Behind the Redwood Curtain

Behind the Redwood Curtain, the California I knew seemed to fall away. Off the PCH or 101, the scenery shifted from the billboards of the Bay Area, advertising marijuana or some new AI firm into towering trees older than time itself. Rain darkened the redwood bark toward umber, while sword ferns and moss held their deep green beneath the grey light. The huge trunks of redwoods and other ancient trees that lined the highways swallowed much that remained of even that sparse light. Moss grew over anything that stood still long enough.

I loved it out here. Every time I came up, I caught myself wondering what it would be like to stay for good. I tried to come as often as I could, usually in the winter, when the forecast regularly promised several days of showers. Summer was for families, RVs, barking dogs, and somebody three campsites over playing music through a Bluetooth speaker. But the chill and the downpour washed them all away.

Once you got far enough north, radio stations thinned out and cell service came and went. Small towns appeared through the mist and vanished just as quickly, leaving long stretches of road nearly empty. Every so often, the trees opened enough to reveal the Pacific in a lovely shade of grey-blue such that, beneath the clouds, it seemed like sea and sky ran together. Bigfoot was everywhere in the form of wooden statues outside roadside shops, faded silhouettes painted on plywood, mugs, shirts, bumper stickers, and maps promising “sightings.”

After pulling into the campground and buying some firewood from the ranger, I got to work setting up my site. If you wanted to be comfortable out here, you learned what the place asked of you; either you adapted or fought against it and would be miserable all the while. I chose the highest patch of ground I could find, pitched my multi-season tent there, and pulled the rainfly taut before staking it deep into the ground. I stretched a tarp over the picnic table and raised a canopy above the fire pit, angling both so the rain would run away from the camp instead of collecting overhead.

The ground was already saturated from the previous week’s deluge. The redwood duff had gone nearly black with moisture. A banana slug crept along the forest floor, scrounging up what detritus it could. The Eel River was close enough that I could hear its steady rush whenever the breeze died down.

By the time I finished unloading, the light had begun to fade. Winter afternoons disappeared quickly beneath these trees. The rain had started again in a fine, persistent drizzle. I stacked the driest firewood beneath the canopy, set my cast-iron pot beside the stove, and hung a lantern over the picnic table.

I liked this little circle of order I’d carved out of the clammy wilderness. The lantern threw an amber glow across the table. Beyond it, wet trunks faded from brown to black and the ferns disappeared within the grey dusk. Just beyond my sanctuary at Burlington campground, I could still hear the Eel River and the soft patter of light rainfall. Somewhere farther off, something cracked sharply in the woods. A single wooden pop loud enough to make me look up from my dehydrated meal. I kept my eyes on the trees for a few seconds, expecting another crack to answer the first. When none came, I returned to my dinner.

* * *

The next morning, I woke with no alarm, not having to worry about any responsibilities. The campground appeared even emptier in the daylight. I could see one RV through the trees on the other side of the loop, but no one had emerged from it. Aside from that, I had the place to myself.

I reflected on this gateway to the Pacific Northwest. The moss that hung from branches like peeling skin and the haze that shrouded the murky region this time of year really made it feel like an alien world. Shows like Twin Peaks and the earlier seasons of The X-Files drew much of their character from that Pacific Northwest atmosphere. Without it, they simply wouldn’t have been the same. It was also the perfect setting for certain legends to spread like the plague.

After breakfast, I decided to spend the morning at Founder’s Grove, a few miles north along the Avenue of the Giants. I packed some water and a rain jacket, climbed into the car, and headed for the campground entrance.

I had just passed the ranger’s hut when the ranger stepped into the road and raised one hand. I rolled to a stop and lowered my window. The man approaching me was north of sixty, lean enough that his dark green State Parks jacket hung loosely from his shoulders. Rain darkened the fabric across the chest and sleeves. Forest-green trousers disappeared into mud-splattered black boots. A grey mustache ran down the sides of his mouth and scratched binoculars rested against his chest. In one hand, he carried an aluminum thermos covered in fading park stickers.

