Agents of Dreamland

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  You getting the heebie-jeebies, old man? Aren’t you the one who never flinched?

  “Wait,” he says, but his voice seems very small in the heat and the reek, small and entirely devoid of authority. “Hold up, Vance, I want to get eyes on—”

  Cool as shit through a polar bear, wasn’t that you?

  And then he sees the look on her face, and even without seeing whatever she sees, he knows it’s bad. “Oh my god,” she whispers. “Oh god. Fuck me . . .”

  The Signalman picks up the remote and turns off the TV. He stubs out his cigarette and goes to the bathroom. His urine is dark, concentrated, the color of apple juice. He wonders how long until he winds up with kidney stones. His old man had them. Howled in pain like a dying hound dog, and isn’t that something to look forward to? He washes his hands with a tiny bar of Ivory soap, then pauses to stare at himself in the mirror. The fluorescent lights make his skin seem thin as vellum, and he rubs his fingers over the salt-and-pepper stubble on his cheeks and chin. He should shave. He won’t feel like it in the morning, hungover and late for his train. If he shaves now, it’s an excuse not to go back to the dossier on Drew Standish and all the nightmares contained therein, all the warning signs nobody heeded until, as they say, it was too late.

  If he concentrates on shaving, maybe he can stave off the memory of what they found at the end of that hallway and, a little later, huddled on the roof. The sight of those bodies, and the smell.

  It’s actually a number of species of fungus existing together in a symbiotic mass, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, often referred to by a more colorful and more pronounceable moniker, zombie fungus. It attacks a particular family of tropical ants, known as camponitids, or carpenter ants, entering the hosts’ bodies during the yeast stage of its complex reproductive cycle. The fungus spreads through an ant’s body, maturing inside its head—and this is where things really get interesting. It eventually takes control of the infected insect, forcing it to latch on to the underside of a leaf and bite down in what we call the grip of death. Then atrophy sets in, quickly, completely destroying the sarcomere connections in the ant’s muscle fibers and reducing its sarcoplasmic reticula and mitochondria. At this point, the ant is no longer able to control the muscles of the mandible and will remain fixed in place. The fungus finally kills the ant and continues to grow as hyphae penetrate the soft tissues and begin to structurally fortify the ant’s exoskeleton. Mycelia sprout and securely anchor it to the leaf, at the same time secreting antimicrobial compounds that ward off competition from other Ophiocordyceps colonies.

  In the mirror, his eyes seem more gray than blue, and the broken capillaries in his nose are as good as a road map, tracing decades and countless drinking binges. But he’s a prime asset, and as long as he gets the job done, Albany is happy to overlook the booze. With luck, they’ll squeeze another ten years out of him. He turns on the tap and splashes warm water across his face, then reaches for the can of shaving cream he left on the back of the toilet.

  And get this, okay? These doomed ants, these poor dying bastards, they always climb to a height of precisely twenty-five point twenty plus or minus two point forty-six centimeters above the jungle floor, in environments where the humidity will remain stable between ninety-four and ninety-five percent, with temperatures between twenty and thirty Celsius. And always on the north side of the plant. In the end, sporocarps, the fungal fruiting bodies, erupt from the ant’s necking, growing a stalk that releases spores that’ll infect more ants. It’s evolution at its best and, yeah, at its most grisly, too. Mother Nature, when you get right down to it, she’s a proper cunt.

  But these weren’t ants. These were human beings.

  Well, sure, and this isn’t Ophiocordyceps, either. We’re not even sure if it’s an actual fungus. No one’s ever seen anything like it. Jesus, if I didn’t know better, I’d say it came from outer space.

  If you didn’t know better.

  Right.

  The mirror is starting to fog from the steam, and there’s a small bit of mercy. The Signalman squirts a mound of foam into his left hand, but can’t quite find the motivation to go any further. Who gives a shit if he’s clean shaven when he gets back to L.A.? Maybe he’ll tell them he’s decided to grow a beard. At least it would hide some of the damage wrought by time and his bad habits, wouldn’t it? And isn’t that what Albany’s all about? Hiding the damage? He rinses the foam off his hand and turns off the water.

