《A Forbidden List of Leads》 CXY121286, Googie-style diner, Aberdeen, Wa. Active. In a run down diner, in the rundown seaside town of Aberdeen, Washington, is an old falling apart breakfast diner, the kind that locals might frequent, but you¡¯d drive on past until you got to a Denny¡¯s. Past the main dining room, and the access to kitchen and restroom is a worn-out seldom-used back dining room. It used to be a smoker''s dining room, but like the customers and the jobs and the old growth forests, that''s long gone. If you visit here in the mornings, you''ll find one single customer dining back here, a grizzled old man who used to be a logger. He''s short, he''s wiry. His hands tremble a little, but beneath that plaid flannel shirt you¡¯d suspect he''s still got grizzled wiry muscles. He orders the same thing every day, white toast, two eggs, sunny-side up, and a breakfast steak, rare. Then he''ll spend a couple more hours there, reminiscing with himself, and having his coffee refilled by an ever cheerful waitress. He has good reason to consider himself history''s most prolific serial killer. If you sit down to chat, he won''t question your intentions, though he will make assumptions. He''ll make small talk with you, the way old people are so practiced at. If you ask him about the logging industry, he''ll go into it in detail. From the golden days of his youth, to its eventual collapse. He''ll talk about environmentalism, and the spotted owls, and the real reasons why it all fell apart. He might surprise you, there¡¯s more to the story then you¡¯d guess, and he¡¯s impressively frank.The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Make a hint of interest in the inherent danger of the logging industry, and he''ll gladly talk about the accidents. All the really grizzly ones, the missing fingers, the shins being split in half from dropped chainsaws, the torso''s being whipped in two by broken guidelines. He''ll talk about how common they are, how, back in the old days before audits and labor groups and worker protections, there''d be police to inform, a few forms to sign, a widow to grieve, how easy to was to make it all look like an accident, how the investigations were always just a formality. How you can just move on to the next job in the next county, and you don¡¯t even need to use your real name. They didn¡¯t even check IDs back in those days, just show you know how to use a chainsaw, and you can start the whole thing all over again. When he sees the growing horror on your face, he''ll ask you how much more information you need before you arrest him. When he realizes you''re not a cop, and the jig isn''t up, he wonders if he can add one more to his tally. He''ll tighten the grip on his steak knife, and he''ll wonder if he''s still fast enough to make it to you before you make it out of your booth, down the hall, and out of the diner''s entrance. He''s still surprisingly fast. The diner''s staff always cheerfully clean Angel Eyes In the town of Bellingham, Washington, on its eastern edge where it begins to run into tall forested hills and deep foreboding lakes, lays Bayview Cemetery, home of most of Bellingham¡¯s illustrious dead. Decades ago it used to have a fine view of the bay, though it is a poor view now, mostly obscured by trees grown tall. Despite the aborted view, it remains a scenic cemetery. There is a small jewish section, an early 19th century area with many worn down obscured stones, a section laid down when laying your dead in graves, rather than cremation, was in fashion. And masons were experimenting in more interesting, more abstract forms. To one side is a deep gully, through which runs a beautiful creek. On the opposite side is a highway which will take you to either the lake, or into town and its collection of Pizza Huts and gas stations. Among all the individual unique gravestones is a particular one with its own mark on local folklore. They call it ¡°Angel Eyes.¡± There¡¯s a large, tall base, on top of that a column, on top of that, a statue of an angel. It¡¯s very much a twentieth century angel. It doesn¡¯t look like the multitudes of angels and cherubim you see in churches and cathedrals if you ever happen to visit merry old England. Maybe it¡¯s a little bit gauche, still, it¡¯s an angel. There¡¯s something a little bit off about its eyes. The tombstone is, supposedly, haunted. It¡¯s the stuff of local folklore, or urban legend.The basic story goes, if you enter Bayview Cemetery, maybe even sneak in, around sunset, and you stand or kneel before Angel Eyes, you have an opportunity. If you make a wish, and Angel Eyes finds you worthy, it might come true. If not, you die that very night. Whether or not your wish comes true, in the fading light, the eyes of the angel began to glow. You can search it on the internet. You¡¯ll find variations of the same basic story. The prime of the tales come from the 1980s. Naturally stories like this appeal to the youth. And naturally the story involves untimely deaths of youth. And, as an extrapolation, youth very rarely die of natural causes, so in the rare event that they do die, Angel Eyes often presents herself as an explanation. The common cause of teenage deaths involves traffic accidents, usually drunken or otherwise reckless driving. The heart of the stories involve Robbie Hintz. A local teenager, from out in the valley, just north of Bellingham. The story goes that in the late afternoon, a little too early, he stood before Angel Eyes, and asked a wish, one summer in 1988. A half hour later, driving out in the valley on his motorcycle, Robbie decided to race a train to an intersection. Naturally, as stories go, he didn¡¯t make it. Robbie, quite literally, lost his head. The photos the police took show a decapitated body, and a motorcycle helmet, laying by the side of the tracks. This story goes, somebody took revenge. In some tales it¡¯s a girlfriend, in others a secret gay lover, or a best friend, or a father. Regardless, the events are the same. The aggrieved party busts through the front gate of the cemetery. Marches down to Angel Eyes. Then with a hammer and chisel, some stories say a flathead screwdriver, carved out the stone eyes of Angel Eyes. At first, this vengeful figure was pleased with their work, but when they looked down at their left hand, they were horrified.The two stone eyes that they carved out were glaring up at them, still glowing. Terrified, this person cast the two stones into the gully that bordered the cemetery, and Angel Eyes never troubled the people of Bellingham again. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. On the surface, the story appears absurd. Statues, like this gravestone, are one single block of stone. There are no separate eyes to carve out. The strange thing is, there are holes where the eyes should be in the angel gravestone. If you carefully examine it, you can come to the conclusion that this is simply artistic expression. The holes are meant to suggest the negative space- pupils, not empty eye sockets.There is stone there that, if viewed skeptically, represent sclera and irises. Knowing thist, it¡¯s easy to understand this ¡°carved out eyes¡± aspect of folklore. The gully that borders Bayview Cemetery is a deep ravine that has been carved out by Whatcom Creek. This creek stretches from Whatcom Lake, perhaps a mile east of the cemetery, down through a locally beloved park, complete with popular swimming holes and photogenic waterfalls, through a nearly inaccessible ravine, past Bayview Cemetery, through suburbs, light industrial areas, under downtown Bellingham, into the old town, past a salmon hatchery and a lower set of picturesque falls, and into Bellingham Bay. At three thirty in the afternoon, June 10th, 1999, a pipeline that happened to cross Whatcom Creek near the park entrance ruptured, spilling thousands of gallons of gasoline into the gully and downstream. At its peak there was more gasoline flowing through the creek bed than water. This spill continued uninterrupted, until something, likely a passing car over a bridge, ignited the giant cloud of fumes that all this gasoline emitted. Naturally, a giant fireball roared up and down Whatcom Creek, incinerating pristine old growth forest, and killing three people. One was an eighteen year old boy who had been fishing, he likely was overcome by the fumes and asphyxiated before the gasoline ignited. The two others were younger boys who had come to the park to play. Both died hours later, in terrible pain, of massive third degree burns over most of their bodies. The one who was still capable of speaking begged listeners to tell his parents that he was sorry. Weeks later, during the investigation, the CEO of the company which ran the pipeline blamed the two young boys, making the claim that they had been playing with fireworks, and that they were the ones responsible for the fire. Why else would the boy say he was sorry? The investigation found the pipeline company responsible, having been the ones who originally damaged the pipeline and failed to perform basic repairs. They were given a fine. The details of this story can also be found on the internet. Unlike Angel Eyes, the specifics are not up for debate. On June the 13th, 1999, with the park completely closed off to the public, an Interloper entered the grounds, disguised as one of the environmental workers assessing the damage. He came late in the evening, as the sun was going down, just as the others were leaving. He waited a couple of hours, until full darkness, then set to work. The forest had been reduced to what the governor described as a ¡°moonscape.¡± All ash, broken here and there by black smoldering stumps of what had been massive trees. Even with all of the underbrush cleared by the devastation, it took the man hours to find them. Two small round stones, finally made visible because they still glowed in the dark and the fire had uncovered him. The angel¡¯s eyes. He gathered them up in a small wooden case and took them home. At the time, he lived in a fine old house, on a hill overlooking much of Bellingham, but with a particularly close view of Interstate 5, and Exit 253. There he got on the phone and contacted certain persons who would want to know. The man would place the two stone eyes, in the wooden case, in a drawer, in an antique roll-top desk, on the third floor of the house, near a window. The eyes remain, though the man is long gone. Engineers for the Washington State Department of Transportation have been perplexed. For the last twenty some years, traffic accident fatalities over a stretch of Interstate 5, near Exit 253 have increased over four hundred percent. No matter how many improvements they make, no matter how much they increase the signage, no matter how much they increase police presence, people keep dying. A Desert Retreat Way out deep in the Nevada desert, way past tourist traps and military bases and working mines and strange religious cults, sits a sun-bleached, wind-burned house. Rural Nevada is peppered with houses like this. You can find such houses in the strangest of places if you search through satellite imagery. One thing that sets it apart is that it''s surprisingly large, considering its remote location, and its peers. Somebody must have spent a fortune hauling all those construction crews and their supplies way out here, down dusty dirty roads. It also would have cost a pretty penny for all those generators and diesel fuel tanks, giant water cisterns, supplying even a swimming pool, and a lot of other amenities usually foregone by the hermits who build houses way out in the middle of nowhere Nevada. On the other hand, there are a number of similarities between this house and other abandoned homes of this remote nature. In addition to the lack of luxury, there''s the litter. Surrounding the house is a great refuse field of empty beer cans, broken beer bottles, emptied liquor bottles, and rusting shell casings. One gets the idea that way out here, with very little to do, a person can throw themselves a fine night of entertainment by filling their bellies with booze, and emptying their guns of ammunition. The man who built this home, or at least paid to have it built, was a man named Trevor Chalmers. Originally from South Texas, Chalmers had spent his youth, and much of his middle age, middling around in lower management at a series of failing Texas oil businesses, all during the boom years of the 50s and 60s. He never made it very big, at least in oil. After one lousy high-proof alcohol bender that threatened a total nervous breakdown, Chalmers had been sent on a trip to Arabia, selling high value equipment assets to the Saudis for top dollar. His bosses reaped the profits, everyone else reaped the pink slips. It''s not exactly clear, on the official record, what turned Chalmers'' luck around. Yet he still ended up a great success at his next oil venture, which he soon sold at enormous profit and, sick of the oil business, moved to Las Vegas. Chalmers'' associates described him as having a free wheeling and very dangerous gambling habit, but Chalmers was only gambling for the fun. He went to Las Vegas to do business. First he bought stakes in a casino, soon he''d have controlling shares. Soon after that, he owned interest in casinos and hotels all up and down the strip. At his prime, it''s estimated that Trevor Chalmers was worth just over a billion dollars. The FBI suspected him of money laundering. Who he was working with was never obvious, and yet at the same time he wasn''t bribing any politicians or people of power, so he was fair game for an investigation. Yet no amount of forensic accounting was able to provide any evidence for any conviction, so Chalmers was never charged, and he never even knew he was being watched. The man appeared squeaky clean, and he always paid his taxes, despite the extraordinary amount of luck and acumen he showed in his dealings. It was like he''d simply been blessed by God. In the mid-1980s, Chalmers had some sort of emotional episode, finally breaking down and hitting rock bottom many years after that big near-miss.. Chalmers liquidated all of his assets, sold all of his shares, cashed in all of his retirement savings, and stuck all his money in a single Wells-Fargo bank account. It seemed he had no problem eating all of those penalties and fees associated with such action, then he fell off the grid. Not so much that the FBI couldn''t keep some tabs on him. It seemed Chalmers, now a few donuts short of a dozen, built a big house way out in the desert. His only contact with society was making runs for groceries and fresh tanks of water. Oh, and guns and ammunition. Trevor Chalmers hoarded guns, including getting all the proper permissions