Agents of Dreamland

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “You talk to me,” he growls. “You stop playing games, you son of a bitch, and you talk to me right this goddamn minute.”

  “Don’t be a sore loser,” Drew Standish whispers, and then the bulge on the girl’s face bursts, a few seconds before that side of her head entirely collapses in upon itself, spilling a cloud of fine mustard-colored spores. An alarm goes off, and the fluorescents are replaced by crimson light that pulses like the ache of a broken bone. Something pulls itself free of Chloe Stringfellow’s chest and begins to roll slowly away.

  “I’m sorry,” one of the white-coated men tells him, sounding not the least bit sorry. “We can’t wait any longer. Containment protocol.” And then cryogenic vents tucked into the ceiling above the fruiting corpse slide open and release jets of liquid nitrogen, flash freezing the nightmare in the cell.

  This is the way the world ends.

  Tiddley-pom.

  10. The Rapture as Low Burlesque (July 3, 2015)

  THIS IS THE MORNING that I have been promised. I open my eyes from a dream that seems more real and brighter and louder than any waking memory, and dimly I recall that this is the morning. I lie in my bunk and watch a galaxy of dust motes sifting through a shaft of sunlight, here on the 6,997th day since my birth to a woman whose face I can now hardly even recall. The mother of my body, the mother of my captivity. Chloe, you were such a beautiful, beautiful baby. I thought you were a gift from the angels, and I couldn’t imagine what I had possibly done to have deserved you. I stare at that shaft of light, slipping in through the tattered drapes, and the dream of the home that was never home slowly begins to fray, admitting this day, instead. This day, 6,977 days after I was shat out, mewling and soft, into a gallery of daggers and broken glass. I wish Drew had been there with me, in the dream. I wish he could have spoken to my mother, and then she could have prepared me for this day. She would have known what I was made for. I might never have strayed from the path, seduced by the ways of wolves and smack and hypodermic solace. I might never have become someone who needed to be cut free from the belly of the beast.

  The air stirs, and the dust motes swirl.

  I’d thought that there would be pain when this morning arrived, but there’s almost no pain at all. My mouth tastes like the air in a cellar. And my head is filled with bees.

  I should get up. I should get up and go find the others.

  Last night, Drew drove me down to Bombay Beach, and we sat in his car and listened to the engine cooling and the desert cooling and the black expanse of Jachin breathing in and out, out and in. We parked at the shore, near the rusting shell of an old school bus sunk almost up to its windows in the salt and the evaporite muck and the bones of dead tilapia and pelicans. He sipped vodka from a paper bag, and he watched my eyes while I watched the starlight pinpoints shimmering above the sea.

  “What do you espy away up there, little Chloe?”

  “I see fire,” I told him. It was the truth. “I see black fire that’s been burning almost forever, and I see the spheres that move through the flames. I see the tiny boat we’ve launched, and I see that other boat, sailing out to meet us halfway.”

  He smiled, and then he laughed a small laugh. And that’s when I remembered Madeline was sitting in the backseat. She lit a cigarette, and for a few moments the night smelled less like dead fish and brine and more like matches.

  “You see all that?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. I’m not afraid of Madeline, but sometimes I have thought that she wishes Drew had never found me in that alleyway. I think, maybe, she’s decided I’ve come to steal away her Titan for my own.

  “What else do you see, little Chloe?” Drew asked.

  “Towers, I see towers. Like an old movie about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves or Sinbad the Sailor. A city of spiraling towers and crystal domes, a city in a desert of ebony sand, a desert at the edge of an ocean. But it’s not like any ocean we know. There aren’t any waves. There aren’t tides. It’s as flat and still as a mirror, Drew. It’s as flat and still as glass. And it isn’t water, either. It’s an ocean of methane, ethane, propane. Sometimes, I see mighty storms that march furiously across that ocean and march across the ebony desert and bury the city beneath blizzards of benzene snow.” And I wonder at the words falling from my lips, because I comprehend they’re not precisely, not entirely, my own. I am a vessel, prepared for a new purpose, and the messengers are free to speak through me. My eyes, my brain, my mouth, but the messengers are translators, intermediaries weaving my dumbstruck thoughts into the tapestry that Drew needs to hear.

