But then she wasn’t on the plane anymore. For a while, she wasn’t anywhere at all.
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you . . .
Pulled free of the fast-foundering jet and the world and all its devices and tribulations, Ellison Nicodemo sinks like a stone through an absolute and utter darkness that she’s only known once before, six and a half long years ago. A solid, smothering black that is neither cold nor warm, neither threatening nor indifferent. It wraps itself tightly around her, and ebony tendrils draw her down into its waiting gullet. No mere riptide or undertow, no sleeper wave or maelstrom has ever been even half so strong as this; she couldn’t fight it if she wanted. And the darkness is filled with voices, a veritable clamor of voices tumbling one over the other, all straining to be heard. Some of them she recognizes, and some of them are memories, and some of them aren’t much of anything but noise.
No, it isn’t like that at all. You have to think of Tindalos as a metaphor, not an actuality. There is no literal hound. It’s more like a thought experiment, or maybe nothing more than wishful thinking, that there could be a sort of close-range super-assassin so fucking good at what they do that all they need to get near their target is the meeting of two intersecting lines. Dude, fuck tradecraft, just hand them a congruent angle.
“Don’t be afraid,” says the siren, the woman named Jehosheba, and Ellison realizes that she isn’t afraid, and she thinks how that fact alone ought to be sufficient to scare her half to death.
“That’s not what I was saying,” Ellison mumbles, half to herself.
“Well, all I know,” says Black Jack Mortensen, “in my day, we wouldn’t have called shit like that the small stuff, fucking state-sponsored indoctrination, ramming all that faggot shit down our throats until we don’t know up from down or even dick from a piece of pussy.”
“Well,” says the Signalman, looking away from the diner window, “this isn’t your day, not anymore. And it ain’t mine, either. For better or worse, we’re just a couple of bad memories the world’s busy trying to forget. So, do me a favor, okay, and let it go.”
“I’m not afraid,” Ellison tells the siren, and she imagines a stream of bubbles escaping her open mouth and trailing back towards the airplane like a swarm of tiny jellyfish. She asks, “Are they going to die up there?”
“Not up there, no,” the siren whispers. “After all, little killer, they’re falling, too.”
Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame . . .
“I’m drowning,” Ellison says. “I’m drowning. That’s what’s happening, isn’t it?”
“No, little killer,” replies the siren, “you’re not drowning. Not just yet.”
At the bottom of the garden, we wore animal masks.
“There are still things I need you to see. Things I wouldn’t show anyone else.”
“Take us home,” says the Chinese agent from X, the chaos theorist that Ellison’s been sent all the way to Taiwan to kill. “Put us in darkness. Do not let us be hungry or alone.” But the hound is very close now, and it’s not as if Ellison really has any say in the matter. Que sera sera and all that happy horseshit.
“Why me?” she asks the siren, wondering if she’s going to sink forever, down, down, down like Alice, all the way through the earth and out the other side.
“Because,” says the siren, “if you look at it just the right way, we’re almost the same sort of beast, you and I. We might as well be sisters. Here now, open your eyes.”
Ellison Nicodemo had not even realized that they were closed.
It’s night and she stands at the window of a small whitewashed stone cabin and looks out at the moonlight and the place where the wild Irish Sea meets a rocky beach. There’s a smoky peat-turf fire burning in the hearth. And there are women, or things that used to be women, walking out of the sea. They wear tangled veils of kelp and periwinkles and the scaly flesh of fish. There’s a naked girl child standing on the sand, waiting for them. The child lifts her arms in welcome.
“That’s you, isn’t it?” Ellison asks the siren, who’s busy tending the smoky fire.
“It is,” she answers. “It was. And my mother, too, and her mother before her.”
“This is where it started, then?”
“No, little killer,” says the siren, “this is only the house where I was born, and that is only the beach where I learned to swim. I don’t know where it started. I doubt that I ever will. It doesn’t matter.”
One of the women from the sea lifts the child and holds her close and kisses her cheek and forehead.
“This isn’t any different than the last time,” Ellison says. “I’m still supposed to kill you. I still have to try.”
“Why?” asks the siren, and she stops poking at the fire and comes to stand with Ellison at the window. Ellison had almost forgotten her face, her human face, and it isn’t unlovely, and it isn’t unkind. “Because a company man told you to? Because you believe that someone out there holds your leash? Weren’t you done with all that, houndwife, weren’t you finished doing their bidding? Weren’t you finally free?”
“Is that why you didn’t kill me?” Ellison Nicodemo asks the siren. “Is
