Wardenclyffe

by F. Paul Wilson

  The floor had vanished. Only empty darkness waited below.

  Not possible…none of this was possible. I had been down here hundreds of times and the floor had always been as solid as rock, as hard as rock. Whenever I’d checked the Tesla coil—

  The coil.

  Fighting nausea and incipient vertigo, I rose and stretched the torch toward the center of the shaft. Its wan glow reflected off the donut of the toroid, along with the primary and secondary coils. All remained attached to the central pipe, but until now the primary coil had been buried in the floor. I knew because I’d helped bury it. No longer. The floor had vanished.

  My reeling mind tried to make sense of it. The central steel pipe had been sunk an extra three hundred feet below the floor, past the aquifer not far below, and deep into the substrata as an anchor. Had the floor and the earth below it crumbled into the aquifer?

  But that didn’t explain this light-devouring miasma, this darkness that seemed almost alive, almost sentient.

  And then something shifted in the blackness below…surged…heaved…flowed…

  I saw nothing, heard nothing, and yet I was overwhelmed by an indefinable and undeniable sense of movement down there. What I had thought an inexplicable void where the floor should have been was not a void at all. Something crouched in the depths here. Something had taken up residence in the nether regions of the shaft, and I teetered on the edge of panic at the prospect of meeting the occupant.

  “Let’s go,” I said, turning to Herb and pointing with the torch. “Up! Out of here!”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Herb, we need to—”

  Without a word and without warning, he pushed me. If I hadn’t had a grip on the railing I’d have tumbled off that last step. As it was, I swung out over the abyss and almost lost my grip on the torch. I cried out in panic. If he pushed me again—

  But Herb wasn’t interested in me. He moved onto the last tread, then stepped off into the void. And like Steven before him, he disappeared without a word or a cry or a whimper. Simply…gone.

  I pulled myself back onto the stairs and began running—yes, running—up the staircase. And as I ran, the Lady’s words came back to me.

  Something came through and stayed…

  Yes. Yes, it had. And I had just found it.

  * * *

  “You’re sure of this?” Tesla said from behind his desk.

  Again I was struck by how this Nikola Tesla was not the jaunty, cocky, spirited man I’d met in 1903. He seemed drained, smaller, as if he’d sunk into his chair. I had no idea how to reanimate him.

  “As sure as I am standing here, sir.”

  “You do understand it is impossible for the floor of the shaft to simply vanish. It must be somewhere.”

  “It may well be, sir,” I told him. “But it’s not down there. I assure you it’s not.”

  “He’s right!” Drexler said, bursting into the office. He looked terrible—pale, shaken, sweaty. “There’s no floor. It’s gone!”

  He hadn’t believed me, so he’d taken a torch and descended into the shaft to prove me wrong. Obviously he’d proved the opposite.

  “Impossible!” Tesla cried.

  Drexler slapped a hand on the desk. “The schnapps, maestro! Give me the schnapps!”

  Tesla looked confused. “Pardon?”

  “I put a bottle of Himbeergeist in your bottom drawer—for the day we celebrated our inevitable success. But I need it now.”

  Tesla found the bottle. Drexler uncorked it and drank directly from its mouth. After two swallows he handed it to me.

  “Here. Drink.”

  “No, I—”

  “You look like you need it. Drink.”

  Indeed I did need it. I usually avoided sprits. I’d nurse an ale to be one of the boys, but I dreaded becoming inebriated and letting something slip that would reveal my secret. I couldn’t see how a sip or two of this could hurt, though.

  I upended the bottle and swallowed. The clear liquid was both harsh and sweet, with a strong raspberry flavor. Drexler took it back for a third gulp. He offered it to Tesla who shook his head.

  I said, “It’s more than just the floor vanishing into a void. Something is down there.”

