Three days later the doorbell rang and Old Jim walked out onto the ramshackle porch of his new place to find an accordion folder of files set ablaze on the steps. An acrid billow of black smoke blew in the opposite direction, released into open sky. Who knew what chemicals they used in the paper.
More improbable, seen through the smoke: An upright piano with bench now stood in the sunlit yard, among the weeds, a mockingbird perched on one corner.
No one in sight.
All right then.
Calmly, Old Jim retrieved a thick kitchen towel and a pitcher of water from the kitchen and walked out onto the porch. He squatted there watching the dossier burn for a few seconds. Such a childish satisfaction watching the red-orange turn black and curl into ash.
He poured the water on the flames and blotted it with the towel, making a smoldering mess that stank of smoke.
No flourish from Central much surprised him anymore.
The piano he’d deal with later.
He could faintly hear one of the telephones ringing harshly in his office. Of course.
Old Jim went back inside and watched the red phone ring ten times, eleven, twelve. He picked up before thirteen. A shift or creak, a hint of shadow falling across him from the window, just the slightest touch as if his anxiety had taken physical form.
He knew it was Jackie before she spoke. Some spy’s intuition, the fact she held back a moment to leave a silence, whereas Jack would’ve plowed right through that.
“Get Jack’s message?” She had a rasp to her voice to counterbalance a melodic youth, as if she’d smoked just to sound older.
“I let them burn.”
“Suit yourself.”
What would the coelacanths in Central’s basement think? Had he passed a test or failed one?
“Thanks for the piano,” Old Jim said. “I’ve only seen that piano in my nightmares of Dead Town.”
“You’re not drunk in an alley pissing yourself anymore. So don’t act like you are. This is a new piano.”
So young to be so full of knives.
When he didn’t reply, she said, “I know how you are, but you report to me, not to Jack. I run this operation on the ground. Is that clear?”
“Yes.” Was it, though? He had the usual back-channel access to Jack.
“I will now go through mission directives and your cover profile. Then I will hang up.”
He did indeed know the drill, as Jack might’ve put it.
“Shoot,” Old Jim said, and so she did.
Old Jim in the field felt different than “Old Jim” in the archives. Some perverse impulse attached to that transition from words on the page, the interrogation of dead text, to the sun on his face, receiving real-time detail. Analysis ceding in an almost sensual way to sensation and muscle memory, and living, absorbing, trying to see people entire while inhabiting a role.
He might be safer trying to pierce the gloom down in the archives, but being in the field was better for him. Easier to become lost out here, and maybe that was for the best.
Jackie’s brief reflected Jackie more than she might realize, Old Jim noticed as she began to supply the basics of his position. He supposed the burning files had included the high-level view and that was why Jackie shied away from that view. Or, maybe, something in the high-level view frightened her, or put her at odds with Jack.
Jack had flagged the whole situation under the vague term “Interference,” which usually mean “foreign, hostile intelligence service”—which meant “enemy hindering our cohesion and compliance experiments on the Forgotten Coast,” in this case.
It felt odd for Jackie to focus on what was tactical, in a sense, in the present moment, when the situation had become so wide, so deep. Central’s official conclusion about the Dead Town Disaster also struck him as relevant to operations currently, and maybe part of his role now was as a kind of secret historian. Mapping the cause and effect, the idea of influence, and even Central itself, in how an organization reacted to failure.
Eighteen years ago an anonymous Central analyst had concluded that “The full extent of foreign interference cannot be grasped from the evidence on hand. For this reason, the Central program should continue, in a different context, and Central should explore more fully why the Forgotten Coast might be of interest.”
Could you lose your mind to an unanswerable question, or just your soul? And what would Jackie become in this strange hierarchy, mired in this mystery, if she stayed here long?
Old Jim’s instinct was to interrupt Jackie’s brief to ask questions about all of this, to make it personal, to draw on the fact that he was part of Jack’s family, too, in a way. But now was not the time, as she drove home points in areas where his expertise far outstripped her own—emphasized his cover, for example, which included that he’d been away from the Forgotten Coast, but now he’d come back. Which was the story of so many here. They went into the world to try their luck, and some failed and came back, but others came back because they didn’t like it as much out there.
“Avoid a surname whenever possible, just use ‘Old Jim.’ I aged you in the documents, including the birth certificate on file in Hedley, where you were born.”
“Old Jim” retained both a proximity to his real name and also the relief of continuity with the past few years. But he didn’t like his real name anyway, or the atonal way his alias reminded him of it. Some days, in the past, he’d woken up wanting to be stripped of it so utterly that he might never be able to return to it.
“And my parents?” he asked, sure they were dead, which was usual and easy.
“Dead.”
“Accident? Or something more interesting this time, like murder?”
“Your parents are both dead, as you might expect,” Jackie said, with a hint of exasperation at starting over. “They met in Bleakersville, in the only pool hall back then…”
They died in a plane crash when Old Jim was only five years old. He’d grown up in the area, raised by grandparents now also conveniently deceased and unlikely to answer any questions, even via séance. Someone at Central had given him the small mercy of having a reputation as a good piano player, to balance two years at a community college studying business management.
“You manage and part-time bartend at the Village Bar. A silent partner of sorts now come back to the area to help out. So become familiar with the place, act like you’ve always known it, and soon enough the locals will act like you’ve always been there. Your name is on the deed for the bar, which leads back to a shell company called Shell Company. You’ll need to familiarize yourself with the legal documents.”
“Cute.” Too cute, the standard Jack swagger.
He’d asked for surveillance on the Village Bar for the usual reasons, figured his cover would be manager, since he’d done it before, but he was still a little surprised they were going to let him actually interact with people, put him in proximity to spirits. Had that been a psych rec? So he wouldn’t molder down to nothing, a shut-in? A test of “situational” alcoholism as opposed to the institutional type?
“So you have always been there, on paper. You’ve always been part of a holding company.”
Who didn’t want to be part of a holding company? It was why he’d joined up.
“False resident, embedded where I never was, for what I will never be.” Something Jack used to say, out in the field.
“Landscape to person, it’s a perfect match.” As if he were a color swatch, wall paint being matched to the flooring.
“Just how old am I supposed to be?” Placeholder for the question he’d wanted to ask, which lay just beyond his grasp. Something about how much Jackie knew, whether she agreed with Jack.
“Sixty-one.”
“I guess the sun and salt spray will age me.”
“And the job. You can let your beard grow wild out here, Old Jim. In fact, ops recommends it. The more you look like a castaway, the more you will fit in.”
“Just let myself go.” Still grappling with having aged almost a decade in a second.
“You have one prohibition.”
“From what?”
“The Séance and Science Brigade calls the whole Forgotten Coast ‘Active Site X,’ but they operate from Failure Island, six miles north of the lighthouse. You are forbidden from visiting the island for security reasons.”
“But why?” This he hadn’t expected. He felt like a child, asking the question, but … why?
Her voice became robotic and he imagined she was reading off a sheet of paper.
“To facilitate a smooth continuation of projects and programs as you right the ship, you will have a liaison who visits the island. This liaison will also report to me.”
“Maybe throw in a concierge, too.” But his sarcasm masked a growing unease and frustration. He liked to be hands-on. From afar, you missed details, had to rely on the unreliable to be your eyes and ears. He didn’t want the extra complication of a go-between.
“I won’t waste time with further details. Just a question: Does your unique memory still work?”
The question caught him by surprise.
“Sure, for most things.”
For example, Old Jim remembered her as a nine-year-old with water wings in Jack’s pool, staring through him into some kid’s daydream about probably nothing at all.
For example, Old Jim on the back deck could catalogue each separate waving reed if he wanted, each and every one, lash himself with them to keep the bad thoughts out. Shove the reeds one two three four into his brain until nothing else existed, for a time. So maybe the mission would serve a similar purpose.
She was still talking, although he felt as if more time had passed and they’d existed in a silence longer than most would consider natural.
“I have to caution you. You might be lulled into thinking this backwater isn’t worthy of your spy craft and expertise, but we both know the history of this place and the foreign entity that infiltrates it suggests a sophistication beyond the norm.”
Still, he felt Jackie brought less urgency to the situation than Jack, and he wondered why.
“What happened to my predecessor?” He’d found the question that had eluded him.
“His head popped at a depth of four hundred meters.”
“All on its own?”
“And his bones liquified.”
“Jack didn’t tell me any of that.” He couldn’t help a flicker of irritation, which receded because what good was it? The files had referenced “an accident.”
“Or, maybe,” Jackie continued as if he hadn’t said anything, “he died because you wish for something you shouldn’t or you look behind you when you shouldn’t, and suddenly you’re a pillar of salt, and who follows orders from a pillar of salt? Not me.”
He frowned, feeling like she’d revealed something personal, but all he could think to say was “I don’t think that’s how the story goes.”
“We’re the ones who write the stories, Old Jim.”
“And what if I can’t be bought by a piano?”
“A gift you never asked for arrives tomorrow. That will be our answer as well as your own.”
The receiver clicked and she was gone, rasp no more, wraith no more.
It was a house; he’d lived in many. Old Jim tried not to get too attached to them. Run-down from the outside, on purpose, but clean and solid inside, with a kitchen, a dining-room area, a living room, two baths, two bedrooms, closets, a room for his office, on one level, ranch-style. All the usual things. Central had thoughtfully furnished the place in a kind of low-key coastal “shabby chic,” although the ranch-style layout pushed back.
Everything from the large faded green-blue plush throw rug on the living-room floor to the sagging off-white couch with floppy pillows felt lived in, with a vague beach theme. The white stucco walls of the living room and kitchen helped offset the low ceilings and the dark-paneled wood of a corridor filled with soft seaweed-green shag carpet that led to the bedrooms and office.
In the office, Central had given Old Jim two phones—a red one with a secure line and a black one for “tourists”—as well as a fax machine. He had to enter a code every time he sent a fax. A safe in the corner of the supply closet to the side could be booby-trapped if he liked, but that was the extent of the cloak-and-dagger—unless the ancient alligator tracking device he’d found in the archives and placed at the far edge of the desk counted as “espionage” rather than “shot in the dark.”
The huge rosewood desk with its ostentatious leather-bound blotter engulfed the tracker and everything else he’d brought … this strenuous desk with its ultra-secure drawers and lion’s paws for feet … He had become slightly obsessed with thinking about how Central had gotten the desk into such cramped quarters. Lifted off the roof of the house and helicoptered it in? Built the house around it, like the desk had grown up in that spot? Maybe he lingered on the question because it felt refreshingly stupid or unimportant.
A Gothic built-in bookcase facing the desk made everything worse, with its pretentious Doric mini-columns, flashing bone-white against the dark wood of the shelves … which held volumes like The Decline and Fall, alongside some thick cookbooks he’d never get around to using. The typewriter was a tiny, delicate-looking thing, like a metal beetle on its back with a hundred legs sticking out, tucked into a cubby in the cubicle-like shelves behind the fax machine, under the office window.
The window there peered out suspiciously on the barbed-wire fence around the biohazard facility that was his benighted neighbor—mostly out of view through a forested easement. Something about how the shadows fell at a certain time of day made the view ominous. Shambling to his desk after fitful sleep, there came the impression of a weight receding from outside the glass.
He had no other neighbors for miles, and the area in general had an unfinished feel to it—unincorporated, mostly public lands or zoned agricultural for timber. The Village not only had no name beyond Village, he’d discovered, but had no mayor or other officials—beholden in theory to a grifty bunch of county commissioners, but in reality left to a kind of semblance of self-rule except for utilities, plumbing, and, most places, garbage pickup. The nearest public airport of note, as he’d discovered, lay seventy miles away, and land was cheap.
In a drawer in the desk, Old Jim had discovered leftover flotsam from his predecessor: multicolored pens, reimbursement forms, a scribbled screed about “secret minders” that didn’t seem paranoid if his head had popped like a grape. It would be just like Jack to build in redundancy or fail-safes.
But his predecessor’s particular obsession had been reports on what had washed up on the beach. Pages and pages of them in the drawer, with certain items underlined using pens with different-colored ink. (On some level, the fact his predecessor had underlined “bag of dog feces” on one list made the man’s idea of a “minder” seem more like a random shadow cast upon the interior wall of the man’s skull.)
Drug kits, baby-doll arm, hair weave, railroad tie, pieces of unidentifiable metal, mousetrap, false eyelashes, mermaid tail for a toy, a green lighter, fuel hose, rubber snake, crime-scene tape, plastic milk carton full of pennies.
Dinner plate, bag of cocaine, floor mat, underwear, yard-sale sign, tiki torch, baseball cap, silica packet, plastic dinosaur, dollar bill, dog bowl, seat belt, bike seat, Hula-Hoop, mattress, fire extinguisher, unopened champagne bottle, bones.
The lists went on forever. They irritated him in the way lists sometimes did, because they represented a kind of raw data, the import of which might only exist in the eye of the beholder. He didn’t like to sift through them, suspected a code or a kind of flailing intensity that he recognized in himself sometimes, too. The underlining had no logic to it that he could discern, with “green” emphasized but not “lighter.” What had his predecessor been looking for?
