Agents of Dreamland(20)
“We’re running out of time,” says the Signalman, speaking to Chloe Stringfellow or the men in white coats or only to himself.
“And you,” she murmurs, “you’re the Twelfth Trump, the Hanged Man. You don’t know it yet, but you are. Pittura infamante, dangling by one ankle from a withered gallows tree. Babylon didn’t put you there, no, but she pulled the knots of that fylfot cross so much tighter than they’d ever been pulled before.”
The bulge on her cheek has turned a livid red and has grown until it’s almost as large as a tennis ball. She scratches at it, and the Signalman wants to believe he only imagines the movement beneath her skin.
“You dance for her, dangling,” she says, only it’s not her voice any longer. But it’s a voice he’s heard before, on a CD from Immacolata’s briefcase. It’s the voice of the man she’s given her life for.
“Who am I talking to?” he asks.
“You,” says a man talking through the dying girl, ignoring the Signalman’s question, “you dance for her, hanging, her long black hair drawn out tightly, fiddling whisper music on those strings. And bats with baby faces . . .” But the voice trails off then, and the girl’s body shudders violently. She slips off the chair to the floor.
“She’s flatlining,” says one of the men in white lab coats.
“We need to shut this down,” says the other. “It’s over.”
And the Signalman is up and on his feet then, suddenly more afraid and more confused than he’s been in a very long time, even more than he was at the ranch by the Salton Sea, when he stepped into the room filled with the smell of mushrooms and the insectile drone of television static. When he first saw Chloe Stringfellow, standing over what was left of her thirteen companions, a shotgun cradled in the crook of one arm. Whatever’s happening in the cell, it’s nothing he expected, nothing he was warned could happen. If Y knew, it’s something they’ve kept from him. He steps forward and places his right hand flat against the Plexiglas divider.
“You talk to me,” he growls. “You stop playing games, you son of a bitch, and you talk to me right this goddamn minute.”
“Don’t be a sore loser,” Drew Standish whispers, and then the bulge on the girl’s face bursts, a few seconds before that side of her head entirely collapses in upon itself, spilling a cloud of fine mustard-colored spores. An alarm goes off, and the fluorescents are replaced by crimson light that pulses like the ache of a broken bone. Something pulls itself free of Chloe Stringfellow’s chest and begins to roll slowly away.
“I’m sorry,” one of the white-coated men tells him, sounding not the least bit sorry. “We can’t wait any longer. Containment protocol.” And then cryogenic vents tucked into the ceiling above the fruiting corpse slide open and release jets of liquid nitrogen, flash freezing the nightmare in the cell.
This is the way the world ends.
Tiddley-pom.
10. The Rapture as Low Burlesque (July 3, 2015)
THIS IS THE MORNING that I have been promised. I open my eyes from a dream that seems more real and brighter and louder than any waking memory, and dimly I recall that this is the morning. I lie in my bunk and watch a galaxy of dust motes sifting through a shaft of sunlight, here on the 6,997th day since my birth to a woman whose face I can now hardly even recall. The mother of my body, the mother of my captivity. Chloe, you were such a beautiful, beautiful baby. I thought you were a gift from the angels, and I couldn’t imagine what I had possibly done to have deserved you. I stare at that shaft of light, slipping in through the tattered drapes, and the dream of the home that was never home slowly begins to fray, admitting this day, instead. This day, 6,977 days after I was shat out, mewling and soft, into a gallery of daggers and broken glass. I wish Drew had been there with me, in the dream. I wish he could have spoken to my mother, and then she could have prepared me for this day. She would have known what I was made for. I might never have strayed from the path, seduced by the ways of wolves and smack and hypodermic solace. I might never have become someone who needed to be cut free from the belly of the beast.
The air stirs, and the dust motes swirl.
I’d thought that there would be pain when this morning arrived, but there’s almost no pain at all. My mouth tastes like the air in a cellar. And my head is filled with bees.
I should get up. I should get up and go find the others.
Last night, Drew drove me down to Bombay Beach, and we sat in his car and listened to the engine cooling and the desert cooling and the black expanse of Jachin breathing in and out, out and in. We parked at the shore, near the rusting shell of an old school bus sunk almost up to its windows in the salt and the evaporite muck and the bones of dead tilapia and pelicans. He sipped vodka from a paper bag, and he watched my eyes while I watched the starlight pinpoints shimmering above the sea.
“What do you espy away up there, little Chloe?”
“I see fire,” I told him. It was the truth. “I see black fire that’s been burning almost forever, and I see the spheres that move through the flames. I see the tiny boat we’ve launched, and I see that other boat, sailing out to meet us halfway.”
He smiled, and then he laughed a small laugh. And that’s when I remembered Madeline was sitting in the backseat. She lit a cigarette, and for a few moments the night smelled less like dead fish and brine and more like matches.