The dreams of the biologists after the Rogue had been potent enough to result in catastrophic damage. But the Medic had been subject to none of that psychic damage in the aftermath of the Rogue, because the Medic had fled, or retreated, or “disengaged,” however they put it in the file.
After debriefing (file missing/withheld), the Medic didn’t skip a beat, reassigned to another top-secret mission. So as the biologists huddled in the remains of City Hall dreaming dreams gifted to them by rabbit cameras, the Medic had been eating three squares a day somewhere, living in relative luxury at a Central safe house.
One biologist survived longer than the rest, despite her dreams. The last entry in her journal read, “They are coming. We cannot hold them back.” When the Central rescue team reached Dead Town, she “put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger, despite our pleading with her to stop.” In her jacket pocket, they found a horrifying account of her last days and clutched in her hand like a talisman the bobber from a dead alligator.
By then, the Medic would’ve been happily preparing for his next assignment, reading through mission directives and protocols. Maybe slowly chewing bites of a ham sandwich while doing so.
A consummate professional.
Despite his need, Old Jim felt a reluctance to speak with the Medic, who through Cass had agreed to meet at the lighthouse. This despite his prep, as if thorough prep were not enough, and he would need some kind of cleansing ritual after. Almost against his will he got out of bed the next morning and at the appointed time drove to the lighthouse. Reluctant, too, because the truth was he didn’t much care for the lighthouse.
A toolshed stood precarious next to the lighthouse building. It marked the last moment before a ridge of soil and coquina morphed into a line of rocks stretching out to sea, parallel to the beach. At low tide, the place where soil and coquina met rock felt like a good place to meet—shielded from the lighthouse road by the shed, but good lines of sight otherwise.
The lighthouse, looming in its disorienting swirl of black and white, felt like it would fall on top of him. If Saul the lighthouse keeper was up there, he wouldn’t be able to see Old Jim through the little windows in the side of the lighthouse. The point was to watch the sea, not the ground.
Soon enough, then, a heavy-set barrel of a man in a leather jacket, flannel shirt, and jeans, with black boots, walked down the trail toward him. He’d lost most of his hair, this man, but white strands floated out to the sides like wisps of fog. He had the gait and build of someone who lifted weights but also drank a lot of beer, with a potbelly jutting from the bottom of his shirt, a jacket bursting tight across the shoulders.
The man’s face as he approached closer had the pugnacious quality of an old-timey boxer, and his hand when he took it from his jacket pocket had a meaty aspect, fingers stubby and rough, although with carefully manicured nails. His handshake managed to be both clammy and dry, making Old Jim withdraw from it even as the Medic tried to clasp more tightly.
The Medic stated his (false) name, his rank in the Brigade, said he was proud to serve his country and would answer “any questions I can for you.”
Old Jim was still staring at the stubby fingers, now quiescent by his side, wondered how, as “medic,” he’d been at suturing wounds or bedside manner. His voice had all the elegance of a rusty ax slowly being pulled from deep in a thick log. He masticated words like if he didn’t they would come out the other end uncomfortably whole.
“I’ve got respect for you, coming on at your age to run things, you know?” the Medic said, which felt like a way of telling Old Jim he’d done his homework, seen his file, too.
Preamble and greetings he’d lavish on someone who was deserving, so he just got down to it.
“I’m going to ask you some questions about the Dead Town expedition.” The chance of mics and other surveillance was practically nil, so the Medic should feel comfortable.
“Sure, sure. I’m up for that. I truly am, you know. Sir.”
His face had such a thick cast to it, such broad features, Old Jim wasn’t able to read him, didn’t know how to take the addition of “sir.”
“When the generator died, what happened to the biologist who disappeared?”
The Medic shrugged. “Same as always, sir. He’d discovered the secret of the generator and the conditioning didn’t work anymore. I told him to be quiet about it. He wouldn’t, and I had to eliminate him.”
What did it matter now, the continuing shrugs appeared to convey. It mattered to Old Jim, but he needed to pretend it didn’t, even though hearing it uttered so plain felt like an abomination. The casual complicity, as if Old Jim should agree it didn’t matter.
“The secret of the generator?”
“Yessir. The subliminal messages. The whole point of the thing, as I saw it. Save lives in the long run, you know. Central cleared me, said it was a solid decision, said the circumstances were not ideal. Being at war and all.”
“At war?”
“With infiltration of the coast and all. And needing the hypnosis experiments to proceed. Self-defense if you think about it, sir.”
“Self-defense?”
“Yes, sir. He would’ve killed me and others, if not. Because of where his mind was at.”
The Medic was as futile as a file in his matter-of-factness. The Medic could state his truth without shame because Central had validated it. This aging man with the wispy shreds of hair and the sausage fingers who talked of murder with such ease. It made Old Jim deeply sad, sick almost, to think that the Medic existed in the same operational universe with him.
Why had the Medic not been exiled to his own island?
Something about a faint pencil-mark erasure in the Mudder’s journal had raised another question for the Medic, made it possible to pivot away from his disgust.
“And how many people were on the expedition?”
“How many, sir?”
“Yes—what number.” Was the man stupid or stalling?
“Oh yes—common misconception, sir, the way the files present it, I’d imagine. Twenty-five, not twenty-four. One got eaten during the alligator experiment and bled out.”
The thought came to him, in that brief interregnum when Old Jim couldn’t think of what to say, that this was another joke of Jack’s. That this person was an actor like Cass was supposed to be, at the start. Except, the Medic was too bad at it; he had to be real. The information he was giving Old Jim had to be real.
“Tell me about the alligator experiment.”
The Medic frowned this time, withdrew into himself, his gaze distant, hands in his jacket pockets like he’d suddenly gotten cold in the sea breeze.
“Not my area, sir. Not my story to tell, not that one. Look for key words ‘Teacup’ and ‘China Shop’ in the archives. Might be what you need.”
He had a frisson of insight, about something Jack had said, back at Central.
“No need,” Old Jim said. “I know it was an experiment to see if people would do some ‘routine’ task while also, without remembering it, perform other, more clandestine tasks. To see if they could be programmed.” He drew up short, had almost added “right?”
“Yessir, that’s about it,” the Medic admitted after a moment of hesitation.
“Teacup, though?” Old Jim said, in a cheery tone. “Really?”
“Yessir. Full tea service on a tray. He was holding it. Almost made it the whole way through the line of gators while they did up the harnesses and prepared for release.”
“The Tyrant, huh?”
“Yessir.” His face had brightened at the mention of the name. “Always was the difficult one, sir. Still might be. For someone.”
Not my problem, that emphasis. Not at all.
A man had died and the man-eater had been allowed to escape into the swamp, there to form a pact with the Rogue. Intolerable.
Staring up at the lighthouse, finding it hard to look at the Medic, feeling ever more disgusted, he thought of another, more current question, one pertaining to Henry, in a way.
“Why did they switch the lenses? The lighthouse lenses, between the one on Failure Island and this one right here?”
He’d seen it in the files, from five years ago, and it had nagged at him, recognizing how much effort it had taken, how much convincing it had taken of the Coast Guard, which had jurisdiction over lighthouses.
“Sir, the Brigade at that time felt they’d learned all they could from the Failure Island lens. Subjected it to all kinds of hocus-pocus fiddley-diddley. And now it was time to turn to the one on the mainland, but it wasn’t as easy to access, being more of a tourist spot. Thus the switch, sir.”
“Is that all?” He meant the herculean physical effort as well as the bureaucratic one, but also stuck on how stupid “hocus-pocus fiddley-diddley” made the Medic sound.
“Well, sir, the Fresnel lenses—they’re a powerful magic,” the Medic said, and maybe there was a wink there, too, and maybe there wasn’t. It felt like the leprechaun version of something Henry would say.
Maybe he should have been adding another task to the long list, about the types of experiments the S&SB had done to coax “magic” out of lighthouse lenses. Yet he was still stuck in the moment where the Medic had watched as a man had been killed by an alligator.
When Old Jim had said nothing for too long, the Medic said, “We have been looking for signals, sir. And, now, I understand you will be looking for traces?”
“Traces?”
“Because we want it to come out into the open.”
“You mean force it?” Old Jim asked, and wondered what worlds lay between his definition of “it” and the Medic’s definition.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“So we can control it or destroy it.”
“Do you think that’s my mission?”
“What other is there, sir?”
The seas were calm, bereft of much interest except seagulls and pelicans. The brief knife of a dolphin’s fin could have been a wave. Out on the beach, the girl Gloria walked with her mom, but on the far side, and he only knew her by her red windbreaker and something solid in her walk.
He was undecided about the risk versus the reward of asking the Medic directly about Henry or the rabbit cameras.
“How long have you been with the S&SB?”
“About a decade, sir.” Correct. The file told the same story. Before that, overseas, but on another coastal “job,” mostly acting like a “foreign entity” inflicted on someone else’s shores. After all, he’d already had the experience of being an infliction.
