The Tindalos Asset

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Of course, Albany didn’t need to google anything. They had video, and they had a couple hundred specimens freeze dried or pickled in formalin, and they also had the death of an agent who’d gotten sloppy and been devoured by a thirty-foot plesiosaur that had lunged out of the flooded basement of the Gove County Courthouse.

  And they had a soapstone idol that had been found in the wreckage.

  Giger’s Buddha, remember?

  And there’s plenty more, sure, plenty more horrors between Christmas Eve and the January morning when Ellison Nicodemo opened her eyes to find the Signalman sitting there in her apartment, staring forlornly at a broken television. But after a certain point, even horror becomes tedium. Or, at best, low burlesque. By now, you either get the picture or you never, ever shall. Them’s the breaks.

  A procession of the damned.

  But just one more item in this Grand Guignol, though. A phone call to Albany, to the Signalman’s office there below all that steel and Vermont Pearl marble, all those tons of concrete and glass pressing down like God’s own paperweight to hide a billion dirty secrets. Just one more damned thing, then we’re done. A woman’s voice, a voice he’d only heard once before and had prayed he’d never have to hear again, except in those nightmares all the whisky in the world wouldn’t banish.

  “Nicodemo should have killed me,” the woman told him. She had a Welsh accent and her voice made the Signalman think of holding a seashell up to his ear. “But you already know that, don’t you? You know how you should have found yourself a better assassin. It’s too late now. Now they’re coming, the Mother and the Father. Now they’re almost here. She should have killed me when she had the chance.”

  And while he was sitting there trying to think what to say, she hung up.

  And so it goes, as Mr. Vonnegut used to be fond of saying.

  And so it goes.

  10.: Monday Evening Kaiju Genderfuck Pas de Deux

  (Atlanta, January 10, 2011)

