The Imago Sequence Read online

  THE IMAGO SEQUENCE

  Laird Barron

  The Imago Sequence and Other Stories © 2007 by Laird Barron

  This edition of The Imago Sequence and Other Stories © 2008

  by Night Shade Books

  Cover art © 2007 by Eleni Tsami

  Cover design by Claudia Noble

  Interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen

  "Old Virginia" © 2003 by Laird Barron. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2003.

  "Shiva, Open Your Eye" © 2001 by Laird Barron. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2001.

  "Procession of the Black Sloth" © 2007 by Laird Barron. Original to this collection.

  "Bulldozer" © 2004 by Laird Barron. Originally published online on SCIFICTION, August 25, 2004.

  "Proboscis" © 2005 by Laird Barron. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2005.

  "Hallucigenia" © 2006 by Laird Barron. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2006.

  "Parallax" © 2005 by Laird Barron. Originally published online on SCIFICTION, September 07, 2005.

  "The Royal Zoo Is Closed" © 2006 by Laird Barron. First published in Phantom #0, 2006.

  "The Imago Sequence" © 2005 by Laird Barron. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2005.

  First Edition

  978-1-59780-146-1

  Night Shade Books

  Please visit us on the web at

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  Dedication:

  For Erin

  Acknowledgments:

  I am deeply indebted to the editors and publishers who've brought out my work over the years: Ellen Datlow; Gordon Van Gelder; David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer; Nick Mamatas; Sean Wallace; Andrew Fuller; Martin Sust; Paweł Ziemkiewicz; and John Betancourt. I'm tremendously honored to become part of the Night Shade Books authors' line—thank you, Jason and Jeremy.

  Thank you to Cory & Catska Ench and the Ench Gallery.

  I wish to express profound gratitude to the following individuals for their support in writing and life: Professor Bradley Steiner, Ben Andrews,

  Chellemiko, C.E Chaffin, John Langan, and Jody Linn Rose.

  Special thanks to my family: Barbara and Erin Baar; Jason & William Barron; Alison and Prakash Stirret; and Leah and Hun Ling Zhu.

  OLD VIRGINIA

  On the third morning I noticed that somebody had disabled the truck. All four tires were flattened and the engine was smashed. Nice work.

  I had gone outside the cabin to catch the sunrise and piss on some bushes. It was cold; the air tasted like metal. Deep, dark forest at our backs with a few notches for stars. A rutted track wound across a marshy field into more wilderness. All was silent except for the muffled hum of the diesel generator behind the wood shed.

  "Well, here we go," I said. I fired up a Lucky Strike and congratulated my pessimistic nature. The Reds had found our happy little retreat in the woods. Or possibly, one of my boys was a mole. That would put a pretty bow on things.

  The men were already spooked—Davis swore he had heard chuckling and whispering behind the steel door after curfew. He also heard one of the doctors gibbering in a foreign tongue. Nonsense, of course. Nonetheless, the troops were edgy, and now this.

  "Garland? You there?" Hatcher called from the porch in a low voice. He made a tall, thin silhouette.

  "Over here." I waited for him to join me by the truck. Hatcher was my immediate subordinate and the only member of the detail I'd personally worked with. He was tough, competent and a decade my junior—which made him twice as old as the other men. If somebody here was a Red, I hoped to God it wasn't him.

  "Guess we're hoofing it," he said after a quick survey of the damage.

  I passed him a cigarette. We smoked in contemplative silence. Eventually I said, "Who took last watch?"

  "Richards. He didn't report any activity."

  "Yeah." I stared into the forest and wondered if the enemy was lurking. What would be their next move, and how might I counter? A chill tightened the muscles in the small of my back, reminded me of how things had gone wrong during '53 in the steamy hills of Cuba. It had been six years, and in this business a man didn't necessarily improve with age. I said, "How did they find us, Hatch?"

  "Strauss may have a leak."

  It went without saying whatever our military scientists were doing, the Reds would be doing bigger and better. Even so, intelligence regarding this program would carry a hefty price tag behind the Iron Curtain. Suddenly this little field trip didn't seem like a babysitting detail anymore.