“Have you been to Dead Town since?”
“Since what, sir?”
“The expedition.”
“No, no I haven’t.”
“Why not?” Old Jim asked.
“Haven’t been instructed to. The lighthouse is our focus now. Have you been?”
“I’ll get around to it,” Old Jim said.
The Medic nodded, and there came a shift in the wind, some indiscernible mote removed from the arc and wheel of the heavens, Old Jim overtaken by a feeling he couldn’t identify. An urge to dive down into the heart of things.
“Did the Mudder escape with you?”
“Who?”
“The woman studying the fiddler crabs. On the expedition.”
“No, sir,” the Medic said. “She wasn’t with Central. Only I was.”
“Did you ask to see the files? About what happened during the storm? With the stranger?”
“No.”
“Did you ever investigate further, in any sense? Or receive further information from Central? As regards the stranger.”
“No, sir.”
“Do you have any thoughts about the identity or current whereabouts of the stranger?”
“No, sir.”
“So you have no idea who the stranger might have been?”
“No. Sir.”
Was that crumbling of his features … that he was about to cry? To bawl, perhaps? Perhaps not. He couldn’t read the Medic at all, as if he came from a culture so foreign they only had five or six words in common.
“Was he part of Central’s experiment? The stranger.”
“No. Not that I was aware.”
“Who would have been aware, if not you?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
The Medic kept shuffling closer to Old Jim, for reasons Old Jim couldn’t fathom, and Old Jim kept stepping back, so that now they stood where the rocks formed a rough semicircle with the startling gleam of a sandbank jutting out to form the rest of the circle, in shallow water.
It felt like a spotlight, with the dark, rich blue of deeper water to both sides.
“What do you think happened out there, to the other expedition members?”
“You mean besides ‘the Mudder,’ sir? Because I think you mean the Mudder got out, too. Which … I never knew that before.”
The Medic said it with no particular malice or interest.
No, he ate the meat and potatoes put in front of him every day, and that was enough for him. No strange dreams for him. No Rogue running riot across a field of smoldering rabbits. He slept the quiet sleep of the certain, and Old Jim almost envied him.
“I’ll ask you again: What do you think happened during the storm?”
“Manifestation of the foreign entity,” he said in a solemn, almost worshipful tone.
“And how do you define ‘foreign entity?’”
“An entity that is foreign, sir.”
“Can you elaborate?” Old Jim asked, and he could not keep a current of sarcasm from his voice.
“An old, old force in the world.”
Old Jim didn’t like that answer. It sounded too mysterious. It conjured up an ancient army headed toward a gap in the world filled with green light. As if some religion had infiltrated Central, this way he kept encountering a quasi-mystical element even in how Jack talked about where he got his intel.
“How would you name it?” Old Jim asked, as he noticed how close the Medic had drifted toward him.
“Unnamable, sir. That’s what the Séance and Science Brigade is here for, sir.”
“To name it?”
“Yes, sir. To name it.”
Old Jim gauged the waves, the distance, the risk, and knew he couldn’t stop himself. He came close as if to end the meeting, shake the Medic’s hand.
Then he shoved the man off the rocks, as hard as he could—toward the sand and shallow water. Watched as that particular barrel managed to put his hands out, break his fall. Get to his feet with surprising agility, arms covered in sand.
Standing there in that semicircle of spotlight staring at Old Jim, devoid of outrage or anger.
Somehow that chilled him more than anything. That the Medic didn’t sputter or wave his arms or shout. But just stood there, in the waves rippling over the sandbank, staring at Old Jim.
Staring and staring as Old Jim walked back to shore over the rocks.
The darkness of the night beyond his desk beguiled him now at times, the way it could feel like the prow of a boat and the mutters of the open waters beyond almost like words rising from the depths. A key from the kitchen hook sometimes slipped into his hand now as he went out onto the deck to enjoy the sunset. As if he had the muscle memory of some other place, and there having been too many other places to identify which one. But he liked the solid, cold feel of it in his hand, an old key, brass, with complex teeth.
If the key in his hand oddly calmed him, like playing the piano, so too did receiving the news that Jack had gotten him the Dead Town evidence. Although it was Jackie, not Jack, who in curt fashion gave Old Jim a caustic call to let him know it had been delivered and where to go to “wade through it.” She gave him the address, then said, “Next time, even if it’s Central you need, go through me, not him.” Chain of command, breached, didn’t know his place, but still couldn’t say Jack’s name over a secure line.
It would feel good to escape them both for a while, along with the files, S&SB management, and Village Bar duties. Escaping, too, the sea debris reports of his predecessor, which still came by fax as if no one had told Central the man was dead.
“Round trip, get in the truck,” Old Jim said when Cass came around for their regular debrief later that morning. “We’ve got all the Dead Town expedition files waiting for us. Just a bit of a trip.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
He decided to take that as earnest, not sarcastic, in part because he’d kept the weight of intel on him, so why shouldn’t she feel lighter than he did?
Maybe he was just getting used to her, but it felt more comfortable with her there on the passenger side than it did empty. Even if he did have to move some maps and file folders and toss a couple of fast-food bags into the back.
“Did David Sheers tell you anything?” Cass asked as he adjusted the truck’s side mirror, which had gotten turned inward somehow in his travels.
Had the Medic told him anything? Not really. It was more that the certainty of the Medic had disturbed him and felt like an implacable force, but he regretted pushing him into the sea. It felt so childish now that he hoped Cass never found out.
“Name, rank, serial number. What I do know is he’s dangerous. Watch your back when he’s around.”
“I always keep a physical distance when we have to meet, have someone else in the room with me.”
Even saying that, Cass had a serene aspect about her that Old Jim hadn’t seen, like they’d done this a hundred times before. As if, in another reality, they’d been running this op for a decade and been through the wars together. The smile she gave him as she’d hoisted herself up into the seat, one hand on the doorframe, conveyed a trust neither of them had earned yet. Was that just a young-person thing?
“Don’t you want to know where we’re going?”
She looked over at him with a glint of weary mischief. “I’ve just come from hearing the early-morning complaints of a bunch of psychics, séance freaks, and submersible techs. Just get me as fucking far away from here as possible. Even if we’re driving right up to the gates of hell.”
He gave her a raised eyebrow for the hyperbole. “Almost. It’s between here and Bleakersville.”
“Everything is between here and Bleakersville, Jim.”
Well, she had that right.
“Hank’s Premium Memories” read the sign at the address, with the legend, “When Yer Hankering for the Best.” A storage-locker business converted out of what appeared to be a doppelgänger of the Starlight Lounge. What was it with the long barracks–pillbox style of local architecture?
“Hankering for a better slogan,” Cass said as they approached, still rife with manic energy.
Old Jim said nothing, not sure he liked her joking tone.
“But seriously,” Cass said, sitting straighter in her seat. “This looks like a great place to get ambushed.”
“Agreed. You strapped?”
“Yep. You?”
“Yeah.” The guns were old, from the archives, but effective.
With all the add-on structures, the place was not just cruel to the eye but an actual maze, so Old Jim parked out front, next to a trashy green sports car right in front of the office.
The white guy behind the counter in a bright red shirt and dreads gave them a map. He drew an arrow with a ballpoint pen to indicate a circular structure out back. “Just walk through this front building to the right,” he advised, “and leave your vehicle here. Back lot’s rutted.”
“Too rutted for a truck?” Old Jim asked. Maybe he sounded incredulous. Maybe he almost wanted to argue about it, given the state of his nerves.
“Too rutted for a tank, buddy, in my opinion. But do what you want.”
“Thanks, buddy,” Cass said, and nudged Old Jim away from the counter.
So they took the advice, although Old Jim didn’t like leaving the truck, and they walked through the main building to the back. It had dozens of doors and more empty corridors off to both sides. Their footfalls echoed and he could hear the wheeze of old plumbing.
Out the other end, through a glass door propped open with a cinder block green with mold, and into the huge gravel lot beyond, littered with a scattering of shotgun shells. The smell of motor oil and burnt rubber was almost a taste in his mouth.
A welter of potholes full of muddy water dominated that space, and his thoughts slid from the Medic’s blithe description of murder to an even more visceral place where the texture of tadpoles and eels brushed against his skin, and maybe that was just how unclean he felt after talking to the Medic, like the potholes were an accurate depiction of the man’s soul.
“I don’t like those potholes,” Cass said. “If this was someplace else I’d sweep those holes for mines first.” Where had she been, then? Before?
At the lot’s far corner, maybe seventy feet away, a windowless stone silo squatted, framed by sprawling pines and oaks behind. A kind of stone approximation of a yurt, with a vaguely chimneylike protrusion just above the roof.
“That feels like a remnant of someone else’s history,” Old Jim said.
“Good times,” she said sarcastically.
