New Tales of the Yellow Sign Read online

  Apr 11. Given subject’s fearful personality, deem further surveillance near apartment excessively risky. Instead frequent target site at subject’s usual arrival times.

  Subject arrives slightly earlier than usual. Initiates talk of comics. I ask him about references on his site to a published comic book he may be working on. Subject is evasive, claims to be superstitious. Once nearly had publication deal but it fell thru. He then felt dumb for telling all his friends about it. I ask him if it’s what he’s working on in portfolio. He says sort of: contains his rough sketches (or layouts, as they are apparently called), which he’ll then redraw as full-page (originals oversized, then shrunk down). Discussion diverges into printing technicalities, which he is just learning. Full bleed, CMYK, paper stocks, POD, various options for electronic publication. Attempts to re-steer interview to contents of book deftly deflected.

  Apr 12. Attempt later arrival. Tactic rewarded: subject is in back (washroom facilities) when I enter. Portfolio sitting out on table. I flip it open. Glimpsed sketch may refer to text: a face that may be a mask, or may be monstrous. Subject returns from washroom. Elect to play it bold, laugh, flirt, tell him I was tired of waiting to look at his stuff. For a moment fear I have overplayed hand and will be forced to hand off case. Subject appears jumpy, autonomic responses elevated. Question whether exposure to text has exaggerated subject’s psychological condition. Steph teases subject, tells him he should be grateful anyone is interested in his stuff. Subject calms down. Removes portfolio from table. Promises he’ll show me when it’s good. I back off.

  Steph has free movie tickets she can’t use. Some action movie neither of us have heard of. Steph takes charge. Before we know it, subject and I are committed to go to this together.

  As per regulations, I review ethical guidelines regarding subject-0fficer romantic contact. Resolve to proceed not only with propriety, but utmost appearance of same.

  Apr 13-15. Subject does not appear at target site. Surveillance of home now deemed too risky. Request for additional observers pending.

  Apr 16. Date night. Experience increases subject’s agitation. Film is terrible. Audience of free ticket holders restive and rude. Apparently there is entire subculture of ticket scammers who obsessively monitor opportunities to attend press screenings. They talk (during screening!), throw popcorn, argue with critics. Subject apologizes for this as if evening was his idea. Afterwards we go to a chain coffee place near the cinema. He says he is almost ready to show me the book. Attempt to balance encouragement with desire not to seem suspiciously over-interested. Suspicions might be characterized as low to nonexistent. (Caveat: subject difficult to read.) Awkward moment when he asks if he can escort me home. Dissemble as best I can. He attempts kiss when parting on subway. My response less than adroit. Subject appears hurt.

  Profile must be completed before ethical transgression occurs.

  Apr 17. While at target site, receive phone call from subject. Invites me to his place next night, to see the work. Deadline will spur him to finish, he says.

  Apr 18. Arrive at subject’s apartment with bottle of wine (for verisimilitude, is bargain-priced, not very good). Subject visibly agitated. A strong match for five of the eight classic symptoms of text exposure, possible for two more, negative only on the blink test. He shows me the comic.

  It is based on the text. A modern-day interpretation of the play, rendered as scenester soap opera. Occasional flashes back to the original story set on the alien world of Hastur. Conceit is that modern Torontonians caught in cycle of eternal recurrence, reenacting unawares the terrible events of the play. The coffee shop, Profundity, appears renamed, as Hali (in the original, the name of the fog-wrapped lake beside which the action occurs.)

  Subject has flipped the genders. Two main characters, Cam and Craig, fall for a mysterious girl who comes into Hali. She is called only the Stranger. Cam and Craig try to resist girl because each is aware of the other’s interest in her. She introduces them to a forbidden text. They fall for her, fall out. Stranger exerts a growing influence over them. Drives them apart. She sleeps with both of them, winds up choosing the confident, handsome one (Craig) over the introverted, sensitive one (Cam, the obvious author stand-in.) Cam grows increasingly obsessed with her. Becomes a stalker, follows the two of them around. Realizes that something is happening to her face. That she isn’t human, it isn’t a face. Trails them to subway station. Confronts her, grabbing her, trying to tear her mask off. But it isn’t a mask. In the struggle, Craig and the Stranger are knocked onto the tracks. Craig hits third rail and is electrocuted (which, incidentally, is less likely to happen on Toronto system than portrayed here.) The train comes in. The doors open. Inside the train is not the inside of a train but the alien landscape of Hastur. The Stranger is waiting inside to bear Cam away, punishing him for his undefined sins.