  Project TALLHAT was a Company job, but black ops. Dr. Herman Strauss had picked the team in secret and briefed us at his own home. Now here we were in the wilds of West Virginia standing watch over two of his personal staff while they conducted unspecified research on a senile crone. Doctors Porter and Riley called the shots. There was to be no communication with the outside world until they had gathered sufficient data. Upon return to Langley, Strauss would handle the debriefing. Absolutely no one else inside the Company was to be involved.

  This wasn't my kind of operation, but I had seen the paperwork and recognized Strauss' authority. Why me? I suspected it was because Strauss had known me since the first big war. He also knew I was past it, ready for pasture. Maybe this was his way to make me feel important one last time. Gazing at the ruined truck and all it portended, I started thinking maybe good old Herman had picked me because I was expendable.

  I stubbed out my cigarette and made some quick decisions. "When it gets light, we sweep the area. You take Robey and Neil and arc south; I'll go north with Dox and Richards. Davis will guard the cabin. We'll establish a quarter mile perimeter; search for tracks."

  Hatcher nodded. He didn't state the obvious flaw—what if Davis was playing for the other team? He gestured at the forest. "How about an emergency extraction? We're twenty miles from the nearest traveled road. We could make it in a few hours. I saw some farms; one will have a phone—"

  "Hatch, they destroyed the vehicle for a reason. Obviously they want us to walk. Who knows what nasty surprise is waiting down that road? For now we stay here, fortify. If worse comes to worst, we break and scatter. Maybe one of us will make it to HQ."

  "How do we handle Porter and Riley?"

  "This has become a security issue. Let's see what we find; then I'll break the news to the good doctors."

  My involvement in Operation TALLHAT was innocent—if you can ever say that about Company business. I was lounging on an out-of-season New York beach when the telegram arrived. Strauss sent a car from Virginia. An itinerary; spending money. The works. I was intrigued; it had been several years since the last time I spoke with Herman.

  Director Strauss said he needed my coolness under pressure, when we sat down to a four-star dinner at his legendary farmhouse in Langley. Said he needed an older man, a man with poise. Yeah, he poured it on all right.

  Oh, the best had said it too – Put his feet to the fire; he doesn't flinch. Garland, he's one cool sonofabitch. Yes indeed, they had said it – thirty years ago. Before the horn rims got welded to my corrugated face and before the arthritis bent my fingers. Before my left ear went dead and my teeth fell out. Before the San Andreas Fault took root in my hands and gave them tremors. It was difficult to maintain deadly aloofness when I had to get up and drain my bladder every hour on the hour. Some war hero. Some Company legend.

  "Look, Roger, I don't care about Cuba. It's ancient history, pal." Sitting across the table from Strauss at his farmhouse with a couple whiskey sours in my belly it had been too easy to believe my colossal blunders were forgiven
. That the encroaching specter of age was an illusion fabricated by jealous detractors of which great men have plenty.

  I had been a great man, once. Veteran of not one, but two World Wars. Decorated, lauded, feared. Strauss, earnest, blue-eyed Strauss, convinced me some greatness lingered. He leaned close and said, "Roger, have you ever heard of MK-ULTRA?"

  And I forgot about Cuba.

  The men dressed in hunting jackets to ward the chill, loaded shotguns for possible unfriendly contact, and scouted the environs until noon. Fruitless; the only tracks belonged to deer and rabbits. Most of the leaves had fallen in carpets of red and brown. It drizzled. Black branches dripped. The birds had nothing to say.

  I observed Dox and Richards. Dox lumbered in plodding engineer boots, broad Slavic face blankly concentrated on the task I had given him. He was built like a tractor; too simple to work for the Company except as an enforcer, much less be a Russian saboteur. I liked him. Richards was blond and smooth, an Ivy League talent with precisely enough cynicism and latent sadism to please the forward thinking elements who sought to reshape the Company in the wake of President Eisenhower's imminent departure. Richards, I didn't trust or like.

