And then only the sound of the wind.
“Open your eyes, little killer,” says the siren, and Ellison Nicodemo does as she’s been told (though, again, she hadn’t been aware her eyes were closed). The darkness has released her into a strange coruscating daylight, by turns the green of an old Coke bottle and the pale translucent blue of fluorite crystals. Her pupils ache at even this weak, inconstant illumination, after so long a plummet through all that perfect dark, and she squints and her eyes tear and leak droplets of her own private ocean down her cheeks. Ellison sees that she’s standing in a high place, on a skyscraper’s concrete balcony, gazing out across a flooded city, out across a flooded world. Only the spires of the tallest towers haven’t yet been swallowed by the rising sea, and then she realizes that this was once Manhattan, because she spots the silver needle of the Chrysler Building not too far off. She looks down to find that a greasy mist lays heavily across the water, parting here and there to allow her the briefest glimpses of a savage menagerie of marine saurians and enormous fishes, archaic yoke-toothed whales and tentacled, boneless things resurrected from the vanished depths of vanished geologic aeons. In the sky above her, unspeakable creatures screech and wheel on leathery wings the color of an oil slick.
. . . there you could look at a thing, monstrous and free . . .
“‘Let the fool gape and shudder,’” says the siren. “‘We know, and can look on it without a wink.’”
Ellison winces at a searing jolt of cold from her left hand and looks down to see that it’s clenched into a fist. When she folds her fingers open, she finds a carved lump of greenish stone cradled in her palm. Like was sewn up inside my hands the day in the warehouse, she thinks. Only this stone, it isn’t some castaway ten-for-a-dollar effigy of Dagon, it’s the very same idol that Jehosheba was willing to risk everything to have, the face of Mother Hydra, the Madonna of Maelstroms, Daughter of the Abyss. Ellison shudders and lets the thing roll out of her hand and tumble over the edge of the balcony and down to the water hundreds of feet below.
“So it’s too late,” she says, wiping at her wet cheeks, feeling angry for the first time since the siren took her from the airplane. “You kept me away so long that it’s too late now, and everything we were trying to stop, it’s already happened and I’ve failed.”
Behind her, there’s a grinding noise, like two icebergs scraping one against the other, like the shredding of the steel hulls girding unsinkable White Star liners. Ellison turns to find the siren waiting there behind her in the gloom of a gutted, burned-out apartment. Her eyes flash copper and crimson.
“Well,” she says, “it’s not as if you lot were taking very good care of the place yourselves.” She smiles, revealing row upon row of recurved, serrate teeth. “And there were others who held dominion here, before mankind was even a glimmer in the eye of the cosmos, before time was even time. And it’s really their world, you know. It was really never anything else.”
“Then why am I still alive?”
“You’ll see,” the siren replies. “Very soon now, you’ll see.” And now the woman steps nearer and extends a hand, running her fingertips lightly along the left side of Ellison’s cheek and down her throat, along the ugly scars there. “My poor, sad beast,” she says. “I wish that had not been necessary. I would take it back, if I could.”
The siren steps to one side, and Ellison sees that there’s something sprawled on the floor, another revelation half visible in the coruscating murk. She needs a moment to recognize that what she’s seeing is the hound—her hound—what’s left of it, mangled and twisted and bleeding out its sticky blue ichor, that indestructible, undying creature laid low, every bit as dead and broken as broken, dead, and drowned New York City. Ellison starts to ask the siren how, but stops herself. What would ever be the point of knowing?
“Another gift,” says the siren, this demon that once was only a woman named Jehosheba, that once was a child waiting for her mother on a lonely Welsh seashore, her humanity stolen even before birth by scheming, nameless beings playing a game of chess with the world. “You’re free of it. You’re free of it forever. Now, they are waiting for us on the shingle. Will you come and join the dance?”
Without another word, Ellison Nicodemo reaches into her jacket and draws from its holster the Glock 9mm she was given by supply sergeant back at Los Angeles Air Force Base. This close, she doesn’t have to aim. She simply squeezes the trigger and the gun shouts thunder. There isn’t even time for the siren to look surprised before her skull comes apart in a red-black spray of bone and blood and brain. Jehosheba Talog drops like a stone. On the floor beside the dead hound, her stubborn body shudders, and Ellison fires the gun a second time and a third, putting two more rounds in the chest of the priestess of Mother Hydra and Father Kraken, the woman who was raised to end the world.
“I can do my own killing,” Ellison says to the corpse. “I always could.”
Will you, won’t you,