  That day they all found Hell by the Salton Sea, that day that’s still unfurling inside his mind, Agent Vance is bracing herself against a doorframe. She’s lowered her gun and covers her mouth, trying not to vomit. “Oh god,” she says again, the words muffled, and she looks at him. Right then, he thinks, I’ve never seen anyone so scared. It’s not true, not by a long shot, but that’s what he thinks, all the same.

  I know an old lady who swallowed a fly. . . .

  What?

  I don’t know. It’s been stuck in my head all damned day long.

  Past the corpses, what’s left of three girls and two boys, none of them older than sixteen or seventeen, there’s an old television set, a real antique, just like his parents bought when he was a kid. The first color TV they ever owned. There’s nothing on the screen but static, a blizzard of white electric snow. It crawls across the curved screen like ants. It drifts behind the glass like deadly spores carried on the wind.

  “Stop the choppers,” he says into the radio, even though he’s not yet entirely sure why he’s giving the order. Some instinct buried deep in his hindbrain, spurring him to act before higher cognition gets in the way of survival. “Get Edwards on the line and set up a no-fly zone, everything from Palm Springs south to Mexicali. Get roadblocks up.”

  The radio crackles and spurts, and the man on the other end wants to know why.

  “Because I fucking just said so,” he growls. “Because I imagine you want to keep your fucking job.”

  He hears footsteps on the tin roof.

  Alfred Russel Wallace, he was the first to identify the fungus, in Brazil way back in 1859. Yeah, Wallace. You know, the dude who almost beat Darwin to the punch? Don’t you people read?

  In his room by the railroad tracks, the Signalman dries his face on a towel embroidered with the hotel’s logo. He spares one last glance at his haggard reflection, and then goes back to the bed, back to the files and the briefcase and his whisky, back to waiting for the long Arizona night to end.

  4. A Piece of the Sky (August 17, 1968)

  AND NOW, PICK UP this silver, open-face watch, which the Signalman carries always tucked into the narrow left inside breast pocket of the cheap suits he wears. It was the property of one of his four great-grandfathers before him, and he’s carried it since the day she died. It is this watch that will earn him his nickname. His mother kept it in an old Whitman’s sampler tin on her dresser. Pick up this tarnished silver watch, manufactured in 1888 by the Elgin Watch Company of Elgin, Illinois, and wind the stem counterclockwise, turning the hands back 34,256 full revolutions. By this action do we arrive at the evening of August 17, 1968, and the living room of a house on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama. It’s Saturday night, and NBC affiliate WVTM, Channel 13, is airing its weekly late-night triple-feature monster-movie marathon. The child who will someday be known to his coworkers, and a few others, as “the Signalman” is eight years old, and he’s allowed to stay up Friday nights (into Saturday mornings) to watch these black-and-white gems. While his parents sleep, the boy is treated to Ray Harryhausen’s Rhedosaurus, Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo, and, finally, English director James Whale’s little-known and once-believed-lost The Star Maiden (1934).

  As with his classic Frankenstein, Whale chose the palette of Gothic horror for this science-fiction/fantasy tale set on an undiscovered trans-Neptunian tenth planet located beyond newly discovered Pluto, “near the farthest edges of the solar system.” The special effects come courtesy Willis O’Brien, fresh off King Kong and Son of Kong, with an unnervin
g, distinctly modernist score provided by Max Steiner (another Kong vet), and a screenplay by none other than Tarzan-creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Star Maiden marks the only time that Burroughs would write for the screen.