“In theory, they’ve shoved all the evidence from the Dead Town Disaster inside.” But something already felt off, even if he couldn’t put his finger on it.
“Did you request they dump it in a brick shithouse with bad vibes, or is that Central giving us the finger?”
“It’s not brick.”
“You know what I mean. Looks like the place a serial killer takes his victims to.”
“I do know what you mean,” Old Jim said.
But they came close anyway, across that messed-up parking lot. The potholes had the look of terrestrial tidal pools, with ankle-turning potential and a disturbing aspect of cloudy water, even though it hadn’t rained recently. Old Jim didn’t like how his face appeared distorted every time he looked down.
The tower-silo’s pockmarked stone had dull green discolorations across the curving surface, mapped to splotches of lichen. Some underlying assault that expressed itself as a melting of the shell rock used to build it, so that a swell of breaking lesions appeared out of that rough surface. The door had a small “24” painted in white high up to the left. Coincidence or Central having a grim laugh?
Old Jim caught a whiff of rotten eggs, of dead animal, but that might just be coming from the seepage ditch before the tree line.
“How do we get in?”
“There’s supposed to be a hidden latch. A key inside to lock the door on the way out.”
Cass gave him a sharp look of disbelief, standing there together with the disquieting door.
“Security by obscurity? So anyone could come along and open this damn door.”
“Highly unlikely. And probably Jack’s idea, not Central.”
“Met him twice, in group meetings. He asked me too many questions.”
“Best place to meet him, though,” Old Jim said. “Now help me find this latch.” Jack didn’t ask “too many” questions of any old grunt, that was for sure. Her file had caught his attention—a file Old Jim still hadn’t seen.
She just stood there, arms crossed, while he felt absurdly like he was patting down the door for weapons. No, he realized, she wasn’t just standing there, but watchful, like she expected an ambush—checking lines of sight, so no one could sneak up on them unexpected, because truth was, they were exposed, and not even the side of the truck to shield them. Fact, too, the way Cass carried herself, there was no tell about her weapon. Shoulder holster, maybe …
Ah, there was the latch, disguised as a rough jut of stone next to the door, and no doubt now that this place was Central’s in the discovery, and had been for a long time.
The odd satisfaction of the click, as if he had solved some larger puzzle.
He shot Cass a proud smile, and the door opened outward—unleashing a rotting-fish stench mixed with a chemical odor so strong it sent them both reeling back across the land of horrible potholes.
“Shit,” he said, his boots wet. Waterproof, but the water had a viscous quality.
“Jesus Christ, Jim, what died in there?”
Well, everything, apparently.
Back at the truck he had a thermos of water and a supply of fresh handkerchiefs in the glove box, for which he got mercilessly teased even as Cass accepted a couple to cover her face.
“Hankering for a handkerchief, Jim? You running a black market for handkerchiefs? Anyway, yeah, this’ll work.” Pulling herself together, looking like a bandit because she’d chosen a black one.
“I have the handkerchiefs,” he said in muffled fashion from under his, white with red polka dots, hoping moistening them would deaden the smell, “because you never know when you’ll need one.” Although really it was one of those habits the reason for which was lost to time and history. Too many ops, too many rituals.
“Right, sure, I can think of tons of uses.” Then she sobered, or he thought she had, but said, “Let’s hit a convenience store after this, Jim. Make some money on the side.”
She was about to walk back out across the parking lot, when Old Jim frowned, held her back with one outstretched arm.
“Let’s wait under the awning a moment.” He’d heard something or thought he had.
Something clicked behind her eyes and she hugged the wall with him.
A moment later, a pickup pulled up in front of the stone silo, bucking over the potholes like the driver had done it a million times before and didn’t give a shit about his truck’s suspension. Three men clambered out, in jeans, T-shirts, baseball caps, armed with rifles.
Cass had her sidearm out so fast he still didn’t know where she’d drawn from, silencer screwed on in seconds. A brutal-looking Beretta. The look on her face told him she was prepared to have a firefight right there, in the parking lot. He could see now how the open button-down shirt allowed her concealment but also a quick draw.
“Don’t,” he said. “We’re not law enforcement. We’re not even supposed to be here. Not officially.”
She gave him a hard glance, softened, nodded, lowered the Beretta, but didn’t reholster. Fair enough. He had his Walther in a shoulder holster in easy reach, and a tiny Central-made peashooter strapped to his ankle. One bullet.
The men had assembled in a row and now were firing furiously at the side of the silo, kicking up stone chips and dust, until they had exhausted their ammo. Then they jumped back in the truck, which popped a wheelie and drifted in a shriek of gravel before finding purchase and roaring out of sight around the corner, leaving behind a smell of burnt rubber and a haze of black smoke from the tailpipe.
“What the fuck,” Cass managed to get out.
Old Jim had already emerged and, hands on his hips, stared out at the stone silo.
“What if they come back?”
“They won’t,” Old Jim said. “Those were really low-caliber rifles. Not enough juice to penetrate that elephant hide. Local talent, but not yahoos or killers.”
“Huh. How’d you know?”
That felt good, he couldn’t deny it.
“Just a sense you get after a while. I think they thought we were in there, and they were just supposed to scare us. Surprise us.” Maybe even sent by whoever had left the belt buckle for Cass. Had the same feel. Peevish.
“The attendant must be deaf,” she said.
“I bet he won’t be there when we leave.”
“But who, Jim? Why?”
He shrugged. Did Jack or Jackie hate his request more? He didn’t like to think the men had been friends of Man Boy Slim—that would be a whole different matter.
“Let’s just get on with the job and get out of here,” he said.
Kicking at the gravel, plop, hit a pothole.
The damp handkerchiefs helped enough for them to pull the door open and survive the interior. Although the door slammed shut no matter what you did, so Old Jim found a loose bracket to serve as a door jam and Cass groped around and found a floodlight in the wall about ten feet up, with a cord … and, well, then they were looking at a “metric ton” of half-rotting evidence arranged amphitheater style to leave a space in front of the door free.
“Do you have a problem with dead things?” Old Jim asked. Because he did, sometimes.
“Only if they’re coming after me,” Cass said, deadpan, but he could tell she was unsettled, too.
Barrels with large jars stacked atop them formed the lower level, with boxes and display cabinets next, so high the piles against the wall disappeared up where the light could not reach. He ran his little pocket flashlight over contents that crushed his mind with the sheer density, the intense mania, of vast numbers.
“I expected banker boxes full of files and, uh, photographs of this … evidence.”
Turtle and tortoise shells stacked in between the cases. Taxidermied fox squirrels, the skins of raccoons and otters and mink. Some cases had fallen open and out cascaded preserved dry feathers of house swallows and purple martins.
Cass poked half-heartedly around the edges. “This is a display case of bat skeletons. This one is full of butterflies.”
“Never get through it all.”
Because it was spooky. Because of the stench. Because of how the darkness of the whole formed the shape of a creature looming over them. Because some of the jars preserved in ethanol had been deposited roughly and cracked, so the chemicals had leaked out. Because the stacking structure seemed chosen without thought for getting any of the samples out of the silo.
A rickety stool had been set up in the middle of the room and under what looked like a handful of parking-lot gravel a piece of paper awaited them. The circular nature of the evidence assembled around it made the stool look like an act the audience had come to see. The audience in this case: the lower layers of jars of sea and river creatures, stacked five high.
Thankfully, his nose had numbed itself or the handkerchiefs were holding up. Had there been a deliberate lag between stacking the jars here and letting him know they’d arrived? Just to add to the general ambience?
“There’s a message, I think,” he said, and stepped forward to pull the piece of paper out from under the gravel, held it up to the flashlight with Cass perched in close, breathing a little shallow in his ear.
But all it said, in large handwritten block letters, on Hank’s stationery, was:
HAPPY JACK
“Happy Jack,” he echoed. Happy Jack?
“No, Jim,” Cass whispered, like they were in a church, not an amateur abattoir. “Happy, Jack.”
“That’s what I said.”
“No. It’s a question, signed by Jack. Are we happy? No.”
“Oh.”
“Aren’t you glad Jack wants to know if we’re happy with this shitshow? And that some underling wrote it down wrong?” Ah well, ah hell.
This was what men who had learned nothing did. Men who didn’t mind repeating versions of their lesser selves.
“You’re a mighty stain on the world,” had been Jack’s call sign once, and Old Jim’s countersign had been, “And you’re a horrible mess.” Followed, in more dire circumstances, with, “Are you the one dying?” “No, I’m the one knifing you in the back.” A life around Jack eroded the wall between do and not do.
The message wasn’t funny or clever, even if Jack thought so. Because what Jack was telling them stank worse than the specimens. That they were welcome to whatever they could pick out of the remains—if they could stand the smell. That instead of a respectful fulfillment of Old Jim’s request, Jack had dumped on the edge of Bleakersville the complete inventory of samples the biologists had taken over that long summer twenty years ago.
