“I know,” she says. “The people in Fall River, they wanted this.”
“Yeah, I just bet they did,” says the Signalman. “All sorts of bad folks have been after this piece of junk since some Frenchman went and dug it up at the ruins of Ugarit not long before the start of World War Two.”
“And this is what she’s after, the Welsh woman?” Mackenzie asks him. She hands the photograph back, and he takes it and returns it to his jacket pocket.
“Oh, no,” says the Signalman. “She already has it. She’s had it going on seven years. We as good as handed her the damn thing on a silver platter and said, ‘Here, crazy sea-witch lady who wants to wake up Great Cthulhu and flood the whole damn world, have your play-pretty. We heard the stars are right . . . again, so please, knock yourself out, with our compliments.’ That shitshow in Maine a while back, that was her. And either we got real damn lucky or it was just meant as some kinda dry run, a windup to the main attraction, the great egress, what have you. Either way, looks like she’s done licking whatever wounds we inflicted at Deer Isle.”
“Oh,” says Mackenzie. “I see.”
“Not yet you don’t,” says the Signalman, “but you will. And I want you to know, Agent Regan, I sincerely apologize about that ahead of time. If we’ve done our math right, crossed all our i’s and dotted all our t’s, this is going to be one of the bad ones, and I figure you’ll have plenty enough reasons to curse my name before it’s all over and done with.”
Mackenzie Regan looks down at the cup of coffee getting cold in front of her.
“Yes sir,” she says, though it isn’t what she wants to say at all.
“So, do you like blueberry pancakes, Agent Regan? A little bird told me this place makes damn fine blueberry pancakes, and I figure it would be some sort of sin to leave without finding out firsthand whether or not that is indeed the case.”
“Sure,” Mackenzie tells him. “I like blueberry pancakes.”
“Good to know,” he says, then turns around in the booth, looking for their waitress, waving to get her attention. But Mackenzie Regan doesn’t know what she’ll do when the food comes. The thought of eating is making her ill, and all she really wants is to go to the restroom and wash her hands, scrub away the layer of skin that came into contact with that awful photograph of that awful thing. But she won’t. Because someone in Albany gave this tired old man her name, and maybe he wasn’t exactly what she’d expected, and maybe the truth won’t match the hype, but this is what she’s been waiting for, the reason she turned down solid offers from the FBI and the NSA—a chance to get her hands dirty. A chance to fight the monsters.
16.: Point Nemo
(Ynys Llanddwyn and Elsewhere, January 18, 2018)
Only an instant ago, an instant or an hour and now it can hardly matter which, Ellison Nicodemo was on an airplane racing along high above the mesas and sagebrush, the lizards and mute Anasazi ruins of the Utah desert. She was coming down so very gently from the Signalman’s clean and potent dope, reading something about a sperm whale in Pennsylvania, something absurd, something utterly idiotic. Something undoubtedly true. And then a single drop of water fell from nowhere at all—splat—onto the neatly paper-clipped stack of documents in her lap. She looked up, and everything that came after that happened so fast that it’s at best a half-recollected blur of events as impossible as a sperm whale stranded on an interstate in the Appalachians, all of it as indifferent to reality as the gravity-defying antics of a Road Runner cartoon. Thirty-five thousand feet above Monument Valley, Albany’s fancy jet airplane was filling up with seawater. It wasn’t leaking in through the fuselage’s thin aluminum skin, but seemed to be gushing from numerous invisible fountains suspended between the floor and the cabin ceiling. The water was freezing cold and filled with tiny darting fish. And there was a sound, too, an almost deafening roar rolling through the plane, like waves pounding boulders to sand. The Signalman was up and shouting something into a handheld MBITR radio, and Mackenzie Regan was still in her seat, staring wide-eyed at the water falling from nowhere, and she looked scared and confused and alone. In what seemed like only seconds, the water had already risen to a foot or two, sloshing and splashing about the narrow aisle. A shower of sparks rained down, bits of fire in the flood, as the electrical system began shorting out, and there was smoke and the air stank of ozone and burning plastic. Somewhere in the plane, an alarm was bleating uselessly to itself and oxygen masks were dropping from their hidden compartments. Automatically, Ellison reached for her seatbelt, because is that what you do, isn’t that exactly what the alarm is telling you do? She let go of the buckle and started to stand, instead, and the dossier slid from her lap, a careless scatter of pages cast upon the water, and she saw that now Mackenzie was watching her. It didn’t take a telepath to read Mackenzie’s thoughts; they were written plainly on her face and in her blue eyes.