  “This is true?” Tesla looked to Drexler for confirmation. “You saw—?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing but blackness down there, but I could sense it. And worse…I felt…worthless.” He shuddered as he raked shaky fingers through his hair. He seemed to be talking more to himself than to us. “I’ve never felt worthless. I was raised to shape history. I have a mission in life, an important position in the Septimus Order—I matter! And yet, down there, I was nothing. Nothing. Down there in the dark I saw no reason for living a moment longer. If I hadn’t forced myself to turn and run, I might have joined the other two.”

  He took another swig of schnapps, then corked the bottle.

  Tesla looked to me now. “And you, Charles? You felt the same?”

  How to put this?

  “Oddly enough, no. I know Herb felt that way. Shortly before he jumped he told me he didn’t want ‘any more of anything.’ I believe that jibes with what Mister Drexler is saying.”

  “But you felt none of that?” Drexler said, giving me a curious look. I sensed his customary imperiousness creeping back. “No hopelessness?”

  “No.” I almost added that I was sorry. For some strange reason I felt apologetic, but couldn’t say why.

  “You’re an odd one, Charles.”

  If you only knew.

  The only explanation I could think of was what the Lady had called my “dissonance.” The disharmony already within me somehow conferred an immunity to the Occupant’s influence. It made a strange sort of sense: How could the Occupant disrupt resonance where none existed?

  But I could hardly get into that with these two.

  I said, “I think we should focus on whatever moved in down there and how to get rid of it.”

  Drexler was calming, but his usual unflappable poise seemed to elude him.

  “Any suggestions as to how we can bell that particular cat, Charles?”

  “Yes. Find a way to send it back to whatever hell it crawled from.”

  A smirk. “Back through this ‘Veil’ that old woman told you about?”

  I reined in a surge of anger at his charade. He not only knew bloody damn well what I was talking about, he firmly believed in it. But I had to keep calm here.

  “Still want to call it a ‘fairy tale,’ Herr Drexler? You didn’t seem to think so a moment ago.”

  I detected a quick flinch but he gave away nothing more.

  He straightened and said, “I think we should run the Wales transmission test as soon as possible—and at the maximum combined power of both generators. Whatever is down there, we will fry it like an egg!”

  Did he realize what he was saying? After what he’d just seen and felt?

  “That could create a huge tear in the Veil!”

  “Well, then,” he said, “if we don’t kill it, we will provide it with a pathway back to, as you said, whatever hell it crawled from.” He turned to Tesla. “Is that not right, maestro?”

  “We must run the experiment,” Tesla said absently. “We must show the world.”

  His words dismayed me. He’d become fixated on vindicating his theory. I didn’t know who or what to blame—Drexler, the Occupant below, or a combination of the two—and I supposed it didn’t matter or change the fact that Tesla’s world-encompassing vision had funneled down to vindicating Wardenclyffe and its tower. He couldn’t see past that.

  Yes, he was going to change the world. Not to the utopia of his vision…but to the hell of Drexler’s.

  That left one person to stop all this. And I hadn’t a bloody clue as to how to do it.

  * * *

  By mid-April all was ready—except for the fog. Tesla and Drexler wanted to use a morning fog here in order to obtain the best evidence in Wales. They’d agreed that filming the tes
t in daylight would head off any accusations of trickery in the dark. The plan was to pick a shady spot over there and insert the bulb fixture’s probes into the ground in multiple locations. The five-hour time difference necessitated an early start in Wardenclyffe.

  I too was ready. Or so I hoped. I’d volunteered to check all the circuits and wiring, replacing anything that might not stand up to the extra power we were planning to run through it. Which I did.

  But while I was shoring up the connections in the instrumentation room, I was secretly building a parallel set of circuitry that would counter the effects of the tower. Or so I fervently hoped.

  My plan was based on pure speculation and I hadn’t the faintest idea whether it would work.

  I’d considered and discarded so many plans—like sabotaging the generators, for instance. But that would prove only a temporary solution. I’d be banished, and they’d fix the generators and everything would return to point A.

  I had to do something that would protect the Veil rather than tear it.

  Use your dissonance, Charles.