No linguistics report. No analysis of any kind. Just every collection of butterflies and moths and stick insects. Every row of pinned iridescent beetles. Every tadpole euthanized for science but then abandoned to an archive or warehouse … probably not even at Central, Old Jim realized, for Jack to give him this so quickly. But somewhere closer.
And Jack telling him that he disagreed, that this wouldn’t help Old Jim neutralize the Rogue, that he was barking up the wrong stone silo. This sad, tired detritus. So maybe that meant they should catalogue it, that Jack had gotten sloppy and didn’t realize what he’d given them.
“Do we try to go through it all?” Cass asked, as if reading his thoughts and with an edge of anxiety in her voice.
“No,” Old Jim said. “I mean, I do.”
“No way. We’re in this together.” Cass, muffled through the handkerchief, both of them trying not to talk too much and let in the stench.
Such a complex knot of feelings in his stomach, with her saying that. But also a sense of comfort, somehow, like maybe someone actually had his back.
“Right,” he mumbled. “Take a stab at it?”
Cass nodded, and not perfunctory, but like she really got it. No files, no analysis from Central. Just … the raw stuff. Rawer by the minute.
“Must be something here,” he said, even though he was used to doing uncomfortable tasks that led nowhere. Prying anything out from the stacks would take patience.
“It’s okay if it’s a dead end, though.”
Old Jim had never seen an end deader.
“Maybe try as long as we can stand it…”
But Cass was already rolling up her sleeves, which Old Jim found reassuring. She was going to roll up her sleeves and get to work.
So they did. For a time.
There came a moment when he’d thought they’d found something. High above, in the murk, the deep-water feel of it, as if they were lost along the bottom of the sea, lost amid shipwreck, lost amid debris and artifact, lost amid ritual and Jack’s wrath.
“Get that for me?” he’d asked.
That broke down Cass’s mask discipline, and out poured too many words: “Can I climb this mountain of crap to get that for you without falling down and burying us both? Because, what, I’m younger? I’m fitter? I’m more expendable?”
“The middle thing,” he admitted, reluctantly.
She considered him a moment, there in the dark, in the stench, protected by his handkerchief, and then said, “Catch me if I fall.”
“Break your fall at least.”
But he took it serious, watched her keenly, arms outstretched, and if she’d fallen, he would have caught her. Or hurt himself trying.
Cass, anchored by one arm and one foot, leaning out over the abyss. His flashlight turned on her in that upper darkness, and from that angle, the forced perspective, the creatures in the foreground, she looked so very far away, and her face so pale, that his heart gave a little, a kind of twinge, as if she had become too remote and was fading away from him, too far to return safely.
“No,” he said, “no,” and reached out with one hand toward her, then dropped it as he realized what he was doing.
“Stuck,” she called down after considering him a moment.
She was grasping for a small red object, wedged between kegs and boxes and display cases stacked as if by some madman who had become an expert on balancing objects atop each other. And this one bright red thing catching his flashlight beam in a way obscure to Old Jim, there near the top.
“It’s really stuck,” and now she was frowning and shining a light on him, as if worried … about what? That his paralysis meant he’d lost his mind. He could not control his expression. Had the smell gotten to him, or something else?
“Cut it loose,” he said. “Drop it down to me and let’s get the hell out. Or just come down.” Every word was torture, the handkerchief failing.
Did he know she had a knife in easy reach? She did. Of course she did.
Later, safely out of the silo, Cass would tell him that the object had been stuck amid the Mudder’s fiddler crab cases, which were illogical, misfiled, difficult to understand. Because most, the closer she looked, had the wrong labels. Filed not as the fiddlers they were but as butterflies, beetles, frogs, dragonflies, anything but.
How far had the delusion spread?
They lasted exactly twenty-nine minutes before they couldn’t stand it any longer and fled, including a terrible moment when it appeared the door wouldn’t open and then, pushing together, it did, thankfully.
The door made a clang as it shut behind them and they tumbled out into the sunlight. Like grave robbers. Like bandits. Like escapees from the wreckage of the Dead Town Disaster, released from those unearthly jars of creatures so long dead and yet newly dying a second death. Reborn anew.
Blinking, ridding themselves of the cursed handkerchiefs and laughing even as Old Jim believed they both had expected more gunfire.
But there wasn’t. There was just the potholed parking lot, the bright sun on their faces, and they both took big, deep breaths, and staggered around, bent over at times with the hysteria of aftermath.
In the truck, he felt exhausted and unclean, like he needed a full decontamination process, or at least a shower, Cass with a look on her face like she felt the same.
“Well, that was terrible and disgusting and worthless,” Old Jim said, as they sat there contemplating the road through a windshield stained white by bugs.
“You think so?” Cass said, weary but impish suddenly, as if the engine that drove her never slept. “Because maybe we learned something valuable. About the habits of the locals. About how fucked up our mission is. About old decomp. Like, avoid it. In fact, I’m going to call this place Old Decomp on the map.”
“I need a bar,” Old Jim said. His legs felt rubbery. He couldn’t shake the weird potholes, the deep-sea drainage, all of it. “Not to drink. Just a quiet place to rest a bit.”
“Sure,” Cass said, giving him a sideways glance, “but I’m driving.”
On the seat between them lay their treasure: The red bobber attached to the tracker, from some long-dead alligator subjected to a pointless experiment during an expedition come to ruin.
013: SEPARATING THE INGREDIENTS
Stacky’s T-Stop had no pedigree to speak of, but at two in the afternoon no clientele, either, and just the right amount of bleach smell slapping out from between the saloon doors leading to the bathrooms to make Old Jim begin to forget chemical smells and rotting things. At an empty adjoining table, the relic of a blackened chicken finger rose above the wax paper covering a red plastic basket, admonishing him to only order water. For Cass it was a burger and fries, initially a beer, then, with a nod to Old Jim, a bottle of root beer instead “because the taps here will be salty and sour.”
“It’s okay if you drink,” Old Jim said, kind of mumbled it. Didn’t know what to do with her thoughtfulness.
Camaraderie still felt unfamiliar to Old Jim, like he’d forgotten the rules. Or the rules with Jack had been so different than the norm. Stuck, too, on the locals shooting the silo, which resonated more deeply with him the more the moment receded from him. While it seemed to have had the opposite effect on Cass.
They’d situated themselves in classic desperado fashion, at the back of the bar, on the same side of a table for four, facing the front door and whoever might burst in, guns blazing. While the bartender, having delivered Cass’s burger, downed a couple of side-by-side shots of whiskey from behind the counter.
Old Jim watched, incredulous, as Cass dissected her meal, using her hands to separate the top of the bun from the burger on her paper plate, place it on a napkin, and then carefully airlift to the side of the plate two tired pickle slices, a scrap of lettuce, a bit of onion, the slice of underripe tomato.
Then she removed the bottom of the bun, placed it on the napkin, and cut the hamburger into eight equal pieces. Which she considered as would an artist some new masterpiece. At which point, she took a bite of bun, then speared a piece of burger and ate it with some pickle, lettuce, and tomato, chewing contemplatively.
Only stopping when she saw the look on Old Jim’s face.
“What?”
“Are you checking for bugs?”
She finished chewing, wiped her mouth with a napkin, gave him a look, and said, “You mean like a centipede? No, I like to see it all separate and then have the right ratios. And I hate onions.”
“I’ve never seen anyone do that before.”
“I always used to eat this way, before the military tried to train it out of me. You should try it.”
Try it? It would drive him crazy just to witness the process more than a handful of times.
She speared another hamburger chunk and repeated the process. It bothered Old Jim that she was going to run out of pickle, tomato, and lettuce before she ran out of burger with bun. It bothered him that she might actually worry about being a target.
“I’m going to give the alligator tracker we found to the psychics.”
“To do what?”
“Sniff it,” she said. “Pick up the trail.”
“Oh, like hunting dogs? To find an alligator.”
“That’s about right.”
Even as every night now, in support of actual science, he turned on the alligator tracker, hoping for a hit. “Maybe that’ll turn up something. Jack wants to see real progress.”
She wiped her mouth again, said in a way that made Old Jim think she was talking about him at first, “Control freak. Maybe too happy about distant messaging and hypnosis.” But she meant Jack.
“What did Jack tell you about Dead Town?” Old Jim asked, thinking of the Rogue.
“A high-level summary report. But it felt incomplete. Was there more to it?”
“Yeah, and I can’t keep it just in my head, and I think it’s important, even though it happened twenty years ago.”
Cass said, “I’m listening,” and the last piece of hamburger was gone. She ate so fast, and yet savored everything.
So Old Jim gave Cass more details about the rabbits, his theory of the generator, his theory of the Rogue—all of it. Dumping it on her in that back corner almost, he felt, like Jack had dumped the specimens on them. Only keeping to himself the fate of Team Leaders 1 and 2. That felt personal, or irrelevant, or … he wasn’t sure, but he omitted it.