  “They sent you here to kill me,” whispers the siren, the coiling and uncoiling collage of silt and shadow pressing down upon you, crushing and pinning you to the hotel bed. She’s bleeding, but you can’t remember why. Her lips are pressed to your left ear with a fearful intimacy, and her breath is the breath of a salt marsh and her wrath is the still quiet before a hurricane makes landfall. “They sent you here with your pet to murder me. They baited a hook, and I bit like a starving mackerel. They sent you here, because they were afraid to come for me themselves.” And how you have tried shutting your eyes. How you have tried so very, very hard. And how you’ve tried all the fancy mental defenses and psychological gymnastics that came with your training—dissociative virtual relocation, concentrative self-hypnosis, think-aloud initiated autogenic-neurofeedback et alia. Grasping at straws, you have trotted out that bag of tricks, all to no avail. You are alone with her in this dingy room off Ponce de Leon Avenue, this room that stinks of disinfectant and mold and tiny bars of soap—and of her, because she is fast eclipsing everything in the world that is not her. Bending low above you, she is plucking all the cosmos asunder and remaking it to suit her secret needs and the secret needs of the powers she serves. Where is the hound? you think, and then you say the words aloud, “Where is the hound?” But your voice has been diminished by the sheer undeniable weight of her, collapsed like a Styrofoam coffee cup sunk fifteen hundred meters down, like the moment of a submarine’s implosion. “Yes,” the siren hisses through needle teeth and baleen, “where is the hound? Shouldn’t I already be dead by now? Shouldn’t I be over and done with by now? Wasn’t that the plan? Well, I know the day I die, and this isn’t it.” Helpless to do otherwise, you stare straight into her bottomless eyes, and she smiles and stares back into you, finding you hardly even deep as a handful of piss. It isn’t coming, she tells you, this time without even moving her lips. She is the ocean’s ventriloquist, and you are, at best, a skillfully carved driftwood marionette. If it were coming, it would be here by now. If it were coming, you wouldn’t be in this fix, this mess you’re in. And when they find the dispatch that I’ll make of you, Ellison Nicodemo, and when they ask you why you have failed them so completely, you will teach them of the soul cages and the merciless justice of drowned gods. Now the siren kisses you, and something living that is not a tongue slides across her lips and moves slimy across your lips and between your teeth and slithers down your gagging throat. It will make a den of your belly. It will make a burrow of your soul. “But what is it I will I make of you?” the siren asks. “What will I fashion from you, little killer, little houndwife, that they will slink away and not ever trouble me again?” The thing she has vomited into your belly snickers to itself and seeps toxins that are the envy of every box jelly and blue-ringed octopus, every lionfish and cloth-of-gold cone ever spawned. Without speaking, the siren whispers, There was a little pool, curved in a smooth arc, dear to Scylla for its peacefulness. This, the goddess tainted in advance and contaminated with her monstrous poison. She sprinkled the liquid squeezed from harmful creatures, and muttered a mysterious incantation, dark with strange words, thrice nine times, in magical utterance. And where a moment ago there was a bed in a seedy room in a tawdry hotel in a crowded night-bound Southern city, there is now only a weathered slab of jasper and pillow lava beneath your naked body. Where there was the noise of traffic and hip-hop blaring from the room next door, now there is the sea slamming itself against the breakers, and jaundiced streetlight through the window has become the ivory moon gazing down from a peephole punched in the salt-dabbed sky. My own grandmother was bedded on this altar stone, the siren whispers. And my mother. It wasn’t meant for unconsecrated filth like you. And again you think, Where is the hound? Why won’t it come? And again the poisonous thing in your gut, Circe’s thrice nine times, snickers to itself and pricks at your mind. But I could make you something better, says the siren, and another wave slams the rocks and showers you in freezing spray. Cell by cell, molecule by molecule, I could undo this crude terrestrial evolution. I could unzip all those inconvenient double helices and remind you where you came from. Then you would be my assassin, little killer. Then you would be my hound. A moment ago, your hands were clutching frantically at damp sheets, sheets she had you soak with water from the tub, but now your fingers scrabble at unyielding igneous stone as you play Andromeda to her Cetus. You may not have been born worthy, but you can be made worthy. You hear yourself say, “Just let me close my eyes, please just let me close my eyes,” and the siren shakes her head and kisses you again, and there’s the taste of kelp and oysters and low-tide estuary mud. Scylla comes, wading waist deep into the pool, only to find the water around her groin erupt with yelping monsters, and Maybe, says the siren, when I’m done, they’ll keep you in a great glass aquarium tank below that watchtower of theirs and show you off as a warning and feed you on fresh alewives and blueback herring. Maybe they’ll even teach you tricks. You’re scraping your fingers raw against her altar, your blood mingling with the roaring, hungry sea. Please, just let me close my eyes, but before you have even finished speaking, all the waves resounded, and a monster menaced them, rising from the deep sea, and covered the wide waters with its breadth. The thing in your belly has become an ouroboros, infinitely recursive, a pregnant Möbius strip, the strangest of all strange loops cycling you back upon yourself, and the scabby Welsh seashore comes apart, just as the hotel room came apart.

  “Where are you now, little killer?” the siren wants to know, as if she needs to ask. “Tell me what you see.”