  For I have gazed in sleep,

  On things my memory scarce can keep. . . .

  “You’re my little poet,” he said, then turns on the car radio. There’s a Beatles song playing, and I know that Drew knew there would be.

  In the backseat, Madeline made a sound that I might only mistake for derisive.

  “Am I awake?” I asked.

  “Love,” he said, “that’s nothing you should ever worry yourself about again. Waking and sleeping, you’ve found your way through the Cavern of Flame, and now you stand at the top of the Seven Hundred Steps. For you, the distinction between dream and waking thought has begun to implode, folding in upon itself. You’ve become a singularity to dissolve everything that separates the one from the other.”

  And then he asked me to tell them a story, he and Madeline, and so I told him the story about the princess in her onyx tower and the Sword Forged of Lamentation and the tall, pale woman who was her lover and then became her champion. I told them about the dragon at the gate and the whisperers below the mountains.

  I should get up. It’s hot, and it must be very late morning by now. It would be so easy to lie here in the sweltering day, even though my anxious excitement tugs at my belly, at the very centermost parts of me. The others will be waiting. Drew and Madeline left before dawn, and now it all falls to me. Now it all falls on me. I have been entrusted with the future, and here I am lying in bed half the damn day, getting turned around in my thoughts when there’s so much still to be done. I sit up, and the alarm clock across the room says that it’s only 8:47, and I breathe a grateful sigh of relief.

  The house is quieter than it’s ever been.

  “What if I’m not ready?” I asked Drew the night before, sitting there by the sea in his little red wagon, and he laughed and kissed my cheek.

  “You’re ready,” he said. “You’re more ready than you can imagine.”

  But you won’t be the first.

  And my head jerked around then, as if I’d been stung, as if a bee or a wasp had slipped up my T-shirt and stung me in some especially vulnerable spot. I stared back over my shoulder at Madeline and the soft glow of her cigarette. But she was watching the sky, not me. And she hadn’t said a word.

  “It’s okay,” said Drew. “In all the wide, wide universe, there’s no one in whom I have more faith than you.”

  They’ll go before you, the thirteen, one by one by one, and you will only be an afterthought, dragged along in their wake. Tardy. Almost forgotten.

  Madeline tapped ash on the floorboard, and Drew asked me to finish my story. It would be the last story I’d ever tell him, and he wanted to hear all the way to the end.

  And as I look, I fain would know

  The paths whereon thy dream-steps go,

  The spectral realms that thou canst see

  With eyes veiled from the world and me.

  I never imagined a house could be this quiet.

  My sweat has stained the sheets yellow, and I push them onto the floor. It’s not the first time I’ve seen that stain, but it’s the first time it’s ever struck me as unclean. I lean over and shove the dirty sheet beneath the bed, only half understanding that what I feel is not only revulsion, but shame, too. Like waking from a dream of bleeding to the shock of my first period and rose petals spread across the linen.

  No. Never mind. Not like that at all.

  I get to my feet, going slowly becau
se the dizziness is worse this morning. No surprise there. I knew it would be. There should be no surprises whatsoever today. It’s all dot to dot, paint by number from here. This map before me is not terra incognita; I only have to fill in the blanks, and I’ve spent months learning the answers. I was born knowing the answers, 6,997 days ago, but must have been so terrified at the truth of it all that I did my best to forget. That was the road to an alleyway between Ninety-third and Ninety-fourth streets in Westmont, desolation row, detonation boulevard, the road of needles, the fucking path of least resistance. The Coward’s Way. But the willful scales fell from my eyes on the road to my own private Damascus, Drew’s Damascus, the television white-noise Damascus where the messengers sing from cathode ray tubes. One foot in front of the other. That’s all it takes. Go to the thirteen, now, and be sure everything is just exactly as it ought to be. You’re the fourteenth, and you’re also the midwife. There can be no greater honor, can there? Make certain that each crosses at her or his appointed time, that they all bloom and spread themselves to the winds blowing down from the Chocolate Mountains, the star winds, the mighty Coachella sirocco. And only when each has folded open may I sit down and follow their examples.