While Cass just kept swigging her root beer, as if he were catching her up on the latest baseball scores or a ten-year history, month by month, of the high-tide marks during storm surges. Even when he didn’t spare her his pieced-together vision of the Rogue shrieking as he ran across the blackened field and, somehow, as Old Jim spoke, he felt as if something evil or evil-adjacent was emptying out of him—and the relief of that he hadn’t expected, almost as if he felt physically lighter. And even though he knew the weight would return, that he’d only banished it for a time, the absence meant something.
When he had finished, Cass held up her empty bottle of root beer and shouted at the bartender like a drunk, “Need another!”
“Come get it yourself!” he half shouted back across the empty room.
“Fucking service around here,” she muttered as she got up, putting a hand on his shoulder to steady herself.
By the time she had exchanged words with the bartender, put her coin on the counter, and sat down beside Old Jim again, he expected she’d tell him he was a paranoid fool—maybe a delusional one. That there was no “Rogue” as he or even Jack envisioned him. No possible way that the events of twenty years ago meant anything to the present day.
But, in fact, she’d split the difference.
“That was a lot of old decomp you spilled,” she said. “I was told that the expedition was a complete success, but I guess not. I guess, you know, the opposite.”
“No one made it home. Not really.”
“But what if we separate out this idea of ‘Rogue,’ as you put it, from the rest of the story. Move away from him laying waste to the expedition with, what, experimental weapons or mind control? Because maybe focusing on that obscures the purpose baked into him.”
“How do we separate that out? He basically killed them.” Surprise that she could dismiss that apocalyptic vision from the dead meadow so easily. That felt like she’d had the intel earlier than today, or did she just have leaps of intuition?
“More like reckless endangerment.”
“Maybe,” he admitted, although he was pretty sure Jack didn’t see it that way.
“So I think about what it would take for someone to do that,” she said in a whisper tinged with awe. “To be part of a twenty-year op? And he might have another twenty ahead of him—we don’t know.”
A peculiar, almost unknowable look had overtaken her that he couldn’t break the code of. He had a sensation of intel that lay far beyond him and had passed overhead in the night, headed for a distant star.
“The mission is … personal … to the Rogue in some way.”
“The mission is everything to the Rogue,” Cass said. “He’ll endure what almost no one else would. Do you do that for God, for country … or for something else?”
Old Jim felt close to an answer, but then it was gone again, and an uneasy silence came over them, until he felt a kind of pressure, a need to acquiesce.
“I’ll think about that. I’ll think about what it means. Or doesn’t mean.”
“Oh, I don’t know what it means, Jim,” Cass said wearily, as if she were older than him and more jaded. “I just know the answers lie so far outside the box that there is no box. Speaking of which, the cameras. Did anyone do an autopsy on them?”
Old Jim felt a chill come over him, like crunching on the ice in his water had given him a headache. “Not sure what you mean.”
But he did know. Maybe it had been in the back of his mind without realizing it.
“They look like toy cameras or something. Fake. I don’t know why. That’s what got me thinking about it.”
The chill cantilevered into his body like something was curving down into his system to infiltrate it.
“An autopsy? They probably took them apart … But you mean … a real autopsy?”
“Yes. I mean a real autopsy.”
“The weird description of the cameras by the Team Leaders was put down to hallucination.”
“Consider for a second what it would mean if it wasn’t a hallucination … what if they did change?” A kind of guarded look to her gaze, as if expressing the idea seemed dangerous to her. “No one at Central saw a ‘living’ camera.”
“A living camera,” Old Jim echoed.
“Yes—and we don’t know what a living camera means.”
Somehow, Old Jim wished he was back in his office watching an alligator tracker that never registered a hit.
Later, exhausted, headed home in the truck, caught in an epic downpour that made Old Jim drive at a crawl through half a foot of water, Cass said to him, “You know, sometimes I feel like I’ve been shipwrecked here. It’s like I don’t have the right tools, and I’m supposed to improvise. It feels impossible.” Half weary, half frustrated.
“But we do have the right tools.”
“The tools are rusty and broken,” she said, and sighed.
“If we fail, I’ll suffer, not you, trust me,” he said, to change the trajectory. Driving through the water made him feel as if he were neither on land nor at sea. Gliding through a limitless expanse.
She sat up a little from her slouch, like he’d caught her out somehow.
“Trust you? Do you really think I can, Jim? Or that you’ll be the only one to suffer?”
He shrugged, didn’t reply, even when she stared at him, just concentrated on driving. The rain assaulted the roof of the truck and the fresh smell came with a drop in the temperature, so it was almost cool.
Something had burnt out in him, some last flare of resistance, and he felt hollowed out and small and maybe a little foolish.
“No,” he said finally. “You’d suffer, too.”
The green light and the cleft between the two mountains, but this time an army of house centipedes poured into the gap in endless legions, against a barren, silent landscape. He woke gasping, as if he’d been deep beneath the sea, the little key cutting into his hand.
The world was filled with forgotten places that had been something else once, had contained something else once, renamed by whatever you did there now. The idea frightened him when it came to him as he woke during the night in the kitchen, sometimes sitting on the chair, with his head full of the rabbit cameras, alligators, and a fading image of a burning candle. An empty vessel.
A meadow of wildflowers was no better or worse a trap than an abandoned quarry where once he’d sat in winter, in a heavy coat and thick beard, and posed like a barbarian for Jack behind a rusted, broken-down metal desk. Jack had snapped some shots with the frozen waterfall cascading down the levels behind and laughed and the next night they’d come back with the informant and done what they had to do. It was no less beautiful the second time.
The alligator tracker … tracked nothing. The further examination of Old Decomp’s contents proceeded laborious through third parties, low-level players on Failure Island brought over for a perhaps useless task. He’d asked Jackie for files on agents killed or gone missing the past thirty years, seeking anything Rogue-like, but there had been no reply. Maybe that was Jack telling him they’d worked that angle, found nothing.
The weather had turned colder, merged into fall, and he had so little that he wanted to report to Jack.
Still not enough sleep, so when the phone rang, it woke him up. Had he been nodding off, in the middle of the day? How many days since Old Decomp? For a moment, he couldn’t remember.
The surprise: It was the phone for “tourists,” as Jack had called it, not the red phone for Central.
“Old Jim here,” he said, into the receiver.
A sense of heavy breathing at some remove made him fight the reflex to hang up, and instead he waited out the silence.
The static parted and a voice came through the line.
“You threatened me if I didn’t call, but I have called and called and you never answer. Not one time. Why would you do that to me? I’ve done nothing. Nothing wrong. You should just leave me alone.”
The voice had a musical intensity that disconcerted Old Jim. The person was using some sort of distortion device, just not the type that made your voice sound muddy and gruff. No, instead, this person sounded lyrical, almost birdlike, but a big, aggressive bird, not a songbird.
“Does it work both ways?” Old Jim asked. “The voice distortion? What do I sound like to you?”
“You sound like an old man to me. How did you know?”
“An educated guess.”
“You threatened me. You wanted to talk.” The voice rising in panic.
The Mudder. He’d known, but it still came at him like a flash of heat lightning. The anti-Medic.
“Why disguise your voice? I know what your voice sounds like from the tapes.”
“You can’t trust voices to just be voices.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“A sound leaves a trace. Like a parasite, in order to exist, sound needs a host.”
That felt personal. Of course, that’s how she felt. How unsettling and terrifying to continue her research in the middle of an expedition she felt was full of zombies. The generator. Her notes.
“What can you tell me about the expedition that wasn’t in your journal?”
“I have no value to you. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You can just forget about me.”
“Did you see who attacked the expedition, at the end?”
“No. I told you, I don’t know anything. I was already far out in the marshes by then, leaving. Why won’t you believe that?” A hint of hysteria rose through her voice.
“What did Man Boy Slim tell you about the situation?”
“How the fuck do you think I got your number?”
Old Jim cursed. He was blowing this, head too buried in the reports and procedures. Now he did feel an urgency—but also panic that he didn’t have the right questions.
“Tell me more about the rabbits, the alligators, then. Even if it was in your journal.”
A hesitation, then: “The rabbits made the alligator worse. No one wanted to say it because it sounded crazy, but the more rabbits the alligator ate, the more atypical it behaved. It did all kinds of things you don’t expect from an alligator, to write about it, that seemed crazier. In the moment. Because we just wanted to forget the alligator experiment.”
A terrible thought occurred to Old Jim.
“Did members of the expedition eat those rabbits, too?”
“I wasn’t keeping track. I never did. But that’s not why the alligator behaved strangely.”
“Then why?”
“Because it ate some rabbits that had cameras around their necks. It ate the cameras, and that was the problem. That’s what changed her, the Tyrant. I think.”
What would it have meant? To eat a camera that was not a camera? He felt light-headed, realized he hadn’t had breakfast, couldn’t remember having had coffee. Why was that?
