The Twelve Days of Dagon

Fiction by Sam Thielman

Dear Sir:

I do not know if this will reach you in time. I have built the box, and hoisted its flag, and prayed, but beyond that the arcane rites necessary to the process are unknown to me, or unknown now. Indeed, I confess I had lost faith, like so many, but now you are my only hope, and I have reason to believe that if this reaches you, you will come to my aid. Please, if you read this letter, I entreat you, come to this place and fulfill the purpose for which, I now believe, you have been intended since before the beginning of the world.

I am—or, as my obituary will say, I was, until recently—an assistant professor of anthropology at a liberal arts college (not a university, please) in the Midwest; Ohio, specifically, where I lived with my wife Susan and my child, Willa, a girl, no, now a young woman, whose blindness from birth has kept too many from, in fact, seeing her. That is: capricious, furtive, improbably beautiful, brilliantly funny, occasionally cruel and unserious, utterly lovable and maddening, capable of cutting sarcasm and surprising tenderness within the span of a breath. 

She should have had many suitors.

Instead, she had Mark Walton, a thickheaded young man who worked at the dairy farm. His two greatest pleasures were shooting at the birds that nested in quiet places like pear trees and rose bushes around our little town with his precious .22 rifle, and twisting the arms of smaller boys while he reached into their pockets and stole their allowances. The first time I saw him he was carrying a partridge and the pair of doves, one of which was still struggling.

Susan saw him for what he was before I did. I dismissed him as unworthy and his attentions to Willa beneath notice or contempt, but Susan was wise enough to estimate correctly the discount my beloved daughter had attached to her affections not from blindness, but from loneliness. She knew she was pretty—people treat you differently if you look like something they want, and in ways you might hear or feel even if you were incapable of sight. But she was alone.

Forgive me, I must skip over this next part and simply tell you of the outcome: she was pregnant and inconsolable and again, alone. 

I am not a man prone to rage. I think perhaps I was born without it, in the same way Willa was born without vision. I saw what had happened, and, instead of hot anger, something within me much more vital than blood froze solid. I told Willa and Susan that I was taking a dangerous appointment near the southern coast of Argentina, where the ruins of an indigenous city had been discovered and where I could make notes for a book and a collection of articles that would assure my tenure and the income from publishing. Then, God willing, we would have the necessary money to provide for the child. Willa was not much more than a child herself, after all. It was a ridiculous plan, and a precarious one, but I clung to it as though it was as sure as the sunrise, and for more than one reason.

Susan, in particular, begged me to stay. At the time, I suspected that she knew what I had planned. Now I wonder whether she had some premonition of what would follow. She was mistrustful of the company I had told her I would keep—two old friends, both from a time in my life when I had drunk too much and spoken too freely. She knows I am impressionable and eager to please, sometimes. 

We kept chickens then, three of them, hens we’d bought from the eight-fingered Parisian who drifted into town to do odd jobs and sell odd things, and when I’d finished telling her my mind was made up, she went outside to feed them.

I left after my last class of the semester, late at night on a Friday in mid-December. The tree was decorated, and the wreath was hung on the door; we went to church, where we sang old songs that everyone, even the children, knew by heart. I was not due in Argentina for another ten days, but I did not tell my family this. 

Susan would not see me off, or kiss me goodbye. Willa cried and hugged me and thanked me, and apologized, which broke my heart yet again. Two pairs of birds called to each other, lovers to lovers, in the trees.

Then I got into the taxi and took the 11:15 flight to Chicago, my first connection. By a stroke of good luck, I ran into a friend from our church in the terminal; he was on the same trip. We did not sit together but I made sure he saw me get off in Chicago; I waved goodbye to him as he hurried to make his next flight between little bookstores filled with ugly magazines and sports bars filled with men who kept their gold wedding rings in their wallets.

I dawdled for a while outside a Chinese chain restaurant, then I asked the ticket agent to rebook me on a flight leaving the next morning. She looked puzzled, but was happy to agree; it seemed my scheduled flight to Mexico City was overbooked. I made sure to keep my boarding pass for the original flight.

I walked out of the airport to the long-term parking lot. Here was the bet I had made with myself: if no cars were unlocked, I would rent a hotel room and board the plane to Mexico City the next morning knowing I had done all I could do.

A car was unlocked, of course.

I made careful note of its location in the lot.

