Agents of Dreamland

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “But I’m figuring,” the deputy says, “no way the government’s gonna bother sending someone out just for a falling star. More like, and I’m just guessing here, mind you, it’s something the Soviets or the Red Chinese put up there. Something the Commies made for spying on us.”

  “You mean a reconnaissance satellite,” she says, then glances at him, her expression neither encouraging nor discouraging his speculation. He’s talking so much because he’s scared, and better he talk than stare at her and start asking himself those questions. “You read a lot, Officer?” she asks.

  “Not especially,” he replies. “Who’s got the time, right? But I got a pretty good idea what the Commies are up to overhead. I mean, Reagan’s always warning us. And I just figure that’s why you’re here. Otherwise, well, it would be someone like that professor at Brown. Or no one at all. Not if it was just a rock. You think maybe it’s radioactive?”

  She doesn’t answer him. Instead, she squats down and brushes away the snow, then presses a naked palm flat against the ice.

  “I swear to God,” says the deputy, “you must be freezing half to death.”

  “I’m fine,” she assures him. And she shuts her eyes.

  Thirty-six years later, on a jet above the North Atlantic, the pilot’s voice comes over the intercom, letting her know to expect a little turbulence up ahead and that she should probably fasten her seat belt.

  She blinks.

  Deep below the frozen surface of the Scituate Reservoir, something is waking up. It’s come a very long way only to crash and find itself mired at the bottom of a lake, but something went wrong in orbit, some slight miscalculation or malfunction. Everyone makes mistakes; nothing is foolproof. Immacolata senses anger, confusion, impatience. Then the deputy’s radio crackles, breaking her concentration.

  You are who you are . . .

  The thing beneath the ice speaks with a voice like angry bees.

  . . . until you aren’t anymore.

  It knows she’s there.

  And then the day slips away from her, and for a while there’s nothing but the view from the Gulfstream’s window, only clouds and the shimmering bluish suggestion of the ocean so very far below. She waits to fall, not from the sky, but from the tenuous strands of Now. Falling is the easiest thing in the world.

  It’s only a matter of remembering not to hold on.

  All things are alone in time.

  That is the Second Law.

  And here it is a brilliantly sunny November day in southern Vermont, hardly a month after the Mexican government ended the rebellion in Veracruz and only four days before Stalin will become the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. She spent the night in a dingy boardinghouse in Townshend, not sleeping, reading Wordsworth by lantern light, and waiting for sunrise. The night was alive with new ghosts. A week before she arrived, the West River flooded, the worst flood in Vermont history. Eighty-four people are known dead. More than twelve hundred bridges were swept away. Fuck only knows how many miles of road and railway were destroyed, how many houses and businesses, sawmills and farms. Immacolata had to make the trip over the mountains on horseback, following muddy deer paths and steep, winding hunting trails all the way up from Brattleboro. She’s always been good with horses.

  At eight o’clock, she pulls on her coat and felt cloche and leaves the boardinghouse with her leather Gladstone satchel. A constable accompanies Immacolata to the tin-roofed redbrick shed behind the volunteer fire department on Grafton Road, where a surly man in overalls shows her the ugly pink-skinned thing that’s been pulled out of the angry, swollen waters of the West River. There’s no way of knowing how far it traveled before snagging up in a jackstraw tangle of fallen logs, barbed wire, and other debris just north of town. Two teenage boys—a farrier’s sons—came upon the body and told their story all about Townshend until someone had at last gone to see what it was they’d found. And what they’d found turned out to be this.

  “You up from Arkham, then?” the man in overalls asks, his words mumbled around the stem of a corncob pipe. Between the pipe and his accent, she’s having trouble understanding him. “They got lady professors down there now, do they?”

  “One or two,” she replies, stepping nearer to the table. “It was dead when they found it?” she asks, and the constable nods and exchanges a glance with the man in overalls.

  “Ayuh,” says the constable. “And if it hadn’t been, we’d have shot it.”