Maybe, in the end, Old Jim’s skull would burst, too, and out would spill the answer.
Soon enough, unable to resist, Old Jim sat at the upright piano next to the stone path, in the glazed sunlight of the weedy front yard, while cicadas seethed in the trees and among the wildflowers, elderberry, and azalea bushes, grasshoppers and green lizards considered each other with caution, dragonflies skimming along overhead.
It felt like sorcery—that the piano had been brought to him down a dirt road and unloaded without him hearing. Whatever its origins, the piano had recently been refurbished and it shone slick in the sunlight, the gleam of keys white and black. He felt a residual, sentimental gratitude toward Jack for the grand gesture.
Old Jim started to play the melancholy notes of a song, “Rast,” part of an eighteenth-century composer’s piano suite, Winter Journey. Had Jack introduced him to the suite or had he introduced it to Jack, when they were out in the field? He’d had it in his head for some time now.
Most of Winter Journey had a kind of universal appeal, and the melancholy satisfaction of existing within someone else’s sadness, their expression of that condition removed from his by centuries and situation.
A phantom’s flaming breath
pulled me from my route:
it led me to rocky depths
with no hope of getting out.
I follow dry riverbeds,
in peace, I make my way;
every stream will meet the sea,
and every sorrow will have its day.
The first of the cycle that he’d learned to play, and he knew it by heart, sang it silently as he played. Minor key, leaping from low A to high A. “I am used to going astray, / every path has its end. / Every joy, every dismay.” How would he get to hell, if lost, anyhow? And would the phantoms lead him astray?
A song, a tune, a melody could not save him, but in the pressure of his fingers against the keys, the memory of a voice rising over the notes, there came a kind of comfort. Rising like the mist over the marsh flats out back, on the days when heat became steam.
There was the signal and there was the sound. The signal and the sound, and maybe it was true the piano made him too sentimental and maybe it was also true that he remembered so much he wanted to forget, with a sharpness where it just came to him when he wanted it. One reason they’d recruited him initially—to be the guy who only needed to be told things once, the one who could look at the mission specs and then burn the paper and never once regret the absence of the map. Yet his almost-wife he could not remember except, if he tried hard, vague, out-of-focus moments that he couldn’t tell was actual memory or a photograph he’d seen. There was just the sickening crunch and slam of the vehicle smashing into the side of them then … nothing. Such a towering silence. It had all been destroyed in his mind, and nothing about the ghosting that had turned into a haunting had brought it back.
What could he do about it? Nothing? Reeducate himself from old vacation films he’d shot? That wasn’t a person, not in the usual way. He resisted that. He kept the photo of her in his wallet. Never looked at it. Sometimes looked at it. Sometimes when he played the piano, though, he got glimpses of her. Little things. Little moments. She’d liked the piano, he remembered. She’d like to hear him play the piano. Maybe it reminded her that he could be things other than a field agent. Maybe it made it seem like they could have a normal life.
What was a person, sometimes, but a wandering fire. But put the flames out, and what was left?
The morning after Jackie Severance’s call, Old Jim stepped onto his porch with his usual cup of coffee, about to check on the condition of the piano in the dew … and she stood there, waiting for him. There came a kind of buckling at the knees and he recalled later how strange that his coffee mug had shattered so easily against the wood and neither of them acknowledged it.
Cass had always looked uncannily like her mother, and so it was the mirroring, too, that punched Old Jim in the gut, got into him so deep he felt unmoored. A terrible weight and yet weightless, mired in the mud of a dead meadow.
“Hi, Dad,” she said in a chipper tone. “It’s good to see you.”
But it wasn’t and yet it was … because this wasn’t his daughter. Old Jim knew that, didn’t know that. A surge of betrayal. Was this a joke? Or Jack’s sick idea of operational integrity? How could Central do this to him? He sat down heavily in one of the two wicker chairs, his legs turning to concrete.
“Leave,” he managed, but it came out as a rasp, a whisper so faint she didn’t hear him. This pain in his heart.
She bent over to collect the largest shards of coffee mug, set them on the rickety oak coffee table, and took the chair next to him.
“Sure, Dad,” the false daughter said, after sitting, as if the script had gotten switched, action to reaction, dialogue versus stage business. “Sure, Dad, we can talk out here. And, later, you can let me in.”
An emphasis on “let me in,” a quiver that felt wrong, and he held her gaze to see what would happen. He knew this was not his daughter, and yet … the terrible, ragged feeling welling up out of him along with the shock … what did it mean about him that he couldn’t tell her to leave a second time?
A flash of worry broke the symmetry of her face, and Old Jim realized he had held her gaze for so long without speaking that she might think he was having a stroke.
“That mug you broke,” Old Jim managed to whisper, making her lean close, which he did not want. “That mug was a present for my daughter I never had a chance to give her.” She’d been more about Halloween than Christmas, so it had ghosts along the sides. And then he’d forgotten to bring it to the diner, and by then it had been November anyway.
The stain of dark liquid along the slant of the porch. A mockingbird sang a jaunty medley from a fence post in the yard. There was no breeze and Old Jim’s neck felt hot.
“Won’t you invite me in?” she asked, staring at the remains of the mug on the porch, and this time, no mistake, she was giving away the game to convey that she understood he’d said “leave.”
When he still didn’t reply, was still trying to compose himself, she said, “There’s so much to get started on for the Séance and Science Brigade.”
How would she leave, anyway? No car, so she’d been abandoned here to deal with his response, no matter what that might be. Armed with her canned speech, that she had decided to deploy as if it were not words so much as some stilted rehearsal.
He could feel his pulse roaring in his ears like an alarm. The hazel of her eyes matched Cass’s, even if achieved by contacts, not real. Matched it to a degree of precision that made him want to weep, imagining someone at Central working on that for hours. A similar sorcery in the line of cheekbone.
This person who had been made to look like Cass in an impervious, trapped-in-time way.
Would he let her in? Would it kill him if he did?
“Let’s sit out here a bit,” he managed, numb, still trying to process her stiffness. Could she be so green an operative that that was real, not a signal at all? No.
“Okay, we can do that,” she said. “Good to catch up.”
“Yeah, good to catch up.” With this person he had never met before.
Invite me in. As if she knew she was something strange, some monster from old folktales that could not pass a threshold without permission.
Terrified, or just anxious, while it was his job to accept or reject her. But he couldn’t get there. Not yet. Did Central think someone else, some foreign entity, was listening in? Was that it, too?
Even now, clean, he wasn’t clean. He wasn’t clear.
The leather jacket over a T-shirt for a punk rock band. The gold earrings in a spiral pattern. The faded blue jeans, the black boots. She smelled of the same breath mints Cass had used to cover clove cigarettes. In all the details of the false daughter in front of him, Old Jim realized that Central, on some level, knew his true daughter better than he had. That the fake made the real sharper, more in focus. But wasn’t that a lie, too, because weren’t his memories the important parts?
“Cass” hadn’t changed at all in the year or more since he’d last seen her. She’d been twenty-nine and now was again. It made him picture her in three years, in five. How the endearing crow’s-feet would become more pronounced. How the smoking would deepen the rasp in her voice, weather her skin along with her love of the sun. Because no life could escape entropy.
The “Cass” in front of him was as close to his memory of her as she would ever be.
So many things that balanced the bleakness of his profession had been taken from him by removing herself. She had known she was taking them, and still she had taken them.
How could she want to take those things from him?
Then a kind of smoldering came over him and Old Jim decided to punish her, this impostor—to unspool her script to the bitter end. Let her think him deranged. Let her think him unrecoverable. He didn’t care. He did care.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” Old Jim said, choosing his words carefully. He couldn’t tell how long they had sat in silence.
No hesitation in the reply, so also from the script: “I just had to go away for a while to work some things out,” she said. “You can understand that, can’t you?”
“I don’t know if I do understand that,” Old Jim said, and realized his anger made him tremble. “Or you.”
“Listen, Dad, I’m sorry. I am. But now I just want our mission to go well. I want that for both of us.” How hard to read worry or deceit from her face.
She leaned forward and took his hand in hers. He could remember when her hand had been tiny in his, and her walk a toddler’s lurch. It was too familiar an act, too sudden and too intimate.
He flinched away, and she sat back in her chair. The competing emotion that came with his anger—that he’d hurt his daughter by flinching. To discourage the illusion.
“Dad … I’ve spent this time trying to figure things out,” she ventured, as if she were extending her hand again and expected him to slap it away. “I’ve been … out of sorts. But I’m better now. I’m here now.”
Dad. The word sounded odd in her voice—one element Central hadn’t been able to coach into the doppelgänger. Cass always had a kind of questioning upturn at the end of most of her sentences, and this Cass never ended with a question, with a voice both too gentle and yet, surprisingly, with more steel behind it.
Enough.
“What’s your name?” Old Jim asked. “What’s your real name?”
He had to admire that she had recovered herself enough to register no response, no tell of surprise.
“Cass, of course. I haven’t changed it.”
“Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?”
“I sure am. Dad.” Was that a bit of resistance in her voice? A flare of irritation or exasperation, coming up from down deep.
“What about your true first name?”
“Eleanor, as always.”
Such an old-fashioned name, Eleanor, and yet also a favored great-aunt who’d once fended off burglars in her lush garden with a rolling pin, according to family legend.
“A shining light,” he said, just to hear it aloud.
For a moment someone else, both older and younger, stared at him. Someone unknowable. Buried there, in her gaze, an emotion or impulse he didn’t understand yet. A sadness and yet still that defiance. A memory personal to her that he’d tripped over with shining light.
“Stay here,” he said. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Jack’s perverse idea of a gift, or some new form of torture—his idea of the moment kept changing. A reminder to him, a message? “Cass” would have the bona fides to be his lieutenant, that he didn’t doubt—nor that Jack intended that she pose as his daughter. Such a Central-like psyops move. The position had a vacancy, in their opinion, why not use that? So sleekly efficient, but also the emotional maze or riddle meant to hold him in place that almost always meant something else as well. He had come to expect the dysfunctional dopamine rush of that, the exhilaration of the manufactured unexpected moment.
But not this way.
The other, terrible thought, that fed into the same decision, as Old Jim searched for the box he meant to show “Cass,” somewhere in the closet of the master bedroom, yet to be unpacked. Why had he buried it so deep? But he knew why.
This terrible thought that couldn’t be true: That false Cass was Jack’s way of hinting he knew the location of real Cass, and if Old Jim just played along, maybe Jack would give him a clue, or even an address and phone number. But the agony of “then what?” Then what, given she didn’t want to be found?
And, ah, hell, what did it matter where the hell was the damn box. What else could he do but dust off the old suit and put it on and spiral back into old routines, working for Central?
Because the fact was … he couldn’t get Dead Town out of his head. And he knew Central. He knew what to expect, which was: anything at all. Central would never abandon him until he was dead, even if it banished him to his own island somewhere. Jack couldn’t truly abandon him, because Jack so pathologically valued “family” and because Old Jim knew where the bodies were buried. True, or just true enough for now, because he hadn’t crossed the fault line yet?
Even if something deeper stared out of him from a dark place, a thought not formed enough to be given voice. A thought so terrifying it might never surface.
Old Jim shambled out onto the porch with the box and upended it at his false daughter’s feet. All the letters in their sealed, unaddressed envelopes. They formed a messy pile, sliding out across the wood. So many dozens of letters, since her disappearance.
“Cass” stared at the pile aghast, frozen—then looked up at him. The way she stared undid him and he didn’t know if he felt pity or empathy or some secret fellowship.
Did she not understand? How could she not understand? So he made her understand.
“I wrote you so many letters. I wrote you so many and there was nowhere to send them.” He was standing over her with the empty box still held in one hand.
She had receded into her chair, as if he meant her harm.
Did he mean her harm?
“I just kept writing them. And you just kept not being there.” Not even a postcard, unsigned, without a message, that he would know was from her.
All the emotion in that moment lay in the letters and none of it in Old Jim. Seeing them all there like that did not make him want to drink. It did not make him want to wind up on a street corner again with Jackie hovering over him. It did not make him want anything more than for his false daughter to respond, to explain, to try to make it right.
But “Cass” was breathing heavily, staring at the letters like she’d been cornered. Like the letters had triggered something personal to her, not part of the role. The look she gave him was feral, grief-stricken, lost.
“God, this is … so fucked up.”
The intensity of that, the tone of voice ripping clean through him.
The terrible whisper: Was this actually Cass and he had gone crazy with his grief?
“All this time—I’ve searched for you. I’ve sacrificed for you. I … I…”
“You don’t even know me.”
Sharp, like an ice pick. All of it crashing down on him, like he didn’t know what was happening to him. But he knew what was happening to him. How could he have any defenses left, even to a false Cass. Central hadn’t given him that. They’d just gotten him clean and put him back in the field.
