But we digress.
On the eve of the Signalman’s reluctant departure for Los Angeles, he received a thick brown Kraft booklet envelope, 9×12.5, straight flap, button string tie, hand delivered by a junior DIRD correlation specialist who’d worked overtime preparing the report stuffed inside and meant, in due course, for a “former” and soon-to-be reluctantly reactivated agent named Ellison Joanne Nicodemo.
By the way, the unofficial motto of the DIRD is Noli nuntium necare.
Don’t kill the messenger, natch.
The report reads like the first act of the next J. J. Abrams Cloverfield flick, like a prospectus for an especially preposterous apocalypse. The contents would have made even Charles Hoy Fort blanch. Fish from a clear blue sky, you say? Why, that’s nothing. Pshaw, even. We got a goddamn sixty-five-foot sperm whale—Moby-Dick’s own great-great-grandkid—stretched across the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Oh, but wait, you’ve heard that one already, haven’t you?
Fine. Never mind the whale. There’s plenty more where that came from.
For example, a string of vicious attacks on swimmers from the eastern Gulf of Mexico all the way up the Atlantic Seaboard to Cape Cod, twenty-two fatalities in all, twice as many more maimed, and not a single one of these the result of sharks—or any of the other usual suspects. Rather, the attackers were swarms of lysianassid amphipods, or “sea fleas,” tiny crustaceans each less than one millimeter in length. In every case, the victims died of massive blood loss and tissue damage before they could receive medical attention. The autopsy of a teenage girl killed at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, recovered more than two thousand feeding amphipods from her body, including many that had burrowed deeply into internal organs.
Yeah, you might want to put down the popcorn now. I’m afraid it really isn’t going to get any prettier.
On the morning of October 30, a woman in Kittery, Maine, gave birth to a live foot-long squid, which a biologist from the state department of marine resources later identified as a young specimen of Idioteuthis cordiformis, or whip-lash squid, a species native to the tropical waters of the west Pacific Ocean. The unfortunate mother died during the delivery, but the bouncing baby squid survived for several days.
See what I mean about the popcorn?
One week later, the aforementioned sperm whale.
Three days after that, on the evening of Friday, November 9, schizophrenic patients at a half dozen New England psychiatric hospitals hallucinated that they were drowning, or being drowned, by some unseen force that held them beneath cold pools of stagnant black water. Eight of those affected would attempt suicide before month’s end, and two would succeed. A similar incident occurred on Thanksgiving Day at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, where violent hallucinations were accompanied by the conviction that all humanity would soon perish in a global deluge, the likes of which would put poor Mr. Noah’s frog-strangler to shame. This time, or so the attending psychologists were advised, there would be no ark and no pretty rainbows and definitely no covenants with a loving god.
Four days later, a Seattle man murdered his wife and two children in what newspapers would later describe as an act of “ritual homicide” and even “human sacrifice.” After their throats had been cut ear to ear and their eyes removed, the victims were disemboweled and their bodies stuffed with table salt, driftwood, and an assortment of frozen seafood. Then the killer blew his brains out with a Browning A5 semi-automatic shotgun, but not before he’d used his dead wife’s blood to scrawl ALMS FOR MOTHER HYDRA on the living-room wall in letters so tall they reached from floor to ceiling.
Over the next week there were essentially identical incidents in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Baltimore. The total death toll was fifteen.
And in Baja, Mexico, thousands of stinging jellyfish fell from a cloudless sky for over an hour.
In Sydney, Australia, it was a species of basket starfish, Gorgonocephalus arcticus.
In Moscow, there was a brief and messy shower of deepwater sea cucumbers, usually seen only on silty abyssal plains, thousands of feet down.
Chicago got a somewhat more mundane fall of shrimp and hermit crabs.
Tiddely-pom.
On the night of December 2, in Pierre, South Dakota, seventeen people drowned in their sleep, their lungs filled almost to bursting with seawater, and never mind that the nearest available patch of ocean—Hudson Bay—is inconsiderately located more than nine hundred miles away. This time, agents from Albany intervened before civilian authorities were able to perform autopsies and all reporters got was an admittedly thin cover story about an outbreak of viral pneumonia.
Not quite a week later, something enormous—or several smaller somethings—slithered out of icy Lake Erie just after midnight and demolished a power plant at Avon Lake, Ohio. Once again, our friends from beneath the Erastus Corning Tower were among the first responders and dutifully saw to it that all that careless talk of sea monsters and the like was quashed before it reached the press.
Over several nights in December, fishing boats off the northern coast of Wales, especially in the vicinity of Anglesey, reported strange lights in the sky and in the water. At dawn on the 17th, both Tŵr Bach and Tŵr Mawr lighthouses on Ynys Llanddwyn exploded and their smoldering ruins tumbled into the Irish Sea.
At precisely 9:23 p.m. UTC on Friday, December 21, at the exact moment of the winter solstice, in excess of
