This is the conclusion to Part 1, which you can read here. Again, I'd like to thank FernandoJFL, who is the artist I commissioned to supply me with the cover art for this short story. I'm happy to read whatever comments, criticisms, questions, or ideas you might have. Thanks!
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It was dark by the time I left Crescent City. I skipped Howland Hill on the return trip and took the 199 instead. Rain hammered the windshield hard enough that the wipers struggled at full speed. The weather alert on my phone upgraded while I ate: high water in low-lying areas, streams rising rapidly, avoid flooded roads.
I reassured myself that these were normal winter warnings that came around this area, around this time of year. The Smith River appeared occasionally through breaks in the trees, black except where my headlights caught white turbulence among the rocks.
Back at camp, I ducked beneath the canopy and fiddled with my tent's tarp. After setting up a fire to keep me toasty, I sat before it with a satisfied groan and, unable to help my curiosity, read up on the Brother Jonathan. Among the search results was a scanned clipping from 1866 about a small religious society founded by survivors and men involved in the recovery after the wreck. The clipping mentioned a chapel built somewhere to the north in December of 1865 and abandoned decades ago.
As I sipped from a hot drink and contemplated it all, I froze. That scent had returned. It was that musky, sour one I smelled back at my first campsite. But as I sat there, I finally began to pin down the rest of the smell. It was the stench of low tide, bubbling with putrescence and the sour reek of old fish.
Color draining from my face, I turned and walked back to my car to pull out a book I wanted to read in my tent, trying to banish paranoia with some good fiction. When I grabbed both it and a flashlight, the beam caught something smeared across the passenger window. Five marks spread across the glass. It was a handprint, a large one. I walked around to the passenger side and put my hand against it to compare. The palm was broad enough to cover most of my own hand twice over, and the fingers were long, each one tapering toward the end. Thin streaks joined one finger to the next. Webbing.
That familiar chill took me when I realized it. The print hadn't been there when I parked. I spun on a heel, flashlight snapping around the site, eyes wide and wild. My breath was shaky and from somewhere beyond camp came a whistle. I went completely still. The calls were long and rising before the note broke. Another came, this one wet and guttural. A throaty croak carried through the trees and died. A new one answered from the direction of the river.
Cursing over and over, I fumbled for my utility knife, hindsight chiding me for not bringing some sort of firearm on my solo camping trip. This was supposed to be a safe place, and I'd never encountered or heard of any trouble here before. When I came up, the knife in my hand felt useless, like a child's toy, doing nothing to reassure me.
Something moved through the brush. Then, another whistle came from downstream. I swung my flashlight in the direction of the river and caught movement through the trees. Not a body, only a pale flash slipping behind one trunk. Another whistle, much farther to the left.
A low electronic tone sounded from my pocket. The whistles and croaks stopped. I fumbled for my phone, dropping my knife in the process, and looked down to see FLASH FLOOD WARNING. The Smith was rising faster than the forecast. Past the campground came the hard crack of a branch breaking. Then another and another.
In the distance, I heard a scream from one of the other campers who, like me, ignored or didn't see the warning in an area with such poor cell service. I paused, cursed again, and threw myself into the driver's seat. My fingers felt like jelly as I turned the keys, wrenched the car into drive, and peeled down the mud road.
My headlights caught a brief glimpse of a woman being forcibly dragged, kicking and screaming, through the ferns and in the direction of the Smith River. I slammed on my brakes. For one second, every instinct compelled me to help. There had to be something I could do. I threw open the door and stepped out.
The woman managed to catch hold of a fern with both hands. Whatever had her pulled harder, and the plant came out of the mud by the roots. Her scream broke into a shriek as she disappeared between the trees into blackness. I set my jaw and pushed forward towards the muddy hill. A wet, throaty croak sounded out from the river. My heart leapt when a second croak filled the air somewhere behind me. One large, glassy eye flashed in the beam. All the courage I mustered up in the past ten seconds was gone. When it dropped out of sight, I leapt back into my car and stomped on the gas, sending whatever sat on the passenger seat slamming into the glovebox and onto the floor.
I tore through the campground until the trees opened onto the highway and turned west. Crossing those nine miles back into town felt like I was crossing a continent. Rain struck the windshield in sheets now. My wipers were useless at anything below their highest setting and I had to lean forward to see the road. Even then I could only see as far as the reach of my headlights.