“That’s not true!”
But he knew she was telling him something genuine, a thing he hadn’t known was possible. Because he’d been isolated. Because he’d been so alone in his own thoughts. Because everyone else had been reduced to points of light against a black screen.
She rose and took the empty box from his hand and let it fall to the ground. Something in the gesture extended a sympathy he didn’t want.
“Do you want me to read these letters?” she asked. “Because if you do, I will.”
Maybe Jack didn’t know where his real daughter was. Maybe Jack was telling Old Jim he could have a version back, some living memory of her. Because Jack thought family meant everything, because Jack liked to play games.
“No,” he said. “No, you don’t need to. It’s okay.”
Strangely, it was okay, at least for that moment. Almost okay enough that he wanted to ask for her real name again. To break a spell. To live once more in the present, in the real world.
Turning to the front door, he might have fallen, exhausted, except she steadied him with an expertise that spoke to some kind of caregiving in her background, followed by a letting go that left him with his dignity. He could always call it off, he told himself. Shatter the illusion as easily as he’d shattered the coffee mug. Couldn’t he?
He still shut the door in her face. He felt he had no choice.
Was Old Jim the candle, the flame, or the vessel? The enormous desk, the awkward chair, the way his thoughts accumulated mass, meaning, so he gasped and turned on his side like he’d been drowning, and he couldn’t for a moment determine if he was in bed or in his office, with the waters rising fast and an echo of shutter bang, shutter bang he would never escape. Still vibrating with an inner discomfort from the encounter with the unwanted gift, plagued also now by new dreams since coming to the Forgotten Coast.
In the most prominent, Old Jim was a small glass vessel containing a lit candle like a memorial at the bend of a rural road, with a green light leaking in from Central’s files. The constraint and prison of that without a body came to him close and suffocating, and the dislocated trickling sound of water somewhere beyond, the sense of a river or creek beyond his view.
This awful sense of not being able to move, not having a body. Of being at the mercy of the world—dead but still having to live. Was that Winter Journey, faint, in the distance, just the music, not the words, or some other song?
The question, in the aftermath, when he came fully awake.
Was he the candle, the flame, or the glass vessel?
Despite a shiny new sign, the Starlight Lounge outside of Bleakersville had already acquired the world-weary shrug of a dive bar, only two years after opening. Jackie had designated the lounge as the location for debriefs or when he needed to see her in person, and he’d decided to call in that chit already. Maybe to get Jackie’s attention. Maybe just because he couldn’t read her over the phone.
A few muscle cars dominated the dirt-and-gravel parking lot, along with Old Jim’s aging pickup—which made it clear to him that Jack no longer believed him capable of car chases. The low, long building, even with the new bright blue coat of paint, suggested barracks and militias to Old Jim, not the fish market it had once been.
Now it boasted “clean bathrooms,” a smattering of pool tables in a sunken back area accessed via purple-carpeted stairs, and, off to the left, a couple of nonregulation sawed-off bowling lanes with bowling balls that looked almost like softballs.
Old Jim took up a position at a less fateful table between the bar and the pool tables. He wanted no part of festivities or the sporting opportunities, a nondrinking chimera, even though he wanted one. But not as much as to be free of his false daughter. He’d become distrustful of any emotion, any sentiment, he’d experienced during their first encounter. Kept seeing the letters spill out and being unable to intuit the look on her face.
Just when Old Jim had begun to wonder if Jackie would show up, she burst in the door, holding a compact duffel bag and dressed in a black pantsuit that looked more military than fashionable.
With deliberate slowness she turned the open sign hanging from the door to closed, walked over, and stood there looming over him.
“Why am I here?”
“You’re chipper,” he said, noncommittal.
She put down her duffel bag, sat down across from him. “You’re not the only project I’m managing. Make it quick. Succinct.”
“Send my ‘daughter’ back to Central,” he said.
Grim amusement touched her lips. “Is that all?”
“I don’t want her here. She seems … unsettled.” He meant unsettling, but didn’t want to admit that. “She seems like—”
“The help you need, but you don’t want? Maybe you still think that someday your real daughter will come back.”
He forced himself to avoid the bait and abyss of that.
“Why did Jack send her?”
“How do you jump-start a dead battery? You give it a jolt.”
Old Jim bit the inside of his cheek to stop from saying something he might regret. So he was a dead battery now and Cass was the jolt. He felt pissed off for both of them.
“Just … what’s the angle, her deal, this ‘Cass’?”
“Angle? She’s your daughter.”
“That’s Jack’s profile, Jackie. Not yours. You don’t like party tricks, rabbits popping out of hats. Unless you do now?” Dead rabbits. Rabbits eating other rabbits.
“You were harder once,” Jackie said. “I remember how you were like bulletproof glass. Jack said once I should be like you.”
“He did?”
No answer, and a look he didn’t care to decipher any more than he liked what stared back from the mirror these days.
“About ‘Cass,’ though—I can give you the broad outlines,” Jackie said, and it felt like she was relenting, while perversely he didn’t want her to. “She grew up poor, joined the ROTC because it felt like a way out, then the military. It took her longer because—”
“Skip ahead. I don’t need the whole sob story.”
“Not in the mood? Okay. Her first mission for Central, just two years ago, she was on a black op. Middle of nowhere. A shore next to a glittering blue sea under a blazing sky, mountains all around. Such a beautiful place, from a distance. But they were all dead, ambushed. A bullet through her clavicle and two days hiding among the bodies, and then three days, under the hot sun, thinking about her dead friends, before exfiltration. People she’d trained with for almost a year and knew well. Gone. Just like that.”
Jackie had leaned closer, as if she were weaving some kind of messed-up spell, so intent on his reaction he reflexively nudged his seat a couple inches from the table.
“Tragic story,” Old Jim said. Was it true? He’d felt a pang like it was true, which meant maybe it was the story Jackie had devised just for him, the one to touch the secret heart of him.
“Not as sad as you might think,” Jackie said. “People move on.”
“Was she? Responsible?” he asked, ignoring the insinuation.
“Are you responsible for the weather around here?” she asked.
“Then, no,” Old Jim said.
“Then no,” Jackie echoed.
This was getting him nowhere.
“What are you not telling me, Jackie?”
She contemplated him in a way he found unnerving. “Hiding something from you would compromise the mission.”
Would it? He tried to be more specific.
“Central must know more about the Rogue—the ‘stranger’ in the files.” “Rogue” felt like a word he needed to say to someone here, on the Forgotten Coast. Not just written on a piece of paper back at Central.
“Jack believes in ghosts, but I’m not so sure. Still, maybe this will help, a little.” She rummaged through the duffel bag. Tossed a thin file folder onto the table.
But he was thinking about his false daughter again.
“What should I do?” He hated asking her advice.
“About Cass? Nothing. Let her do her job. Which, just so you know, is to push you sometimes.”
“She reports to me. I’m her superior.”
Jackie laughed caustically like he’d told a bad joke.
“Jim. I still need to make sure you’re functional. Jack is less sure it matters—whether you’re broken or not. He thinks it’s a good sign you let the files burn. I don’t.”
“Your father is a bastard.”
“Takes one,” Jackie said. “Definitely takes one.” She stood, duffel bag in one hand. It made a dull clank, like she had tools in there.
At the door a thickset mustached man in a cowboy hat, blue denim shirt, jeans, and boots had appeared, waiting for her.
She acknowledged the man, then turned to Old Jim again.
“This wasn’t an emergency. Call next time.”
“I think you’re evil and you’re going to kill me,” he said.
Her glance made him feel childish.
“Your father’s favorite call sign,” he explained.
“Thanks for the history lesson. Now go do your job. You used to be good at it. You used to be brutally good at it.”
He didn’t want to think about that. “And what if I can’t work with her?”
She shrugged. “Then you’ll be staring at Central’s dull walls again. Or maybe you’ll be dead.”
Typical Jackie. Not so much a threat as a clinical assessment.
Then she was gone as if she’d never been there, like any true rogue.
In that comfortable stillness, that dusk-like darkness, broken only by the soft clack from the pool tables, Old Jim sat for a long time after Jackie left. A low-grade sadness had come over him. For himself, but also for his false daughter. To be lashed to the mast of authenticity after losing everyone you held dear. Something about bonding with your team was hard to describe. The younger you were the first time catastrophe struck, the harder to process what had happened, the more it damaged you.
If he chose to believe Jackie, and for now he did.
Which left him with the file in front of him and while he wasn’t going to burn it, Old Jim did feel with a kind of superstitious certainty that he should read the file where he sat, know what it contained before bringing it back to his house. Some information burgeoned, and became even more monstrous the more you considered it. Sometimes people never recovered from that.
Another sip of tap water, a reflexive look around, and then he read the account.
The incident detailed in the file had happened in the late summer of the previous year, in a remote area, estuary-fed, that lay between Dead Town and the coast. The kind of place it took a dirt road to get to and once you were there all you could do besides fish is drink beer, swim a little in brackish water, and maybe shoot off some fireworks.
Two teenagers on their way to the beach reported seeing a naked man on a raised berm in the marsh, with a huge alligator walking beside him. The alligator held a lifeless body in its jaws—that looked exactly like the man walking. Both, from details of the teenagers’ account, resembled the Rogue. Except, the one in the alligator’s jaws had a “floppy, soft quality, like it wasn’t real.”
Old Jim was inclined to ignore that last detail, because sometimes the mind filled in for mystery in an erroneous way—and, somehow, he, personally, needed to ignore that detail. Recoiled from it in a visceral way. As if he had come across the body later and found it liquified, peculiar, not right.
The important thing—this had to be the important part?—was Jackie telling him this sighting was one reason Jack thought the Rogue was back. Had been seen. Was doing things that from afar seemed … uncanny? Was that the word?
The police hadn’t bothered to follow up on the report, as far as Old Jim could tell. Why would they? It sounded insane. They’d probably assumed the teenagers had been drinking and maybe cast a glance at missing person reports, found nothing.
Someone startled Old Jim by using a bowling lane. Such a hard sound, a bowling ball hitting a lane and then knocking over a pin, contrasted with the velvet-crushed clack of a billiard ball. He tried to regain his equilibrium.
A man, a person, who had been here twenty years? As the AC turned on with a startling creak, Old Jim had the thought that the Rogue could be like a soldier who didn’t know the war was over. Ordered to hold some remote island outpost, a kind of exile very different from Team Leaders 1 and 2.
But what did that make the Tyrant?
In Old Jim’s imagination, the Tyrant breached the surface only long enough to breathe and sometimes snap and tear at the harness of its prison. And then the appearance of the leviathan’s head, the body of some swamp god, made manifest.
With one red-eye bobber, embedded in the midst, burning out at him.
A war of dreams in his head, but he couldn’t divine what lay tangled there. Except him as a vessel with a candle inside, teetering on his deck railing in the wind, and the night beyond the deck alive with the flash of some animal and the mutters of the water that almost seemed like words. The flame of him guttering, flaring, but never going out. Sometimes, waking up with coffee, he wondered how long it would take him to get used to the Forgotten Coast, after so long roaming. And how long, too, would it take him to get used to Cass?
The first real attempt at a briefing occurred a few days after he’d met with Jackie and he’d been wading through files and S&SB procedure in ways that made him punch-drunk. Impressive amounts of paperwork needed to manage psychics, and not enough accountability on budget.
Old Jim just looked at Cass on the stoop, scowled, and said, “Okay, then, come into the damn house.”
She hesitated, stood there, shy of the steps onto the porch. Her hair had a wild, disheveled look and she seemed about as awake as he did. She’d ditched the false daughter attire, at least, for a blue T-shirt with a wave pattern, an unbuttoned men’s white linen shirt over that, and tan pants tucked into boots.
“Okay, then,” she said, reaching some kind of decision. “I will come into the ‘damn house.’” She walked up to him like she was calling a bluff, clutching her satchel close.
Already a kind of resistance he could feel seething in the air. But why had he started it? He didn’t even know, just that he felt fuzzy, lack of sleep, even though he didn’t recall getting up during the night.
Old Jim’s mood soured further when she said, “What’s with the piano?”
“What about it?” he asked, defensive. “People keep all kinds of things in their yards around here.” The truth was, two attempts to get it to the Village Bar had failed. He meant to call a third company after Cass left.
“Not pianos, they don’t.”
“Forget the piano and come inside. But take off your shoes first.”
“Boots.”
“Well, take them off. No boots or shoes in the house.”
“I don’t take my boots off. Operational rule.”
“If someone chases us out of the house while you brief me, you’ll just have to run away in your socks.”
Cass gave him a frustrated look as she struggled to pull her boots off.
“You’re wearing shoes. You know that, right?”
Damn it.
“Don’t worry about what I do, k—”
Kid. He could tell from the look that came over her face that she knew where that had been headed.
Facing Cass over the kitchen table, in chairs opposite each other, had an adversarial edge. He’d placed a pomelo on her side, along with her coffee (black, no cream). The pomelo was an offering that he regretted now. Old Jim felt like eating the pomelo himself. In front of her. As noisily and sloppily as possible.
