Wardenclyffe

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Well, today is as foggy as we’ll ever see,” I said. “Shall we give it another go?”

  Tesla gazed at one of the high, south-facing windows where the fog seemed to press against the glass, then nodded. “We shall.”

  And we did. Same procedure as the night before. We knew all the connections were good, but would they hold up under the electrical load Tesla wanted to put through them?

  He didn’t send the workers home. I think he wanted to see how aware they would be of the testing. Their only involvement was indirect: He kept them continually stoking the coal fire of the generator.

  Fog still shrouded the cupola when he threw the switch. We heard the hum of the coils and the crackle of the bolts, saw their muted flashes through the mist, but the workers remained unaware due to the noise level within the building.

  But once again, standing outside between the rear door and the tower, I had that same uncomfortable sensation, that wrongness deep in my chest. I pressed a hand over my sternum and turned to Tesla and Scherff, standing nearby.

  “Do you feel anything…in here?”

  Scherff shook his head. “No.”

  “Like what?” Tesla said.

  “I-I’m not sure.” I felt somewhat foolish. “Almost like…fear.”

  Both cast me dubious looks.

  Tesla said, “It is most likely the electromagnetic field created by the tower. You are simply sensitive to it.”

  I knew quite a bit about electromagnetism, and had indeed experimented with its effects in my studies. This was quite different. I was sure that even if I enclosed myself within a Faraday cage I would feel this. I was similar to Tesla and Scherff in so many ways, yet knew we were also fundamentally different, a difference that might explain why I sensed what they couldn’t.

  But that subject was off limits, so I let the matter drop.

  After an hour we shut off the power and the wrongness receded. Relieved, I joined them in checking the connections for signs of overload damage.

  We found none, so Tesla decided on a twenty-five percent increase next test.

  That opportunity presented itself two days later during another pea-soup fog. And once again I experienced that wrong feeling, only this time it seemed more intense. Proportional to the power Tesla was feeding the tower? As before, Tesla and Scherff remained oblivious.

  Upon subsequent inspection, the increased power had caused no damage to the circuits.

  That afternoon, the three of us gathered in the quiet chaos of Tesla’s office. The desk and all his files from the Hudson Street lab had wound up here—or perhaps I should say had been dumped here. He sat in a chair behind a desk piled high with paper. Scherff and I seated ourselves on boxes.

  “With these three test runs,” Tesla said, “we have been sending energy into the atmosphere and through the Earth in a diffuse and unmonitored manner, without an attempt to document the range. Now that we know the circuitry is sound, we can test the range of energy transmission. We must decide now how best to do that.”

  “Why not use the same method as Colorado Springs?” Scherff said.

  I was only vaguely familiar with that. “Was that when you lit fifty-watt bulbs miles from the transmitter?”

  Tesla nodded. “Two-point-six miles, to be precise.”

  The distance startled me. “Why doesn’t the world know this?”

  “Because the world is not ready to believe, and less than three miles, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing.”

  I couldn’t argue that.

  “But if things were going that well, why did you leave Colorado?”

  Tesla glanced at Scherff, then said, “Money, as usual. I ran out of it.”

  “One hundred thousand dollars consumed in eight months.”

  “But worth it!” Tesla said, pounding his desk. “I learned much and filed new patents.” He spread his arms. “But everything comes to fruition here.”

  Exactly what I wanted to hear—exactly why I was here.

  “Tell me what you need me to do and consider it done.”

  “That’s the spirit!” he said and we started making our plans.

  As the meeting broke up, with the promise that we would concretize our tentative plans over the weekend, I waited for George to leave, then approached Tesla.

  “Can you tell me now what the Gypsy woman said to you?”

  He frowned, hesitated, then shook his head. “It was nonsense. Not worth repeating.”

  “But—”

  “Not worth repeating,” he said in a firmer tone.

  I backed off the subject. If he said it was nonsense, then it probably was. As for me, I was too filled with the excitement of endless possibilities stretching before us to worry about it.

