Twenty-five
“Bazodee”
Wednesday
9 January
07:56
Ocean City
There were seven of them, giving each of six a set of heavy oars, while the stern was alive with the cries of one who had done this before. He steered the boat with an aft oar, and the breakers were even worse than the heavy sea.
“Mister Finnegan, ye’ll no’ be slackin’ on my watch, ye willn’t. Look alive, boys, breaker astern!”
They pulled with all their might, and their oilskins weren’t enough to keep the freezing water from soaking them as the wave broke over the Captain’s back. “Oars up, ride ‘er down!”
The oars out of the water, a risk, to ride the crested wave fast in order to make a leap closer to the mainland, they executed his command but grew more apprehensive. It was the summer solstice, not winter. The morning had dawned with calm water and sunshine. each man knew this was not right, not normal.
“Cap’n, this be magic!”
“Nay, Mister Flanagan, it be life or death, and ye’ll no’ be takin’ me down with yer infernal tongue! Shut yer traps an’ heave to!”
“Cap’n! Behind ye!”
“Mister Finnegan will ye shut up!”
Finnegan pulled hard but couldn’t believe what he saw. They should not have been out of sight of the lighthouse yet, but it was gone.
A strange sound coming from shore reached them, and the boys kept pulling, but the sound grew louder, sounding like a wounded animal, a big one.
It appeared from a horizon none of them were familiar with. Where they should by now see pristine beach, there were instead buildings of some kind, and from the top of them, a screaming beast appeared, flying low, smoke trailing its wings. “Lord!” cried the Captain, “I think it to be a wivvern!”
The bow hit the beach, and the men stowed their oars while the captain looked at the wyvern moving out to the ocean.
He was at a loss; how did anyone ever wound such a beast?
“Cap’n, this be the proper beach?”
“We ain’t alter course none.”
“Cap’n, what beast be a wyvern?”
“Yer lookin at one, though it be goin’ round out to die.”
“Little feet,” Finnegan observed. He turned back to the funny-looking buildings and said, “What marvels these houses be,” but was unaware that they were seasonal businesses and were closed for the winter. The snow fell harder as the seven approached the landward edge of the sand. “Funnel cakes?”
“Dunno,” said the captain.
In a tall apartment building usually empty at this time of year, a man who always wintered in Florida with his wife set down a pair of binoculars and told her, “We’ve just been invaded by the Gorton’s Fishermen.”
He elected to stay in Maryland because a TV news special did a story on the calamities that were crippling the state. And that was before the dam failure. He couldn’t wait for it to spread to Ocean City; he was here to watch the show.
He merely suspected a shipwreck offshore, a disappointment, but called 911 anyway.
The men mounted the concrete of the boardwalk and stopped, waiting for the captain to figure out what to do. A black box on wheels with flashing blue lights rolled right up behind them as they faced north and began to search for signs of people and shelter. They were wet and shivering.
“We got nay a chance o’ makin it back to the light, them seas be too heavy,” was how he put it.
Two men got out of it, dressed in uniforms. The captain stood still, staring, scared because the soldiers carried sidearms visible at the hems of their jackets.
“Morning, gentlemen,” one said. Did your boat have some sort of trouble?”
“Nay, it be sound, but we canna—”
“Then what is this, some cosplay, you got a camera recording this?”
“A… What?”
Officer First Class Arturo Fenzel wasn’t in the mood for this and said, “Come on, let me see some ID,” and he pulled his Beretta. His partner, Ron Yamaguchi, said, pulling his Beretta also, “Get down! Get down on the ground, now!” It was that instinct police officers get that told him this was all wrong, but it backfired. The Captain pulled his revolver and shot Yamaguchi in the face, then turned it on Fenzel and did the same thing.
With the two soldiers dead, he was in a panic and was sure that more would show up.
And because Fenzel had died with an open mic, dispatch sent the SWAT team out immediately. The truck didn’t go on the boardwalk, it dropped its members off at two side streets, one ahead and one behind the yellow coats, as a drone flew overhead.