“Morning, Sutter,” I said, putting the car in park. He’d been the ranger who sold me my bundle of firewood last night.

“Site treat you alright?” he asked.

“Can’t complain. It’s just how I like it.”

“Hear anything last night?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” I replied with a shrug. “Rain, wind, the usual around here.”

“Figured I’d heard a widowmaker break. Wanted to make sure you were okay.”

I frowned a little, not comforted by the fact that he waited until morning to check on a situation like that while hiding away in his hut. “Yeah, I heard that. Wasn’t near me.”

He worked his mustache side to side, the soft breeze sending the few wisps of grey hair that clung to the top of his head billowing slightly. “You know, some folks talk a lot around here. Legends and folklore,” he continued, watching me as if he was testing me. “Bigfoot and all that.”

“Yeah, it’s really popular around here,” I replied, wondering where this was going.

“I was just thinking about one. How they knock on tree trunks with rocks and sticks. To communicate, you know? Just wanted to make sure you weren’t the sort to get worked up over that.”

I paused to think, trying to think of something to say that would appease him before moving on. “If any cryptid could be real, I guess a few apes hiding out in the Cascades or Appalachia would be more believable than something like that Slide-Rock Bolter.”

That was my mistake. His grey-blue eyes lit up. “You’re so right,” he agreed. “Bluff Creek, the Patterson film, all those roadside museums. Just meant to draw in tourists. You know, I hear and see all sorts of strange things out here. Been out here a while.”

The silence between us was heavy until I finally broke it.

“What? You’ve seen one?” I asked.

“Tracks.” His answer came quickly enough to surprise me.

“Tracks?”

“Couldn’t be sure. Footprints in the mud. Certainly weren’t human. Stuff like that washes out around here. I couldn’t get anyone to believe me.” He shrugged then turned toward Eel River. “They follow the water, you know.”

“What? Sasquatch?” It made sense, I suppose. Just like any wild animal, it’d be wise to stay near freshwater.

He didn’t reply. Instead, he grabbed a palm-sized notebook swollen twice its original thickness from years of being soaked through. He flipped through it and I glimpsed dates from the ’80s and ’90s at the start. “I keep track, you know. Of things the folks around here talk about. Whistles, smells, weird noises, odd shapes in the woods and tall things crossing the road. Most of it is bears, or elk, or people screwing around.”

He waggled the leathery notebook and smiled. “Been meaning to write a book on it one of these days.” The ranger glanced down at some of the newest entries. “All I’m saying is, don’t go wandering around the river at night.”

“Because of Bigfoot?”

“Because it’s December, it’s rainy, you’re alone, the ground is soaked through, and who knows when a river rush might come through.” He paused. “And Bigfoot.”

* * *

After my jaunt around Founder’s Grove, I drove up to Eureka to stock up on supplies. Sutter and his stories should have stayed at the campground, but they didn’t. I caught myself glancing at the tree line before deciding I was an idiot. I wasn’t a kid anymore, to be made paranoid by the power of mere suggestion.

At the market, the selection of seafood was disappointing. I’d been expecting a bounty this close to the coast. Instead, I was stuck mostly with mussels, clams, oysters, and some sanddabs. The stocky man behind the counter shrugged, offering a “boats not bringing much in lately.” I contented myself with some mussels and clams.

Behind the register were various newspaper clippings, a missing poster dated a little over a week ago sporting a picture of a college-aged girl, and half a dozen black-and-white photographs of what looked like the aftermath of a war. Photographs showed houses tilted sideways, cars half buried in mud, and whole sections of road gone. I leaned closer to one and read “WEOTT-DECEMBER 1964.”

The woman behind the counter caught my stare and smiled. “Christmas flood,” she said, thumbing at it as she slid some potatoes over the scanner. “A couple miles from here. They already had a bad one in ’55. Folks figured that’d be the worst they ever had to deal with and another hit in ’64.”

“Was the twenty-first,” an old man in line behind me said.

I glanced at him. “What?”

“December twenty-first. Bad day around here.”

The cashier rolled her eyes. “Don’t listen to him.”

