Black Helicopters

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I insist,” he says, motioning to a chair with his glass.

  So, Mary Vance sits down, and the Signalman takes another glass from a desk drawer, and he pours her a drink and passes it to her. She stares at the glass, then glances at the clock again.

  “Jesus,” he sighs, “will you please stop doing that? If you don’t, I’m going to get up and pull the damn thing off the wall.”

  She apologizes and takes a sip of her whiskey, then sits staring at the floor.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” he says, though even he would have to admit there’s nothing especially convincing about the way he says it. “It’s a goddamn mess, sure. It’s one for the ledgers. It gets a goddamn gold star by its name, no doubt about it, but it isn’t the end of the world. It never is.”

  Vance doesn’t look like she believes him.

  “You want to hear a joke?” the Signalman asks her.

  “Not especially,” she replies. “Not if I have a say in the matter.”

  “Good and Evil walk into a bar,” he says.

  “So, I don’t have a choice,” says Vance.

  The Signalman shrugs, and he reaches for the half-empty pack of Camel Wides lying on top of a stack of printouts stamped with catchy, ominous, Secret Squirrel watchwords like Eyes Only and Burn After Reading and Cosmic Top Secret. He takes a matchbook from his shirt pocket, free matches courtesy a dive bar on Jefferson Street called the Palais Royale. A pretty chichi name for a dive bar, but what the hell. He’s been going there every night now for the past two weeks, ever since he got yanked from his usual digs in Los Angeles and dropped into the Ant Farm, as the men and women in the black suits have been known to call the offices below the subbasement of the Erastus Corning Tower. The Signalman lights his cigarette, then drops the spent match into an ashtray that needed to be emptied yesterday. One of the few perks of working this far below the radar is that no one gives a shit if you smoke. No one gives a shit if you drink yourself to death or pop oxycodone or snort enough coke to keep Colombia happy for a year, just as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the work. There are no drug tests in Albany and there aren’t any no smoking signs, either.

  “Of course you have a choice,” says the Signalman. “You always have a fucking choice, Vance, and it’s no skin off my nose. I was just trying to lighten the mood, that’s all. You want the gloom and doom pure and undiluted by levity, have it your own way.”

  Vance frowns and takes a swallow of her scotch.

  “No, it’s okay,” she says. “Sure, tell me a joke. Good and Evil walk into a bar. What then?”

  “No. Screw it. The moment’s passed,” and he takes a long drag on his cigarette and blows smoke rings at the water-stained tiles overhead, at everything above, at God in his sumptuous gold-plated Heaven, if that’s where the fucker really lives. “It wasn’t very funny, anyway. You smoke?” he asks and offers her a Camel.

  “No, sir. I don’t smoke.”

  “Kids these days,” he mutters and steals a peek at the clock.

  “It’s getting late,” she says, her eyes following his. “They’re waiting.”

  He nods, then asks her, “You know what I wanted to be when I grew up?”

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “Anything but this,” he says. “Anything in the whole goddamn universe but this right here. You know what the population of Deer Isle, Maine, was before Sunday, August 12 arrived and turned that place into a Stephen King novel? Just under two thousand human beings, Vance. By now, I figure they’re mostly fucking dead. Or worse. But we know some of them are still alive. A hundred, at least. Maybe twice that number. We’re still getting a couple of shortwave ham broadcasts coming out of Stonington. The transmissions are staticky and intermittent, but they’re there, people asking for help, over and over and over. People wondering if anyone on the outside is still listening. People who, you gotta figure, by now they’re starting to think maybe they been marked out as, I don’t know, let’s say sacrificial lambs, offered up to appease the gods. And after a fashion, they aren’t so very far off the mark, are they?”

  Vance sets her glass down on the edge of the desk, and then she clears her throat and looks him in the eyes. “Sir,” she says, “pardon my asking, but you’re not getting cold feet, are you?”

