The Tindalos Asset

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Potsdam,” he tells Mackenzie. “I assume you’ve heard of Potsdam.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of Potsdam,” she replies, and he can tell she’s doing her best not to sound annoyed with him. “But I haven’t heard of Babelsberg.” Mackenzie takes a swallow of her vodka and cranberry, then goes back to stirring it with the swizzle stick.

  “So, you didn’t read about the thing with Ellison in Babelsberg?” he wants to know.

  “No,” she tells him, “I guess not. I must have skipped over that part.”

  “But you got the gist,” he says.

  The Signalman takes out his cigarettes and lays the half-empty pack on the table between them. Mackenzie points to one of the No Smoking signs, and so the Signalman points at the poster of Johnny Cash flipping the bird.

  “Fine,” she says. “I just thought we were keeping our heads down.”

  “I’ll see if I can’t smoke it inconspicuously,” he tells her, but doesn’t actually fish one of the cigarettes from the pack. “Anyway, so Ellison’s assignment in Babelsberg—in Potsdam—it was this soirée being thrown by a neo-Nazi outfit, a sorta latter-day offshoot of the Thule-Gesellschaft calling themselves the Schwarze Sonne. Crazy bunch of well-heeled fascist sonsabitches trying to open a doorway to Hyberborea and lead all the good Aryan boys and girls off to the promised land, etcetera and etcetera. Ellison was sent in undercover, as a heroin dealer from Tijuana, a Romanian expat named Elle Grau. So she shows up for this shindig, right, hosted at some billionaire’s mansion on the Griebnitzsee. And it’s a goddamn unholy bacchanalia of Rhineland mysticism and far right-wing politics, also known as pretty much what you’d expect. The cocaine and liquor flows like proverbial milk and honey. There’s whores of every conceivable flavor and a veritable battalion of Berliner skinheads working security and armed to the nines. Shit, there’s even—”

  “Wait,” Mackenzie interrupts. “Nicodemo, isn’t she from somewhere in Ohio? Columbus or Cincinnati or someplace?”

  “Yeah, she’s from Cleveland. So?”

  “So, wouldn’t it have made more sense to establish her as an American expat?”

  The Signalman looks up and glares at Mackenzie, then he looks down again and glares at the pack of Camels. The Doors song ends and Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My” immediately comes on to replace it.

  “Well,” says the Signalman, “that would be a question for whoever was her handler at the time and also for whatever geek was overseeing risk assessment. I assume Albany had their reasons, and you should follow my example. Maybe the Schwarze Sonne wasn’t keen to deal with Americans or something. I don’t know, because I wasn’t there. It wasn’t my call. And you’re missing the point, besides. If you don’t want to hear this, just tell me and I’ll talk about something else.” Then the tooth reminds him how many times he’s put off having it pulled, and so he has another mouthful of J.T.S. Brown. He also takes out one of the cigarettes, but he doesn’t light it. He feels a little better just having it parked there between his fingers.

  “No,” says Mackenzie Regan. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

  The Signalman swishes and swallows the bourbon. “Yeah, well, anyway,” he says, “turns out half these Nazi bastards—and bitches—were werewolves and somehow we missed that, and here Ellison’s walked into a pack of lycanthropes with no backup, no wire, not even a sidearm, just these two briefcases of uncut Mexican horse.”

  Mackenzie goes back to stirring her drink. “I sorta thought the whole point of Ellison Nicodemo is that she comes with the backup built in.”

  “Well, sure. But this thing in Babelsberg—and you’d know this if you’d actually bothered to read the file—it was an exfiltration op. We were trying to get someone out, okay? There was this teenage girl, kidnapped daughter of a Canadian diplomat, if I recall correctly, and that night she was scheduled to be sacrificed as a blood declaration of faith or some blah, blah, blah cultist shit, and Ellison was supposed to get in and get her out alive and in one piece. We’d worked a deal with Barbican Estate and once the girl and Ellison were clear, London was gonna level the place with an AIM-9 strike and write it off as a gas leak. Only a pair of Julia Set agents show up with their own agenda. They blow Ellison’s cover, and everything goes sideways faster than you can say Jack Robinson. Total fucking bloodbath.”

  “She used Tindalos?” Mackenzie asks, and the Signalman shakes his head.