  At least until the next morning when I saw a newspaper belonging to one of the workers.

  * * *

  Tesla and Scherff had yet to arrive from their Port Jefferson lodgings. I’d fried some eggs and potatoes and settled down to peruse a borrowed paper as I ate. I stopped in mid chew when I read that a barn had disappeared yesterday in Rocky Point, the hamlet just to the west of Wardenclyffe.

  A small barn, according to the article, but size was irrelevant: How could an entire building simply disappear? An eye witness—a Mrs. Williams, owner of the property with her husband—claimed to have watched the building “flaking off” and disappearing into the fog, along with the horse they had quartered there.

  Normally I would have laughed it off, but the mention of the fog caught my attention. I’d skimmed the article. This time I read it more carefully and noticed that the witness’s statement included the time of the occurrence…the barn had disappeared yesterday during the hour of our third test of the tower.

  Coincidence, I was sure. And yet…that feeling I had whenever the tower was powered…that feeling that something was not right…

  Two pages later I came upon another short piece about the release from the hospital of a Sound Beach groundskeeper named Timothy Herring after treatment for burns he’d suffered while cleaning a swimming pool.

  Burns? From a swimming pool?

  The incident reportedly happened on Tuesday, the day of our second test. Sound Beach was another nearby hamlet, just west of Rocky Point.

  Hadn’t some of the dead fish I’d seen appeared burned?

  I lost my appetite. I’d always been a practical sort, never one to let my imagination run wild, but my odd feelings and these even odder incidents had kindled a fire of worrisome possibilities. Questions assaulted me and I was determined to see them answered.

  The train with Tesla and Scherff wasn’t due for another 40 minutes but I couldn’t wait. I grabbed one of the bicycles and travelled west along the county road that paralleled the tracks. I had no idea where I was going, no idea where Shoreham and Wardenclyffe ended and Rocky Point began. I saw no signs, but I knew I was looking for a farm. The thick pine woods to my left precluded agriculture of any sort, so I focused my attention to the right. It couldn’t be far. The hamlets out here were small—maybe two miles on a side at most—and the farm properties relatively large.

  Somehow I passed through Rocky Point without seeing the farm. I did however come upon a large estate in Sound Beach bordered by a dry stone wall with a cozy gatehouse guarding the entrance.

  I knocked on the gatehouse door with the intent of asking directions to the Williams farm, but when I saw the bandaged arms and neck of the stubby man who answered, I realized I had serendipity working for me.

  After a quick glance at the newspaper I’d brought along, I said, “You wouldn’t happen to be Timothy Herring, would you?”

  “I would.” He jutted his chin at the newspaper in the bike’s basket. “And I suppose you been reading about me.”

  “I have, sir. I read about your burns and I wonder if you might relate the circumstances to me.”

  He could have been fifty or seventy years of age, badly in need of a shave, wearing bib overalls over a short-sleeve shirt. He eyed me suspiciously
.

  “You another of them reporters?”

  “I assure you, I am not. I’m staying not far away and I’m curious as to the time of day you suffered these burns. On Tuesday, am I correct?”

  He nodded. “Tuesday midday. Up at the pool. I always skim the pool midday.”

  Tuesday midday…the exact time of our second test. My unease grew.

  “Where’s the pool?”

  “Behind the house.”

  “Fancy a stroll up there?” I needed to see this.

  “You talk funny, young fella.”

  “I’m British. We all talk funny. Shall we go?”

  He hesitated, obviously not anxious to return to the site of his injuries, but also not wanting to show fear. Finally he decided on the manly thing to do.

  “Follow me.”

  He led me up a rising stone driveway past a granite mansion.

  “What exactly happened?” I said.

  “Wait’ll we get there and I’ll show you.”

  He rambled on about other matters, how he could use help maintaining the grounds, how he hadn’t been back to the pool since Tuesday, and how the Ainsleys—the owners—came out from their Fifth Avenue townhouse on weekends in the summer and would be arriving early afternoon.

