Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

  NOVELS

  The Elfin Ship

  The Disappearing Dwarf

  The Digging Leviathan

  Homunculus

  Land Of Dreams

  The Last Coin

  The Stone Giant

  The Paper Grail

  Lord Kelvin’s Machine

  The Magic Spectacles

  Night Relics

  All The Bells On Earth

  Winter Tides

  The Rainy Season

  Knights Of The Cornerstone

  Zeuglodon

  The Aylesford Skull (forthcoming)

  COLLECTIONS

  Thirteen Phantasms

  In For A Penny

  Metamorphosis

  The Shadow on the Doorstep

  NOVELLAS

  The Ebb Tide

  The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs

  WITH TIM POWERS

  On Pirates

  The Devil in the Details

  Copyright © James P. Blaylock 1997

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Dirk Berger.

  Cover design by John Berlyne.

  Published as an ebook in the U.S. by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in conjunction with the Zeno Agency LTD.

  ISBN: 978-1-936535-70-5

  CONTENTS

  Also by James P. Blaylock

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  For Viki, John, and Danny

  And this time, especially for Dean and Gerda Koontz for fifteen years of friendship

  With special thanks to John Accursi, Chris Arena, Loren Blaylock, Dan Halkyard, Judy and Denny Meyer, Tim Powers, Jack Miller and the Huntington Beach Department of Public Works, and Sarah Q Koehler.

  1

  THE PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY WINDS ALONG THE VERY edge of California, a narrow asphalt ribbon that marks the western rim of the continent, separating the isolated beach towns and the chaparral-covered hillsides of the Coast Range from eleven thousand miles of Pacific Ocean. Heading south from Crescent City, the Highway swings inland below Eureka, wandering thirty miles from the ocean through redwood groves and mill towns before angling west again above Mendocino and then more or less following the shoreline all the way down into southern California. There are still wild and rocky stretches of coast around San Luis Obispo, and empty coves and bluffs above Santa Barbara, but south of Ventura the Highway plunges into the overpopulated beach cities of Los Angeles and Orange and San Diego counties, past hundreds of thousands of wooden bungalows and stucco apartment houses, past fishing piers and rock jetties and boat harbors and ramshackle main streets lined with fish restaurants and bars and surfboard shops and used bookstores and parking meters. And on any sunny summer afternoon, countless people drive out of the suburbs and cross the Highway, drawn to the uttermost edge of the continent for reasons they can’t always define.

  In winter, cold north swells move down out of the Arctic in long lines, and the blues and greens of the late summer water turn gray beneath cloudy skies. The unsettled ocean shifts with the rolling swell and darkens with the shadows of moving clouds. Storms hammer the coast, washing precarious sections of the Highway into the ocean and veiling beach cities with curtains of misty rain the same steel-gray cast as the rising swell. The surging tides swamp oceanfront houses in Malibu and Surfside and Newport Beach, and rogue waves slam through wood and concrete piers, ripping pilings out of the ocean floor, shifting heavy rocks in harbor jetties, sweeping countless tons of beach sand away in the longshore currents, ceaselessly changing the contour of the sea bottom.

  The beaches themselves are nearly empty of people in winter, especially on stormy days—perhaps only a couple of surfers watching waves break across outside sand bars, or a beachcomber with a metal detector, or someone gathering seashells along the high tide line where the ocean dumps its flotsam of kelp and driftwood and sand dollars and polished stones.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY THERE WERE STILL TRAIN tracks along the ocean side of the Highway through Huntington Beach. A chain-link fence separated the tracks from the fifty yards of sandy shoreline, and onshore winds piled beach sand into ice plant-covered dunes that pressed against the rusty chain link and swept across the edge of the tracks and out onto the Highway, which was narrower back then, with a ragged dirt shoulder along the northern verge. Beyond the shoulder there was a grassy marsh, and beyond that stood, and still stand, the pink and gray cinderblock walls that shelter narrow suburban backyards. By the early 1970s passenger trains had long ago quit running along that part of the coast, and the tracks that followed the Highway had fallen into disrepair. Walking along the tracks at the edge of Huntington Beach State Park, a person could find old rail spikes and other iron debris in the sandy ice plant, or, on a lucky day, a heavy, broad-headed nail with a raised number on it, a thirty or a thirty-six or a forty, recalling the year a particular tie had been sunk in the road-bed.

  In the winter there was something lonesome and desolate in the rusty chain link and the blowing sand, in the scattered bits of railroad iron and the deep green ice plant with its feathery pink flowers. There was a natural stillness in the air despite the sound of the cold north swell breaking along the beach and the cries of gulls circling in the sky. And beneath windswept skies it could seem that the ocean was a hundred miles removed from the suburban neighborhoods only a couple of blocks inland, as if the Highway, with its sand-softened verge and its distant vanishing points, was a borderland between the suburbs and the shifting sea. When there was a sizable swell running and the winter sun was low in the sky, a traveler gunning north or south along the Highway could glimpse over the crest of the beach the pale green transparency of a backlit wave as it surged upward over a sandbar and pitched forward with the sound of distant, hollow crashing….