The old man stared at the cashier and licked his lips. “Humboldt’s cursed around December 21st. Earthquake in ’54, the flood in ’55, Christmas Flood in ’64-”

“Which happened on Christmas, Karl” the cashier cut in.

“Close enough,” Karl continued, working his jaw side to side. “Then those two quakes a few years back. December again. Twenty-first, give or take.”

“Give or take is doing a lot of work there,” the cashier said.

Invigorated, he began counting off on his fingers, raising one after the other as he recounted events off the top of his head. “The 1992 Cape Mendocino quake, 1995 Eel River flood, 1997 floods, couple earthquakes last decade off Eureka and Ferndale, an-” The cashier cut him off before he could continue with a glance that could spoil a morning’s catch.

The cashier scanned the last of my vegetables and shook her head. “Those things happen on other days too, Karl.”

I had to admit, it was odd. The only thing that stopped me from asking more questions was the growing line behind us. When I stepped back outside and looked up, I watched as radiant sunlight broke up the grey clouds. With the rainbow stretching across the fluffy grey-white and blue expanse, it seemed something out of a postcard. I loaded my groceries into the back and started south.

As dusk settled in, the blue sky tucked itself away behind a blanket of thick grey once more. The black road glowed under my headlights and rivulets of water from the drizzle spilled down embankments in fresh streams off the shoulder before pouring into culverts. In places, the forest floor seemed less like soil and more like a sponge ready to burst with overflow.

When I pulled back into the campground, the RV I’d seen that morning was gone. The entire site was mine now. Before shutting off my car, I reminded myself that was what I wanted. Still, Karl’s talk of floods and earthquakes followed me south, just as Sutters stories had followed me north. I sat with the engine running for a few seconds longer than I needed to, listening to the rain strike the roof.

* * *

I got a fire going before the rain could worsen and I set about making dinner. While I was stuck with shellfish, I could still make the most of it. Soon enough, I had a pot of clams and mussels swimming in a stock of butter, cream, and garlic with some sourdough to tear apart and drag through the broth.

I rinsed my plate, sealed the leftovers, and was reaching for another piece of firewood before something struck a tree somewhere across the campground.

Tok.

I froze, the log still in my hand, eyes darting around the site. I waited. Droplets tapped against the tarp, the fire shifted and sent smoke billowing up, but there was nothing.

I laid another split log across the little log-cabin stack in the fire pit, then sat back and listened to the forest.

Tok. Tok.

The sound didn’t come from the road to the east or the woods to the south and north. It came from the west, near the Eel River.

“Okay,” I said, talking aloud to comfort myself. “Just a woodpecker.” I wondered whether woodpeckers operated at night.

That was when the smell hit me. At first, I thought something had gone bad. Scrunching up my face, I opened my cooler and checked the seafood. Everything was sealed. The smell was coming from elsewhere. I tried to place it. The odor was musky, perhaps mixed with some soaked earth, and a sharpness I couldn’t quite place. When I stood, the odor strengthened for a few seconds. The wind shifted and it vanished.

I bent to shove my cooler into the bear box and closed the brown door with a long, metallic creak, worked the latch, stepped back, and looked up.

Between two trees, a shape remained perfectly still. Every muscle in my body locked. Whatever stood there was upright. My gaze dared to flick to the ranger station where I saw Sutter’s light was on. My head snapped back. The shape was gone.

The spell broke and adrenaline pumped through me. I breathed like I’d finished a sprint and whipped my head around. I didn’t know what was worse, seeing it watch me at the edge of my site, or not knowing where it was now. I bolted for my flashlight, fumbling with the switch to violently swing the beam of light around my former sanctuary. There was nothing, only redwoods, fern, and rain.

“Hey!” I shouted, voice hoarse. When nothing answered, I turned to make for the ranger hut. “Sutter!”

His door opened. “You alright?”

“Did other guests stop in tonight? Get here late?” I asked, turning to survey the campground.

“Nope,” he replied, stepping out and following my gaze. “See anybody?”

“Yeah, there was somebody wandering around, spying on my camp.”

“Where?”