  As we crossed the rear of the estate we were rewarded with a beautiful view of the Long Island Sound. The tower loomed over the trees to the east, but I decided it best not to mention any connection to Wardenclyffe.

  He waved at the Sound. “Why you need a pool when you got all that out there is beyond me, but that ain’t none of my business.”

  He stopped about a hundred feet from the pool where a long-handled net lay on the grass.

  “Do me a favor,” he said, handing me the net pole. He looked unsettled, perhaps even frightened. “Take this and go have a look at the bottom, will ya?”

  His attitude made me uneasy, and so now came my turn to hide any show of fear. I walked the rest of the way with all the nonchalance I could muster. Slate tiles surrounded the pool, as did tables, chairs, and furled umbrellas. A steady breeze flowed off the Sound. The pool itself was lined with white tiles and rested within a concrete coping.

  I don’t know what I expected to see when I reached the edge but, except for dead leaves floating on the surface of slightly cloudy water, it appeared quite empty. Why did he want me to have a look at the bottom?

  I called back, “What about the bottom?”

  “Can you see the tiles at the deep end?”

  An odd question. “Yes.”

  “Take the net and touch it to the bottom there.”

  Curiouser and curiouser, but I did as he asked. The net pole ran perhaps ten feet in length but the pool’s deep end was barely six. I bounced the net against the bottom tiles.

  “I’m doing that.”

  Herring came up beside me and took the pole. After a few test touches against the bottom, he said, “Wasn’t like this on Tuesday.”

  “What was different?”

  “The bottom at the deep end was black…blackest black I ever seen. The water itself was clear, mind you. Just the bottom was black. Like it had been painted or the like. We had us a fog that day, if you remember.”

  “I do.” I did indeed.

  “Well, I thought the black might have something to do with that. A trick of the light, you see, although I never seen nothing like it before. Anyways, I stuck the pole into the water to scrape the net along the bottom and see if the black would come loose, in case it was some sorta dirt. Well, the net keeps going down, don’t you know.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “You mean you dropped it?”

  “No, I didn’t drop it.” His tone became annoyed. “I been doing this every day every summer for more years’n you been alive. I’m saying the pool is six foot deep at this end and the pole is ten feet long and it kept going straight down six, seven, eight, nine feet into the black—all the way except for the handle in my hand.”

  He had to be mistaken. “How…how is that possible?”

  “It ain’t possible, young fella. Ain’t possible at all. And what’s more, I couldn’t see the net. Like the blackness down there had swallowed the end of the pole. I kept pulling it back and shoving it down again and again, trying to reach bottom but not touching nothing. I was about to give up and look for a longer pole when I hit something.”

  “The bottom.”

  “No…not the bottom.” He’d been talking at a normal volume, but now his voice lowered to just above a whisper. “Not hard like tile. Firm, yeah, but softer.” He clinked the net against the bottom. “Hear that? That’s tile. This made no sound. I pushed again, harder, and then harder still. Something was down there. But what, I couldn’t imagine.”

  He fell silent, staring into the water. I wanted to ask him about the burns but sensed he was getting to that.

  “And then?”

  “And then…” He took a deep breath. “And then the pole was pulled from my grip. No, not ‘pulled,’ snatched—snatched right from my hands to disappear below. I mean to tell you, it was gone. No sign of it.”

  “But it was here on the lawn when we came up,” I said.

  “I know damn well where it was when we came up, but it was pulled from my hands to disappear into the black, and then a few seconds later it come flying out of the water to sail over my head and land behind me.”

  “How is that—?”

  “Wait,” he said, holding up a finger. “Wait. I ain’t through. As I turned to go get the pole, my ankle suddenly felt like it had been set on fire.” He pointed to his left ankle. “I looked down to see a long black rope—at least at first sight I thought it a rope. It was trailing out of the pool and wrapped around my ankle.”

  “Bloody hell!”

