The Tindalos Asset

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  . . . there you could look at a thing, monstrous and free . . .

  “‘Let the fool gape and shudder,’” says the siren. “‘We know, and can look on it without a wink.’”

  Ellison winces at a searing jolt of cold from her left hand and looks down to see that it’s clenched into a fist. When she folds her fingers open, she finds a carved lump of greenish stone cradled in her palm. Like was sewn up inside my hands the day in the warehouse, she thinks. Only this stone, it isn’t some castaway ten-for-a-dollar effigy of Dagon, it’s the very same idol that Jehosheba was willing to risk everything to have, the face of Mother Hydra, the Madonna of Maelstroms, Daughter of the Abyss. Ellison shudders and lets the thing roll out of her hand and tumble over the edge of the balcony and down to the water hundreds of feet below.

  “So it’s too late,” she says, wiping at her wet cheeks, feeling angry for the first time since the siren took her from the airplane. “You kept me away so long that it’s too late now, and everything we were trying to stop, it’s already happened and I’ve failed.”

  Behind her, there’s a grinding noise, like two icebergs scraping one against the other, like the shredding of the steel hulls girding unsinkable White Star liners. Ellison turns to find the siren waiting there behind her in the gloom of a gutted, burned-out apartment. Her eyes flash copper and crimson.

  “Well,” she says, “it’s not as if you lot were taking very good care of the place yourselves.” She smiles, revealing row upon row of recurved, serrate teeth. “And there were others who held dominion here, before mankind was even a glimmer in the eye of the cosmos, before time was even time. And it’s really their world, you know. It was really never anything else.”

  “Then why am I still alive?”

  “You’ll see,” the siren replies. “Very soon now, you’ll see.” And now the woman steps nearer and extends a hand, running her fingertips lightly along the left side of Ellison’s cheek and down her throat, along the ugly scars there. “My poor, sad beast,” she says. “I wish that had not been necessary. I would take it back, if I could.”

  The siren steps to one side, and Ellison sees that there’s something sprawled on the floor, another revelation half visible in the coruscating murk. She needs a moment to recognize that what she’s seeing is the hound—her hound—what’s left of it, mangled and twisted and bleeding out its sticky blue ichor, that indestructible, undying creature laid low, every bit as dead and broken as broken, dead, and drowned New York City. Ellison starts to ask the siren how, but stops herself. What would ever be the point of knowing?

  “Another gift,” says the siren, this demon that once was only a woman named Jehosheba, that once was a child waiting for her mother on a lonely Welsh seashore, her humanity stolen even before birth by scheming, nameless beings playing a game of chess with the world. “You’re free of it. You’re free of it forever. Now, they are waiting for us on the shingle. Will you come and join the dance?”

  Without another word, Ellison Nicodemo reaches into her jacket and draws from its holster the Glock 9mm she was given by supply sergeant back at Los Angeles Air Force Base. This close, she doesn’t have to aim. She simply squeezes the trigger and the gun shouts thunder. There isn’t even time for the siren to look surprised before her skull comes apart in a red-black spray of bone and blood and brain. Jehosheba Talog drops like a stone. On the floor beside the dead hound, her stubborn body shudders, and Ellison fires the gun a second time and a third, putting two more rounds in the chest of the priestess of Mother Hydra and Father Kraken, the woman who was raised to end the world.

  “I can do my own killing,” Ellison says to the corpse. “I always could.”

  Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

  I know the day I die . . .

  And then from everywhere comes the hateful, cheated bellow of a titan, a god that is no god shaken awake from its ancient, imprisoned slumber, thinking how its time has at last come round again—only to be told to go right back to sleep, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, better fucking luck next time. It bellows, and the walls and floor and ceiling shake. The concrete balcony begins to crumble beneath Ellison’s feet and she thinks maybe a sound like that, it could almost split the moon in two. Such a sound, it might even snuff out stars. And then the world unravels around her once again, melting away, evaporating same as the whitewashed stone cabin at Ynys Llanddwyn melted away. Only this time, the darkness isn’t waiting there to claim her. This time, she doesn’t fall. Instead, she finds herself in bright daylight, kneeling on dry, rust-colored sand and rock with the Glock still in her hand, as a bitter January wind howls across John Ford’s valley and the predatory shadows of unmarked black helicopters race across the landscape towards her. Ellison gets to her feet and waits for them, and she tries not to think how maybe that had been just a little bit too easy and how maybe Jehosheba had known it was coming all along. Buying time, that’s the new V-Day. . . .

