Authors: James P. Blaylock
The Rainy Season
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 © 1999 by James P. Blaylock
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Dirk Berger. Cover design by John Berlyne.
Published as an ebook in North America by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc. in conjunction with the Zeno Agency LTD in 2012.
ISBN: 9781936535712
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Placentia, California, 1884
Peralta Hills, 1884
Mission San Juan Capistrano, 1884
Vieja Canyon, 1884
Santiago Canyon, 1884
Santiago Canyon, 1958
Santiago Canyon, 1958
Santiago Canyon, 1958
More ebooks from James P. Blaylock
For Viki, John, and Danny
and this time,
for Justine Keller
and with special thanks to Tim Powers, Denny Meyer, and Matt Keefe
“Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Spring and Fall”
COASTAL SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
is a semiarid land crosshatched with mountain chains, narrow valleys, and dry riverbeds. The upper reaches of its steeply sloped canyons are nearly impenetrable—its sunny broken rises blanketed with greasewood and sumac and mesquite, dense miserly plants that survive eight or ten rainless months each year. The shady slopes, turned away from the sun, are covered with oak and fern, and at higher elevations maple and big cone pine. On the flats and along streambeds grow sycamore and alder, their roots sunk deep into the loamy alluvial soil. In rare decades when one drought year follows another, stands of alder along dry creeks wither and die as groundwater falls away deeper and deeper into the earth.
But this parched landscape is largely a surface phenomenon, for beneath its plains and arroyos and rocky gullies lie vast aquifers of water-bearing rock. Unceasing and invisible cataracts flow beneath the dry beds of intermittent streams, and where strata of granite and basalt lie close to the surface, the water above is forced upward until it lies in quiet, leafy pools in the shaded canyons, even in the driest years. Elsewhere, almost as a counterpoint to these solitary pools, creek water tumbling down rock-strewn beds might vanish suddenly into the ground as if into a chasm, and within a few short yards, what had been a flowing stream over mossy stones and boulders is a desert of dry sand and rock, littered with broken limbs and fallen leaves, its scoured stones bleached white in the sun.
And then with winter rains the groundwater rises again, and dry springs bubble to life. In the wet years, once in a decade or two, long-vanished waterfalls abruptly reappear, coursing down sheer canyon walls and feeding creeks and streams that have grown overnight into deep torrents of rushing water. In the otherwise silent darkness of the canyons, one’s sleep is troubled by the water-muffled clatter of heavy boulders shifting and rolling in swollen streams. Unwary canyon residents awaken to find themselves hopelessly stranded: crossings washed out, footbridges undermined, narrow hillside roads swept utterly away, paths blocked by fallen trees.
And even on the plains below the mountains and in the hollows of grassy foothills, shallow, spring-fed pools arise in once-dry meadows, and water seeps into long-abandoned farmhouse wells like the revived ghosts of lost and despaired-of memories. …
PHIL AINSWORTH DEVELOPED
photographs in the darkroom at the back of the house. It was late early spring, and outside in the darkness it was raining. He often worked at night, especially on nights when his sleep was troubled, and he had a premonition that this would be that kind of night. He could hear the occasional rising of the wind like a drawn-out sigh, and the sound of the rain rose and fell, beating insistently against the windows and then diminishing to a blurry rush. He found the rain comforting. There was an element of isolation in it that he liked, although it made photographic travel into the back country difficult and sometimes impossible, especially during winters such as this one, when the rains were more or less continual.
That was really the only problem with the rain—that it impeded travel on unpaved country roads. His roof didn’t leak, the property drained well, and even if the power went out and didn’t come back on for a month, he had enough firewood for heat and enough oil lamps to brighten any room in the house. He wasn’t a hermit, but he had found it increasingly easy to live alone, out here on the edge of things—a way to stay out of emotional debt, looking out at the world through a veil of rain. Living alone, his needs were so few that he was almost never interrupted. The world was less necessary to him, and the result was that he had become equally unnecessary, which suited him.