“What about the stranger?” He had to come back to the Rogue. “He talked to you in the bar once. A man whispered in your ear. Man Boy Slim might’ve called him ‘the Rogue.’”
A strong sense of violation in the Mudder’s reply: “How do you know that? How do you know that he talked to me?”
Anything he said might provoke her, so he said nothing. There was a long pause, and he thought he’d lost her.
Then: “Men always whisper in your ear. It’s disgusting.”
“I think you know what I mean.” Surely she remembered what the Rogue had said.
“I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“He whispered, ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. It should be different already. But it isn’t, so I’m doing my best.’”
I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. It should be different already.
While he digested that, she rushed into the gap. “That’s all he said. That’s it. Like a lunatic. I didn’t know him. I never saw him again. I thought he was drunk and he’d mistaken me for someone else.”
“What was his voice like?”
“Ordinary. So ordinary I can’t remember.”
“Are you sure he didn’t say anything else to you?” Something that had affected her mind, and she couldn’t remember because the Rogue didn’t want her to remember.
“I’m telling the truth!”
“Was it after he said he was sorry that you had the idea to leave the expedition?”
“No. He said nothing to me about that.” That hadn’t been Old Jim’s question, but no point asking again.
“Why did you leave the expedition that night? That particular night?”
“The hurricane was coming on strong. The expedition was falling apart. It didn’t take a genius to see that, and I was scared.”
“Not because the stranger had told you to leave?”
“No!”
“I believe you,” Old Jim said. But he didn’t know what he believed, exactly.
“No you don’t.”
Maybe he didn’t. It would easier if what the Rogue had whispered had been a confession, a reason, something that didn’t leave Old Jim in the dark holding a strange key.
“Did you see the stranger that night?”
“No. We were already out on the mud flats, me and Man Boy Slim. Too far away.”
“Did you ever see the stranger after that?”
Silence. For too long.
“I just want to understand,” Old Jim said. “Help me understand. And then you’ll never hear from me again.”
“What is there to understand? There’s nothing to fucking understand because nobody will ever fucking understand it. Don’t you get that?”
“Where did you see the stranger?” Old Jim said, patient.
A sigh like the Mudder was expelling every ounce of oxygen from her body.
“He was shucking cameras like oysters. We saw him the next morning with the Tyrant shucking cameras like oysters.”
“I’m not sure I heard that correctly,” Old Jim said. “Could you repeat that?”
“You heard me right, old man. We’d gotten lost and we saw him through the binoculars across a lagoon. And he was melting down cameras, like in a bucket. Like shucking oysters, except keeping the shells? Harvesting them. And he tossed the rest to the Tyrant, who gobbled them up. Right there by his side. Like a fucking pet.”
“How did he do this?”
“You won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
“He stood over them and he breathed on them and he…”
“He what?”
“He drooled on them.”
“You mean like he spat on them? Saliva?”
“Just what I said. I know it sounds funny, but the more he did it, the more material he’d tossed in the bucket after he’d … he’d ‘shucked’ the cameras … well, it was like dry ice or something.”
“He spat on the cameras in a bucket and they steamed and smoke rose up.”
“It was long-distance. I don’t know what I saw. Why do you keep pressing? It doesn’t matter. Fuck you. That’s all I remember—don’t ask me any more about it.”
What had the cameras been coated with? Some psychotropic substance? Maybe even contact with a harmless substance would make them bubble or seethe?
“And the rabbit cameras … you viewed some of the video footage.”
“Yes.” She sounded sad now, not defiant.
“How would you describe it? The footage.”
“If you saw it, you would have run as far away from that place as you could.”
“What does that mean?”
“Will you stop asking questions then? Will you really just leave me alone?”
“I will. I promise.”
“But you keep saying that. You keep saying you’ll stop, but I don’t know you. Maybe you’re not even who Man Boy Slim thinks you are. Maybe you’re trying to keep me on the line to triangulate my location right now. I won’t be here long. I won’t be here at all. It won’t work on me and—”
“I didn’t mean to—”
There came a formless, primal scream from the phone and Old Jim held it away from his ear as the Mudder began shouting. The Mudder had begun to spiral and Old Jim hadn’t recognized it in time.
“You see a place like the coast, you see it, but it’s different and impossible things live there and the lighthouse is a glowing green spear and out at sea you can see ships split in half and if you walk too far you reach a point you can’t go any farther and you’re trapped while all the impossible things are hunting for you, all the monstrous things you thought were only in your dreams.”
Said breathless, in a jumble, and he had to work hard to make sense of it. To see how the sentences fit together.
“Take a breath. Just breathe.” He was trying to avoid saying “stay calm” even as his own heart rate had spiked. That would just send the Mudder over the edge.
“But I can’t forget and you can’t forget I ever existed, which is what I want and you can’t fucking do it, can you? No you can’t. I want you to forget and either you or someone else will come after me and ask more questions I can’t answer and I’ll have to give the same answers and I’m sick of having to think about this, you understand. I’m sick of worrying about people finding me and asking, and I don’t know if I believe you. I know I don’t dare believe you. How am I supposed to believe you? The fact is I can’t and someday you’ll come for me and so how can anybody have peace of mind in that? You can’t. You can never have peace of mind. Something terrible is coming. It’s still uncurling from that long-ago moment. I know it, and it’s going to kill us all every one of us. It’ll kill you and me and—”
“I want to assure you that no one else even knows—”
“Goodbye. Fucking old man. Stupid fucking old man.”
But there came no click of the phone. Instead, Old Jim heard a loud crack like a handgun firing, a weight hitting the floor and then the receiver banging a table. Or so it seemed.
He waited. And waited. The line remained open. He didn’t know what he was waiting for—someone else to pick up?—but instinct told him not to hang up.
“That was good acting,” he said finally, maybe to no one. “But I know you’re still on the line.” The gunshot had been a recording. He knew it hadn’t sounded quite right, like from a television show.
“Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you. Leave me the fuck alone or I’ll kill you. I’ll come back there and I’ll kill you. I’ll—”
Old Jim placed the receiver back on the phone. It was the kindest thing to do. For the Mudder.
Maybe no one had really survived the expedition except the Medic.
Old Jim tried to go back to work, but he couldn’t. The sense of being caught in a trap or a maze, the suffocation of that.
He escaped to the porch instead. Didn’t quite know what to do with himself. Sitting on the porch doing nothing helped, a bit. Yet even doing nothing, he was allowed solitude for only a brief time.
Because soon enough, Gloria arrived on a bike, reckless over the ruts in the yard, clutching a crumpled paper bag against one handlebar. She careened to a stop in front of the porch, let the bike crash to the ground, and hopped up the steps so fast she had to skid to avoid pile-driving through him and his chair.
Her face was flushed from the exertion, and her hair was so thoroughly wind-tangled, she kept having to brush it away from her face. She smelled like a kid who had been exploring mud and swamp all day. Her boots told the same story.
She dropped the bag on the table next to him.
“Mom’s cookies. No raisins. Just oatmeal and also chocolate chip. Thanks for taking the hook out of my foot.”
“You’re welcome,” Old Jim said, looking in the bag. He had so little interest in talking to her, wanted her gone so she wouldn’t interrupt thinking about the Mudder’s words.
“You should read the note. It’s from my mom. She likes you.”
“Your mom doesn’t know me well enough to have an opinion about me. And neither should you.”
Except she knew he had taken the fishhook out of her daughter’s foot. That would be enough for some people.
“Just read the note.”
The note read “Thanks for taking care of my daughter. Maybe I can buy you a drink someday as thanks. Trudi Jenkins.” Sure. Right. Maybe they could go on a date while psychics screamed in submarines at the bottom of the sea. That seemed likely, seemed right. The absurdity of his life overwhelmed him. The sheer unnatural quality of that life.
“Do you like the note?”
This insistence on him liking the note irritated him. Caught at the wrong moment or the kid was genuinely cloying.
“Yeah, I like the note fine. Thank-you notes are good to write.”
“Mom says that, too. She writes letters sometimes.”
His interest perked up.
“You ever write letters?”
“No, mostly I draw things I see. Starfish. Lighthouses. Pretty rocks. Should I write letters?”
“Well, depends on to whom,” Old Jim said. “Sending a letter means something.” Or, it would, unless you wrote a hundred of them, to someone who never received them.
“What about that man you pushed into the sea? Will he get a letter?”
So she had seen that.
“No, he will not get a letter.”
“What about a postcard? Is that okay?” She was looking at him with an earnestness that made him smile.
“When you only care a little bit, yes.”
“So he gets a get-well postcard?”
No, he gets a fuck-off-and-die postcard.
“Sure, why not. He can have one. Everybody can have one.”
“You sound like you need a postcard,” Gloria said.
He laughed at that while she stood there, mouth open like she wanted to laugh, but wasn’t quite sure why they were laughing.