  Subject watches me read, anxious for my reaction. Calibrating my performance while at same time executing mental defense routines versus text contamination proves highly challenging. Mustering required effort, I conceal my revulsion at the obscenity of its otherworldly decadence. I ask myself: what would my character do? She likes dark and gothy things and isn’t so bright and is attracted to him. Once mentally stabilized, I gush at him: enthralling, weird, haunting. Subject appears pleased by this response.

  Taking a risk, I ask him if it isn’t based on something, because it seems like a free adaptation, but of a source I’m not familiar with.

  Bizarre claims follow, establishing depth of subject’s delusions. He claims based on a book long publicly available, published 1895, in print in various editions, available in free (public domain) ebook format on the Internet. Not suppressed at all, with only its relative literary obscurity to keep it from all mankind.

  The delusion is intricate, detailed, and airtight in its internal logic.

  Conclusion: subject deeply, irretrievably enmeshed in Text Psychosis.

  Extrication from evening’s romantic overtones simpler than feared. Subject hints at his romantic intentions but waits for me to make first move. I play it as if his comic so effectively horrific that mood for anything else set aside. (Were I in this situation as myself I’d tell him that the act of presenting a work so rife with misogyny, self-loathing and violence as a courting offering ought to warn any halfway mindful woman to flee from him at maximum velocity.) The potential for coupling deflated, the evening winds to an early halt. When exiting I sustain his engagement with a few encouraging signals.

  Aubret’s comic will be scanned in to computer to be colored by another artist. Until then, his pages are the only copy.

  Apr 19. Surveillance window curtailed by need for personal time. Report filed separately. Though need to act quickly given state of completion of subject’s work is a factor, a brief cool-down period will heighten my upper hand in power dynamic with subject.

  Apr 20. Receive call from subject. He proposes tour of used bookstores to find a copy of the Text. Quest is of course preposterous but will grant opportunity for what must be done.

  We meet at Profundity, walk to St. Andrew station. When lights of train appear in tunnel I push subject onto the tracks. I have positioned us into established camera blind spot. As per training I exit scene in calm, unhurried fashion, attracting no attention as I ride escalators to surface. Out of caution, walk to subject’s apartment in circuitous scatter pattern. Enter suspect premises using copied key (impression made during previous date night.) Quickly locate portfolio, check to make sure all pages are present. Remove his computer’s main hard drive and take his external backup. Pages burned. Hard drives held on site for retrieval by electronic intelligence department.

  News reports of subject’s termination refer only to an unknown suspect, witness reports sought by police, no description given. At this early juncture it appears as if cover is maintained. Necessity of request to headquarters for extraordinary intervention into judicial process currently rated CODE BLUE / LOWEST RATING.

  Apr 21. CAR
RYOVER TO NEW FILE: As per previous personal time report, home situation becoming untenable. Likely that Mother found and read this report or others. Signs of secondary Text Psychosis upgraded from incipient to active. She confronts me with contents of rifled blackbox. Claims my ID is homemade, my badge a brass toy. A Class Two delusion. Best current presumption says she is unaware of my role in subject neutralization. In a classic inversion technique, she threatens psych evaluation.

  Absent contrary instructions, will treat Mother as new subject.

  Gaps

  Then you’re driving a car. You haven’t seen it before. It’s a very old Pontiac, like from the seventies old, enormous compared to today’s models, green inside and out. The steering wheel fights you with every adjustment. It smells like pipe smoke.

