Winter Tides
Authors: James P. Blaylock
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 © James P. Blaylock 1997
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Dirk Berger.
Cover design by John Berlyne.
Published as an ebook in the U.S. by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in conjunction with the Zeno Agency LTD.
ISBN: 978-1-936535-70-5
CONTENTS
For Viki, John, and Danny
And this time, especially for Dean and Gerda Koontz for fifteen years of friendship
With special thanks to John Accursi, Chris Arena, Loren Blaylock, Dan Halkyard, Judy and Denny Meyer, Tim Powers, Jack Miller and the Huntington Beach Department of Public Works, and Sarah Q Koehler.
T
HE PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY WINDS ALONG THE VERY
edge of California, a narrow asphalt ribbon that marks the western rim of the continent, separating the isolated beach towns and the chaparral-covered hillsides of the Coast Range from eleven thousand miles of Pacific Ocean. Heading south from Crescent City, the Highway swings inland below Eureka, wandering thirty miles from the ocean through redwood groves and mill towns before angling west again above Mendocino and then more or less following the shoreline all the way down into southern California. There are still wild and rocky stretches of coast around San Luis Obispo, and empty coves and bluffs above Santa Barbara, but south of Ventura the Highway plunges into the overpopulated beach cities of Los Angeles and Orange and San Diego counties, past hundreds of thousands of wooden bungalows and stucco apartment houses, past fishing piers and rock jetties and boat harbors and ramshackle main streets lined with fish restaurants and bars and surfboard shops and used bookstores and parking meters. And on any sunny summer afternoon, countless people drive out of the suburbs and cross the Highway, drawn to the uttermost edge of the continent for reasons they can’t always define.
In winter, cold north swells move down out of the Arctic in long lines, and the blues and greens of the late summer water turn gray beneath cloudy skies. The unsettled ocean shifts with the rolling swell and darkens with the shadows of moving clouds. Storms hammer the coast, washing precarious sections of the Highway into the ocean and veiling beach cities with curtains of misty rain the same steel-gray cast as the rising swell. The surging tides swamp oceanfront houses in Malibu and Surfside and Newport Beach, and rogue waves slam through wood and concrete piers, ripping pilings out of the ocean floor, shifting heavy rocks in harbor jetties, sweeping countless tons of beach sand away in the longshore currents, ceaselessly changing the contour of the sea bottom.
The beaches themselves are nearly empty of people in winter, especially on stormy days—perhaps only a couple of surfers watching waves break across outside sand bars, or a beachcomber with a metal detector, or someone gathering seashells along the high tide line where the ocean dumps its flotsam of kelp and driftwood and sand dollars and polished stones.
I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY THERE WERE STILL TRAIN
tracks along the ocean side of the Highway through Huntington Beach. A chain-link fence separated the tracks from the fifty yards of sandy shoreline, and onshore winds piled beach sand into ice plant-covered dunes that pressed against the rusty chain link and swept across the edge of the tracks and out onto the Highway, which was narrower back then, with a ragged dirt shoulder along the northern verge. Beyond the shoulder there was a grassy marsh, and beyond that stood, and still stand, the pink and gray cinderblock walls that shelter narrow suburban backyards. By the early 1970s passenger trains had long ago quit running along that part of the coast, and the tracks that followed the Highway had fallen into disrepair. Walking along the tracks at the edge of Huntington Beach State Park, a person could find old rail spikes and other iron debris in the sandy ice plant, or, on a lucky day, a heavy, broad-headed nail with a raised number on it, a thirty or a thirty-six or a forty, recalling the year a particular tie had been sunk in the road-bed.
In the winter there was something lonesome and desolate in the rusty chain link and the blowing sand, in the scattered bits of railroad iron and the deep green ice plant with its feathery pink flowers. There was a natural stillness in the air despite the sound of the cold north swell breaking along the beach and the cries of gulls circling in the sky. And beneath windswept skies it could seem that the ocean was a hundred miles removed from the suburban neighborhoods only a couple of blocks inland, as if the Highway, with its sand-softened verge and its distant vanishing points, was a borderland between the suburbs and the shifting sea. When there was a sizable swell running and the winter sun was low in the sky, a traveler gunning north or south along the Highway could glimpse over the crest of the beach the pale green transparency of a backlit wave as it surged upward over a sandbar and pitched forward with the sound of distant, hollow crashing….