“Is there something wrong with you?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Now, you should go.”
She hesitated, gave him a look he could not interpret, and got back on her bike. Now he could see, half-hidden by trees, that a car waited at the end of the driveway. Her mom. So maybe she didn’t roam as far as he thought.
Old Jim watched her go, wondering how he could dissuade her from coming back. The premonition of the urge to deploy her if she did come back, to turn her into a little spy who reported to him all unknowing.
By then, Old Jim had almost forgotten the wreck and ruin of the Mudder. He almost felt like he was just some washed-up guy who deserved cookies for taking out a fishhook.
Every sorrow might have its day, as the song went, but perhaps joy could, too, sometimes.
If joy meant oblivion.
Later, though, the itch came back and Old Jim went inside and pulled the rug out. The safe (and it wasn’t strange, was it, that he’d spent the time on that, or that it seemed to have taken no time at all?) appeared to him like a greedy little mouth, with its twin dials for the combination like eyes, and how could he be sure that somehow the safe didn’t open a link to Central, such that whatever he put in was immediately taken out on the other side back in the sterile cathedral?
He pulled the Mudder’s journal out, closed the safe, replaced the rug, and sat on the couch. No one had physically examined the Mudder’s journal for a decade. When he had first seen her journal in the secure, climate-controlled environment, a kind of weight had lifted from him. Even having to view it via gloves shoved into a sealed chamber usually reserved for plague bacteria or radioactive objects. An unexpected grace and beauty, swathed in darkness, the light all concentrated golden on this artifact from a now-ancient conflict.
What he’d left in that space in the archives approximated what he held in his hands, even if he trusted no one would request a viewing in a month or even a year. Some reliquaries were not in high demand at Central, while others likely were hauled out at Brute meetings like, well, a monkey’s paw. Anointed with unholy water, blessed, prayed upon.
As carefully as he could, Old Jim pulled the journal from the plastic protective sheath. He was looking forward to revisiting it, with the idea that parts might mean something different after the phone call.
Except … all the pages had been slashed to pieces with something like an X-Acto knife and then patiently pushed between the covers to fit in the plastic container.
He stared at the desecration, mind blank, truly shocked.
Someone had come into his house to do this. Someone had known the combination to the safe.
A kind of message from … whom? From Central? Belt buckles. House centipedes. Rifles firing into the side of the silo. Secret minder or Failure Island sicko or the “Bad Slack” of the Rogue? He felt bereaved, shaken.
But it felt like a test, as well as a message. So he replaced it in the safe, adding the strange little key, too.
Then he went into his office for the nightly ritual of turning on the alligator tracker. The usual moment of disappointment, which this time would also be the relief of normalcy. The relief of knowing that there was no Tyrant out there, possibly no Rogue from twenty years ago.
He flipped the dial on the tracker, watched as it came on. The familiar green of nothingness. No signal to receive. No trace. Like he wished his mind would be: empty, at peace.
Then the dot blinked red. It blinked red. He almost fell out of his chair. He peered at the coordinates, compared them to his foldout map, heart beating rapid.
It was … it was … in the middle of Dead Town? How was that possible. He tapped the side of the machine as if it had malfunctioned.
The dot shifted to a different location.
Shit. A scramble to look up those coordinates. Middle of a marsh, of course. Nowhere. Literally nowhere—nothing nearby, no roads, nothing. As remote as could be.
The dot hovered there for a moment, flashing against the green circles like mosquito coils. Then it began to move. Rapidly.
It took a moment to realize the dot was headed directly toward his location. At speed. As if whatever lay out there knew he was tracking it.
Old Jim shut off the tracker. He pulled the plug out of the wall. Then he took the whole apparatus and he went out onto the back deck and he tossed it into the darkness.
“You can have it!” he shouted. “Take the fucking thing!”
Who kept fucking with him. Why couldn’t he shake his dreams.
He had no clue.
There came onrushing the Friday night of the Monkey’s Elbow gig, like a great beast coming for Old Jim. When a new Commander Thistle would join the band for one night only.
Cass had called several times, but he hadn’t picked up. He needed time to think, to connect the dots, and he spent whole days drawing and redrawing diagrams that showed the Mudder, the Medic, Man Boy Slim—3M for short—in relation to the Rogue. In spite of himself he kept trying to see some pattern that fit Cass’s operational acronyms.
But it seemed impossible. Cass’s intensity about the Rogue, the idea of some higher purpose for him, some reason that ranked above God and country—it infected him at times, got to him in a way that felt like a yearning. Like he, too, needed such a purpose.
He escaped the trapped feeling of that, and what felt like dysfunction, by letting the bar job overtake him as the place began to fill up. A certain amount of good feeling in recognizing Trudi, Gloria’s mom, with a wave, and less of that feeling noticing Man Boy Slim walk in. But that was put aside as the pace of mixing drinks, pouring beers, quickened, thankful that the Village Bar had only a rudimentary toaster-oven menu.
Soon enough, the band took the stage, with acoustic and electric guitars, violin, keyboards, drums, and the vocalist, traditionally sans instrument (to broaden a limited pool). Trudi was on tambourine, like usual, the rest less familiar to him. The boisterous applause from a packed, standing-room-only crowd shook the wooden foundations and Old Jim gasped despite himself, no dust settling from the ceiling, no impact of missile or bomb. Just a band that, sometimes, drew people here from all over the county.
Monkey’s Elbow had some rules about their twice-a-year “Commander Thistle” as lead singer, a role held otherwise by Brad the lighthouse volunteer. You could not use your real name onstage, and Commanders typically used masks to disguise their true identity, even if you didn’t have to be a spy to figure out someone from their body language.
Another reason the crowd had swelled: Every volunteer lead singer had to write a new song that would be recorded only for a limited-edition small-batch pressing. To be purchased, along with T-shirts, from a weary-looking gray-haired woman in a long drab skirt standing behind a rickety foldout merch table.
Commander Thistle came up after the regular members of Monkey’s Elbow, a bulky man dressed in a strange hat and long trench coat that, from behind the bar, Old Jim paid only half a mind to as the drink orders came in. But the audience oohed and aahed at the elaborate nature of the disguise. Maybe because if you knew Commander Thistle, say, was the butcher down the street, you might not take his singing seriously. But, then, somebody at the bar had said it wasn’t a popularity contest.
The man’s voice fit his image: rusty and slow-roasted, with a hint of barbed wire, rasp but no twang. Nothing of the sea in that voice, oddly enough. At least, as Old Jim thought of the sea, or even the way the sea had served as a backdrop to the squat barrel of the Medic’s own raspy voice before Old Jim had pushed him in the sea.
Shining out like shining out like shining out
So the dark so the dark is no longer to blame.
Shining out like shining out like shining out
God in his tower and Man in his berth
Shining out, shining out, shining out …
The “shining out” became less divided as it repeated, until the commas had been obliterated and it could as easily have been “out shining out shining.”
He wondered if the song lingered in his ears from Central research, or just déjà vu from other songs. A moment of recognition in the words he didn’t understand. For the song or the singer?
Looking at that implacable mask, he wondered what he didn’t know about the here and the now. Not the past, with which he had become intimate. Not the future no one could see, but maybe what existed here, outside of the Brigade, Central, the Rogue. The man’s weighty head tilted forward as if to topple, mask still disguising his features. It was disconcertingly, with the tricorn hat, a premonition of the guillotine ushering in a new age.
As Commander Thistle launched into another song—“Down in the Marshes, Up in the Sky, I See My God”—Cass walked into the bar.
A whole new wave of energy burst in behind her, in the form of five fishermen just off shift, ready to drink, and the festivities became more jubilant. Cass looked askance at the noise of them, walked up to the bar, and asked Old Jim a question.
But he couldn’t hear over the music. He motioned to his ear and she looked exasperated, waved her hand, like “talk to you later,” and said hello to a man and woman dancing to the music, who led her closer to the stage, so the three of them were swallowed by the crowd. Old Jim kept serving drinks.
Maybe, for one night, they could both just be civilians.
O weary night. O ceaseless journey. For, how long could a band play without pause when their lead singer was made of solid stone?
Candle, flame, or vessel? The question came to him again as a long treatise in his head about the limits of a middle-aged man’s endurance, being both owner of a bar and in charge of a secret mission, the limits of which had become murkier and murkier.
As the night wore on. While he washed beer mugs and gave Sally backup support, changing out a tap, then another, the rage of conversations as energy-sapping as the repetition of nautical terrors and misfortunes from days of yore. Were they now secretly a colonial-era pub? Wrung out the dish towel, had to hand dry as the dishwasher decided to malfunction. Couldn’t be sure he was hearing the lyrics right, or maybe there was no right way. Because so different.
Oh, to be the burning light
sinking beneath the waves.
Oh, to escape this nameless plight
and dive into a whirling grave.