  THE WOMAN SITTING BENEATH THE BEACH UMBRELLA WAS a tourist—one of the purest examples of tourist that Dave Quinn had ever seen. She was heavyset, dressed in dark clam-digger pants
more reminiscent of 1960 than 1980, and she wore socks and shoes and a broad-brimmed hat with a flower in the hatband. Despite the hat and the umbrella and the cloudy winter sky, she was sunburned pink. Her dark glasses flared up toward her ears in plastic crescents worked with rhinestones. She turned a deck of playing cards over one by one onto her beach blanket, starting a new game of solitaire, and the wind picked up a couple of the cards and flipped them face-side up. She lunged forward, holding her blouse shut at the neck with one hand and pinning the cards to the blanket with the other, and then patiently settled back into the depression in the sand and pulled the rim of the umbrella farther around in front of her to block the wind.

  Two slender black-haired girls, clearly twins, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, played in the cold surf, running after the edge of a retreating wave, then screaming with laughter as the next wave chased them back up the beach. They had wandered thirty yards north from where their mother sat on the blanket, and it made Dave edgy to watch them. If they were his kids, messing in the surf on a day like this, he would have called them back, and he sure as hell wouldn’t be shuffling cards while they played tag with the winter ocean. He watched the rip current running down off the steep beach, roiling up the inside break, cutting its own dangerous channel through the bars.

  As long as the girls stayed in shallow water …

  And anyway, they weren’t his kids. He ditched the idea of saying something to their mother. He hated shoving in his opinion when nobody was asking for it.

  A couple of tin buckets and shovels lay at the edge of the blanket that the woman had unfurled with tremendous care, and there was a basket with a lid, an actual picnic basket, holding down the windward corner of the blanket. Probably she had cold chicken in the basket, the tourist food of preference. Dave realized that he was starved. He had been out in the water surfing since around six, and it was nearly ten in the morning now. His arms ached from paddling, and the cold water had drained him of energy. What he wanted was breakfast and coffee and a couple hours of sleep before afternoon classes. He looked up toward the top of the beach. The concession stands were closed, their windows covered with plywood. Some distance to the south, a half-dozen lifeguard towers sat shuttered and empty, waiting to be repainted. Farther on down, maybe a hundred yards, a couple of surfers had a fire going in a fire pit and sat hunched in front of it, their backs to the wind. A white surfboard with a broken-off nose was shoved up out of the fire pit like the ghost of a rocket, and bright orange flames licked up along the rails of the board, sending a churning cloud of black smoke into the air. The smoke tumbled away in the wind, and Dave could smell the chemical reek of burning fiberglass.

  The sky was full of broken-up storm clouds, and the water was brown with sand boiled up from the relentless, wind-chopped swell. The swell was rising, and the surf was deceptively powerful. The bigger set waves broke in long, collapsing walls, one after another across sandbars a hundred yards or more offshore, throwing themselves forward against the force of the outgoing tide, churning up the sandy bottom and scouring out a channel between the bars. The waves re-formed in the channels and then broke a second time near shore with a deep, booming roar that sounded like thunder. The entire surface of the ocean seemed to be moving south because of the longshore current, and with the cloud shadow darkening the water, the ocean was ominous and gray.

  Dave watched the twin girls nervously. There was a single surfer out in the water a couple of hundred yards down the beach, lying prone on his surfboard as a broken wave pushed him into shore. About a mile north, the Huntington Beach Pier stretched out into the ocean, and even from that distance Dave could see the surging breakers slamming through the pilings. It was no time to be in the water, especially if you were twelve-year-old tourist girls from Kansas or some damned place. Their mother was half hidden behind her umbrella now, dealing cards again. Relieved, Dave saw that the girls had wandered higher up the beach and seemed to be picking through tossed-up seaweed.

  It was time to go. He reached behind his back and grabbed the cord attached to his wetsuit zipper, yanking the suit open and moving his shoulders to loosen it up. The neck of his suit was full of dredged-up sand from when he had gotten worked on his last wave, and there was sand in his hair, too. The wave had pounded him all the way into shore before letting up on him. He peeled the wetsuit off, shivering in the wind, and brushed the sand off his neck and shoulders with the thin old towel that he’d been taking to the beach for the last three or four years. His jeans and a flannel shirt sat in the car, and he wished he had brought them down to the beach. His feet were thawing out, and burned now with an itching, prickly heat. The water was cold, fifty-six or fifty-eight degrees—not headache water, but cold enough to wear you out, to drain you of energy despite a wetsuit.