  The very last, I hear Madeline whisper. By the time you arrive, little afterthought, the deed will be done. The parade will have come and gone. But don’t be sad. Every revolution needs a rear guard, just in case. Someone will be thankful, I’m sure.

  In the hallway, between the kitchen and the television room, that’s when I see the shotgun. It’s always been there, the break-top double-barrel twelve-gauge that Drew said he got cheap off some bikers up in San Bernardino. To keep away the coyotes, he said, though I’ve never seen a coyote come anywhere near Moonlight Ranch. I don’t know what the fuck they’d even eat out here. I’ve never even seen a jackrabbit or an armadillo, either, and it’s not like coyotes can eat creosote bushes or cacti. I check to see if the shotgun’s loaded, pushing back the latch to open the breech. I can’t recollect just when I learned to do that. But maybe Drew taught me, right after I came here. In case there were coyotes. I find two shells in the gun, and didn’t Madeline tell me there were more in a kitchen cupboard?

  What are you doing, Chloe? What the fuck do you think you’re doing?

  I find the extra shells, and I carry the gun with me when I go to the television room. All the others, they’re too far along for the bunks, and so they’ve slept here, bathed in the salt-and-pepper light of the television, wrapped in the lullaby voices buried deep in the static since the Big Bang was new. My 6,997 days, the cosmos’s 13.7 billion years, this planet’s 4.5 billion years. I never used to have a head for facts and figures, but the messengers have brought so, so many gifts.

  The room is becoming a garden, and it’s my job to see that the flowers open out of doors, not inside this stifling room. They would be wasted here. What good is a rose that no one ever sees or smells.

  What are you doing?

  I won’t even remember pulling the trigger. I know that. I am absolutely certain of that, just as I’m certain that I’ll also have no doubt whatsoever that I did. It isn’t fair that I should be the last, not when I’m his favorite. I know that, and Madeline knows, too. It was always a part of his plan, she whispers behind my eyes. But not a part that even he fully understands. It’s like that, you know. Sometimes even prophets need a helping hand. Just like Judas helped Jesus. Maybe you’ve never been a Christian, never gone to church or prayed, but I bet you know that story, I bet you understand that analogy. So don’t you worry your pretty head. You won’t be last, after all.

  It wouldn’t have been fair.

  I find them all right where they ought to be, and the gun cracks the day like an egg.

  11. Lowdown Subterranean End-Times Blues (Revisited)

  THE HAUNTED HUMAN PSYCHE craves resolution. Indeed, it petulantly demands it. This unfortunate state of affairs may be a simple issue of how gray matter has been hardwired by millions of years of mutation and natural selection, a quirk of evolution riding piggyback on the emergence of a complex higher consciousness. We cannot know if the australopithecines or their forebears were burdened by this same weakness—and it is a weakness—as we cannot observe their interactions with an unresolved and likely unresolvable universe. We can’t question them. But humans, inherent problem solvers that we are, chafe at problems that cannot be solved, questions that cannot ever, once and for all, satisfactorily be put to rest: the assassination of President Kennedy, the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the Wow! signal, Casper Hauser, the Voynich manuscript, the identity of Jack the Ripper. Just for example.

  How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

  I got a million of ’em. The mind balks at the idea that these mysteries will never be solved. Which, of course, has no bearing on their solvability. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men are for naught.

  Wishing ain’t getting.

  In his heart of hearts, the Signalman knows this is gospel. But his job is, all the same, to pursue answers for the Powers That Be, the powerbrokers, the gatekeepers. And in the absence of answers, he’s learned to settle for the doubtful consolation of necessary fictions. He is, above all else, a practical man. Whatever idealism he once might have harbored was sacrificed a long, long time ago. Scar tissue stiffens and numbs the inquisitorial soul.

