by Logan Jacobs
“Perhaps they are in a different place,” Fela suggested. “Maybe we should go back and try to follow the path of that machine. If it is something your folk built, it might return to them.”
“That thing looked like a piece of farm equipment run amok,” I said. “Let’s try to find the river again. Even if it doesn’t lead us into town, we’ll probably need more water for Floppy soon.”
“If the river led into town, why didn’t we follow it in the first place?” Fela asked.
“Because I thought I knew where we were going,” I sighed. “They tell you to follow running water to civilization if you get lost in the woods, where I come from. Even if my town isn't where I left it, we might find other people along the--fuck!”
I stumbled over a metal bar that I hadn’t quite seen under the layers of leaves and tall grass. Once I caught my balance, I started to kick away the underbrush so I could see what had tripped me up.
“Another machine trail?” Fela stopped short and pricked her ears up. “I hear nothing.”
“Yeah, I think so.” I’d cleared away enough dead leaves and branches to see that the thing I’d tripped across was a rusted old railroad track, complete with wooden beams buried in the gravel underneath the metal rail. “It doesn’t look like there’s been a machine along here in a long time, though. We can try following this into town.”
“If it is as abandoned as that cow house, we may not find anything,” Fela argued. “But if it is not abandoned, we may have another machine chasing us. I do not like either of those situations.”
“I don’t, either,” I agreed, “but I really don’t want to give up yet. Listen, we’ve been going northwest for just a couple of hours, and it’s not like we’re hurrying. Let’s change direction and head northeast for a while. Either I’ll find what I’m looking for or I won’t, but we’ll definitely hit the river again.”
“Are you sure?” Fela’s eyes narrowed.
“Pretty sure,” I said. It had been a long time since I’d walked to Sol’s, and I’d used sidewalks instead of hiking through a mostly trackless wilderness, but I was pretty sure that if we didn’t make it to Farmington soon that meant it just wasn’t there. I peered both ways down the railroad line, darted over the tracks, then pointed myself northeast. “Come on, it won’t be that bad of a trip. Why don’t I tell you about human timekeeping while we walk, huh?”
”Very well,” Fela agreed as she leapt over the railroad tracks. “What is an hour?”
“So, humans break the day up into these equal chunks of time called hours...” I began, and then we spent the next few minutes going over what time meant and how to measure it.
I’d just taught Fela the concept of counting seconds using the “one-one thousand” method and was about to launch into what I remembered about the Earth’s rotational tilt when I started to see patches of solid gray walls through the trees.
“Hey, I think we found something!” I cheered.
“Let us hope it will not shoot sparks at us,” Fela muttered.
The closer we got, the easier it was to see the buildings, and soon we were in what looked like the overgrown backyard of a rambling, weathered old Victorian house. Most of the paint had worn off long ago and left the wooden boards a shiny gray like the barn, but the big black scorch marks that pockmarked the house’s walls seemed to have etched themselves into the wood. The gingerbread trim and shutters around the windows hung at creepy haunted-house angles, the wraparound porch and the wooden pillars that held it up had caved in, and the roof was missing a bunch of shingles. The house and its neighbors had clearly been deserted a long time ago.
“These are tall caves indeed.” Fela peered at the broken cupola that sat atop the two-story house. “Are these familiar to you?”
“Uh, not this backyard specifically, but there are a lot of houses like this in town,” I told her. I strode toward the gap in the houses, where I could see the rusted remains of an elaborately curly wrought-iron fence and gate. “Except I don’t think anyone lives in these now. I’ll know more when I see the street.”
I tried to lift the latch on the wrought-iron gate, but it broke apart into rusty flakes under my fingers. I figured the gate was probably rusted shut by now, so I shoved my shoulder against the wrought-iron bars to force it open, but I could actually feel the metal bending and flaking against my shoulders even as the hinges screeched their song of protest. I stood back, aimed my right foot at the gate, and slammed the sole of my boot right through the crumbling iron bars.