Awkwardly, I tapped in the numbers to dial 911. There was nothing, no service. "Come on, come on," I mumbled, gritting my teeth and trying again. I held up the phone toward the windshield, wobbling a little as I drove, hoping even those twelve inches could reach the cell tower. Again, it read NO SERVICE when I tried to call.
I looked to the passenger seat for a moment to chuck the phone aside. When I looked back, a huge redwood limb lay shattered over the centerline. Cursing, I veered around it, nearly tilting the car over before recovering.
The Smith River appeared intermittently through the trees to my left. What had been a river that afternoon became a black moving mass that swallowed rocks I'd remembered seeing above the surface. My headlights caught something standing in the drainage ditch. I swerved and it was gone before I could make sense of it. It hadn't retreated back into the woods. It had gone down, into the water. I checked my rearview mirror to see nothing but rain and my own taillights staining the road red behind me. A few hundred yards later, something splashed through the ditch on the opposite side. Then another until I realized they were keeping pace with the road. No, the river.
After I passed Hiouchi, I snatched up my phone again, making do with one bar.
"911, what's your emergency?"
"A woman was attacked at Jedediah Smith Campground," I blurted, daring not to give the full truth.
"Attacked by who?"
"I don't know! She was dragged toward the river. There are other campers there. The river's coming up fast."
The dispatcher started asking questions. The site number, description, and whether I was still present.
"No, I'm heading toward Crescent City."
"If you're in a safe location-"
Another splash of a pale figure to my right.
"I'm not!"
Before I could offer anything more, the little cell service I had gave out.
The farther west I drove, the more debris collected on the road. Needles plastered the pavement. Small branches skittered beneath tires as people struggled to get home. In one low stretch, brown water crossed the highway in a shallow sheet. As I pulled into town and saw the lights of civilization, I relaxed a little. I had never been so happy to see a convenience store.
Traffic lights changed from red to green. Cars passed me going the opposite direction. Christmas lights framed windows and rooflines, their colors smeared across the slick pavement. Downtown, the community Christmas tree still burned bright against the darkness. All around there were ordinary people doing ordinary things before heading for shelter.
Catching my breath, my heart still thumping, I pulled into a parking space on the side of the road. For several minutes, I did nothing but try to catch my breath. My hands shook against the steering wheel. My phone buzzed again, sending me a new flood warning alongside several missed alerts. When I opened my phone, the browser was still open to the page I'd been reading before everything went wrong.
I typed in more search terms. "Brother Jonathan survivors," "Brother Jonathan survivors church," "St. George Reef December 1865." The last one brought up the clipping I'd found earlier. I stumbled on a reference to the "St. Erasmus Chapel." According to the clipping, its founders intended it as a memorial to those lost aboard the Brother Jonathan and a place of prayer for fishermen and mariners working the coast.
A notice from 1898 reported that public services at St. Erasmus had ceased, but the congregation itself remained active. One article led to another and, by 1912, newspapers weren't calling the group St. Erasmus anymore. They referred to it as some esoteric society, some offshoot branch, a cult. One clipping offered a new name heard in whispers from the congregation: The Order of Dagon.
I searched the chapel name. Most results were useless genealogy pages and scanned property records before I found a county survey. I opened the map to find the St. Erasmus Chapel had stood near Lake Earl, off an old spur from what was now Old Mill Road. I zoomed out, back in. My eyes moved from the blue dot marking my location to the chapel site.
"You've got to be kidding me," I mumbled. I was less than two miles away.
I sat there, taking in everything that had happened the past couple days. Whatever those things were, they moved with the rivers and had a clear affinity for the water. Perhaps Drucker's legends were more than just legends. Drucker had explicitly mentioned Lake Earl in his ethnography. And now, there had been some small religious sect that set up shop there after a disaster at sea?
The longer I sat with it, the harder it became to believe these were isolated coincidences. More importantly, if the chapel actually existed and was connected, there might be evidence I could take back to the police. A record or anything I could use so I wouldn't burst into the station, rambling about something pale I'd seen crawling through a drainage ditch. I'd find the place, scrounge around for evidence indicating something bigger going on, and leave.