  The “death” of Chloe Stringfellow closed avenues of investigation that can never again be opened.

  And the answers in Immacolata Sexton’s dreadful briefcase only get him just so far.

  And so it goes.

  Still, and all, there is a trail of half truths and three-quarter lies that leads him, finally, to San Diego and the Hollister Street Days Inn, less than three miles from the Mexican border, less than a hundred miles from the ranch on the shores of the Salton Sea. He caught a lucky break, got a tip from a CI, a schizophrenic who’s spent the last two decades creating a concordance for the Weekly World News, “the World’s Only Reliable News,” painstakingly cataloging and correlating everything from Jersey Devil sightings to Bat Boy, from Israeli mermaids to the discovery of an alien spacecraft at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and patterns inevitably emerge. All those strange things that come and go as early warnings. And one of those patterns leads the Signalman and three FBI agents to Room 210.

  That the tip came from the lunatic fringe and not from complaints about the smell is just exactly the sort of thing that never ceases to amaze the Signalman.

  There in the parking lot was Drew Standish’s 1967 red Buick Sport Wagon, and behind the door to Room 210 was his corpse and the corpse of a woman who will later be identified as Madeline Nightlinger, a former Facebook executive who’d been missing since January 2013. A coroner back at Groom Lake will determine that they’d both been dead since at least July 5. Their skulls have been cut open and their brains removed, the brain stem so neatly divided from the spinal column that even the most jaded neurosurgeon would surely be impressed. There was not so much as a drop of blood anywhere. The bodies have been positioned on their backs, hands folded on their chests. Both were naked, their clothing neatly folded and placed thoughtfully in the room’s chest of drawers. As for the top halves of their bisected crania, genuine skullcaps, those turned up in the bathroom sink. Hungry ants were everywhere.

  The brains themselves were nowhere to be found.

  One of the FBI agents excused himself and vomited his breakfast over the railing and onto the asphalt below.

  Standish’s Black Book, described in a dossier from Immacolata’s briefcase, was nowhere to be found. On the other hand, there was a peculiar metal cylinder resting on a table near the door, and some would say that it more than makes up for the missing book. The Signalman is, however, most emphatically not one of those people. The cylinder only poses a hundred new questions and answers none. It’s about a foot tall, not quite a foot in diameter, with three sockets arranged in an isosceles triangle on the conv
ex surface of one end. As for the composition of the metal itself, that will never be determined, though it will be found to match other anomalous samples recovered from Roswell, New Mexico, and Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. SEM magnifications from < 100×–15,000×, ED× area scans, elemental mapping, and point-and-shoot analysis will all fail to yield conclusive results.

  Looking at the cylinder, the Signalman shuddered, and he considered, albeit briefly, chartering a fishing boat and sinking the damned thing in the deep Pacific water out beyond the Coronado Escarpment. In the long years to come, the cowardice that stays his hand will be a recurring source of regret. Could’a, should’a, would’a.

  Don’t you know it.

  Three nights after the discovery at the Days Inn, when Standish and Nightlinger’s corpses are safely on ice in Nevada and the metal cylinder has forever vanished into the labyrinthine bowels of Dreamland, the Signalman—more than half drunk—gives in and calls a number that Immacolata Sexton gave him that night back in Winslow, scribbled on the back of a coffee-stained paper napkin. He’d almost thrown it in the trash; he’d certainly never intended to use it. Not for Sweet Baby Jesus, love, or green folding money. But in the dead of night, alone with his thoughts and memories and fears, alone with a deeper despair than he’s ever known, intentions turn out to mean less than nothing. She answers on the fourth ring. Her voice is every bit as icy as he remembers.

  “You found him,” she says before he has a chance to even say hello.

  “How the fuck do you know that?”

  “A little bird,” she replies.

  “Whatever,” he says, and laughs. “I’m calling it quits, putting in for early retirement. I think they’ll let me go. I think Albany sees they’ve wrung every last bit out of me they’re going to get. The salad days are over and gone.”