  “You got a husband?” the man in overalls asks, and Immacolata ignores him. But she can’t help but be amused that they’re both so concerned with her sex that they’ve hardly seemed to give a second thought to her paleness or her smoked-lens spectacles. She sets her satchel down on an edge of the table and opens it, selecting from the array of items inside a pair of rubber gloves, forceps, and a stoppered bottle of sodium phenoxide. She pulls on the gloves.

  “What are you a professor of?” the man in overalls wants to know.

  “A doctor of anatomy,” the constable answers for her.

  “That so?” the man in overalls asks.

  “That’s very much so,” Immacolata says, speaking hardly above a whisper. It’s a good-enough lie. It’ll suffice until she’s done here.

  The thing on the table is a biologist’s nightmare, clearly belonging to no known phylum of animals. The exoskeleton and jointed limbs suggest an arthropod, while the dorsal pair of membranous appendages might almost pass for stubby wings. The anterior limbs end in claws, like those of a crab, lobster, or crayfish. At the end of what she assumes is its neck, there is a bizarre ellipsoid organ, which she takes to be the head, sprouting fleshy tendrils that remind her of the tentacles of an anemone or sea cucumber. End to end, the creature measures just over 1.5 meters.

  “You know what it is?” asks the constable.

  “I don’t,” she says, and then uses the forceps to retract a leathery flap of skin located between two of the rows of tendrils.

  “Would you venture a guess?”

  “I’d prefer not to,” she tells him.

  Beneath the flap is a sticky yellow mass, and she takes a sample, depositing it in an empty specimen bottle. Under the microscope, it’ll reveal structures reminiscent of the tellospores of certain Pucciniomycetes fungi, named rusts and smuts, but the resemblance will only be of the most general sort.

  “You gonna buy it?” asks the man in overalls. He takes his pipe from his mouth, and she realizes he’s missing most of his front teeth.

  “I wasn’t planning to,” she replies, returning the specimen bottle to her satchel. “With the roads out and the trains not running, there’s really no way I could get it back to Massachusetts, anyway.”

  The man frowns, clearly disappointed, and then he returns the pipe to its place between his gums. “Ayuh,” he says. “Don’t suppose you could.”

  “After I leave, I recommend you burn it.”

  “Why should we do that?” asks the constable.

  “Just to be safe. Better safe than sorry, right?”

  She snips one of the tendrils and places it in another bottle, then proceeds to pour a few drops of the sodium phenoxide on the thing’s skin. There’s no reaction whatsoever, but she hadn’t expected there would be.

  “Old folks round here tell stories,” says the constable, “yarns about demons way up in the hills, off towards Turkey Mountain.” He pauses and points north.

  “Stories?” says Immacolata without looking at him.

  “Yes, ma’am. Things that were here a thousand years before the Indians. My grandmother, she told us those stories when I was a child. She said they could fly, and that they’d crawled outta Hell to haunt the gorges and hollers. She said, back when she was just a girl, some prospectors from Montpelier went up into those hills and were never seen again. Said sometimes the demons flew down into the towns, and that she’d seen their footprints in the snow. But she was a superstitious woman—a bit touched, if truth be told—and we never paid her tales much heed.”


  “Sounds as if she had quite the healthy imagination,” Immacolata tells him. Of course, she’s heard the stories, too, and she’s read Eli Davenport’s 1839 monograph collecting various oral traditions from the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, folklore that describes creatures very similar to the drowned, broken thing laid out before her. She returns everything to her bag, snaps it shut, and pulls off the rubber gloves, depositing them on the table beside the body.

  “After I leave, do promise me that you’ll burn it, please. Right away.”

  The constable scratches his chin. “What’s the rush?”

  “I’ve noticed a few stray dogs about town,” she says, “and if they were to eat it, the flesh might prove poisonous. There even could be disease. Were I you, I shouldn’t take any chances.”

  “You sure you ain’t wantin’ to buy it?” asks the man in overalls.

  “I’m sure,” she says.

  Suddenly, the plane bucks and shudders around her, and Immacolata is jolted rudely back to Now. There are no highways in the sky, as a Jimmy Stewart film once warned, only these unpredictable, invisible causeways of air to hold you up or drop you, their whims as capricious as any god’s. A cold front from Greenland collides with a wall of warmer, wetter weather, and here she is caught in between. Fasten your seat belts, please remain seated, and the pilot assures her they’ll be out of this shortly. She checks her iPhone for messages, but there’s nothing. Maybe the storm brewing out there is blocking the signal. So she turns her attention back to the window. Fourteen thousand feet below the jet, a roiling stratocumulus canyon land of thunderheads has hidden the sea from view.