  17.: The Small Print

  (East of Birmingham, Alabama, February 19, 2018)

  It’s a bright, chilly Monday morning, almost a month to the day since Utah, and Ellison Nicodemo stands near the top of a low hill on the edge of a weary little town, almost within easy sight of the interstate. She’s surrounded by grey granite headstones that seem to stand silent guard against the tawdry, metastasized sprawl of Walmart and fast-food restaurants and strip-mall parking lots bordering the cemetery. The sky overhead is a wide carnivorous blue, not even the hint of a cloud to relieve the monotony. It’s the sort of sky that can blind you, she thinks, if you stare at it too long. Dressed in her sharp black suit and shiny black shoes and black sunglasses, a matching black knapsack on her shoulder and the bolo tie the Signalman gave her cinched about her collar, Ellison imagines she looks like someone who belongs here among these graves and beneath a merciless sky like that. A crow, a raven, a dapper vulture dutifully come to ferry a soul down to Hell.

  Unfortunately, she isn’t alone. No way they would have let her come by herself, and so there’s her handler waiting in a black Ford sedan outside the Cedar Grove First Baptist Church and there’s also Agent Jack Dunaway standing at her side, a thin, officious prick of a man whom the Signalman had loathed. For the past four weeks, Ellison has seen far too much of Jack Dunaway, as she’s been shuffled to and fro between Groom Lake and Albany and the bunker at the Dugway Proving Ground. He’s watched on while she’s endured a barrage of debriefings and interrogations and so many medical, metaphysical, and psychological tests that Ellison finally lost count and lost track and decided it would continue for whatever remained of her life. But then, two days ago, Dunaway called her into a conference room and told her she’d be permitted to attend the Signalman’s funeral. Until that moment, she hadn’t even been sure that he was dead, though any other outcome had seemed unlikely. The Beechcraft King Air B200 had disintegrated in midair, and the wreckage was found scattered over more than a mile of desert. Only Mackenzie Regan survived. Her parachute had deployed, and the Signalman’s hadn’t, but survival had come at the cost of an eye, her left leg below the knee, and a couple of fingers. So, the Signalman was dead, along with the pilot and copilot, both found with their lungs filled with seawater. Yet here was Ellison Nicodemo, who’d walked away without so much as a scratch or a bruise or a broken fingernail. The retrieval team had picked her up on Navajo land, not far from the Arizona border, just shy of forty-eight hours after she’d disappeared from the plane.

  Lucky girl.

  Ellison glances up, and there’s a jet tracing a white contrail streak across that too-blue Alabama sky.

  “You have any idea how much it would have pissed him off, you being here today?” she asks Jack Dunaway, and he shrugs the shrug of the truly indifferent and checks the Timex on his wrist.

  “If you want to say your goodbyes,” he tells her, “you should do it now. We have to be back at Sumpter Smith by noon, and it’s already a quarter past ten.”

 
“Yeah, sure,” she says. “Don’t piss yourself. I won’t be long,” and then she leaves Mr. Jack Dunaway and goes halfway down the hill to the place where, if the company’s to be believed, the Signalman’s body has been laid to rest. There’s no marker yet and no flowers, either. There was a minister here a little while ago, and he read a dutiful, perfunctory service over the mound of soil and red clay only mostly hidden beneath a dingy blanket of synthetic turf. Ellison had thought it best to hang back until he was done. Whatever was being read from the minister’s book, it probably wasn’t anything she wanted to hear.

  You know what I hate worse than cemeteries? the Signalman asked her, years and years ago. Nothing, that’s what. Absolutely nothing at all.

