The Tindalos Asset

The Tindalos Asset
Author	Caitlin R. Kiernan
Language	English
Series	Tinfoil Dossier
Genre(s)	Cthulhu Mythos
Publisher	Tor.com
Release Date	October 13, 2020
Pages	174
Preceded by	Black Helicopters

The Tindalos Asset is a novella by Caitlin R. Kiernan, the third and final installment in their Tinfoil Dossier series, which blends the Cthulhu Mythos with the government conspiracy thriller genre. It was published by Tor in 2020.

The story focuses on Ellison Nicodemo, a former assassin for an occult secret agency who is brought in to deal with the return of a serial killer who may be plotting to usher in the apocalypse.

It draws on the work of H. P. Lovecraft and other Mythos writers, especially Frank Belknap Long and his short story "The Hounds of Tindalos".

Organizations

Albany: A secret agency dedicated to fighting occult horrors, sometimes referred to as Dreamland. Its headquarters are a "sprawling labyrinth of fluorescent lights, subway tile, and narrow, winding corridors" located "two hundred feet beneath the Erastus Corning Tower" in Albany, New York. One of its agents comments, "[W]hat Albany wants, Albany gets, and they get it one way or another, by hook or by crook or courtesy a few enhanced interrogation techniques.” It has never trusted computers for sensitive information, relying instead on typewriters and carbon copies. Albany has an office, the Directorate of Information Retention and Disposal (DIRD), nicknamed Fort Fate, whose unofficial motto is Noli nuntium necare: "Don’t kill the messenger."

Barbican Estate: A rival, London-based occult agency that sometimes cooperates with Albany; for example, planning a missile strike on a neo-Nazi gathering after Ellison Nicodemo exfiltrates a would-be human sacrifice from the location.

X: An occult agency run by a woman named Julia Set, which is often at odds with Albany. An Albany agent reflects that as bad as it would be to fall into the hands of Barbican, it would be "much worse yet" to be captured by "the Julia Set crowd." X are believers in chaos theory; Ellison Nicodemo is sent to Taiwan at one point to kill an agent of X, a Chinese chaos theorist. When Nicodemo infiltrates the occult neo-Nazi group Schwarze Sonne, "a pair of Julia Set agents show up with their own agenda" and blow her cover, resulting in a bloodbath.

Schwarze Sonne: "Black Sun", an Austrian neo-Nazi group, a "latter-day offshoot of the Thule-Gesellschaft." They sell heroin to fund things like "expeditions to find the Aryan descendants of Atlantis" or "trying to open a doorway to Hyberborea." Its members are werewolves, as Nicodemo finds out when she infiltrates a gathering they have at "some billionaire’s mansion on the Griebnitzsee" in Potsdam.