Most cars built before the end of the last century are very easy to start without the ignition key, provided you are willing to break the steering column lock. The hardest part was finding a screwdriver exactly seven inches long, so that the security guards would let me take it in my carry-on luggage. I left the airport in my new car, paid the fine for a lost ticket, and made my way south to a suburb of my hometown and a mobile home in that suburb, where a half-dozen geese roosted among plastic bottles and trash bags, and a bedroom in that mobile home, and a pig-faced young man who screamed for help as soon as he saw my face and stopped screaming shortly thereafter.

I filled the tank, obsessively making note of the gas meter’s level. I don’t know why I did that. The parking place next to the one where I had taken the car was open when I returned to the airport. I left $400 in fifty-dollar bills under the mirror flap—I hoped it would be enough to cover the damage I’d done in starting the thing. It wasn’t much to look at, and I thought that perhaps the person I’d borrowed it from could ill afford to spare it while the mechanic worked on it. I wondered if I should leave more.

For a moment I thought, “I’ll write him a check,” and then I laughed, and some spell was broken. It was as if I’d never gotten into the car in the first place. The idea was absurd! Why would I steal a car? It was a dream. It must have been a dream I’d had while I wandered out to the parking lot on my layover.

I checked my watch. I’d been wandering around the parking lot so long it was nearly daybreak, and I wouldn’t need to rent a hotel after all. I’d have to hurry or I’d miss the flight to Mexico City, and then the next leg to São Paulo. I walked back into the airport, dropping the screwdriver into a garbage can half-filled with water bottles in the security line.

“You probably could have kept that,” observed the guard.

“Better safe than sorry,” I said.

I boarded the flight without incident, and I refused to dream.

Again. I refused to dream again.

The flight into Ushuaia was terrifying. The plane did not slowly descend like a dowager walking down stairs, the way American airliners do; it simply dropped out of the sky in a quick corkscrew, pulling up at the last minute to land squealing on the tarmac. The man next to me snored through the entire event. He was South American, I thought at the time; he had a small moustache and protuberant eyes and smiled ingratiatingly when I sat down, but he nodded off quickly after the flight began and did not wake up again. When the bell rang for us to take off our seatbelts, he sprang to life, bustling around his tiny portion of the seat to collect the shoes he’d taken off, the obscure pornography he’d been reading, the coat he’d slung over the seat in front of him (the plane was sparsely booked), and a little dark-green fetish, about the size of a fist, that he’d been rubbing furtively as he slept. I could not tell what it was meant to represent.

“You are the anthropologist, I think!” he said, merrily stuffing his magazine and his miniature into an old leather satchel he produced seemingly from nowhere.

“Yes,” I said, taken aback. I told him my name and he told me his—Luis Tertius, of an old family that had always lived on the island—and we exchanged pleasantries. He was leading the expedition from Ushuaia south toward the Antarctic continent. He would help us find what we were looking for.

“We are so happy to have you,” he said. “Your work, it is very good. It is new.” He paused, as if deciding whether or not it was safe to say: “My patron likes new things.”

It was midsummer in Argentina, and beautiful. We were just over the Chilean border and the weather was brisk but pleasant. All the trees seemed to grow in one direction (“They are the flag trees,” Tertius explained as we strolled toward the hotel) and I could make out a lighthouse in the distance. Swans strolled by us, suddenly, in a small flock, and I grew unaccountably homesick.

Tertius kept up a steady stream of chatter as we made our way to the little hotel. It was more of a hostel, really—whether the beams held up the plaster or the plaster held up the beams, I could not tell, but it was warm and comfortable and a fire was roaring in a fireplace surrounded by some furniture under dust covers. And in the furniture were two of my oldest friends: Arthur Stern, still teaching Spanish at Whalestone, and Liza Machen, once celebrated as a great, if eccentric, semiotician. Now she works as a travel writer, sleeping on couches and scraping together enough money for a plane ticket every few months. 

I put my bags in my room and called Susan. She told me about her day and Willa’s progress and the baby’s latest ultrasound—they’d been to the doctor—and then she said, “Mark Walton is dead. The women from the dairy found him when they got home from the early shift.”

I was shocked. I was actually shocked, because I had forgotten completely.

“I had a dream on the airplane that he died,” I said.

“Did you kill him?” Susan asked.

“In the dream,” I said.

“I love you,” she replied. “I love you no matter what.”

“How is the baby?” I asked.

“It’s a girl,” said Susan. “I’ll talk to you later.” And she hung up.

I went downstairs and talked with Liza and Arthur for a while, about this and that, and the local wine was astonishing. Arthur made himself sick on it very quickly—he’d been a teetotaller when I’d known him, but that was apparently at an end—and stumbled up the stairs to bed to sleep it off.

