The hound wails, and there is clarity.
And within this clarity you close your eyes.
The label in the display case claims the idol came from marine dredgings off the coast of Prince of Wales Island. That it turned up in 1937, during a canal expansion for a ferry, hauled up by the crew of the Sweet Leilani, a week before the ship sank into the frigid depths of Cross Sound. There were no survivors, says the label. This siren, the Welsh-born woman named Jehosheba, she takes your hand, and hers is wet and cold as ice. “Alms,” she says, “Alms for Mother Hydra. Alms for the Abyss.”
The sharpshooters open fire. The hound wails.
She squeezes your hand.
And that should be that, between the hound and the guns, the two or three bullets that found their mark, the red mess spilling from Jehosheba’s gut—except that isn’t that. That isn’t that at all, and now is later and you’ve gone down to her god and walked her maze and with eyes closed you’re stepping through a mirror, out of one nightmare and straight into another. You’re helplessly, frantically wondering why no one’s stopping this, why no one is coming to your rescue, why no one has your back like the Signalman promised just the night before. The siren smiles and kindly takes her claws from your skull, either because she has what she wants or because it wasn’t ever there in the first place, and she whispers, “It’s almost over now, little killer.
“It’s almost just begun.
“Hush now.
“You’ve no one to blame except yourself.
“And him.”
11.: Memo to Human Resources (Whistling in the Dark)
(Dreamland, January 19, 2018)
When God created black, this room must have been the reason why. Black was created because, one day, 13.8 billion years down the pike from the instant of the Big Bang, it would be needed for this room to exist. Mackenzie Regan opens her eyes, then shuts them, then opens them again. She’s sitting in a black chair at a black table. The walls are black and so are the floors. So is the ceiling, but she’s trying not to look directly at the ceiling. There’s something wrong with it, something awful. It seems to rotate counterclockwise, and she thinks of Dorothy caught inside the twister, flying away to Oz. Mackenzie looks at everything that isn’t the ceiling. She looks down at her thin, pallid hands, if only because they’re not black.
She thinks, This is what an interrogation room would look like if whoever built it had only seen interrogation rooms in old cop shows and gangster movies.
And if they could only use the color black.
“Am I alive?” she asks, and the achromatic stick figure sitting across the table from her seems to waver for a moment, like heat shimmer rising off scalding asphalt. When it doesn’t answer, Mackenzie adds, “Did I die on the plane? Did we all die on the plane?”
“We have a few questions for you,” the stick figure replies, and its sexless voice is as black as the room. Compared to the voice of the interrogator, that Siri bitch is just dripping with charisma and sunshine.
“First, I want to know if I’m alive,” she says. Mackenzie Regan might be relatively new to the spy vs. spy scene, but she’s been around long enough to know that the agency has ways of making even the dead talk, should the need arise.
The stick figure tilts its featureless stick-figure head to one side, and it crosses its long stick-figure arms. “Rest assured, we will come back to that, Agent Regan. But time is a factor. Time is of the essence. Time is the only thing we do not presently possess in abundance.”
The walls and floor of the black room look like sheets of polished graphite. There are no windows. There’s no door. There’s no visible light source, and there’s nothing that Mackenzie would ever go so far as to call light, but somehow she can still see, can distinguish one perfectly black shape from another.
No, not graphite, she thinks. Graphite isn’t this black. And then she remembers something called Vantablack, a man-made substance capable of absorbing 99.96% of all light that touches it. A honeycomb of vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays, VANTA, that traps photons and holds them until they’re finally absorbed and dissipated as heat. At some point, she read a briefing on the potential weapon and camouflage applications of Vantablack, but when was that? Vantablack, trademarked by Surrey NanoSystems Limited, referenced in three patents—
“It would be helpful, Agent Regan,” says the stick figure in its black voice, “if you would please try harder to focus. We need to talk now about what happened on the flight from Los Angeles to Quonset. Your mind is wandering. We need to talk now about what you saw, what you recall of what you may have experienced before the plane went down.”
“So, we crashed?” she asks, already knowing the answer.
“We need to talk now about the water in the plane.”
And Mackenzie remembers the water then, and the terrible cold of the water, and the Signalman cursing while the cabin of the Beechcraft King Air flooded. At least the black room isn’t cold, even if it isn’t actually warm, either.
“Yes,” says the stick figure. “The plane. The flood inside the plane.”
Mackenzie stares back at her faceless inquisitor, and she thinks, If you can read my mind, why don’t you just take whatever it is you’re looking for and leave me alone?
“We are bound by protocol,” it replies. “There are rules, regulations, restrictions.”
“Is he dead, too?” Mackenzie asks. “Did we both die up there?”
“We’ll come to that, by and by,” says the stick figure. “But first there are other, more pressing matters. And time is a factor.”
“Time is of the essence,” Mackenzie whispers to herself.
“Very much so,” says the stick figure. “We have questions about Agent Nicodemo, and about the water, and about