The reaction to men with funny-looking rifles was swift, the captain fired on one, and that was it. Six men in yellow rain gear went down, riddled with bullets. Only one remained standing. Lighthouse Attendant Thomas Finnegan’s hands reached up as high as he could manage, he was shivering so much. Mostly from terror but the weather had given that a head start.
He was taken into custody and transported a short distance to the police station, where his ripe smell of body odors, fish and dirty foaming seas made him a big hit.
The commotion was significant even for this department which had been on edge as street racers and gangs had infiltrated the town after Memorial Day and stayed so long that arrest records were broken three years running.
Thom Finnegan was relieved of his oilskins and led in handcuffs to a small interrogation room lined with acoustic panels. One small table and two chairs were all that was in there. Finnegan was in deep shock, and it made his initial confusion over the storm, the smoking dragon that was wounded badly enough its fire went out, and then the hostile terrain he first thought of as a marvel.
His mates were all dead. He was lucky not to be among them, and yet he wished he was shot, too.
Detective Lin Lee walked in, closed the door behind her and put some Vicks under her nose. “Okay. What’s your name?”
Finnegan looked unfavorably at her clothing choice. She had a fancy white shirt with a funny collar on it, and it had buttons down the front, half of which were not fastened. She wore gray breeches with lines like a crease, and her coat matched them. He stared at a spot where the shirt revealed enough that he thought she was shameless.
“Thomas Aloysius Finnegan,” said Thomas Aloysius Finnegan.
“And where are you from, Mister Finnegan?”
“What?”
“Where did you come from?”
“I came from?”
“Yes,” Lee said, starting to feel a migraine coming.
“I came from me mam,” he answered, and she asked, “Mam?”
“Yes, from me mam. Where else,” he asked, thinking this Chinawoman must have trouble hearing. He repeated slowly but louder, “I…came…from…me…mam.”
“Jesus Christ,” Lee said, resting her head in her palms, her pen dropping to her lap.
Finnegan looked around. “I dun see him.”
“You dun see who?”
“Jesus Christ. Did he comed back? Is that what happened?”
“Stop playing games with me,” she said.
“Hey? What game warr we playin, cailín?” His face looked comically amused and confused.
“Shut up! You keep acting like a dummy, and I’ll lock you up with people crazier than you, bigger than you, and you are bound to get laid your first night!”
“Laid?” Now Finnegan was really confused. These strange people in this strange world were not making any sense.
“Get laid…like a egg? I dunno—”
“Let’s try something else. What do you do for a living?”
“For…living…well I spose I eat and breathe to be livin’ and I dunno why ye—”
“Oh my God, shut up.”
“First ye ask me a question then ye tells me to shut up. Will ye make yer mind up?”
“We’ll see how much of a smart mouth you have after a night in the lockup, with five guys who will fuck your ass!” It was a lie; nobody was currently being held. Her threat failed anyway.
“Woman I ain’t a farmer an’ I ne’er owned a ass, not a goat, not even a chicken. And who is enough of a fiend that they be wontin’ to fuck a donkey?”
Outside of the interrogation room, there were peals of laughter, with the lieutenant even chained up in mirth, helpless to stop.
Finnegan was on a roll, though: “Ah swears, ye brung me ‘ere in irons, an’ ‘ere I did no killin an’ yet ye speak ta me like Ahm a killer.” His speech grew louder and more angry. “At least tell me what manner of land this be, why ye have irons on me, why Ahm in a room with walls ate by shipworms, an,’ what is yer meanin o’ tellin me nonsense. Where am Ah at, tell me that at least afore ye hang me!”
Lee asked, “What? Hang you?“
“Isna that the price o’ murder?”
“You already tested negative for GSR. We know you haven’t fired a gun. So no, you’re not going to be hanged and we don’t do that anymore. Where the hell have you been, anyway?”
“Afore lighthouse duty Ah sailed all over. Ah could climb a ratline and cross the main yard—pardon the language, Ah, dinna mean in that way as to…well, ye know, Ah guess, ye bein’ a lawman—woman—“
“It’s okay. You say you sailed on ships with ratlines and sails, right? And you really don’t know what I mean by ‘ass,’ right?”