The slant of the morning sun’s rays across the table from the kitchen window happened to be in Cass’s eyes, orchestrated that way. Old Jim wanted to see how long she’d last blasted by the light. Most people quickly squirmed their way out of it.
Cass had stopped rooting around in her satchel for something and begun to pull her hair back in a ponytail when she registered the pomelo.
She pushed it toward him. He pushed it back.
“That’s for you.”
“No, thanks. I don’t like citrus.”
The citrus smell suddenly seemed bitter and too strong.
“But you always loved pomelos.”
Even as he said it, Old Jim became angry at himself. How he’d justified the gift as test of how deep her briefing on him went. But that wasn’t really it, was it? Fooling himself about what he wanted out of that. How it undermined everything he’d said about not wanting her to pretend to be his daughter.
“Tastes change, Dad. People change.” With her hair pulled away from her face, she looked older, more grown-up, but something about the conciliatory tone flipped another switch on his temper.
“Don’t call me Dad,” he said, putting force behind it.
“Yes, sir,” she said in a calm tone. “Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again, sir.”
With a slow, deliberate motion, he pushed the pomelo off the table. It landed with a fat, thick sound on the floor, so heavy it didn’t even roll. So now it was just sitting there on the floor between them, under the third chair. The exhaustion, still, of constantly having every object, every encounter, put him back in a kind of purgatory—unable to move forward or even fully backward, into the past.
“Don’t call me sir, either.”
Cass followed the pomelo’s progress with a grim set to her jaw.
“Right,” she said, “message received.”
The light was burning her face for sure and yet she looked comfortable saying that, like she was meant to be there—and he couldn’t take it.
“Why are you here?” he asked, trying to match her calm. “What qualifies you to be here? Besides some fucked-up whim of Jack’s.”
“I’m former military. Central assigned me to this op because I have experience managing people and I am proficient at intelligence analysis.”
Her face had gotten more flushed and the freckles under her eyes had become a fiery pink, but her tone remained dispassionate. How could he not admire that? Even as he kept digging a hole.
“What about surveillance? Field ops in general?”
“You’re assuming you’re still current on the latest methodology in field training.”
“Or, standards might’ve dropped since I joined up.”
“Lo those many years ago.”
That was kind of funny, but mocking, too, and anger won out.
“I don’t like this,” Old Jim said. “I don’t want to be briefed right now. I don’t even know if I can trust you.”
He didn’t care how he sounded; he didn’t know how he sounded. His body was vibrating with tension and lack of sleep. He refused to look at her.
But she was appraising him in a clinical way, said, with no emotion, “I don’t know if I can trust you, either. Old Jim.” Emphasis on old.
“And this arrangement,” he said, when she just sat there. “This pointless, ridiculous arrangement. I have a hard time with bullshit.” Maybe he was being childish, petulant. But he was also ill-served, ill-treated. Manipulated into pretending all of this was normal.
“Your entire life has been ‘bullshit,’ but suddenly you have a problem with it.”
The tone was dispassionate, aloof, and it should have stung. But somehow the rebuke steadied him and he looked at her sharply. Because it felt real. That she’d let slip something about someone who was not his daughter, not just lost her cool behind a clipped delivery.
And what if she was right? That his life had been “bullshit” in the way he lived in a world of deception and often liked it. That the amount of time he’d had to be someone else, or some variation on the real him, had eroded all of his relationships, professional and personal, taken hold in ways that made him, yes, an empty vessel hoping the flame would stay lit.
“I’d like for you to leave now.”
“Suit yourself.” She pulled a folder out of her satchel, put it on the table. “Read the House Centipede report before we meet again.”
“What the hell is a house centipede?”
“And next time try to act like a professional.”
“A professional? A professional. You know nothing. I have years of experience on you.” Furious, but on some level he had to marvel at how she was taking him behind the woodshed for a beating. All while her pulse never seemed to rise above seventy.
“Oh, so this is how a seasoned professional behaves? Is this how you learned to conduct yourself over all those years?” she asked, still in a measured tone.
“No,” he admitted, then felt like he’d capitulated in some vague, hard-to-define way. Or that she’d wanted him off-balance. To show she could handle him?
“Jim. We don’t have time for this. Look over the files. Something very strange is happening here—and it’s intensifying. So we can’t afford to do this much longer, whatever this is.”
He hesitated, unwilling and unable to agree with her, although he did agree with her. This sense of something wrong that he had not yet put his finger on.
“And you need to start acting like I’m your daughter, for the mission. Or you’re going to blow my cover.”
“I think you know more about blowing a mission than I do,” he said, hackles up again.
Even with her prior calm, it shocked him that she didn’t register his cruelty. It shocked him that, outwardly, what should’ve been a direct hit … seemed to have no impact. All that registered was that he’d intentionally tried to hurt his daughter, and he felt a deep, burning shame.
“Don’t assume that you know me any better than you knew your daughter.”
A ringing in his ears and he could feel his face getting red.
“Get out of my house,” he managed to say, more like an old man’s croak.
She took her time rising from the table, pushing the chair in, retrieving the pomelo. Retrieving it, too, with little effort because he’d begun to notice that not only was she just as tall as him but also twice as strong.
“Okay, Old Jim, I’m leaving now,” she said, an awful permanence in the word leaving that he resented her for, even as she placed the pomelo in front of him. “But I’ll be back. We’re stuck with each other.”
At the door, Cass turned, lit up by the sun coming in from the east.
“If you really care about your daughter, be the kind of person she would want in her life.”
“I said get the hell out.”
“Also, there’s a safe hidden in the floor under your rug—bet you didn’t even know that.”
“I did know! I did fucking know! I knew that!”
But she’d already slammed the door behind her. And he didn’t. He didn’t know that. He hadn’t checked.
Old Jim picked up the pomelo and heaved it at the door. All he accomplished was to knock a little painting of a fishing boat off the wall.
Fucking hell.
After she had driven off in the stupid little red hatchback his real daughter would never have driven, Old Jim sat at the piano in the front yard and played his heart out. He wanted to smash the keys and get out his frustration. Loud enough to startle the deer and the raccoons and maybe even a stray otter or two. But he didn’t care.
“Now, I find myself weary / as I stop and take in the silence: / my journey kept me hurried, / then held me with a violence.”
This was Winter Journey as soul-devouring rage and it didn’t need to sound good. His thoughts were a torment, crashing down around the sound of the music and nothing had a melody or a progression or any logic to it at all. He didn’t have to sing the words to remember them.
“I have committed no sin / that should keep me from my kind— / what a wild fool I am then / with endless desert in my mind.”
Because it was how he felt, no matter how Central had cleaned him up. Because “Cass” was right—he could sense that they had little time, that there was a time bomb somewhere in this mission, even if it had started ticking way back in time with Dead Town.
Old Jim had thrown the pomelo against the wall out of a general frustration, really. He felt wrong, like he was already back to sleepwalking, a recurring problem for him. What point in being rescued just to be put back in a new kind of purgatory? How a dead old file could erupt as a nightmare in the middle of the night or even when he was out buying groceries from the stupidly named Piggly Wiggly.
Maybe he couldn’t see the danger clearly now, or what the Rogue had been doing, because she’d destroyed something in him, the real Cass had, and Old Jim couldn’t be sure he’d get it back.
If he hadn’t been puking his guts out in gutters. If he hadn’t been putting her picture up like someone had abducted her … and though he felt the loss still, he looked back on the person who had been so distraught with pity, almost with contempt. Although he was that same person.
The fake Cass had just said it straight—and how he resented, hated, the impulse that he should try to be a good person for the fake Cass so that, in some way well beyond logic, the real Cass would love him again.
The ghosting had become entwined, too, with a general sense of being fucked over, and now as he slammed the keys until his fingers pulsed and ached, he wanted to hurt not the fake Cass but the faker Jack, for putting him in this place. For saving him.
Ah, hell, how had he ruined that so thoroughly. Both things, then and today.
When one of his fingers began to throb, Old Jim went back inside and iced his hands at the kitchen sink.
After, with some difficulty, he pulled the edge of the throw rug back … and back, and back some more. Stared at the unbroken space beneath in puzzlement for a moment. There was no secret safe hidden in the floorboards. There was nothing at all there.
He laughed, stopped himself when it threatened to become more of a cackle. Except it really was funny.
No safe. Nothing there at all.
Ah, Cass. Good one. Really good. A sense of humor there, mixed in with the pointed reminder to watch his six.
Then he went into his office to read her damned House Centipede report.
007: THE HOUSE CENTIPEDE INCIDENT
The file referred to it as the “House Centipede Incident,” but Old Jim that night, leaning back in his desk chair as far as he was able, thought of it more as “The Earwig and the House Centipede.” Not a real earwig, but something that had infiltrated the mind to incite. A mystery of cause and effect, where he had to keep in mind what came first, what came after, and prioritize the importance of each. The eye could be distracted by the most dramatic part of the story, when the important moment had already occurred, partially out of sight.
Real earwigs he knew already—those pincer fiends that legend had it burrowed deep, but also in the sonic world, an aural sensation that could have mysterious effects. Especially at Central. While a “house centipede,” he’d learned, was a six-inch-long, fairly wide, translucent thousand-legged eater of insects in someone’s house. It didn’t look like any centipede he had ever seen. The feelers alone …
In the file, they referred to the House Centipede Psychic as HCP1, a Central operative embedded in S&SB. Old Jim knew her first name was “Helen,” but what was better, to think of the person or of her role in the situation? Along with a couple of other notes, he did scribble on his office blotter “kind of fucked up they call her the House Centipede Psychic now.”
At first, it appeared Helen HCP1 would have a normal day on the mainland, after a quick boat ride from Failure Island. She usually rode her bicycle to the Village for lunch, and then came back in the late afternoon.
Old Jim would’ve called it a “well-established routine that violated current security protocols,” but that was the problem with kids today. Or with secret ops accreting around an amateur organization like the Ouija Hicks. The Henry Kage credited with parts of the report had a weakness for dramatic phrasing.
On the way back from the Village, an “uncertain event occurred,” in Helen HCP1’s words. It felt certain, though, because it had happened. A rut. A rut or a stone, “I’m not sure which.” Between the lighthouse and the dock where the boat picked her up. Helen HCP1 went flying over her handlebars, landed in a clump of lacerating grass, knees bruised, “left elbow bloodied from collision with a rock,” documented to separate out the injury as occurring earlier.
What did it matter, except as she got up, righted the bicycle, and checked her knees, “a weird sort of panting” came to her across the crashing waves on the one side and the rippling wind on the other. Then a voice she described as “both raspy and sweet, harsh and kind, threaded itself between sea wind and land wind.” This was what Old Jim thought of as delivering the Earwig. Some entity that had, through sound, physically altered the life of the mind.
What words did this disembodied harsh-kind voice utter? She didn’t know.
“It trickled into my ears like water and it sounded like someone had spoken to me from under the sea or the marsh. But, also, I could have imagined it.”
Helen HCP1 had shaken off the sensation, gotten back on her bicycle, and gotten over hearing the Earwig by the time she returned to Failure Island.
The Séance and Science Brigade kept a daily POE (Peculiar Occurrence Event) log, in which HCP1’s experience had been added to a list of “nascent auditory hallucinations” that Kage, the designated “Log Leader,” felt might be a “natural expression of the ‘signal openness’ of our extrasensory personnel to an environment that keeps broadcasting an unfocalized ‘uncanny presence’ as a side effect of the intervention of a ‘foreign entity.’”
Log Leader made Old Jim snicker and almost lose his balance on the chair. Well, okay, it was still possible to lean back too far, despite the desk.
The notation gave Old Jim the first inkling that psychics had their own bureaucratic bullshit language, but also that the “extrasensory personnel” might view the “foreign entity” as more akin to a demon or other physical being and not as Jack deemed it an “influence” or “sabotage mission.”
That night, Helen HCP1 ate dinner in her quarters within the Failure Island complex that also housed the S&SB’s salvage and research operations. Docks and piers led inland to a series of buildings behind a high wooden fence that housed legitimate and more experimental operations. The docks hid the submersibles, in what appeared to be derelict boathouses.
The extent of the submersibles project surprised Old Jim, felt aggressive and almost reckless. This impulse to use sensory deprivation at the bottom of the sea to explore the idea of distant messaging, among other experiments.
After a quiet dinner in her apartment, HCP1 turned in early. But in the middle of the night, reporting no dreams, which would have been put on a “precog descriptive list,” Helen HCP1 woke up and “made my way to the bathroom,” for the obvious reason. “Halfway there, I felt something soft underfoot and I briefly faltered but was determined to pay it no mind.”
Here, HCP1 entered a loop of “no mind no mind no mind” that the interviewer put down to the calming drugs that had been administered to her in the S&SB clinic. But Old Jim read that instead as an activated subliminal command embedded by the Earwig that, by the interviewer ignoring it, intensified the anxiety and suggestibility of Helen HCP1. If he were to accept the premise of the interference of a foreign entity.
