We hustled up the stairs, mindful of the way the wood creaked and popped as we passed over it. The landing branched off into two long hallways. One of them was dark and littered with broken furniture and debris. We chose to follow the lighter one, which was lit by a series of holes in the roof and light streaming in from rooms on the side. The walls were decorated with neon-colored streaks of paint marker, bright oranges, pinks, whites, and silver that ran the length of the walls and tapered down as they reached a doorway at the far end of the hall. That door was surrounded by crudely drawn stars and odd glyphs.
“Check that out,” Sharon said, her voice still muffled.
We moved into the room, noting the debris-free floor. It was painted stark black, a series of constellations etched in marker, like walking on a demented sky. I didn’t remember much from my college astronomy classes, so I couldn’t judge the accuracy, but someone had spent quite a bit of time on it. I started filming the room, panning around to catch all of the mural on the floor, the way it bled up onto the walls, all of it leading to the main act. In the corner, an antique radio sat on a crooked end table. The back of the case was open, tubes exposed. Wires splayed out from the back into a hallucinatory spider web pattern on the wall, running over the top of the tags and graffiti. That meant they had been placed fairly recently. In the other corner was a camping chair that still looked to be in decent shape. On the floor in front of the chair was a battered spiral notebook. There were diagrams and notes inside, things hastily scrawled, notes about the cracked sky, the refractions, sound travel, frequencies.
I flipped to the front of the book, noting the thick column of shredded paper trapped in the spiral. All of the early notes were torn out. The first page was dated from over a decade ago, starting midway through a journal entry about other hotspots around the sea. The handwriting and charts became more agitated with each turn of the page, losing coherence toward the end. A few pages from the end, the scrawl turned childlike, reading :
. . . they want to talk, you understand ? They have things to say. Years and years and years. It’s important. We are vessels. We were vessels. We opened it and I wanted nothing to do with it, but now it’s open. They cracked it without thinking of what might be on the other side. I never wanted any of it. None of us did. I miss my wife. I never saw them. I only heard them. Maybe they’ll come through. Maybe they’ll get bored and leave us alone. All of the changes, all of it, it’s all them. All them. There is no more.
The rest of the pages were hurried slash marks made with a black pen. The back of the last sheet was an endless spiral that looked like the author was trying to get all of the ink out of his pen on to the page. Near the top was a bloody fingerprint. Or maybe it was dirt and my mind was giving way to fantasy.
“Holy shit,” Sharon murmured, looking at the handwriting and pulling that photo out again. The handwriting matched. “What in the honest hell, Dee ?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, but I’d say we have a story here, wouldn’t you ?”
“Yeah, but . . . shit. This means we have to stay. We have to, right ? We at least need to try turning our radios on.” The corners of her jaw worked. I thought she might be biting her lip the way she did when she got frustrated. I wish that’s all it had been. She yelped. “Shit ! Bit my cheek.” She reached up to pull her paper mask off.
“Let’s go outside for a minute, make some plans in the fresh air.” I grabbed her hand.
She turned and stumbled a bit as she looked out the window. “A crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
We both had a thing for Leonard Cohen. Seemed appropriate given the circumstances, but I should have asked her what she saw when she looked out the window. Instead, we walked down the stairs in silence. We stopped by the camera in the parking lot. I lifted my mask. She did the same, spitting out a gob of bloody saliva.
“Really tagged it,” she said. “Least it’s easier to breathe out here.”
The stink of the Salton Sea ruined the refreshing air, but was an improvement over the dank inside. I checked the camera, fast forwarding through the footage to see if anything interesting had happened while we were inside. There was nothing. I erased the file and reset the whole thing, checking the battery.
“We can get about four hours out of this thing on low quality video. Probably need to come outside to check the battery, maybe change out cards. We could set up your camera here on time lapse, maybe one photo every thirty seconds, just in case there’s a light show at some point and—”
She grabbed my face and kissed me deeply. Her tongue tasted of blood and salt and something electric. She pulled back and beamed at me.
“This has been a pretty decent vacation,” she said.