Characters

• Franklin Babineaux: A "skinny kid from New Orleans" on the Atlanta police force, he's the first one into the Atlanta warehouse.
• Patrick Breen: A leader of the Donner Party, he's said by Six Pack Charlie to have found the Mother Hydra idol in the Rocky Mountains.
• Charlie Six Pack: He spent "seven years up at Folsom for robbery and a concealed weapons charge."
• The dark man: A stranger who looks after Abishag Talog after her mother drowns herself. He is "born in the Egyptian desert," and "knows the languages of sand dunes and scorpions, of serpents and of men." He is Jehosheba Talog's father.
• Emil Duarte: Born c. 2078, and "went to school in some faraway dry place." Known as Old Duarte in 2151, he has a house on Cemetery Hill on Brooklyn Isle.
• Jack Dunaway: An agent of Albany, a "thin, officious prick of a man whom the Signalman had loathed."
• Ecaterina: Marquardt's companion, whom she met in Paris in 1951. She is a "very pretty woman, dark-eyed and her hair black as coal"; she comes from Bucharest and speaks with a heavy Romanian accent. She is apparently a werewolf.
• Maxie Honeycutt: A "skinny little man" in Los Angeles in the 1960s whose friends call him Paranoid Jack. He is often involved in "questionable business ventures with nefarious individuals," but declines a request from Charlie Six Pack to look after the Mother Hydra idol.
• Inamorata: Born c. 2124, "island born and island raised"--meaning Brooklyn Isle Proper. Geli Núñez's lover.
• Frank Belknap Long: The author of record of "The Hounds of Tindalos".
• Adelie Marquardt: A striking, handsome woman, nearly six feet tall with grey eyes and an easy smile.
• Absolon Thibault Moreau: A Frenchman "who’d been a student of Helena Blavatsky’s when he was hardly more than a boy," who was obsessed with sunken continents and "believed that the god Dagon had originated in R’lyeh." He buys the Mother Hydra idol from Schaeffer sometime after 1929. He is later arrested for murder after eight bodies are discovered buried on his estate near Avignon, France; there are allegations of cannibalism.
• Black Jack Mortensen: An associate of Albany and a contemporary of The Signalman.
• Ellison Joanne Nicodemo: Born April 1987 in Cleveland, Ohio. She is one of the rare people with a "natural affinity" for the Hounds of Tindalos, "born predisposed, kinda like a living, breathing...dog whistle what only these things can hear.” Around 1999, she sees her Hound for the first time, when it runs off her abusive stepfather. In 2005, she is recruited by Albany because of her ability to manifest the Hound.
• Geli Núñez: Born c. 2132. She is a sanderling--stalking the drift lines for whatever refuse the tides fetch up--and an “innate twelfth-hierarchy intuitive,” which means "she often knows things that she shouldn’t know." She is Inamorata's lover; her "auburn hair shines like a new copper pot."
• Ptolema: Another member of "Barbican's freakshow". (She is a major character in Kiernan's Black Helicopters.)
• Mackenzie Regan: An agent of Albany. Recruited by Albany straight out of Quantico. Ellison Nicodemo thinks, "She’s too pretty...too young and fresh-faced, entirely too sober and unscarred, someone who would look more at home teaching elementary school than running with the likes of the Signalman." She is "not really one for drinking on the job"--or off it, either. She survives a plane crash over Monument Valley in 2018 "at the cost of an eye, her left leg below the knee, and a couple of fingers."
• Claude Schaeffer: A French archeologist who led the excavation of Ugarit at Ras Shamra. He finds the fetish there, which he labels "Mother Hydra".
• Julia Set: The leader of the occult agency X.
• Immacolata Sexton: An agent of Barbican Estate who is thought to be able to operate across time; it's suggested that she, and not Frank Belknap Long, is the true author of "The Hounds of Tindalos". (She has a larger role in Kiernan's Agents of Dreamland.)
• The Signalman: An agent of Albany from Birmingham, Alabama; his first name is Quentin. The partner (and sometimes lover) of Ellison Nicodemo; later partnered with Mackenzie Regan. Has a reputation as "one of the last of Albany’s True Believers, a stone-cold MiB, the agency man through and through." Likes old-school country music, like Kitty Wells and Connie Francis. There's nothing he hates more than cemeteries. (The Signalman plays a central role in all three books in Kiernan's Tinfoil Dossier.)
• Nell Snow: A "face-stealing ghoul-human hybrid," or possibly just a sleeper agent constructed by Barbican Estate. (The ghoul-connected Snow family recurs in Kiernan's fiction; see "Pickman's Other Model", Low Red Moon, etc.)
• Esmé Symes: A psychic who works with the Atlanta Police Department. She was born Esther Simon, "the youngest daughter of an evangelical minister." After leading police to the great white shark in an Atlanta warehouse, she hangs herself with an extension cord a week later.
• Abishag Talog: The mother of Jehosheba Talog, born in September 1962. "Her eyes are the blue-green of shallow saltwater on a freezing day. Her hair is the color of bone char."
• Jehosheba Talog: A Welsh serial killer, born in August 1973, who "wants to wake up Great Cthulhu and flood the whole damn world." Her "skin is the color of fog," and her "eyes shine like polished copper pennies"; they are "the star-specked midnight eyes of the dark man."
• Kristall Weber: A “former double agent for the BND and GRU with ties to X" who double-crosses Albany. She does "business in retro-engineered Zeta-Reticulan tech and backside exo-trafficking." The Signalman arranges for Nicodemo to assassinate her "before she defects to Julia Set and makes it out of the States."