In the bathroom, Helen HCP1 “could not deny” a sensation of wetness on the bottom of her right foot but “almost made it back to bed before I gave myself over to the feeling that something terrible and disgusting may have occurred to me. Because of me?”
The surge of guilt Helen HCP1 reported appeared compulsive and debilitating, and this was still the emotion occupying her mind at a later debrief at one of Jack’s covert sites. Old Jim noted that Jack (or Jackie?) had chosen not to bring her to Central, almost as if to put her in a partial quarantine.
Next, she walked back into the bathroom, wiped her foot, “although it felt as if I could not get it clean, as if what I felt had become part of the bottom of my foot.” She remembered “thinking of soft water and how your palms feel and you cannot get it off, like you’ve become chalk, and how I must have just stepped in some soft water. Because it’s a bathroom—water lives there.”
Water lives there. Where had he heard that before? The little hairs on the back of his neck rose and he listened intent to the night outside his house, but heard nothing, and then wondered why he heard nothing at all. Except the words “water lives there.”
Then, like a hiccup had resolved itself, there came the kinetic thrispy sound of crickets, the croak of a night heron, and some thrashing thing that almost sounded musical. He resumed reading by the calm yellow light of his desk lamp.
Something other than water lived in the apartments, too, because an hour after she returned to bed, Helen HCP1’s right foot began to feel “wrong” and she woke to a voice and the voice was coming from her foot and the voice kept saying “Help me help me help me.”
A liquid creeping sensation spread across the bottom of her foot, like feathers sticky with oil or molasses.
But she couldn’t move, she dared not move. If she moved the voice would come back and she did not want the voice to know she was still there. She did not want her foot to know she was still there.
And where was she to run to? And how was she to run away from this, at all? From her own body. Old Jim felt a twinge of sympathy.
Yet she shivered. Yet she flinched and the voice came again asking for help and she remembered nothing after the wave of overwhelming fear that roved from her toes to the top of her head, as if she were now covered with quivering oil-drenched sodden birds.
Except they weren’t feathers—they were house centipedes.
Her neighbors found her unconscious in the hallway, in shock. She had “done herself damage” with the emergency fire ax, which she had retrieved by smashing her fist through the safety glass. Blood smeared the floor, mixing with pieces of broken glass.
Her severed right foot lay next to her.
She had scrawled “help me” on the floor.
Breath, air, the soul. Debunked, unscientific, that link. But the question became what lived in the body and in the mind, regardless. Could a thing debunked by science still impact a person—if they believed it and had believed it for a long time? Did a fact, not, in fact, matter if in a sense matter had a different authority depending on one’s perception of the truth? Wasn’t this, as much as any belief in the uncanny, the reason why Jack found the S&SB research useful? What the generator had wrought for Central. What the coelacanths deep in Central’s basement dreamed of delivering up for mission ops.
Would conditioning first mean bringing into focus, or making live in the body, that which was not fact, such that it became fact for the individual in question? How swiftly could that occur, under the right conditions? Aware that this contradicted Henry Kage’s own conclusion, which veered more toward the outright otherworldly.
A rut, a stone, a voice that burrowed into the ear. Old Jim mistrusted the rut, the stone. But if he believed in the Earwig, he could rationalize that a command phrase, not a spell, had caused her to lose control of her bicycle.
Words that had curled into the brain to live there, to murmur and suggest, to begin to eat away at free will, perhaps even at psychic powers. Secret suggestions and directives. The house centipede underfoot and the softness of the body in the alligator’s mouth, seen by the teens in the police report, made him queasy. Something about the similarity of texture disturbed him, would not let him rest.
The next night on Failure Island, a disadvantage of the close quarters became evident. The psychic in the apartment directly above that of Helen HCP1 woke screaming in the night, convinced his leg was talking to him. The psychic directly below HCP1 dreamed of being suffocated by house centipedes.
They were found in the same hallway, having “begun to work on each other.” The report further noted: “There is a surveillance gap of a similar length. What the two may have communicated to each other is not known.”
Both victims received immediate treatment for mutilations, followed by hospitalization. None of the three had come back to work, had hampered the core of the S&SB’s work for months.
A quick stab of worry now that it was too late: Should he not have read the report? Because it seemed like farce that the origin of the Earwig could be anyone other than who he sought. The Rogue with a sonic boom of golden light exploding outward. He felt no different, but made a note to check how reports like this one were disseminated to Jack and, presumably, to Central. As summary docs, or the primaries.
The remains of a house centipede had been found on the bottom of Helen’s detached foot, “wedged between the third and fourth toes,” along with detached centipede legs on a white bath mat next to the shower.
How much did the inciting object matter? Was it like stepping on a mental land mine that had a moment before been innocent of such intent? And what if she hadn’t stepped on a house centipede? What if she had woken in the morning and reported to her job in the submersible? Going down into the depths with her team? Would she have gone off like a bomb down there?
To distract himself from a shiver down his spine, he returned to Kage’s analysis. Kage, who had risen high in the S&SB ranks, believed that “an uncanny force endemic to the area has either been harnessed to malign effect or simply seeps out like swamp gases from time to time,” but this felt decoupled from the idea of “culprit.”
He already disliked Kage for that. This idea of some unnatural phenomenon that could not be tracked back to a person. Even if it appeared that someone had conducted a kind of sabotage on a complex op without there seeming to be an end goal or reason. Except, there must be a reason, an end goal.
And did Jack believe the Rogue was part of an “incursion” meant to sabotage Central’s experiments and in so doing create a disaster or did he think something on the Forgotten Coast had strategic or material value for a “foreign presence” infiltrating the area? And that pursuit of this something would lead to disaster?
In matters of nuance, or a pungent scent on the wind despite no sign of the fox, Jack might be vulnerable to using any old excuse to prop up a course of action. If already committed to the idea of a fox. Or if that was the easiest way to secure funding. Old Jim finished reading the report, which included a useless appendix from Kage about “historical precedents,” and rewarded himself by turning to the alligator tracker.
The black box had a circular radar screen in the middle. It looked more like a small radio. The device smelled disconcertingly of motor oil. Why should it smell of motor oil? And what would he do if the tracker brought up a latitude and longitude, to indicate a hit? A shot in the dark, after twenty years.
The moment of truth. He flipped the switch, turned the tracker on … and watched the steady green blip-blip on the cascading red background of circles for a long time. If the device ever did find a signal, the circles would turn green, the dot red. The dot might even start to move across that primal screen, the return of the Cavalry. Or, at least, the Tyrant.
Disappointing despite the odds, but it felt in sync with how accustomed now he was to the blinking red light through the forest, from the biohazard facility next door. The quiet hum of some mechanism within the facility that kept all in order.
Ah well. He turned the tracker off, forced himself to abandon the office for the bedroom.
Because the main thing to mull as his eyelids grew heavy, more even than a psychic who cut off her own foot, was the fact that in going over the personnel files, he had found a familiar face. One he hadn’t in his wildest dreams expected to see, but unmistakable. Older, perhaps, not wiser.
Maybe that was why he couldn’t rid himself of a tingling in his right foot.
Because the Medic from Dead Town was part of the S&SB on Failure Island.
Turn on the lights, sweep and mop the floor; clean bathroom faucets, countertops, and toilets; restock toilet paper, soap, paper towels; unplug the plugs from the taps, wipe clean with a fresh towel.
Destroy the fuzziness in his head by filling the ice well with three buckets of ice. Stanch the dreams spilling out of him by cutting garnish to fill the garnish trays (limes into wedges, lemons into half slices, cucumbers into slices). Escape the weight outside his office window by taking inventory of cups, straws, jiggers.
A waning late-summer morning at the Village Bar, when the coolness of fall had begun to creep into the air and the sun lay not quite so heavy over everything.
Old Jim had decided that the Village Bar had a simple but pleasing flow to it: counter to the left, office on the right. The main space had dark wooden tables in front of a music stage. The left-hand corner held a love seat, with a shelf of old books on the wall. He felt comfortable in that space, once he shook off the night’s dreams, with no urge to drink. Hadn’t he almost confided his sins to bartenders in many far-flung lands? Hadn’t so many bars seemed the same—comfort and curse— as the coordinates that let him forget the intensity of what he had come to do and then the place he assembled himself after a mission, sometimes with Jack sullen or cracking jokes beside him.
After he was done opening, Old Jim sat down at the piano, which he’d placed to the right of the stage, facing the door. He was continuing to work on his rendering of Winter Journey. Old Jim didn’t know why his affection for it had grown in relation to the Forgotten Coast. Maybe something in the contract of climate and mood, snow for sun, cold for heat.
The words he sang in a foreign language had already been mistaken by the regulars for some sort of rousing drinking song. But the lyrics were stranger than that, the emotion not really jaunty: “Happily I’ll go forth / through wind and rain again! / If no god is here on earth / we will be the gods among men.”
Playing was cathartic. Making the upright piano do what he wanted for these compositions was difficult, it required total concentration. The piano took the edge off a kind of febrile wrongness in his head. Contemplating wryly that there were simple, human things the years took from you. His hands had a bit of a tremor sometimes now, but steadied on the heavy piano keys. These damaged hands, healing well. But what didn’t hurt in time?
Self-proclaimed Gods are the worst of all, but usually they’re easier to kill. Maybe Jack had said that to Old Jim, but more probably Old Jim had said it to Jack, in that space between foolishness and wisdom at a bar after several drinks. So many years ago, when anything seemed possible.
All he knew was: The piss smell in the toilets had been fixed, forever, and everyone but Man Boy Slim seemed grateful.
When Cass walked through the door a few minutes later, Old Jim almost said, “Get out,” even though he’d called the meeting. The bar had felt like a neutral site and he had decided to surrender. Which just meant this time had to be different.
He’d almost mistaken the dark gray of her clothing for another fisherman from a boat, come in for a break. But instead it was the severity of her business suit, which had the look of armor and her Joan of Arc on the battlefield or something.
Her cover for the briefings, as his daughter, was as a real estate agent come to the Forgotten Coast to recuperate from an undisclosed illness and to help her good old dad with some holdings on Failure Island. Undisclosed illness was always good, and made the locals do half the work of beginning to like her.
A power suit for a Realtor disguise. But did power and lineage work that way around here? You might look like a derelict and turn out to own a thousand acres. And yet, those boots at the end of the trousers, streamlined yet still anomalous.
“Hi, Dad, I’ve got that Failure Island property information,” she said, patting her satchel.
She gave him a respectful distance by remaining at the bar, so he extricated himself from the piano bench and managed a smile. A little stab of regret: That any closeness shared the first time they’d met, no matter how fraught, had receded—would keep receding. Unless they managed to find a middle ground.
“Oh great, thanks for coming by.”
“No problem, sorry it took so long,” Cass said, as they continued their stilted conversation.
While Sally looked on with interest, but not too much interest. Old Jim gathered Sally had met Cass before. She’d had a couple of months alone on the coast to set that framework, sell the idea of dear old dad’s arrival, too.
“Great. Let’s go look it over somewhere quiet.” Brushed by her, headed into the office, which unfortunately was still a dump.
The office smelled of sour beer, had some kegs in the corner next to a desk with chairs, and a door leading out to the supply room and then out back. The ceiling always felt low to him, like he should be bending down. He pulled the string that turned on the bare-bulb lighting.
“Take a seat.”
Pointless, for there was no seat to be taken until he finished taking the piles of invoices off the chair.
“Is that for me?” she asked, unable to keep the mischief from her voice.
“What?” He looked over at her, standing there in her armor.
“That thing. The grapefruit.” Pointing at the huge pomelo.
Ah, crap. He’d forgotten he’d put it there, next to the blotter.
“Pomelo,” he said. “And, no, it’s for me.”
“Sure,” she said, sitting down with a grin.
He ignored her, put the beast of a fruit awkwardly on a shelf to the side, because he didn’t want to start out this way. Again.
Neither did Cass, apparently, because she got right down to business.
She tossed an evidence bag onto the desk from her satchel.
It had a belt buckle in it, absurdly.
Provocation or important? He held the buckle through the plastic. It had a weight to it, made of brass, or a genuine equivalent, with the words “Champion Angler” on it and “Hedley Regional Finals” underneath, smaller. Nothing odd about that. Nothing inscribed on the other side. Just looked more like a cattle rancher’s buckle, that’s all.
“Fine craftsmanship,” he said, contemplating the buckle.
“An Object of Interest,” Cass said. “As opposed to something that is Foreign Entity Related. For S&SB purposes. For what could be related to a ‘foreign entity’ and what’s just the usual weirdness around here. Out in the field, for anything we can’t bring to the lab, we use TOT, Trash or Treasure, as a graffiti tag to mark anything interesting for later analysis. So, if you see that, you know. Infantile, but enigmatic to the locals.”