  The boy sips at a Coca-Cola, the soda gone flat from half a handful of salted peanuts he dropped into the bottle, and he tries hard to stay awake. But it’s a rare Friday night that he manages to make it through all three features. He’s drifting off, and the movie is beginning to blur together with half-formed dreams. Tomorrow, he’ll have trouble remembering which bits of the story were actually part of the movie and which bits he made up in his sleep:

  A willowy woman with white hair is locked in a black tower in a city at the edge of a blacker plain. From her prison, she gazes out through barred windows, across the weird angles of a city carved from obsidian and onyx, granite and slate, across rooftops and strange hanging gardens and past the spires of other towers. Overhead, the sun is only a faint smudge peering down at this world through a veil of perpetual night. The white-haired woman has been shut away by an evil, ancient man, who might be an alchemist, or a scientist, or a wizard (this is never made quite clear) and who intends the woman to be his bride, very much against her will. Her only hope for deliverance is a sword that can defeat the dragonlike, stop-motion beast that guards the tower gates. But the sword was lost long ages ago in a dimly remembered war between the people of this world and giants who attempted to invade and conquer it from another dimension. There is a hero, of course, a handsome man with hair as pale as the woman’s. He eludes the alchemist’s robot soldiers and travels far from the city to reclaim the sword, which, it turns out, was stolen by a grotesque race of winged, crablike humanoids, creatures who inhabit a forest of immense glowing fungi—tall as redwoods—at the edge of an underground sea. They worship the very beings who were once defeated by the magical sword, hiding it in hopes that someday those extradimensional titans will return.

  The creatures speak in a language that sounds like the buzzing of bees.

  Back at the black tower, the villain wields an enormous spyglass and confides in his prisoner, revealing to her the recent discovery of a planet orbiting much nearer to the sun, a paradise of blues and greens, which he intends to conquer and enslave with a deadly heat ray. Then, he tells her, they will travel together through the aether to rule over this new domain as its rightful king and queen. Just how this trip will be accomplished is never fully explained, but the method of conveyance is clearly nothing so mundane as a rocket ship.

  “Only our minds,” says the alchemist, “need leave this sphere and make the long, cold journey through the dark. These bodies we wear are no more, my love, than tattered garments we’ve outgrown. In the new world we’ll have new forms, new bodies.”

  Two surgeons are summoned, stooped men who look more like vultures, and the white-haired woman is sedated with a drop of some narcotic tincture. The surgeons then strap a bizarre metal cap over her head, preparing to cut open the skull and remove the brain. Meanwhile, our hero, who has managed against all odds to wrest the sword from the claws of the flying crustaceans, battles the dragon thing that guards the tower gates.

  The maiden. The mad scientist. The champion.

  Three crisply drawn archetypes.

  Think of them as tarot cards.

  Think of the film as a reading.

  According to the Los Angeles Times and various other newspapers and tabloids, the actress who played the heroine in The Star Maiden died a mere five weeks after production wrapped, having sustained massive brain injuries in an automobile accident. The irony hasn’t been lost on the morbid sort of movie buff who catalogs so-called cursed films. While the fact of her death is well documented, there are rumors that she’d become paranoid and left behind a diary with a very peculiar final entry, several pages that rambled on about nightly visits by “tall men in black suits” who came to the windows and watched her when they thought she was sleeping. They spoke in “buzzes and clicks,” she’s supposed to have written.

  The actor who played the alchemist, he died the next year of a morphine overdose, after his homosexual love affair with a much younger screenwriter became common knowledge among his peers. He appears to have had connections to a number of hermetical and theosophical societies and to have corresponded during the last three years of his life with Aleister Crowley and other occultists.

  As for the hero of the tale, he left acting in 1936 and moved to New Mexico, where he wrote a pair of science-fiction novels, Starlost and Sunfall, neither of which was ever published and both of which amounted to little more than barely coherent theories about life on Venus and Mars, a secret Martian base beneath the desert, and the role he believed aliens to have had in the emergence of Communism and the October Revolution. He was found dead in 1946, long after The Star Maiden was all but forgotten, the last print believed to have been destroyed in a Burbank theater fire.

  And there was the cameraman who is said to have hanged himself during filming.

  And the makeup artist who might have died a few hours after the premiere.

  And the strangers said by some, including the director, to have haunted the set, men in dark suits who come off sounding an awful lot like the actress’s Peeping Toms.

  Make of this what you will or make of it nothing at all.

