“You don’t have to read it all at once,” he says. “You’ve got some time. But I do need you to read all of it, kiddo. And then we’ll talk.”
Ellison takes a swallow of the cold malt liquor, wipes her mouth, then looks back down at the folder in her lap, the bloody-red paper clip, the crisp typed pages, the bizarre catalog of atrocities lined up all neat and tidy for her careful consideration. The life and times and not quite unspeakable sins of a Welsh woman named Jehosheba Talog, the only assignment Ellison Nicodemo never finished, the only one who ever got away.
“To tell you the truth,” says the Signalman, “after what happened in Atlanta, I thought maybe she’d crawled off somewhere to lick her wounds and . . . whatever. Swum away home like a good pollywog to King Neptune’s stately pleasure palace or just fucking died. What the fuck ever it is people like her do when they’ve finally done the world all the mischief they can manage. I honestly thought we’d heard the last of her.”
After what happened in Atlanta . . .
Ellison glances down at the scars on her hands, then shuts her eyes again.
“No, you didn’t,” she says, so softly that the words are almost lost in the low, rumbling purr of the King Air’s twin turbine engines. “You didn’t think that for a minute. So why bother lying to me about it?”
When he doesn’t answer the question, Ellison opens her eyes and goes back to staring at (but not reading) the contents of the manila folder. It’s not like she really expects an answer.
“Anyway,” the Signalman says finally, “read it. Maybe you’ll see some kinda pattern there we’re missing. Maybe it’ll make more sense to you. We’re refueling at Offutt, then flying on to Quonset Point.”
“And there’s nothing the least bit portentous about making a pit stop at the birthplace of the Enola Gay.”
“I stopped thinking like that a long, long time ago,” says the Signalman. “You have to, or you wind up seeing the face of Jesus in every bowl of breakfast cereal.”
“But that’s pretty much what you want me to do, isn’t it?” she asks him and points at the dossier.
“No, it’s not. All I want you to do . . .” But he trails off and sighs and quietly massages his temples and eyelids a moment before continuing. “No one ever got as close to her as you did. At least no one who’s still walking around and breathing.”
“Well, I’m not a profiler, either,” Ellison reminds him.
“Look, I’m not saying I believe you can read that file and tell me what the bitch is going to do next. Just that maybe you’ll see something the rest of us have missed. Something. Anything. And the sooner we find her, the sooner we can put this one to bed for good. Before more people die. Before she wakes up something we don’t know how to put back to sleep or blow to smithereens or banish to whatever shithole banana republic dimension she’s called it forth from.”
“And, after all, if I hadn’t fucked this up seven years ago . . .”
“That’s not what I said, kiddo. That’s not at all what I just said. Listen, as long as the hound still comes when it’s called, that’s mostly all they care about.”
“I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”
The Signalman sighs and looks away from the window.
“Just do what you can,” he says, and she can hear his exasperation as clearly as she can see the sheen of sweat on his face. She wonders if he’ll make it to Offutt without having to use one of the airsickness bags. “Just do your best, given the circumstances.”
“When has Albany ever been happy with that?” she asks him, and the Signalman scowls and goes back to his seat. Mackenzie Regan mutters something Ellison can’t quite make out, and the Signalman tells her to play nice and mind her own damn business. Ellison starts to ask if times have really gotten so hard that TPTB have started hitting up the steno pool for new talent, but then she thinks better of it. It might bring a smile to her face, poking the bear and all, but then again, it might not, and the folder would still be right there in her lap, lying in wait, ready to snap shut like a steel-jaw trap.
The plane bumps and shudders for a moment, passing through some invisible wrinkle in the sky, some harmless pocket of clear-air turbulence, and Ellison glances over at the Signalman. His teeth are clenched and he’s holding on to the armrests for dear life. She imagines she can hear his molars grinding and his stomach rolling. She looks back down at the dossier. She doesn’t like seeing him like this.
She takes another swallow of beer.
Fine, she thinks. I will read these things. Hell, I’ll read them twice, three times, but I won’t see shit, and pretty soon they’ll figure out I’m useless and send me packing. So read the file, get it over with, go the fuck home.
The second page of the dossier begins with a brief account of a thirty-two car pileup on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, just outside of Harrisburg. A sixty-five foot sperm whale had appeared, ex nihilo, in the westbound lane. The whale had still been alive when first responders arrived on the scene.
The plane hits another pocket of rough air, worse than the last, and she glances up at the Signalman again. He’s doing a piss-poor job of pretending that he’s neither ill nor terrified. Ellison finishes her second beer, takes a last drag on her Chesterfield, smoked almost down to the filter, then drops the butt into the empty bottle. She imagines a faint, brief sizzle, even if she doesn’t actually hear one. She sets the bottle back in the cup holder before turning her attention once more to the typescript—the unfortunate, impossible sperm whale on I-76, twelve people dead, and so on and so forth.
And then a single drop of water falls onto the paper in her lap. More annoyed than surprised, Ellison Nicodemo sits staring at it for four or five seconds, as the ink begins to run, before she looks up to see where it could have come from.
8.: In Power We Entrust the Love Advocated
(Ynys Llanddwyn, Wales, November 27, 1972)
Almost every evening now, the dark man comes to see the girl named Abishag Talog. Almost every evening since her mother died, he comes strolling up the narrow, stony path that leads from the mainland out onto the craggy jut of ancient pillow lava and red chert, limestone and shifting sand that is only an island at high tide. He comes in fair weather and he comes even if the sky is spitting sleet or snow or rain that stings like needles fired from faerie bows. The girl has never learned his name. He’s never volunteered it, and she’s never asked. His name has never seemed especially important. He comes all the way out to her mother’s whitewashed cottage near the lighthouse, and he brings Abishag food so that she never goes hungry. He sees that she has warm clothes and coal and kerosene for the lanterns. He sees that she has shoes. Once, when she caught a bad chest cold, he brought her medicine and nursed her back to health. Two months ago, on her tenth birthday, he brought her sweets and a small music box made from cherry wood and inlaid with abalone shell. When her mother died, the girl was afraid that there would be well-meaning, prying men and women from Newborough who’d come and take her away from the cottage, who’d see that she was shipped off to an orphanage. After all, she had become an orphan, hadn’t she? But the dark man told her she’d need never again worry about being forced to leave the cottage where she was born, the house her grandfather had built for her grandmother, before they’d both gone down to the sea, and the only home the girl has ever known. The dark man told her that he’d taken care of everything, every last detail, so she was free to remain on the island as long as she wished.