I waved my flashlight in the general direction of the river.

He stared to the northwest for a moment. “Nobody else is here tonight. Just you and me.”

“You staying here all night?” I asked, to which he cocked a brow and looked at me quizzically.

“Where else would I go?” he said, thumbing behind him at the ranger station, before smiling, trying to reassure me. “This is home enough for me.” He paused, thinking. “Stay by your fire tonight.”

Returning to my campsite, I stayed beside the fire for a couple more minutes, hoping its warmth would reassure me. I didn’t dare look back into the treeline again. For all I knew, it was still there, just beyond the inky blackness where I couldn’t see it anymore, but it could still see me.

Only moments later, to the west, heavy splashes broke through the forest. Another followed, then another, the sound coming faster, moving through the darkness before abruptly stopping. The redwoods fell silent again.

* * *

By morning, what little daylight reached the campground revealed exactly what had been there the day before. There was nothing out of the ordinary. The memory of the figure between the trees became less convincing with every minute the sun stayed up. I had been tired, Sutter had spent the morning stuffing my head with Bigfoot stories, and I’d been alone in the dark. It was a trick of the light with a frightened imagination doing the rest.

Steaming coffee in hand, I ventured to the western edge of the campground until I reached a soft trail lined with trunks of fallen redwoods. I took hearty gulps from my mug while my boots crunched along the gravel bank as I approached Eel River. It was louder than it had been the day before. A day of rain thickened it into a broad, brown-green current that rolled between gravel bars and half-submerged logs. Foam gathered around the exposed ends of fallen branches before tearing loose and disappearing downstream.

Comforted by the flowing water, I began to walk upstream, keeping the river on my left and the thick foliage of the forest on my right.

It was then that I found the first footprint. That familiar chill, deeper than just the cool morning air, took me again. The print was longer than my forearm. Not just long, but broad, with the toes spread farther apart than was natural. Rain softened the edges and filled the deepest portions with some brown water, but there was no mistaking its shape. I followed the trail from the broad impressions in the gravel to the mud on my right, where the prints crushed foliage and led back toward the campground.

My jaw set and I cursed again. I whipped my head around, half expecting to find Ranger Sutter there with a pair of fake feet to make impressions with and prank the lone camper. But he wasn’t there. One set led from the water to the campground. A different set appeared to come from the campground back into the river. Beyond that, there was nothing, only the river.

Clutching my mug tight to my chest, I backed away from the bank. Sutter’s words weren’t funny anymore.

When I got back to camp, he was there. He stood beside my fire pit with his thermos in one hand and the swollen notebook in the other. “Morning,” he said, scanning me up and down, “you look exhausted.”

“I’m leaving today,” I said.

“Your reservation says you’re here for another few days.”

“Yeah, well, I changed my mind. I won’t ask for a refund.”

“Where you going?”

“North. Figure I’ll set up camp in Del Norte. Get a room if I can’t find a place to drop in at. I always liked the drive up anyway.”

Sutter nodded in agreement. “Ever check out the Lagoon?”

“Hard to miss, you drive right by it.”

“Did you know there used to be an old lumber camp up thataways? Hammond originally. Changed hands a few times after that. Most everybody cleared out years ago.” He stared at me a while longer before adding, “you know, they said there were Sasquatch tracks up around there after the place emptied out.”

“When?”

“Long time back.”

“You see them?”

“Nope. Private timberland. Not going to play detective somewhere I’m not supposed to be. You reminded me, is all.” He paused. “Do me a favor. If you stop there, stay where you’re supposed to and don’t go anywhere you’re not.”

After failing to get anything useful out of me to add to his notes, he returned to his station and I packed up my camp. Up by Jedediah Smith Redwoods Park, maybe I could find a campground just outside Crescent City that stayed open through the winter. But I wasn’t going home. This was my vacation. I needed a change of scenery away from whatever prankster locals hung around here. I put the Eel River behind me and kept driving north.

