Otherworldly Maine (9 page)

In the aftermath of these events—the disappearance of Griswold Masterson, the discovery of the cylinder, the loss of Miss Ward's grip on reality, the destruction of the house—and as news spread out into the world, scientists and sociologists and theologians hastily began postulating theories. A few of these ideas were incorporated into the summary presented at a recent meeting of the American Board of Science in Washington, D.C.:

“Due to the absence of conclusive data, and the seclusion and secrecy in which Griswold Masterson chose to work throughout his life, and because so much of his research was destroyed, our inquiry, though arduous, has been, in many ways, unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, it is our shared opinion that Mr. Masterson achieved the ability to project himself into the physical form and mental development of his own infancy, and that he used this means to renew his future. That is to say, he opened the door to what he called the ‘Theoretical Future' not by achieving longevity, but by reducing his age as the framework of life around him progressed at its usual rate. This means that Masterson, who was sixty-three years old at the time of this experiment, by regressing, made available to himself another seventy-two years (based on current life expectancy for a male in this country) . . . . The idea seems to have been to enable himself to observe the future at least seventy years hence, with his records of his first sixty-three years meant to serve as the link between his lifetimes. Of course, this would leave open the possibility of his regressing to infancy again and again—a capability he may not have originally anticipated . . . . Tragically, however, we will probably never know precisely how he accomplished this, for the machine Beryl Ward found has disappeared, and the baby Griswold is dead.”

While the theory of the American Board of Science has the weight of evidence behind it, the editors of this magazine must point out that there is an important consideration that has not yet been addressed: the human element. Beryl Ward had apparently fallen desperately in love with Griswold Masterson. And faced with the prospect of having to watch the man she loved slowly bloom into a youngster—and then into a young man—while she grew shriveled and weak (unaware of the universal implications of his experiments), she may have placed a pillow over the child's mouth until it wailed and clawed no longer. (Miss Ward is locked behind bars in an institution for the criminally insane.) Thus a basic human emotion may have been responsible for our being separated forever from the full implications of Masterson's experiments. This, as we see it, is the ultimate irony, the ultimate tragedy of the life and times of Griswold Masterson.

The sheriff's office is much too close to the real world to bend to the hypotheses of the intellectual community, so they have simply listed Griswold Masterson as a missing person. The child in the cylinder? From the pulpit Rev. Leopold Ossip has rendered the opinion, on more than one occasion, that the infant was the illegitimate offspring of Mr. Masterson and Miss Ward, and that in her madness she murdered her own son. The story she told to the sheriff, Ossip proclaimed, was the invention of an unholy “and therefore diseased” mind. While much of Marshville seems to have accepted the reverend's view, the rest of the world does not agree—judging from the many interpretations that have surfaced on the significance of the child. The most remarkable aspect of the entire affair, however, may be the steel cylinder. While its whereabouts has never been firmly established, a newspaper article (no date was indicated) clipped from the
Brattleboro Gazette
, published in Saskatchewan, Canada, and sent to our offices by an anonymous reader, could well have some bearing on the mystery:

CAVE PEOPLE IN STRANGE VIGIL

People have begun to gather on a hillside outside Brattleboro, Saskatchewan, and each morning there seems to be more of them, speaking in a growing variety of tongues.

All day these people do little more than sit and stare at an object partially imbedded in the earth, which blocks off the mouth of a natural cave—one of a series in the area. The stainless-steel capsule, apparently catching the gleam of the sun, seems to glow as if from its own internal light.

Toward evening, the cave people can be heard chanting. Once the sun is down, they build campfires, and the chanting stops. Lately they have been entering the catacombs of surrounding caves to shelter themselves for the night and, it is said, to pray.

Brattleboro police told the
Gazette
that the cave people are orderly and are breaking no laws. “That hill is part of a huge national forest preserve, open to all Canadians,” said Chief Judd Nooson. “There's nothing much we can do about them, legally.”

A professor of philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan, Stanley Nihlin, offered a possible explanation: “In these times of rapid change, when religious belief is at such a low level, people try on cults like new shoes. And discard them just as quickly.”

A curious postscript to that newspaper item and, indeed, to this entire investigation, is that the editorial assistant who first heard about the Hermit Genius of Marshville, and the reporter who covered the story for
EQMM
, have resigned. Reportedly she left her husband and children and he left his fianceé and friends behind to join the cave people. But this has not been confirmed.

^†
At their request, the identities of the assistant and the reporter are being withheld.

S
ome people said we were heroes and some said we were traitors, but we were just a few old Mainers, with scruffy white beards and tussled white hair, in the right place at the right time—or maybe the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on your point of view.

Either way, the place we were at was a little seafood and ice cream shack called The Cabana at the southeast end of a little lake outside of Auburn. My brother, Ben, and I had been out fishing since the sun came up.

I love the lake first thing in the morning, when great clouds of steam rise up into the sky and a dazzling glare sparkles across the water. I was trying out a new bass lure—yellow and red with little flukes on the side. We didn't have much to show for the effort, but it was a wicked good way to keep a couple of old men out of their wives' way for a few hours.

It wasn't much of a lake—only a couple miles long and less than a mile across and pretty rectangular down at our end. Nothing like its bigger neighbors, Sebago and Thompson, but sufficient it was to the purpose of the day.

Our cottage was at one corner of the lake—now a duplex with my wife and I on one side and Ben and his wife on the other. The Cabana was over at the other corner, set just far enough back to be out of view from our porch.