and licensing for fully automatic and very high caliber weaponry. The fancy stuff only the richest of gun nuts could afford. After all, he had nothing on his criminal record. This raised a couple of eyebrows at the FBI, and a few over at the BATF as well, but nothing came of it. Whatever case they might have had was long gone. Trevor Chalmers was a fish that got away, and he probably wasn''t a very big fish anyway. Besides, they''d all seen this kind of thing before. Some shady businessman, probably laundering money for bad eggs like the Mafia or Colombian Cartels, gets spooked or has had enough, tries to break free and becomes some hard-to-reach recluse out in the middle of nowhere. They had a tendency to arm themselves to the teeth. They''d spend the rest of their lives paranoid, always wondering if the cartel would show up to take care of old business. In 2007, a group of young, out-doorsy ¡°Urb-ex¡± explorers (they were aware of the irony of the term, given it couldn''t have been a more rural location), found Trevor Chalmers home. They''d found all the beer bottles and spent shell casings and all the other detritus that could be found in abundance at a dozen previous abandoned houses they''d explored. They found high powered very expensive weaponry just laying around in the dirt, covered in dust. That worried them. They''d have to report that to the police when they got back to society, probably. People don''t just leave that sort of thing laying around. People coming to a bad end way out here, and nobody ever knew about it until they stumbled across it. The young adventurers were expected to find a corpse before they actually found it. The wide sliding glass doors at the back of the house had all been shattered. So to all the windows. That wasn''t too surprising, in bad storms, the wind can drive good sized pebbles at surprising speed. With no glaziers around to replace them, windward windows don''t last too long. The desert had gotten in. There was a lot of dust. Desert rats and other critters had nested here and there, sometimes digging into the drywall. The roof hadn''t held up to the rare yet heavy rains that come once or twice a year, and there was, oddly, a lot of water damage.The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. The place had been a mess of unnatural causes long before nature got her turn. Here too were enumerable liquor bottles and empty food cans, and lots more empty shell casings. There were bullet holes and shotgun blasts that had ripped up a lot of the walls and what little was left of the furniture. It seemed to them that whoever had lived here, had a lot of personal demons that they were fighting. They found his remains in the master bedroom. The investigators never could determine when Chalmers had died, or exactly how. All that remained was a skeleton. He could have died in the 1990s as far as they knew. It wasn''t a complete skeleton either, it had been scattered about by scavengers. Probably coyotes that had gotten in. The skull was different from the other bones. Those had been gnawed on, before the insects stripped them clean. The skull, on the other hand, was shattered into a thousand little pieces. The Medical Examiner would guess, but not conclude, that Chalmers had taken his own life with one of the shotguns, also found in the room. After all, he''d been an old man, probably failing health, no family or friends. There was also a shotgun blast hole in the near wall, then again there were a lot of such holes all over the house. It was far too late to draw any solid conclusion, and the Medical Examiner wrote it up as ¡°Death by misadventure.¡± This was the last time a government investigator would ever think of Trevor Chalmers at all. There was something all of the investigators missed. It was a very important part to miss, if you had wanted to understand what had really happened there. It was the shell casings they found all over. They assumed it was just the sloppy leftovers of a gun nut playing with his toys, all alone all those last years. It wasn¡¯t that at all. Starting to the east above the complex was a rise, a small ridge. Up on this and across the ridge was a gun emplacement, a .50 caliber Browning heavy machine gun. Investigators supposed he had placed the gun here because of the view, it afforded a fine one of the flat plain sliding away to the East, a good place to fire any gun if you were into that kind of thing. They even noticed that Chalmers had placed stakes out on that plain at measured intervals, for range finding. They also noticed, though did not appreciate, the outdoor table, complete with umbrella, that he¡¯d set up near the machine gun. The umbrella had long since blown off and wedged between nearby stones, the table overturned. They noticed large piles of empty beer and water bottles. They noticed several pairs of high price binoculars. Yet none of the detectives realized just how much time Chalmers had spent out here, under the shade of his umbrella, his view facing the sunrise. Watching. Waiting. If they¡¯d followed the easier footpath south then west around towards the main entrance to the homestead, they¡¯d have seen more bullet casings. These were smaller, 5.56mm NATO casings, which made sense to the detectives. The M-16s, which Chalmers had been licensed to own, that Chalmers had fired this ammo from were far lighter and more portable than the Browning. He¡¯d be able to fire them as he moved. Yet they didn¡¯t notice they hadn¡¯t been collected there over many years of Chalmers¡¯ isolation. They¡¯d collected there over minutes, over seconds, as Chalmers withdrew from his position near the picnic table. In some places they were laid out single file down the footpath, like a metallic string of pearls. Other times they laid out in little clusters, where Chalmers had dumped full mags. There were empty mags here too, discarded and never picked up. Investigators were most impressed with the showpiece of Chalmer¡¯s collection. To the south of the house, in a narrow defile between two ridges of stone, at the head of a trail that led curving north towards the front entrance, was where Chalmers had installed a 20 mm Oerlikon autocannon. It had once been an anti aircraft gun on a warship from WWII, before being sold as surplus after the war was over. He¡¯d himself bought it at auction when a private museum had shut down. Surrounding the gun emplacement was a large pile of 20 mm casings. Again, the gun was permanently fixed, and the investigators assumed Chalmers had just never bothered to pick up. They never guessed he had fired all these shells in one single action. There were several cases still full of ammunition. There was still a jammed shell in the breech, one that Chalmers had been unable to clear. The shell and the gun itself showed signs of partial melting, catastrophic overheating from excessive fire. Leading up from the autocannon up to the front entrance to his house, largely unnoticed by investigators, were another chain of pearls of old casings, this of 9mm pistol casings, and in one place, a jammed 9 mm pistol. There were more pistols found in front of the house, and they appeared to match the holsters found on the remains of clothing found in the same bedroom as Chalmers remains. At the entrance of the house, the same door that Chalmershad retreated through, was a rack of shotguns, Chalmers¡¯ last hope. Many were still here when the hikers had found the home. Chalmers appears to have chosen a semiautomatic riot gun, which he discharged, as evidenced by holes in his walls, on his way back to his bedroom. This is where Chalmers met his final end. One thing investigators did note is that there was not one single bullet or shell case that didn''t obviously match one of Trevor Chalmers'' guns. But of course there wouldn''t be. He was out here alone, just shooting off his guns. They''d never suspected foul play in the first place. Yet Chalmers hadn¡¯t died alone. He had died fighting something. Something he had been preparing for years for, yet in the end it wouldn¡¯t matter. A butcher whose bill was due. Something that didn¡¯t shoot back. Something that couldn¡¯t be stopped. Something that didn¡¯t bleed. Something that couldn¡¯t die. Billy Gohl Billy Ghol (ghoul?) was a prolific serial killer from the turn of the 20th century, operating out of the remote seafaring town of Aberdeen, Washington, on the Pacific Coast of North America. His modus operandi was to murder sailors as they put into port and drank at the local bars and enjoyed the local brothels and slept in the local hotels. Indeed, he would eventually become a local union official, and every visiting sailor would have to speak to him personally and register their stay. This gave him ample opportunity to gain their confidence, find a secluded spot, murder them, steal their valuables and last pay (which was often declared as they had registered), and he''d dispose of their body. He even had a sluiceway under his office that led directly into the waters of the harbor. He had a reputation as a bully and a thug, in the way many would exploit their union offices in the day, but his petty organized crime was only a cover for his true depravity. His name is seldom remembered today, despite the great toll of lives that he stole. Consider a near contemporary, Jack the Ripper, who¡¯s alleged to have killed five persons in total, far less active, yet far more infamous. This is likely due to the remoteness of the town. There were no rail lines in those days, and the easiest way in and out was by ship. Naturally there was more fame, or infamy, to be found in a metropolis like London. Jack the Ripper chose prostitutes as is victims, a common target, as the lay public often wouldn¡¯t care, or even blame the victim. Given the resulting notoriety, his choice in victims did not appear to deter the police. Billy Ghol had a somewhat similar scheme. In the days of tramp steamers, when men would be shanghaied and pressed into service, a sailor jumping ship at any given harbor and simply disappearing was common. There were rarely any investigations. Despite this, Billy Guhl was so overwhelmingly prolific in his proclivities that Aberdeen, Washington developed a sinister reputation. Sailors in far away ports like Copenhagen or Macao would whisper at how its tarry rotting docks, always under a gloomy overcast sky, should always be avoided. Its infamy, at least in sea ports, was briefly worldwide. And in time not even the locals could not ignore their troubles when so many bodies began to wash ashore at high tide. After decades of operating under their noses, Billy Ghol was finally caught. Only convicted for a handful of murders they could conclusively prove, Billy Ghol ended up in state asylum for the mentally insane, his brain thoroughly riddled with untreated syphillus. Yet authorities suspected he was involved with the murder of over one hundred men.Stolen story; please report. This was a significant underestimate. Authorities based their estimate upon the number of reported missing men. Only a small number of the missing had ever been reported. Jonnie Jeremiah, at the time that Billy Guhl performed his deeds, was an older Native American man of an unrecorded tribe from the Salish language family. He was often considered the town''s fool, or idiot, or mad man, back when they rarely distinguished these terms, and used far less acceptable slurs. Jonnie was certainly unwell, he suffered from chronic, untreated syphilis, what may have been bipolar disorder, and the terrible drama of seeing his friends, family, and loved ones all die of smallpox in his youth and middle age. Owing to Jonnie''s condition, and his position on the lowest rung of the social ladder, nobody believed Jonnie when he tried to tell of the things Billy Ghol was doing. Jonnie knew, of course. Billy had been Jonnie''s best friend. He spent all those years telling people, yet nobody would listen. Jonnie, and sometimes Billy, had lived in a dilapidated shack on a grassy bluff overlooking the tidal flats of Grays Harbor. It''s long gone, of course. The area was zoned and developed into a residential neighborhood in the 1960s. There is a lot of roughly 3000 square feet where his shack once stood. Now there stands a small three bedroom house, the kind that would have been a home for a working class laborer, almost certainly a logger. By the 1960s, the timber industry had long surpassed the trade steamer industry. This house is often unoccupied. It sells cheap, and is often on the market. Sometimes, late at night, usually in the fall when the weather is bad, and cold storms blow in off the northern Pacific. Sometimes the ghost of Jonnie Jeremiah appears. As his life had no geographical reference to the house that came later, he might appear in the living room, or the backyard, or just over the fence line, or halfway embedded in the door to the little closet space for the hot water heater. The ghost of Jonnie tries to warn the observer about Billy Guhl. He yells. He cries. He screams. About those bodies. The bodies in the water. Dead. All dead. All of them. Billy and the dead. He has no voice. Nobody ever listens to him. The Road to Aberdeen If you get off the Interstate 5 in Olympia, Washington and take the highway out to Aberdeen, you may see many unusual sights, if you know exactly what it is you¡¯re supposed to be looking for. If you don¡¯t realize what you¡¯re looking at, you still may feel a queer sense of unease. There are the streetlights, for example. This section of highway was rebuilt and redeveloped in the late 1960s. At the time, a corrupt and penny-pinching highway department sought to save costs by accepting the lowest bid on a manufacturer who designed and manufactured streetlight posts. The company which manufactured these posts only existed for five years, from 1966 to 1971, before a series of consolidations and bankruptcies forced them to close. Their factory was located in Sandberg, Indiana. The difference between these streetlight posts and any other on any stretch of road in any part of the world is subtle. This is one of the reasons you need to know what to look for. Other than a vaguely unique shape and form to their design, there¡¯s one other feature that makes these streetlights remarkable. When viewed directly, they seem to be placed in a perfectly even and reasonable cadence. When viewed indirectly, they convey a message. Not in light, but in shadow. The only way to see this message is by being in a vehicle. Not as the driver of the vehicle, that is too distracting, but as a passenger. The vehicle will need to be traveling at, or about, the speed limit. It helps a great deal if it is a very large, roomy vehicle, such as a van, where the