Fela picked up a big, thick branch and started to bash at the rusty bars that surrounded my foot, Floppy lowered his head and smashed his tusks through the fence, and I kicked at the gate’s rusty hinges. It only took us a couple of minutes of destruction before there was a Floppy-sized gap in the fence.
I crossed the overgrown yard, stepped out onto the silvery-gray grit and wood chips that covered the road, and looked up and down Grand River Avenue. I recognized most of the elegant, gingerbread-trimmed Victorian houses that I saw standing on the street, but all of them were in the same weathered, half-collapsed state, with ivy and moss grown over their walls and rotted beams, and they all had the same kinds of scorch marks scattered across their outsides.
“Shit,” I muttered, “this looks like a ghost town. I’m not liking this, Fela. Something bad must have gone down here.”
“Do you fear the spirits of your ancestors?” Fela asked. “Or are you worried that the spirits here do not know you? Will they pull you down into the earth?”
“I didn’t mean that literally.” I kicked at one of the wood chips, and it turned to mush under my toe. “It’s just a saying that means there’s nobody living in a town anymore. And all of these houses have been standing for over a hundred years in my world, so I’m not really sure when they left, except that it was a pretty long time ago.”
“Maybe they all died,” Fela whispered. “Whatever killed them could still be here.”
“If it’s a mega-disease thing like The Stand, everything that had it might have been killed off,” I mused. “If it was a chemical leak or something, it would have probably dissipated by now. Or we’d already be screwed by drinking the water. Same for if they dropped the bomb on Detroit, although I don’t see any nuclear shadows. And if it went all Flint in the 80’s, there should at least be a few people left. Right?”
“You speak of a plague?” Fela frowned. “Poison? The town turning to stone?”
“When you put it that way, it sounds like the wrath of God or something.” I shook my head. “Whatever happened to Farmington, it happened a pretty long time ago, and I want to find out what it was.”
I headed with Fela and Floppy southeast down Grand River toward Farmington’s tiny downtown.
Most of the historic houses were about where I expected them to be, even though it was seriously creepy to see them all weathered and abandoned, and I recognized the Charles Addams silhouette of the Masonic Lodge on the corner of Grand River and Farmington. Beyond that the entire streetscape looked more like the set of an old Western than the quaint, tree-lined downtown the Chamber of Commerce had so carefully cultivated. The boxy shops of weathered wood and crumbling brick were all several feet apart from each other instead of being all crammed together wall to wall. They all had wooden canopies that hung over raised wooden platforms that you had to cross to get to the front doors, but most of those had rotted or collapsed, too. There were one or two buildings I recognized, like the two-story Cook Building with its brick arch at the top, and the Methodist Church with its stone tower and stained-glass windows, but most of the other buildings had been torn down long ago in my world. The buildings were covered with the same kind of scorch marks that we’d seen on the houses, but I only saw a few scattered buildings with the kind of charred remains that suggested a fire.
I could still read some of the names on the shops as we passed, and apparently Fela could, too, now.
“Tom McGee’s Drug Store,” Fela read out slowly. “D
ay Dickerson’s Hardware. Fred L. Cook’s Dry Goods and Grocery. William Walter’s Pool Room...”
“Pool with a capital P...” I sang the line I half remembered from The Music Man.
“How is it that I can hear these words in my head, but I do not understand what most of them mean?” Fela asked.
“That’s phonetic language for you,” I said. “And a lot of those are just peoples’ names, so don’t worry about trying to understand them. Names in our world don’t usually mean much anyway. They mostly just sound nice.”
“Davvve Meyer,” Fela drawled. “It’s satisfying to say. And it does not mean anything?”
“I mean, the first dude who had my name killed a giant with a slingshot and then they made him king,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure I was actually named after my great-uncle. Uh, what does Fela mean?”
“It means me.” Fela gave me a close-mouthed, fang-toothed smile. “Well, we have found your town, and there is nobody here. Shall we find the river and go back to your world-moving cave? If we leave now, I think I might be able to make a spear for both of us before night comes for us.”