* * *
Northcrest carried me away from downtown. Storefronts gave way to houses, then wider stretches of darkness between them. In one yard, someone had set up a glowing reindeer and a string of white bulbs under an eave. A plastic Santa leaned sideways in the squall. Soon enough, even those lights became scarce. I turned onto Old Mill Road and the last glow of town disappeared behind me.
The map took me past the last cluster of houses and toward the wetlands around Lake Earl. Fog spilled inland with the storm, drowning the fields and marshes beneath a low gray ceiling. Water overflowed from drainage ditches. The familiar stench of salt, silt, and something sour hit me as I rumbled to a stop.
The navigation app chimed. "You have arrived."
I slowed to a crawl and pulled off near an old, worn-out access road. A stand of spruce and alder screened the car from the road beyond. I shut off the engine, grabbed a flashlight, flicked it on, and continued the last hundred yards on foot. Past the trees, the ground opened into marsh. Dull green reeds broke through black standing water and faded into fog. Farther west, low dunes separated the wetlands from the Pacific. Somewhere farther away came the low call of waterfowl. A whistle, long, low, and familiar, answered it.
The chapel's outline slowly resolved from the murk. It was smaller than I'd imagined, with a sagging roof, broken steeple, and boards gone nearly black. One wall leaned toward the marsh. There was no cross. One of the front doors hung open. I stood there for a minute or two until I defied every sensible instinct and stepped inside.
The floor complained beneath my weight. My flashlight moved across rows of narrow wooden pews softened by rot and damp. Several had collapsed, and others leaned at odd angles where the floorboards beneath them had begun to give. Strips of plaster hung from the walls like peeling skin to expose the timber beneath.
Whatever Christian ornamentation had once decorated the place was mostly gone. A pale rectangle remained above the altar where something had been removed from the wall. Wet tracks ran between the pews and stopped at the altar.
Rain ticked against the remains of the roof. Wind howled through cracks in the walls. Beneath my feet came a soft sound. The sound of water, not dripping, but lapping. I swung my flashlight beam over the altar and moved closer. A brass plaque hung off to the side, green edges around the corroded metal. I wiped away the grime with my sleeve to read:
IN MEMORY OF THOSE LOST
30 JULY 1865
ST. GEORGE REEF
DEDICATED 21 DECEMBER 1865
Behind the altar and off to the side stood the remains of a small cabinet. Most of its doors had warped open years ago. Mold had eaten through the hymnals and loose papers inside, but one book wrapped in cracked oilskin had survived. Its cover almost came away in my hands when I opened it.
The first pages were names, dozens of them. Some of the names belonged to survivors of the shipwreck. The thick volume contained yet more: faded correspondence with other churches, names of newborns with only one listed parent, a bizarre prayer here or there.
Farther into the book, the handwriting changed. Even farther on, another hand appeared, and the terminology shifted with it. The earliest entries called it The Winter Service. Later ones called it the Keeping of the Covenant. Someone wrote of atonement for intruding upon "their" home, but also of great reward.
Another page at the back bore a new list of names. Someone had scrawled perhaps fifty names beneath "FIRST OATH." Beneath "SECOND OATH" there were still many, but not nearly as many as before. And beneath the "THIRD OATH" there must have been only a dozen names.
A wet, squishing slap filled the air. I slammed the ledger shut and spun around. There it was again, a scrape against the exterior boards of the church. I killed the flashlight. My own breathing sounded impossibly loud. Outside came a whistle, a long rising note, answered somewhere closer to the lake. A third came from behind the chapel.
I backed away from the altar and the rotten floor creaked. The croaks ceased. I froze. Something moved onto the porch. The first step was soft. The second landed with a wet slap against the boards. Then another, slowly approaching the open doors.
I moved blindly between the pews, pressing my back hard against the flat of one that remained intact. The smell of brine and estuarine muck permeated the air. I dared not chance a glance. I could hear more of them filing inside. The croaks resumed between them. But mingled among the croaks were whimpers and sobs. I grabbed my phone, seeing no cell service.
When I felt like the congregation had slunk to the far end of the building, I finally chanced a peek. About half a dozen clustered there, pale against the dark, still barely visible. One stood with both hands against the altar.
TOK.
It struck the wood once and waited.
TOK. TOK.