Combing through the trash and beaches for evidence of mischief, sorting through it on conveyor belts back at Failure Island. Is this a turd or a piece of gold? Dumpster diving for psychic retrieval. OOI, FER, TOT. It made a rough sort of sense, although he hated acronyms, decided not to use these, either.
“So, how’d you come by the buckle?”
“I found it in the parking lot of the convenience store near my apartment.”
“And?”
“First, what do you know about your predecessor?”
She’d said “predecessor” like it was someone undead buried in a coffin in a castle somewhere.
“Jackie told me he died a horrible death. The files back at Central just said ‘heart attack.’”
The incident had happened more than a year ago, and so predated the decision to bring them both into the fold. While the rest of the Ouija Hicks likely had been told his predecessor had been recommissioned, along with the body-bagged psychics. Their own deaths that they hadn’t seen coming.
“One of the Brigade’s submersibles imploded, for no good reason,” Cass said. “The House Centipede Incident felt like more of the same.”
“The man was obsessed with debris that washes up on the shore. Why?”
“I don’t know. The whole submersibles program redirected its attention to searching for sea trenches and other anomalies in the months before he died. So, I guess he was interested in the shallows and the depths.”
“Did his last dive have a particular purpose?”
“He was with two Central-trained séance personnel on a distance messaging attempt. He never did field inspections with Brigade members who weren’t Central. He’d begun to get paranoid about amateurs.”
“By ‘séance personnel,’ you mean psychics?”
“Yes, psychics. Clairvoyants. Telepaths. I forget all the categories.”
“By distance messaging, you mean remote communication between minds?”
“Yes, although it can take various forms or be about two or more psychics connecting to ‘solve’ some problem, let’s say.”
“In one of those three-person sunken bathtubs? Those glorified septic tanks.”
“Yeah, those,” she said. “The Brigade loves them, can’t get enough of them. Two more on order.”
From the distance messaging reports, he’d gleaned what he thought might be traces of the Rogue, or was that nonsense? This trace of a man with his eyes too wide open: “There is a crevice in the black sea with a light pouring out. The stranger lives there, peering up at us. Something lives with him close, something beyond understanding. When his eyes open, so too do the eyes of others.”
What he’d been struggling with was … if he believed in psychics who might perceive the Rogue, did that mean he also believed in the Rogue’s ability to trace that link back? To yank on it like it was a physical rope binding psychic to Rogue? It felt like a mystical question, not an analytical one.
“Do you believe in any of this?” he asked, because he sincerely wanted to know.
“Does it matter? What I thought I believed about a lot of things hasn’t helped me here. Has it helped you?” She’d fixed him with one of those seemingly impassive looks he’d come to think of as dangerous.
“No,” he admitted. “No, it hasn’t.” Although the truth was, he didn’t know what he believed anymore, which might be the problem.
“The Brigade also does more conventional research on sensory deprivation,” Cass said. “And the data is sent to other Central projects. The Forgotten Coast also seems unusually rich in reported ‘psychic’ phenomena.”
The S&SB had a fascination with “psychic dead spots and hot spots” on the Forgotten Coast. Which also fascinated the part of Central that seemed to believe warring psychics were the future of combat. Sometimes Old Jim felt they treated the “foreign entity” like unexploded ordnance or a thing currently inert, like a sleeper cell, that ultimately, under controlled conditions, must either be made to blow up or in other ways react. If they were to understand it or learn from it, “profit or prophet” from it, as Jack liked to say.
“Tell me more about the buckle.” Although he thought he could guess, some of it.
“The buckle belonged to your predecessor. He wore it all the time, but it wasn’t on him in the submersible for some reason. Instead, it was propped up on the concrete block at the head of my parking space at the convenience store. Someone put it there while I was inside buying a gallon of milk. Do you want to guess when I found it?”
“When?” He didn’t want to guess.
“The week you came to the Forgotten Coast.”
“That sounds like a message. Any guesses about who?”
“The locals are much more sophisticated than Central gives them credit for. They definitely aren’t as clueless as Jackie seems to think. But I can’t figure out how anyone from outside the S&SB could get hold of it.”
“What about internal? Anyone disgruntled?”
“Not really, no, but…” The hesitation came with a frown, like Cass wanted to handle her own business.
“But what?”
“I’ve been having some trouble with Henry Kage.”
“Kage wrote the House Centipede report.”
“Yeah. He and his half sister, Suzanne, came on board a few months before the sub incident. And since then they’ve, well, I guess you could say they’ve taken control of part of the operation. The more … radical … psychics take their cue from Henry, especially. They don’t disobey me, but they also do their own thing.”
“Is that why you don’t live on Failure Island?” He’d noticed she’d ignored Central’s place for her on the island and lived in an apartment just six miles from his house.
“One of the reasons I’m glad I don’t,” Cass said.
That alarmed him. He’d been in situations as the latecomer to a power vacuum, and sometimes an operation would’ve already become feudal, disguised by mounds of rational-sounding paperwork.
“Who brought them into the operation?”
“Jack. I don’t know if Jackie likes them very much.”
“Are they Central agents?”
“No, they’re civilians, with a history of investigating uncanny phenomena. But Henry has a history of violence.”
“What kind of violence?”
“As a teenager, he tried to burn down a gardener’s shed, with the gardener in it. Tortured his pet hamster by cutting out its eyes and replacing them with pebbles. Claimed it was the collateral damage from a séance.”
From the semi-disgusted look on Cass’s face, she felt about the same relaying this information as he felt receiving it. Violence was simple because it could be expressed as “subject-verb-object,” but Henry felt more complex than that.
“Do they know about Jack, about Central?”
“Not to my knowledge. They just think I’m a new, unnecessary management level added by someone higher up in the Brigade.”
Old Jim considered that a moment. While he also considered that Jack had been expecting him not only to step into a dead man’s shoes, but to head up an operation compromised by Jack’s obsession with the uncanny, now saddled with his baggage and the relative inexperience of a lieutenant who felt responsible for the deaths of her comrades on her last mission.
For a moment, he felt like he was down there with the dead man, without any wall between him and the water.
“Why must I stray from the beaten path … / looking for the hidden track.”
“What if Henry did put the belt buckle there? What does it mean?” he asked her. Because it still didn’t feel like a Rogue-ish thing, and he wondered if half his job would be like Cass’s: separating strange wheat from very ordinary chaff.
“Definitely a threat, then, driven by ego,” she said. “He was sending the message that he knew you had arrived and telling both of us who’s really in charge.”
He didn’t insult her by pointing out that this would also mean Henry had been following her and knew her routine.
“I hope you use more than the usual security protocols,” he said. What if she had a secret minder, too? “Do you feel safe?”
She’d been somewhere else for a moment, but the question brought her back, and she gave him a curious sideways glance.
“I do feel safe, thanks for asking,” she said. “I trust no one, and only you and Jackie know where I live.”
He looked at his watch, rose from the chair. A contractor would be there in just a few minutes. Certain key obligations to maintain his cover.
“I have to finalize the remodel plans. Get me the file on Henry Kage, if you don’t mind. I also want to talk to David Sheers, from S&SB staff, as soon as possible.” The Medic. “Can you set that up?”
“Sure. Sheers is one of my main contacts, especially for status reports on morale. He’s a loyalist, so a laugh riot. A real patriot.”
He could tell she was surprised at the request, but he liked that she didn’t ask him why. He also liked that the Medic made her sarcastic.
As he walked with her to the front door, Old Jim felt an urgent need to apologize for last time they’d met. To tell her that he understood she was caught between Jackie and him, between him and Jack. That theirs might be a strange and uneven fellowship, because the mission itself was strange. Because they were both messed up, too, but that was all right.
Instead, he just said, “There was no safe under the floorboards, but there is now.”
Let her think about that for a while.
But he could tell from the grin spreading across her face that he’d said the right thing.
The original batch of Ouija Hicks had been UFO conspirators in another life, or counterculture freaks looking for a new fix that wouldn’t get them arrested so easily. To this motley crew at the S&SB, many now long in the tooth, Jack had added a stabilizing layer of what Old Jim was tempted to call “the professional psychic class.” A series of recruits who didn’t come to the organization by chance but by dint of careening careers and the whims of “high command,” as he and Jack had joked and toked before Jack had become part of that high command and given up pot.
Old Jim didn’t mind the old-timers because they meant well, and most likely the latest direction of the Brigade bewildered them. The overemphasis on submersibles. The sudden hint of danger, the spike in malaise and depression that hinted at the effects of a more subtle application of an Earwig. The way members were there one day, then gone, the change in hierarchy that meant the decision-making was more top-down.
But Henry and Suzanne had a totally different kind of profile. What the Brigade psychics would’ve called “a bad vibe.” Along with an agenda Old Jim didn’t think quite synched with Central. Suzanne was five years younger, from another mother, and how did that work? What fucked up lineage meant your half sister joined you, inseparable, in what amounted to a cult? What kind of family? “A phantom’s flaming breath / pulled me from my route: / it led me to rocky depths / with no hope of getting out.”
Henry and Suzanne sounded like names from a crime-spree news article. That they looked as if they had stepped out of some fascist youth summer camp into their own future gave him one kind of clue. The formal aristocracy of Henry’s overbearing mother and father gave him another.
Old money and older appetites, German Hungarian by way of upstate New York, mansion by the river. Henry had been part of the Pickeling Society long before the Brigade, an organization with a nihilistic streak that uplifted and tried to make respectable fringe psychics and other quacks.
Henry had a juvenile record, sealed, that, as Cass had indicated, included torturing a hamster and setting fire to the gardener’s shed on his family’s property—when he believed the gardener to be inside. Henry’s father had “sent him abroad” after that, in the grand tradition of rich people across the centuries. Frankly, Old Jim was surprised Central hadn’t tried to recruit him at that point. Disaffected, with a violent streak that could be channeled into a useful aggression.
“Abroad” hadn’t helped Henry much, except for picking up an accent that appeared to be affectation, and drinking absinthe out of a half of a human skull, which he boasted about in a privately published pamphlet account of his experiences.
As an adult, Henry had managed to avoid charges on gouging a man’s eye out in a bar, sustaining an injury of his own that slanted a shoulder, made his head look not put on quite right. Clearly some kind of payoff from Henry’s father, who managed to combine his old money with liquidating material assets from companies he bought out of bankruptcy.
Henry claimed to have had several encounters with “occult influences,” usually “in abandoned buildings, alleys,” and similarly cheery places. Over time, up north, associated with various fringe groups Central kept tabs on, Henry had gained a reputation for so-called bunking or debunking of a series of “haunted light stations” around the Great Lakes.
He had found “unique if controversial ways to draw specters out of refracted glass” and make them manifest, even speak, while also gaining a reputation as being picky and high-strung. He debunked as much as he bunked. He could also become vicious toward people who scoffed at his “powers.” He’d careened from organization to organization in part because he became paranoid and in part because, the subtext indicated, some initial magnetism ceded to dislike, which meant, in the long term, people didn’t trust his ideas. Which only made him more paranoid about authority, which also drove him to become ever more knowledgeable about the occult. Not so much a vicious cycle as somewhat pathetic.
At this point in his “career,” Jack, inexplicably, had discovered “the once and future magician asshole” (as one of Henry’s colleagues described him) languishing in the Midwest and deemed him worthy of the Forgotten Coast op, joining the Brigade “raw,” as they put it, which meant Henry and Suzanne had no Central training and, in theory, no knowledge of Central’s role in the Brigade. They would need to be managed and controlled from afar, so to speak, through the Brigade hierarchy—which looked like the Medic’s tutelage. Even as it was clear Jack wanted Henry to believe he had agency and power in the Brigade.
Old Jim’s first, uncharitable thought: Jack was sabotaging the project for some reason. Which gave way to the grudging idea that Jack might honestly believe the Brigade needed an injection of urgency.
Had the rationale been to counter the Rogue with a rogue of Jack’s own in the person of Henry?
As for Suzanne, the file contained next to nothing about her. Suzanne had no record of having lived a life at all, except for the basics, and hadn’t even gone to high school, let alone college. Suzanne had existed in her father’s mansion for many years, like the personification of a Gothic novel, playing pretend scientist with mail-order kits before joining the Brigade as an attachment to Henry.
But she seemed to be the one who made Henry look presentable. Whenever Henry had an analysis, it looked to be Suzanne who made it conform to Brigade format and protocols. Liminal spaces fascinated Henry, especially in the context of the lighthouse, and expressed themselves in stunningly dry and sometimes incomprehensible reports that had been “dictated to Suzanne,” which reflected poorly on her editorial skills.
Sometimes, Old Jim thought, she made his batshit theories appear … semi-reasonable.
“If you can find the liminal space, neither day nor night, in the threshold, you can receive the dreams or thoughts of others.” Henry conveyed this idea in the context of the lighthouse lens, and there being a place, theoretically, “neither here nor there.”
Old Jim wondered if he was wrong about the old hands, if they might in fact thrill to hear some of the bullshit issuing forth from Henry’s psycho mouth.
