Agents of Dreamland(23)

The brains themselves were nowhere to be found.

One of the FBI agents excused himself and vomited his breakfast over the railing and onto the asphalt below.

Standish’s Black Book, described in a dossier from Immacolata’s briefcase, was nowhere to be found. On the other hand, there was a peculiar metal cylinder resting on a table near the door, and some would say that it more than makes up for the missing book. The Signalman is, however, most emphatically not one of those people. The cylinder only poses a hundred new questions and answers none. It’s about a foot tall, not quite a foot in diameter, with three sockets arranged in an isosceles triangle on the convex surface of one end. As for the composition of the metal itself, that will never be determined, though it will be found to match other anomalous samples recovered from Roswell, New Mexico, and Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. SEM magnifications from < 100×–15,000×, ED× area scans, elemental mapping, and point-and-shoot analysis will all fail to yield conclusive results.

Looking at the cylinder, the Signalman shuddered, and he considered, albeit briefly, chartering a fishing boat and sinking the damned thing in the deep Pacific water out beyond the Coronado Escarpment. In the long years to come, the cowardice that stays his hand will be a recurring source of regret. Could’a, should’a, would’a.

Don’t you know it.

Three nights after the discovery at the Days Inn, when Standish and Nightlinger’s corpses are safely on ice in Nevada and the metal cylinder has forever vanished into the labyrinthine bowels of Dreamland, the Signalman—more than half drunk—gives in and calls a number that Immacolata Sexton gave him that night back in Winslow, scribbled on the back of a coffee-stained paper napkin. He’d almost thrown it in the trash; he’d certainly never intended to use it. Not for Sweet Baby Jesus, love, or green folding money. But in the dead of night, alone with his thoughts and memories and fears, alone with a deeper despair than he’s ever known, intentions turn out to mean less than nothing. She answers on the fourth ring. Her voice is every bit as icy as he remembers.

“You found him,” she says before he has a chance to even say hello.

“How the f*ck do you know that?”

“A little bird,” she replies.

“Whatever,” he says, and laughs. “I’m calling it quits, putting in for early retirement. I think they’ll let me go. I think Albany sees they’ve wrung every last bit out of me they’re going to get. The salad days are over and gone.”

There’s a long pause then, and it’s the Signalman who finally breaks the silence.

“It’s not finished, is it?”

“No,” she says. “It isn’t. It’s only just begun.” But she kindly doesn’t tell him about the streets she’ll walk in a ruined L.A. only twenty-eight years farther along, or the battalions of winged fungoid monstrosities skimming low above shattered skyscrapers, or the black ships.

“You know about New Horizons, too?”

“I do.”

“Good,” he says. “Then I don’t have to tell you.”

“If it’s any consolation, you did the best you could. And you may have bought us all a little more time.”

Another pause, and then he says, “That tarot card, the one we found nailed to the front door of the ranch house—”

“The World.”

“Yeah, the World. You’re the dancer, aren’t you?”

He listens and waits while she lights a cigarette.

“No more than anyone else,” she says. “No more than you. No more than that poor Stringfellow girl or Standish or the woman who served us coffee that night in Arizona.”

“Did you keep the card?”

“No. It’s in the archives at Barbican. For safekeeping.”

He goes to the refrigerator for a few ice cubes, cracks the seal on a fresh bottle of J&B, and refills his glass. “Would you like to know a secret,” he asks.

“Sure. What’s one more, after all.”

“That night, they wanted me to kill you. They wanted me to kill you and take the briefcase. I talked them out of it. I still don’t really know why, but I talked them out of it.”

“Yes,” she says, “I know. No hard feelings. No ill will.”

He asks her another couple of questions, though they’re really nothing of consequence, and then she hangs up first. He’ll catch hell from Albany for making the call, but what the f*ck. He only wishes it had left him feeling even the smallest bit less afraid, the smallest bit less alone.

But that’s not the way it is, he reminds himself. You knew that when you signed up. That’s not ever the way it is.

The Signalman sits at the big bay window of his apartment in the Santa Monica Hills, and he sips his whisky and smokes and watches the sky. Only a few bright stars are visible through the white-orange haze of light pollution. At least that’s something. It’s surely more than he deserves.