As he did, several young women in maids’ outfits burst into the lobby, laughing and talking, and one of them produced a little speaker for her cell phone and began to play loud, explicit music that all eight of the others joined her in dancing to. Liza and I laughed, and then (as the man who served as concierge and bellhop and probably cook, as well, came down to shoo them away from the common area) we fell to talking, then to talking deeply, then to confessing, then to kissing, then to kissing deeply, and then it was the next day.

I found myself in the bathroom, staring at the face of someone who had killed a man and slept with a woman who wasn’t his wife in the space of a day, and I wondered, idly, who he was. Through the mirror I could see Liza on the bed, dark brown hair in her mouth and over the pillow, arms wide and unselfconscious, and I wondered whether I should stay here in Argentina, simply never call home again. I doubted Susan would call me. They would have each other and the baby. Perhaps no one would need or want me. Perhaps I could tell them all that I had done, in a letter, and drive them far away from me. What I am asking you to do, in the manner of children down through the centuries, or millennia, is to judge me.

The schooner that promised to take us to the island was crewed by mutes who wrote terse instructions to each other on pads of paper. I thought they were mute, but I was mistaken.

I hadn’t realized that there were schooners still sailing: ships with three or four masts (for us, three) that crept quietly on the wind. It might have been romantic in another life. Instead it was eerie, and we felt frightened and dizzy. The ship itself was a sickly yellow color that seemed to seep into everything. I asked a crewman his name: “Goose,” he wrote. I asked another one—I thought it was another one—the same question. “Goose.” There were nine of them, I think, though they looked exactly alike. Beyond that I will not describe them.

“I’ve seen lights coming from that place,” said Liza, the day we set off. She was looking out over the sea toward a darkness blurred by clouds that grew larger as she spoke. “I’ve been here for weeks now, and it gets struck by lightning way too regularly. Sometimes I see things flying away from it. I’ve got a telescope back on the mainland I’ve been using to watch it, but until now, I haven’t been able to make it out here.”  

“I’m glad you brought that little weird guy,” she added. I had not brought Tertius. But that seemed unimportant. He had no trouble making himself at home among the crew; in fact he and they shared a pidgin language he spoke more readily than Spanish or English, which fascinated Liza.

Arthur and Tertius talked in low voices and played chess, and once I saw Tertius, his eyes locked on Arthur’s, humming softly as Arthur, mouth agape, stared glassily back at him. When they saw me in the doorway, they abruptly stopped whatever they had been doing. The sturdy tension between them held. I tried to ask about the game; they gazed fixedly at me until I went back downstairs.

Late at night, over the two-day voyage to the island, the crew sat on the bridge in a circle, each of them with a flute or a recorder of some kind, and played a huge and haunting melody that sounded to me both worshipful and cruel. I had certainly never heard anything like it before; I hope never to hear anything like it again. I found Arthur, taciturn and wide-eyed, joined in this performance. I had not known he played that instrument, or any instrument.

Did I say island? The city simply stood in the middle of the ocean, a huge onyx cylinder jutting upward at right angles to the water, smooth and black and inhuman, with many towers, crooked extensions of its bulk, bending over the water or each other like flowers beheaded in a vase. No motion was visible anywhere.

The schooner would leave us there and return in a few days, Tertius said. He led us to a sheer, regular face leading about a hundred feet up, which, we could see, was ringed with evenly spaced ridges. We could climb them, like the rungs of a ladder, into the city. I wanted nothing more than to be rid of the hideous boat and its staring, unspeaking crew, but felt a new sting of apprehension. We put plastic garbage bags over our backpacks, filled with food we could not ever imagine eating, and lashed them and our tent into a raft that Arthur and I carried between us. We climbed with surprising ease.

The four of us—Tertius, Arthur, Liza and myself—found ourselves unable to speak for several minutes when we attained the plateau. Scrabbling over the edge like ants onto a tabletop, we saw the vastness of the city, the roads too wide for anything human, the buildings with their enormous doorways, and at the center, a boiling cloud of black smoke that did not dissipate or float. Rather, it shifted and shifted within itself, and at the place where its bulk met the smooth, mirror-like floor of the island, there stood a small arch through which bright sunlight shone.

Every feature of the island, if it was an island, was joined to every other feature without a seam or crack. At first, we thought that nothing moved there, that we stood in a necropolis apparently carved into a single piece of obsidian by hands the size of battleships. But there was some industry happening in our peripheral vision; some sense of things being made and built and distributed that we could not see or hear except fleetingly. Liza knew it, too; we whirled this way and that trying to catch glimpses of activity and snatches of conversation until we were thoroughly disoriented. Once I am certain I heard a baby cry. Liza heard something at the same time, and her face drained of color. I asked her what it was and she would not say. 