  Amy sits in the back. She tucks a blue blanket over a little girl’s shoulders. You want to see more but have to keep your eyes mostly on the road.

  The mammoth car hogs all of its lane. Two-lane highway slices through a forest. Black-barked, leafless branches whiz by. Patches of snow resist the march of spring.

  You sneak another backwards glance. Dried tears trail down the girl’s red cheeks. She’s five or six. Blond hair, searing blue eyes, a space between her teeth. Freckles.

  It comes to you that you and Amy have kidnapped her. With the realization comes a dropping sensation in your gut.

  You suffer from gaps. Lately they’re getting worse. Suddenly you’ll be somewhere, doing something. You’ll be able to search back for your most immediately previous memory, but between them will be a gaping space where a bunch of stuff happened, which you don’t remember. Bits of context might float up into your mind, or they might not. Instinct, or maybe a buried, vital understanding, tells you never to admit this to anyone. So instead you play along until you figure out more or less what occurred during your most recent gap.

  This one though is a doozy. You want to run the car off the road. Ask Amy what the hell she was thinking. How she convinced you to do this. Does she want to keep the kid? Are you rescuing her from a terrible situation? It could be a ransom thing. Does that feel like the Amy you know? You have the sense that this has tripped you up before. Character judgments can turn out badly wrong when based on selective information.

  The consequences for kidnapping strike you like a fist. This is bad. Worse (you think) than anything you’ve ungapped to before. How did she get you to do it? Was it even her idea? For all you know, this could be your fault. Perspiration flash-floods out your pores. Your mouth goes desert dry.

  You grope for leading questions. They have to be clear enough to get you the info you need, but glancing enough so’s they don’t tip her off. But what if you’ve already gapped, and asked them already, and then gapped again? What if you ask them, get the answers, but flash ahead to your next gap and can’t access them?

  Despite superficial resemblances, this isn’t Alzheimer’s. You’re way too young and the symptoms don’t fit. After those initial vertiginous moments when you exit from the gap, you can remember recent events with perfect lucidity—except for huge hunks of missing time. Whereas Alzheimer’s patients, from what you understand, lose short-term memory formation, period, and years and years worth of later recollections, period. This is something different.

  The book. You shouldn’t have read the book.

  You didn’t intend to read the book.

  There was a meme that went around, when word got out there was this old play that drove people nuts. Some Russian asshole found it and posted it to the net. There was this symbol associated with it. They called the meme yellow-rolling. You got a link to click on, a seemingly innocent URL on some other topic entirely. Then as a prank, you find yourself looking at the text of the book. If you didn’t click away soon enough, you got sucked in and kept reading. That’s what happened to you.

  The gaps started after you read it.

  Did Amy read it too?

  If you’ve ever asked her, the answer got erased.

  You swerve to the shoulder to give berth to an oncoming transport truck.

  “All right back there?” you ask.

  “Just drive,” Amy tells you.

  Okay, she’s pissed. That’s a clue.

  She would either be pissed because:

  This was your plan, and she resents going along with it.

  This was her plan, and you’re messing it up.

  Or regardless of whose plan it is, you could have done something else wrong moments ago.

  You take a shot. “Are you navigating?”

  “Very funny.”

  “Seriously though the kid’s alright. Right?”

  “Why would you ask that?”

  The trees grow denser. The road bends to thread through a rock cut. Rural graffitists have spray-painted its pink quartz surfaces. One team left behind a day-glo version of the Yellow Sign, with gradients and 3D effects, further deconstructed by the steps and juts of the exposed stone.

  You’re sprawled in a musty-smelling futon in the large central room of a cottage. Amy paces, clutching a beer bottle by the neck, not drinking from it.

  The place is totally unfamiliar, so unless you’ve gapped every single time you’ve been here before, for the entire length of your stay in each case, you’ve never been here before. It used to be nice but hasn’t been kept up. You might say more of a hunting lodge than a cottage. Varnished plank walls set the rustic tone. An empty gun rack hangs beside a stone fireplace. Mud-colored throw rugs dot the parquet floor. A deer head looks down from one wall, a moose head from the opposite. In their antlers, spiders trap flies.