This is your fault, junkie. Whatever this is, it’s all your fault.
Still shouting into his radio, the Signalman turned and looked directly at Ellison. He made some sort of frantic motion with his left hand, but she had no idea what it was supposed to mean, what he was trying to tell her. And she saw, in that terrible moment, that he was as helpless as anyone who’d ever lived, just an old man who’d spent his life tilting at alien windmills, an old man shivering and soaked straight through to the skin, still clinging to the illusion there was anything left he could do to save this day or any other. She wanted to tell him that she was sorry, wanted to apologize for everything—for the drugs and how the operation in Atlanta had gone sideways and . . . all of it.
But then she wasn’t on the plane anymore. For a while, she wasn’t anywhere at all.
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you . . .
Pulled free of the fast-foundering jet and the world and all its devices and tribulations, Ellison Nicodemo sinks like a stone through an absolute and utter darkness that she’s only known once before, six and a half long years ago. A solid, smothering black that is neither cold nor warm, neither threatening nor indifferent. It wraps itself tightly around her, and ebony tendrils draw her down into its waiting gullet. No mere riptide or undertow, no sleeper wave or maelstrom has ever been even half so strong as this; she couldn’t fight it if she wanted. And the darkness is filled with voices, a veritable clamor of voices tumbling one over the other, all straining to be heard. Some of them she recognizes, and some of them are memories, and some of them aren’t much of anything but noise.
No, it isn’t like that at all. You have to think of Tindalos as a metaphor, not an actuality. There is no literal hound. It’s more like a thought experiment, or maybe nothing more than wishful thinking, that there could be a sort of close-range super-assassin so fucking good at what they do that all they need to get near their target is the meeting of two intersecting lines. Dude, fuck tradecraft, just hand them a congruent angle.
“Don’t be afraid,” says the siren, the woman named Jehosheba, and Ellison realizes that she isn’t afraid, and she thinks how that fact alone ought to be sufficient to scare her half to death.
“That’s not what I was saying,” Ellison mumbles, half to herself.
“Well, all I know,” says Black Jack Mortensen, “in my day, we wouldn’t have called shit like that the small stuff, fucking state-sponsored indoctrination, ramming all that faggot shit down our throats until we don’t know up from down or even dick from a piece of pussy.”
“Well,” says the Signalman, looking away from the diner window, “this isn’t your day, not anymore. And it ain’t mine, either. For better or worse, we’re just a couple of bad memories the world’s busy trying to forget. So, do me a favor, okay, and let it go.”
“I’m not afraid,” Ellison tells the siren, and she imagines a stream of bubbles escaping her open mouth and trailing back towards the airplane like a swarm of tiny jellyfish. She asks, “Are they going to die up there?”
/> “Not up there, no,” the siren whispers. “After all, little killer, they’re falling, too.”
Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame . . .
“I’m drowning,” Ellison says. “I’m drowning. That’s what’s happening, isn’t it?”
“No, little killer,” replies the siren, “you’re not drowning. Not just yet.”
At the bottom of the garden, we wore animal masks.
“There are still things I need you to see. Things I wouldn’t show anyone else.”
“Take us home,” says the Chinese agent from X, the chaos theorist that Ellison’s been sent all the way to Taiwan to kill. “Put us in darkness. Do not let us be hungry or alone.” But the hound is very close now, and it’s not as if Ellison really has any say in the matter. Que sera sera and all that happy horseshit.
“Why me?” she asks the siren, wondering if she’s going to sink forever, down, down, down like Alice, all the way through the earth and out the other side.