Timeline

(Note: The various sightings of the Mother Hydra idol are hard to reconcile. Some reports may be disinformation, there may be more than one idol, or it may have a non-linear progression through time.)

• 1814 BC: The Mother Hydra idol came to Ras Shamra from Egypt, possibly during the reign of Amenemhat III, sometime after this date.
• 1763: The house at 135 Benefit Street is built by a Providence merchant named Stephen Harris.
• 1846: Patrick Breen of the Donner Party supposedly finds the Mother Hydra idol, which tells him to eat the dead members of their party.
• 1888: The Signalman's silver pocket watch manufactured by the Elgin Watch Company in Elgin, Illinois.
• June 30, 1908: The Tunguska explosion.
• 1929: The Mother Hydra idol is "recovered from the ruins at Ras Shamra during Claude Schaeffer’s excavations there."
• March 1929: The short story "The Hounds of Tindalos" published in Weird Tales. There is a rumor that it was planted there by Madame Immacolata as "temporally retroactive disinformation."
• 1937: The Mother Hydra idol is supposedly dredged up off the coast of Alaska's Prince of Wales Island by the Sweet Leilani, a ship that sank a week later in Cross Sound.
• December 2, 1942: The "first self-sustaining, controlled nuclear chain reaction" is achieved beneath Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. Participants say "they saw a hole in time," and "monsters plural" that "crawled, slid, or wriggled through the cracks that day." J. Robert Oppenheimer names the monsters "Tindalos".
• April 16, 1943: Albert Hoffman accidentally doses himself with LSD in Basel, Switzerland.
• June 1943: The secretary of a DuPont chemical engineer who attended the Stagg Field reaction dies in the same manner that Halpin Chalmers was killed in Frank Belknap Long's story. This is the first of a few dozen identical deaths, seemingly random, over the following years.
• October 28, 1943: The Philadelphia Experiment.
• June 14, 1947: Incident at Roswell, New Mexico.
• 1951: Dr. Adelie Marquardt meets Ecaterina in Paris.
• October 29, 1955: Ysabeau sees the Mother Hydra idol at a party at 135 Benefit Street in Providence, thrown by Marquardt.
• November 5, 1955: The body of a nude young man seen at Marquardt's party is found floating in the Seekonk River.
• December 1956: Ysabeau writes a letter to Ruth about Marquardt's party.
• September 1962: Birth of Abishag Talog.
• November 22, 1963: Lee Harvey Oswald kills John F. Kennedy, or possibly it was "aliens working with the Mafia, the Bilderberg Group, and the RAND Corporation".
• June 6, 1968: Robert Kennedy assassinated in Los Angeles.
• June 1969: Maxie Honeycutt, at the Whiskey a Go Go in West Hollywood, turns down a request from Charlie Six Pack that he babysit the Mother Hydra idol.
• November 27, 1972: The dark man gives Abishag Talog the Mother Hydra idol. Jehosheba Talog conceived.
• August 1973: Birth of Jehosheba Talog.
• July 21, 1975: The Mother Hydra idol photographed in Perth, Australia.
• 1981: The start of the Signalman's career.
• April 1987: Ellison Joanne Nicodemo born.
• 1999: Nicodemo sees the Hound for the first time.
• 2005: Dreamland builds a black sphere as a defense against the Hounds of Tindalos. Nicodemo is recruited by Albany because of her relationship with a Hound.
• 2009: Nicodemo, as Elle Grue, goes to Babelsburg, Germany, to infiltrate a party thrown by the neo-Nazi occultists of Schwarze Sonne, only to discover that they are werewolves.
• January 9, 2011: Nicodemo and The Signalman have sex in an Atlanta safehouse before the assassination attempt on Jehosheba Talog.
• January 10, 2011: Jehosheba Talog foils the assassination attempt and instead captures Nicodemo, sewing her into the carcass of a great white shark as an offering to Mother Hydra.
