Annihilation

The narrator finds the psychologist “propped up against a mound of sand, sheltered by the shadow of the wall, in a kind of broken pile, one leg straight out, the other trapped beneath her” (123). It is apparent that she jumped or was pushed from the lighthouse. She is still alive. She is covered in blood, and her eyes are open. The narrator takes the gun from the psychologist and throws it to the side. When the narrator touches the psychologist on the shoulder, the psychologist screams, “Annihilation! Annihilation!” (124). Propping up the psychologist again, the narrator notes, “I heard a kind of creaking groan and realized she had probably broken most of her ribs” (124).

The narrator gives the psychologist water. The psychologist tells the narrator that she looked like a “flame” as she approached the lighthouse. The narrator believes the psychologist is trying to hypnotize her and tells the psychologist that hypnotism won’t work on her any longer. The narrator then asks the psychologist a long series of questions, some of which the psychologist answers, some not.

The psychologist didn’t shoot the narrator as she approached because for some reason, she wasn’t able to pull the trigger. She says she jumped from the lighthouse because she believed something was coming towards her from the stairs and felt fear. She explains that she took the anthropologist down into the tunnel due to a “miscalculation. Impatience. I needed intel before we risked the whole mission. I needed to know where we stood” (126). The psychologist says that the anthropologist got too close to the Crawler, or creature in the tunnel, and that the Crawler then killed the anthropologist and wounded the psychologist. The psychologist suggests that the secret behind the tower remains unknown, even to the Southern Reach. She says, “The border is advancing” (129). Amongst her last words, she says, “We should never have come here” (131) and tells the narrator that no one has returned from Area X “for a long time now…[n]ot really” (132).

After the psychologist dies, the narrator takes her journal and examines her injured left arm: “From her collarbone down to her elbow, her arm had been colonized by a fibrous green-gold fuzziness, which gave off a faint glow” (133). The narrator takes samples from this arm and her other arm. The journal contains new passages transcribed from the walls of the tower as well as a note in the margin that reads, “lighthouse keeper” (134). Among her possessions are scraps of paper with commands for hypnosis. In one of them, “[t]he word ‘Annihilation’ was followed by ‘help induce immediate suicide’” (135).

The narrator realizes she’ll have to travel through the night in order to make it to base camp. She looks back and sees “a thin green fountain of light gushing up” near the lighthouse, coming from the psychologist’s wound (138). She gathers her supplies and her husband’s journal and sets out for the base camp. As she nears an area of reeds, she once again hears the moaning. She walks crouching so as not to be seen above the reeds. Something touches her boot, and she shines her flashlight on an image resembling a human face, “a kind of tan mask made of skin, half-transparent, resembling in its way the discarded shell of a horseshoe crab” (140). She sees more evidence of a molting creature and concludes that “the moaning creature was, or had once been, human” (140).

The moaning grows louder as she walks, and soon she hears movement. The reeds near her are quickly being cut down by the movement. She begins to run: “The crucial moment came. I thought I felt its hot breath on my side, flinched and cried out even as I ran. But then the way was clear” (142). The creature seems to have tried to change direction or to brake as it approached the narrator, while also making a sound as though “pleading with me to return, to see it entire, to acknowledge its existence” (142). She keeps running without looking back. She climbs a tree and spends the night half-asleep, half-awake.

Towards the morning, she finds that her skin gives off a phosphorescent glow. As she nears the base camp, she is shot in the left shoulder and then again in the left side. She falls to the ground and feels some pain, “[b]ut it quickly subsided to a kind of roiling ache” (145). The surveyor calls out to her, asking where the psychologist is. The narrator responds by telling her that the psychologist is dead. The surveyor shoots off more rounds, then says, “You’ve come back and you’re not human anymore. You should kill yourself so I don’t have to” (146). The surveyor asks what the narrator’s name is and the narrator responds, “How would that make any difference?” (146). The narrator crawls in the grass towards the surveyor. For a moment, she sees the surveyor’s head above the grass only 10 feet away: “It was just a momentary glimpse. She was in plain view for less than a second, and then would be gone. I didn’t think. I didn’t hesitate. I shot her” (147). When the narrator checks, she sees the surveyor sprawled in the grass.

The narrator rolls the surveyor’s body to the water’s edge and says a few words before letting her sink into the black water. Shortly afterwards, the narrator falls to the ground, “cocooned in what felt like an encroaching winter of dark ice, the brightness spreading into a corona of brilliant blue light with a white core” (149). She has visions of the surveyor, psychologist, and anthropologist; the moaning creature; and a living map of the border of Area X. She continues to spasm in the grass.

When she awakes after her spasms, she is back at base camp. She drinks nearly a gallon of water. She finds the base camp has been destroyed by the surveyor. She collects some remaining food and supplies.