“Ah figure it not to be speakin’ o’ no donkey then. Ye mean them gangs was randy, but fer what Ah dunno. Ah remembers, Ah do, one o’ the mates on a reefbait called Winds O’ Kalahari, he had the hot blood on him so bad he took a wineskin an’ whale oil an’ bilt hisself a woman an’ rubbed his yard so raw it turned to black like a banana and falled off.”
That was fucking it. Lee burst into laughter, uncontrollable, violent, heaving laughter, and even Finnegan was laughing, glad that she finally understood something he said. Well, he thought, it was funny, a sailor who couldn’t keep his yard in his breeches, having it just fall on the deck while he walked about with fever. They’d had to bury him at sea off the Bermudas the next day.
Detective Lee wasn’t laughing twenty minutes later. She was on the computer, searching for terms he had used. She found his ship, Winds of the Kalahari, found where it sank, found the previous voyage manifest and partial crew listing. The name Thomas Aloysius Finnegan was on it. She began to sweat. She called the lieutenant over and ran down what she knew, and while she didn’t find a record of a lighthouse after 1890, there was an article from a Baltimore newspaper that mentioned one in 1888. The name of the last keeper was there along with the single line that he had been lost when the light went out during a hurricane, and afterward there was no longer a “light.”
The lieutenant said, “We both know that name. Look him up.” Now he was sweating too, and sick to the stomach for even considering the possibility.
One hour went by. Lee had everyone working to find any additional records of the man they knew from this century who had, evidently, switched centuries with the Gorton’s Fishermen and Thom Finnegan of the ratlines.
She couldn’t eat. She was sick; her headache had finally caught up with her, and her hands were shaking so much that she was bouncing the mouse on her desk.
At 16:31, someone cried, “Eureka!”
A forensic officer brought her an old, yellowed photograph. “It was in a museum in Rehoboth Beach. I told them to bring it down as soon as they sent a jpeg. I knew you had to have the real thing. Who was the guy, anyway? An ancestor of the ding-a-ling you’re holding?”
Lee studied it. She called her lieutenant over. He said, “Yeah that’s him. I worked with him years ago and last year we both met him at the convention. You said you’d date him if he asked.”
“Yeah. It’s impossible, but it’s him. That explains the story we’re being told about the longboat, the people who recovered it from the beach say it’s antique and new.”
“Finnegan’s telling the truth, but—call the boss,” she said. “You tell him. I refuse.”
While Detective Lee was on her way home to have a glass of wine and then pace all night because she’d spent the day in a bad science fiction movie, the Lieutenant met with his chief, who made a call.
He hesitated. He hadn’t heard anything about it, but Finnegan spoke of a dragon tailing smoke, headed for a “splash.”
Now reports were coming in that just before the time the “Gorton’s Fishermen” were spotted, a Boeing 747 had lost its number four engine, its having fallen off over Salisbury, then lost its number one and two engines to flameouts, and was reported down ten miles off the coast.
HCPD Headquarters
Ellicott City
17:20
Adrian was meeting with his chief when a priority call from OCPD’s chief came in. “Chief, I’m emailing a copy of an old photograph to you. Please look at it very carefully and then call me back.”
He got the notification and opened it right away. The attached photograph made him ask aloud, “What is this?”
Adrian asked what was wrong. The chief showed him the screen. Adrian said, “Oh, my God, that looks just like—”
“Do me a favor,” the chief said. “Try calling him. I betcha he won’t answer.”
Sitting across from the chief, Adrian dialed the number and waited. The call could not go through.
“Don’t worry, Chief. It’s not possible. It happens all the time, people like celebrities have look-alike people show up in vintage photography.”
He dialed Angie’s number. “Hey, Angie, where’s Joe, can I speak—”
“Who’s this? What’s wrong with Angie?”
“It’s Vince, Captain, we’ve met. Angie’s really a mess, and Joe is missing. Yes, sir, that is correct. He’s been gone for almost 24 hours. I was about to call you guys, because Angie can’t even talk.
Adrian James was speechless. He stared at the photograph on the screen. It was impossible, but the proof was plain to see.
It was Joe. Weathered, alone, depressed, aged. But it was him. Alone, smoking a pipe. In the wrong century.
And he was dead now. Long ago, dead and buried by the sea itself.