by Scott Carson
Already he knew that he wasn’t going to try to explain them. He’d listened over the radio as help arrived in the discharge basin and discovered the hole in the wall. Listened to Deshawn Ryan and Gillian Mathers offer their explanation: Deshawn had been there years ago, and he thought it might have proved dangerous after the flood.
Some guess, Aaron thought. One hell of a guess.
He didn’t blame Deshawn for the lie, though. He didn’t think it would go well to explain that dead men in tunnels under Queens Boulevard had sent him north, and that Aaron had gone into the water, swimming past men and women with gaunt gray faces and flickering steel picks who were knocking down the wall one block at a time.
An intuition was the better story. A nervous father’s hunch. People would want to believe that one.
His radio crackled back to life. The National Guard was in the discharge basin now. They were sending a team in to get him.
“You’re sure it’s a straight shot?” the man on the radio asked. “Nobody’s going to peel off and head down a dead end, get lost?”
“It felt like a straight shot to me,” Aaron said. Maybe he’d passed other corridors in the dark. He didn’t think so, though. It had been a long walk, and at times a steep one, but it had been straight enough.
“I can come back to meet them,” he said. “They don’t need to come in for me. My light’s burning down anyhow. I can make it back.”
The way back wouldn’t be so hard. It would be slow and painful, but he had no doubt that it could be done.
“Negative, Ellsworth. Sit tight, and we’ll have you out soon.”
So he waited. Sat there with the chemical light dying at his feet. The contracting light made the room feel bigger. The molecules that provided the glow played well together, but only for so long. They burned bright for a while, but then something in their relationship fell apart, and the light died. He didn’t know the science of it, how such a thing could produce such a bright glow and then fall out of balance and fade to darkness, but at least it went slowly. It was nice to know when something was leaving you. To have the chance to prepare for the absence.
Water dripped out of the cracks, traced the back of his head, slid down his neck, and plinked onto the stone floor. The big lake whispered to him from the other side of the wall. He liked listening to it. A soft and peaceful sound. Hard to believe that it was the same water that had ripped through his town like the devil’s plow, shearing Torrance to the bone.
Could’ve been worse, though. All the dead, all the buildings destroyed… and it was just a taste.
When the tunnel swelled back to brightness, he thought it was his chemical light catching some final flare. Then he realized it was coming toward him.
The rescue team was here. It seemed too fast, after the walk Aaron had made. He wondered how they’d done with the swim.
Then they came into view, and he realized they were carrying scuba tanks.
He started to smile then. Couldn’t help himself. He was grinning like a fool when they gathered around him, but they started smiling back, and he saw that they thought he was just glad to see them, that was all. He realized then that he was glad to see them. Awfully damn glad.
“Ready to get out of here, Ellsworth?” the point man said. There were three others behind him.
“Yeah. More than ready.” He struggled upright, lurching to his left, keeping his balance on his left leg.
“We understand you’re injured,” the point man said. Behind him, the others were already unfolding a rescue sling.
“My foot,” Aaron said. “But it’s not bad. I made it in; I can make it out.”
“All due respect, Officer? We’re not going to let you do any more walking or swimming. Not today.”
Officer? Aaron looked at him, confused, then down at his uniform. Saw the Coast Guard insignia illuminated in the dying green-yellow light.
“Oh,” he said. “The uniform isn’t real. Well, it’s real, but it’s not… I didn’t earn it.”
He was trying hard to make sense, because it mattered a great deal, but the point man seemed disinterested.
“I’m pretty sure you earned it today,” he said.
He guided Aaron down and into the sling. Aaron wanted to object, wanted to come out the way he’d come in, but the pain was strong now, and they lifted him easily. He complied, because he knew that it was a dangerous and frustrating task to save someone who was determined to fight you.
“We’ll have to do a bit of underwater work at the end,” the point man told him. “I guess you know that, but it’ll be different this time. Just trust us, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Aaron said. “Thank you.”
They were about to haul him out when he saw the chemical light resting on the stone floor. Not much left to the glow now, just a glimmer of decaying golden light on the dark stone, but still he reached out and snagged it as they carried him by.
He wasn’t sure if it could hold the light for the remainder of the trip, but he didn’t want to leave it behind, either. He held it to his chest, closed his eyes, and let himself be rescued.
78
Anders Wallace walked up the slope of the dam and out across the top of it to the edge above the spillway, to the crumbling earth that was all that remained of the place where the gatehouse had once stood. Mick followed, and when Anders sat, he sat beside him.
For a long time they didn’t move. It was as if no one had seen Mick go. He could hear the distant voices and chaos back near the intake chambers, and sirens wailed and helicopters thrashed the sky, but up here on the bluff with the tailwaters far below, Mick felt detached from all of it.
“I didn’t think we could be interrupted,” he said at length. “Not before it was finished.”
“That was unforeseen,” Anders Wallace agreed in a distant voice. He hadn’t looked directly at Mick since Aaron Ellsworth made his radio call and illuminated the cracks in the stone.