  And where, indeed, but a dark place, and it is a darkness unlike any you have ever known before, unlike any you have even managed to halfway imagine, waking or asleep or anywhere in between. This is a solid darkness possessed somehow of form and substance, and you can feel it, palpable, crowding in all around. You think how you might easily reach out and grab a whole fistful, if you had the courage. If you were that careless. It feels eager, the dark; it feels impatient. And crouching helpless and afraid you
think how you must have wandered alone in this lightless, echoing place for days upon days, weeks upon weeks, retreating across some vast plain of polished stone, coming finally to a corner—or something that only seems vaguely like a corner if you don’t allow yourself to think on it too hard. If you pause to consider its screwball, cockeyed geometry, it doesn’t seem anything at all like a corner, but more like a curve than the meeting point of convergent lines. If it were only a corner, you think, the hound could find me here and slay the dragon and take me home again. You hug yourself and shiver, naked and slick with brine and diatomaceous ooze and clinging strands of seaweed, with the siren’s gift growing fat in your belly. You know that somehow you’ve become lost beyond lost within some impossibly cavernous space beneath the bottom of the sea, without knowing how you know this. You are lost, and the hound isn’t coming, and Albany isn’t coming, and the Signalman isn’t coming. But worse and worst, you are not alone, after all. Something here is stirring. And all at once you remember how you know exactly what that something is, because the siren whispered its awful name into your ear and into your mouth and brain, and the thing that wears that name is infinitely worse than the smothering darkness, which is, in truth, only here to keep this god-thing hidden, and to keep it company and to mutter worshipful obscenities to flatter a sleeping leviathan. What an utterly insufficient word—leviathan. The serpent of Job and Isaiah is hardly even the palest poor phantom beside this titan that has slept away untold eons, shrouded by the endless, impenetrable night here at the bottom of the deepest part of the sea. A million years ago or more, the siren whispered and set you wandering the lightless hallways of a sprawling, sunken necropolis so that you came suddenly upon the Sleeper in His abyssal vault, and even through the living blackness you saw Him. And beholding Him, you fell to your hands and knees and scuttled away to this corner that is no corner, wishing yourself only a pair of ragged, inconsequential claws, smaller even than a mote of dust, so that there would not be even the slimmest chance that the Sleeper—in His own dreams—would ever notice you. A mountain walked, the siren whispers, and you never have needed to scream so badly as you do now. But you won’t scream. You know that you won’t. You won’t make any sound at all. The siren whispers—or you think to yourself—No woman or man has ever been even half so damned as would be the one who wakes Him. Even Judas Iscariot would seem, by comparison, a saint. Hitler would seem a choirboy. So in the darkness you wait, and the thing in your belly snickers, and great white worms and fish with blind and bulging eyes, creatures that have never seen sunlight, slip about you and wrap you in their icy folds.

  And then—and now—

  —it may be the Sleeper was nothing more substantial than a fever dream, because here you sit in a chair at the center of a red maze painted upon a wooden floor. The siren is waiting somewhere at your back, and there’s a tall looking glass in a rotting wooden frame, standing only a few feet in front of you, holding your reflection captive. And everything here hangs suspended within a shimmering liquid sphere. Like mercury, you think, or oil, or water drawn up from the bottom of the sea. It’s perfectly smooth, that sphere, so now you know why the hound hasn’t come. It can’t come because there are no admitting angles for it to slip through, not here within the siren’s hollow sphere. You take a deep breath, because your chest aches, as if you haven’t breathed in ages, and the air reeks of dead fish and sulfurous hydrothermal fissures, of encrusting salt rimes and blood. In your belly, the siren’s child wriggles, wanting to be born, and you can feel its mother searching through your thoughts, thumbing memories like sodden pages. You look down at your muddy feet, at the webbing that has grown between your toes, at the scatter of iridescent photophores glowing blue-green beneath your skin, and you ask the siren what she thinks she’ll find, what it is she’s seeking. You tell her you’re not trying to hide anything, not anymore. You make promises and swear that all your consciousness and unconsciousness is an open and willing book. “I’m not keeping anything back from you,” you whisper desperately and hear yourself sobbing, and you hate that sound, as you have always hated the sound of crying. The siren roughly brushes fragile recollections, and they burst in your mind like bubbles rising from deep, deep places. Days and nights come and gone—

  “She got mixed up with an Austrian group, Black Sun. They use heroin to fund . . . fuck, I don’t know what all. Expeditions to find the Aryan descendants of Atlantis. Also, I think you broke my jaw. I’m going to have to explain this to my handler, you know.”

  “Rough sex explains a lot, Elle. Especially at some crappy, Johann-come-lately Thule sex party . . .”

  “Can I at least get up off the floor now?”

  “I’m not keeping you on the fucking floor. Get up if you want to. Just tell me, how much shit is Dieter bringing you tonight?”

  “Listen, if you’re going to take those briefcases, you can’t leave me conscious. It has to look like I didn’t just give them up.”

  “In my opinion, I’d have to leave you dead. Anyway, we’ve got dope contacts, if I wanted the dope.”

