New World a-Coming, Ch. 24

Aftermath

It was a long, hellish night. The fires were burning so hot, and so fast, and at so many points where they’d broken out all along the Avenue—why??—that the little Monterey volunteer fire department was overwhelmed, and most of the Row’s population just stood and watched Pacific Biological burn. We had found Ed, and established that he was OK, and that everyone who’d been at the party had gotten out all right. But I couldn’t stop thinking about all the lab animals—admittedly, most of which were destined for euthanasia and dissection anyway—but dying in agony and frightened.

And Abe had disappeared.

By sunup, as the sky was paling to southeast behind the Cypress Ridge hills, the fire had mostly burned itself out. Rina and I had tried to help, as Ed would sidle gingerly into this or that part of the structure that was still standing, and try to salvage books or instruments. But we’d been mostly helpless. And, even though I hadn’t known Ed more than a day, I understood from Rina that—besides the trauma—the Lab burning might ruin him financially.

Morning. The day after. Stench of smoke and wet ashes. The entire Row reeks of it, and the stench of melted rubber and burnt metal—and of charred meat and fish, from the hundreds of live specimen animals who’d been in the tanks and holding pens when the lab’s burning roof collapsed in on them. The lab itself is nearly destroyed, a few charred beams still standing, the twisted and melted aluminum panels of its roof lying among them. Ed’s old sedan is parked at the curb, with—incongruously—his treasured typewriter sitting on its roof.

Ed is hunkered down in the dirty wreckage of the lab. He’s pantsless—in his underwear—but wearing the rubber boots he used in the tide pools There are half-burned books lying open and scattered in the ashes, their scorched pages riffling in the morning breeze off the water. He is patiently combing through the ashes, sifting out individual instruments and pieces of glassware that might be salvaged.

The Colonel is standing at the lower end of the lot, just at the line of dried kelp and trash that represents the high-tided mark. He has his back to Ed, and is staring out at the bay’s horizon, one hand shading his eyes. With a shock, Ani realizes that there is a pistol in the Colonel’s other hand.

Rina is nearly incoherent with rage. “Where the fuck did Abe go? Why isn’t he here? Did he have something to do with this?” No one answers for a moment, and then the Colonel drops the hand shading his eyes, turning back to look up the beach’s slope, past Ed on his knees in the wreckage, toward Ani and Rina. The pistol disappears under his armpit.

“No, it wasn’t Abe. They’re going to claim it was the electrical company, but… it wasn’t. There were other forces at play.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

I looked across at Ed, still hunkered down in the wet ashes; he seemed oblivious to Rina’s furious questionThe Colonel turns to look down at Rina from his towering height. Although his face is expressionless, his eyes are molten with rage.

“Abe didn’t cause it, and he wasn’t fleeing. He was drawing the Old Ones away.”

Ed cocks his head to one side, and then looks over his shoulder—in the distance, there is the faintest high wail of a train whistle. He looks back at us, and, surprisingly, there’s a crooked smile on his face. He says, “Sometimes, I hear that whistle, and I just think it might be OK to head up to the crossing, and get on that train, and ride. Just let things go.

“But I have responsibilities. And so I stay.”

Postscript: from the Locked-Room Archives

I only found out years later, after Ed was gone and I’d lost Rina, what might have been the truth of the matter. Though it was pretty clearly established that the electric company had been negligent somehow—maybe they had cut corners on code compliance when they wired the canneries, or maybe the canneries bribed them, or maybe it was just that hodgepodge disorganization that governed, or misgoverned, so much of that part of the world—the courts later found them blameless. Rina was livid, and she ranted about wanting to find a progressive lawyer, maybe from up in San Fran, but Ed was philosophical about it: he knew better than to count on the courts.

But it turned out that it wasn’t just negligence or accident, after all—though we only realized that years later, after Ed was gone. It might have been outer forces. Older ones. Older ones that knew Bassanda, and targeted Ed, and the Colonel, and Abe.

You have to understand that in the Thirties we didn't really know how these things worked. Some of them—the Colonel and the General, for sure—already had Rift Travel experience, but it was instinctive, and individual, and unpredictable. In that decade, Hazzard-Igniti had begun to theorize it but by ‘41 he was disappeared into the Gulag and some percent of his knowledge had gone with him. it wasn't really until the 1960s and the Rift Accidents that took the Band and the Beast backward in time that his disciples began to be able to codify rift properties. But even in the Thirties, we knew that the fire at Western Biological in 1936 hadn't actually been an act an accident when the canneries had sent a complete overcharge of DC current through the lines and started fires in the walls.

The story I heard was that the Colonel was in Monterey because he knew that something was gonna come up out of that Bay. He was working with Ed because Ricketts knew the tide pools and had noticed that there were some strange patterns going on with weird warm water currents coming up from the floor of the bay and changes in the patterns of the invertebrates in the tide pools. Ed knew that the Bassandans might have some understanding of weird electromagnetic phenomena, but they didn’t get to the answers in time.

The Colonel and Ed were wading and mapping in the shallows, and they went out sometimes in Ed's boat with the glass bottom. But they needed more personnel, and they needed more money to hire the personnel, and they didn't have time to finish mapping the patterns of the electrical currents that seemed to be agitating the floor of the bay and disturbing the sea creatures.

We now know —or at least we surmise — that it wasn't an accident from the canneries, and it wasn't even an accident of the natural electromagnetic pattern that ran up and down the coast of Northern California. It was an attack. And Doc and Abe just didn't get there in time.

Addenda to the archival record:

A lost Hazzard-Igniti essay entitled “Quantum Drift and Apparent Time Displacement in the Bassandan Rift Valley,” in the 1926 edition of the Journal of Speculative Geographical Metaphysics (Paris), is only documented in a brief one-sentence abstract (obviously not authored by the Doctor), which references the “complex fourth-dimensional quantum mechanics found at certain tectonic and magnetic nodes, worldwide.” Notes on the single index card (from a card catalog evidently gone missing) in Habjar Lawrence’s handwriting.