“And Gasper offered you twenty?” she asks, passing the thing back to Geli. The stone feels slippery, oily, and when she looks at her fingers and palms, they glisten like she’s been handling slugs. She wipes her hands on her skirt.
“I can do better,” Geli replies.
“Probably,” Inamorata agrees. “Have Sully post it for you, full span. I’ll cover the tab. You want more than twenty, then the buyer’s gonna have to come from somewhere besides the island.”
“Will do,” says Geli, turning the thing over and over, examining the object from every angle.
Admiring it, Inamorata thinks, and the thought gives her an unpleasant little shiver. To her, it isn’t horrible at all.
“I wish you could have seen all those starfish and urchins,” Geli says, and she returns the green thing to her gunny. “Heaps of them, thousands and thousands, like maybe the sea’s gotten bored with starfish and urchins and sent them all packing.”
And just then, far out across the water, a siren starts to wail; a few seconds later, another pipes up, and shortly after that, a third joins the chorus, the shrill cry of the Hudson Authority’s hurricane warning towers. Inamorata picks up the spyglass again and scans the low waves, but there’s still no sign of a company crew, only a few ragged fishing boats, bobbing and rolling and going about their day-to-day business. The waves, the boats, and the slick. Nothing she can see to warrant an alarm.
“What’s happening?” asks Geli, sounding more curious than concerned. “Why would they wind up the screamers on a day like today? There’s not a cloud in the sky.”
“I don’t know,” Inamorata tells her, and then she focuses on the slick, which seems bigger than it did only five or ten minutes before. An enormous flock of gulls has gathered above it, and she watches as the birds dive, one by one, from the sky and plummet headfirst into the oil. There’s no splash when they hit. Not even a sludgy ripple. They’re just gone. But odder still, the slick seems to be drifting nearer Prospect Beach, moving south and east, even though the current from the sound should be pushing it west, off towards Liberty Bay.
“You go find Emil,” she says, and the way she says it, Geli doesn’t hesitate, and she doesn’t ask why. She just gets up and heads quickly back downstairs, shouting for the old man. Inamorata doesn’t take her eye from the spyglass, not looking away from the falling birds or the shimmering oily patch, hardly half a mile from shore now and creeping slowly closer. But she’s thinking of that ugly chunk of stone from Geli’s sack, and she’s thinking of dead starfish and sea urchins, and she’s remembering the way her mother did the voice of the bridge troll.
And the sirens scream.
Author’s Note
Black Helicopters, the first chapter of The Tinfoil Dossier, was written—almost effortlessly, it seemed at the time—over the course of only twelve days in December of 2012. The second chapter, Agents of Dreamland, was written—somewhat less effortlessly—over the course of about six weeks in the summer of 2015. By comparison, The Tindalos Asset was begun in June 2017 and finally “finished” in May 2019. But that’s not entirely the whole story, because several sections that would be included in the novella had already been written in December 2015, as “Excerpts from An Eschatology Quadrille,” for Ellen Datlow’s Children of Lovecraft anthology. Moreover, I came back to the manuscript again at the end of January 2020 and did a bit of rewriting. So, revise that original estimate and say that the writing of The Tindalos Asset spanned something more like four years—plus a couple of months. No, I can’t entirely explain why this one took so much time. It just fucking did.
Regardless, my thanks to my editor, Jonathan Strahan, and to Tordotcom Publishing for showing such great patience with me as I blew deadline after deadline. My thanks also to my partner, Kathryn Pollnac, the original Agent Sixty-Six, for every other sort of patience and for being my constant sounding board and first reader. Thanks to Sonya Taaffe and Vic Ruiz, each of whom I also owe various sorts of debts on this novella. As I noted six and a half years ago in the acknowledgements for Black Helicopters, I do not write in a vacuum, and The Tindalos Asset bears the scars of its many various influences. First and foremost and most obviously, Frank Belknap Long’s 1929 short story, “The Hounds of Tindalos,” along with various works by H. P. Lovecraft, especially The Shadow Over Innsmouth, “Dagon,” and “The Call of Cthulhu.” Other influences are less obvious, and far too many to list in full. But I should note that the post-deluge geography and place names of “Exit Music for the Anthropocene” were borrowed from the speculative cartography of Jeffrey Linn, imagining a one-hundred foot sea-level rise and the emergence of the “Sea of New York,” following the melting of roughly (only) half the world’s ice caps. Also, Coil’s Backwards, They Might Be Giants’ The Else and The Spine, Wake by Dead Can Dance, David Bowie’s Outside, “Casey’s Last Ride” by Kris Kristofferson, Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back, Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible and Everything Now, Muse’s Black Holes and Revelations and Absolution, the songs of Kitty Wells and Connie Francis, Tonio K’s Romeo Unchained, and Take Fountain by The Wedding Present—in all this music is the soul of the book. Also and finally, my description of Mother Hydra (here and elsewhere) undoubtedly owes something to the artwork of Dave Carson and Randy Broecker.