Mick was frustrated. He wanted an explanation. Wanted to know how the Galesburg crew’s tunnels, so long in the making, had been interrupted by such an inconsequential man.
“How could they be stopped?” he asked.
“No one was stopped.”
“It feels like it.”
“There will be another day,” Anders Wallace said. “Another place. We move downstream. It’s that simple, sir. A steady process. A patient one. There’s no other choice, after all. Not when you’re committed.” He rose and looked out across the lake and then back to the tailwaters, to the overturned earth and severed trees, the ripped slabs of stone and twisted iron scattered in pools of trapped floodwater.
“Time to move on,” he said.
Mick felt a pulse of dread laced with shame. He had failed. He’d promised them good work, and he hadn’t been able to see it through. They seemed like a dangerous crew to disappoint.
“Tell them I tried,” he said. “Tell them it was almost done and that I made the right choices. I couldn’t anticipate the things that I couldn’t see. That’s the only trouble. It’s the things you don’t see that cause the worst problems.”
“You can explain it when we’re downstream.”
Anders stepped out onto the lip of the ruptured dam. Loose soil crumbled and fell beneath him. Fell far, far down and scattered in the carnage below.
“I don’t want to follow you,” Mick said. “I tried my best, but I’m not going to follow you now.”
For the first time since they’d come up here, Anders turned to face him. “Actually, Mr. Fleming… you have to. Time on the surface is fleeting, sir. You’ll have to serve below now.”
79
A dozen people saw him jump. By evening, when the social media surge had carried it along to the point that the network news shows decided they might as well join in, several million more had watched.
In the hour after the Ashokan Reservoir had been saved from catastrophic flooding that might have rippled on down the chain and all the way to the city, eliminating fre
sh water from millions, Mick Fleming, chief engineer in charge of dam safety, walked to the top of the wounded dam, faced the lake, and turned to look out across the valley, at what was left of the village of Torrance.
Then he’d stepped right off. Stepped, some people observed as they scrutinized the horrific footage, as if he’d expected a staircase was waiting for his foot rather than thin air. It was a casual motion, almost nonchalant. Head down, hands in his pockets, two steps out and then the last, walking with apparent confidence.
He didn’t make a sound when he fell. No scream, no cry for help. Down he went, eighty feet, until he met an upturned slab of stone that had once been the facing of the old Chilewaukee spillway.
The rain was falling hard, and by the time the first rescuer arrived, most of Mick Fleming’s remains had been rinsed off the rock and into the floodwaters.
* * *
A few days of speculation followed before the FBI confirmed that they were investigating the actions taken by Fleming in the hours before the breaching of the dam, as well as ballistic evidence connecting his personal handgun to the murders of Arthur Brady, the dam operator, and Sheriff Steve Ellsworth.
The strange step into open air began to make a bit more sense then.
* * *
There would be an investigation and there would be investment, officials from all corners promised. Federal, state, and city organizations united in a task force. Vulnerabilities at other reservoirs, dams, and supply tunnels were being inspected and addressed. Money flowed. Blame was scattered and conspiracy theories abounded, but all parties agreed on one thing: the disaster at the Chilewaukee would not be repeated.
To the families of the 712 souls who had died in Torrance, this was a cold comfort.
80
They broke ground on the new Arlington Heights Inn on the last week of January, and it was snowing, but no one minded.
Everyone appreciated the snow that winter. After two months of demolition and destruction, after two months of a daily tableau of heartbreak and horror, gutted foundations and crushed roofs and downed trees and everywhere the stink of the flood, the blanket of white snow was most welcome in Torrance. The Catskill winter painted over the town’s past, buried the carnage, and left a clean, bright landscape in its place.
Gillian and Aaron went down for the groundbreaking together. The Christmas lights were still up throughout the areas of town that had survived or had already been rebuilt. No one seemed to want to take them down.
The glitter of the lights and the clean snow and the brisk northerly wind made it feel like a less solemn affair, a more festive one. There was the first hesitant, experimental sense of fresh life in the air. The applause that went up when the first shovel overturned dirt felt genuine.
No one turned to look at the 712 candles that burned on the courthouse square. Not that night.
Gillian signed her pledge to return to the building—most of the survivors were returning to the Arlington—and then she went back to the Ellsworth house with Aaron. She’d stayed there nearly every night since the flood. Her own home was gone—both of them, if you counted the old house in what had once been Galesburg, swept away—but still she’d turned down all offers of reassignment to another precinct or a return to the city.
It was the wrong time to leave, she said, and she was the right person to stay. The DEP needed people who understood the town, its people, its losses. Its resilience. They needed people who were of the place.
They needed Gillian Mathers.
Aaron had been working with the county all winter. There was no shortage of work for the road department, which had been tasked with much of the cleanup and rebuilding efforts. He made friends fast. People remembered him, and people knew the family name. That was important. It was good to know your neighbors. The night of the groundbreaking, Aaron was referenced by one of the speakers. No surprise there. After all, it was Aaron who’d stopped a cascading disaster that would have taken the troubles of Torrance and swept them all the way down to Manhattan. It was Aaron who’d made it through the tunnel.
