Agents of Dreamland

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “We’re sending you,” says Jack Dunaway. He doesn’t sound annoyed or impatient; he just sounds bored.

  “Fuck that. Send Vance.”

  “Well, that would have been my first choice, but Vance is benched for the duration. Maybe longer.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “You got a lot of anger in you, you know that? A guy your age, that’s not so good for the ticker. All that anger and all the hooch.”

  “Groom Lake is Vance’s neck of the woods,” says the Signalman, letting the observation about his temperament slide. It’s not like it isn’t true.

  Dunaway glances at the bottle of J&B, then takes one of the disposable plastic cups from the sink and helps himself. He squints at the sunlight through the window.

  “She came up red last night. She’s already in quarantine in Atlanta. Anyway, Albany doesn’t want Vance, they want you, and you’ll be on that plane.”

  But the Signalman doesn’t hear that last part. He doesn’t make it past She came up red last night. Suddenly there’s an icy knot in his bowels that no amount of whisky’s ever gonna burn away. He stares at Dunaway, and Dunaway stares back at him.

  “How’s that even possible? She went through decon. We were all clean.”

  Dunaway shakes his head, sort of shrugs, almost smiles. “Man, you take the cake, you know that? After all these years, you’re still out here bothering with why and how. I don’t fucking know how it happened. She came up positive. That’s what they told me, so that’s what I know. How about you stop busting my balls?” He screws the cap back on the bottle and offers it to the Signalman.

  You smug little shit, he thinks. When’s the last time you so much as got your hands dirty? The Signalman empties his cup, then refills it halfway. He sets the bottle on the floor by the briefcase, safely out of Dunaway’s reach.

  “Anyone else?” he asks.

  “Anyone else what?” Dunaway wants to know.

  “Is Vance the only positive so far?”

  “From the team, yeah. As far as I know. That’s all they’ve told me.”

  “So nothing from California? No bad news from Bombay Beach?”

  “Dude, if you’d bother to check in more often, you might be a little more up on current events. As far as I know, no cases in the hot zone. Of course, we both know that means next to zilch, what with the epidemiologists still stuck trying to suss out exactly what we’re dealing with.”

  “We know what we’re dealing with,” says the Signalman, wanting a cigarette so badly, his hands are shaking.

  Dunaway does that almost-laughing thing again. “Right, well, you’re just going to have to excuse me for not drinking Standish’s purple Kool-Aid. If you want to, go right on ahead, but I’m waiting for something a little more scientific than a madman’s gibberish about extraterrestrial mildew from Planet X.”

  The Signalman takes out his half-empty pack of Camels, opens it, then puts it away again. Look at the bright side, right? With Williams Junction coming up fast, at least he can grab a goddamn smoke or five before they shove him onto the plane to Nevada.

  “You’re just made out of bad habits, aren’t you?” smirks Dunaway.

  The Signalman ignores him. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see it.” And he wants to start ticking off the long, long list of shit this thirtysomething asshole hasn’t seen and doesn’t know and apparently can’t imagine, but what’s the point. Here’s the next generation sitting across from him, the future of the Company just waiting around for the gullible old Cold War spooks like him to retire. The future so bright and all that happy crap. One good thing he can say for Barbican Estate, you don’t hear all this skeptical, rationalist mumbo jumbo from the agents of Y.

  “Whatever you say. I’m just here to make sure you don’t find some way to fuck up and miss that flight. You want to believe in little green men, you go right ahead. Toss in the Easter Bunny, I won’t argue.”

  “What about the case?” the Signalman asks Dunaway.

  “It goes with you. I’ll take your report, you keep the case.”

  The Signalman nods. “We didn’t used to be so damned sloppy,” he says. He’s thinking about Vance reading clean, then reading hot. And he’s also thinking about all the people he’s had contact with since he was released from quarantine: L.A., Winslow, the train and taxis, restaurants and bars, the hotel. What does that come to? Five hundred, maybe? More than? And all those people, how many have they had contact with? If he’s infected, how many thousands of opportunities has the contagion enjoyed at his expense? He shuts his eyes and concentrates on the rhythm of the steel wheels against the rails.