  Time is the navigator, and we are only hitchhikers.

  The Third Law.

  She slips, and the plane fades like mist coming apart at the end of morning.

  For a handful of seconds, she’s back in that booth in Winslow, smoking and listening as the Signalman talks about Drew Standish and his followers.

  “It’s all right there on the suicide drive,” he says.

  Then she blinks, and now Immacolata walks the streets of a city that once was Los Angeles. To those who never left, now it is merely the City, shattered by the great earthquake of 2032, flooded, burned, and finally consumed by the invaders who came first as a terrible wasting disease carried by windborne alien spores. It’s not as if there weren’t warnings. She stops outside a crumbling building, gutted by decay and half buried beneath the glistening, ropy fungi that grows almost everywhere. She knows this place; she’s been here several times before.

  The sun never shines on the City.

  The black ships have seen to that.

  Two weeks ago, the Pan-Asian Alliance dropped nuclear warheads all across southern India, from Thiruvananthapuram to Bangalore, in a desperate, last ditch to halt the northward progression of the invaders. Three days from now, the titular head of what remains of the United States will be assassinated by militants from the Earth–Yuggoth Cooperative. Afterwards, the EYC will burn what little is left of Washington D.C.

  There are signposts in the future, just as there are signposts in the past.

  A traveler can get lost here, too, easy as pie.

  A young woman is standing in the doorway of the building, and she waves to Immacolata. Whatever this place once was—perhaps a hotel, perhaps a bank or office building—now it’s a filthy burrow where the blighted and dying huddle together and wait for the end. It’s been seven years since the last evacuation, and the borders were sealed long ago. The bridges blown, the highways mined. Dozens of snipers guard the perimeter day and night, making sure no one will ever get out of the ruins of L.A. Not that most here would ever try to leave. These women and men were not so much abandoned, as they allowed themselves to be left behind. Some might say that these are the resigned, the ones who saw the writing on the wall.

  The New Gods rule here, the Elder Beings.

  Everything old is new again.

  The woman in the doorway beckons. She tries to smile, but her twisted face only vaguely remembers how, and the expression comes off more like a grimace.

  “You came back,” she says. Her voice is hoarse and phlegmy.

  “I did,” Immacolata replies, her own voice muffled by the mask and rebreather she’s wearing. “I said I would.”

  “I was afraid we’d seen the last of you. I didn’t want to believe that, but I was starting to, all the same.”

  Immacolata is carrying a backpack bulging with canned goods, mostly fruit and vegetables, and she lays it at the woman’s feet.

  “I wish I could’ve brought more. But—”

  “This is plenty. You do so much for us. Don’t you dare ever apologize for not doing more. We get by.”

  But Immacolata has seen what passes for getting by with the inhabitants of the City. She’s followed them into the sewer and subway tunnels where they hunt coyotes, feral cats and dogs, rats and swarms of roaches. All these species have long since become subterranean dwellers, driven mad by the spores, their morphology transformed, mutated by the mycelial mats and fruiting bodies rooted in bone and muscle, blood and skin, running rampant through every internal organ. As with the people who hunt them, some are hardly recognizable for what they once were.

  The woman unzips the backpack and takes out a dented can of peaches. “Oh,” she says. “I remember these. We ate these when I was a child.”

  There’s a symbol painted above the doorway. It identifies those living in the building as supplicants of Nyarlathotep and Azathoth. Whether or not they truly are, whether they regularly make the trek to the temple a few blocks way, that’s another matter altogether. The mark’s enough to keep the ravagers at bay, the shuffling heaps who prowl the streets and alleyways searching for the faithless. Immacolata has seen the crucifixions for herself.

  “And pears,” the woman says, pulling out another can. “I remember these, too.”