I smiled at her. “Let me see your cheek.”
“No ! It’s fine, it’ll stop bleeding in a second. Sorry, I got a little excited.”
We spent the next few minutes staying busy by the car, me setting up the cameras while Sharon dug out every piece of audio equipment she could find. We had a couple of old mp3 players that could catch FM frequencies. I had an emergency flashlight in the trunk with an AM / FM radio on it and a hand crank. That would last us all night. I brought in a camera and Sharon came in with an omni-directional microphone plugged into her voice recorder.
We stopped at the entrance to the Yacht Club, the sun fading and the temperature dropping.
“This is dumb, right ?” she asked.
“Yep. Very dumb. Still more exciting than talking to a bunch of squatters out in the desert about their opposition to well water and property taxes.”
Sharon sighed. “All right. Let’s do it. This one’s for Doreen.”
We walked back up the stairs side-by-side and stepped into the Yacht Club. I looked back at the car as we entered and a ripple moved across the sky, like the end of a film reel flapping against the light. This time it was more clearly defined, like fogged glass in a lightning shape that curved around the mountains and over our heads. I nudged Sharon to look, and she nodded. I snapped a picture. When we checked the frame on the back of the camera, the sky looked perfectly normal.
I knew enough about the Salton Sea to know none of it is normal if you look closely. The sand isn’t sand. Just piles and piles of desiccated fish bones. From a distance, it fools you into thinking of pristine white shores. Up close, you’re ankle-deep in razor-sharp fragments of calcified fish parts. Death surrounded the sea. There were little pockets where things clung to life, birds, reptiles, people, but everything there tells you that life doesn’t belong.
We went back into the lobby. There was a low rumble and then a sustained hum, followed by a loud pop like a set of concert speakers coming to life. We instinctively ducked. The lights had come on. I looked at Sharon, her chest moving quickly, the hairs on her arm standing up. Not every fixture was lit, but enough that the lobby was thrown into a greater level of detail. This whole area should have been off the grid. I almost preferred having the lobby dark. Seeing everything made it more ominous.
“Guess we get to save on batteries for a while, huh ?” I said.
Sharon nodded and we turned the crank on the emergency radio, bringing it to life. We tried a few different ends of the dial, but only found static and weak country music broadcasts. At the high end, there was a little bit of an ebb and flow to the static, an undulating rhythm that probably meant nothing, but we stayed with it for a while, staring at it like we’d see sound flowing out of it.
Sharon headed for the hallway. “Wanna try the old timey radio upst—”
The lights in the building flickered and the air shot through with a sharp static noise like a giant set of lungs taking a deep breath. Then came dreadful silence. It wasn’t until a few seconds later that I realized the pounding I heard was my own heartbeat. We held our breath, waiting for the exhale. Waiting for an intonation, an invocation, a whisper, a word.
Nothing.
“What was—” Sharon’s jaw dropped.
<
br /> The lights dimmed and the static returned in regular pulses, a sharp inhale every thirty seconds. As much as my mind tried to rationalize it as just a noise, I couldn’t help but think of it as breathing. Only breathing in, and the lack of exhale, the absence of that release of pressure spiking my heart rate.
“Is that coming out of the radio ?” Sharon asked.
I quickly flipped the switch and checked that all of our gear was off. I scanned the ceiling for old speakers leftover from when the building was still alive, but there was nothing.
Sharon’s eyes went wide. She extended her arms, turning in a slow circle. “You feel that ? Stick your hands out. Do it ! Move your fingers.”
I reached out like a mindless puppet, my fingers brushing through the air, pushing against waves of static that felt like the aura that would buzz around an old Tube TV screen after you shut it off.
There was a phrase written in that notebook upstairs, a note about the rising tide. We needed to get back up there.
“It’s moving !” Sharon said. “Hold your fingers still, you can feel it running through . . . ”
And I could. Like gritty water flowing through my fingers.
Blackout.