  He takes another drag and holds the smoke in until his ears start to buzz. And what if I am, Vance, he’s thinking. What if I am. Are you sitting there drinking my whiskey and imagining maybe this is your big break? I lose my nerve, I flinch, I get the heebie-jeebies and you rush in to fill the void? Do you look in my face and see a promotion? Is that how it is, little girl? Is that ambition I smell? The Signalman thinks about the loaded SIG Sauer P226 in his top desk drawer, and he thinks about the ugly hole it would make. He exhales, and the silver-grey smoke rolls towards Mary Vance like a fog rolling in off the sea.

  “What you just asked me,” he says, “I didn’t hear that, you understand.”

  Several long seconds pass before she nods and looks away, before she reaches for the glass of whiskey again, and the Signalman knows that if she didn’t need the drink before, she needs it now. He looks at the white clock on the wall, and then he picks up his great-grandfather’s silver railroad watch, the watch that earned him his nickname with the agents of Dreamland, with all the spooks and shadow bosses and star chambers from sea to shining sea, and then checks that, too. Both the pocket watch and the clock on the wall agree that there’s only seven minutes left until midnight. Zero hundred hours. That magic moment.

  Vance finishes her drink in one long swallow. Then she wipes her mouth on the back of her left hand, and she says, “I didn’t mean anything by it, sir.”

  “You didn’t mean anything by what?” he asks, and then he closes the MacBook Pro, so he doesn’t have to see the live satellite feed off that hazy, ever-expanding smear where Deer Isle used to be. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Yes, sir,” she says. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t thank me yet, Vance. Could be this one really is the end, and I just did you a grave disservice.” And maybe she knows what he means, and maybe she doesn’t.

  “Yes, sir,” she says. “Will you be needing anything else?”

  “Just some privacy,” he tells her. “I have a call to make.”

  17.: Thunder Perfect Mind/Judas as a Moth

  (undated)

  Estrid Noble sits naked and alone on the wet concrete floor of the small room that, though it is a small room, seems to stretch on forever in all directions. Forever and forever and forever. The towering, rumbling Waxen Men have all two gone, but she couldn’t say how long since they left her, were she to say anything at all. Which she won’t. There is no light in the room save the miserly flicker-glow of a naked twenty-five-watt bulb. One of the Waxen Men bumped his head against the dangling fixture on his way out. He snarled obscenities, not noticing and, surely, not caring how he’d set the light to swinging pell-mell so that it became the arm of a luminous pendulum. It sways from side to side, pushing at the four murky corners of the room that is surely much too small to have four murky corners. The shadows are indignant and push right back. The light is a bully. And, if that’s so, the darkness is a counter-bully. Or, it is the other way around. Or, such a black-and-white dualism cannot even exist here. But this is where they left her, sick of her again, sick of, they say, her bullshit, and so they left her in this room where the walls seem to stretch on forever. Estrid, her back pressed against freezing, slippery ceramic tiles and mildewed grout. Once upon a time, back before the ghosts of all these imprisoned lunatics, those walls were white as snow, white as the uniforms of the Waxen Men who dragged her howling from Room 66 and left her here. First, they took her clothes and turned the spigots on her, water so cold it would freeze a polar bear in its tracks.

  A line, a white line, a long white line . . .

  Her honey-colored eyes do the math, calculating angles, the dilapidated geometry of the inside of this cube, the velocity a
nd acceleration vectors of that swinging bulb. Before anyone knew she was insane, she was called a prodigy, carrying the burden of π to 67,393 digits, NaN x 10-4 around in her booming, insomniac skull. In this place, hospital, institutional blue, asylum (which does not mean sanctuary), neither the doctors nor the nurses nor the Waxen Men will take mercy and give her paper to put the numbers on. She has to keep them all in her head. This she will learn to do forever more.

  Four walls that once were white. You can only scrub so much shit, mold, and, yes, even blood off four walls. Probably, she believes, it has been a thousand years since these walls were genuinely clean. They will never be clean again, for so befouled is their soul, the soul of the walls of this dripping room. A tenth circle of the Inferno. Or an annex to a lesser circle. It is cold as the Arctic here, and she shivers. Hence, it might be the antechamber of the Ninth Circle, possibly the foyer. Obscure they went through dreary shades, that led along the waste dominions of the dead.