We had not realized how dark it had become on our journey south. It should not have been—this was the middle of the summer, and we were there during the region’s month-long day—and yet it was. 

Though the sun did not move, it gave light stingily. The light from the star behind the archway was clean and new, and it was coming closer and closer to us. It was the only beautiful thing in that place, and yet it was terrible, too, as though everything that could have distracted from its gaze had been leached of color, texture, and movement, the better to display it. The edges and corners of things, the half-syllables and recent stillnesses, were all that remained of a city that had not been destroyed or expelled but simply taken and added to this central, undifferentiated perfection. Soon, we would be through, and into the beautiful region beyond, with its huge inhabitant, who might deign to eat us, too. I heard the baby cry again, more clearly now.

I realized with a start that I was walking toward the lighted archway. We all were. I tried not to drop a step; behind me was Tertius, I thought, for I could hear footsteps. Arthur was staring into the light, too, walking next to me in perfect lockstep. I saw out of the corner of my eye a darkened portal into a large building, and Liza was turned toward Arthur. I grabbed her hand and ran.

“No!” shouted many voices from behind us. “No, no, no, no!”

Liza had come back to herself more quickly than I had. She was tearing at Arthur, who was unmovable. When she felt me pull on her hand, she let him go and sprinted ahead of me into the building. I followed her, though I saw little I can now remember—a row of obelisks, mathematically arranged, and a glass sphere at the center of a circular dais. There was a spiral staircase and she fled up it; cursing, I followed her. I chanced a look over my shoulder and realized I had been hearing a noise: the beating of twenty-two hands on the rocks behind us. Tertius was now eleven men, all pounding out a nauseating rhythm on the rocks, one that seemed to enter our heads and direct us toward the light and the creature beyond it. I wrenched my eyes away.

We were not pursued. I don’t know why. After a few minutes there was an unearthly scream. I assume that was Arthur.

We were on the roof of one of the island’s protrusions; it was slanted and raked and slick, so it was impractical to crawl but dangerous to stand. Accordingly, I sat for a while, rocking back and forth, for how long I do not know. Liza left, and Liza returned. She said there was no sign of anyone else, anywhere on the island. The archway was still there, still glowing. We debated whether or not to go through it anyway, realizing that the schooner’s return was improbable, at best.

Here is one thing I have done that I think is not evil or stupid or weak. I do not know your mind but I think you will agree: we did not give up. We stayed on the island. We returned to the place where we had dropped our packs and our tent, and found that all four were still there, and the tent was undamaged. We now had food for each of us for three weeks. At first we thought we would have food for a month, but when we opened Tertius’s pack, we found it stuffed with old scraps of browning paper written in a language neither of us spoke, or had ever seen before.

I have seen him, sometimes, around corners, in the city. He runs away when I call to him. He is wise to run; I have killed a man before and I do not fear it now. And I do not think he is even a man.

We pitched our tent as near to the edge of the island as we could get without falling over its sheer face into the sea. Liza and I have slept together, but we have not had sex again. I keep hoping I will be able to weep, or laugh, but this place dulls me at the rough edges, the places where I am most myself. Liza thinks there is a landmass off the northeastern coast of the island; sometimes I think I can see it. Sometimes I know it is her imagination.

Twice I have seen Tertius in places he cannot be; at the very top of one of the pillar-like buildings, or in quick succession in two places that are very far away from each other, wearing different clothes. Sometimes he is naked. I have taken to naming the apparitions, and I am certain my names are correct, notionally, at least: Quartus. Quintus. Octus. Duodecimus. Centecimus. Time after time I have seen some version of him leap, flat-footed, from the base of one of the towers to its top. He does not fly or hover, he jumps like a striking snake. There is nowhere we are hidden from him, and yet we are not molested.

We have spent the month rationing our food carefully and making a study of the papers in Tertius’s bag. There are figures on them, weird figures, but they correspond to writing on the wall in one of the buildings. There is a story written there; Liza and I have deciphered much of it. 

Liza is stronger than I am. We ate the last of the food this morning. I sleep so much now—often I wake and she is writing, or talking to herself, or to me. Today, this morning, or evening, I woke on my own, and she was gone. The bags were also gone, their contents stacked neatly near our campsite, along with a note, explaining what she had done. I hope the landmass is really there. I hope she makes it home.

