of crabs and worms continued to be written into its surface. A whole community lived here, was going about its business, oblivious to our conversation.

“Leave me here when I die,” she said. Now all her fear was visible. “Don’t bury me. Don’t take me anywhere. Leave me here where I belong.”

personal anguish that went beyond her physical condition.

“Has anyone ever really come back from Area X?” “Not for a long time now,” the psychologist said in a tired whisper. “Not really.” But I don’t know if she had heard the question.

It was hard to think of her as an adversary the closer she came to death,

There were things I had to do after she died, even though I was running short of daylight, even though I did not like doing them.

Certain parasites and fruiting bodies could cause not just paranoia but schizophrenia, all-too-realistic hallucinations, and thus promote delusional behavior.

… but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive …

I had not seen a name or heard a name spoken aloud for months, and seeing one now bothered me deeply. It seemed wrong, as if it did not belong in Area X. A name was a dangerous luxury here. Sacrifices didn’t need names. People who served a function didn’t need to be named.

About me she had only this cryptic phrase: “Silence creates its own violence.” How insightful.

The word “Annihilation” was followed by “help induce immediate suicide.”

The splinter in his mind, never fully dislodged, disintegrated into nothing.

All I understood of what he called Area X at the time came from the vague official story of environmental catastrophe, along with rumors and sideways whispers. Danger? I’m not sure this crossed my mind so much as the idea that my husband had just told me he wanted to leave me and had withheld the information for weeks. I was not yet privy to the idea of hypnosis or reconditioning, so it did not occur to me that he might have been made suggestible during his meetings.

searched my face for what he thought he hoped to find there.

The arguing came later, when it became real to me. But never pleading. I never begged him to stay. I couldn’t do that. Perhaps he even thought that going away would save our marriage, that somehow it would bring us closer together. I don’t know. I have no clue. Some things I will never be good at.

reliquary.

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.

The ever-more distant sound of waves was like eavesdropping on a sinister, whispering conversation.

The shapes in the exposed remains of rooms had gathered a darkness about them that stood out against the night and in their utter stillness I sensed an unnerving suggestion of movement.

I felt as if I should recognize these features—that it was very important—but with them disembodied in this way, I could not.