I glanced at my watch and was relieved to realize that it was only a few minutes after 2 PM.
“We have plenty of time before the sun starts to set,” I said. “And it won’t take that long to get back to the world-moving cave, since my watch lets me know exactly which direction to go to find it. Let’s poke around and see if we can salvage anything. I bet we could find some materials for your spear.”
“What can we find here that we cannot find in the forest?” Fela asked. “It is not difficult to find stone and wood for a spear. The stones these caves are made of look like they would crumble into dust as soon as I tried to knap it.”
“It probably would,” I conceded. “But there might still be stuff we can use in the shops, and maybe poking around will help me figure out what happened here.”
“Maybe one of your folk left a warning before they abandoned the town,” Fela suggested. “Is there any place your people like to paint shapes?”
“The library!” I snapped my fingers. “Yeah, of course. They’d probably have newspapers. It was back up the street a little way in my world, let’s go see if it’s still there.”
The library was on the south side of the street where I remembered it, but instead of being a plain brown brick building with a slanted metal roof, it was a little granite wedding cake with a tall set of stone steps that led up to the wide smoked glass double doors. Copperplate carved letters above the door read FARMINGTON COMMUNITY LIBRARY.
“Wow, this is gorgeous,” I commented as we climbed the steps to the library. “In my world this is such a dinky little building. I wonder what happened?”
When I pulled on the doors, they creaked open more easily than I’d expected, almost like they’d been taken care of, but I figured that was probably because they were protected by the overhang of the stone roof instead of being out in the open like the rusty gate, so I poked my head inside and looked around the place before we went in.
The library looked like it was only one room a few dozen yards across, for all the complexity of the stonework outside. Sunlight filtered down through rectangular windows and highlighted the dust floating around in the air. Chest-high wooden shelves stacked with cloth-bound books lined the walls and filled most of the room. A wooden rolltop desk with a sign that read CIRCULATION sat against one wall, and against the opposite wall I saw a wooden magazine rack filled with yellowing newspapers next to a cluster of tattered leather armchairs. Some of the books had fallen off the shelves, and the air was filled with dust, but other than that the place seemed to have been remarkably untouched by the ravages of time.
“Hey, Fela, get ready to bust out those new reading skills.” I turned back to see Fela leading Floppy up the steps. I opened my mouth to ask her to leave Floppy outside so he wouldn’t wreak elephantine havoc in the library, but then I realized that nobody else was ever going to come in here again once we left. As long as I got the information I needed out of the library, it didn’t really matter if Floppy knocked over a few shelves. “All right, everyone in. Can’t leave Floppy outside with the electric rabbits, can we?”
I held one door and Fela held the other, and the little mammoth ducked his head and pulled his ears flat as he walked through the door, even though he was small enough to be able to get in the doors anyway. He looked around the room, headed right over to the CIRCULATION area, and started to rub his tusks against the closed wooden cover of the rolltop desk.
“What are we looking for?” Fela glanced around the inside of the library.
“I’m going to check out those newspapers over there.” I pointed to the wooden newspaper rack. “Those papers tell people about what’s going on in the world, and I might be able to find out what happened by going through them. So that’s me.”
“I’ll guard the doors.” Fela pulled out the hunting knife.
“Eh, I don’t think anything is going to try to get in just now.” I went over to the shelf, pulled out one of the books, and opened it up to show Fela the pages. “These are books. They’re full of words, and most of them either tell you a story or tell you everything the writer knows about one particular topic.”
Fela peered at the open page.
“Can the mind by its powers alone cross the infinite spaces of the heavens?” the cat-woman read as her eyes moved from right to left. “No, not under its own power, but by using the forces of nature. The force of attraction is one of these great powers.”
“It sure is,” I murmured. I closed the book, then showed her the spine. “See, the title is on the side here. It tells you what’s inside the book.”
“Real and Imaginary Worlds,” Fela read. “Could that tell us about the worlds we might travel to?”
