The Tindalos Asset

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  For a few seconds, neither of them speaks, and then the psychiatrist asks her, “How old were you, the first time you saw this monster?”

  It’s not too late to make a bad joke of the whole thing, Ellison thinks. It’s not too late to go back to lying and chalk it up to being in a worse mood than usual. He’d believe that. But then she reminds herself that the psychiatrist possibly doesn’t live in a universe that permits the existence of monsters—not real monsters, anyway—and besides, by the unspoken rules of their game, everything she tells him is a lie, every confidence a deception. So it really doesn’t much matter what she says.

  “I was almost eleven years old. No, wait. That’s not right. I was already twelve. I’d already started junior high school. I was in sixth grade the first time I saw the hound.”

  “The hound?” he asks her. “So, the monster was a dog?”

  “No,” she replies. “No, it wasn’t. It really wasn’t anything like a dog. But I always thought of it as ‘the hound,’ right from the beginning. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. But I had to think of it as something, you know, and I guess thinking of it as a hound was a lot easier to deal with than acknowledging that it was a monster.”

  She expects the psychiatrist to make a note of that, but he doesn’t. He just watches her, instead.

  See, now he’s sitting there waiting to hear a proper story. His favorite lunatic has whetted his appetite, and now he wants to know some more. He wants a ripping good yarn. Now he’s got a rock-solid hard-on for a scary story from a crazy lady, a story that he can diagnose and dismiss and make not the least bit scary at all. Here, in this office, be no monsters whatsoever. Have another few pills, Ms. Nicodemo. You’ll feel better in a day or two, and it’s all covered by your insurance, naturally.

  “We’ve talked about how my stepfather beat my mom,” she says, and now she keeps her eyes on the painting on the wall behind the psychiatrist. Ellison hates the painting, because of all the awful things it dredges up—Jehosheba and the shark and all the rest. But even those horrors, a danse macabre to put Edgar Allan Poe and all his ilk to shame, are somehow easier to face than what she’s about to tell the old man with the bushy white eyebrows.

  “Yes,” says the psychiatrist. “Yes, we have.”

  “And I told you that he finally stopped. I told you that he stopped after that time he beat her so badly that he put her in the hospital with broken ribs and a concussion.”

  “You did.” The psychiatrist nods.

  “Well, that wasn’t the truth.”

  “He didn’t stop hitting your mother?”

  “No, he stopped, but that isn’t why he stopped. He stopped after the first time the hound came. It was a Friday or Saturday night. I’m not sure which, but I remember I was up late because I didn’t have school the next day, and my stepfather came in drunk. My mother said something to him. I don’t remember that, either, just what it was she said, but it doesn’t matter. Probably something she should have known was gonna set him off. I imagine by then she didn’t much care anymore. By then, she probably knew she’d get hit no matter what she did or didn’t say. Anyway, she said it, and he knocked her down. We were in the living room. I was on the floor in front of the TV, and when he hit her, she stumbled backwards and tripped over the coffee table. Mom landed right next to me. Her lip was bleeding. She lay there staring up at him, sort of smiling, like she was daring him to keep it up. She didn’t even look at me. It’s almost like I wasn’t there.”

  Ellison is quiet for a moment, concentrating on the painting of the sea, the waves battering that rocky shore, the white cottage that seems as if it’s about be swallowed up by the tide, shivered and dashed apart and washed away.

  “It’s fine if you’d like to stop here for now,” says the psychiatrist, but she knows he doesn’t mean it. And even if he does, she’s gone too far to turn back, and wasn’t that always the way of it? Isn’t that something the Signalman said to her once, ages and ages ago, that she had a way of getting in too deep too fast, like she was afraid if she didn’t jump in both feet first she might never jump in at all?

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I’m fine.”

  “Then continue,” says the psychiatrist, as if Ellison needs his permission.

  “She was lying there, and he was standing over her, and I sorta think he really meant to kill her that time. And so maybe he’d have had to kill me, too, because I would have seen him do it, and my stepfather, he was terrified of going to prison. His own dad had—never mind, that’s a different story. There was my mom, and there I was, and suddenly I heard this sound, and I smelled something like—well, to tell you the truth, it wasn’t like anything I’d ever smelled in my life. But it was a cold sort of smell, you know? That night, sitting there on the floor waiting for him to kill her, I thought how it was a smell that could have only come from some very cold place, like Antarctica or outer space or”

  . . . the bottom of the sea . . .

