The Tindalos Asset

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Does it mean that she didn’t care for me?” she asks him, when almost five full minutes have come and gone with nothing but silence and the crackle of the fire and the sigh of the wind about the eaves of the cottage. “That she went to the sea like that?”

  “I can’t answer that,” he tells her. “But if she didn’t, she was a fool. Did she never say that she loved you?”

  “No,” says the girl, though she wonders if that’s the truth or only the way it has come to seem in the time since she was left alone. “She was always good to me, though. She was never cruel.”

  “It wasn’t cruel to leave you, the way that she did?”

  “Maybe she knew that you would come, that my father would send you to keep me safe, to keep me from starving.”

  “No, she didn’t know that.”

  “Then maybe she thought my father would come for me himself.”

  The dark man shakes his head, and he tells the girl, “No, she knew that your father had dealings elsewhere, business that left him with no time to look after a daughter, even if he’d had the inclination.”

  “Oh,” says the girl and stares down at her plate and the bits of food there, waiting to be scraped and scrubbed away. She picks at a crust of laverbread.

  “Regardless, it’s nothing you should fret over now,” says the dark man. “Your mother is gone. She made her choice. You are here, with me, and you have many choices remaining, none of which concern your mother.”

  “Please tell me a story, before you go,” says the girl, regretting that she asked the dark man such a childish question, knowing how it had been a mistake to let on that she dwells overly on whether or not a drowned woman ever loved her. “Tell me again about Mother Hydra and Father Kraken. Or about Dagon and the Sargasso Sea.”

  “Not tonight,” he says. “Indeed, I think possibly the time for stories has passed.” And then the dark man stops smoking his pipe and taps the ashes out onto the hearthstones at his feet. The girl is about to ask him what he means, that the time for stories has passed, when he says, “I’m going to show you something now. Maybe I should have shown you a long time ago, but I was afraid that you weren’t yet ready. Maybe you’re not ready even now, but I don’t dare put it off any longer. Not if the sea is already trying so hard to lure you away.”

  The girl begins to ask him what it is that he’s going to show her, what it is that he’s afraid she’s not old enough to see. But then she stops and reminds herself to be patient. Whatever it is, she’ll know soon enough. Her mother was impatient, and all it got her was drowned.

  The dark man has put away his pipe and he’s no longer gazing into the fire. He gets up, walks around the table and the dirty dishes and remains of their supper, and then stands looking down at the girl. Her eyes are the blue-green of shallow saltwater on a freezing day. Her hair is the color of bone char. The dark man reaches out and presses the tip of his left index finger firmly against the flesh between her brows. She sits looking up at him. She isn’t frightened. He’s never given her any reason not to trust him. He smiles a tired sort of smile, and she smiles back.

  “All your life,” he says, “you’ve been waiting for this revelation to find you, though you didn’t know it ever finally would. All your short life, you have sensed there was so very much more to the world than you could see, and you feared that you would grow old and die with all those great mysteries still hidden from your view. You have even begun to believe you’re not meant to know them, not beyond the measly shreds and rumors your drowned mother whispers in your dreams and when you are no more than half awake. Close your eyes now, and I’ll show you everything.”

  The girl nods once, then shuts her eyes.

  And the dark man shows he’s as good as his promise.

  Long hours later, when the sun is up and she opens her eyes again, Abishag sees the gift that he has left for her on the mantel, the figure carved from a lump of green stone. Stone almost the same color as her eyes.

  And there will be another gift.

  In nine months, the girl in the whitewashed cottage by the sea will give birth to a daughter, and the child will have her mother’s black hair. But her eyes will be the star-specked midnight eyes of the dark man and her skin will be the color of fog.