“It’s kind of a long shot, but maybe?” I shrugged. “What I want you to do is go up and down these shelves, and see if you can find any books that seem like they might help us survive. Stuff about how to build a house, or plant a farm, or anything about general survival. I feel like a little farming town might have a lot of books about planting.”
“Planting seeds is not hard,” Fela scoffed. “You cover them with dirt and pour some water on them every day.”
“I get the general principle, yeah,” I said, “But I know there’s got to be more to it than that if you’re doing it right, and I want to make sure that I can do it right when we actually get our hands on some seeds again. We don’t know what the food supply is going to be like in any given world we visit, and as long as we’re sitting on an expanding dirt circle it would be cool to have our own supply of veggies and stuff. Plus, we’re going to need some place to sleep other than the car--I mean, the cave.”
“I can show you how to make a little cave with sticks and furs,” Fela offered. “And I can show you how to tan furs, too.”
“I would love to learn that,” I said. “But I want to make something a little more stable than a tent, and I feel like there’s a lot of other things we can learn to make our cave more comfortable.”
“I will see what I can find, but I promise nothing.” Fela sauntered into the stacks. “Come, Floppy. Help me find a story that will tell us the right way to plant seeds.”
Floppy looked up from where he’d been reducing the circulation desk to a pile of splinters, made a happy little blat noise, and lumbered over to help his mistress. He followed Fela’s pointing finger and started to prod at the books with his trunk.
I could hear books dropping off the shelves one by one as I headed over to the wooden newspaper rack. I just hoped Floppy wouldn’t get clumsy and knock anything over onto Fela, but I hadn’t really seen the mammoth make any missteps so far. The big fuzzy dude was really damn smart.
I pulled out a stiff, crackling copy of the Detroit Free Press, grinned at the familiar Old English masthead, then checked the date: September 13th, 1900. A quick glance at the mastheads of the Detroit Gazette, Detroit Ledger, and the Detroit
News-Tribune showed the same date, so I went back to the Free Press and started to scan the headlines of its tiny, cramped columns of text.
“Thousands Flee to Houston as Flood Swamps Galveston,” I read. “Von Otter Takes Place as Swedish Prime Minister. Beet Prices Drop, Farmer’s Futures--yeah, yeah, just give me the apocalypse, okay?”
I tried to unfold the newspaper, felt the page start to break off in my hand, then turned it over carefully in my hands to read below the fold.
“Beloved Inventor Nikola Tesla To Activate Global Free Energy Machine,” I read. “The brilliant Serbian who brought us alternating-current power, the remote-controlled boat, and the radio plans to unveil a device that will provide us all with free electrical power, wirelessly transmitted from the Earth’s upper atmosphere to your very own home appliances...”
My eyes darted to a black-and-white picture of the famous, mustached inventor standing next to a gigantic tower of metal struts with one of his famous metal coils perched on top. I’d seen pictures of Tesla’s huge tower at Wardenclyffe before, but instead of being protected by a gigantic metal cage, the coil at the top was bare.
“Ooh, boy, that does not have a Faraday cage on it,” I muttered. “Bad idea, Nicky.”
I went back to the article.
“Once Mr. Tesla turns on his machine, it will direct its electrical charge not through the air at first, but into the very Earth itself,” I read. “Mr. Tesla claims that this will help him tap into the Earth’s natural electrical charge. Once the tower is charged up by the Earth’s energy, Mr. Tesla will send all that juice up toward the heavens, where he will use the Earth’s own natural layer of conductive gas to transmit this electrical energy to all of our dishwashers, toasters, and light bulbs...”
The next few paragraphs were all about Tesla’s life and inventions. After he’d won the Current Wars against Edison, he’d successfully developed and patented invention after invention. He’d become a household name and beloved celebrity in a matter of years.
“Hey, good for you,” I muttered. “Edison was a dick anyway. Henry Ford should have collected your last breath in a bottle instead of his. Maybe your pigeon girlfriend wouldn’t have let him, though.”