  For a minute or two, Ellison just stands and stares at her feet and at the abominable fake grass. Then she takes the silver pocket watch from her blazer, the Signalman’s silver pocket watch, made in 1888 by the Elgin Watch Company of Elgin, Illinois, and she opens it and checks the time. The watch is just about the only other thing that survived the crash more or less intact, and Albany, in a show of generosity almost as inexplicable as letting her attend the funeral, decided she could have it. Dunaway had even given it to her himself.

  Someone said you’d want this. It’s yours if you do.

  It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me, he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire . . .

  Ellison unshoulders the black knapsack and unzips it. She takes out a pint bottle of J&B Scotch, cracks the seal, unscrews the cap, and has a long swallow before emptying the rest of the whisky on the grave. Then she reaches into the knapsack again, and this time she takes out a pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes and a red, white, and blue “I Like Ike” campaign button; she sets them both on the ground beside the grave. She zips the knapsack closed and returns it to her shoulder.

  “I just wanted to say that I don’t blame you,” she says, speaking just above a whisper. “Not for any of it. I figure, what you did, it was what you had to do, and mostly I think you did right by me, or as right as you were able, as right as they’d ever allow.” She pauses and checks the pocket watch again. It’s ten thirteen. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” she says, closing the watch and glancing towards the black Ford in the church parking lot, thinking about Albany and Nevada and her filthy, stinking apartment in LA, about the dope and Jehosheba Talog. “She’s dead,” Ellison tells the grave. “I killed her. She killed the hound, and I killed her. And there haven’t been any more whales turn up in Pennsylvania, so maybe it’s over.”

  Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, kiddo. Best we not go making any promises until we know how it all shakes out a little farther down the road.

  “Just get some sleep, old man,” says Ellison Nicodemo, talking to a ghost if there’s any ghost listening, and then she turns and walks away, winding between the rows of headstones and footstones, careful not to step on any of the graves. When she was a girl, someone once told her that was the worst sort of bad luck.

  18.: Exit Music for the Anthropocene

  (April 2151, Isle of Brooklyn Proper)

  A light wind is blowing from the northeast, and the morning smells like oil. The sky is filled with hungry, noisy gulls.

  From her perch on the roof, Inamorata is using Old Duarte’s spyglass, trying to spot the slick she’s been told rose up in the night, a great black bubble freed by a breach in one of the ancient concrete storage tanks. It only takes her a moment to pin it down, a muddy, iridescent smudge marring the blue-green shimmer of Queens Bar, less than half a mile out from Prospect Beach. A slick that long, that wide, it could easily yield fifteen, maybe twenty thousand gallons. She’s seen bigger, but not for several years now, and not since the Hud extended its reach to the barrier islands. It’s surprising there’s not already a company team on the scene, siphoning it off. There will be soon enough, surely by noon, noon at the latest. One of the big sweeper skiffs docked at Carnegie Island and a host of support vessels will slip smooth and silent through the heat haze, set up shop, and get to it. And any jackals caught trying to nip a tub or three will be sunk on sight, with the governor’s blessing. But for now, the slick is a pristine blemish on the sea. In this light and at this hour, it’s almost beautiful, the way that so many poisonous things are beautiful.

  Inamorata puts down the spyglass just as Geli comes up from below. She’s a sanderling girl, is Geli Núñez, stalking the drift lines for whatever refuse the tides fetch up. She’s nineteen, and most of her life she spent on the Row, with the other beachcombers and the crabbers and the bums. Before she met Inamorata, before they became lovers and Geli came to live with her in Old Duarte’s house on Cemetery Hill, she worked for one of the black-market agents. Now, Inamorata has her registered with a legal pickers syndicate, and Geli gets top dollar and doesn’t have to worry quite so much about the law.

  “You seen it, then?” she asks Inamorata.

  “I’ve seen it,” Inamorata replies.