He looked around the darkroom, which was almost cozy in the amber glow of the safelight. The long stainless steel counter and sink, the rows of chemical bottles, the enlarger, the drying racks, and the rest of the equipment and cabinets that crowded the narrow room were sepia-toned in the perpetual semidarkness, where there was no difference between noon and midnight. He had built his own drying racks out of wood and screen, and right now those racks were layered with photos of Irvine Park, a nearby regional county park, which, in this rainy winter, was cut by the waters of Santiago Creek, the same creek that ran along the back of Phil’s property. As the storm fronts moved through coastal southern California, the cloudy skies over the park and the deep shadows of its wooded hillsides kept so constantly changing that the landscape seemed almost alive with darkness and light and the on and off haze of rain.
Yesterday he had spent a moodily lonesome day out there in the park, from dawn until sunset, wandering along the mesas and through the dense foliage of the arroyo, shooting black and white film, mostly of cloud formations and flowing creek water and the slow, ghostly dance of shadow beneath the oaks and sycamores and willow. He had planned on going back earlier today, but the renewed rain kept him home.
He picked up his mug from the top of the paper safe and drank cold coffee, thought about putting on a fresh pot, and immediately abandoned the idea. He realized he was worn out, but what he wanted was sleep, and not a second wind. It was usually time to pack it in when none of his work looked any good to him, and he had pretty clearly reached that point tonight. He looked at the last print that had come out of the chemicals—a vast sky with clouds and shafts of sunlight like the end of the world above an enormous heavy-limbed oak silhouetted against the gray horizon. It was starkly spectacular, but there was something about the tone of the photo that bothered him. …
The telephone rang, a startling intrusion on a night like this. He glanced at the clock. It was late enough so that the call was either a wrong number or bad news, so he let the answering machine in the kitchen pick it up, only half listening while he looked for a different filter to darken the image. A man’s voice spoke, and Phil stopped to listen, holding his breath, recalling the man’s name at the same moment that his mind took in the message: that Phil’s sister, Marianne, was dead of a stroke.
He pushed through the darkroom door, went out through the workroom and into the kitchen, grabbing the phone and switching off the recorder.
“Yeah,” Phil said.
“Mr. Ainsworth? George Benner. Sorry to be calling so late.”
“I’m a night owl,” Phil said, his heart hammering. The wind blew rain against the kitchen windows. He saw that water was pooled up on one of the sills, and he had the strangely foolish impulse to find a towel in order to wipe it off. Marianne was his twin sister, his only living relative aside from her daughter Betsy, who was ten. He sat down in the kitchen chair and leaned against the table to steady himself. “You said a stroke?”
“Yes. I apologize for being blunt, but I assumed it would be worse to be timid, under the circumstances. I knew you’d want to know as soon as possible.”
Phil nodded his head, realized what he was doing, and asked, “When?”
“This afternoon. I just heard, though. I didn’t think it could wait until morning.”
“Of course not,” Phil said, having to think hard in order to come up with the words. He felt empty-headed and slow. “Thanks for calling.”
“I felt I had to,” Benner said. “Especially in light of Marianne’s will. I don’t know how you feel about the will, but since it names you as Betsy’s guardian, I thought you’d want to fly out here as soon as possible.”
“Yeah,” Phil said. “In the morning.” He realized with a vague dread and guilt that the news of Marianne’s death didn’t surprise him. She had been taking antidepressants off and on for years. “This wasn’t…”
“Suicide?” Benner asked. There had been no hesitation, which was troubling.
“Yeah.”
“Apparently there’s no real indication of that. They’re calling it a simple stroke, which isn’t remarkable, given her medical history. Her condition might have been aggravated by medication, but there’s no reason to suppose it was suicide.”
Lightning flashed out in the night, illuminating the rain-streaked window glass, but it seemed like a long time before he heard a distant rumble of thunder. The assurance struck him as unconvincing. “Where was Betsy when it happened?” he asked.