  There was a major housecleaning in the works. Men of Richards' caliber were preparing to sweep fossils such as myself into the dustbin of history.

  It was perfectly logical after a morbid fashion. The trouble had started at the top with good old Ike suffering a stroke. Public reassurances to the contrary, the commander in chief was reduced to a shell of his former power. Those closest saw the cracks in the foundation and moved to protect his already tottering image. Company loyalists closed ranks, covering up evidence of the president's diminished faculties, his strange preoccupation with drawing caricatures of Dick Nixon. They stood by at his public appearances, ready to swoop in if he did anything too embarrassing. Not a happy allocation of human resources in the view of the younger members of the intelligence community.

  That kind of duty didn't appeal to the Richardses of the world. They preferred to cut their losses and get back to slicing throats and cracking codes. Tangible objectives that would further the dominance of U.S. intelligence.

  We kept walking and not finding anything until the cabin dwindled to a blot. The place had been built at the turn of the century; Strauss bought it for a song, I gathered. The isolation suited his nefarious plots. Clouds covered the treetops, yet I knew from the topographical maps there was a mountain not far off; a low, shaggy hump called Badger Hill. There would be collapsed mines and the moldered bones of abandoned camps, rusted hulks of machinery along the track, and dense woods. A world of brambles and deadfalls. No one came out this way anymore; hadn't in years.

  We rendezvoused with Hatcher's party at the cabin. They hadn't discovered any clues either. Our clothes were soaked, our moods somber, although traces of excitement flickered among the young Turks—attack dogs sniffing for a fight.

  None of them had been in a war. I'd checked. College instead of Korea for the lot. Even Dox had been spared by virtue of flat feet. They hadn't seen Soissons in 1915, Normandy in 1945, nor the jungles of Cuba in 1953. They hadn't seen the things I had seen. Their fear was the small kind, borne of uncertainty rather than dread. They stroked their shotguns and grinned with dumb innocence.

  When the rest had been dispatched for posts around the cabin I broke for the latrine to empty my bowels. Close race. I sweated and trembled and required some minutes to compose myself. My knees were on fire, so I broke out a tin of analgesic balm and rubbed them, tasting the camphor on my tongue. I wiped beads of moisture from my glasses, swallowed a glycerin tablet and felt as near to one hundred percent as I would ever be.

  Ten minutes later I summoned Doctor Porter for a conference on the back porch. It rained harder, shielding our words from Neil who stood post near an oak.

  Porter was lizard-bald except for a copper circlet that trailed wires into his breast pocket. His white coat bore stains and smudges. His fingers were blue-tinged with chalk dust. He stank of antiseptic. We were not friends. He treated the detail as a collection of thugs best endured for the sake of his great scientific exploration.

  I relayed the situation, which did not impress him much. "This is why Strauss wanted your services. Deal with the problem," he said.

  "Yes, Doctor. I am in the process of doing that. However, I felt you might wish to know your research will become compromised if this activity escalates. We may need to extract."

  "Whatever you think best, Captain Garland." He smiled a dry smile. "You'll inform me when the moment arrives?"

  "Certainly."

  "Then I'll continue my work, if you're finished." The way he lingered on the last syllable left no doubt that I was.

  I persisted, perhaps from spite. "Makes me curious about what you fellows are up to. How's the experiment progressing? Getting anywhere?"

  "Captain Garland, you shouldn't be asking me these questions." Porter's humorless smile was more reptilian than ever.

  "Probably not. Unfortunately since recon proved inconclusive I don't know who wrecked our transport or what they plan next. More information regarding the project would be helpful."

  "Surely Doctor Strauss told you everything he deemed prudent."

  "Times change."

  "TALLHAT is classified. You're purely a security blanket. You possess no special clearance."

  I sighed, and lighted a cigarette. "I know some things. MK-ULTRA is an umbrella term for the Company's mind control experiments. You psych boys are playing with all kinds of neat stuff—LSD, hypnosis, photokinetics. Hell, we talked about using this crap against Batista. Maybe we did."

  "Indeed. Castro was amazingly effective, wasn't he?" Porter's eyes glittered. "So what's your problem, Captain?"