  “Nope, not that night. But she still got that girl out of there,” he answers. “So, kiddo, when I say Ellison Nicodemo was good, that right there’s the sorta shit I’m talking about.”

  Mackenzie Regan takes a sip of her vodka and cranberry. Most of the ice has melted, and now it’s more LA tap water than anything else. “Okay, so what do you think went wrong that night in Atlanta?”

  “What I think is that’s yet one more question that falls outside the purview of my authority,” replies the Signalman, and so Mackenzie lets it drop.

  “I met a werewolf once,” she tells him, “up in Pennsylvania. She actually wasn’t such a bad sort.”

  “Just shows to go you,” he says. “Me, I’m gonna light up this damn coffin nail now, and management and the health codes of Los Angeles can go fuck themselves if they don’t like it.” And with that the Signalman retrieves his Zippo from a jacket pocket and flips back the silver cap. He lights the cigarette and blows smoke at the ceiling.

  Mackenzie just shrugs and checks her wristwatch. “I still don’t understand why we have to wait until tomorrow morning to pick her up,” she says.

  “‘Theirs not to reason why,’” the Signalman tells her, and he winks. “‘Theirs but to do and die.’” And then he reaches into his jacket again and takes out an envelope and lays it on the table next to the pack of Camels. The envelope’s crumpled and bent from riding around in his pocket, and there’s what looks to be a coffee stain on one corner. “This is strictly on the q.t., what I’m about to tell you,” he says, then glances up at Mackenzie. “But I’m telling you because I sorta trust you, as much as I figure I can trust anyone these days. And, hey, you’ve been partnered up with me about two and a half months now.”

  “Okay, so what is it?” Mackenzie asks.

  “My letter of resignation. When this is over and the dust has settled—assuming any of us lives that long—I’m putting in for retirement. I’m too old for this shit. I’ve been too old for this shit for some time now.”

  The Signalman watches Mackenzie’s steel-blue eyes, and sure, there’s surprise there, but not half as much as he’d expected there to be. He’s all too aware of his reputation as one of the last of Albany’s True Believers, a stone-cold MiB, the agency man through and through, balls to bones. The sort of man whose work is his life and the sort of man who probably wouldn’t last long without it. Definitely not the sort of man who voluntarily bows out of the game.

  “You’re serious?” she asks him and starts to reach for the envelope, then stops herself.

  “Yes, I am,” he replies. “I came real damn close back in 2015, after that goddamn mess by the Salton Sea. I should’a done it then, but . . .” He trails off and takes a drag on his cigarette.

  “You know they’re not going to be happy about this,” Mackenzie says. “Do you really think they’ll even accept it?”

  The Signalman exhales a cloud of smoke, then picks the envelope back up off the table and returns it to his jacket. “No shit they won’t be happy about it,” he says. “But when they see I’m serious, and that I’m not gonna back down, I imagine they’ll let me go. Anyway, what’s one more Cold War dinosaur put out to pasture?”

  Mackenzie sits up straight and crosses her arms. She looks past him towards the glowing red exit sign and the door leading back out onto Sunset Boulevard, into daylight and the shimmering, dusty wilds of La La Land. “I don’t suppose why is really any of my business,” she says.

  “I’m wrung out, that’s all. It ain’t no more complicated than that. I’ve been at this business now for thirty-seven years, since way b
ack before you—or Ellison—were even born. And I’m simply too tired to keep pace anymore. I’m not that damn Energizer bunny rabbit beating on its drum. Surely there’s a limit to how many times a mortal man can fairly be expected to come face-to-face with cosmic annihilation, and this thing with Jehosheba Talog and all her little green fishmen, it’s the last apocalypse I’ve got in me.”

  Neil Young gives way to Linda Ronstadt and “Blue Bayou,” and neither Mackenzie nor the Signalman says anything else for two or three long minutes. He smokes his cigarette and she stares at the exit sign.

  “Okay,” she says finally. “Are you going to tell her?”

  “You mean Ellison?”

  “Yeah,” says Mackenzie.

  “You think there’s some particular reason she needs to know?”

  Mackenzie shrugs again and and rubs her temples. She’s getting a headache. She hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since before the horror show in Gove City, and whenever she can’t sleep she gets headaches. “Never mind,” she says. “It’s none of my business. But can I ask you a question?”

  “You certainly can,” he tells her, stubbing out his cigarette on the underside of the table and dropping the butt on the floor. “Shoot.”