  The end of the world as exponential growth.

  “I don’t need a fucking babysitter,” he says.

  “And I don’t need a gig as your keeper, but there you go.”

  The Signalman doesn’t say anything else. He just keeps his eyes shut, trying not to think about Vance locked away somewhere and dying. Yeah, man, good luck with that.

  6. The Beginning After the End (July 2, 2015)

  “YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL,” Drew tells us, me and Madeline and all the faceless others. They have, to me, become faceless. “All of you, each one, so perfect. You are my dreams made manifest. We are the children of all the eons. You are the path unto deliverance. There are no accidents here.” I’d say that the television sounds like a waterfall, except I’ve never been to a waterfall, only heard them recorded, and recordings are only echoes, and echoes can lie. So, I’ll say that the television sounds like rain on the streets of a fallen city I’ll never have to see again. Not ever, and that’s a promise. We sit within the mandala Drew has scratched into the floor of the room with the television. My God, this room is filled with ghosts, and those are echoes, too. I can hear them, and I can see them. I don’t know if the others can. Last night, when I told Drew, when I only whispered about the ghosts because maybe they can hear me, he said it was a sign of the nearness of the star winds. That gave me chill bumps, sent something small and frightened scurrying across the grave that I will never have. And now, we sit here in the night with the television blaring white-static wasp voices and the night wrapped tight about the house like a wet towel. Drew reads to us from the Black Book. He has told Madeline (she has told me) that he found the book in Iran, where it had been hidden since the Achaemenid Empire, a.k.a. the First Persian Empire, in the year 352 B.C., when it was placed in the tomb of—well, he never reads the name aloud. Some things are like that, he assures us. You do not say some words out loud. You only know them, and you only dare mutter them in dreams.

  The Black Book revealed us all to Drew. Our names are written there.

  We are not permitted to see the pages of the book.

  I don’t mind.

  “This is how long we have waited,” he says. “So many ragged centuries have the promises lain unfulfilled, gathering the weight of seconds and minutes and hours, while the messengers from Yuggoth prepared the way, while they mined what they needed from this world to build eternal cities for our souls.”

  He turns a page.

  The girl he found in Seattle tries to speak, and he pauses in his reading to listen. The noises she makes are no longer precisely words. We all think that she will be the first. She was pretty once, and now, transformed, she is beautiful. No, that’s still too small a word. “A flower,” Madeline says. “She will fold open like a rose, and the star winds will come pouring down from the sky and down from the mountains to scour the rocks and lift her up to the heavens. As you each shall be lifted.” We have to carry her up to and down from the roof now, the girl from Seattle. In the gray light from the television, her skin shimmers with colors I don’t know the names for. She was afraid, a few days ago, but now I don’t think she is. Fear of the passage is an affront to the messengers, Drew says. Fear is a poison that binds the minds of men and women to the same stone where Prometheus’ liver is devoured forever by the cruel beaks of hungry birds.

  Yesterday, I forgot my name. It
was an odd sensation, realizing I no longer knew what my mother and father had christened me, a few seconds of cold panic. But the panic was fleeting, and behind it was peace and assurance. We can’t carry our names with us on the journey that lies ahead.

  Drew sets the metal cylinder at the center of the mandala. That will be his chariot across the void. Madeline also has a silvery tube. When we are complete, those of us whom he has brought here to the garden, then he and Madeline will have their own passage, which is not to be the same as ours.

  I believe my thoughts do not flow as they once did.

  I can almost remember being some other way.