• January 12, 2011: Esmé Symes leads police to the great white shark in an Atlanta warehouse.
• January 19, 2011: Symes hangs herself with an extension cord.
• 2012: The Signalman pushes the button at Deer Isle (referring to events related in Black Helicopters). The situation is blamed on Jehosheba Talog.
• 2013: Nicodemo sees The Signalman for the last time in five years.
• 2014: Mackenzie Regan recruited by Albany straight out of Quantico.
• 2015: The Signalman almost resigns from Albany after the Salton Sea incident (as detailed in Agents of Dreamland).
• October 2017: A string of attacks by lysianassid amphipods, tiny crustaceans, kills 22 swimmers in the Atlantic Ocean from the Gulf of Mexico to Cape Cod, and maims twice as many more.
• October 30, 2017: A woman in Kittery, Maine, gives birth to a live, foot-long squid.
• November 6, 2017: A live, 65-foot sperm whale appears on the Pennsylvania Turnpike outside Harrisburg, causing a traffic pileup that kills 12.
• November 9, 2017: "Schizophrenic patients at a half dozen New England psychiatric hospitals hallucinated that they were drowning."
• November 23, 2017: Patients at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, experience violent hallucinations "accompanied by the conviction that all humanity would soon perish in a global deluge."
• November 27, 2017: A Seattle man kills his wife and two children and then kills himself in what's described as a "ritual homicide"; he writes "ALMS FOR MOTHER HYDRA" on his living-room wall in his wife's blood. There are "essentially identical incidents in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Baltimore" over the next week, killing 11 more people.
• December 2, 2017: "In Pierre, South Dakota, seventeen people drowned in their sleep." Agents from Albany cover up the incident.
• December 8, 2017: A power plant at Avon Lake, Ohio, is destroyed by "something enormous—or several smaller somethings—" that "slithered out of icy Lake Erie." Again, Albany keeps the event out of the press.
• December 17, 2017: In Wales, the "Tŵr Bach and Tŵr Mawr lighthouses on Ynys Llanddwyn exploded."
• December 21, 2017: Twenty-two people deliberately drown themselves in the Gulf of Mexico near Naples, Florida. Suicide notes talking about "eternal life and never-ending bliss in the loving arms of Dagon" are kept from the media. The same day, 25,000 Twitter accounts post lines from Lewis Carroll's "Lobster Quadrille" and Tennyson's "The Kraken".
• December 22-23, 2017: Reports of "grotesque, fish-like humanoids with glowing red-gold eyes" emerging from the ocean "from Gloucester, Massachusetts, north to Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia."
• December 24, 2017: The Indian Navy reports the sudden emergence--and abrupt vanishing--of a landmass in the South Pacific near 48˚52.6’S 123˚23.6'W. Gove City, Kansas, is inundated by prehistoric marine life, killing every one of its nearly 100 residents. The Signalman and Regan arrive at Gove to seal off the area. The Mother Hydra idol is found in the wreckage.
• January 16, 2018: The Signalman discusses the reactivation of Nicodemo with Mackenzie Regan at the Whiskey a Go Go in West Hollywood.
• January 17, 2018: The Signalman goes to the apartment ofNicodemo to tell her she's been reactivated.
• January 18, 2018: A plane carrying The Signalman, Nicodemo, and Regan floods with seawater and goes down over Monument Valley, Utah. Nicodemo is held captive by Jehosheba Talog. Telog is shot and killed by Nicodemo.
• January 19, 2018: Regan is interrogated in Dreamland.
• February 19, 2018: A funeral service is held for The Signalman at the Cedar Grove Baptist Church east of Birmingham, Alabama.
• June 7, 2028: Nicodemo talks to a therapist in Albany, New York.
• 2132: Birth of Geli Núñez
• April 2151: The Mother Hydra idol found on the Isle of Brooklyn Proper.