Agents of Dreamland(11)
“You’re just made out of bad habits, aren’t you?” smirks Dunaway.
The Signalman ignores him. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see it.” And he wants to start ticking off the long, long list of shit this thirtysomething * hasn’t seen and doesn’t know and apparently can’t imagine, but what’s the point. Here’s the next generation sitting across from him, the future of the Company just waiting around for the gullible old Cold War spooks like him to retire. The future so bright and all that happy crap. One good thing he can say for Barbican Estate, you don’t hear all this skeptical, rationalist mumbo jumbo from the agents of Y.
“Whatever you say. I’m just here to make sure you don’t find some way to f*ck up and miss that flight. You want to believe in little green men, you go right ahead. Toss in the Easter Bunny, I won’t argue.”
“What about the case?” the Signalman asks Dunaway.
“It goes with you. I’ll take your report, you keep the case.”
The Signalman nods. “We didn’t used to be so damned sloppy,” he says. He’s thinking about Vance reading clean, then reading hot. And he’s also thinking about all the people he’s had contact with since he was released from quarantine: L.A., Winslow, the train and taxis, restaurants and bars, the hotel. What does that come to? Five hundred, maybe? More than? And all those people, how many have they had contact with? If he’s infected, how many thousands of opportunities has the contagion enjoyed at his expense? He shuts his eyes and concentrates on the rhythm of the steel wheels against the rails.
The end of the world as exponential growth.
“I don’t need a f*cking babysitter,” he says.
“And I don’t need a gig as your keeper, but there you go.”
The Signalman doesn’t say anything else. He just keeps his eyes shut, trying not to think about Vance locked away somewhere and dying. Yeah, man, good luck with that.
6. The Beginning After the End (July 2, 2015)
“YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL,” Drew tells us, me and Madeline and all the faceless others. They have, to me, become faceless. “All of you, each one, so perfect. You are my dreams made manifest. We are the children of all the eons. You are the path unto deliverance. There are no accidents here.” I’d say that the television sounds like a waterfall, except I’ve never been to a waterfall, only heard them recorded, and recordings are only echoes, and echoes can lie. So, I’ll say that the television sounds like rain on the streets of a fallen city I’ll never have to see again. Not ever, and that’s a promise. We sit within the mandala Drew has scratched into the floor of the room with the television. My God, this room is filled with ghosts, and those are echoes, too. I can hear them, and I can see them. I don’t know if the others can. Last night, when I told Drew, when I only whispered about the ghosts because maybe they can hear me, he said it was a sign of the nearness of the star winds. That gave me chill bumps, sent something small and frightened scurrying across the grave that I will never have. And now, we sit here in the night with the television blaring white-static wasp voices and the night wrapped tight about the house like a wet towel. Drew reads to us from the Black Book. He has told Madeline (she has told me) that he found the book in Iran, where it had been hidden since the Achaemenid Empire, a.k.a. the First Persian Empire, in the year 352 B.C., when it was placed in the tomb of—well, he never reads the name aloud. Some things are like that, he assures us. You do not say some words out loud. You only know them, and you only dare mutter them in dreams.
The Black Book revealed us all to Drew. Our names are written there.
We are not permitted to see the pages of the book.
I don’t mind.
“This is how long we have waited,” he says. “So many ragged centuries have the promises lain unfulfilled, gathering the weight of seconds and minutes and hours, while the messengers from Yuggoth prepared the way, while they mined what they needed from this world to build eternal cities for our souls.”
He turns a page.
The girl he found in Seattle tries to speak, and he pauses in his reading to listen. The noises she makes are no longer precisely words. We all think that she will be the first. She was pretty once, and now, transformed, she is beautiful. No, that’s still too small a word. “A flower,” Madeline says. “She will fold open like a rose, and the star winds will come pouring down from the sky and down from the mountains to scour the rocks and lift her up to the heavens. As you each shall be lifted.” We have to carry her up to and down from the roof now, the girl from Seattle. In the gray light from the television, her skin shimmers with colors I don’t know the names for. She was afraid, a few days ago, but now I don’t think she is. Fear of the passage is an affront to the messengers, Drew says. Fear is a poison that binds the minds of men and women to the same stone where Prometheus’ liver is devoured forever by the cruel beaks of hungry birds.
Yesterday, I forgot my name. It was an odd sensation, realizing I no longer knew what my mother and father had christened me, a few seconds of cold panic. But the panic was fleeting, and behind it was peace and assurance. We can’t carry our names with us on the journey that lies ahead.
Drew sets the metal cylinder at the center of the mandala. That will be his chariot across the void. Madeline also has a silvery tube. When we are complete, those of us whom he has brought here to the garden, then he and Madeline will have their own passage, which is not to be the same as ours.