  “Bloody hell is right! That wasn’t no rope. It was alive and it was pulling me toward the water.”

  I swallowed. “You’re having me on.”

  He turned on me, shaking his fist in my face. “I am not! The police thought I’d been nipping at the bottle, especially when they looked in the pool and found nothing but empty water. But they weren’t here when that rope, that tendril wrapped around me.”

  It seemed best not to challenge him further, so I went along. “Was it like an octopus tentacle—you know, with suckers and the like?”

  “No, it was smooth and round like a rope. And strong. I tell you, I did a tour out West with the Nineteenth Infantry during the Cheyenne Wars, and I thought I’d never again be as scared as I was doing hand-to-hand combat with those savages. But I tell you true, young fella, and I ain’t ashamed to say it: I pissed myself.”

  “Oh,” I said, at a loss as to how to respond.

  For a man like this to admit such a level of fear…

  “It pulled me off my feet and dragged me along these slates here. I was able to stop my slide by wedging my boots against the coping, but only for a little bit, because another tendril come out and looped around this arm.” He held up his right. “It knew exactly where to go—like it could see! A third wrapped around my left leg and I was lost. I screamed like a damsel in distress as I was dragged over the coping and into the water.”

  “Dear God!”

  “God was nowhere in sight, young fella. I was pulled down through the water and into the blackness and I was sure I’d drawn my last breath when suddenly the water started churning. I was spun around and found myself facing the tiles at the bottom of the pool. I made it back to the surface and pulled myself onto land. As I got my wind back, I calmed down, but that was when I noticed the pain. My arm and both legs—ain’t never felt such pain.”

  “How did you get to the police?”

  “I dragged myself to the house and used the phone there. They thought I was drunk or crazy. Same with the doctors. Thought I’d imagined the whole thing. But you tell me.” He pulled back the bandage on his left forearm. “You tell me if I imagined that!”

  I saw a deep linear burn layered with a dark ointment. It resembled
the burns I’d seen on the larger fish along the shoreline Tuesday morning.

  “Doctors said they look like acid burns. What they didn’t say is that they think I burned myself. But we ain’t got no acid ’round here, so how did I do it? And why would I burn myself? Answer me that?”

  He seemed close to tears at the injustice of it all.

  “I…I don’t believe you did any such thing,” I said, and meant it. “But why do you think it released you?”

  He smoothed the bandage back into place. “Who can say? I’m more interested in what ‘it’ was and how ‘it’ got into the pool and how a six-foot pool got a lot deeper and darker, but most of all I want to know if ‘it’ is ever coming back. There’s a damn good chance I’m going to lose my job when the Ainsleys hear about this, but you know what? If there’s a chance that thing might come back, I don’t care.”

  “Certainly understandable,” I said.

  He turned east and pointed to the tower. “You think that thing could be the cause?”

  I feigned ignorance. “I’ve seen it, of course—who out here hasn’t?—But I don’t know what it’s for.”

  “That Tesla fellow. Supposedly gonna give free electricity to everyone. Don’t know about that, but I do know I seen flashes through the fog when I come up here to clean the pool, and they’d stopped by the time I crawled out of the water all burnt and half drownded. So maybe…”

  I waited, silently pleading that he would not blame the tower for his misfortune.

  Finally he shrugged. “Ah, who knows? And who’d believe it anyway. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve wasted enough time here. I got work to do.”

  Relieved, I watched as he stalked off toward the mansion. I called after him: “Before you go, can I ask just a few more questions?”

  “No!” was all he said without slowing his pace.

  Then I remembered my other mission.

  “Well then, can you at least tell me how I might find the Williams farm?”

  “Head east,” he said without looking back. “Look for the big rock on the north side of the road.”

  As I made my way back to the gatehouse and my bicycle, I tried to sort out what Timothy Herring had told me. Was he a secret opium smoker who had dreamed the whole thing? Certainly it had all the aspects of a fantastic nightmare.