* * *

Big Lagoon emerged through the fog in pieces. The highway shone dark with wetness. Reeds and low-lying vegetation emerged along the margins of that straight shot of road, only to fade into a bank of mist behind my car’s taillights as the road curved northwards. On my left, beyond the strip of land separating the highway from the Pacific, waves broke on the shore. In the winter, I knew a proper downpour could make the lagoon breach that barrier and join the ocean again.

I turned off 101 and followed the narrow road down toward Big Lagoon. It twisted between the trees with barely enough room for one car until the forest opened onto a brief stretch of cement overlooking the sandy beach. Beyond the sand spit came the steady crash of the Pacific. I enjoyed the cold air and walked along the length of the lagoon to stretch my legs before continuing north.

Back on the 101, I remembered what Sutter had said about the old lumber camp. A little farther on, an unmarked road disappeared east into the timber. A locked metal gate blocked the entrance. I pulled onto the shoulder and saw that beyond the gate, the road ran beneath spruce and redwood before bending out of sight. I couldn’t see any houses from where I stood. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound save for the ocean to the west.

I stared down that empty road. The longer I stared, the more I was certain someone stood somewhere among those trees, watching me. Somewhere deep inside me, that primal sense of dread and fight-or-flight bubbled to the surface. Flight won out. Even as I turned to return to my car, that feeling lingered. It was one that couldn’t be assuaged by turning to catch the voyeur in the act; surely the moment I did, they would wriggle back into the undergrowth. The imagined set of eyes remained on my back even as I locked the door and drove away.

The rain returned before I crossed into Del Norte. By Klamath, it was coming down steadily and by Crescent City, the Pacific dissolved behind a wall of gray. Deciding I needed a hot shower and warm bed before setting up camp the next day, I found a motel in Crescent City, dropped my gear inside, and went back out to explore.

The ocean dominated the town in a way it hadn’t farther south. From where I was, I could constantly hear the ocean even when I couldn’t see it past the buildings.

I eventually found myself staring at Battery Point. The lighthouse sat on its little island offshore, white walls stark against the murky water. The tide already covered enough of the land crossing someone could use to get to it. A sign warned visitors about exactly that, so I watched waves break around the island.

Two younger men, probably in their early 20s, approached the vista point. One of them, eyes red and glassy, looked around. “Where’s the tour group, dude?”

“Musta’ just missed it,” the friend said, seeming forlorn.

I knew what they were talking about. The Battery Point Lighthouse had tours where you could cross over and walk around inside. But those only happened during low tide. There certainly wouldn’t be one scheduled right now.

I gave them the bad news that I’d been there for ten minutes and there was no tour group.

“Damn man! We got scammed,” the red-eyed one said, rubbing underneath his nose and sniffling.

“No,” his sober friend said, “you got us scammed!”

The red-eyed one frowned. “How?”

His friend pulled out a phone and tapped it a bit until he found the tour website and groaned. “Today is the twentieth.”

“So, we should be good, yeah?”

“The twentieth at 1:40. You told me at 4:10.”

The red-eyed one stared at his friend before offering a “what?”

I cleared my throat, trying to get their attention.

That broke up their argument, and the sober friend shook his head. “Doesn’t matter anyway. We came here to see ghosts, and ghosts come out at night, not during the day.”

“Why come?” the other asked, rubbing his red eyes. “And we still can’t get over there, dude. It’s like, totally wet.”

“What ghost?” I asked, breaking in.

“The lighthou-“

“The li-“

They both looked at each other. “No, you go, sorry,” one said.

“The lighthouse ghost, dude.”

The sober friend shook his head. “People say they hear somebody walking around when no one is there. Noises around the lighthouse after midnight. Dark shapes floating around the foundation, stuff like that.”

“Probably ghosts from that ship what sunk,” the other said.

“What ship?”

“The Brother Jonathan. There’s stuff about it back in the museum,” the sober friend said, thumbing at the town behind him.

As they descended into disagreement over something else, I returned to my car. A short drive and I was back to my motel after some gumbo by the pier. The heater rattled every few minutes, the bed was soft, and I’d finally managed to catch up on some much-needed sleep.