observer has room to turn about. It must, by necessity, be at night. You¡¯re not to look at the lights directly, but at the interior surfaces of the vehicle. It¡¯s the way shadows shift as they move across the interior of the vehicle. It¡¯s in the way the angles change as you drive underneath the light. They are not at all regular, like the posts themselves are, which makes no sense. Even if you¡¯re looking for a message, you might not see it in a car. In the back of an empty and spacious van, however, the message becomes obvious. It¡¯s the way the light and the dark moves about your surroundings that conveys the message. It is similar to Morse code, though it is not Morse code. There is no prior training to interpret the message. You will simply know it when you see it. The message is incomplete. It is only a portion, one third of the entire message. Before folding, the factory which built these street lights produced a batch delivered to Washington state. Florida. And Delaware. Nobody has ever completed the full message. There are those within our organization going through substantial efforts to make sure no one ever does. Then again, a few are very curious. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Then there are the businesses to the side of the highway. Not all of them are what they seem. You will see dealerships selling agricultural equipment, like tractors. Others sell boats. A business selling small prefabricated barns. It would appear that these businesses are accessed from a road that runs parallel to the highway, but if you try to exit the highway, and find these roads, and the businesses in question, you will not find them. The businesses never sell the presumed products. They make no profit off of them. On rare occasions they will rotate their stock, as it weathers and erodes in the long years the stock sits there in their lots, easily viewable from the highway. These businesses are all fronts for something else. They do very brisk business. Just don¡¯t dig into it. Then there are the parks. The rest stops. The various greenways administered by the Parks Department. Similar to the Highway Department, the Parks Department was very active throughout the 1960s, and since then has only maintained its work. Prior to the interest in public beautification, Satsop county had been ravaged by clear cut logging, the area¡¯s primary industry. Naturally, the parks department set to work, filling their green places by planting trees. This was still in the early years when people were only beginning to think about environmental health. There was not a lot of thought in the selection of what sort of species to plant, nor consideration of diversity, native species, proper spacing, how the parks might look once the trees grew to size, and so on. If you go to a park now, all the trees seem similar. Same size. Same species. Widely spaced. They all grow very tall and very straight, and don¡¯t resemble the sort of natural growth trees you¡¯d find in a proper forest. It provides an unnatural, uncanny feeling. For that matter, there seems to be something strangely uncanny about the other park features, the style of the signage, the architecture of the buildings, like the restrooms and the covered picnic shelters, the parking lots themselves. The strangeness somehow amalgamates with the strangeness of the trees. If you look very closely, more closely than anybody should ever look at trees, you will see that they are perfectly identical. Down to every single detail. Unless you dig, you¡¯ll never notice how these trees connect underground. Then there¡¯s a certain house, in Elma, a town about halfway to Aberdeen. A trailer really, double wide. It sits in a now worn out trailer park that had been built in the 1970s. Its original intended occupants had been young engineers and construction workers, and their families, who had been brought to Elma temporarily to build the Ajax nuclear reactor. That project was canceled and those workers left. You can still see the old cooling towers from the highway, they were never finished. At least not in this world. In another world, that plant was finished, in a manner of speaking. It¡¯s good for our world that it was never finished here. In the other world, the consequences were very unexpected. That trailer was abandoned in January, 1981. The current residents of the trailer park never acknowledge the presence of that home. No one had gone in since its abandonment, though the doors were left unlocked. Though a small interior door near the back of that trailer, a part of that other world leaks through an open door in its twin. It¡¯s enough to cause serious problems within our world, though it¡¯s unrelated to any of the strange phenomena previously mentioned. At least it¡¯s hoped it¡¯s got nothing to do with that message. A Brutalist Aquarium It¡¯s not hard to assume that most people don¡¯t immediately recognize what the term Bbrutalist¡± means when applied to architecture. Then again, it¡¯s also hard to imagine that there is anybody who isn¡¯t familiar with many examples. Brutalist architecture evolved in the 1950s after WWII and prominently featured the structural materials themselves rather than false exteriors, most importantly steel-reinforced concrete. Rather than emphasizing ornamentation, they were minimalist, simple flat sections of concrete, almost cubist in nature, broken up here and there by thick perpendicular wooden timbers. In addition to its distinct visual style, it¡¯s also noted for its inexpensive construction. In many examples you can still see casts of the wood grain in the plywood used to construct the molds. In the United States, in the first few years after WWII, most people were simply preoccupied with getting on with the rest of their lives. Various government officials, economists, and academics were elsewhere focused on the economy, and the significant cultural changes occurring across the country; everything was changing. One thing that was significant that they noticed, contrary to the surplus of just about every other kind of goods and services, was that there was an acute shortage of obstetricians and gynecologists all across the country. It turned out that the baby-making business was positively booming. Five or six years later there was an acute shortage of Kindergarten classrooms. By now, the government officials and academics had caught up to the important facts, and thanks to the construction industry, brand new elementary schools were popping up all over like mushrooms after a hard autumn rain. There were a good five or six years following that for plenty of new high schools to be laid down. There¡¯s a good chance that if you¡¯re an American, you went to one of those high schools, even if it had been remodeled and renovated half a dozen times. And, of course, by the time all of those little baby Boomers were sending off applications to college, the universities themselves had finished a whole crop of brand new buildings. Of course, since it was all on the tax payer¡¯s doll, they had to build all those new buildings relatively cheaply. So if a person is going to recognize a building of the Brutalist style, it would probably be on a college campus, noticeably of a different style than the great masoned brick and mortar buildings of the original part of the campuses. So chances are, if you¡¯ve been on a college