“If you could control the effect, if you could inhabit whatever clambered out, that would be spectacular. That would change the world.”
Grandiose, but also he didn’t much care for the idea of “clambering” and the lighthouse beacon.
Distance messaging. Panic listening. Authoritarian sound. Projection across time and space. Some of Henry’s ideas evoked the Rogue to Old Jim. One of them involved “dream bombs” like a “destroyer searching for a submarine below.” That this delivery at distance could kill a person remotely, or rewire their personality or beliefs. The psychics seeking strange minds, strange thoughts from the bottom of the sea constrained the Rogue. That he could not leave a zone without being noticed by psychics.
Perhaps the Rogue was trying to take out the submersibles for some reason, not the personnel, and that was just collateral damage. Which led Old Jim back to what might just be another kind of witchcraft. That the Rogue, or someone, was tapping into Central training and protocols. And, again, how was that possible unless they’d interrogated someone from Central or were from Central?
A whiff of sorcery, too, in not wanting to evoke Henry too directly, even confined to his office. Only ever “H” in his notes, which he assumed Jack spied on by having a vampire fly in a window at night and hover long enough for the old click-click before leaving again.
Late in the day, he drove to Bleakersville, trying to put the pebbles in a dead hamster’s eyes out of his head, but also wanting to do something, make some progress he should’ve achieved by now but hadn’t.
He was back in Bleakersville for some of Jack’s old-school bullshit, the spy craft of past generations that said loitering half in disguise at a dirty pay phone outside the Starlight Lounge was better than using a dedicated, secure landline in the luxury of his own home. The reason was clear—to discourage Old Jim from contacting him and yet Jack still couldn’t quite give up the back channel.
In part, he found it worth the trip for a drive others found boring: thick forest and half-dry swamp, on bridges and perilous curving two-lane roads, most of them dirt. Plus, Bleakersville had the best Piggly Wiggly within reach.
He put in his dime and when the gruff, ultramasculine voice answered, said, “Town and country,” with the annoying affirmation of “Living the life, Captain.”
Then he waited while the receiver burbled and burped—there, at the far end of the parking lot, as if when putting in the phone, they’d asked the question, “Where can we put it where it’s easiest to get mugged at night?” Looking back from the shade into the rusty sunlight of the parking lot, Old Jim already sweating and low on patience.
Then Jack was on the line saying hello and Old Jim, slipping into a well-worn familiarity, said, “You ever going to visit us in the flesh, you think? There’s been great weather here. Spectacular. You might like the fishing.”
“Sure, Jim, we could go out in a boat. Maybe a rowboat. That’d be nice, two old buddies. But would we both come back?”
“If you give me what I ask for, sure.”
Jack laughed. “Well, I don’t go out in the field much anymore. Don’t need to—I put in my time.”
“And I didn’t?”
“Yes, you did. But you are the field, Jim. You know that. Plus, a salvage project. Be thankful you’re in the field, rather than in a field somewhere. So, you settling in? Cass working out? Why the fuck am I getting this phone call?”
He didn’t think he could address the question of Cass without anger, so he stuck to what was on his list, first item of which was Henry.
“Settling in fine. Catching up on the files. Getting to know the personnel. You’ve got some live ones, for sure. Like … Henry Kage. He’s interesting. How’d you find someone like that?”
A pause. A definable pause, before a reply.
“Oh, you know, here and there. You get a sense for where to look.”
“Why use him?”
“Say, Jim, why don’t we stop dicking around and get down to brass tacks: Why me, not Jackie, for whatever this is?”
Typical, and Old Jim had expected the question.
“The ask is of Central and not necessarily operational. But I think it pertains.”
“So spit it out. Spit it out.” Somehow the tone of that made Old Jim not want to spit it out.
Item 2: Those who had viewed the camera footage.
“The exiled team leaders of the Dead Town expedition. I need to talk to them. Reinterview them.” Maybe it would reassure him to know they were still alive, if he considered himself as a Team Leader 3.
“Out of the question,” Jack growled.
“Why not? They’re valuable. Central hung on to them for a reason, right?”
“Sure, that I can tell you. Insurance. Monitoring. Someone back in the day thought that if anything about them or their situation … changed … then it might be like an alarm going off. Because of their contact with the cameras.”
“I could submit a list of questions.” To wash up on their respective beaches, dot matrix paper shoved into glass bottles.
Jack cursed incomprehensibly, said, “Do you have something serious to ask for? Something I can actually do?”
Old Jim considered that. He had lost the thread for a moment—because he needed better sleep. Needed to stop having a war of dreams in his head, with a thick rustling through the reeds as prologue that he couldn’t be sure was in the dream or outside the window.
Item 3: Reexamining the biologist expedition.
“I want to see everything from the Dead Town Disaster.”
Jack went quiet, and Old Jim knew he was trying not to blow his top.
“It … it wasn’t a fucking disaster. Fuck no. We learned from the yurts, the meadow, the stranger. You have no idea how much we learned. You ever see the linguistics report on the journals? That alone…”
Jack hadn’t given him the linguistics report, likely on purpose.
“I’ll call the Dead Town experiment whatever you want if you can get me everything from the expedition. I can come to Central to—”
“No. Stay there. Wait a second. Gotta put you on hold.”
The click followed by the hold sounds. Not music. No, it sounded a little like a baby crying, and a snarl on the line he hoped was feedback, or that baby was in trouble. Plus, a hum or mumble of words in the background.
A silence in which Old Jim reflected on Jack. Maybe there wasn’t much left of Jack to appeal to. Maybe Jack had started too young and that’s the legacy he had left Jackie. Now, aged prematurely, maybe his mind held only the fast-approaching hunger of an aging predator. That kind of hunger could kill you as fast as anything coming downriver faster and more determined than it should’ve been, trapped in a twenty-year-old harness.
Remembered Jack telling him about some comic strip he liked—two crows with hands, in trench coats, who worked for rival espionage agencies. Immortal, but they kept blowing each other up when, as Jack put it, “they could just explain that explosives are funny and spy agencies do stupid things.”
Somewhere in that delayed response, too, he decided to share all of the files on the Dead Town Disaster with Cass. He wasn’t quite sure why.
Old Jim wasn’t sure how much time had passed until he heard a voice again.
“Okay, Jim,” Jack said, with a sound like a foot had picked up the phone, not a hand, “we’ll send you everything. Might take a few days. Then someone will get back to you with the details.”
“Can that include the linguistics reports and any cameras retrieved from the yurts?”
“There aren’t any cameras. The linguistics reports are irrelevant to your mission. I can get you everything else.”
“Are you sure that—”
“What about ‘everything else’ don’t you understand?” Jack asked.
“Fair enough.”
Jack’s intensity, perhaps even a hint of desperation, battered Old Jim over the phone: “And make some damn progress on the Rogue. Apply fucking pressure. Do what you fucking have to. You’re running out of time.”
Maybe the Brutes had begun to fray Jack’s nerves. Maybe Jack was losing it and all he could do was babble about psychics and distance messaging and the rest of Central had had their fill. Hard to adjust your pace to a ticking clock when you didn’t know the end date.
The drive back to his house felt long and tedious after that, and lonely as hell. Tossing his keys on the kitchen table, he ignored the impulse to seek a drink somewhere, and went out onto the deck.
The last of the season’s fireflies in the dusk, and a lone bird plucking them from the air, snuffing out that tiny light, but what manner of bird, Old Jim could not tell. Also on the deck was a package, delivered by private courier.
Good. The items he’d smuggled out of Central and mailed to himself had finally arrived.
The Mudder’s journal.
A little gun.
A bigger gun.
010: A PHANTOM’S FLAMING BREATH
The light from the lighthouse that swept out nightly in a thick blade also bore down on Old Jim—exacted a pressure on the far wall of the house as he imagined it, which was also a pressure on the brain from afar, as if Henry were working dark magicks from the top, or it was weighted by an unseen pendulum, achieving a terrible velocity, saying, somehow, direct to him, “I see you, I see all of you, even when you try to hide in the shadows.”
His dream of vessel, candle, flame, guttered against that light, for a time, became distant, like it was someone else’s dream. The music of Winter Journey welled up in him constantly in those moments between rest and wakefulness, but the words were not always the same. The beam of the lighthouse a green weight against the side of his face as he woke and woke and woke … even though how could that be true?
Maybe it was just moonlight, transformed, and in shining out quieted the rest, or made the dreams retreat, but Old Jim allied it to Jack’s urgency. How he needed a result, even though he couldn’t see through the murk yet.
So, a couple of days after going to Bleakersville, Old Jim came to the Village Bar with purpose: a need to interrogate Man Boy Slim about the past. Because who else with secrets could he make feel like they were twisting in the wind? While over on Failure Island Cass concentrated on enforcing “a diminished silhouette” that included canceling shore leave for the psychics, limiting the scope of submersible operations, and making S&SB conform to a two-by-two rule that even on the island turned them into the visual language of missionaries going door to door.
This felt like damage control, not progress, and worse, once he got to the Village Bar he became distracted by an emergency, one calibrated to the more mundane threats on the Forgotten Coast. A local kid, Gloria, had gotten a large fishhook through her foot. He’d seen her on the road on his way home a few times, so he knew she was an adventurer. Hadn’t seemed afraid of anything.
To honor that, he poured whiskey, amber and ancient, onto her sunburnt foot after getting the fishhook out and stitching up the jagged part of the wound, right there on the counter. She was a brave kid, wincing but not crying, as he tried to finish as fast as possible.
Sally told him Gloria would poke her head in at least once a week and shout, “Am I old enough yet?” And get a resounding “No—go away” from the patrons. Given she was only nine or ten. A local legend, already.
“She’s not a quilt,” Man Boy Slim said, critiquing his stitches. “She’s not Frankenstein’s monster. She’s not—”
“Not what?” Old Jim snapped, and Man Boy Slim opened his mouth, thought better of whatever he wanted to say, and took up a position far down the bar. He’d already put up with Man Boy Slim being reluctant to help, even to call Gloria’s mom, as if anything Old Jim asked was suspect.
In taking the measure of Man Boy Slim in the flesh it had been as if noting the appearance of some minor celebrity or saint many thought long since turned into reliquary or the dust of a disappointing career arc. The man had a rangy glory, now in his fifties with a long unkempt gray beard and mostly the quality of his cheekbones and tricky green-blue eyes to demonstrate he might be younger than his age. That didn’t mean his personality had aged gracefully, as well.
Man Boy Slim had also been by far the most skeptical regular. An edge there, as if Old Jim both fascinated and frightened him. A losing battle anyway: Old Jim had already wooed most of the rest with free drinks, an extended happy hour, and giving the house band, Monkey’s Elbow, more gigs.
Old Jim bandaged the wound and got Gloria a soft drink and some ice cream after he finished. Then he talked to her awhile about nothing in particular, because she seemed to need it—and suddenly he was exhausted and he didn’t want to think about secret ops or psychics.
He asked her to tell him about Monkey’s Elbow, given they had a gig coming up, and he was curious just how obscure they were.
“They call themselves Monkey’s Elbow because the monkey’s paw is cursed, that’s what I hear. So if it’s just the elbow, they’re cursed enough to make songs, but not so cursed they die over it.”
He decided not to say something stupid in reply, but just let her ramble. She mentioned a “Commander Thistle,” which sounded like a lot, but was just a thing the locals knew. The name Monkey’s Elbow gave to any local who volunteered to sub in for their lead singer around this time of year. Some kind of in-joke about the purple thistles that popped up everywhere. One gig only.
“You did a good stitching job,” Gloria said, pivoting abruptly. “Like you have medical training. Like my mom.”
“Just good with a needle,” Old Jim said.
Gloria considered that while Old Jim thought how ridiculous it would be if a kid blew his cover.
“You should reuse the fishhook,” she said. “It’s bad luck if you throw it away after it got me.”
Old Jim nodded sagely at that, although the fishhook would go in the trash.
Then Gloria’s mom, Trudi, burst through the door to collect her, a little concerned until she’d checked his work, and then gave him a quick nod, before whisking her off for some real medical care.
By then he felt confused, found it hard to focus on Man Boy Slim. Which puzzled him, until he figured it out.
For a moment there, he’d wanted to believe that maybe he had been born on the Forgotten Coast. That maybe he really belonged here.
Maybe some of the locals didn’t really fit in, either, though. Because digging around a little deeper in some of the ancillary files, Old Jim discovered that Drunk Boat had not just “died”—he had been found torn to pieces on his motorboat, a couple of years after the Dead Town Disaster.
The boat, rocking indolent in an inlet, had been discovered at least a week postmortem, the paraphernalia around him indicative of alligator poaching, but no sign of who or what might’ve taken offense at him, or that act. More than one Village Bar regular might’ve remarked how easy it was to make a body disappear, so why hadn’t they? Why leave him in full display, like a trophy himself? No one cared to speculate.