  “Even if Nicodemo can still do what you want her to do, and even if she does it and everything goes off this time without a hitch, we’re working on the assumption that killing the Talog woman will stop what she’s started. We’re assuming that the way it’s going to work, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” the Signalman replies, “we are proceeding on that assumption, and no, there aren’t any guarantees, just like usual.”

  “Is there at least a contingency plan?”

  “Maybe. Possibly. We can always fucking hope. But nobody’s told me, one way or the other. Still, since you asked, I’m sorta thinking Ellison is the contingency plan.”

  “Oh,” says Mackenzie. She takes a bottle of store-brand aspirin from a pants pocket and stares at it.

  “You getting another migraine?” the Signalman asks her. “Maybe it and my bum tooth could get together and compare notes.” He lights another cigarette.

  “Listen, I’ll be back in a minute or two,” she says, then slides out of the cherry-red Naugahyde booth.

  “But you’re okay? Besides the noggin, I mean?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’m fine. I just need to piss, that’s all.”

  The Signalman nods, and she leaves him alone with his toothache and the defiant mighty middle finger of Johnny Cash, with his bourbon and dread and a nigh unto bottomless well of uncertainty about exactly what he’s going to say to Ellison Nicodemo come Wednesday morning. Worse still, and worse by a long shot, about what he’ll do if she puts up a fight.

  13.: Bee of the Bird of the Moth

  (Undated)

  Sure, it all comes down to who you’re gonna believe. But can’t both things be true. This ain’t no wave-particle duality sorta situation. Meaning no disrespect to X and butterflies and hurricanes, but this ain’t no sun shining down at midnight so that walrus Buddha and carpenter Christ might go about their bloody business without the inconvenience of an electric torch. So either you take this literal or you don’t and tell yourself it’s all just some sort of crytographical malarkey, and sure, if that gets you through the night, if that gets you hard and wet, sweetheart, you go on ahead and be my guest. No skin off my dick.

  But, really, it all comes down to who you’re gonna believe.

  Now, between you and me and the Staten Island Ferry, we’re gonna cut the crap and talk about Tindalos, as I am given to understand the matter. Straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. The horse being this guy I knew who knew a guy who knew this hippie chick who knew this bull dyke physicist used to be in tight with a certain American nonprofit global policy think tank which shall here remain nameless. The way that particular horse laid it out, you gotta look at what showed up in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales magazine as some kinda temporally retroactive disinformation. Yeah, I just made that up, that phrase, but it works about well as anything. The horse (and we’ll call him Harry; Harry the Horse, just like in that Beatles song and Guys and Dolls and what the hell ever else), he said it was none other than the fabled Madam Immacolata what done the deed, planted the story under the name of this Frank Belknap Long fella, since she slips the surly bonds so well and all. But I don’t know whether that’s true or just more flaps and seals, given she ain’t never exactly been a player for Albany. Given her allegiances lie elsewhere. But who cares, right? Either way, all that fancy pulp window dressing doesn’t show up until thirteen years before the Chicago Pile-1 goes critical and Enrico Fermi gets his wish and any number of those assembled to behold that blessed event are left with a nasty recurring impression that much, much more than the first self-sustaining, controlled nuclear chain reaction was achieved there beneath the bleachers of Stagg Field. Say that ten times fast, how about it. Well, anyway, there’s Chianti from Dixie Cups all round and Arthur Compton phones up Jim Conant with the news how the Italian navigator has landed in the New World, and Conant, he wants to know how were the natives, and Dr. Compton replies very fucking friendly indeed. That’s what you’ll get in the history books. If you want to know about the poor unfortunate members of the CP-1 team who bore witness to what crawled, slid, or wriggled through the cracks that day, then we have to go off-off-off record. The Horse says folks saw a monster. Or monsters plural. He also says that, at the moment of criticality, they saw a hole in time. Who am I to argue, as Harry the Horse, he ain’t yet ever steered me wrong.

  I wish to strip from my eyes the veils of illusion that time has thrown over them, and see the beginning and the end.

  Right.

  There is an abyss of being which man has never fathomed.

  Sure thing.

  A hole in time, leading all the way back past Precambrian seas and good ol’ Archean squiggly microbial what-have-yous, back four billion plus years and spare change to an aptly named Hadean hellscape, the brand-new molten moon filling up half the writhing charcoal sky. That’s what they claimed they saw.

