KTLN
A Bay Area video game programmer opens a gateway for a long-sleeping ancient evil and an SFPD detective hears it open—that’s the short pitch for KTLN, my second novel. This is a book about modern magic, amoral startups, asymmetrical evolution, micro-climates/climate change, chosen/rejected family, and the way those things have shaped the Bay Area over the last twenty years (and how they might continue to over the next ten).
What follows is the very beginning of the book, a scene that recurs later towards the end of the book. When we experience it again, however, it’s a little different than we remembered it—POVs shift, details emerge, and everything we’ve learned as a result of reading this novel alters our relationship to this scene.
Chapter 1
0
Three events at once, invisibly connected but only apparent at a distance—like a constellation. Occasionally in life, you can see from that perspective. It’s not something you’re meant to see for long.
1
Witness: a rare intention springs forth from the earth. The mantle rumbles deep under the Pacific, then ruptures. These are not the kind of quakes this part of California is used to.
1.1
Witness: a rare intention springs forth from the water. A wave rises twenty feet in the air. It hits the shore in a tide that rushes inland, past the coast.
1.1.1
Witness: a rare intention springs forth from the ( ). The tide washes two masses of flesh onto the shore. One of them is alive.
1.1.2
The tide recedes. Rodie unwraps the warm white mask from his face. He is alone.
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Name.first.last = Rodrigo Carson Nevarez Age.range = 25, 35
The cool air on his skin feels good. He stands, the water just two feet deep. Up ahead, the middle distance is choked with fog, the shore hidden in grey-white mist. He can almost make out a vague shape ahead. A sturdy, immobile structure. Maybe some sort of tower.
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Rodie can’t remember what got him here. He doesn’t feel troubled, though. Not yet, at least.
The stabbing odor of rotting fish pervades his nostrils. Dead saline flesh. A memory of lavender blooms through his cortex and mercifully floods his sinuses, overtaking the awful odor like a sensory antibody.
He trudges forward, his feet sinking into the muck with each step. The air is muggy and warm. Every draft blows fish rot in his direction—it stings his eyes like the mist. At less than a hundred feet away the tower becomes better defined, with something like gnarled wooden logs protruding from its center.
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He feels his phone buzzing in his pocket. It should be dead after being submerged in ocean water. The buzz erupts several times, in a pattern, like the phone is speaking in Morse code.
Ignoring logic, he checks it. It is, in fact, dead.
Hair.color = black Ethnicity = > 0.5 in {S. America}, < 0.5 in {W. Europe} Body.type = in bottom 50 percentile for height, in bottom 25 percentile for weight
Rodie takes a deep, awful breath, and tries to sprint the remaining distance, running like he doesn’t believe the shore will be there when he reaches it. His muscles don’t want to comply. They feel atrophied—the programming drags on his legs and arms like a weight sapping his strength with each stride.
Country.residence = United States (99% likelihood) Country.origin = United States (79% likelihood)
Suddenly the fog clears. He sees the tower is not what he’d believed it to be. What had looked like gnarled logs were actually parts of human bodies, carefully arranged in such a way as to lose all senseand distinction. A grotesque intertwining of the limbs. Where there’s a concavity, a protrusion closes it. Where there are gaps between fingers and toes, bone fills the vacancy. It’s an assemblage of human parts as though made by someone or something that never saw a living human form. Like the work of some extraterrestrial biologist hypothesizing on possibilities. This entangled mass is made of bodies, but is hardly a representation of humanity.
But the thing that really tears open his soul are the eyes: serene and brown, set against mocha skin. The eyes look somehow alive, interrogating him, even as their bearer lies empty of consciousness. There’s something wrong with the lips on that face but he daren’t get close enough to see.
Those eyes, they know him.
They recognize him.
Forgive me…
He stops in his tracks and falls to the sand, as though to get any closer would infect him with a certainty he’s not prepared to receive. When at last willful disbelief can no longer deny the fact that these nine sacrifices are here because of him, his stomach drops. The blame punches his gut and he recoils.
He spasms; a shot of salt water rises up and stings the back of his throat. He retches out several mouthfuls.
For a long moment, he dithers between the guilt tremulating at his temples and his repulsion at the scene before him. And at once, he finds himself in the space between the extremes, in the eye of the storm; that weird, tenuous serenity that feels like the prelude to a slap in the face. He wonders how long he can sit in this still place.
Hi, there. Are you still watching?
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No
Your connection was lost. Reconnecting in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… Connection restored. Loading…
1.1.3
Name.firstlast = Cora Ratner Age (range) = 30, 40
Cora approaches the man standing on the other side of the beach. Then she freezes. That man is wearing white, just like the men from the day before. The men who had surrounded her home and attacked her and her partner, Willy.
This one is different. His face is uncovered.
All at once the smell hits her again: like rotting fish and lavender. Cora feels her phone vibrate. Against good judgment, she checks it.
Hair.color = brown Body.type = in top 40 percentile for height, in bottom 50 percentile for weight
It’s another status update from QNTS:
Breath of rot and flower. CTHULHU AWAKENS.
The timestamp is now. The geostamp is a little more than two hundred feet in front of her. Where the man in white is standing.
Country.residence = United States (99% likelihood) Country.origin = >0.9 from countries in EEurope
The man notices her. Then he starts running straight at her. Cora’s heart races. A voice cuts through the fog.
It’s not him — Willy’s voice emanates unmistakably inside her skull.
“Stay right there,” Cora calls out, drawing her gun. “Put up your hands and stop moving.”
The figure slows his pace. She hears a moan from the distance. She crouches and aims her weapon, her hand shaking.
“I said stop.”
It’s not him.
“Shut up, shut up,” Cora murmurs to herself.
The man speeds up. He’s sprinting toward her. Cora asks herself why—whether—how—she could be wrong to shoot him. Her breath is shallow, her mouth dry.
“Stop!”
Cora shoots.