  He reads from the book the lines about the flood, and the lines about the crack in the earth that lies below the waters of the flood. The book calls the flood Jachin, and it calls the crack Boaz. We were all taught the wrong words for things, a sleight of hand perpetrated by the Old Ones who would forever delay our escape. We were taught to call the crack San Andreas, and we were taught to call the flood Salton. In names is all the power of a splitting atom, and if you steal names, you steal hope. I go down to sleep each night, and swim among the fish that swim the flood. The tilapia are iridescent angels that glide silently above the muddy, silt-shrouded bottom, and the sun filters down through the seraphim phantoms of croakers and orangemouth corvina. “On a day very soon,” says Drew, “Boaz will shudder, and Jachin will murder her own. And we’ll know, then, that the day has arrived.

  “It’s so close now. Cross my heart and hope to die. Bo and Peep, Doe and Ti, as you are the Children of the Next Level.”

  There isn’t only the television and the burring voices buried in the static. There’s also an old record playing on the turntable, a diamond needle setting free the Beatles even as our blooming shells will soon set free our souls and even as the fruit of our passage will liberate a million more. The music is a counterpoint to the TV, and it gives me comfort. So, we have the commingled symphony of white noise, the messengers, Lennon and McCartney, and the words read from the Black Book. Taken together, this is the Third of Seven Trumpets. And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. It’s a poem, we are told, and a poem is a metaphor, and we take the stanzas literally at our own peril.

  Just before dawn, I watched the lights that sometimes come to wake us, blue and crimson and purple. The lights that dance above the desert and dance above the house and dance above us all.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Did I hear what?” I asked the boy that Drew and Madeline found in a whorehouse in Las Vegas.

  “It was like someone crying, a long ways off.”

  “No, I didn’t hear that,” I answered, and then I asked him not to talk so much.

  When was that?

  My memories are like the waters that flow down to Jachin, losing themselves to the brine, saltier than the sea.

  Drew closes the book and lays it next to the cylinder. Beyond the thin walls of the house, the messengers are moving about, and they are as angels. Their wings tremble at a frequency that sets our bones to humming. They click their chitinous song, so here’s another layer added to the symphony. Blackbird singing in the dead of night, all your life, you were only waiting, take these broken arms, my broken heart, our ruined lives, and fold us into thee. Blackbird singing . . .

  Seven for a secret never to be told.

  All will be revealed.

  The girl from Seattle sort of whimpers, and “Hush,” Drew says. “Hush, hush, hushabye, my sweet.”

  Blackbird singing . . .

  I bow my head (which isn’t as easy as it was yesterday), and I listen to Drew as he translates for us.

  “It begins here, with the seeds of your becoming, but the star winds will be a ferry, bearing the gift of the messengers far and wide. All those devils in their secret bunkers and Federal marble halls, all their conspiracies and machineries will have been for nothing. Their plots will be undone by each inhalation of the very same ones they’ve tried to damn. You will be drawn in through unsuspecting mouths and nostrils, down throats into lungs and bellies. So fuck their digital revolution, and fuck their Office of Spectrum Management. In the end, it will profit them not one whit. The faceless agents in their black suits and narrow ties, those sons of bitches who did their best to bury the Holy Visitations at Kecksburg, Roswell, Tunguska, Spitsbergen island, Paradise Valley. Call them X, Y, Z. Call them what the fuck ever. They’ve lied, and they’ve intimidated all the world over. They show up on doorsteps. They peer through windows, keyholes, and glory holes. They intimidate and spew false intimations. They are the demigods of stasis, and this is the week of their downfall, come round at last.”

  I want to close my eyes now.

  Soon, pilgrim. Soon.

  Thud. Skitter. Thump. The messengers are on the roof now.

  “They came to a fortunate, chosen man in Vermont, way back in the autumn of the year 1927. But those faceless men interceded, and sure, they might have won that round, but what’s on its way, they’ll rue the day. When the globe becomes a grove, and the sky is sooty with clouds born of the believers’ cast-off shells, they’ll weep at the futility of all their sour endeavors. Even now, children, they scheme and scramble, deluded, drawing plans for that final battle. All in vain. They’ll roll through the night in black panel vans and ebony Cadillacs, four horses of a misbegotten apocalypse. They’ll come to our door. But they’ll come too late.”