Together with her parting missive was the packet of our notes from the translation, which I have summarized. Shall I read it to you? It is a story I think you know.

Near the end of the universe before this one, or perhaps next to it, there were two thinking beings. One was a shadow-creature, a devourer, a thing that ate and ate. It called itself Dagon. I will call him the Goat. Mostly it ate stars and nebulae; it craved information and variety and flattened them all into itself, a non-thing, a gaping void, a nothing with long, thin, knobbled tentacles that reached out, seeking. It lived at the center of a black star that stole light from the sky, and around which whirled a huge galaxy devoid of life or color; everything that was not so simple as to be boring to the light-eater had been eaten. Hydrogen was left, and helium, and a few other elements, in a vast, rotating cloud that spun around the Goat’s black home like the strands of a spider’s web.

The other creature was its opposite—I will call it the Giver, although now I believe there is another, more common name known to everyone on earth. There is some suggestion in Liza’s translations of the etchings on these walls that this being was a constellation, or a system of interlocking galaxies, that developed patterns of thought and understanding through sympathetic frequencies aligning between member stars until it was as though Cassiopeia or the Great Bear had come to life and begun to speak. And so the Giver became attuned to the invisible lines of energy crossing the universe, and knew everything, and could travel everywhere, instantly. Another notion, since, as I say, this comes at the end of their universe: The boundaries between things blurred as everything collapsed in on itself. One day there were ten dogs; perhaps the next day there was only one dog, but one who knew everything known by all ten. Perhaps all people became two people, one man and one woman, in the end, rather than the beginning—all people, all animals, all plants, male and female, polylocated, omniscient. Carbon calls to carbon; like calls to like. The Giver, at the end, was the condensation of all living things, everywhere, all the world’s dogs barking and swans a-swimming and ladies dancing united into a single creature that kept trying to bring back life and variety even as the universe succumbed to the impulses of its entropic counterpart, billennia of light-years away.

But distance becomes shorter, and less important, as a universe goes dark, and as this one collapsed in on itself, faster and faster, the two remaining minds, on its opposite sides, finally met. In the sparkling, generous, failing light, the Goat saw his last meal. In the flat darkness of the singularity that warps space and time, the Giver saw possibility. And so they met, and passed through each other, and in doing so, out of their own, dying, indigo universe and into our own.

The next part is clearer: The pair of them landed on this planet, aeons ago. When the Goat collided with the world, a chunk split off and made the moon, so great was the impact. When the Giver, blood-red and snow-white, touched down gently, the very first creatures in the very first tidal pools lived and breathed and were.

The Goat has made his home at the South Pole, where he receives sacrifices. Past this place, this island, it becomes dark and cruel, and neither heat nor light can escape. This is the outpost, the commercial zone, where slave-trading creatures from all over the universe land with offerings of tribute, lest the Goat choose their home for its next roost after it has swallowed all the life on our world. One day, he will rise up and that will be the end.

But, somehow, he has not yet destroyed us.

You are still on this world, I think.

The Goat has made his home at the bottom of the world, where there is no life, and, brainless, he may eat the creatures sacrificed to him by servants who live like fleas on a rabid animal. Some of them—Tertius and his brethren—originate on other worlds and have simply grown fond of mimicking humans and preying on us as they would on their own creatures; imagine a big-game hunter who goes to Venus and shoots that world’s greatest philosopher for a trophy.

You, too, have attracted a race from outside our stars, and you have struck an alliance with them. What you provide to them I do not know, but it is enough that they are happy with the bargain, and they work for you, in your home. As this thing that has dragged me here must take and take, according to its nature, so you must give. And you must have servants, workers who will help you make your gifts, so that you can distribute them freely and well.

The Goat lives here, at the South Pole.

You live in the North.

It is said that you know when we are sleeping and when we are awake. Do you know if I am bad? I no longer know.

I have written this to you, in explanation, and to request your judgment. I have done two very bad things this year; one, I hope, forgivable, one unforgivable, except by you.

Still, I ask for a present.

I built a mailbox this morning, out of tent poles and an old thermos. For a flag, I have torn a strip from one of my undershirts and dyed it red, although the red is fading to brown. But the flag is up! It calls to you! I do not know if it is too late—it is at least the middle of December, by now. And I do not know what you will decide if you do, but I know that it is in your power to save me from this thing. Please, for the sake of my daughter and my granddaughter, for the sake of my wife, who may yet forgive me, choose wisely!

I await your reply.

I watch the skies for it.

Yours,

[unreadable]