campus you¡¯re familiar with the style. A lot of people nowadays, if asked, would consider the whole style rather ugly and oppressive. The college administrators who commissioned the construction of those buildings were paying for the floor space, not the aesthetics, and when it comes to architecture, it seems that ugly is cheaper than pretty. That said, there are many visual pleasing examples of brutalist architecture. They tend to be large public buildings like large city public libraries, or museums, or city halls. These are places built when they wanted the structures to last, and to make a statement, back when Brutalism seemed like the architecture of the future. They¡¯re places where large numbers of people flow through, and interact with the stacks of books or the exhibits, and their surroundings seem like a natural metro-organic extension of the surrounding city itself. The point isn¡¯t the building itself, but how it serves the people. The Seattle Aquarium is a good example of excellent use of the style. It¡¯s located right on the edge of Elliot Bay, just down the hill from the world famous Pike Place Market, and the towering skyscrapers of downtown. From the view from the street, it doesn¡¯t appear to be a remarkable building, and certainly not Brutalist. The exterior appears to be a big wooden warehouse, almost barn like, jutting out into the bay on a pier. Back in the seventies, when this aquarium was built with taxpayer dollars, there were many such structures along the bay. They¡¯d been common since well before WWII, but had largely declined for more modern urban renewal projects by the time the aquarium was finished. The masterpiece behind its application of Brutalism is that it isn¡¯t meant to be on display like so many other Brutalist buildings. It¡¯s meant to be subtle, to be discovered as you move through the aquarium. A visitor entering the aquarium goes through a typical ticket counter and turnstyle. They¡¯ll see a large tank of fish, or sea anemones or jellyfish and admire them for a while. Then the visitor, out of the corner of his or her eye, will see another tank and decide to inspect that. Then another, and so on, each visitor thinking they¡¯re exploring the aquarium based on their own whims, but really they¡¯re being guided by the subtle intentions of the architect. Every visitor, thinking they¡¯re exploring by their own free will, follows the same basic path from the aquarium¡¯s entrance to the gift shop at the end. It¡¯s not just the tanks, but the placement of the interior walls, the decorations, and the low descending ramps which are both easy to walk down, and promise an interesting new sight just around the corner. The Brutalism comes on slowly. A concrete surface here, another there. Sometimes they appear in decorative steps alongside the descending ramps. There are water features here, flowing down those artificial falls, and you get a strong whiff of salt air, reminding you how close you are to the ocean. By the time you¡¯re outside again, on the opposite end of the pier, the Brutalism has organically taken over, completely hidden from the rest of the city, and it does its job so well that the visitor probably doesn¡¯t even notice it. Here the sea otters play in their great big tank, observable from above or below through windows. The Brutalist concrete blocks they play on resemble the natural rocks on a wild shore. The portions of the building that decend into the bay have become encrusted with barnacles, and are stained by the salt water. If you stand in just the right spot you can see the tips of the skyscrapers just over the roof of the aquarium, and the city seems to merge into the ocean in one homogenous transition, accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of human society living in harmony with the wild world. Arguably the centerpiece of the aquarium is the ¡°Dome.¡± The visitor descends down another shallow ramp, to their side sea water pores over another set of stair-like platforms. The air noticeably grows cooler, as if you¡¯re descending into the sea itself. The visitor turns the corner, the prize purposefully set out of view, and then he or she findes themselves in the Dome. It¡¯s an enormous underwater tank. There¡¯s a great concrete honeycomb of concrete support beams, the pinnacle of Brutalist aesthetic. Between the concrete beams are thick aquarium glass, and beyond that the sea water, a good forty feet depth of it, stretching from the ¡°sea¡± bottom, to the surface just above the Dome¡¯s oculus. It¡¯s filled with fish, of course. The sort of rock fish and pelagics you might expect to see swimming around in Puget Sound, in among tall fronds of kelp. It would be easy to forgive an imaginative child thinking that the Dome actually extends out into open water. That this was what the sea really looked like. Indeed, even a naive adult might make that mistake. Of course it¡¯s not true. It¡¯s just another enormous tank. Concrete square walls all the way around, with the dome in the middle, flooded with sea water and stocked with fish, just like any other tank in the aquarium. Naturally, it has to be. No open view of Puget Sound is going to display so many fish, or entertain visitors for the two or three minutes that they linger in here, the way the Dome does. This wasn¡¯t the original intent of the original architect. No, the original architect had a much stranger idea in his mind. The original plan had indeed an actual submerged tank out into the open ocean, instead of a dome, it was a sort of bleacher seating arrangement, unidirectional, with all of the aquarium¡¯s visitors looking out into the depths beyond. As if the ocean were a theater.If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. On the surface of it, the concept was absurd and a hard sell. It¡¯s difficult for people to imagine now, but throughout the 50s and 60s, the problem of pollution in the United States was every bit as bad, if not worse, than it would be in industrial China some fifty years later. Puget Sound, particularly in Elliot Bay next to Seattle and all of its industries, was a veritable dead zone. The vast school of herring that once sustained immigrant Scandinavian fisher communities were essentially gone. PCBs and mercury contaminated the muck of the ocean floor, and on up into the food chain. Yet the architect sold his concept. The wasteland was indeed a part of his sale. Visitors wanting to see fish and other sea creatures would have many opportunities in the aquarium¡¯s other exhibits. The point that he wanted to emphasize was the devastation that man had wrought upon the oceans. It was the early years of the environmental movement. The point the architect wanted to showcase, in addition to the harmony between steel-reinforced concrete cities and rocky ocean shores, was how humanity could play a role in restoration and healing of the natural world. Sure, the view outside of that outwards facing tank would be a bleak one, at first. They¡¯d see sterile muck, and random bits of litter and garbage. Even, on one side, a pile of old tires. What they wouldn¡¯t have appreciated at the time- that pile of tires was a part of the architect''s plan. The original visitors to the aquarium might pass through this portion of the exhibit, turn their cheek or roll their eyes, and pass on. But they would bring their children, who would be