  I’d returned to basics: What did the tower do? It created standing waves in the Earth’s crust that synchronized natural telluric currents. The Septimus map had showed lines of force converging on the weak points to shore them up. The Lady had indicated that Tesla’s standing waves were diverting the dlap lines from the Wardenclyffe nexus, weakening the Veil and allowing access from the other side.

  The standing waves were the key…and standing waves were synchronous…creating resonances within the crust. Maybe the key was to create a dissonant wave…counter Tesla’s standing wave by propagating a disruptive wave that would draw in the dlap lines and reinforce the Veil.

  Listen to yourself, a part of me thought. Dlap lines…the Veil…nexus points. You’ve completely bought into that old woman’s madness. It’s become a folie à deux.

  But another part recognized that as wishful thinking. So convenient to write it all off as madness. But I’d seen the chew wasps, I’d visited the void at the bottom of the shaft, I’d sensed the foulness growing there.

  Madness, yes. Madness for certain. But madness that existed in the real world. The one I had to live in.

  I was ready to sabotage my hero—or at least give it my bloody damned best try. My parallel circuitry was ready. All we needed was fog.

  But I needed one more thing: I needed Tesla away from Wardenclyffe during the test in case he detected my countermeasure.

  To that end I made the short walk to the Shoreham train station where the ticket agent also acted as the local telegrapher. I found him slumped in his chair behind the barred window, looking dazed. My knock on his windowsill roused him from his reverie.

  “How would a wire message reach here from Abereiddy, Wales?” I said.

  He looked at me with dull eyes. “Why would you want to hear from Wales?”

  An odd remark.

  “Please answer my question.”

  He sighed. “It would be sent through the transatlantic line to New York City, then routed here. Why do you care?”

  “Mister Tesla will be expecting an important message some morning soon.”

  “Nothing’s important, young man,” he said with a hang-dog expression. “Nothing matters. Nothing at all.”

  I realized to my horror that the Occupant’s influence had spread far beyond Wardenclyffe. Clearly this clerk had been affected. How many others? How fast was it spreading?

  * * *

  I awoke with water dripping on my face. The loft was usually stuffy and I often tilted the fanlight atop the window next to my cot to allow fresh air to circulate. Moisture was condensing on the glass and dripping on me…moisture from fog?

  I leaped up and saw…nothing.

  “Fog!” I shouted. “A thick one.”

  I’d been sleeping in my clothes. We all were. We had to keep both generators ready to run on a moment’s notice, so we took turns during the night stoking their coal fires. Drexler had set up a cot in the library downstairs. I had to shake his shoulder quite a bit before he awoke. As he stumbled after me to the main floor to wake Tesla, the maestro emerged from his office, looking as if he hadn’t slept all night.

  “Our fog is here,” I said. “Shall we begin?”

  “Is it worth it?” Tesla said, his tone bleak. “Will anyone really care?”

  The Occupant was definitely winning.

  “Yes!” I cried. “Remember this date: seven thirty-five A.M. on April eighteenth. This is the birth of world wireless!”

  Or, I thought, this is the end of our world and the birth of another in which we cannot survive.

  Surprisingly, it took some coaxing to spur Drexler to action, but soon he and I were stoking the generators. Tesla’s plan needed all the power we could supply. As did mine.

  When the generators were running at maximum output, we gave the maestro the honor of throwing the switch. I’d recruited Drexler in convincing Tesla to await the confirmation from Wales at the railroad station, insisting he deserved to be the first to know. In his current state he couldn’t counter the suggestion, so he’d acquiesced.

  With Tesla headed for the station, Drexler and I walked out to look at the tower. The latticework of the base was barely visible in the mist but blue-white flashes lit the shaft from below while bolts of energy pierced the fog above.

  “I must confess to some trepidation about this,” Drexler said.

  The admission shocked me. Sanity at last?

  “You?”

  A quick nod. “I spoke to Stubbs, the brother from San Francisco. He told me you’d been examining the maps at the Lodge. You know more than you should, so I can be frank with you.”