  “someplace like that. And then the hound was there, standing over my mom. It was big. I mean fucking huge. One minute it hadn’t been there, the next it was, but I thought maybe it had come in through an open window, and I was so scared I just hadn’t noticed.”

  “The hound?” asks the psychiatrist.

  “Yeah,” says Ellison. “The hound.”

  “But it didn’t look like a hound.”

  “Not even a little bit,” she tells him, not taking her eyes off the painting. “Back in 2005, when the agency headhunter recruited me, they already knew about the hound. That’s why they recruited me. But still, they’d never seen it for themselves. They would, later on, soon enough, but they hadn’t yet that day. Anyway, I honestly tried to describe it for them, until I realized that I might as well have been trying to describe the color pink to Stevie Wonder.”

  “But that night, your stepfather saw it. And your mother.”

  Ellison nods. “Yeah. He shit himself. I mean he literally shit his pants. And then he ran away and we never saw the son of a bitch again. He didn’t even call or come back for his stuff or anything. He was just gone.” And Ellison snaps her fingers for extra added emphasis. “Mom, she lay there on the floor, and she didn’t really look scared. Me on the other hand, I was plenty boo coo scared, because I figured this thing, this monster, that had jumped in through the window and frightened off my drunken stepfather was about to devour the both of us.”

  The psychiatrist scratches his eyebrows. “But it didn’t,” he says.

  “Well, obviously,” says Ellison, wishing he’d stop interrupting and let her finish. “It looked down at Mom, and then it sorta looked over at me. And I say ‘it looked,’ but that’s only because I don’t know how to explain what it really did. And then it vanished again, leaving behind that cold smell and these smears of blue slime where it had been standing. It would take Mom days to scrub that stuff up off the floor, and even then there would always be a stain. Anyway, that night I crawled over to her, and we sat there a real long time, holding each other and crying, waiting for my stepfather to show up again and kill us, or for the monster to reappear and eat us. I think we must have sat there almost until dawn. And that was the very first time I saw my monster, the hound.”

  Ellison stops staring at the painting and allows herself to look at the psychiatrist again. He doesn’t seem nearly as surprised as she might have expected. But he also doesn’t look as if he buys a word she’s said. Why would he? He knows the rules of the game.

  This is a true story.

  Every word I say is a lie.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I wouldn’t believe me, either.”

  “I didn’t say that I don’t believe you,” the psychiatrist tells her, and then the clock on the wall above the office door ticks especially loud, and Ellison glances up to see that it’s only five minutes after two.

  “How are you doing today?” the psychiatrist wants to know, and he swipes two fingers across his pad and
clears his throat. Before she answers, he asks, “Are you about ready to begin?”

  She squeezes her eyes shut, and she imagines she hears the Signalman.

  “Your move, kiddo. We don’t have all day. Not much point belaboring strategies you know perfectly damn well you’re too cowardly to even attempt.”

  “Sure,” Ellison Nicodemo tells the psychiatrist, and she opens her eyes, and the game begins again.

  5.: The World Before Later On

  (Ynys Llanddwyn, Wales, January 18, 2018)