  9.: Rime of the Super-Sargasso Sea

  (October 2017–January 2018)

  Two hundred feet beneath the Erastus Corning Tower, in the sprawling labyrinth of fluorescent lights, subway tile, and narrow, winding corridors, there’s a cheery sunflower-yellow door marked FORT FATE. Rest assured, the joke isn’t lost on the studious men and women who comprise the agency’s Directorate of Information Retention and Disposal (DIRD), those unlucky few to whom every damned thing is laid bare. And like the man said, by damned, I mean the excluded. That which it’s best goes unnoticed and unknown by as few souls as possible, those rude, unruly truths which have no fit place in any decent, polite, and sane understanding of the cosmos. And I say unlucky few, because, turns out, any given human being can only endure just so many worldview-shattering, paradigm-shifting revelations before their sanity starts to fray like a cheap pair of socks. The human psyche might well be resilient, but even Superman has to worry about kryptonite. So, employee turnover in the ranks of the DIRD is high and the retirement benefits include, more often than not, padded cells and Thorazine. Want to look past the cover-ups, doublespeak, and obscurantism to find out what really happened at Roswell, New Mexico, on June 14, 1947, or learn the truth about Lee Harvey Oswald, the Philadelphia Experiment, and the Tunguska Explosion? Ever wondered what Bigfoot and Nessie eat for breakfast? If maybe the Pope shits in the woods? Then you’ve come to the right place. The folks at the DIRD, sequestered there behind that cheerful yellow door, they have you covered, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 damn days a year, a multitude of antique typewriters clack-clack-clacking their verboten tarantella.

  But we digress.

  On the eve of the Signalman’s reluctant departure for Los Angeles, he received a thick brown Kraft booklet envelope, 9×12.5, straight flap, button string tie, hand delivered by a junior DIRD correlation specialist who’d worked overtime preparing the report stuffed inside and meant, in due course, for a “former” and soon-to-be reluctantly reactivated agent named Ellison Joanne Nicodemo.

  By the way, the unofficial motto of the DIRD is Noli nuntium necare.

  Don’t kill the messenger, natch.

  The report reads like the first act of the next J. J. Abrams Cloverfield flick, like a prospectus for an especially preposterous apocalypse. The contents would have made even Charles Hoy Fort blanch. Fish from a clear blue sky, you say? Why, that’s nothing. Pshaw, even. We got a goddamn sixty-five-foot sperm whale—Moby-Dick’s own great-great-grandkid—stretched across the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

  Oh, but wait, you’ve heard that one already, haven’t you?

  Fine. Never mind the whale. There’s plenty more where that came from.

  For example, a string of vicious attacks on swimmers from the eastern Gulf of Mexico all the way up the Atlantic Seaboard to Cape Cod, twenty-two fatalities in all, twice as many more maimed, and not a single one of these the result of sharks—or any of the other usual suspects. Rather, the attackers were swarms of lysianassid amphipods, or “sea fleas,” tiny crustaceans each less than one millimeter in length. In every case, the victims died of massive blood loss and tissue damage before they could receive medical attention. The autopsy of a teenage girl killed at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, recovered more than two thousand feeding amphipods from her body, including many that had burrowed deeply into internal organs.

  Yeah, you might want to put down the popcorn now. I’m afraid it really isn’t going to get any prettier.

  On the morning of October 30, a woman in Kittery, Maine, gave birth to a live foot-long squid, which a biologist from the state department of marine resources later identified as a young specimen of Idioteuthis cordiformis, or whip-lash squid, a species native to the tropical wa
ters of the west Pacific Ocean. The unfortunate mother died during the delivery, but the bouncing baby squid survived for several days.

  See what I mean about the popcorn?

  One week later, the aforementioned sperm whale.

  Three days after that, on the evening of Friday, November 9, schizophrenic patients at a half dozen New England psychiatric hospitals hallucinated that they were drowning, or being drowned, by some unseen force that held them beneath cold pools of stagnant black water. Eight of those affected would attempt suicide before month’s end, and two would succeed. A similar incident occurred on Thanksgiving Day at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, where violent hallucinations were accompanied by the conviction that all humanity would soon perish in a global deluge, the likes of which would put poor Mr. Noah’s frog-strangler to shame. This time, or so the attending psychologists were advised, there would be no ark and no pretty rainbows and definitely no covenants with a loving god.