About the Author
Photograph by Kyle Cassidy
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN was born near Dublin, Ireland, in 1964, was raised in Alabama and Florida, and before turning to fiction writing in 1992 they’d already worked as a vertebrate paleontologist, a museum exhibit technician, a biology instructor, a reproductive rights activist, and a drag queen. Their novels include Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree, and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. They are a prolific short-fiction author, and, to date, have published more than 270 short stories, collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder, Wrong Thing, From Weird and Distinct Shores, Alabaster, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, Dear Sweet Filthy World, Houses Under the Sea, and The Dinosaur Tourist. Subterranean Press has published a two-volume “best of” retrospective of their short fiction, Two Worlds and In Between and Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea, and, more recently, Tachyon Publications released The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan. In the 1990s, they scripted The Dreaming for DC Comics/Vertigo, and they returned to comics in 2011 with Alabaster: Wolves, Alabaster: Grimmer Tales, and Alabaster: The Good, the Bad, and the Bird, for Dark Horse Comics. They are a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and the Bram Stoker Awards, a four-time recipient of the World Horror Guild Award, and have also received the James Tiptree Jr. and Locus Awards, along with nominations for the Nebula Award, Mythopoeic Award, British Fantasy Award, and Shirley Jackson Award. They studied paleontology, geology, and comparative zoology at both the University of Alabama in Birmingham and the University of Colorado. In 1988, they codescribed a new genus and species of mosasaur, Selmasaurus russelli, from Alabama, and ten years later discovered the first evidence of velociraptorine theropod dinosaurs (“raptors”) from the southeastern United States. In 2017, Brown University’s John Hay Library established the Caitlín R. Kiernan Papers, archiving juvenilia, manuscripts, artwork, and other material related to their writing. In 2019, they returned to paleontology and are now a research associate and vertebrate fossil preparator at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama. Recently, they coauthored “Asmodochelys parhami, a new fossil marine turtle from the Campanian Demopolis Chalk and the stratigraphic congruence of competing marine turtle phylogenies,” based in part on a specimen they discovered in 2001. Kiernan currently lives in Birmingham with their partner, Kathryn A. Pollnac, and two cats, Selwyn and Lydia.
Also by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Black Helicopters
Agents of Dreamland
Cherry Bomb (as Kathleen Tierney)
Red Delicious (as Kathleen Tierney)
Blood Oranges (as Kathleen Tierney)
The Drowning Gir
l: A Memoir
The Red Tree
Beowulf (novelization)
Daughter of Hounds
Murder of Angels
Low Red Moon
The Five of Cups
Threshold
Silk
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1.: Paint Me As a Dead Soul
2.: Ballad of a Thinner Man
3.: Saint Joan(ah) Redux
4.: Creature → Feature ← Comforts
5.: The World Before Later On
6.: The Lady and the Tiger Go To Hell
7.: Black Ops Alt (#friendlyskies)
8.: In Power We Entrust the Love Advocated
9.: Rime of the Super-Sargasso Sea
10.: Monday Evening Kaiju Genderfuck Pas de Deux
11.: Memo to Human Resources (Whistling in the Dark)
12.: Casey’s Last Ride (Cue Ennio Morricone)
13.: Bee of the Bird of the Moth
14.: Strangers When We Meet (High & Dry)
15.: Another Toe in the Ocean
16.: Point Nemo
17.: The Small Print
18.: Exit Music for the Anthropocene
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE TINDALOS ASSET
Copyright © 2020 by Caitlín R. Kiernan
All rights reserved.
Cover photographs: coastal home © Getty Images; ocean © Shutterstock.com
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
A Tordotcom Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
120 Broadway
New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of
Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-19114-4 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-19115-1 (trade paperback)
First Edition: October 2020
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The Tindalos Asset Page 14