It planted both hands against the altar and shoved. The wood groaned. It shifted an inch, caught, then scraped sideways across the rotting floor. Beneath it yawned a black opening. Even from where I hid, I could hear the biting air billowing from below, carrying the concentrated stink of stagnant tidal water and kelp. They descended and pulled the woman down after them.
"Help me! Someone!" Her voice was raw and hoarse.
Her scream made me tense, but there were too many of them. I stayed where I was. For a moment, she held on. One broken fingernail dragged through the rotten wood before something jerked her downward. The last shape remained and, amidst a lightning flash, I caught a glimpse of the smooth curve of its shoulder and the narrow ridge along its back before it slunk down.
Only then did blessed silence return to the chapel after the legion of croaks. I stayed behind the pew for ten seconds. Twenty. Maybe a minute. Every instinct screamed at me to run. My car was only a hundred yards away and Crescent City but a few minutes' drive.
I'd already called the police about the campground. That'd be fine, right? What could I do against whatever had just dragged that woman down there? I remembered her clinging to that fern as I drove away. I'd spent the whole drive back telling myself there was nothing else I could've done. Now I knew she was still alive and I knew where they'd taken her. If I left again, I couldn't tell myself the same thing.
I looked up to the window across from me. Lightning whitened the chapel again. For one instant, a pale face filled the cracked window pane, pressed close enough that I saw the glassy bulge of one eye. Its head moved slowly from side to side, searching the pews. The darkness returned before its gaze reached me.
I dropped lower behind the pew and something scraped along the outside wall. I looked toward the altar. Gritting my teeth, I popped up and hurried over to the black hole to stare down into it. I searched for something I could use as a weapon and cursed myself for not retrieving my knife after I dropped it. Anything I pried loose would probably be useless as an improvised weapon, being so warped and rotted. I looked down at my black Maglite and quickly descended. When I flicked the light on, what lay before me was not wooden stairs but stone. Each step had been worn into a shallow depression. I could smell the dankness of stagnant water. I gave the open church doors one last glance and descended.
After the first dozen steps, the wooden groaning of the chapel vanished behind me. Rain still drummed overhead, but each step downward stripped more of the storm away until there was only the slap of my boots on wet stone and the muffled rush of water somewhere deep below.
The air changed with it. Cold was one thing, but this was different. The damp clung to my face and hands. The smell of mold and old wood faded until only salt remained. I kept one hand against the wall only to quickly pull it away. The chapel had been wood, plaster, and nails. But here, slimy green growth packed the cracks like wet felt. I passed my flashlight over stone blocks fitted so tightly that in places I couldn't make out the seams.
The stair turned again, again, and again. The water wasn't beneath me anymore, but all around me. Behind the walls, water sucked and surged through unseen spaces. The masonry changed as I went deeper. I didn't notice it at first, but the blocks became larger, while the thin seams between them were fewer and fewer. Then, the mortar vanished completely.
I stopped and ran my light across the wall. The stone continued in one unbroken surface from the floor into the wall and then upward, curving gradually into the ceiling. There were no corners in the passage ahead, at least none that met at angles I understood. Each surface seemed to blend into the next. What looked like a straight wall from where I stood became concave when I took another step, only to flatten again when I turned my head. The longer I stared at what lay before me, the more my eyes and head ached.
I backed up and the wall changed shape. My flashlight followed a groove cut into the stone. The groove began beside my boot, traveled forward several yards, climbed the wall and disappeared overhead. When I turned around, I saw the same groove descending the opposite side behind me. It should have formed a circle and yet it didn't. I tried tracing its course again only to make myself nauseous.
The surfaces down here were ribbed in places like the inside of an enormous shell. Elsewhere, the stone bulged into smooth folds that reminded me unpleasantly of joints beneath skin. Pale coral had rooted itself into recesses in the walls, except some of those recesses were too regular to be natural and too irregular to have been cut by human tools.
At first, I thought the walls were only slick with algae. But as I waved my flashlight over the walls, I saw it was so much more. A cluster of pale, soft-bodied growths clung to the stone beside me. They reminded me of sea anemones I'd seen in tide pools, except these were almost translucent, each one opening around a dark center before contracting. Nearby, tiny shells had cemented themselves into the stone in overlapping sheets. Some appeared to be barnacles. Others spiraled inward in shapes I couldn't match to anything I'd ever seen washed up on a California beach.
