A traveler can get lost here, too, easy as pie.
A young woman is standing in the doorway of the building, and she waves to Immacolata. Whatever this place once was—perhaps a hotel, perhaps a bank or office building—now it’s a filthy burrow where the blighted and dying huddle together and wait for the end. It’s been seven years since the last evacuation, and the borders were sealed long ago. The bridges blown, the highways mined. Dozens of snipers guard the perimeter day and night, making sure no one will ever get out of the ruins of L.A. Not that most here would ever try to leave. These women and men were not so much abandoned, as they allowed themselves to be left behind. Some might say that these are the resigned, the ones who saw the writing on the wall.
The New Gods rule here, the Elder Beings.
Everything old is new again.
The woman in the doorway beckons. She tries to smile, but her twisted face only vaguely remembers how, and the expression comes off more like a grimace.
“You came back,” she says. Her voice is hoarse and phlegmy.
“I did,” Immacolata replies, her own voice muffled by the mask and rebreather she’s wearing. “I said I would.”
“I was afraid we’d seen the last of you. I didn’t want to believe that, but I was starting to, all the same.”
Immacolata is carrying a backpack bulging with canned goods, mostly fruit and vegetables, and she lays it at the woman’s feet.
“I wish I could’ve brought more. But—”
“This is plenty. You do so much for us. Don’t you dare ever apologize for not doing more. We get by.”
But Immacolata has seen what passes for getting by with the inhabitants of the City. She’s followed them into the sewer and subway tunnels where they hunt coyotes, feral cats and dogs, rats and swarms of roaches. All these species have long since become subterranean dwellers, driven mad by the spores, their morphology transformed, mutated by the mycelial mats and fruiting bodies rooted in bone and muscle, blood and skin, running rampant through every internal organ. As with the people who hunt them, some are hardly recognizable for what they once were.
The woman unzips the backpack and takes out a dented can of peaches. “Oh,” she says. “I remember these. We ate these when I was a child.”
There’s a symbol painted above the doorway. It identifies those living in the building as supplicants of Nyarlathotep and Azathoth. Whether or not they truly are, whether they regularly make the trek to the temple a few blocks way, that’s another matter altogether. The mark’s enough to keep the ravagers at bay, the shuffling heaps who prowl the streets and alleyways searching for the faithless. Immacolata has seen the crucifixions for herself.
“And pears,” the woman says, pulling out another can. “I remember these, too.”
Then Immacolata smells ozone and gasoline, and she looks up just as the cloud of invaders appears, seventy-five, a hundred, a living veil skimming low above rooftops, somehow staying aloft with those thick, stubby wings. They’re identical to the drowned creature she glimpsed in a storage shed in Townshend, Vermont, in November 1927. After only a few seconds, the buzzing becomes just short of deafening, and the woman grabs Immacolata’s left elbow, yanking her roughly toward the darkness waiting inside the building.
“Come on. We can’t stay out here. They won’t follow us. They never follow us.”
The woman leads her through the lobby, then down a steeply slanting hallway and past the deeper, gaping blackness of twin elevator shafts. In here, the droning calls of the invaders are muffled, made distant by thick stone walls, and Immacolata is surprised at her own relief. Their language works its way into your brain, digging in and lodging in the convolutions of the cerebrum, burrowing into the fine grooves of the cerebellum, threatening to highjack all reason and even the basest animal instincts. She’s led down a crooked flight of stairs to the basement level.
To the garden.
“They’ll be gone soon,” the woman assures her. “They’ll pass us by. They always do.”
It isn’t dark down here. There’s a violet-blue phosphorescence cast by things that can no longer, even by the broadest of definitions, be called human. They seem to have sprouted directly from the concrete floor, anchored motionless for months or even years. Some have grown one into another, all pretenses at individuality abandoned. Here and there, Immacolata can discern the dim suggestion of limbs and faces. The worst are the ones who still have eyes and mouths, the ones who watch her and struggle to speak.
“It won’t be long. You’ll see,” the woman says, oblivious to the horrors around them.
You are who you are, until you aren’t anymore.
Immacolata Sexton, dead and undying child of another age, blinks.
“The World,” she said to the Signalman. “The dancer is meant to signify the final attainment of man, a merging of the self-conscious with the unconscious and a blending of those two states with the superconscious.”
Again she falls, which is the easiest thing to do. Swept up by bottomless, billowing darkness, she tumbles.
The World implies the ultimate state of cosmic awareness, the final goal . . .
Der Übergeist.
The darkness comes apart.
And the buzzing is replaced by the comforting hum of the Gulfstream’s engines. She rubs at her eyes, then checks her watch. Almost a full hour and a half passed that time. Nearly too long, and she’s well aware how much she’s pushing the margin of safety. Outside, the summer sun is sinking quickly towards the sea. In another moment, the pilot announces they’re approaching Ireland.
8. Not Yet Explored (July 4, 2015)
ANYONE WOULD HAVE TO admit it’s a neat trick, Immacolata Sexton’s knack for mentally slipping the surly bonds of Grandfather Time to touch the face of Eternity, all those Immacolatas that have been and are yet to come, even if she’s not quite genuinely “unstuck.” She’s no Billy Pilgrim, true enough. But, all the same, take a page from her playbook. Because it may be we have gotten ahead of ourselves, which is always a danger when attempting to perceive the apparent progression of any series of events as orderly, strung like pearls on a silken thread. In imposing order, it’s easy to miss the obvious.
Look over your shoulder. Become the wife of Lot.
A pillar of salt, enlightened.
At 1:54 P.M. EDT, one day after the Signalman entered a ranch house near the shore of the Salton Sea, the mission operations center at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory abruptly lost contact with NASA’s interplanetary probe New Horizons. Autopilot switched the craft from its main computer to a backup and placed the probe in safe mode, then began attempts to reestablish communications with Earth. Using the Deep Space Network in California, Madrid, and Canberra, NASA reestablished contact at 3:15 P.M. But a lot can happen in an hour and twenty-one minutes, especially when you’re three billion miles away and it takes roughly nine hours to phone home. At 4 P.M., the New Horizons Anomaly Review Board met to “gather information on the problem and initiate a recovery plan.” A software glitch was discovered, a timing flaw in the command sequence that would allow the probe’s Pluto flyby. While the Signalman and everyone else who’d entered Drew Standish’s compound waited out their time in quarantine, while what they found there was removed from the scene and transported via five unmarked, refrigerated semitrailer trucks to the USAF facility most commonly known as Area 51, engineers worked to resolve the problem.