  Four days later, a Seattle man murdered his wife and two children in what newspapers would later describe as an act of “ritual homicide” and even “human sacrifice.” After their throats had been cut ear to ear and their eyes removed, the victims were disemboweled and their bodies stuffed with table salt, driftwood, and an assortment of frozen seafood. Then the killer blew his brains out with a Browning A5 semi-automatic shotgun, but not before he’d used his dead wife’s blood to scrawl ALMS FOR MOTHER HYDRA on the living-room wall in letters so tall they reached from floor to ceiling.

  Over the next week there were essentially identical incidents in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Baltimore. The total death toll was fifteen.

  And in Baja, Mexico, thousands of stinging jellyfish fell from a cloudless sky for over an hour.

  In Sydney, Australia, it was a species of basket starfish, Gorgonocephalus arcticus.

  In Moscow, there was a brief and messy shower of deepwater sea cucumbers, usually seen only on silty abyssal plains, thousands of feet down.

  Chicago got a somewhat more mundane fall of shrimp and hermit crabs.

  Tiddely-pom.

  On the night of December 2, in Pierre, South Dakota, seventeen people drowned in their sleep, their lungs filled almost to bursting with seawater, and never mind that the nearest available patch of ocean—Hudson Bay—is inconsiderately located more than nine hundred miles away. This time, agents from Albany intervened before civilian authorities were able to perform autopsies and all reporters got was an admittedly thin cover story about an outbreak of viral pneumonia.

  Not quite a week later, something enormous—or several smaller somethings—slithered out of icy Lake Erie just after midnight and demolished a power plant at Avon Lake, Ohio. Once again, our friends from beneath the Erastus Corning Tower were among the first responders and dutifully saw to it that all that careless talk of sea monsters and the like was quashed before it reached the press.

  Over several nights in December, fishing boats off the northern coast of Wales, especially in the vicinity of Anglesey, reported strange lights in the sky and in the water. At dawn on the 17th, both Tŵr Bach and Tŵr Mawr lighthouses on Ynys Llanddwyn exploded and their smoldering ruins tumbled into the Irish Sea.

  At precisely 9:23 p.m. UTC on Friday, December 21, at the exact moment of the winter solstice, in excess of twenty-five thousand Twitter accounts simultaneously posted the following passage from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 poem, “The Lobster Quadrille” (alternately known as “The Mock Turtle’s Song”): Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance./Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?/Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance? Twelve minutes later, those very same accounts posted the closing lines of Tennyson’s 1830 sonnet “The Kraken”: There hath he lain for ages, and will lie/Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,/Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;/Then once by man and angels to be seen,/In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die. Early the next day, Twitter blamed the anomalous tweets on Chinese or Islamic State hackers, which seemed a reasonable enough explanation to pretty much everyone, save the usual gang of conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxer, flat-earther, Michelle - Obama - is - actually - an - alien - lizard - man crackpots.

  That same day, seventeen women and five men joined hands and walked, fully clothed, into the Gulf of Mexico at Vanderbilt Beach, near Naples, Florida. There were several witnesses to the mass drowning, including a camera crew from the local CBS affiliate that had gotten an anonymous heads-up via email. Twenty-two people went into the water, but recovery efforts would fail to turn up even a single corpse. Several of the drowned left behind suicide notes, all of which found their way into the attentive hands of the agents of Dreamland before any inconvenient red flags were raised by lunatic ramblings about eternal life and never-ending bliss in the loving arms of Dagon. Not much could be done about the camera crew, which had been broadcasting live.

  On December 22 and 23, there was a veritable frenzy of reports describing grotesque, fish-like humanoids with glowing red-gold eyes seen lurking along beaches and roads bordering salt marshes all the way from Gloucester, Massachusetts, north to Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. Albany decided to let the media have their fun with this one. There are, regrettably, only so many fingers available to plug leaking dikes at any given time, agency resources being considerably less than infinite. And, anyway, the visiting fishmen left behind no especially incriminating physical evidence, save a few sets of muddy footprints and one blurry photo. The overworked folks in the DIRD found a measure of much needed levity in headlines about the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  The real show came on Christmas Eve.