  Someone up ahead is going to call me a sadist. I put my hands tightly over my ears and I can hear that, plain as day. I will be called a sadist by the choirboys in blue and the men in tinfoil hats and the spooks from Groom Lake, because one thing may look very much like another, unless motive is taken into account. They will trot out great reams of psychobabble and the terror of comfortingly orthodox diagnoses and file me and dismiss me. Throw away the key, if they get their wish. Send me down to some cell in their Ant Farm labyrinth and throw away the key. A bullet to the brain, if I am only lucky. Anyway, I uncover my ears again and all I can hear now is the rain, the soothing winter rain and the voices woven into the rain. The rain, which is, by extension, merely the sea. There is nothing worth hearing that is not the sea. I know that so damn well, like I know the beat of my heart and the moment of my death, and yet I allow myself to be distracted by things that will be said in days yet to come by all those self-important phantoms of no consequence and no significance. I sit in my grey room in this cottage by the restless sea, and I sit before the looking glass that was my mother’s, and I will listen to the sea, not to all those roiling futures that are still being born by my hand and by the will of Father Kraken and Mother Hydra, the indeterminate determination of R’lyeh, the mermaid’s whisper, the yelp of waves breaking on basalt boulders down more than four billion years. In the mirror, I hold one finger to my lips, before I say too much. My skin is the color of fog. My eyes shine like polished copper pennies. And I know they will say that I am a sadist. It shouldn’t bother me, but it does. There is nothing in this room but my chair at the center of its maze drawn on the floor, nothing but the looking glass and the drapes that hide the windows, a single bare electric bulb shining above me, and the whisperer in the corner. I won’t speak the name of the whisperer, but she has been with me a very long time now, and she knows so many of my secrets. There have been many lovers since her murder, but her jealousy eclipses all those other passions. “Why won’t you ever say my name?” she wants to know, and I keep my eyes on my reflection. I keep my eyes on me. “You took so much, but you didn’t take my name, not you and not the sea and not all the voices of the sea and all the sea’s many gods, none of you stole my name. None of you were able to do that.” I’d cover my ears again, but it wouldn’t do any good. The whisperer seeps through mere flesh, like water through cheesecloth. I almost tell the whisperer that I never tried to take her name, but there’s that cautionary finger, to seal my blue lips. Outside it’s raining, and it’s either daylight or night, and I am in this room and I am with the whisperer and my own face in silvered glass and the certainty that one day they will see me as nothing more than a sadist and a lunatic. “Maximum disruptive contrast,” says the whisperer in her rheumy, salt-rime voice. “Countershading, markings, of whatever sort, tend to obliterate, to cancel, by their separate and conflicting patterns, the visibility of the details and boundaries of form, and so one thing is mistaken for another, an octopus for a handful of sand and gravel, a fish for a coral branch. A martyr for a sadist. And anyway, what difference does it make to you, how they judge the monster that you are?” I want to reply that I’m not a monster, any more than I am a sadist, but once I give the whisperer the satisfaction and validation of a reply, well, I know where that always, always leads. Better I seal my lips and keep my thoughts to myself and my eyes on the looking glass and suffer myself to silence. She tells me, “For what you’ve done, Jehosheba, they’re coming for you. For everything you’ll do. You’re being hunted again. You should have kept your head down. They thought you were done for. They thought you’d gone away, so much flotsam and jetsam dragged off with the tide. But they know better now.” I don’t respond. I’m trying to remember what day this is, what day in what year, and I’m wishing it were the day before I led the whisperer into the icy sea below Tŵr Bach lighthouse and held her head beneath the water until she stopped spitting up bubbles and there was no more breath left in her. Then I might have a little peace, just until the moment of her drowning finds me out. Before the Father and the Mother, I’m not trying to shirk my duties. I’m only trying to hear myself think. From her corner, the whisperer laughs and makes a noise like a damp mop slapped against a wall. Be still, I want to say. Be still and be quiet and let me listen to the rain. But I don’t say that or anything else. I hold a finger to my lips, and with my other hand, my left hand, I make a fist and clutch the stone become the graven image of my fate and the fate of all my lovers and the rhythm of the tides and the towers of sunken cities. “They’re coming for you,” the whisperer says again, “and they’re coming very, very soon, all the way from halfway around the world. And I will not shed a tear.” My fisted hand bleeds water, my heart’s own stigmata, the mark of Y’ha-nthlei and Our Lady of Perpetual Midnight. “There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea,” says the whisperer. “And that’s where they’re going to put you, Jehosheba, for all the things that you’ve done. There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea, the tolling bell, the whine in the rigging, and that’s where you’ll sleep away the aeons, little lobster.” The water drips from my fist, the blood that is the water that is the life, and it spatters the floorboards at my feet. It spatters