Sharon pushed back toward the door. The light outside was almost gone. We weren’t thrown into total darkness, but it was still disconcerting. The disorienting lack of noise, just our breath and a strange pressure in the ears. The lights snapped back on and the static / breath noise returned, this time barely audible, high-pitched. It was desperate, like someone breaking the surface of the ocean after a near drowning. Neither of us moved. We looked to one another, hoping for answers, hoping for sense, finding only that same empty anxiety staring back.
“Are we getting any of this ?” I whispered.
Sharon’s face lit up and she laughed. “All work and no play. Shit.” She fumbled with a couple of her recorders and flipped them on, checking the screen “Needle’s not moving, but we might as well leave it running. I’ll go up and check the radio. You check the camera out in the lot and then come find me.”
I took half a step toward the door and paused. Sharon laughed again.
“This isn’t a scary movie, Dee. Just a creepy abandoned building. Nobody’s here but us fishes.” She threw her arms around me and kissed my cheek. “This is the worst vacation rental you’ve ever taken me to. I’m leaving such a shitty Yelp review !”
I gave her a puzzled smile in return.
“Check the camera. Go ! Shit’s happening !” She hustled away, her footsteps strangely silent on the stairs. She stopped halfway up and pulled out her camera. “You stay there. You stay right there. Just like that. I want to remember this. I’m going . . . to . . . never forget this.”
The flash pulsed hard twice in the gloom, blinding me. And then she was gone.
The clumsiness of her last sentence, like she’d tripped over her own tongue. I hate to think of that now. It’s only now as I write this that I recall the purple behind my eyelids. Not the usual stars you get from a flash going off. These were odd, geometric fractals, honeycomb shapes that danced and moved.
There was a strange cold-water-down-neck feeling I would get when my fight-or-flight . . . well, flight instinct kicked in. I counted to twenty. Enough time that Sharon would think I’d gone outside to check the gear. Whatever she was feeling, I wasn’t getting the same vibe. At that point I’d have been content to leave, even with all of the strangeness around us. If it happened once, it would happen again. We could come back with more gear. Better gear. A bigger crew.
. . . and twenty. Every step a tiny mountain. I got to the top of the stairs and looked down the tiny hallway. Dull light pulsed out of the radio room.
“Sharon ?”
“Dee ? Dee ? Dee ? I can’t see. I can’t see. I need a flashlight. Mine died.”
I hurried into the radio room, but it was empty.
“See ? Dee ? See ?”
“Sharon, where are you ?”
“I’m in it. We’re in it. They’re here.”
Her voice was coming from the speaker on the old-timey behemoth on the table.
“This isn’t the time to fuck around with the equipment, Sharon. Where are you ?”
I moved out into the hallway, anger overtaking fear.
“Deeeeeeeeeee ?” Her voice echoed from the radio room.
I stomped from one room to the next, rounding a bend in the hallway. There were more of the layers of odd graffiti and tags that curved on the walls and tapered down the closer they got to the door at the end of the hallway, as if the art was slowly being pulled inside. Maybe it was a break room in a past life. The skeleton of an old fridge loomed in the corner, filthy cabinetry and pipes exposed through shattered walls. Sharon stood against the back wall, arms splayed, her paper mask moving so fast it looked like she was chewing gum. No sound.
I was across the room before I even realized I was moving. I pulled the mask from her face. Her mouth jabbered soundlessly, spittle flying. Her breath came out in ragged cold puffs, no noise. I fumbled for my phone to take a video. The screen wouldn’t unlock, wouldn’t register any of my touches. But the speakers came on, and I could hear her then, faintly, a cacophony of words and sounds coming too fast to comprehend.
There were words that got repeated more than others, but nothing I’ll ever be able to make sense of.
Sands. Yuma. White Sands. Delta six five . . . Breathe. Fire. Cross. The gate, the gate, the gate . . .
I let out a tiny scream when she seized my hand. My eyes snapped up to meet hers. She’d pulled her mask back on. In the fading light, her eyes looked all-pupil, harsh black against the whites.
“What’s wrong, Dee ?” she whispered. This wasn’t a question, more that she was begging for an explanation.