  "The problem is the KGB has pretty much the same programs. And better ones from the scuttlebutt I pick up at Langley."

  "Oh, you of all people should beware of rumors. Loose lips had you buried in Cuba with the rest of your operatives. Yet here you are."

  I understood Porter's game. He hoped to gig me with the kind of talk most folks were polite enough to whisper behind my back, make me lose control. I wasn't biting. "The way I figure it, the Reds don't need TALLHAT . . .unless you're cooking up something special. Something they're afraid of. Something they're aware of, at least tangentially, but lack full intelligence. And in that case, why pussyfoot around? They've got two convenient options—storm in and seize the data or wipe the place off the map."

  Porter just kept smirking. "I am certain the Russians would kill to derail our project. However, don't you think it would be more efficacious for them to use subtlety? Implant a spy to gather pertinent details, steal documents. Kidnap a member of the research team and interrogate him; extort information from him with a scandal. Hiding in the woods and slicing tires seems a foolish waste of surprise."

  I didn't like hearing him echo the bad thoughts I'd had while lingering in the outhouse. "Exactly, Doctor. The situation is even worse than I thought. We are being stalked by an unknown quantity."

  "Stalked? How melodramatic. An isolated incident doesn't prove the hypothesis. Take more precautions if it makes you happy. And I'm confident you are quite happy; awfully boring to be a watchdog with nothing to bark at."

  It was too much. That steely portion of my liver gained an edge, demanded satisfaction. I took off the gloves. "I want to see the woman."

  "Whatever for?" Porter's complacent smirk vanished. His thin mouth drew down with suspicion.

  "Because I do."

  "Impossible!"

  "Hardly. I command six heavily armed men. Any of them would be tickled to kick down the door and give me a tour of your facilities." It came out much harsher than I intended. My nerves were frayed and his superior demeanor had touched a darker kernel of my soul. "Doctor Porter, I read your file. That was my condition for accepting this assignment; Strauss agreed to give me dossiers on everyone. You and Riley slipped through the cracks after Caltech. I guess the
school wasn't too pleased with some of your research or where you dug up the financing. Then that incident with the kids off campus. The ones who thought they were testing diet pills. You gave them, what was it? Oh yes—peyote! Pretty strange behavior for a pair of physicists, eh? It follows that Unorthodox Applications of Medicine and Technology would snap you up after the private sector turned its back. So excuse my paranoia."

  "Ah, you do know a few things. But not the nature of TALLHAT? Odd."

  "We shall rectify that momentarily."

  Porter shrugged. "As you wish, Mr. Garland. I shall include your threats in my report."

  For some reason his acquiescence didn't really satisfy me. True, I had turned on the charm that had earned me the title "Jolly Roger," yet he had caved far too easily. Damn it!

  Porter escorted me inside. Hatcher saw the look on my face and started to rise from his chair by the window. I shook my head and he sank, fixing Porter with a dangerous glare.

  The lab was sealed off by a thick steel door, like the kind they use on trains. Spartan, each wall padded as if a rubber room in an asylum. It reeked of chemicals. The windows were blocked with black plastic. Illumination seeped from a phosphorescent bar on the table. Two cots. Shelves, cabinets, a couple boxy machines with needles and tickertape spools. Between these machines an easel with indecipherable scrawls done in ink. I recognized some as calculus symbols. To the left, a poster bed, and on the bed a thickly wrapped figure propped by pillows. A mummy.

  Doctor Riley drifted in, obstructing my view—he was an aquamarine phantom, eyes and mouth pools of shadow. As with Porter, a copper circlet winked on his brow. "Afternoon, Captain Garland. Pull up a rock." His accent was Midwestern nasal. He even wore cowboy boots under his grimy lab coat.

  "Captain Garland wants to view the subject," Porter said.

  "Fair enough!" Riley seemed pleased. He rubbed his hands, a pair of disembodied starfish in the weirding glow. "Don't fret, Porter. There's no harm in satisfying the captain's curiosity." With that, the lanky man stepped aside.