  Late on the morning of December 24, the Indian Navy’s marine acoustic research ship INS Sagardhwani, while conducting a meteorological survey in the South Pacific, reported the sudden appearance of an uncharted landmass very near the oceanic pole of inaccessibility (48˚52.6’S 123˚23.6’W). Before a decision could be made whether or not to investigate further, the landmass abruptly vanished. The sixteen scientists onboard wrote the experience off as an especially convincing instance of a Fata Morgana mirage. However, approximately two hours after the mirage disappeared, minor tsunamis struck each of the three points of dry land nearest to the location of the Sagardhwani’s phantom shoreline—Ducie Atoll in the Pitcairn Islands; Maher Island, off the coast of Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica; and Motu Nui, south of Easter Island. Seismic stations failed to register any earthquake activity that would have accounted for the tsunamis.

  In a maternity ward in Galveston, Texas, there was a second improbable birth, when doctors delivered a full-grown pelican eel, also known as the umbrella-mouth gulper, a fish more usually at more home in the deep sea than in Texan uteri. It was stillborn, but the mother lived. The belly of the eel was found to contain an assortment of small shrimp and squids and a fist-sized lump of carved greenish stone. Imagine if maybe the Buddha had been designed by H. R. Giger, or so says the relevant DIRD report.

  More mass drownings. More murders in the name of this Mother Hydra character.

  Hallelujah, Hosanna, blah, blah, blah.

  One of China Eastern Airlines’ Boeing 737-800s, en route to Los Angeles International, flew through a school of hammerhead sharks at an altitude of 39,000 feet.

  But wait . . . there’s more!

  There’s still the motherfucking pièce de résistance.

  We take you now to Gove City, Kansas, population less than a hundred men, women, and children, not one of whom would live to see Christmas Day 2017. After a frigid, snowy night, the mercury began to climb right about sunrise and by noon on December 24th the temperature had reached a blistering 98˚F. An hour later, the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Wichita reported the sudden development of a supercell thunderstorm directly over Gove City, a writhing, psychedelic blob of red and magenta dancing across their doppler screens. A tornado warning was duly issued. Aircraft were warned to steer clear. And then, with
in a matter of seconds, all evidence of the storm disappeared from the radar. Abracadabra and so on and so forth. Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat. Attempts by the NWS to reach the sheriff’s office in Gove proved futile, and search and rescue teams were dispatched to the area. But once again Albany intervened, and the Signalman and Mackenzie Regan got there first. With the aid of Army and National Guard troops, a fifty-square-mile area around the town was cordoned off, no one in, no one out, and the CDC obligingly coughed up a federal order for isolation and quarantine. The FAA was just as cooperative in declaring the entire county prohibited airspace. So, hush-hush, because loose lips sink fragile human perceptions of order and chaos, of time and space.

  “What’s down there, man, you’re not going to fucking believe it.”

  “Dragons. I saw dragons.”

  Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs . . .

  “I shit you not, I saw goddamn dinosaurs.”

  A week later, with the cleanup and cover-up behind him, with Gove City a bulldozed, napalmed, salt-sown wasteland, the Signalman would struggle to describe the scene that greeted him and Agent Regan when their Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk set down on what once had been Broad Street. Every building, every utility pole and cottonwood tree, absolutely everything over a foot or two high had been leveled. Automobiles looked a lot more like crushed soda cans. And water, water everywhere, rivulets and streams and great pools of saltwater were laid out beneath the vast, pale sky of the Kansas prairie. There were rubbery mountains of kelp and an impossible assemblage of dead or dying reptilian monsters and long-extinct fishes and the whorled shells and tentacles of giant ammonites stolen from a Late Cretaceous epicontinental seaway, dry and gone some eighty-five million years, and unceremoniously dumped across Gove City.

  “When I was a boy,” said the Signalman, “we had this big ol’ coffee-table sorta book, The World We Live In, published by Life magazine back in the fifties. In that book, there was a painting, a double-page spread depicting all the sorts of weird shit that lived in the sea back in the Mesozoic, during the dinosaur days. The painting was done by a guy named Rudolph Zallinger, same fellow painted the murals for the Peabody Museum down at Yale. The ones that won the Pulitzer. You want to know what we found in Gove? Yeah? Well, you just google that painting. You’ll see for yourself.”