“Because,” says the siren, “if you look at it just the right way, we’re almost the same sort of beast, you and I. We might as well be sisters. Here now, open your eyes.”
Ellison Nicodemo had not even realized that they were closed.
It’s night and she stands at the window of a small whitewashed stone cabin and looks out at the moonlight and the place where the wild Irish Sea meets a rocky beach. There’s a smoky peat-turf fire burning in the hearth. And there are women, or things that used to be women, walking out of the sea. They wear tangled veils of kelp and periwinkles and the scaly flesh of fish. There’s a naked girl child standing on the sand, waiting for them. The child lifts her arms in welcome.
“That’s you, isn’t it?” Ellison asks the siren, who’s busy tending the smoky fire.
“It is,” she answers. “It was. And my mother, too, and her mother before her.”
“This is where it started, then?”
“No, little killer,” says the siren, “this is only the house where I was born, and that is only the beach where I learned to swim. I don’t know where it started. I doubt that I ever will. It doesn’t matter.”
One of the women from the sea lifts the child and holds her close and kisses her cheek and forehead.
“This isn’t any different than the last time,” Ellison says. “I’m still supposed to kill you. I still have to try.”
“Why?” asks the siren, and she stops poking at the fire and comes to stand with Ellison at the window. Ellison had almost forgotten her face, her human face, and it isn’t unlovely, and it isn’t unkind. “Because a company man told you to? Because you believe that someone out there holds your leash? Weren’t you done with all that, houndwife, weren’t you finished doing their bidding? Weren’t you finally free?”
“Is that why you didn’t kill me?” Ellison Nicodemo asks the siren. “Is that why you sewed me up inside a rotting shark and left me scarred and half alive?”
“It was a gift,” the siren replies. “Not without a price, that’s true. But it was a gift, all the same.”
Low waves and foam race up the beach, shimmering in the pale moonlight, and break about the legs of the women who’ve walked out of the sea. The woman holding the child sets her back down on the sand.
“We can’t stay here much longer,” says the siren. “We shouldn’t be here at all.”
“How the fuck was it a gift?” Ellison asks her.
The siren quietly regards her for a moment or two and then replies, “How long had it been since anyone offered you a choice? What about your beloved Signalman? Did he ever give you a choice? No, little killer, he didn’t, because you were merely another asset to him, merely a pawn, another valuable commodity to be exploited until there was nothing valuable left.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Ellison says, but she knows that she’s lying to herself.
“Then how exactly was it? Tell me. I’m listening. Tell me of your loyalty to this man who made you his weapon. Tell me how you love him, even now.”
“I wasn’t ever in love with him,” she says, so there’s another lie.
“I suppose you’re not in love with the heroin, either?” the siren sighs. “I suppose next you’ll tell me that.”
On the beach, the child turns her head and looks towards the cabin, towards Ellison, and there’s a brilliant flash of white eyeshine, as if the moon is trapped somewhere inside the girl’s skull. The siren pulls Ellison away from the window then, and once more she says how they’ve stayed too long, how they shouldn’t have come here at all.
“It was foolish of me,” she says, and the cabin melts away like sugar in hot coffee, and once again Ellison Nicodemo is plunging pell-mell through the lightless and unlightable void, washed in the tumult of voices and memory.
“Zealandia, most likely, from New Caledonia all the way south to the Campbell Plateau. Oh, I know the theosophists and Alhazredians have their hearts set on the South Pacific, but . . . anyway, you’re missing the point here. There’s just not enough water on the planet. Even if you melt every last bit of ice at the poles and all the glaciers, you’re only looking at a sea-level rise of sixty-one meters, max, and sure, that’s gonna ruin tourism in Florida and Hawaii, but it’s a long, long way from Waterworld or the goddamn Noachian Deluge. There’s only about two billion metric tons of water to work with, see, and if you want to submerge the Himalayans, you’d need three times that amount. Do the math. If you really want to flood the globe, it’s not just a matter of raising sea level, but of sinking all those inconvenient continents.”
“Are you going to kill me now?” Ellison asks the siren.
“If I’d only wanted to kill you, I’d have done it six years back, wouldn’t I? If I’d only wanted you dead?”