  Xibalba be. A unillumined path through the stars. Six calamitous houses: Dark House, Cold House, Jaguar, Bat, Razor, and Hot House.

  She lies down on the floor, anxiety descending, the hollowing-out anxiety of a person who loses a name (for all the Waxen Men will call her is Sixty-Six). Now, right cheek, right shoulder, right side come to rest against the smooth concrete and she stares across that grey manufactured plain towards the faraway door, locked, like Hell, against her escape. Like Hell, no one escapes this place. No one. Five to one, baby. Five to one. She recalls snow and knows all too well that this is the sort of plain that ought to be smothered under a blizzard.

  “Tell me, when was the war over?” I asked.

  “The war is not over,” he answered. “Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”

  Not only me. The world is mad, and the we of I, the wee of eye, we will fight in unknown wars.

  A line, a white line, a long white line . . .

  Through the window of her room, the glass trapped behind a screen of steel diamonds, every winter she watches the snow. It brings more comfort than any of the pills or injections or the sizzling, sparking electrodes to her temples.

  This is Hell, and her mother is the Queen of Heaven who damned her.

  The Waxen Men are only devils.

  The snow is redemption, eternally out of reach.

  A line, a white line, a long white line . . .

  In this room, no snow, just rain to set her to shivering, teeth to clattering, the uncrystallized water from the spigots. Uncrystallizable.

  I have mingled my drink with weeping,

  And my days are like a shadow.

  “You have no one to blame but yourself,” said Mother. “You’re not sick, you’re lazy. You just want the attention. You’re not sick, but you can damn well be treated as if you are. See how you like that. I’ve had enough, you hear me?”

  So Estrid has her room and the dayroom, never outside, never anything but the glimpse of snow outside, the shower when she’s filthy or when the Waxen Men, like Mother, have had too much of her bullshit.

  For my days vanish like smoke.

  I am like an owl in the desert.

  Among the ruins.

  A wall, a barrier, toward which we drove.

  My God, man. There’s bears on it.

  Are there? Three bears? A wolf in a red riding hood?

  I know numbers, but the walls are high, and I can’t climb over.

  Estrid Noble lies on the concrete floor, and she lies in snow softly drifting down from a leaden winter sky. Both these things are true, a particle and a wave. That, or, instead, the flawed observer, her, the madwoman observer, an emergent, second-order consequence, madness and quantum, madness disbanding paradox. I don’t know what I mean, Mother. I don’t know what I mean, anymore. Has she wrongly believed there is no escape, when, in truth, she can always, always retreat on ragged claws to the snow globe of her unconscious where the Waxen Men cannot follow?

  However, lying in the snow, there is blood in the sky mixed with the snow, and she reaches for the shotgun at her side, and she feels the magic welling up within her, which means this cannot be then, then consigned to a dustbin of her past, and so this must be now.

  She sits up in the small room, where the Waxen Men have left her.

  She sits up in the snow, where the Waxen Men do not know she can go, which means they cannot stop her and cannot find her when she’s here.

  She sits up in the small room, realizing someone is watching her from the shadows. Someone indistinct to the left of the door, tucked into that corner, only half revealed when the bulb’s glow happens to swing that way.

  The someone is another woman, white as a ghost, blue eyes, hair same as the snow.

  “I know you,” Estrid says, and the pale woman says, “I know you, too.”

  “How did you find me here?” Estrid asks her.

  “It wasn’t hard. You split your head wide open. You let me in.”

  “They don’t let anyone in.”

  “How could they have stopped me?”

  Estrid has no answer for that question, but the shotgun feels very good in her hands. At such close range, this is no job for the Kalashnikov, her favorite engine. No. So, her finger’s on the trigger of the gasoline-powered, twenty-eight-gauge Remington 1100; this close, she couldn’t miss if she tried.