It was one of those aging gems you find around Maine, with red-and-white-striped awnings outside and dark wood paneling inside. A juke box sat in the corner with little units at each booth where you could drop your quarter and pick your song. There was an old Coca-Cola sign on one wall and a Moxie sign on the other—the real thing from the factory in Lisbon Falls, not one of those phony Americana factory fakes. The place had the smell of moss and old grease and pine oil. It was a monument to the heyday of Maine's Golden Age, a century ago, before the rest of the country moved on and it stayed behind. (“Hea'd you had a Depression down theah,” my father used to say to the tourists, with a heavy Down East cant. “Hea'd it was ovah.”)

We tied our little boat at the dock and walked across a deep green dew-soaked lawn, through the sunroom and into the dining room proper.

And there we found Ted, the owner of the place, perched atop a stepladder, poking around in the space above the acoustic ceiling.

“What you up to, Ted?” Ben asked.

Ted must not have heard us come in, because he was so startled he gave a quick shudder that threw him off balance, making him lose his grip on whatever he was working on and nearly falling off the ladder. Ted was a good cook and he ate way too much of his own cooking, so climbing to the top of a stepladder was always a challenge to the laws of gravity—more so if anything broke his concentration.

I rushed forward and grabbed him by the arm before he completed the disaster and helped him regain his balance as he climbed down the steps to the floor.

“Jeezum, Ben, don't ever sneak up like that on me again,” Ted said when he regained his composure. “I thought you was one of those Homeland Stupidity guys.”

“Why would you think I was one of them?” Ben asked.

“Because he's got a guilty conscience.”

We turned our heads to the table in the corner where Dan Adams was sitting, tapping away at a beat-up old laptop that looked nearly as old as Ben and me—and him. Ted turned white, then red, then sputtered briefly.

“Do you want to tell them or should I?” Dan asked.

“You're being so clever this morning, why don't you?” Ted said. “It was your idea.”

“He's hooking up the satellite dish,” Dan said.

“What for?” I asked. “Hockey season doesn't start until the end of next month.” Since they cut off the cable from Canada a few years back, Ted had been running a pirate dish to pick up the CBC satellite feed so folks could watch the games from Montreal and Quebec—you know, real hockey for real hockey fans. He kept the dish in the attic, under a skylight, where it couldn't be seen from outside, and he had a cousin who was a state trooper who would give a day's warning whenever the Homeland Stupidity guys got the idea someone might be watching foreign videos and they needed to do a sweep of the countryside.

“We were watching CNN a little while ago when they broke in with a report from Juneau, Alaska. Something about a communications blackout—maybe a natural disaster, they weren't sure. Then one of those Homeland Security announcers came on and said we couldn't watch the Juneau story any more.”

“Hey, Ted, doesn't your sister live in Juneau?” Ben asked as he poured himself a cup of coffee from the big chrome-plated urn behind the counter.

“Yeah,” Ted said. “Dan couldn't find anything on the Internet about it.”

“Just ‘Error 999' screens,” Dan said. “Security blackouts.”

“So I figured I'd hook up the satellite dish and see if there was anything on the Canadian news. It was only going to be for a few minutes, then I was going to disconnect it. I just wanted to find out if anything might have happened to my sister.”

“Then don't let us hold you up,” I said. “Finish what you were doing. Ben and I will spot you on the ladder. We'd do it for you, but our wives told us when we turned 70 that we couldn't go climbing ladders any more.”

“Thanks, Toby,” Ted said. “Say, what have you two been up to this morning?”

“We were trying to find that big old bass over there near our cottage, the one that's been hiding all summer long over where the reeds are thick and the rocks stick out of the water.”

“That fella's been hiding there for three or four summers now, hasn't he?” Dan asked.

“Ayuh,” Ben said. “And one of these days we're going to catch him.”

Ted started to climb the stepladder, but was interrupted before he got two steps up by a tremendous buzzsaw roar that rattled the windows and the silverware and the dishes and the coffee cups, starting in the front of the dining room and rushing over the sunroom.

“What was that?” Ted asked. But we were already rushing out into the sunroom and then out onto the lawn in time to see a bright yellow float plane zoom on overhead towards the lake—no more than fifty or sixty feet above the ground.

“Jeezum!” Ted cried when he caught up with us—just in time to see the plane touch down on the lake's surface.

The plane tipped left, then right, and it seemed like the pilot was having problems. We could see he was going to have bigger problems as he veered towards a little island that sits a hundred feet from the shore. The pilot must have seen the island, because we could see the rudder flip and the plane tip as he tried to come about before running out of room.

He should have cut the engine, but that was probably one thing too many to think of—and the next thing we knew, the plane was on its side.

“Come on, Toby!” Ben called to me. “Get in the boat!”

For a couple of old Mainers, we managed to move surprisingly fast.

All we had was a little twenty-horsepower gas motor, so it took us about five minutes to get our aluminum boat across the water to where the plane went down.

And the dangest thing about it was that my mind wasn't on the poor guy thrashing around in the water as the yellow tail fins slipped lower and lower, surrounded by green water and bubbles. It was across the lake, in the shallow water full of reeds and flat rocks with that big old largemouth bass that we'd been after all morning.

I pictured him down there in the shadows, behind the big rocks, in the reeds, laying in wait for some little minnow to make his breakfast—the great lake hunter waiting in ambush. And my lure kept running past him, trying to bring him out of hiding, ready to turn the hunter into the hunted. Somehow my deception wasn't enough, or he just wasn't hungry enough, and we went our separate ways once again.

Then we were on top of the sinking float plane, and Ben throttled back the motor to come alongside the pilot. He must have been a halfway decent swimmer, because he hadn't gone under yet. But he was struggling.

We pulled him in over the side, being careful not to swamp the boat in the process. He kind of rolled over the thwarts, water running off his green coveralls and nylon jacket. His heavy boots were soaked, and I wondered for a moment how he had managed to keep his head above water with a couple of anchors like those on his feet. I could see that he had a cut across his forehead, the blood mixing with the lakewater and running freely down the side of his face.