The psychiatrist scratches his eyebrows. “But it didn’t,” he says.
“Well, obviously,” says Ellison, wishing he’d stop interrupting and let her finish. “It looked down at Mom, and then it sorta looked over at me. And I say ‘it looked,’ but that’s only because I don’t know how to explain what it really did. And then it vanished again, leaving behind that cold smell and these smears of blue slime where it had been standing. It would take Mom days to scrub that stuff up off the floor, and even then there would always be a stain. Anyway, that night I crawled over to her, and we sat there a real long time, holding each other and crying, waiting for my stepfather to show up again and kill us, or for the monster to reappear and eat us. I think we must have sat there almost until dawn. And that was the very first time I saw my monster, the hound.”
Ellison stops staring at the painting and allows herself to look at the psychiatrist again. He doesn’t seem nearly as surprised as she might have expected. But he also doesn’t look as if he buys a word she’s said. Why would he? He knows the rules of the game.
This is a true story.
Every word I say is a lie.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I wouldn’t believe me, either.”
“I didn’t say that I don’t believe you,” the psychiatrist tells her, and then the clock on the wall above the office door ticks especially loud, and Ellison glances up to see that it’s only five minutes after two.
“How are you doing today?” the psychiatrist wants to know, and he swipes two fingers across his pad and clears his throat. Before she answers, he asks, “Are you about ready to begin?”
She squeezes her eyes shut, and she imagines she hears the Signalman.
“Your move, kiddo. We don’t have all day. Not much point belaboring strategies you know perfectly damn well you’re too cowardly to even attempt.”
“Sure,” Ellison Nicodemo tells the psychiatrist, and she opens her eyes, and the game begins again.
5.: The World Before Later On
(Ynys Llanddwyn, Wales, January 18, 2018)
Someone up ahead is going to call me a sadist. I put my hands tightly over my ears and I can hear that, plain as day. I will be called a sadist by the choirboys in blue and the men in tinfoil hats and the spooks from Groom Lake, because one thing may look very much like another, unless motive is taken into account. They will trot out great reams of psychobabble and the terror of comfortingly orthodox diagnoses and file me and dismiss me. Throw away the key, if they get their wish. Send me down to some cell in their Ant Farm labyrinth and throw away the key. A bullet to the brain, if I am only lucky. Anyway, I uncover my ears again and all I can hear now is the rain, the soothing winter rain and the voices woven into the rain. The rain, which is, by extension, merely the sea. There is nothing worth hearing that is not the sea. I know that so damn well, like I know the beat of my heart and the moment of my death, and yet I allow myself to be distracted by things that will be said in days yet to come by all those self-important phantoms of no consequence and no significance. I sit in my grey room in this cottage by the restless sea, and I sit before the looking glass that was my mother’s, and I will listen to the sea, not to all those roiling futures that are still being born by my hand and by the will of Father Kraken and Mother Hydra, the indeterminate determination of R’lyeh, the mermaid’s whisper, the yelp of waves breaking on basalt boulders down more than four billion years. In the mirror, I hold one finger to my lips, before I say too much. My skin is the color of fog. My eyes shine like polished copper pennies. And I know they will say that I am a sadist. It shouldn’t bother me, but it does. There is nothing in this room but my chair at the center of its maze drawn on the floor, nothing but the looking glass and the drapes that hide the windows, a single bare electric bulb shining above me, and the whisperer in the corner. I won’t speak the name of the whisperer, but she has been with me a very long time now, and she knows so many of my secrets. There have been many lovers since her murder, but her jealousy eclipses all those other passions. “Why won’t you ever say my name?” she wants to know, and I keep my eyes on my reflection. I keep my eyes on me. “You took so much, but you didn’t take my name, not you and not the sea and not all the voices of the sea and all the sea’s many gods, none of you stole my name. None of you were able to do that.” I’d cover my ears again, but it wouldn’t do any good. The whisperer seeps through mere flesh, like water through cheesecloth. I almost tell the whisperer that I never tried to take her name, but there’s that cautionary finger, to seal my blue lips. Outside it’s raining, and it’s either daylight or night, and I am in this room and I am with the whisperer and my own face in silvered glass and the certainty that one day they will see me as nothing more than a sadist and a lunatic. “Maximum disruptive contrast,” says the whisperer in her rheumy, salt-rime voice. “Countershading, markings,