  “Sixty-Six,” the pale woman says, the albino whose name is Ivoire. Okay, not her name—because the Waxen Men and X stole all their names—but the sole name that anyone knows to call her. “Sixty-Six, I would ask you who wants me dead, who’s making you do this, but you wouldn’t tell me. I know you’d never tell me. You can’t, can you?”

  “Where are we really?” Estrid asks Ivoire. “Ivoire, when are we really?”

  “Don’t you usually call me Ivy?” the albino asks. “That is, when you bother to call me anything at all. Why are we so formal now?”

  The air is bruised with questions.

  “Star fall, phone call, no one gets out of here alive,” Estrid whispers, hating the way she whimpers like a rabbit in a snare. Isn’t she the one holding the shotgun, five to one? Doesn’t she have the upper hand?

  “Your poor spirit,” Ivoire sighs. “Shattered, piled up with equations, snippets of song, memories broken apart like twigs. Aren’t you tired of being used?”

  In an Ithaca asylum, Estrid lies on the concrete shower floor, and in an attic in Maine she holds the barrel of the Remington beneath Ivoire’s chin. She blinks, and wishes that just this once, the Waxen Men had forgotten to lock her in with the grout and the dirty wet tiles and the ivory beast. The light swings, and Ivoire’s blue eyes twinkle, a flash before the light swings away again, a flash like a falling star plummeting, screaming as it tumbles towards Penobscot Bay.

  “I know your secret,” she says to Ivoire, and Estrid smiles a vicious Cheshire cat grin. It’s all she has, the secret and the shotgun. If I’d had the shotgun back then, I’d have lain low the Waxen Men. If I’d had the gun then . . .

  “But you didn’t, Sixty-Six,” says the voice from what is momentarily only darkness. “There in the showers, you were naked and helpless. You didn’t have anything at all but a dream of snow.”

  Outside the window of the attic where they sleep, demons are marching out of the sea. Outside the attic window, hardly anyone is left to scream at the sight.

  “Tell me the secret,” Ivoire urges her, though she doesn’t sound the least bit desperate to know. There is no hint of urgency in her voice. “Then we’ll both know. If I’m about to die, where’s the harm in my knowing?”

  “I am now, and I am then,” Estrid whispers.

  The light shows Ivoire’s face, and Estrid thinks she looks a little sad, like whatever’s coming is something she doesn’t want to arrive.

  “A particle and a wave. You are the paradox, Sixty-Six. Free and a prisoner. At now and at then. I know all about that.”

  Well, I went down in the valley,

  You know I did over t
here ever stay.

  You know I stayed right there all day.

  “A broken record, that’s you,” says Ivoire. Estrid tightens her grip on the trigger, and she stares up into the bloody snow falling all around her. “And the paradoxical fruitcake, two places and two times at once, if only in your mind.”

  “Not like you,” Estrid says. “Maybe I’m a metaphor, but not you.”

  “Is that your secret, Sixty-Six,” and now, ah, now the woman in the corner of the shower room looks nervous. Dread, that’s the word for her expression. The woman’s blue eyes are filled with dread.

  “Twin,” Estrid growls.

  “Yes, Sixty-Six, I am a twin. I have a sister.”

  In five seconds, Estrid Noble will squeeze the trigger and splatter Ivy’s brains across the attic wall. That’s already happened.

  “No,” says Sixty-Six. “Twin. It’s not a noun. It’s a verb.”

  She grits her teeth and closes her eyes and fires two rounds. Someone has told her this will save the world. One death. One instant. One action. A butterfly flaps its wings.

  18.: Soft Black Stars

  (Forward Command, Byard Point, Maine, 12/21/2012)

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Good and Evil walk into a bar . . .

  Here: At precisely eight hundred ten hours, the directive came down from on high, effective immediately, cease all evacuation efforts. Additional civilian and military casualties an acceptable loss. Mourn the coming dead after zero-zero-thirty of the twenty-first day of December, but blow the goddamn Deer Isle-Sedgwick suspension bridge spanning Eggemoggin Reach, blow it this very night, bury it on the muddy bottom of the leprous bay.