I woke sometime after midnight. Vague dreams of dark shapes twisting and floundering at the base of a lighthouse, only hints of them visible beneath the foaming surface, prodded at my waking mind. The heater had gone quiet between cycles and rain whispered against the window. For a few seconds, I lay there staring into the dark.

The hair suddenly rose along the back of my neck. I had the distinct feeling that someone was watching me again. The curtains were closed except for a narrow gap where they hadn’t quite met. Through it, I could see a slice of the motel parking lot, pavement shining beneath a yellow lamp, and the rear quarter of my car beyond it. Nothing moved. I held my breath, as if expecting to spot the glimmer of eyes just over the bottom of the window. None appeared. Eventually, I got up and pulled the curtains completely shut.

I lay down in my bed. My eyes drifted to the door to my room. From the small crack, I watched as the light from the hallway shifted with an approaching shadow. The shadow stopped at the center of the gap. I stared, not moving a muscle as I listened to the shifting, rustling sounds outside my door. And then, as quickly as it came, it was gone. It was only after the heater rumbled back to life that I gradually fell asleep once more.

* * *

By late morning, I was back in the redwoods, setting up camp. The respite of a warm room and hot shower was nice, but I truly felt liberated again. Even better, I’d never camped in Jedediah Smith Park before. There was the promise of unexplored trails all around me. The season was quiet enough that I had no trouble finding a spot at this first-come, first-served site. There were a couple of people around but we had all taken spots far away from each other. When I finished setting up, I sighed to breathe in the woodsy air. It was still chilly out. Not freezing, but enough to warrant a couple layers to protect from cold and rain.

Not wanting to wait any longer, I pulled up a trails app on my phone and hit up the trail closest to me. Muddy hills and dense foliage hid the Smith River from view. On the map, I followed its course west and saw that it reached the ocean only a short distance away.

After some lunch, a nap, and some reading, I decided to drive into town for a bit to treat myself to some dinner at a restaurant by the pier, taking the scenic Howland Hill Road on my way out. The road itself was unpaved and only barely wide enough for two cars to negotiate past each other. My tires hissed over shallow puddles while the road twisted around enormous, buttressed trunks, some close enough that I could have reached out the window to touch the bark of a trunk bigger than my car. Rain deepened the redwood bark to a dark russet-brown while the undergrowth, conspiring with the moss, crowded the shoulders in wet, green masses. Little runoff channels formed along the shoulders, carrying water downhill toward Mill Creek, while moss-covered banks rose on one side to drop away into fern-choked hollows on the other. I took it slow, partly because of the nature of the road and partly because there was no reason not to.

Before dinner, I stopped at the historical society museum. The exhibits showcased photographs of the coast, logging equipment, and household goods.

But the tragic tale of the shipwreck garnered its own section of the museum. The Brother Jonathan left San Francisco for Portland in July 1865 carrying passengers, military cargo, and heavy equipment. Gale winds caught her near Point St. George. Her captain tried to turn back toward Crescent City. She struck what was then locally called the “Dragon Rocks” or “Dragon’s Teeth” and, less than half an hour later, she was gone.

More than two hundred people died and nineteen survived. I studied one of the salvaged gold coins from the wreck until a voice from behind me said, “you interested in the wreck?”

I turned to see an older woman wearing a museum volunteer badge standing with her hands folded in front of her.

“Didn’t know anything about it until yesterday,” I said.

“Most people don’t unless they’re from around here.”

“So, two hundred people?”

“And only one lifeboat.”

I looked back at the display while she continued. “Some washed ashore afterward. Some were identified. Some weren’t.”

I moved on after asking a few more questions. The museum had a room devoted to Tolowa and Yurok material. Basketry occupied much of it, along with photographs and other artifacts of the peoples native to the region.

I had nearly finished my tour when the volunteer passed me again.

“Can I ask you something stupid?” I said.

She turned to look, waiting expectantly.

“This area has a lot of people talking about Bigfoot.”

That got a reaction from her. Not laughter, but a weary smile. “What about it?”

“Are there old stories around here about that sort of thing?”

“There are old stories about all sorts of things. Problem is, people decide every hairy thing in Indigenous tradition must be Sasquatch.”