The tunnel itself wasn’t addressed at the groundbreaking. Not by the speakers, at least. There were plenty of theories, but the official inquest wasn’t complete, and no official answers had been provided. Most people thought the shock of the dam breach had something to do with that split in the earth and the crumbling wall. Others suspected terrorism. They wondered if Mick Fleming had really been the lone-wolf actor that he was made out to be. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, he was too dead to answer questions, and that felt convenient, didn’t it?
The commission would provide answers soon, everyone hoped. The commission, Gillian knew from her own numerous interviews, also seemed intent on not providing the public with a few troubling details about their emergency inspections up and down the Catskill aqueduct. Repairs were being performed, reservoirs had fresh funding, and Water Tunnel Number 3 was racing toward an accelerated completion date. When that was done, the old tunnels could be taken off-line for complete overhaul.
Gillian hadn’t heard anyone speak of Galesburg. It seemed anyone who remembered the tragedies that had come before the Chilewaukee—fires, murders, a pact—did not connect it to the tragedies of Torrance.
That was the sane choice, of course. Galesburg was long gone.
The owner of the Hard Truth Brewery—also rebuilding, with tentative plans to start in the spring—jokingly asked Aaron when he’d run for sheriff. Aaron smiled it off politely. Gillian could tell that he appreciated the need for humor in the night, and she knew that he was also not comfortable with the joke. Not yet, at least.
They made the drive out of town together, her left hand on the steering wheel, her right hand on his thigh. They didn’t speak, but that was all right. They were good in silence together. Maybe better, in fact. Until the hard nights came, and then it was important to break the silence.
It was so very important to do that.
Out of town and up into the hills, the snow was blowing harder, dancing through the headlights, a whirl of energy. There were already fifteen inches down and more on the mountains. It would be a good snowpack this year, with plenty of runoff in the spring. The repaired dam would welcome the water. The Chilewaukee would fill again, and there was talk of officially connecting it to the city’s system after all these years. The fractured tunnel beneath the mountain could be viewed as either a threat or an opportunity. It would need to be done slowly, done right… but the water was there for the taking.
When that happened, Gillian thought it was important that she and Aaron remain in Torrance County. She wasn’t sure what would come—how could you be? Nothing was promised—but she knew that it would be good to have a few souls left in town who’d seen things the others hadn’t. A few who remembered the old stories.
She called her father that night. Told him about the groundbreaking, and the fresh clean snow, and the lights. Asked how he was holding up. Urged him again to retire. Move north, maybe, to be closer to her. Move south, soak up the sun.
He’d think about it, he said. He always said that.
They talked often, and they talked deeply, more openly than ever before. The only thing they didn’t speak of were the ghosts in the tunnels.
She remembered her grandmother’s teachings, though. One day, they’d walked up the hillside behind the house and her grandmother had pointed out all of the puddles, trapped water waiting in pockets of stone.
“Individually useless,” Molly Mathers said. “They have no force, do they? They just sit there.”
Then Molly had turned on the hose and poured water down from the hilltop. They watched as the puddles were claimed, joined up in the torrent, and swept downhill, carving a new channel through the earth.
“They have to help, then,” Molly said. “They have no choice. Do you understand, dear? The puddles aren’t good or bad. They’re just waiting. And when the right amount of force is applied, they join it. They accelerate it.”
Gillian had st
ared at the deepening furrow in the soil. Then she looked back up at her grandmother.
“But you turned on the hose,” she said. “Without you, they’d stay where they were. Maybe even evaporate if you waited long enough.”
“That’s the point, dear. That is precisely the point.”
Gillian remembered that conversation often now. Her father had told her that the ghosts in his tunnels meant no harm. She could believe that was true, but they were waiting on something, weren’t they? And when it came for them, would they have a choice in the matter?
Maybe they would now. Galesburg had intended to explode downstream driven by trapped fury, a burst of pent-up energy. Instead it had been reduced to a trickle, a slow leak.
But still moving. They are still on the move.
She did not speak of this, though.
On the night of the groundbreaking, she told her father that she loved him, and then she hung up and sat with Aaron in the flickering light of the woodstove and watched the snow fall. The moon was out and the wooded, blanketed hills looked like a landscape painting, one that could have been done this year or a hundred years ago. Two hundred. You could imagine a truck out there in the snow, or a sleigh, or a horse. A lonely band of pioneers huddled against the winter wind. An Iroquois hunting party. You could look out at those hills in the moonlight and imagine absolutely any of them appearing in the distance. From the right vantage point in the Catskills, the place could look as if it had never changed at all.
Acknowledgments
Emily Bestler brought unflagging enthusiasm and tremendous editorial insight to this project from the first conversations to the final revisions, and I couldn’t be more grateful. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege, Emily.
The team at Emily Bestler Books and Atria is fantastic. Thanks to Libby McGuire, Lara Jones, David Brown, Milena Brown, Paige Lytle, Al Madocs, and everyone else who has worked so hard on behalf of the book and shown such enthusiasm and energy for it. That means more than you guys know.