The way the black of Commander Thistle’s mask felt like stark night, like stark night staring back at him when he woke distressed. Despite the neutral expression on those wide features, the mask captured the beginning or very end of a scream. A sense of violence or disturbance lurked beneath the impassive gaze, the suggestion of thick lips in the pale flash of the mouth hole.
He checked. The key was back in his pocket, but he did not remember opening the safe. When had that happened?
Man Boy Slim had come up to the bar, and Old Jim was instantly on high alert. He tried to find Cass in the crowd, but he’d lost her.
“You know what I learned today?” Man Boy Slim asked. The band had finished their first set, so Old Jim could, unfortunately, hear him.
“No, what did you learn today?”
“Well, Old Jim, what I learned today is that what appear to be the stubby legs on a caterpillar are actually proto legs—they’re completely fake. The real legs are on its face, if you can believe that—can you believe that?”
“No, that’s pretty interesting,” Old Jim said. Man Boy Slim appeared to have lost his fear of black sites, or an ass-kicking.
“So, anyway, these fake legs still help the caterpillar move around. Real fake legs. Imagine that. Can you imagine that, Old Slim?”
“I can imagine I’m not serving you another drink, that’s what I can imagine.”
Man Boy Slim wiped at his eyes like a fly had settled on him. “Yeah, well, it means something, philosophically. Like, would you recognize a caterpillar as a caterpillar without its fake legs? And what if the caterpillar’s disguised as something else to begin with? And if you carefully pull off the fake legs, would it walk on its face?” Man Boy Slim started giggling at his own rhetoric. “Walk on its own face.”
“Profound,” Old Jim said in a neutral voice. Was he high?
“I have to take a leak. But don’t go anywhere. So many tales left to tell you. So many tales to tell on you.”
Old Jim watched Man Boy Slim head for the bathroom. The distress in the man. How it probably meant the Mudder was unrecoverable, that Man Boy Slim would never find her, never talk to her again.
He needed a break, felt like he was suffocating.
Outside was cool and dark, the streetlamp in front having gone out and the county in no rush to come around to replace it. Just a tinge of moon and the triangle wedge of blue-green light from the neon sign shouting “Village Bar” that let him see. That lulling sound of tide and sea, the hunkered shapes of the houses and other businesses, few of them lit up, along with all the cars and trucks here for the concert. The band noise buffered by the door, distant enough to hear himself think.
He began to feel at peace when a boy and a girl stepped into the neon blue-green, their faces striated by it, bodies whorled and swelling because of it.
No, not children, not teenagers. Adults. They just had that aspect, dressed all in black, the man in particular—the kind of youth preserved in aspic you saw mostly in centaurs and aging child actors. She had a demeanor of golden-haired innocence he couldn’t quite explain, sharpened and estranged by the neon light. Her gaze was feral, her teeth sharpened by shadow.
Two undead freaks, trapped here by the seaside, in the offseason. Or maybe they were about to sell him some form of God. Someone reeked of turpentine.
“Hello, Jim,” the man said, with a foreign accent. He had small eyes in an oval face, was stout but no muscle behind it, and had a stilted look to the slant of him. Like his neck wasn’t properly connected to his body.
“Do I know you?” Old Jim asked. He had his peashooter at his ankle and a knife at his waist, but not his Walther, because he didn’t like having real firepower around the bar.
“I think you do. In fact, I think you know all about us. You’re the Night Commander, after all, pulling the secret strings of Valhalla.”
Night Commander said smarmy, disrespectful, and then Henry waited to gauge Old Jim’s reaction, when Old Jim knew he wanted to say more.
“The secret strings of Valhalla, huh? Sounds important,” Old Jim said. Or meaningless.
While Suzanne stood there as mute as a wax museum statue of herself.
“And I know all about you, too—your insomnia, your sleepwalking,” Henry said when Old Jim said nothing. “All your pacing back and forth in your office? I understand it’s a lot of responsibility running our organization. Must wear on you, Night Commander.”
Jesus. Compromised. Surveillance? At a distance, from off- property.
“Got a point to this?” The point Old Jim felt he might have to emphasize was a quick kick to Henry’s groin and then a retreat back into the bar.
Henry had come closer while Suzanne hung back. A good disguise, Henry’s indeterminate age. You might underestimate him based on youth if you didn’t know better. The adroit use of makeup and the put-together look of pressed trousers and crisply ironed shirt under a tailored blazer, along with good genes, give a sense of perpetual youth, if also a whiff of school uniform. But one day, maybe decades hence, this man’s head would sink like a shriveled apple into the ruins of a waiting wattled neck.
“We want to know who your boss is, Night Commander. You run tricky Cass and maybe someone runs tricky you. And we want to know where the rest of the resources are—the money we need to do our critical research. Where is it? Why withhold it now?”
Critical for who? For what purpose? A half sister who followed him around like an unpaid intern.
“Are you one of those Ouija Hicks that roam the coast? Is that who you are?” Maybe pointless to pretend he didn’t know who Henry was, but narcissists didn’t like being treated this way.
But Henry just laughed in a thin-lipped mirthless way. “If so, you’re the head hick, Night Commander.”
“If a bird flies long enough inside a house is it still a bird?” Remembering the questions the psych had asked him at Central.
Henry looked confused, struggled to respond.
“Do you exhibit glib and superficial charm?”
“Is there something wrong with you, Night Commander? Something breaking down, perhaps?”
“Here’s another one,” Old Jim said, his own special nod to the the manual for identifying psychopaths: “A belt buckle and a brick are traveling in opposite directions, away from each other, the brick at the speed of a snail on a bad day and the belt buckle at the speed of a waistline expanding at the rate of three inches per month. Which one will reach you first, if you stand at the exact opposite end of the universe? The snail or the waistline?”
Henry smiled, revealing the affectation of sharpened incisors. Old Jim felt like he’d hit his target, and also suggested the “Night Commander” might be deranged enough to do anything.
“So, which is it?” Old Jim prodded, left hand resting on his knife.
“Did you like how you were greeted at the silo?” Henry asked.
Before Old Jim could answer, a group of fishermen came sprawling out from the bar. They looked as rough as bare-knuckle boxers. Henry kept a cocked finger like a gun pointed at Old Jim, even as the two retreated, receding and receding until they were gone, taken by the darkness.
As if they really were vampires. Except, soon after, Old Jim heard the cough of a car engine starting and he figured they’d decided not to fly away.
Old Jim had no stomach for going back to the bar after that. Not right away. So, instead, he braved the wall of sound long enough, Monkey’s Elbow raving on again, to duck into his office, and from there through the storeroom and out back, in search of the little bridge. There was just enough moon and glow from a back window of the bar to find his way.
He could see the lighthouse’s beam shining out, moving on, shining out, revolving three hundred sixty degrees to take the entire measure of the Forgotten Coast. The smell of salt and brine from the coast came up quick on the seething breezes.
Henry had unnerved him, maybe more in what he already had gleaned about Central’s operation than his demeanor. What did he mean about the money? Resources? Was that just a shakedown? Or something else?
The dull vibration of drums and bass guitar weakened, strengthened, as the distant front door opened and closed, opened again, along with the rough wail of Commander Thistle. “The stars start to glow / and the sun shines its last.”
He’d unwind for ten minutes and then return to help Sally. Get his shit together, talk to Cass, maybe, about priorities for next week.
But when he stepped onto the bridge, he heard a sound in the water as of an animal moving away into the marsh. Some beast large and ponderous.
A figure arose at the other end of the bridge.
Old Jim stood completely still. The figure was just a silhouette.
“Man Boy Slim? Is that you?” Old Jim asked.
The figure said nothing, remained motionless at the other end of the bridge. A nothing smudged by night.
It wasn’t Man Boy Slim.
“Who’s there?” Old Jim asked. “Who are you?”
But he knew who it was.
Whispering at Old Jim, whispering and whispering like a floating flame over the mud flats. Whispering and whispering, intent on the whispering, like some psychic, like some phantom, like something ancient and yet new.
The Rogue.
He tried to drop to one knee, pull the peashooter out of his ankle holster. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. It was too late.
Because the Rogue’s words were slamming into him now, slamming into him and drawing him close, reeling him in and drawing him out, until he was as thin as taut twine and nothing at all was left of him. Nothing at all, like it was always meant to be.
Except, Old Jim’s mouth was opening wide and wider still to vomit words, to erupt words toward the Rogue. Words in patterns he had never learned, words meant to harm, and he heard the Rogue shriek as if he’d been dealt a physical blow.
Even as Old Jim was falling. Falling down a deep well, a flight of stairs, into a crevice far beneath the sea, with no oxygen to breathe. No pulse. No heartbeat. Nothing but dark sky above.
Until his body felt like a vast blackened meadow with the rain coming down.
Ah, Cass. Ah, Genevieve. What had he done? What was he still doing?
Then there was nothing but darkness.