“Let’s get outside. Are you okay to walk ? This has gotten a little too big for us, I think.”
“ . . . are we okay ?” she asked. The way her eyes searched mine. Like she was out to sea, like I was the thin lifeline tying her to a rescue boat in a black tide.
“Come downstairs.” I took her hand, and it felt like I was pulling a balloon behind me.
The lights in the building were a flickering yellow that barely allowed us to see each other.
“You feel it ?” I asked, extending my fingers and slowly waving my hand around below my knee, like trawling through still water. That gritty sand feeling returned, tingling every nerve up to my wrist. Something was off. My mind raced backward to what we’d had to drink the previous night, the lunch Doreen packed us. Was something spiked ? Was I about to lose my shit with her ? Was I already ?
Sharon waved her hand and nodded. “Tickles my feet. Did you see it open ?”
Every breath I took felt like I was inhaling liquid sand, tickling my tongue on the way in and rasping my throat on each exhale. The breathing noise started again, this time in reverse, a great exhalation of static that reduced to a bare whisper. I descended the stairs slowly and carefully, making sure Sharon wasn’t going to stumble. By the time we reached the bottom, the sound grew quieter, the lights dimmed. Eventually, we were left in darkness. I felt Sharon’s hand tug twice, then her fingers slipped through mine.
“Sharon ?” I whispered, marveling at the electric charge it brought between my teeth.
“Dee ?” Her voice came back from the flashlight / radio that was clenched in my other hand. I didn’t remember turning it back on. I only saw her silhouette, standing still. Looking, I think, in my direction.
The radio crackled twice. “Are you tired yet ?”
“Just come over here and talk to me. We’re gonna get outside to the parking lot. I think we need to call it a night. Sleep it off in the car and get home. Okay ? Sharon ?”
“I’m almost there. It’s opening,” She took two steps in my direction and there was a crack from the floor. “We can’t do this anymore. This is it—” Another crack, this one twice as hard, like so
meone had sledgehammered the floor from beneath us. I tried to shine the flashlight in her direction, but the bulb dimmed. I grabbed for my phone and fumbled it, watching the screen dim as it bounced away into the blackness.
“Dee ?”
Another crack. And another. Her head tottered back and forth. She hunched suddenly and came forward, like she was trying to run.
“Dee ? Dee !”
What happened next ? The car crash. That’s the only way I can describe it. Impact. Pure force that knocked me onto my butt, and when I found my bearings, she was gone. I couldn’t move. I thought maybe there was a hole in the floor. Maybe she’d fallen through. Maybe she was out cold in the basement, bleeding to death. But this place wouldn’t have a basement. I crawled, slapping at the floor with my free hand, clutching the flashlight / radio in the other like it was my lifeline, screaming her name. Twice my hands splattered into some unidentified mess that I hoped was only bird shit or wet paper. There was no hole in the floor. I couldn’t see, but I was certain of it.
“Sharon ? Sharon, please say something.”
The static crested for a second, and there was an exchange, two men’s voices, nasally, brief, curt. Sounded like mission control. I couldn’t make out any of the words.
There was the faintest delineation ahead, the night sky in the seam of the great plywood front doors. I don’t know how I’d made my way so close to them, but it was part of a solution. I pushed forward until I felt the warped wood and gave it a push. The door swung open easily. What little difference it made in the light ended about three feet into the building.
That Cohen lyric Sharon said earlier echoed in my mind, unmistakably painted above me. The sky . . . was cracked.
A crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in . . .
It was a razor thin tear that originated somewhere over the horizon and bent at impossible angles, backtracking against itself until it looped down somewhere behind the sea, like some manic god had slashed the sky with a knife in a fit of jealous rage. It bled light out into the purple sky, an inky flow of indigo-black. There were no stars in the sky. No moon. I stumbled out and looked for the car, banging my knee on the tripod we’d set up earlier. I slapped at my pockets for the keys. If I could shine the headlights into the doorway, maybe . . . but Sharon had the keys.
Lost Signals Page 11