I thought back to Ranger Sutter. “So, there isn’t anything like that?”

“I didn’t say that.” She thought for a moment. “Philip Drucker. Berkeley anthropologist from the 1930s. If you’re actually curious, look him up.”

“What did he write?”

“Ethnography of the Tolowa. He recorded something usually translated as ‘woods devils.’ Hairy, human-shaped beings. They whistled at hunters, bothered people in the woods, and put out campfires.”

“You’re telling me that doesn’t sound like Bigfoot?”

“Say what you want, but he didn’t call it Bigfoot.”

“Did he mention anything about water?” I asked.

That made her pause and lift a brow. “Why water?”

“A ranger I met down south kept saying part of the legend was that they followed rivers.”

“Drucker did mention water beings, too,” she conceded. “Look, if you’re hunting for some sort of monster manual, you’re going to be disappointed. Ethnography isn’t there to turn someone’s culture and tradition into cryptids.”

That managed to shut me up. She was right, though, and I certainly felt a fool for asking.

She softened and sighed. “If you’re really curious, Berkeley has it digitized. You can read it all online.”

My phone buzzed and I pulled it out. A fresh weather alert. Outside, rain began to streak the museum windows.

The volunteer glanced toward them. “Are you camping?”

“Jedediah Smith.”

“Tonight?”

“That’s the plan.”

She considered that. “Just keep an eye on the river.”

I thanked her and left before I could embarrass myself with more questions.

* * *

I was hungry enough that the downpour couldn’t dissuade me from walking a few blocks around town looking for dinner. I found a place out on the harbor, got a table beside a droplet-streaked window, and ordered jambalaya and a beer. While I looked over the menu, I noticed that some of their usual seafood specials were unavailable.

The jambalaya arrived in a wide bowl. The rice had soaked up a crimson stock heavy with tomato, pepper, and spice. Coins of andouille sausage were browned almost black around the edges, with chunks of chicken buried among shrimp curled pink from heat. Bell pepper, celery, and onion had cooked down into the broth until they were barely distinct from it. I stirred a little hot sauce in and took the first spoonful too quickly, burning the roof of my mouth. It was worth it.

Beneath the heater and amber light of the restaurant, I concentrated on eating. Every so often, I’d glance over my shoulder at the smoky blue harbor, enjoying the view before curiosity won out. I found Drucker’s book on my phone before I’d finished half the bowl.

The Tolowa and Their Southwest Oregon Kin. University of California. 1937.

I had expected something written for a general audience. It wasn’t. Tables, terminology, descriptions of fishing, marriage, ceremonial practices and settlement locations filled page after page. One entry caught my eye.

Drucker had collected a short list of supernatural beings. There were ocean animals corresponding to creatures on land, small beings that led travelers astray, and the hairy ‘wood devils’ the museum volunteer mentioned. Before those, a separate entry on “water people.”

Drucker placed them in both the oceans and streams. Unlike the hairy things, which supposedly annoyed hunters and extinguished campfires without doing much real harm, Drucker described the water people as dangerous. Seeing one, or even dreaming of one, was associated with sickness or death unless the person underwent purification.

“Everything alright?”

I looked up to see the server pointing at my bowl.

“Yeah, why?”

“You’ve been holding the same spoonful for about a minute.”

“Sorry, reading. The food is good.”

“Book must be good, too.”

“Anthropology.”

She stared at me. “What’s that?”

“Study of people, cultures, customs, things like that.”

“You’re reading on vacation?”

“I guess so?”

Another pause, another stare. “Can I get you anything else?” she asked, glancing towards a different table.

I nodded and, after finishing the forgotten spoonful, returned to my reading. Elsewhere, Drucker recorded particular places associated with things in the water. In one instance, he connected a monstrous sea serpent with Lake Earl, only a few miles north of Crescent City. In another, he wrote that water people lived on one side of the reef; a young man canoed out to the sharp rocks one day, peered down from his canoe, and supposedly saw one beneath him, watching.

* * *

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.

Credit: William D.