  Then Immacolata smells ozone and gasoline, and she looks up just as the cloud of invaders appears, seventy-five, a hundred, a living veil skimming low above rooftops, somehow staying aloft with those thick, stubby wings. They’re identical to the drowned creature she glimpsed in a storage shed in Townshend, Vermont, in November 1927. After only a few seconds, the buzzing becomes just short of deafening, and the woman grabs Immacolata’s left elbow, yanking her roughly toward the darkness waiting inside the building.

  “Come on. We can’t stay out here. They won’t follow us. They never follow us.”

  The woman leads her through the lobby, then down a steeply slanting hallway and past the deeper, gaping blackness of twin elevator shafts. In here, the droning calls of the invaders are muffled, made distant by thick stone walls, and Immacolata is surprised at her own relief. Their language works its way into your brain, digging in and lodging in the convolutions of the cerebrum, burrowing into the fine grooves of the cerebellum, threatening to highjack all reason and even the basest animal instincts. She’s led down a crooked flight of stairs to the basement level.

  To the garden.

  “They’ll be gone soon,” the woman assures her. “They’ll pass us by. They always do.”

  It isn’t dark down here. There’s a violet-blue phosphorescence cast by things that can no longer, even by the broadest of definitions, be called human. They seem to have sprouted directly from the concrete floor, anchored motionless for months or even years. Some have grown one into another, all pretenses at individuality abandoned. Here and there, Immacolata can discern the dim suggestion of limbs and faces. The worst are the ones who still have eyes and mouths, the ones who watch her and struggle to speak.

  “It won’t be long. You’ll see,” the woman says, oblivious to the horrors around them.

  You are who you are, until you aren’t anymore.

  Immacolata Sexton, dead and undying child of another age, blinks.

  “The World,” she said to the Signalman. “The dancer is meant to signify the final attainment of man, a merging of the self-c
onscious with the unconscious and a blending of those two states with the superconscious.”

  Again she falls, which is the easiest thing to do. Swept up by bottomless, billowing darkness, she tumbles.

  The World implies the ultimate state of cosmic awareness, the final goal . . .

  Der Übergeist.

  The darkness comes apart.

  And the buzzing is replaced by the comforting hum of the Gulfstream’s engines. She rubs at her eyes, then checks her watch. Almost a full hour and a half passed that time. Nearly too long, and she’s well aware how much she’s pushing the margin of safety. Outside, the summer sun is sinking quickly towards the sea. In another moment, the pilot announces they’re approaching Ireland.

  8. Not Yet Explored (July 4, 2015)

  ANYONE WOULD HAVE TO admit it’s a neat trick, Immacolata Sexton’s knack for mentally slipping the surly bonds of Grandfather Time to touch the face of Eternity, all those Immacolatas that have been and are yet to come, even if she’s not quite genuinely “unstuck.” She’s no Billy Pilgrim, true enough. But, all the same, take a page from her playbook. Because it may be we have gotten ahead of ourselves, which is always a danger when attempting to perceive the apparent progression of any series of events as orderly, strung like pearls on a silken thread. In imposing order, it’s easy to miss the obvious.

  Look over your shoulder. Become the wife of Lot.

  A pillar of salt, enlightened.

  At 1:54 P.M. EDT, one day after the Signalman entered a ranch house near the shore of the Salton Sea, the mission operations center at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory abruptly lost contact with NASA’s interplanetary probe New Horizons. Autopilot switched the craft from its main computer to a backup and placed the probe in safe mode, then began attempts to reestablish communications with Earth. Using the Deep Space Network in California, Madrid, and Canberra, NASA reestablished contact at 3:15 P.M. But a lot can happen in an hour and twenty-one minutes, especially when you’re three billion miles away and it takes roughly nine hours to phone home. At 4 P.M., the New Horizons Anomaly Review Board met to “gather information on the problem and initiate a recovery plan.” A software glitch was discovered, a timing flaw in the command sequence that would allow the probe’s Pluto flyby. While the Signalman and everyone else who’d entered Drew Standish’s compound waited out their time in quarantine, while what they found there was removed from the scene and transported via five unmarked, refrigerated semitrailer trucks to the USAF facility most commonly known as Area 51, engineers worked to resolve the problem.