  Ten minutes from THE END, the eight-year-old boy loses his struggle, slipping from half awake to fast asleep. It’ll be twenty-six years and then some before he learns how it all played out, whether the maiden was rescued and the villain defeated. Twenty-six years before he’s known to those few who know him as “the Signalman” and he’s shown how the film thinly disguised as fiction a nightmare that unfolded on a remote Vermont farm in 1927. How it foreshadowed still other more ominous events in the decades after its release. One day, it will lead him, however indirectly, to a run-down diner in Winslow, Arizona.

  The best foreshadowing never seems like foreshadowing.

  5. Last of the Hobo Kings (Shining Road) (July 10, 2015)

  BENEATH A SKY OF brutal blue, Engine 69 drags its silver snake, rattling and swaying and clanking along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. It pulled out of Flagstaff fifteen minutes ago, rolling west across the Colorado Plateau. In his sleeper car, the Signalman sits with his back turned to the engine, looking east, the way they’ve come. He doesn’t like that vacant shade of blue hanging above the afternoon, and so he keeps his eyes on the green-brown patchwork of scrub and ponderosa pine. Snowcapped Mount Elden is growing small in the train’s wake and the Flagstaff skyline has been entirely lost to view. Only a hazy veil of smog remains to mark its place. Immacolata’s briefcase sits at his feet. Thanks to the fresh bottle of Scotch he picked up before boarding the Southwest Chief, he already has enough of a buzz that the night before is beginning to lose its edge. He’s thinking maybe he’ll even catch a little shut-eye before L.A., now that he’s finished writing out his report. Sure thing. A few more shots, and sleep won’t be so hard at all.

  But then there’s a knock at the door to his compartment, four sharp raps, and at first he figures it’s just one of the attendants, because who the hell else would it be. An attendant, or maybe another passenger who’s mistaken the Signalman’s sleeper for their own. But when he draws back the blue privacy curtain, the face of the man standing in the corridor is all too fucking familiar. And right now, maybe it’s not the very last face he wants to see, but it’s certainly high on the list. He briefly allows himself to entertain the fantasy that he won’t open the door, that he’ll pretend not to recognize the ferrety eyes and crooked nose, the thin lips and jutting chin. You got the wrong man, bub. So just keep moving. Louse up some other poor slob’s day.

  It’s nice while it lasts, all four or five seconds, and then he pops the latch, tugs at the handle, and slides the door open. The noise from the corridor pours in, washing over and through him, like the rumbling, discordant notes of the bullbitch hangover he’s got coming. The man—whose name is Jack Duna
way—nods once, smiles, and there’s a glimmer in his small, dark eyes as he steps into the compartment. The Signalman fakes a smile in return, then shuts the door behind him and locks it again.

  Jack Dunaway takes a seat. He’s fifteen years younger than the Signalman, and he looks it. He was recruited out of MIT, towards the end of George W’s administration.

  “Got on in Flagstaff,” he says.

  “Well, I didn’t imagine you parachuted onto the roof like Roger fucking Moore,” replies the Signalman, and he follows the man’s gaze to the briefcase.

  “That’s it?” asks Dunaway.

  “Yeah, that’s it. You think I’d be headed back empty-handed?”

  “Fuck, you never know, right? Tell me, was she as bad as people say?”

  “Bad? I think I’d want to have a few more colorful adjectives at my disposal before I tried my hand at describing her. What the fuck are you doing here, Jack? What is it couldn’t wait a few more hours until I’m back in Los Angeles?”

  The man glances out the window. “A shame they stuck you on this side of the train. From the other side, you can see the San Francisco Peaks. It’s what’s left of a prehistoric volcano. Did you know that?”

  “I’ve had enough scenery to last me awhile,” he says, and takes a sip of whisky, making a point of not offering Dunaway a drink. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Jack’s eyes dart from the southern view to the Signalman, then back to the window and the desert rushing past on the other side of the tinted glass.

  “I’m afraid you’re not going back to L.A. You’re getting off at Williams Junction. We have you flying out of Clark at six seventeen this evening.”

  The Signalman wants to punch Dunaway in the face.

  “I don’t fly,” he says.

  “They need you at Groom Lake.”

  “Fuck Groom Lake. I don’t fucking fly, you know I don’t fucking fly, and besides, Dispatch said I could stand down after running courier to Winslow. Send Vance.”