That same day, seventeen women and five men joined hands and walked, fully clothed, into the Gulf of Mexico at Vanderbilt Beach, near Naples, Florida. There were several witnesses to the mass drowning, including a camera crew from the local CBS affiliate that had gotten an anonymous heads-up via email. Twenty-two people went into the water, but recovery efforts would fail to turn up even a single corpse. Several of the drowned left behind suicide notes, all of which found their way into the attentive hands of the agents of Dreamland before any inconvenient red flags were raised by lunatic ramblings about eternal life and never-ending bliss in the loving arms of Dagon. Not much could be done about the camera crew, which had been broadcasting live.
On December 22 and 23, there was a veritable frenzy of reports describing grotesque, fish-like humanoids with glowing red-gold eyes seen lurking along beaches and roads bordering salt marshes all the way from Gloucester, Massachusetts, north to Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. Albany decided to let the media have their fun with this one. There are, regrettably, only so many fingers available to plug leaking dikes at any given time, agency resources being considerably less than infinite. And, anyway, the visiting fishmen left behind no especially incriminating physical evidence, save a few sets of muddy footprints and one blurry photo. The overworked folks in the DIRD found a measure of much needed levity in headlines about the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
The real show came on Christmas Eve.
Late on the morning of December 24, the Indian Navy’s marine acoustic research ship INS Sagardhwani, while conducting a meteorological survey in the South Pacific, reported the sudden appearance of an uncharted landmass very near the oceanic pole of inaccessibility (48˚52.6’S 123˚23.6’W). Before a decision could be made whether or not to investigate further, the landmass abruptly vanished. The sixteen scientists onboard wrote the experience off as an especially convincing instance of a Fata Morgana mirage. However, approximately two hours after the mirage disappeared, minor tsunamis struck each of the three points of dry land nearest to the location of the Sagardhwani’s phantom shoreline—Ducie Atoll in the Pitcairn Islands; Maher Island, off the coast of Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica; and Motu Nui, south of Easter Island. Seismic stations failed to register any earthquake activity that would have accounted for the tsunamis.
In a maternity ward in Galveston, Texas, there was a second improbable birth, when doctors delivered a full-grown pelican eel, also known as the umbrella-mouth gulper, a fish more usually at more home in the deep sea than in Texan uteri. It was stillborn, but the mother lived. The belly of the eel was found to contain an assortment of small shrimp and squids and a fist-sized lump of carved greenish stone. Imagine if maybe the Buddha had been designed by H. R. Giger, or so says the relevant DIRD report.
More mass drownings. More murders in the name of this Mother Hydra character.
Hallelujah, Hosanna, blah, blah, blah.
One of China Eastern Airlines’ Boeing 737-800s, en route to Los Angeles International, flew through a school of hammerhead sharks at an altitude of 39,000 feet.
But wait . . . there’s more!
There’s still the motherfucking pièce de résistance.
We take you now to Gove City, Kansas, population less than a hundred men, women, and children, not one of whom would live to see Christmas Day 2017. After a frigid, snowy night, the mercury began to climb right about sunrise and by noon on December 24th the temperature had reached a blistering 98˚F. An hour later, the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Wichita reported the sudden development of a supercell thunderstorm directly over Gove City, a writhing, psychedelic blob of red and magenta dancing across their doppler screens. A tornado warning was duly issued. Aircraft were warned to steer clear. And then, within a matter of seconds, all evidence of the storm disappeared from the radar. Abracadabra and so on and so forth. Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat. Attempts by the NWS to reach the sheriff’s office in Gove proved futile, and search and rescue teams were dispatched to the area. But once again Albany intervened, and the Signalman and Mackenzie Regan got there first. With the aid of Army and National Guard troops, a fifty-square-mile area around the town was cordoned off, no one in, no one out, and the CDC obligingly coughed up a federal order for isolation and quarantine. The FAA was just as cooperative in declaring the entire county prohibited airspace. So, hush-hush, because loose lips sink fragile human perceptions of order and chaos, of time and space.
“What’s down there, man, you’re not going to fucking believe it.”
“Dragons. I saw dragons.”
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs . . .
“I shit you not, I saw goddamn dinosaurs.”
A week later, with the cleanup and cover-up behind him, with Gove City a bulldozed, napalmed, salt-sown wasteland, the Signalman would struggle to describe the scene that greeted him and Agent