enthralled with the colorful tropical fish in the other tanks, or the strange and wondrous tactical sensations of the touch tank. Then they would come back. Maybe a few years. Maybe they would come back when they had children of their own. Maybe they would take their grandchildren when they had that precious opportunity. The whole point of the prescient architect''s plan was one of transformation. Things would change. The barren poisoned sea floor would change. The school of herring, with proper management, would return. That pile of tires was the basis for an artificial reef. Over time, life would regrow. Giant plumose sea anemones, strange albino lengthy things crowned with cloud like tentacles would cover many of the available surfaces. Great sea cucumbers, fat as a big summer zucchini, purple and covered with soft orange spikes, would crawl along the restored seabed. Monstrous sunstars, enormous sea stars with over twenty arms, would be a common sight, crawling over the tires, looking for mussels and oysters to devour, just like they did on any other reef in Puget Sound. Massive lingcod, a popular eating fish of all the local fish n¡¯ chips spots, would find refuge in all the little crevices made by the artificial reef, the envy of all the local amateur fishermen, a fine meal just out of reach. If they were lucky, a Giant Pacific Octopus, a perennial fan favorite that can grow up to 14 feet across tentacle tip to tip, might just make her home and nesting ground next to the warming glass of the undersea tank, and satisfy her unearthly inhuman curiosity by observing all of the strange air breathing creatures inside. If they were very, VERY lucky, maybe the Gray Whale population would rebound, and on a clear high visibility day the visitors just might be able to make out their silhouettes. Perhaps, and this was a distant dream, pursued by the marvelous orcas which hunted them back when the ocean was healthy. The scheme was bought. The plans were accepted and built. The privileged Seattle oligarchs who had nepotistic positions on the committees had approved of the idea, given their hardiest endorsements. After all, it would be all of the working class rubes who¡¯d be fronting the real bill for construction. The pseudophilanthropists had simply given a pittance, and had their names placed on plaques claiming responsibility for the public aquarium, out by the ticket office where regular visitors queued up to pay for admittance. It had been opening night. Not for the public, that would come much later. But for the elite, the crust of the upper crust. They had come for a party, finally dressed and delivered in limousines, late one evening, its details kept out of the press. They drank on champagne, and ate seafood hors d''oeuvres. They told terrible jokes about how they were eating the creatures they were casually observing in the tanks. Late in the evening, clothed in the now ugly 70s dresses and tuxedos, they funneled into the bleacher style seating of the tank facing outward into the ocean. It was obscured by a great red velvet curtain, ready to be opened on the big reveal. Of course all the attendees had known that the curtain would open up into nothing. What¡¯s more, it was well after dark, and they¡¯d only see empty blackness. What¡¯s more, many of the people attending had been responsible, directly or indirectly, for the pollution that had killed Elliot Bay. They had made their fortune on it. They owned the factories dumping their waste straight into the water. Yet that wasn¡¯t the point. The point was the opening of the curtain, and the speeches they wouldn¡¯t remember. Then they¡¯d pile back into their limousines and head back to their mansions for the typical hedonism they enjoyed after such important events. The curtain pulled apart. The self-indulgent audience applauded the black view of nothing. A man began to talk. Not the architect, no, but an old and rich man from his firm, intent on taking the credit for the aquarium, began to talk. Then it came. Where it came from, the audience would never know. Its origin was far deeper than any sonogram of the Puget Sound¡¯s floor could ever plumb. When it struck the outer surface of the tank, it was traveling so many knots, it struck with such force that all knew its intentions immediately. They could feel its hatred in their marrow, in their neurons. When that ear-drum breaking thump hit the outward facing windows, each of them realized every mistake that they had made in their lives. It struck first, and then it enveloped the tank, like a Great Pacific Octopus attacking an oyster, or a sunstar turning its own stomach inside-out to envelope its prey. It formed a blackness darker than the black they had seen before. Then the lid of the thing opened, and it rolled its giant singular eye down to look at them. To stare at the horrible disgusting air-breathing creatures that lived within the tank. It saw them, and it hated them. They knew it too. It was inside of their mind, a concept utterly alien to them, but something that the thing understood as naturally as extracting oxygen from seawater. Those that survived fled. Those that did not still remain. The next day the construction workers who had been still completing the finishing touches for the public opening ended up sealing the entrance and exit tunnels with fresh surplus concrete. It wasn¡¯t even remotely cured before the plans were hastily drawn up for the Dome. The architectural firm had hinted to the writers of the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that the grand new aquarium would showcase an underwater viewing experience, so naturally they needed to provide what they had promised. The dome was hastily put together, not by the original architect, he was long gone as was his dream of humanity living in harmony with what lurked in the deep, but by imitators mocking his style. There was a delay, of course. Cost overruns. What public project doesn¡¯t have them? But they did it. They built an artificial tank, completely offset from the open ocean itself, providing the illusion of the experience of being in an underwater dome. The fish were stocked. The population of flora and fauna is viewable to this day, well controlled and unnatural. That¡¯s how it¡¯s been from the original generation, to their children, grandchildren, and now, great grandchildren. The aquarium was a great success, and remains to be. That outward-viewing tank is still out there, down the shallow slope below the retaining wall that houses the Dome. Thanks to its good hermetic engineering, it¡¯s still full of air. It¡¯s still full of the corpses of those who couldn¡¯t make it out. As for the thing, the thing that saw and hated, its location is unknown. The original socialites who escaped, now long dead of natural causes, would have told you it''s just as well. They had no idea how not to make their terrible mistakes and how to not screw over future generations. They couldn¡¯t help themselves. They never told anybody. It¡¯s still out there. It still hates. The Gravel Pit From the Forbidden List of Leads Subject DDE11212, The Gravel Pit James Conner returned from the war in the fall of 1945 with a deep tan, a desire to put the past behind him, and the notion to do something with his folks¡¯ property, a decent tract of land near a small town not too distant from Bismarck, North Dakota. The land