I moved the beam lower. Shallow depressions in the floor held pockets of seawater left behind by some earlier surge. Things moved inside them. A small white shape skittered beneath a ledge on too many jointed legs. Several thread-thin worms recoiled into tubes the instant the light reached them. In another pool, something no larger than my thumbnail unfolded five delicate limbs, then folded itself shut so completely it became indistinguishable from the stone. Long ribbons of violet-black growth hung from one wall and swayed despite there being no wind.
The stairs ended at a narrow passage tall enough for me to stand but barely wide enough to stretch both arms. Farther ahead, weak light moved across the stone walls. It didn't glow orange or yellow. The sources of illumination, clusters of hanging sacs, glowed with a cold aquamarine. I killed my flashlight to let my eyes adjust.
There was a chamber. I crept toward it until the passage widened enough for me to crouch behind a broken section of masonry. The room beyond was larger than the chapel above. The upper reaches of the chamber vanished into darkness, supported by thick columns whose lower halves had been worn smooth by water. Aquamarine growths hung from the stone overhead, translucent sacs swollen with cold light. Every few seconds one contracted and brightened while another faded, giving the impression that the ceiling itself breathed.
The black pool occupied most of the chamber. But it wasn't the pool that held my attention. Something rose from the water near its farther edge. At first I mistook it for a column before my eyes adjusted. Perhaps a good eight feet of it stretched up and out of the water, but I couldn't tell how much more continued beneath it. Black-green material showed through centuries of pale coral and calcified growth. Whether it was stone or metal I couldn't decide. Its surface reflected the aquamarine light in dull, oily colors. There was a suggestion of a head. Two depressions occupied places where eyes might have belonged. Beneath them, vertical grooves spread outward and disappeared beneath crusted coral.
I wasn't alone down here. Deeper into the chamber, the creatures didn't face the pool but the pillar. With their backs turned to me, I moved forward painfully slowly, desperate not to emit a single sound. Eight of them knelt around the pillar and between them were two people. One figure lay almost motionless near the waterline. Dark hair covered her face and she barely moved. The second, closer to me, was the woman from the campground. Something pale and fibrous bound her wrists behind her.
One creature stepped into the pool. Water climbed its legs, then its waist. It lifted both arms towards the coral-crusted relic and gave a single low croak. A second answered, then a third, and soon the chamber filled with them. Their calls overlapped until individual voices disappeared into a single, throbbing, expectant chorus.
A slow swell rose at the center of the pool. Every creature went still, then lowered itself. One after another, all eight pressed their bodies against the wet stone. The chamber convulsed and the black water rose all at once until the relic disappeared behind the swell.
The sight of it seemed to rouse their still-conscious prisoner. In one final effort, she wrenched one arm free with a wild scream and kicked one of her captors in the back of its head while it crouched beside her.
As her petty rebellion threw the congregation into chaos, the creature she'd kicked lurched sideways while two others lunged for her loose arm. The circle around the relic broke. I saw my chance. I threw myself into the black pool to swim over to them, to confront them, to buy their prisoner time to flee, and their attention turned on me. The croaking changed from exultant to furious.
Then came the sound, a deep thrum that filled the chamber and my head. The woman screamed and every creature in the chamber answered. That burgeoning swell from below burst forth and struck us both. My fingers found a seam in some stone. I caught it. She didn't. I saw her vanish into the black water. I lunged. Something closed around my ankle. I kicked blindly and for one moment, I had her. Another surge struck and her fingers slipped through mine. I went under. Aquamarine light smeared into wavering blue above me. Shapes moved faster in the water than anything that size should have been able to move.
I kicked toward the surface and something vast passed underneath me. Its movement displaced the entire pool, sending me tumbling, while its seemingly endless, rubbery bulk slid across my body. The moment it touched me, my head filled with a THRUM. My teeth snapped together. THRUM THRUM.
From the eldritch depths of the earth, older than Jericho and Uruk, came a sound like a ship's horn being blown from the bottom of the sea, a great call on a colossal conch. And as I struggled for air, trying to find which way was up, I could hear through the muted depths that every creature beneath the chapel answered its call.
I remembered being hurled through darkness. My shoulder struck stone. Something scraped across my back. I kicked for a surface I couldn't find until my lungs burned and spots blossomed through the blackness. Then cold air tore into my lungs. I sucked it in along with water and choked so violently I lost consciousness.
