Annihilation

The narrator examines samples from the psychologist’s body under the microscope. They appear to be normal human cells. The narrator becomes convinced that the cells act differently when she is not observing them and change the moment she looks at them. She looks at the moss from the figures in the village. “The moss and the fox…were composed of modified human cells” (159). She reflects on the human-like nature of the boar near the base camp, the dolphin who looked at her in the canal in the village, and the moaning creature in the reeds.

The narrator reads her husband’s journal. Most of the entries are addressed to her. The husband was part of the 11th expedition, which had eight members. They, too, discover the tower. Ultimately the expedition splits up. The narrator’s husband and a surveyor head north, “but even though we cover a good fifteen to twenty miles by nightfall, nothing has changed. It is all the same” (163). They return when they see strange lights coming from behind them. At the lighthouse, they find evidence of violence as well as suggestions of strange phenomena such as “a strange residue on the floor” (164). At base camp, they find the biologist has been stabbed and killed and a note from the linguist saying that he’s gone to the tunnel.

That night, the narrator’s husband and the surveyor see “a ghastly procession heading into the Tower: seven of the eight members of the eleventh expedition, including a doppelganger of [the narrator’s] husband and the surveyor” (165). They are afraid and unsure what to do. They spend the night arguing about whether to kill or interrogate the doppelgangers. During the night, a sound like steam and a spire of light shoot out from the tower. The surveyor and the narrator’s husband decide to go separate ways. The narrator’s husband writes in his journal that he is taking a boat he has found and will “follow the shoreline as far as I can go. To the island, and perhaps beyond. If you ever read this, that is where I am going” (168).

The narrator decides to go to the tower. She leaves behind many tools and instruments, including all but one gun. The narrator’s body emits a green glow. She enters the tower and quickly reaches the place where the anthropologist died. Her body is still there, covered by the small hand-shaped organisms. The narrator continues to descend. The tower’s heartbeat becomes louder. She feels she is growing close to her goal. She turns a corner and sees light: “The edges of a sharp, golden light that emanated from a place beyond my vision, hidden by the wall, and the brightness within me throbbed and thrilled to it” (172). The narrator begins to spew the brightness from her mouth. She feels her “free will was compromised” (172). She continues into the light.

She encounters the Crawler. “There, in the depths of the Tower, I could not begin to understand what I was looking at and even now I have to work hard to pull it together from fragments” (176). The light changes from golden to blue-green. Her vision is so overwhelmed that she begins to focus on other senses. She hears a sound like “ice crystals shattering” (176). The Crawler changes forms quickly: “It was a figure within a series of refracted panes of glass. It was a series of layers in the shape of an archway. It was a great sluglike monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star” (176). She thinks she can make out something that looks like an arm and a head-shaped shadow inside the mass.

The narrator cannot move. She blacks out and comes back to consciousness repeatedly. She remains unable to clearly see the figure of the Crawler. Then, she begins to return to herself. “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” (179). She manages to turn away from the Crawler and to move back but then feels “a kind of licking, lapping wetness, as if the thick light was transforming into the sea itself” (180). The narrator begins to feel as though she is drowning. She has the impression she is being watched by “hundreds of eyes” (180). The brightness tells her that she won’t survive, and so she opens her mouth and welcomes the water and painful sensation of drowning. She feels a strong pressure, and then the pressure eases up, after which: “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” (181). She blacks out and comes to several times, in severe agony. Then there comes a push, and the Crawler tosses her away down the steps. She crawls away from the Crawler.

Eventually, the narrator recovers enough to descend further down the tower. In the distance, “a tiny rectangular block of fuzzy white light began to take form, shape, far below” (183). As she gets closer, the door begins to resemble the door of light she saw when she glanced back while first crossing the border into Area X. She approaches but feels the door might be a trap. She comes to a halt. “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” (184). She turns around and heads back up the stairs.

Nearing the Crawler once more, she is prepared for more pain and the feeling of drowning, “but none of that happened. None of it, and I don’t know why, except that having scanned and sampled me, and having, based on some unknown criteria, released me once, the Crawler no longer displayed any interest in me” (186). After passing it, the narrator looks back at the Crawler and sees “the face of a man, hooded in shadow and orbited by indescribable things I could think of only as his jailers” (186). She recognizes the man as the lighthouse keeper from the photograph. He has not aged since the photograph was taken.

The narrator reaches the surface and lays on her back in the sun. She stares at the photograph of the lighthouse keeper. She heads back to base camp and reflects on what she has seen: 

Imagine these expeditions, and then recognize that they all still exist in Area X in some form, even the ones that came back, especially the ones that came back: layered over one another, communicating in whatever way is left to them (191).

 The narrator heads to the lighthouse and spends “four long days perfecting this account you are reading” (193). She leaves the journal and some materials on top of the pile of other journals beneath the trapdoor at the top of the lighthouse. She also replaces the photo of the lighthouse keeper after adding a second circle around his face: “If the hints in the journals are accurate, then when the Crawler reaches the end of its latest cycle within the Tower, Area X will enter a convulsive season of barricades and blood, a kind of cataclysmic molting, if you want to think of it that way” (193). The narrator notes that “the brightness is not done with me” (194). She plans to continue into Area X, following her husband up the coast. The novel ends, “I am the last casualty of both the eleventh and the twelfth expeditions. I am not returning home” (195).