“I know,” she says. “The people in Fall River, they wanted this.”
“Yeah, I just bet they did,” says the Signalman. “All sorts of bad folks have been after this piece of junk since some Frenchman went and dug it up at the ruins of Ugarit not long before the start of World War Two.”
“And this is what she’s after, the Welsh woman?” Mackenzie asks him. She hands the photograph back, and he takes it and returns it to his jacket pocket.
“Oh, no,” says the Signalman. “She already has it. She’s had it going on seven years. We as good as handed her the damn thing on a silver platter and said, ‘Here, crazy sea-witch lady who wants to wake up Great Cthulhu and flood the whole damn world, have your play-pretty. We heard the stars are right . . . again, so please, knock yourself out, with our compliments.’ That shitshow in Maine a while back, that was her. And either we got real damn lucky or it was just meant as some kinda dry run, a windup to the main attraction, the great egress, what have you. Either way, looks like she’s done licking whatever wounds we inflicted at Deer Isle.”
“Oh,” says Mackenzie. “I see.”
“Not yet you don’t,” says the Signalman, “but you will. And I want you to know, Agent Regan, I sincerely apologize about that ahead of time. If we’ve done our math right, crossed all our i’s and dotted all our t’s, this is going to be one of the bad ones, and I figure you’ll have plenty enough reasons to curse my name before it’s all over and done with.”
Mackenzie Regan looks down at the cup of coffee getting cold in front of her.
“Yes sir,” she says, though it isn’t what she wants to say at all.
“So, do you like blueberry pancakes, Agent Regan? A little bird told me this place makes damn fine blueberry pancakes, and I figure it would be some sort of sin to leave without finding out firsthand whether or not that is indeed the case.”
“Sure,” Mackenzie tells him. “I like blueberry pancakes.”
“Good to know,” he says, then turns around in the booth, looking for their waitress, waving to get her attention. But Mackenzie Regan doesn’t know what she’ll do when the food comes. The thought of eating is making her ill, and all she really wants is to go to the restroom and wash her hands, scrub away the layer of skin that came into contact with that awful photograph of that awful thing. But she won’t. Because someone in Albany gave this tired old man her name, and maybe he wasn’t exactly what she’d expected, and maybe the truth won’t match the hype, but this is what she’s been waiting for, the reason she turned down solid offers from the FBI and the NSA—a chance to get her hands dirty. A chance to fight the monsters.
16.: Point Nemo
(Ynys Llanddwyn and Elsewhere, January 18, 2018)
Only an instant ago, an instant or an hour and now it can hardly matter which, Ellison Nicodemo was on an airplane racing along high above the mesas and sagebrush, the lizards and mute Anasazi ruins of the Utah desert. She was coming down so very gently from the Signalman’s clean and potent dope, reading something about a sperm whale in Pennsylvania, something absurd, something utterly idiotic. Something undoubtedly true. And then a single drop of water fell from nowhere at all—splat—onto the neatly paper-clipped stack of documents in her lap. She looked up, and everything that came after that happened so fast that it’s at best a half-recollected blur of events as impossible as a sperm whale stranded on an interstate in the Appalachians, all of it as indifferent to reality as the gravity-defying antics of a Road Runner cartoon. Thirty-five thousand feet above Monument Valley, Albany’s fancy jet airplane was filling up with seawater. It wasn’t leaking in through the fuselage’s thin aluminum skin, but seemed to be gushing from numerous invisible fountains suspended between the floor and the cabin ceiling. The water was freezing cold and filled with tiny darting fish. And there was a sound, too, an almost deafening roar rolling through the plane, like waves pounding boulders to sand. The Signalman was up and shouting something into a handheld MBITR radio, and Mackenzie Regan was still in her seat, staring wide-eyed at the water falling from nowhere, and she looked scared and confused and alone. In what seemed like only seconds, the water had already risen to a foot or two, sloshing and splashing about the narrow aisle. A shower of sparks rained down, bits of fire in the flood, as the electrical system began shorting out, and there was smoke and the air stank of ozone and burning plastic. Somewhere in the plane, an alarm was bleating uselessly to itself and oxygen masks were dropping from their hidden compartments. Automatically, Ellison reached for her seatbelt, because is that what you do, isn’t that exactly what the alarm is telling you do? She let go of the buckle and started to stand, instead, and the dossier slid from her lap, a careless scatter of pages cast upon the water, and she saw that now Mackenzie was watching her. It didn’t take a telepath to read Mackenzie’s thoughts; they were written plainly on her face and in her blue eyes.
This is your fault, junkie. Whatever this is, it’s all your fault.
Still shouting into his radio, the Signalman turned and looked directly at Ellison. He made some sort of frantic motion with his left hand, but she had no idea what it was supposed to mean, what he was trying to tell her. And she saw, in that terrible moment, that he was as helpless as anyone who’d ever lived, just an old man