  You don’t see the kid. You want to ask about the kid. But you can’t ask because if something’s happened to her, or you’ve gapped way past the entire incident with the kidnapping, you’d be giving yourself away.

  How can Amy love you, if you’re not actually present half the time? If you’re continually trying to hide the holes in your awareness? Has she noticed, and she’s trying to hide that, so that both of you are constantly masked from the other?

  “They should have called by now,” she says. She sets down the beer, checks her phone.

  “Do we get reception here?”

  She checks the screen. “Fuck!” Did this not occur to her? You decide this is definitely her plan. She’s in command. She’s the one waiting for the call. You see a big bedroom, a bathroom, a closed door to what might be a smaller bedroom. The kid’s probably in there sleeping. You weigh the risks of a peek-in.

  An old doubt crystallizes. During the gaps, or during the events that occur during the gaps, you’re still doing stuff, making decisions, and appearing to others as much yourself as you are now, during the times you consistently remember. In those times, is it possible that you have full recollection of everything, including the previous gaps? In other words, is the you that takes charge during the gaps the real you, the one retaining full will and volition, leaving your current self as merely a shadow?

  “No bars?” you ask.

  Amy paces faster. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

  “What do we do?”

  She roams the room, holding her phone up, casting for bars. Nothing. “Shit fuck damn.”

  “Wait. If we’re the kidnappers, why are we waiting for them to call us?” The regret sinks in before the words have left your mouth. They hang in the air.

  She looks at you like you’ve lost your mind. Then she rationalizes away from the truth to a more acceptable alternative reality: “That’s so incredibly not fucking funny right now.”

  You’re perching on the side of the girl’s bed. She has the ugly brown and blue quilt tucked up over her head. Feathery snoozing noises escape from the pillow.

  Where’s Amy? You ease up off the bed, so as not to disturb the sleeping kid. You poke your head into the living room, then the rest of the cottage. The sound of waves against shore lap through the room’s silence. No Amy.

  The two of you are already in irredeemably deep shit but if you give the kid back
unharmed, before claiming any ransom, that might help some. You reach for your phone. Of course. No bars here.

  Amy must be off finding a cell tower.

  The floor creaks. You turn. There’s the girl, the quilt wrapped around her shoulders. Her feet are bare and so are her legs. You get mad at Amy for not putting the kid in proper PJs. Thoughtlessness like this is typical of her. That’s a fact your gaps aren’t wide enough to hide.

  The kid’s scared. “Can I have water?”

  You jump up. “Sure, sure.” You find the small kitchen area. There’s no plumbing. Instead you see a large plastic water dispenser. You grab a cup and pour it nearly full. Her small fingers reach for it. She takes a long sip. She hands you back the cup.

  “When can I go home?”

  You don’t know what to tell her. For want of an eloquent gesture, you drink the rest of the water.

  “I want to go home,” the kid says, her voice quieter.

  “Be good, and you will,” you tell her.

  She thinks about this. “I didn’t do nothin bad did I?”

  You pat her blond head. “No of course not, sweetie.”

  She clamps herself onto your leg, hugging you tight. “I want to go home.”

  ***

  You’re running with the girl beside you, through the woods. You wend through rough ground. Tree roots catch your feet. They pull off one of her tiny Velcroed sneakers. You put it back on. Her foot is dirty and scraped. She’s crying. You touch your face. You’ve been crying too. She goes limp in your arms. “I’m tired,” she whispers.

  From the circumstances you’re pretty sure you have to keep on going. Why you’d have to flee Amy isn’t clear but here you are doing it and there has to be a good reason behind that. You pick the girl up. She resists, making herself dead weight.

  “Please, we have to go,” you tell her.

  “Why do we have to go this way?”

  “It’s our best chance,” you guess.

  “They want to hurt me, don’t they?”

  You want to ask her what ‘they’ means but revealing your slender grasp of the situation will upset her way worse.