“When I was a boy,” said the Signalman, “we had this big ol’ coffee-table sorta book, The World We Live In, published by Life magazine back in the fifties. In that book, there was a painting, a double-page spread depicting all the sorts of weird shit that lived in the sea back in the Mesozoic, during the dinosaur days. The painting was done by a guy named Rudolph Zallinger, same fellow painted the murals for the Peabody Museum down at Yale. The ones that won the Pulitzer. You want to know what we found in Gove? Yeah? Well, you just google that painting. You’ll see for yourself.”
Of course, Albany didn’t need to google anything. They had video, and they had a couple hundred specimens freeze dried or pickled in formalin, and they also had the death of an agent who’d gotten sloppy and been devoured by a thirty-foot plesiosaur that had lunged out of the flooded basement of the Gove County Courthouse.
And they had a soapstone idol that had been found in the wreckage.
Giger’s Buddha, remember?
And there’s plenty more, sure, plenty more horrors between Christmas Eve and the January morning when Ellison Nicodemo opened her eyes to find the Signalman sitting there in her apartment, staring forlornly at a broken television. But after a certain point, even horror becomes tedium. Or, at best, low burlesque. By now, you either get the picture or you never, ever shall. Them’s the breaks.
A procession of the damned.
But just one more item in this Grand Guignol, though. A phone call to Albany, to the Signalman’s office there below all that steel and Vermont Pearl marble, all those tons of concrete and glass pressing down like God’s own paperweight to hide a billion dirty secrets. Just one more damned thing, then we’re done. A woman’s voice, a voice he’d only heard once before and had prayed he’d never have to hear again, except in those nightmares all the whisky in the world wouldn’t banish.
“Nicodemo should have killed me,” the woman told him. She had a Welsh accent and her voice made the Signalman think of holding a seashell up to his ear. “But you already know that, don’t you? You know how you should have found yourself a better assassin. It’s too late now. Now they’re coming, the Mother and the Father. Now they’re almost here. She should have killed me when she had the chance.”
And while he was sitting there trying to think what to say, she hung up.
And so it goes, as Mr. Vonnegut used to be fond of saying.
And so it goes.
10.: Monday Evening Kaiju Genderfuck Pas de Deux
(Atlanta, January 10, 2011)
“They sent you here to kill me,” whispers the siren, the coiling and uncoiling collage of silt and shadow pressing down upon you, crushing and pinning you to the hotel bed. She’s bleeding, but you can’t remember why. Her lips are pressed to your left ear with a fearful intimacy, and her breath is the breath of a salt marsh and her wrath is the still quiet before a hurricane makes landfall. “They sent you here with your pet to murder me. They baited a hook, and I bit like a starving mackerel. They sent you here, because they were afraid to come for me themselves.” And how you have tried shutting your eyes. How you have tried so very, very hard. And how you’ve tried all the fancy mental defenses and psychological gymnastics that came with your training—dissociative virtual relocation, concentrative self-hypnosis, think-aloud initiated autogenic-neurofeedback et alia. Grasping at straws, you have trotted out that bag of tricks, all to no avail. You are alone with her in this dingy room off Ponce de Leon Avenue, this room that stinks of disinfectant and mold and tiny bars of soap—and of her, because she is fast eclipsing everything in the world that is not her. Bending low above you, she is plucking all the cosmos asunder and remaking it to suit her secret needs and the secret needs of the powers she serves. Where is the hound? you think, and then you say the words aloud, “Where is the hound?” But your voice has been diminished by the sheer undeniable weight of her, collapsed like a Styrofoam coffee cup sunk fifteen hundred meters down, like the moment of a submarine’s implosion. “Yes,” the siren hisses through needle teeth and baleen, “where is the hound? Shouldn’t I already be dead by now? Shouldn’t I be over and done with by now? Wasn’t that the plan? Well, I know the day I die, and this isn’t it.” Helpless to do otherwise, you stare straight into her bottomless eyes, and she smiles and stares back into you, finding you hardly even deep as a handful of piss. It isn’t coming, she tells you, this time without even moving her lips. She is the ocean’s ventriloquist, and you are, at best, a skillfully carved driftwood marionette. If it were coming, it would be here by now. If it were coming, you wouldn’t be in this fix, this mess you’re in. And when they find the dispatch that I’ll make of you, Ellison Nicodemo, and when they ask you why you have failed them so completely, you will teach them of the soul cages and the merciless justice of drowned gods.