  He hesitated, seemingly indecisive as to what to say next, how much to reveal. But I already knew more than he realized. Perhaps more than he himself knew.

  “You’re going to tell me you’ve been funding Tesla not for wireless power but because he’s tearing the Veil? I’ve already guessed that.”

  He looked shocked. “You know?”

  “You showed up right after the fish died and the barn disappeared.”

  He nodded. “Don’t forget the caretaker’s story. The sum of those incidents alerted the Council as to what was happening here. They sent me to make sure it kept happening. But now…now I think Septimus might be probing dangerous territory.”

  “But the whole basis for your existence is—”

  “To prepare the way for the One. But…”

  The Lady’s words…they do not know that they wait in vain for the One. He is not coming. He will never come. He is sealed away forever…

  Now was not the time to pass that on.

  “I saw those chew wasps,” he blurted. “And I felt the hopelessness and futility of all existence when I was down in the shaft. In fact, I’m feeling as if this morning’s test is all a waste of time. Is that the new epoch my people are working toward?”

  I saw a man whose belief system had been built on sand, and was now crumbling. But I didn’t yet feel it safe to tell him my plan. I could hint, though.

  “We have to seal the Veil.”

  “Not till we kill whatever is down there or we send it back.”

  “The Occupant,” I said.

  “Is that what you call it?” He shrugged. “As good a name as any. It doesn’t belong here.” He stared at the flashes lighting the mouth of the shaft. “The Occupant cannot be feeling comfortable right now.”

  “How do we know it feels anything?” I said, starting toward the tower. “I have to go look.”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  “I have to see.”

  Drexler fell into step beside me. “I think I do too. But does it matter what we see?”

  It seemed everything was becoming increasingly futile to Drexler.

  I, on the other hand, was bursting with purpose. But I needed time before I initiated my counter waves.

  We crossed the hundred feet to the base, ducked through the latticework, and inche
d up to the edge of the shaft. We stood there, tense, uncertain, the flashes from below lighting our features.

  I fought a fear—certainly not unfounded—that the Occupant would send up snakelike tendrils and snare us like Timothy Herring up the road. Holding my breath I chanced a quick look, thrusting my head forward and pulling it back almost immediately.

  “What did you see?” Drexler said.

  “Nothing. A medusa’s head of electrical bolts but little else.”

  The afterimages drifted through my vision. I took a second look, this time squinting to protect my eyes. Again the flashes, but this time I saw the Tesla coil that was creating them. And below it…only blackness. The floor was still gone.

  Drexler took a turn at peeking, but didn’t recoil. Instead, he began leaning farther and farther over until I grabbed his shirt and pulled him back.

  “Nein-nein,” he said, leaning toward the shaft. “I am fine. I know where I belong. I—”

  I pulled him farther away this time.

  “Drexler, no!”

  He looked at me with terror in his eyes. “Get me away from here.”

  My thought exactly. But as I was leading him, something the size of a large lobster rose on dragonfly wings from the depths of the shaft. I recognized it immediately.

  “Chew wasp!”

  Fear overcame Drexler’s crushing despair and we ran, but slid to a stop at the braces when we saw what lay between us and the plant. A huge, white fusiform shape undulated along the ground, looking like a fat, thirty-foot maggot.

  Instinctively we both ducked at the buzz of oversized wings growing behind us. The chew wasp overshot us and zipped through the latticework, sailing over the maggot thing and banking into a turn for another pass. The maggot lifted its head and shot a gray tendril—its tongue?—at the wasp, snaring it and snapping it back into its mouth. It disappeared without a trace.

  …chew wasps are merely mosquitos of the Otherness…

  The Lady had been right. But how had she known?

  I forgot the question when the maggot angled its glistening body toward us.

  “Back the other way!”

  The maggot was slow and clumsy and I figured we could exit the base of the tower at the far side and make a run around it to the plant. But the maggot wasn’t alone. Through the fog I could see others like it undulating on all sides of the tower, moving toward it.