the lines and causeways of the maze so meticulously painted there. All the world unfolding is in that map, all this present world and all those other past and future worlds, and you only have to know how to read it. With each lover, I learned a little more. With each little life I commended to the deep, the Father and the Mother opened my eyes that much more to the glory and the wonder and the pageant of twisting, twining moments. Each life that I have taken is strung like pearls within the maze, and every drop of water from my clenched fist will become another pearl. “You’ll pay for every one of us,” the whisperer promises me. “Soon, you’ll be served your comeuppance, for all those sins and stolen lives, and they’ll call you a sadist.” Even though I have loved them all, and even though I have never taken even an instant’s pleasure in their pain. “Yes,” mutters the whisperer, “even though all that might well be true. You’ll pay. You’ll see, Jehosheba.” On the floor, the saltwater that has dripped from my hand rolls to and fro along the maze until it arrives at the moment past when I drowned the whisperer, and it lingers there, while I’m dragging her naked, sodden, limp body from the bay and up onto the rocks again. Above us, the foghorn bleats and just offshore a bell buoy clangs its meaningless answers. The stars wheel overhead, a hurricane of pinpricks in the dome of Heaven, and I take great care not to look up. I shiver, bite my bleeding lips, and I do my work, putting it all in motion, so that one day I will sit here in this room before this mirror, so that one day I shall paint a maze upon the floor of this room, so that one day I will place an inconstant, loveless Jonah in the belly of a great fucking fish, so that all will be revealed in the fullness of time and the abyss. There on the rocks beneath Tŵr Bach, I kissed the whisperer’s dead lips. I laid a small white sand dollar on her forehead. I covered each nipple with a limpet, and I arranged a wheel of whelks and periwinkles and marsh snails on her belly. I hid her sex with a kindly handful of knotted wrack. I did exactly as I had been instructed. And down in the sea a million upturned eyes shone their approval. I left her there for the crabs and the gulls and the maggots. I left her there for the tide to drag away to the hungry children of the Mother and the Father. Within the maze on the floor at my feet, drops of water from my hand roll away from that night to other nights and other sacrifices, and each of them I loved as much as I’d lo
ved the whisperer in her turn. I sit in my chair, and I kneel on sharp limestone at the edge of Bae Malltraeth and drift in utter darkness twenty-one hundred fathoms down. Sitting in my chair before the looking glass, sinking through hadopelagic depths that have never been insulted and bruised by the scalding insult of the sun, feeding the maze, I am shown everything that has been and all that is still to come. I have opened so many doors, doors within myself and doors in the fabric of creation. I am ushering in the flood. I am waking the Sleeper in His ancient sepulcher. A swarm of trilobites and viperfish weave a holy shroud about me. In her corner, the whisperer reminds me what a fool I am, like every other saint who ever lived. I wish I knew the words to banish her. I wish I knew that spell. But even she has a part to play, like the irritating grain of sand to worry the oyster to grow the pearls that spill from my hand to roll along the pathways of a maze painted on a floor in a cottage by the sea. The whisperer says, “You should have killed her when you had the chance, my own and gentle salmon. Like you undid me, you should have undone her, made of her only a torn seine, a shattered lobsterpot, a broken oar. Was she really so much more beautiful? Did you really love her so much more?” And I almost reply. I go so far as to open my mouth, and I very nearly speak the words—I would show you the whole of it, if I were but allowed to do that. Then you’d see. There’s a wing on the fly on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea, and I would show you all of it, my love, and then you’d know your death was not in vain. I would show you the drowned lands rising above the waves, and I would show you all the dry lands sinking into the vault of the sea. I would show you the stations of my cross. I would not be so alone, if you could see it, too. The whisperer laughs as if she’s read my mind and isn’t buying any of it. Not one whit. I open my hand and look down at the stone carving, the graven image of the Mother. The whisperer is threatening to set all my ghosts free, but I know that she’d have done that by now, if she were capable of such a thing. The whisperer laughs and makes a slithering sound. I drift deeper, and the stone in my hand glows like the bioluminescent lure of an anglerfish, light for my eyes only, light that owes nothing to the sun, light born of chemosynthesis and hydrothermal vents. I sink, and the one whom I could not kill rises from an asphalt runway to sail among the clouds. She stinks of the poppy’s venom in her blood. She stinks of incremental, sour deaths. Nothing is happening that I have not set in motion. All of this was planned. If I were a sadist, I would say these things aloud and with these truths taunt the whisperer who taunts me. I would torture the whisperer and take some small relief from the necessary masochism of my every act. Instead, I clench my hand tightly around the stone again, and around me and within me the grey room fills up with the absolute stillness of a hole in the bottom of the sea, and the pressure of a thousand atmospheres would crush me flat, were it not for the invisible fist clenched about me.