“That’s all fine and dandy, but the creationists are just gonna fire right back with a bunch of tired-ass pseudoscientific baloney about runaway subduction events and the extra water having come from ‘the fountains of the deep’ and ‘the windows of heaven,’ from huge freaking reservoirs buried in the outer mantle and from some sort of collapsing vapor canopies and—Jesus, why am I telling you this? You’ve read more of that crap than I have. Anyway, I’d imagine if a Great Old One or two wants to play dunk tank with the whole wide world, the mere facts of the hydrosphere probably aren’t gonna stand in the way.”
“I don’t know,” says Ellison, wondering if she’s falling headfirst or feet first or neither. “I don’t understand why you’ve done anything you’ve done.” Not that it was ever her job, trying to understand. All she had to do was be a good tin soldier and follow orders. Usually, all she had to do was show up and let the hound do the rest. Not always, but usually.
The Signalman sits in his office beneath the Erastus Corning Tower and reads aloud from the lab report on the sample of blue goop taken from initial tests with the Nicodemo kid. There’s no one else in the room with him, but it’s an old habit, reading lab reports out loud. It makes them slightly easier to decipher. “The substance,” he reads, “bears numerous traits in common with the cytoplasm and nucleoplasm of living cells, especially those of fungi and animals. Like normal protoplasm, the sample behaves at times like a disordered colloidal solution and at other times like an integrated network, exhibiting distinct fluid and solid phases. But, as already noted on page two, the substance, while undoubtedly alive, completely lacks hydrolyzing enzymes, making it not only unique in known biology, but suggesting an extraterrestrial, and perhaps even extradimensional, origin. In the absence of enzymes . . .” He rubs his eyes and lights a cigarette.
“No, you don’t know yet,” says the siren, “but you will, very soon. We’ve almost reached the bottom.”
Ellison shivers, though she isn’t cold, and she thinks, So there is a bottom, after all, and the siren replies, Of course there is a bottom. You did
n’t think I’d let you fall forever, did you?
“How would I know?” Ellison replies.
Meanwhile, the darkness around her seems to be growing thinner—not any less dark, but less palpable somehow. And the cascade of voices and remembrances is rapidly growing fainter, countless moments and thoughts and actions bleeding one into the other, smearing as she nears the end of her descent— There is another shore, you know, upon the other side, where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest, and I’d ask my friends to come and see an octopus’s garden with me . . . But it isn’t a hound. They aren’t hounds at all. They aren’t anything anyone will ever have a right name for, except that Oppenheimer, the old phony, went and called them Tindalos . . . Resignedly beneath the sky, the melancholy waters lie, and watching the furrow that widens behind you, long afloat on shipless oceans, tiefer, tiefer, Irgendwo in der tiefe Gibt es ein licht, and yes, there was one particular glance that made me afraid, the very deep did rot, instead of a cross, the Albatross, silver on the ocean stitching through the waves the edges of the sky.
And then only the sound of the wind.
“Open your eyes, little killer,” says the siren, and Ellison Nicodemo does as she’s been told (though, again, she hadn’t been aware her eyes were closed). The darkness has released her into a strange coruscating daylight, by turns the green of an old Coke bottle and the pale translucent blue of fluorite crystals. Her pupils ache at even this weak, inconstant illumination, after so long a plummet through all that perfect dark, and she squints and her eyes tear and leak droplets of her own private ocean down her cheeks. Ellison sees that she’s standing in a high place, on a skyscraper’s concrete balcony, gazing out across a flooded city, out across a flooded world. Only the spires of the tallest towers haven’t yet been swallowed by the rising sea, and then she realizes that this was once Manhattan, because she spots the silver needle of the Chrysler Building not too far off. She looks down to find that a greasy mist lays heavily across the water, parting here and there to allow her the briefest glimpses of a savage menagerie of marine saurians and enormous fishes, archaic yoke-toothed whales and tentacled, boneless things resurrected from the vanished depths of vanished geologic aeons. In the sky above her, unspeakable creatures screech and wheel on leathery wings the color of an oil slick.
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