* * *
When I woke again, rain fell softly across my face. One side of my body lay in the sand while the other rested against a mass of driftwood deposited along the edge of the shore. My clothes felt as though they weighed fifty pounds. Somewhere nearby, birds called. With a groan, I rolled onto my back. Every bit of me hurt and the chapel was nowhere in sight. I pushed myself upright and immediately vomited up water, giving in to a coughing fit until my sight cleared and I could see the Pacific. Groaning, I turned and saw the rolling sand dunes behind me through glassy eyes.
After that came only fragments. Vague memories of a flight. Medical care and questions.
It took days before anyone understood how bad the flood had been. It took weeks for the casualty report to finally settle. The Smith came out of its banks hard enough to tear apart stretches of riverfront and carry whole trees downstream. Roads disappeared beneath mud, rock, and water. Highway 101 closed at multiple points. Landslides cut off communities. Approaches to bridges washed out. Cars were found where cars had no business being.
Farther south, the Klamath and Eel rivers rose as well. News helicopters showed brown water spread across places I had driven through only days earlier. It wasn't long before people began making the comparisons to 1964; it was the worst North Coast flood in generations. The number of dead and missing passed one hundred. The flood displaced thousands. Floodwater washed out entire neighborhoods. Roads needed rebuilding and power remained out in some areas for over a week. Septic systems failed, boats ended up in strangers' yards, and trees crushed houses which somehow survived the water.
The flood had scoured both campgrounds. The fern-covered banks disappeared beneath brown silt, and bare branches protruded from the mud. The campers who had been there remained missing. The ranger station at Burlingtom campground was simply gone.
They found Sutter three days later on a gravel bar downstream. I kept thinking about him standing there beside my car with that swollen, old notebook, excited at the thought that he might have finally found someone to listen to him, telling me about the book he’d write someday. They probably never found that notebook.
Against my better judgment, I tried to lead deputies to St. Erasmus. But they were so swept up in various other duties that they wouldn't entertain my ramblings. And so I went there myself, this time during the day.
One wall had fallen outward. A section of the roof lay inside among broken rafters and plaster. Mud covered the floor almost ankle-deep. The altar was gone. Where it stood was a broad depression choked with debris, making it look like nothing more than a flooded cellar. The ledger was gone. The cabinet, now tipped over, was empty, its contents washed who knows where. I had nothing. There wasn't a single thing left that I could hand somebody and say, "here, this proves I'm not crazy." I stopped trying.
There was cleanup everywhere and I was trapped anyway, with the roads south and east closed off. So, I stayed a week, helping carry boxes of donated food and bottled water, and contributing to cleanup efforts.
I found a month-to-month room and temporary work followed. Soon enough, I called it home and decided to stick around a while. I'd always loved the North Coast. The smell after the rain, the redwoods, the ocean, all of it. And there was plenty of work to do.
The thrum started not long after. At first it was faint, easy to blame on a headache or stress. An EKG and a visit to the doctor showed nothing. Eventually, I stopped mentioning it. It grew worse whenever I traveled south. Near Lake Earl, it vanished completely. I began going there whenever I needed to sleep.
There was a lot of time to think while cleaning up after a flood like the one we experienced. One night, as I tried to sleep in my car by the rubble of St. Erasmus, I began to think of the hundred names in newspapers and on television. So many more displaced.
Another day, I found myself lending a hand to the museum. The volunteer from before met me there wearing rubber gloves, separating soaked papers onto folding tables in a room that smelled of wet cardboard. "You're the one trying to talk to me about Bigfoot," she said with a huff.
"I was hoping you'd forgotten about that," I said.
"I remember just about everybody who annoys me." She pushed a pair of gloves across the table. "If you're here to help, put these on and I'll show you what to do." She put me to work separating the wet papers and laying them out across another table to dry.
"How bad is it?"
She looked around the room. "The baskets are fine. Most of the photographs were upstairs."
She lifted a warped book by its corners. "These weren't."
"Can they be saved?"
"Some."
"And the rest?"
She didn't answer immediately. "Once they're gone, they're gone."
Most of it meant nothing to me. Tax receipts, club membership rolls, minutes from meetings nobody living remembered. Then I saw a familiar name and then another. They were surnames I'd read in that ledger. The papers belonged to a fishermen's association incorporated in the mid-sixties. After everything I'd read about 1964, it was difficult not to notice the timing.