If he observed close, too, Old Jim could see what the files spelled out: Under the long pants, somewhere along the way one of Man Boy Slim’s legs had become messed up below the knee, apparently due to a bad fall visiting relatives up north. A brace. Although some said it was an alligator attack and Man Boy Slim was too embarrassed at having been surprised by a creature so ubiquitous to the area. Old Jim didn’t have a date on that, but he wondered if it coincided with Drunk Boat’s demise.
Man Boy Slim had gone outside, so Old Jim went in search of him.
He found the man out front, near the door, smoking a cigarette, where the wind didn’t mess with the lighter. No one was around.
Old Jim nodded to him, asked, “You got another cig?”
Man Boy Slim hesitated, then offered him one.
Old Jim lit and took a drag. They smoked in silence for a while, then Old Jim asked, “Do you know who I am?”
Man Boy Slim shrugged. “Owner of the bar … I guess.”
“You don’t sound convinced,” Old Jim said, thinking of the scary film Man Boy Slim had talked about seeing with Drunk Boat, twenty years ago.
Man Boy Slim took a drag of his cigarette, smoke spiraling from his nose like a sad-looking dragon. The bags under his eyes, in the sunlight, were practically caves.
“Yeah, well, it’s just the tells, you see. That give you away.”
“The tells. Do tell, Man Boy.”
“You’ve got all these tells. But the biggest is, you ask questions not like you used to live here but like you’re writing a book about the Forgotten Coast. And you act like you know me, Jim. Why is that, pray tell? And you act like you knew poor dead Drunk Boat. What’s that about, Old Jim?”
“You found a rabbit with a camera around its neck, didn’t you,” Old Jim said. “Way back when, I mean.”
Man Boy Slim’s jaw opened and shut, opened again, like he was a mullet out of water, gasping for breath. While a vibration built in Old Jim he couldn’t deny. An itch for the old ways, for the directness of that. Did Man Boy Slim sense the danger yet?
“Who the fuck are you? Who sent you?” A hint of menace in his voice, to go with the flicker of fear, as if he still didn’t quite understand the danger.
“What did you do with the camera? Other than view the footage? You shared it with your girlfriend, didn’t you? With Samantha?” The Mudder.
“Who?”
The way of all questioning. The bad acting. The faux innocence betrayed by the widening of the eyes and the fatal inability to look directly at the questioner.
“Don’t fuck with me,” Old Jim said. “You don’t want to fuck with me.” He just wanted to punish someone for still being in the dark. He wanted to remember what being in control felt like.
Man Boy Slim dropped his cigarette, rubbed out the burning end with his shoe. “I’m going back inside. I don’t have to answer squat.”
Old Jim pushed him into the wall. Hard. Then closed the distance, punched Man Boy Slim in the gut, so he slid down the wall onto his ass, clutching his stomach.
“Don’t get up and don’t make me do that again,” Old Jim said, squatting in front of him. “Answer my questions unless you want more of that.”
Still no one around, Man Boy Slim slumped there, arms around his knees, Old Jim rising to loom over him.
“Start talking or I start kicking.”
“She wasn’t my girlfriend.” Man Boy Slim said it quiet, sad, like it was something Drunk Boat had teased him about back in the day. Like Old Jim had knocked loose the memory, so it had decanted fresh.
“Actually, I don’t care what she was to you. The point is—you got a camera and both you and Samantha viewed the video on it. Did Drunk Boat see it?”
The look on Man Boy Slim’s face was enough.
“Let me guess—what you saw unnerved you, so you had your friend watch it, too.”
Man Boy Slim miserable, but Old Jim recognized the usual relief, too, as if he wanted to confess.
“It changed. Each time it changed.”
So, there it was, out in the open, Man Boy Slim flushed like a quail. But that wasn’t enough. He needed more of a push.
“You asked who I am. I’m the guy who, if you don’t tell me what I need to know, you’ll be brought to a black site and the experts will take you apart looking for answers. Maybe they’ll never let you out of there, or maybe they’ll exile you to some godforsaken island and you’ll never see the Forgotten Coast again.”
Conjuring up a persona more like Jack, because once Old Jim had kind of been Jack.
The terror in Man Boy Slim’s eyes—he’d imagined something like this already, and not just as one of the Forgotten Coast’s paranoid conspiracy theory wet dreams.
The way he started talking again, but in a different register, subdued, beaten.
“The first time, Samantha watched it. I couldn’t get the camera to work, but she could. I was bivouacked out in a tent in the swamp. She used to come visit and sometimes we’d fish in my rowboat. Then I watched it, then I had Drunk Boat watch it. Sam didn’t see much, or she wouldn’t talk about it. She said … she said—”
“She said what?”
“That it made her feel bad. It made her feel bad in the way you feel when you think something terrible is going to happen and you can’t do anything about it.”
“I don’t like that answer. Try again.”
The sunken-in aspect of Man Boy Slim’s gaze began to turn the fear back onto Old Jim.
“She said it showed everybody disappeared, gone.”
“You mean dead? It showed the biologists she was with dead?”
He shook his head, slow, like he still didn’t understand it himself. “No, it showed the coast, like overhead, and there … there was just no one here.”
“Were there any other details you can remember?”
“It wasn’t like a nuclear disaster or anything like that. It was more like everyone going about their business one day and … just not there the next. How is that possible? How would that be possible?”
Did the chill live in Old Jim’s body or the wind off the sea? Jack’s “prophecy,” brought to him by illegitimate sources, precogs and bullshit artists that the rest of Central didn’t believe in.
“And when you viewed it, what did you see?”
A tic pulsed under Man Boy Slim’s left eye, like something small inside the skin was trying to get out.
“I saw an army fighting a strange light between two mountains,” Man Boy Slim said.
The shock of that, the shudder bang in Old Jim’s ears. What if the biologists had gotten the dream of the green light from the cameras.
“And what did you let Drunk Boat see? That killed him?”
A guess, meant, even in denial, to keep Man Boy Slim on his back foot, like another punch to the gut. And it hit the target, and in Man Boy Slim’s confused, anguished expression Old Jim could see that what came next, he’d held on to for a long time. The exhalation of breath, the way the words came tumbling out.
“He saw his own death. He saw himself in some sort of ecstatic vision, like, Blakean as he put it, being torn apart by the Tyrant. He saw every detail of that, and I could have spared him ever seeing that. I could have never shown him the camera, never caught that first rabbit. Never gone anywhere near Dead Town.”
Man Boy Slim had caught the first rabbit. The timeline changed in Old Jim’s head.
“Do you think you caused what happened? Because you didn’t.”
“I killed my best friend,” he said, slumped against the wall. Which brought them to the boat.
“Is what happened on the rabbit camera video what happened in real life? Were you there? And the Tyrant killed him and injured you?”
“I was there, and, no, the Tyrant didn’t kill Drunk Boat. The camera did. I did.”
“How did the camera kill Drunk Boat?”
“We tried to destroy it.”
“Because you thought destroying the camera would save Drunk Boat?” A weird, animistic logic to that.
“No. The Tyrant was just a myth. The footage was just some really creepy bullshit. I thought. Like, doing a psychological number on us. No, I did it because Drunk Boat got real depressed. He was more oracular about it, he had too much imagination. And I wanted to stop dreaming of the green light. And I did think the camera might be somehow … dangerous. People might come looking for it.”
“But it didn’t go as planned,” Old Jim prompted.
Man Boy Slim let out a sob. “No. It went wrong. I thought we could just dissolve it with this bleach mix I’d used for other things. But there was a reaction. It caused an explosion.”
“And instead Drunk Boat died and you were injured.”
Just to carry Man Boy Slim through the horror of that, to leap from boat to land. Old Jim didn’t care about the details, like how Man Boy Slim had tried to make out like his injury came later, which also delayed anyone finding the motorboat.
“Yeah. But the camera was still there, the nub of it. Damaged, so no one could see what it had shown us.”
“And then you did what?”
“Hid it. Hid it far out in the swamp, because I couldn’t just throw it in the water. That felt wrong.”
Man Boy Slim had gone chalk white, appeared to have some trouble drawing breath.
Time to take his foot off the gas around the bend, so he could accelerate again.
“What about the piano out at Dead Town? What were they playing? What kind of music?”
“Well, you know it,” Man Boy Slim said in a whisper, staring at the ground. “You just played it in the bar. One reason I wondered about you.”
“What?” No, that had to be wrong. That was wrong.
“Yeah, that’s the music they played. Old piano music. Just like that.”
Old Jim laughed. “That’s bullshit. Not just like that.” Trying to throw the echo back on him, but now he felt like he was in retreat. He didn’t want to hear Man Boy Slim talk anymore. He wanted to kick him, punch him.
“I’m just saying—”
“You keep that shit to yourself, okay? You just tell Samantha to contact me. On my phone at the house.”
“I can’t. I won’t.” But Man Boy Slim sounded like a beaten dog.
If before his face had looked like chalk, now he looked like a truck was about to slam into him.
Old Jim wanted to tell Man Boy Slim that some nights he took the Mudder’s journal out of the safe and read it before sleeping. That he knew the Mudder better than anyone.
Instead, he said, “If she doesn’t contact me, it will go very badly for her. And for you. Have her call my number at the house.” He scribbled it on the back of a Village Bar business card and tossed it into the man’s lap. “Keep your mouth shut. Show up at the bar like you usually do, and it’ll be like it ever was. Otherwise…”
Old Jim left that threat hanging in the air and walked back into the bar.
What a man did next depended solely on the man, and Old Jim didn’t quite have the measure of Man Boy Slim, even now.
“Every stream will meet the sea, / and every sorrow have its day.”
Time would tell.
Later, Old Jim took a book from the shelf above the love seat, The Monkey’s Paw and Other Stories, and went out back for a breath of fresh air, trying to get clear again. A canal lay beyond the gravel parking lot, with a raised berm flanked by tall reeds, and if you followed the path, you came upon the bridge—sturdy, wooden, with wire crosshatching beneath the railings so no one could duck under to leap into the marsh.
Birdsong and the persistent trickle of water. Minnows stippled the silted brown water beyond the railing, as iridescent in the sunlight as a living oil slick; the pattern of their intrusions on the water’s surface felt soothing and the railing was pleasantly smooth and whorled.
What did it mean to see your own death?
He’d read part of “The Monkey’s Paw” before Gloria had come in with the fishhook, curious about how it had influenced the band. Was Monkey’s Elbow the result of “be careful what you wish for”? Even as he wondered if he’d violated the sacred rule with Man Boy Slim: any action might have an equal and opposite reaction. Energy moved from vessel to vessel. Status quo made sense at times, if you weren’t sure yet that you could deal with the consequences.
Before, he’d had the usual frissons of appreciation for the timeless quality of the tale told—the truth in uncomfortable observations like “the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth” and the son’s worry that wishes fulfilled would turn the father “into a mean, avaricious man, and we shall have to disown you.”
But now he also read it, almost against his will, with a spy’s eye for detail. Hidden motivations and hidden agendas. The opening game of chess struck him as a series of messages, put him in mind of how the resistance communicated under repressive regimes. And did they live so far out in the sticks so their elicit activities would fly under the radar?
The Sergeant Major with the monkey’s paw felt both baldly symbolic and beyond the writer’s intent. For a member of the military to basically use the family as subjects to test a weapon felt perhaps too on the nose, perhaps because he couldn’t forget Jack’s spiel about poison gas, and it lived ominous in his head, to think of the uncanny object as a made creation, a kind of experimental weapon developed by the military to use on a civilian population. The way the paw got people to self-destruct, like it was also a psyops threat.
Not only couldn’t he get the idea of the paw as a weapon out of his head but echoes of the house centipede made him uneasy. “‘It moved,’ he cried, with a glance of disgust at the object as it lay on the floor.” Seeing faces in the fire.
But then, when he came to the son joking that they’d find a big bag of cash on their bed “and something horrible squatting up on top of the wardrobe watching you” it put him in mind of the spy’s life and the way Central operated. “He was caught in the machinery.” A man was frantically trying to find the monkey’s paw in the dark, like it was the opposite of a grenade. Even though it was a grenade.
When the nature of the couple’s last wish became apparent, Old Jim stopped reading for a time, then finished and closed the book. Life was more complicated than that, life had to be, and his daughter wasn’t dead. And he wasn’t trying to bring her back to life, and yet still it struck him that way.
A terrible genius to the idea that people could wish themselves into poverty, injury, death, psychic damage. That, in fact, given the freedom … that’s what they would tend to do. The way things almost always turned out. All you had to do is give them a window of opportunity. A tiny, shriveled paw. Wish upon a star. Wish upon a paw.
Disembodied voices. House centipedes. Psychics in subs thousands of feet below the surface, seeking a mystery. A name from the past uttered at the right time, to the right person, having such an effect. A terrifying vision told by a fool to another fool, about a camera that was not a camera.
And, in the end, as in the story, all that might be left besides horror and regret was a streetlight shining on a “quiet and deserted road.”