In the mirror, his eyes seem more gray than blue, and the broken capillaries in his nose are as good as a road map, tracing decades and countless drinking binges. But he’s a prime asset, and as long as he gets the job done, Albany is happy to overlook the booze. With luck, they’ll squeeze another ten years out of him. He turns on the tap and splashes warm water across his face, then reaches for the can of shaving cream he left on the back of the toilet.
And get this, okay? These doomed ants, these poor dying bastards, they always climb to a height of precisely twenty-five point twenty plus or minus two point forty-six centimeters above the jungle floor, in environments where the humidity will remain stable between ninety-four and ninety-five percent, with temperatures between twenty and thirty Celsius. And always on the north side of the plant. In the end, sporocarps, the fungal fruiting bodies, erupt from the ant’s necking, growing a stalk that releases spores that’ll infect more ants. It’s evolution at its best and, yeah, at its most grisly, too. Mother Nature, when you get right down to it, she’s a proper cunt.
But these weren’t ants. These were human beings.
Well, sure, and this isn’t Ophiocordyceps, either. We’re not even sure if it’s an actual fungus. No one’s ever seen anything like it. Jesus, if I didn’t know better, I’d say it came from outer space.
If you didn’t know better.
Right.
The mirror is starting to fog from the steam, and there’s a small bit of mercy. The Signalman squirts a mound of foam into his left hand, but can’t quite find the motivation to go any further. Who gives a shit if he’s clean shaven when he gets back to L.A.? Maybe he’ll tell them he’s decided to grow a beard. At least it would hide some of the damage wrought by time and his bad habits, wouldn’t it? And isn’t that what Albany’s all about? Hiding the damage? He rinses the foam off his hand and turns off the water.
That day they all found Hell by the Salton Sea, that day that’s still unfurling inside his mind, Agent Vance is bracing herself against a doorframe. She’s lowered her gun and covers her mouth, trying not to vomit. “Oh god,” she says again, the words muffled, and she looks at him. Right then, he thinks, I’ve never seen anyone so scared. It’s not true, not by a long shot, but that’s what he thinks, all the same.
I know an old lady who swallowed a fly. . . .
What?
I don’t know. It’s been stuck in my head all damned day long.
Past the corpses, what’s left of three girls and two boys, none of them older than sixteen or seventeen, there’s an old television set, a real antique, just like his parents bought when he was a kid. The first color TV they ever owned. There’s nothing on the screen but static, a blizzard of white electric snow. It crawls across the curved screen like ants. It drifts behind the glass like deadly spores carried on the wind.
“Stop the choppers,” he says into the radio, even though he’s not yet entirely sure why he’s giving the order. Some instinct buried deep in his hindbrain, spurring him to act before higher cognition gets in the way of survival. “Get Edwards on the line and set up a no-fly zone, everything from Palm Springs south to Mexicali. Get roadblocks up.”
The radio crackles and spurts, and the man on the other end wants to know why.
“Because I fucking just said so,” he growls. “Because I imagine you want to keep your fucking job.”
He hears footsteps on the tin roof.
Alfred Russel Wallace, he was the first to identify the fungus, in Brazil way back in 1859. Yeah, Wallace. You know, the dude who almost beat Darwin to the punch? Don’t you people read?
In his room by the railroad tracks, the Signalman dries his face on a towel embroidered with the hotel’s logo. He spares one last glance at his haggard reflection, and then goes back to the bed, back to the files and the briefcase and his whisky, back to waiting for the long Arizona night to end.
4. A Piece of the Sky (August 17, 1968)
AND NOW, PICK UP this silver, open-face watch, which the Signalman carries always tucked into the narrow left inside breast pocket of the cheap suits he wears. It was the property of one of his four great-grandfathers before him, and he’s carried it since the day she died. It is this watch that will earn him his nickname. His mother kept it in an old Whitman’s sampler tin on her dresser. Pick up this tarnished silver watch, manufactured in 1888 by the Elgin Watch Company of Elgin, Illinois, and wind the stem counterclockwise, turning the hands back 34,256 full revolutions. By this action do we arrive at the evening of August 17, 1968, and the living room of a house on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama. It’s Saturday night, and NBC affiliate WVTM, Channel 13, is airing its weekly late-night triple-feature monster-movie marathon. The child who will someday be known to his coworkers, and a few others, as “the Signalman” is eight years old, and he’s allowed to stay up Friday nights (into Saturday mornings) to watch these black-and-white gems. While his parents sleep, the boy is treated to Ray Harryhausen’s Rhedosaurus, Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo, and, finally, English director James Whale’s little-known and once-believed-lost The Star Maiden (1934).
As with his classic Frankenstein, Whale chose the palette of Gothic horror for this science-fiction/fantasy tale set on an undiscovered trans-Neptunian tenth planet located beyond newly discovered Pluto, “near the farthest edges of the solar system.” The special effects come courtesy Willis O’Brien, fresh off King Kong and Son of Kong, with an unnerving, distinctly modernist score provided by Max Steiner (another Kong vet), and a screenplay by none other than Tarzan-creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Star Maiden marks the only time that Burroughs would write for the screen.
The boy sips at a Coca-Cola, the soda gone flat from half a handful of salted peanuts he dropped into the bottle, and he tries hard to stay awake. But it’s a rare Friday night that he manages to make it through all three features. He’s drifting off, and the movie is beginning to blur together with half-formed dreams. Tomorrow, he’ll have trouble remembering which bits of the story were actually part of the movie and which bits he made up in his sleep:
A willowy woman with white hair is locked in a black tower in a city at the edge of a blacker plain. From her prison, she gazes out through barred windows, across the weird angles of a city carved from obsidian and onyx, granite and slate, across rooftops and strange hanging gardens and past the spires of other towers. Overhead, the sun is only a faint smudge peering down at this world through a veil of perpetual night. The white-haired woman has been shut away by an evil, ancient man, who might be an alchemist, or a scientist, or a wizard (this is never made quite clear) and who intends the woman to be his bride, very much against her will. Her only hope for deliverance is a sword that can defeat the dragonlike, stop-motion beast that guards the tower gates. But the sword was lost long ages ago in a dimly remembered war between the people of this world and giants who attempted to invade and conquer it from another dimension. There is a hero, of course, a handsome man with hair as pale as the woman’s. He eludes the alchemist’s robot soldiers and travels far from the city to reclaim the sword, which, it turns out, was stolen by a grotesque race of winged, crablike humanoids, creatures who inhabit a forest of immense glowing fungi—tall as redwoods—at the edge of an underground sea. They worship the very beings who were once defeated by the magical sword, hiding it in hopes that someday those extradimensional titans will return.