  Hosanna.

  World without end.

  Amen.

  7. All Along the Watchtower/Midnight City (1927, 1979, 2015, 2043, & etc.)

  YOU ARE WHO YOU ARE, until you aren’t anymore.

  This is the First Law.

  Thirty-nine thousand feet above the North Atlantic, Immacolata Sexton surfs the oily waves and troughs of Then, and Now, and What Will Be. The steel thrum of the Gulfstream G280’s turbofan engines are the best lullaby she has ever known, and she’s just about heard them all. Though her eyes may well be open, and though she may respond when the flight attendant speaks to her, her present cognitive state in no way resembles wakefulness. The plane races towards England at Mach 0.80, while the consciousness imprisoned in her living corpse knows no meaningful speed limits and travels in all directions simultaneously. She is the perfect voyager day-tripping an ever-expanding continuum of space and time without ever leaving her seat. She’s a quantum-foam tourist, unanchored, unfettered, and her hajj has neither a beginning nor an end. Number lines are for squares.

  She blinks, and it’s a freezing February morning two days after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini ousted the Shah and seized control of Iran. Six days ago, Pluto moved inside the orbit of Neptune. Eleven days ago, Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose. Immacolata Sexton dog-ears the hour. Tomorrow, the American ambassador to Afghanistan will be kidnapped by Muslim extremists. She bookmarks the minutes and sets out signposts at each and every millisecond. It wouldn’t do to get lost in here.

  The sky is the color of lead.

  She’s walking slowly across the frozen Scituate Reservoir, a few miles west of Providence, Rhode Island. An inch or so of fresh snow crunches beneath her boots, and the sheriff’s deputy has mentioned twice now that she isn’t dressed for the weather. Not far from the Route 14 Causeway, there’s a hole punched through the ice. Cracks extend out from it like the radial strands of a spiderweb. The wind across the reservoir sounds lost.

  “Where is the man who saw it?” she asks. The deputy stares at her a moment before answering, “We sent him home, but it’s not far from here,” he tells her.

  He looks frightened.

  “I’ll need to speak with him,” she says.

  “Of course, ma’am. That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  He thinks that she’s NSA, and that story should hold just long enough for her to see what she needs to see. A little farther south, a clever bit of misdirection from London has the two agents from
Albany chasing their tails round and round the mulberry bush. By the time they shake it off and get their bearings, she’ll be long gone. It’s a violation of three different interagency accords, but these things happen. With luck, everyone will be grown-ups about it.

  “He figured maybe it was a satellite,” says the deputy.

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. He said it sorta slowed down and leveled off just before it hit the ice, like maybe it was aiming to make it to those trees over there,” and the deputy points a gloved finger towards the line of oaks and maples on the eastern bank. “But I told him that didn’t make a lot of sense. Not like a satellite’s gonna have a pilot inside or anything, right? He also wondered if maybe it might be some sort of airplane, but that hole’s just too small. For an airplane, I mean.”

  The hole is roughly teardrop shaped, slightly more that twelve feet across at its widest point, with the narrow end oriented towards the north, the direction from which the witness said the thing that fell from the sky came.

  He said that it fell burning.

  He said that it screamed.

  There are odd marks on the ice, partly obscured by the light snow that’s still falling, marks that suggest the object may have skidded a hundred yards or so before breaking through and sinking to the muddy bottom of the reservoir fifty feet below.

  The deputy says, “The man we talked with at Brown, the astronomer, he thinks it was most likely nothing but a meteorite.”

  “Most likely,” she says.

  The object was picked up by air traffic controllers at Logan and T. F. Green and was briefly tracked from Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts. The latter estimated it was moving at about two thousand miles an hour, several times slower than any meteor’s descent. The fireball was seen all across New England and Upstate New York.

  The wind rearranges Immacolata’s black hair and ruffles her blouse. She checks her wristwatch, then glances at the gray sky. She pulls up the collar of her coat, just for show.