  —and the siren, she smirks, and the thing inside your belly snickers, and you realize that the red maze shifts and rearranges itself every time you look away. There’s no path out, unless she says so. Picking at the convolutions of your frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex, the siren’s claws are as good as razor blades. This isn’t necessary, you tell her. “I fucking swear to you, I’m not holding anything back.” But the siren, she laughs her typhoon laugh and tugs hard at the supramarginal gyrus of your left parietal lobe. We’ll be finished soon enough, she says, and when I have what I need, little killer, then we’ll play dress up and you can be the pretty princess and I can be the hagfish with a poison apple, luring you away to nap inside your glass whale-fall coffin. She leans in and laps the tears from your face, and another mnemonic bubble bursts—

  . . . The car races through the stormy night, the Signalman hunched behind the wheel. Ellison Nicodemo skims over the clutter of redacted documents until she finds the mug shot of a woman she has to kill tonight.

  “Her name’s Kristall Weber,” says the Signalman, “a former double agent for the BND and GRU with ties to X. Not a very nice woman, when all is said and done. True to form, she decided to double-cross us. Which is what I get for trusting the Greek. Anyway, I can’t tell you exactly what all she had her grubby fingers in—mostly because our friend hasn’t told me—but what I do know is that we’ve got a very fucking small window available to tidy everything up before she defects to Julia Set and makes it out of the States. Best guess, she’s headed for a helicopter extraction. We had eyes on her until about twenty minutes ago, and then our spotter went and . . . well. Shit happens, right?”

  Ellison commits Kristall Weber’s face to memory. Then she switches off the iPad and slides it beneath the car seat. She ruffles the brunette wig she’s wearing with her fingers, sending up a spray of rain droplets that spatter both the Signalman and the windshield.

  “Goddamn rain,” she says, drawing the 9mm from somewhere inside her coat, giving it a quick once-over, popping out the clip, jamming it right back in. “Three businessmen from Turkey are going to be very fucking unhappy if I’m late. I just need you to understand the consequences of that, okay? These aren’t men who are accustomed to being left at the altar.”

  She pulls back on the slide, putting one in the chamber.

  “Mags in the glove box, hardware in the trunk,” the Signalman tells her. “Listen, I didn’t even want to put you in play for this. But we don’t have a lot of deniable resources in striking distance. Weber has business in retro-engineered Zeta-Reticulan tech and backside exo-trafficking, so we’re going to spin the hit as a preemptive decap strike. The competition getting aggressive, throwing its weight around.” The Signalman looks at her as they race down an entrance ramp onto the Massachusetts Turnpike. ”Can you do this, kiddo?”

  Ellison opens the glove compartment, takes out the spare clips and puts them into the pockets of
her raincoat, then slams it shut again. “Yeah,” she says, “I can do this. But first, I need you to be absolutely clear about the . . .”

  —the siren has told you to walk, and so you’re walking, putting one foot in front of the other, following the endlessly shifting warp and weft of the maze painted on the floor, careful to avoid dead ends and switchbacks. Your aching skull, so filled with her fingertips, feels as if it’s about to burst open at the seams, but you know that’s not going to happen. There’s no easy way out, not now, not here. And don’t look at your feet, the siren sneers. Look at the mirror. Keep your eyes on the mirror, little killer. That’s where all the action is. Or soon enough will be. And, because there’s no fight left in you, you do as she says and look up. The mirror’s still right there, but now, instead of your reflection, it’s become a window into what appears to be a dilapidated building of some sort, bare concrete floors, cement columns, exposed ductwork and tattered fiberglass insulation and everything lit by stark fluorescent tubes hanging on chains from the ceiling. There’s something else hung there, too, and at first—even after all you’ve seen, after all she has shown you—you think your eyes are playing tricks on you. No, dear, not this time. No sleight of hand. No subterfuge. What you see is what you get. And what you see through the looking-glass window is an enormous shark, gutted and hanging snout down from the rafters of that deserted, derelict place. Soon, whispers the siren, and she’s put something in your right hand, something small and hard that you don’t dare take your eyes off the mirror to see. Soon enough we’ll be done here. Your carriage awaits. And, at that, the thing in your belly rolls over and over and over, slouching towards whatever Bethlehem is its birthright. The siren sighs, the tempest’s sigh, the bone’s wrangle, and a talon digs deeper into soft grey matter—