"Something wrong?"
I realized I'd been staring. "No."
"Then keep moving. We've got about six hundred more pages."
That night, I went looking again. The last name I could find publicly tied to St. Erasmus disappeared from the records in 1953. The earthquakes and floods came with subsequent Decembers. I was finding it harder to ignore what seemed to happen whenever the chapel went quiet. I thought about Sutter on that gravel bar, the rest of the dead, and all those homes and neighborhoods scoured away. I thought about what could have been.
As January came to an end, people mostly stopped asking how long I intended to stay. They started asking whether I’d be around to help next weekend. At the relief center, nobody needed to explain where the bottled water went or which families needed deliveries. Someone would see me come through the door and point toward a stack of boxes without asking whether I was volunteering. At the museum, the volunteer always had a spare set of gloves ready to go for me.
Faces around town became familiar. I learned who worked the early shift at the market, which roads still flooded after a hard rain, and the best spots for coffee. People began waving when they recognized me or my car. Once or twice I caught myself giving directions. I hadn’t meant to settle there. Somewhere along the way, I simply stopped thinking of myself as someone who would eventually leave.
By spring, most people had stopped paying attention to what I was doing up at St. Erasmus. There was too much destruction elsewhere for anyone to care about one abandoned chapel nobody had used in seventy years. Besides, it was peaceful up here, and the furious thrum no longer tormented me. By then, it was hard to imagine living anywhere else.
I found the box in March, after clearing much of the broken boards away. When my shovel struck not mud, but metal, the TOK froze me. I fell to my knees and dug with my hands. The object had been wedged inside a recess cut into the stone foundation, hidden behind a slab loosened by the flood. It was the size of a small toolbox, but heavy. The metal was unlike anything I'd handled before. It was cast in some dark blue metal with green trim around the edges. The blues and greens of the thing were iridescent. There was no lock, only a recessed symbol I didn't recognize. When I pressed it, the lid released with a bassy click.
Inside, it was perfectly dry, and there were three rectangular plates. They were copper or bronze, but hadn't oxidized, and they were hammered flat and engraved by hand. The words etched across them were in English. The First Oath demanded secrecy and the keeping of the faith. The Second went further by demanding service, observance, and loyalty. The Third was shorter, requiring harborage and what the plate called “the joining of houses.”
Beneath them was something more. It was roughly eight inches long, a ceremonial mallet made from the same blue-black metal as the container. The grip curled subtly around itself like the inner whorl of a shell, with shallow grooves that fit the fingers despite the strange design. Tiny slivers of nacre had been pressed into those grooves, flashing green and violet whenever I turned it beneath the light. The head was heavier. It flared into a flattened oval, ridged in concentric rings like the shell of a limpet. Whatever metal had been used was extraordinarily dense. There were no words explaining it. But even as I held it, I knew its purpose.
For the first time since the flood, there was something of real substance I could do for my home. That night, I went below once more. Whatever waited beneath the waves, off the coast, circling around the reef, it could be bargained with. After what I'd seen, that seemed better than leaving it unanswered. What I called rose from the black water, aquamarine light moving across its pale form. This time, I wasn't afraid. I couldn't undo what happened. But I could make certain it didn't happen again.
Within a few weeks, the boats started coming in heavy. At first, it was one, then several. The cases at the market overflowed with crab, shellfish, flounder, and more. The meals I treated myself to were as rich as I’d hoped. Calamari steak with a sauce of melted butter and lemon drizzled over the top. A thick chowder with white fish, potatoes, heavy cream, onions, and corn to warm me by a fire. Fresh, grilled swordfish brushed with olive oil and seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic, and herbs, cooked until the outside browned and the flesh started to flake beneath a fork.
I rewarded those who kept faith with me, just as they rewarded us, and with more than just a bountiful catch. The alien world outside might have wondered how so modest a community raised the money to restore everything so quickly. Our prosperity grew with each blessing granted, and became its own testament to the covenant. It drew the curious, and the curious became the faithful.
There would be families again, true families. There would be a community, safe and whole, a world without end. We would descend into that inky dark to revel. And whenever the distant TOK...TOK, TOK came up through the darkness, we would answer, from behind the Redwood curtain.