  What’s more, says the Horse, says he, during various debriefings over the next several months, agents of the National Defense Research Committee et al. were regaled with stories of strange angles that have no counterpart on Earth (quote/unquote) and formless grotesqueries that moved slowly through angles. They have no bodies, and they move slowly through outrageous angles (ibid., I think). When told to please be more precise, none of them does much better. But someone used the word hounds and someone else spake the three-mystery syllables we keep coming back around to—Tindalos. A little of this bushwa even, allegedly, came from Fermi himself. Upshot being, maybe it wasn’t just a bunch of stray neutrons got loose that Wednesday afternoon. As for the patriotic folks administering the Manhattan Project, they’re just trying to stop Hitler and the Japs, and there’s bombs to be built and dutifully dropped, and so no one strains themselves overly trying to make hide nor hair of the dubious ravings of a bunch of clearly excitable eggheads and their fellow travelers. Maybe it was something in the air. Who knows. An unforeseen psychoactive side effect of being so very proximal to all those graphite blocks and uranium pellets. Who cares, ducky. There were bigger fish to fry, fatter geese to cook, and so forth. Move along. Nothing to see here.

  “The seeds of the deed move through angles in dim recesses of time. They are hungry and athirst!”

  Oh, really? Hungry and athirst? I’m just saying, I’d have rolled my eyes. I mean, who talks like that? Anywho . . .

  Where was I?

  Where were we?

  Rewind. Press play. Whatever. It all comes down to who you’re gonna believe.

  Harry the Horse, he likes to talk about dead people. It’s a thing with him. As regards to the matter at hand, and I mean Tindalos, he has talked (in prudent, hushed tones, mind you) about the death of a doomed young man who worked for a certain DuPont chemical engineer, a chemical engineer who happened to be
in attendance at Stagg Stadium on that celebrated, fateful December day in 1942. The victim was, allegedly, said chemist’s secretary. Maybe also the object of numerous homosexual indiscretions. But who am I to judge? What you do in the privacy of your own Erlenmeyer flask and all that. So, six months after the experiment, the secretary goes and turns up dead, and I’m saying not just only merely dead, but, according to the ol’ reliable Horse, really most sincerely dead. Dead dammit. Dead with Reddi-Wip and a maraschino cherry perched on top. And also, what is more, the scene of this gruesome discovery had been (aka would be) described thirteen years prior in that aforementioned issue of Weird Tales. Wanna hide something right out in plain fucking sight? Just hide it behind you:

  Chalmers lay stretched upon his back in the center of the room. He was starkly nude, and his chest and arms were covered with a peculiar bluish pus or ichor. His head lay grotesquely upon his chest. It had been completely severed from his body, and the features were twisted and torn and horribly mangled. Nowhere was there a trace of blood.

  The Horse says he actually saw some corroborating crime scene photos what made the rounds a few years back, and maybe he did (but we’re talking real deep web, darknet stuff here, so don’t even bother googling this shit). He says over the years there have been a few dozen identical deaths, seemingly random. No discernable patterns or what have you. Attacks, he calls them. He’s got unhealthy interests, does Harry. He’ll talk your ear off about Elizabeth Short and Jack the Ripper and the Beast of Gévaudan, if you let him.

  He’s a sick twist, that one.

  It was also him, by the by, what told me about the big black sphere Dreamland maybe had built special back about 2005, somewhere like Bolivia or Nevada or the goddamn Southern Mauristemo Islands, someplace thin like that. (But you know all about the thin places of the world, don’t you? We’ve already had that conversation.) Supposedly, the whole raison d’être for this gadget—the sphere—was to create a sort of cubbyhole in spacetime so perfectly smooth on the inside that if you—well, not you, per se, but someone—were hiding within it you’d be safe as houses from these so-called hounds of Tindalos, these hungry and athirst creatures from another dimension that Fermi and his Project Y goons had inadvertently called up, these critters that can only reach us through angles. The inside of the sphere, we’re talking hypersmooth, here. We’re talking smoother than goose poop on a rotten banana peel, quantum stabilized atom mirrors of nanometric thickness cobbled together from an alchemical soup of lead molecules and silicon crystals and so on and such like. Real Marvin the Martian, Mr. Wizard territory, yeah? You better believe it.