Astronomy(31)

Now and then, Susan caught a glimpse of something in the trees below them. It seemed to glint in the sun. Susan took it for the Faulkenberg Reservoir spillway. Then the trees opened up and the spillway showed itself to be a trail of mud. She lost sight of it as they continued up to the valley rim, though Susan continued to see evidence of some sort of passing.

Periodically, they would find a barefaced cliff, where an avalanche or over-saturation had peeled away a layer of earth and vegetation. More rarely, she would find herself looking up a path as wide as a road, cleared straight up the side of the mountain. The trees in these vertical clearings would be snapped over a couple of feet up from the ground. The stumps would be tilted into the unyielding soil as if from a great weight.

This worried her. She had seen similar trails in her Watermark seminars about Dunwich, Massachusetts. There were trails like this all through the hills around Dunwich. No one had taken pictures of the thing that had left them, but oral tradition surrounding it had impressed her greatly.

Malmagden seemed to grow quieter with each passing trail. She watched his eyes follow each one off into the distance. Clearly, he knew more than he was telling.

They were at the ridge crest. The air grew pungent with wood smoke. It congealed in the dusk before their headlights. Charley turned the car left, into the mountains that surrounded the reservoir. And stopped.

Faulkenberg Reservoir was gone.

Charley said, “Damn.” Malmagden sat back, quiet and morose. The three of them stared into an empty bowl of rock. Millions of cubic meters of water were gone—flashed to steam? Susan could hardly imagine it. More than the reservoir was gone. An entire deciduous forest, from the edge of the shoreline to the top of the crest line had been turned to cinders and loose rock.

Below them, the road wound down through smoke that flattened out along a thermocline, patchy and soot-gray. Susan made out a huge fire toward the valley center, just past the shore-side turnout, where nothing but water should be. It was like the heart of a rose quartz. The entire cloud flickered and pulsed to its every shift. But this was not the source of the smoke cover. The smoke that filled the Faulkenberg Wald breathed out from beneath the bare rock walls of the canyon. It curled up from the road. The evidence all around her spoke of immensity. Whatever the Germans had fooled with up here had scoured Faulkenberg Wald from the bottom of the reservoir to the cliffs over her head.

Rock cascaded to their left. Susan had her Thompson nailed to the spot and would have blown out the windshield but for Charley’s restraining hand.

“It’s a rockslide,” he whispered. She looked off her target just long enough to see what he was saying. The bare limestone was cooling from whatever had happened. Rock was raining down all along the flanks of Faulkenberg Tal.

“What do you know about this?” Charley was addressing Malmagden over his shoulder, though his eyes were on the blasted valley before them.

Horror or calculation had Malmagden silent. Susan shot a hand over the seat. Her fingers latched onto Malmagden’s collar. She repeated Charley’s question.

“Get me to the valley floor,” he croaked. “I will give you an informed opinion.” Susan cinched up her grip. “Night is coming,” Malmagden squeaked. “We have to get off the road.” He seemed very sincere about this.

The blacktop had been heated to taffy. Susan could see where it had run down the embankment like loose mud. Between the mounting smoke and precarious road, going was slow; it took ten minutes to roll down the last half mile to the shore. On the way down, they passed over a rail crossing; the tracks stretched away in their bed all along the surrounding cliffs.

A little further on, Susan could see some sort of encampment waiting down in the reservoir. Hard to tell through the smoke cover that layered the valley, but the fire was unmistakable. It rose twenty feet, surrounded by a tiara of wobbling shadow.

Trucks were backed up to it. Susan cupped her hand to her forehead and made out the silhouettes of soldiers heaving long branches onto the flames.

She marveled at this. The heat beneath the smoke cover was stifling. Not hot enough for some. The trucks were heavy with wood. Whoever these people were—Russians?—they must have scavenged every dead tree in the Franconian Forest.

They were still coming in. As Charley left the blacktop and started down the steep grade into the dry reservoir. A truck loomed out of the smoke just ahead of them. A stake bed, overloaded with tree trunks, branches, saplings complete with roots. The whole mass swayed unsteadily as the driver picked his way around the potholes and small boulders.

The truck pitched right. Its load slewed in the opposite direction. Charley slammed on the brakes. Ash from the lakebed blew up in a fine cloud that coated the windshield like paint as he then gunned past the truck. They ducked into their shirts, coughing, to avoid being asphyxiated. Shrieve fumbled at the wipers and the headlights. Susan peered through twin arcs of clean glass at bales of concertina wire across the road.