  “It’s a gulper,” says Geli, and she sits down near Inamorata’s perch and begins emptying her morning’s haul of plastic out onto the roof to dry and be sorted. In the sunlight, Geli’s auburn hair shines like a new copper pot.

  “It’s big,” Inamorata tells her, “but it’s not as big as all that.”

  Geli shrugs and pulls a fat wad of green nylon fishing line from her gunnysack, all tangled with wire weed and kelp. “Well, Joe Sugar, he says it’s a gulper.”

  “Joe Sugar lets on, and you know he hasn’t seen it for himself. Good take?”

  “Oh, just you see this,” Geli grins, and she looks up, squinting at the bright morning sky, cloudless and a shade of blue so pale it might as well be alabaster. “Down at the pilings, right in close to Fincher’s docks, there was a stranding. All of it starfish and urchins, hundreds upon hundreds of them—thousands even, maybe. Starfish and urchins big about as my hand. I think they might’a washed upcurrent from Park Sloop or the Slaughter.”

  Inamorata looks back to sea again, staring out across the water towards the oil. “Could have been poisoned by the slick,” she says, half to herself.

  “Maybe. There was some sheen on the sand, so might have been the slick got them. But, anyway, that ain’t the point of it,” and then Geli reaches deep into her sack and pulls something out from the very bottom. “This,” she says and holds it up for Inamorata to see. “Found it at the stranding, mixed in with the dead stuff. It’s jade, I think. Real jade, not poly or resin. Gasper already offered me an even twenty for it, before I could get back here, which means it’s worth eighty, easy and sure.”

  Inamorata is island born and island raised, not so much more than a sanderling herself, and in her twenty-seven years she’s seen her share of ugliness and misbegotten dragged in by the tides. There’s a whole drowned world out there, always puking up its secrets and mistakes, the shameful ghosts of a wasted, shining petrol city that went under before her grandmother’s mother was born. But this, this is something rare indeed, the milky green lump in Geli’s hand, and it catches her off guard.

  “Looks Japanese,” says Geli. “Doesn’t it look Japanese? I think maybe it’s an oni. An oni or a dragon.”

  To Inamorata, it doesn’t look much like either. Geli holds it out to her, and Inamorata leans forward and takes the thing from her hand. It’s about as big around as her balled-up fist and heavy—definitely stone—though she’s hardly qualified to say whether the thing is actually jade or not. She holds it up to the sun, and finds that it’s translucent. Whoever carved it, whenever and whyever it was carved, however many decades or centuries ago, they’d clearly meant to convey something terrible, and Inamorata would have to admit that they succeeded in spades. The word that comes first to her mind is troll, because when she was little her mother told her a fairy story about three nanny goats trying to cross the ruins of the Williamsburg Bridge. But there was an enormous sea troll nesting below the span, a monstrous, malformed creature of slime and muck and rus
ted steel, and whenever the goats tried to cross, the troll would rise up and threaten to eat them. This thing that Geli’s found on the beach, it could be the graven likeness of her mother’s bridge troll, a refugee from Inamorata’s childhood nightmares. Except, she always imagined the troll to be male, though she can’t recall whether her mother ever explicitly stated that it was. The maybe-jade thing, it’s unmistakably female, an obscene caricature of the feminine form, from the exaggerated fullness of its breasts, hips, and buttocks to the gape of its vulva. But its bulging eyes, those make her think of the fishmongers’ stalls down on the Row, and the mass of finger-like tendrils sprouting from its belly remind her of a sea anemone.

  “It’s not the bridge troll,” Geli says, and Inamorata frowns and looks at her, then looks back at the ugly lump of green stone she’s holding. Emil Duarte, who’s seventy-three and went to school in some faraway dry place, has referred to Geli as an “innate twelfth-hierarchy intuitive,” and he has explained to Inamorata how people like Geli are used by the military and the multicorps. Down on the Row, there were folks who called her a witch, who thought she was possessed by demons, because of the way she often knows things that she shouldn’t know, that she has no way of knowing, and that she can never explain how she knows. Inamorata hasn’t ever told Geli Núñez about her mother’s bridge troll story.