T
HE WOMAN SITTING BENEATH THE BEACH UMBRELLA WAS
a tourist—one of the purest examples of tourist that Dave Quinn had ever seen. She was heavyset, dressed in dark clam-digger pants more reminiscent of 1960 than 1980, and she wore socks and shoes and a broad-brimmed hat with a flower in the hatband. Despite the hat and the umbrella and the cloudy winter sky, she was sunburned pink. Her dark glasses flared up toward her ears in plastic crescents worked with rhinestones. She turned a deck of playing cards over one by one onto her beach blanket, starting a new game of solitaire, and the wind picked up a couple of the cards and flipped them face-side up. She lunged forward, holding her blouse shut at the neck with one hand and pinning the cards to the blanket with the other, and then patiently settled back into the depression in the sand and pulled the rim of the umbrella farther around in front of her to block the wind.
Two slender black-haired girls, clearly twins, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, played in the cold surf, running after the edge of a retreating wave, then screaming with laughter as the next wave chased them back up the beach. They had wandered thirty yards north from where their mother sat on the blanket, and it made Dave edgy to watch them. If they were
his
kids, messing in the surf on a day like this, he would have called them back, and he sure as hell wouldn’t be shuffling cards while they played tag with the winter ocean. He watched the rip current running down off the steep beach, roiling up the inside break, cutting its own dangerous channel through the bars.
As long as the girls stayed in shallow water …
And anyway, they weren’t his kids. He ditched the idea of saying something to their mother. He hated shoving in his opinion when nobody was asking for it.
A couple of tin buckets and shovels lay at the edge of the blanket that the woman had unfurled with tremendous care, and there was a basket with a lid, an actual picnic basket, holding down the windward corner of the blanket. Probably she had cold chicken in the basket, the tourist food of preference. Dave realized that he was starved. He had been out in the water surfing since around six, and it was nearly ten in the morning now. His arms ached from paddling, and the cold water had drained him of energy. What he wanted was breakfast and coffee and a couple hours of sleep before afternoon classes. He looked up toward the top of the beach. The concession stands were closed, their windows covered with plywood. Some distance to the south, a half-dozen lifeguard towers sat shuttered and empty, waiting to be repainted. Farther on down, maybe a hundred yards, a couple of surfers had a fire going in a fire pit and sat hunched in front of it, their backs to the wind. A white surfboard with a broken-off nose was shoved up out of the fire pit like the ghost of a rocket, and bright orange flames licked up along the rails of the board, sending a churning cloud of black smoke into the air. The smoke tumbled away in the wind, and Dave could smell the chemical reek of burning fiberglass.
The sky was full of broken-up storm clouds, and the water was brown with sand boiled up from the relentless, wind-chopped swell. The swell was rising, and the surf was deceptively powerful. The bigger set waves broke in long, collapsing walls, one after another across sandbars a hundred yards or more offshore, throwing themselves forward against the force of the outgoing tide, churning up the sandy bottom and scouring out a channel between the bars. The waves re-formed in the channels and then broke a second time near shore with a deep, booming roar that sounded like thunder. The entire surface of the ocean seemed to be moving south because of the longshore current, and with the cloud shadow darkening the water, the ocean was ominous and gray.
Dave watched the twin girls nervously. There was a single surfer out in the water a couple of hundred yards down the beach, lying prone on his surfboard as a broken wave pushed him into shore. About a mile north, the Huntington Beach Pier stretched out into the ocean, and even from that distance Dave could see the surging breakers slamming through the pilings. It was no time to be in the water, especially if you were twelve-year-old tourist girls from Kansas or some damned place. Their mother was half hidden behind her umbrella now, dealing cards again. Relieved, Dave saw that the girls had wandered higher up the beach and seemed to be picking through tossed-up seaweed.