  Winter storms had eroded the beach away steeply, and the swell was rising fast. Broken waves rushed up the beach, leaving parallel trails of sea foam near the dry edge of the sand, then rushed seaward again, driving down the incline and back out into the oncoming swells in a moving surge, the rip current chopping up the surface of the ocean all the way out into the outer break now.

  Dave took another look at the twins, who apparently had lost interest in the seaweed and had waded out into shallow water again. They stood in the heavy, receding wave wash, their feet sinking ankle-deep into the soft sand, the water leaping around their legs and splashing them to the knees. One of the twins pushed the other one, trying to shove her over, and Dave could hear her laughter on the wind, followed by the other one’s angry shout as her sister tried to pull her out into deeper water. Their mother looked up from her card game, but the umbrella nearly hid the girls from her view. She leaned forward and waved at them, and the twin who was doing all the pushing and pulling saw her and waved back, and then the woman adjusted her hat lower over her face and returned to the game, letting the kids have fun. The second twin managed to yank herself loose and run up into shallower water while her sister threw a clot of wet sand into her hair, then bent down to scrape up more.

  Tossing down his towel, Dave walked back down toward the waterline, watching six big pelicans swoop over the top of a swell, soaring above the waves in a dead-even line, rising and falling as the wave passed beneath them. The twin in the water threw more sand, into her sister’s face this time, oblivious to an incoming wave that threw itself forward in a collapsing wall, the white water leaping upward as the wave smashed into the girl’s back, knocking her down and washing up the steep beach. She stood up in knee-deep water, but the receding wave rushed back downward, piling up against her legs as she tried to high-step through it, the moving water dragging her backward and off balance. She stumbled sideways, fell, and was buried by another wave.

  Dave sprinted along the edge of the surf as she floundered heavily to her feet, coughing water out of her throat. Another wave pushed up out of the deeper water of the inside channel and drove in over the sandbar, throwing itself over in an explosion of white water that seemed to swallow her. Her sister screamed from where she stood on the shore, and Dave ran out into the surf as the drowning girl was swept out into deeper water at high speed now, like a boat carried on a river. She was neck-deep and trying to swim, thrashing her arms desperately and raising her head above the chop as if she wanted to climb into the sky. Her sister waded out into the surf, and Dave yelled at her to stop, but already she was caught up in the rip herself and panicking, trying to make her way in again.

  Not two of them, he thought, and instantly he changed course. He would grab the close-in girl first, and then he’d swim after the other one. He couldn’t deal with two of them in deep water. He could hear the second girl screaming as he dove through the face of a wave, stood up, and launched himself forward again, diving under another wave that broke in front of him. He swam hard through the turbulence, trying not to lose ground, and when he surfaced a few yards from her he threw himself forward again and grabbed her arm, holding onto her as he tried to stand up. The force of the rip
was incredible, and for a moment, before he got his feet set, he was helpless in it, and the weight of the girl nearly pulled him down. Fighting again just to stay where he was, he dragged her close to him and spun her around so that he could get an arm across her chest.

  Like a gift from heaven, a wave formed across the inside bar thirty feet out, pitching skyward into a vertical, foam-laced wall of gray-green water. He turned to face the shore, holding onto the girl, and pitched himself forward right before the wave slammed into him. He kicked his feet hard, and the wave picked them up and somersaulted them, dragging Dave across the bottom on his back. He fought to get his feet under him and stand up as the wave receded, tearing at his knees again, trying to pull him back down. He stumbled forward a few steps, climbed the slope, and dumped the girl on the sand. She collapsed forward and gasped for breath, then broke into a fit of coughing and retching as she clambered farther up the beach on her hands and knees.

  As Dave turned toward the ocean again, he saw that the woman on the beach was running toward her daughter. The wind snatched her hat off her head and threw it into the air, and she pointed out to sea with a hand full of playing cards. For a moment it looked as if she was going to wade out into the ocean herself. Dave ran straight out into the surf again, waving the woman toward shore and looking for the other twin, who was simply gone now. When he was waist-deep he kicked himself high over a breaking wave and spotted her—impossibly far out. Waves broke on either side of her, but the rip itself was a churning current through the surf, holding the waves off and throwing up its own backward-breaking chop.

  Dave dove through the face of another wave and came up swimming, angling into the center of the rip. He rose over an unbroken swell and found her again. She was still thrashing around, holding her head above water and looking straight up into the sky, sucking in air. The sun had disappeared behind the clouds, and the wind chop slapped into his face. When he looked for her again, kicking hard to hold himself above the chop, he couldn’t find her, and for a moment he was certain she’d gone down. He swam forward hard, knowing that she was at least twenty yards farther out. If she had gone under, he might never locate her….