had never been very good for crops, but that was fine with James. He had another plan in mind. He had been a combat engineer, and he¡¯d become exceedingly skilled in reducing coral and lava islands into gravel and dust, and then leveling them out into airstrips. On the eastern edge of the property, edging up against a little babbling river, was a low hill. In fact, this was the terminal moraine of one of the ancient glaciers that scoured the country in the distant past. Like a titanic bulldozer, the glacier had scraped up the earth and deposited it here, and it remained there long after the glacier had melted away. James'' plans hadn¡¯t involved the top soil, but what was lying underneath. There were none of the mineral wealthy you typically think of when it comes to mining, no gold or coal. Nor would there be any oil shale, that fracking technology would be decades away. No, the money here was all in gravel Gravel has a lot of uses, the most important being used in roads and other concrete products. All you need to do is dig it up, wash away the soil, and with simple milling processes, sort it into the appropriate sizes per the customer¡¯s need. You needed to use and maintain heavy equipment, but James knew that like a back of hand, plus the government was selling plenty of it as surplus. The Conner Gravel Quarry, everybody just called it the gravel pit, quickly proved successful. For a few years, James was the richest man in town, and at its height the pit employed a dozen men with generous wages. The biggest boom was during the Eisenhower years, when the country was laying down highways and interstate freeways all over the country. Yet every boom has its bust. A lot of people had gravel deposits on their properties, and so many people got into it, production soon outstripped demand, and the bottom fell out. Jim would end up laying off his workers, and shutter the entrance gate of the gravel pit in 1959. He¡¯d still tool around in his bulldozer now and then. He¡¯d help acquaintances with their gravel driveways, and supply pea gravel to the local playgrounds and such, but he never had the drive to start a new business. Besides, he was enjoying a very early retirement, and all of his former workers had found good jobs. At the end, when closed, the pit was a massive open wound in what had once been rolling prairie. A great v-shaped trough had been dug out, almost like a canyon from an old western, leading back away from the little babbling river. In places cuts were made into the canyon walls, creating sharp vertical cliffs, fifty feet high or so. In some of the wider cuts were great piles of well sorted gravel, ranging in size from large stones down to sands of various grain sizes. It was all product that hadn¡¯t sold. James had kept his employees working even as the market collapsed, just in the hope that it might come back. In 1962, three boys disappeared from the little town outside of Bismarck. Jonathan (10), his little brother Nicky (7), and their next door neighbor, Ronny (9). The town had been the sort where on nice warm summer days, boys could run out their door after breakfast, and go running off on their own to play with other boys, sometimes coming home for lunch at one house or another, and make their way home by dinner. At the very least they¡¯d call if they were having dinner at a friend¡¯s house. At any rate, they¡¯d always make it home before dark, usually after the sun was down but while there was still a golden and turquoise light on the western horizon. When the boys didn¡¯t show up after dark, calls were urgently placed to the parents of all the local boys. By two hours after proper dark, the night full of stars, the police were called. After two days, the FBI. No sign of the boys, not even a hint, was ever found. At first, relatives were interrogated, especially strange uncles who lived alone. Later, various ex-cons living all the way over in Bismarck were interrogated. Again, no clue.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. In the summer of 1963, another boy went missing. Two more in the summer of 1964. Again, there was never even a hint. The people of the town weren¡¯t familiar with the term ¡°serial killer,¡± though part of their minds were afraid of the vaguely formed concept. The parents would never find closure. The problem was, it was a strange phenomenon that was fairly widely understood, and feared, in a different context among the people of the Upper Midwest. It was a terrifying scenario, but was feared by agricultural workers, people who worked in grain mills and grain silos which could be found everywhere, from Montana in the west, to Missouri the south, to Pennsylvania in the West. You see, when you have large gravel, big pebbles, a person of any proportions and weight can walk right up the pile, and not even notice a problem. If the pebbles are very small, that is to say sand, the same thing occurs. It¡¯s a mostly solid mound, and a person can walk right up a sand dune. However, there¡¯s a very strange exception. If a mass of pebbles or gravel is just the right size, just the right shape, say perhaps it¡¯s been specifically milled that way, then a human being won¡¯t be able to stand on it. No, they¡¯ll just sink right in, the gravel will part as they sink through, and the gravel will fill in above them, swallowing them. If a person were to try to walk up a large pile of such gravel they will immediately notice the danger after a step or two, and then fall backwards out of their predicament to safety. However, if they are standing on a low but steep cliff, and they see below them a pile of such gravel, they¡¯d have no idea of the danger they faced. It would appear just a soft cushion for a big fun stunt. Jump off the cliff and land in a big safe cushion of soft gravel. It didn¡¯t look that much different than the pea gravel at the playground anyway. The parents of the missing boys had all passed by fifty years after the last boy disappeared. The gravel pit would have been unrecognizable to people from the past. Rain and snow and wind had reduced the whole thing to low humps, barely recognizable as hills, all along a little babbling river. Bismarck had never been a big city, but it had grown, particularly after the boom of the oil shale rush. Still, a housing development had been built over the site of the old gravel pit. Lots of middle class homes, mostly owned by commuters who didn¡¯t mind the drive, but preferred the slightly lower costs of living. The people of this housing development had a problem. They would wake up gasping for breath in the middle of the night, sheets soaking wet, with the terrible sensation of being smothered, unable to breath. They¡¯d all go to their different doctors, and all be misdiagnosed with sleep apnea. Their cpap machines would fail to give the victims relief. There are official government agencies designed to recognize clusters of outbreaks, like the EPA and the CDC. Except they''re designed to recognize clusters like cancer, or listeria. There are no official agencies trained to recognize the ghosts of little boys who smothered to death under piles of gravel. Booms are followed by busts. The fracking industry has moved on, and the housing development by the little babbling brook has seen better times. Most have moved out, and the houses themselves are in a terrible state. They sort of look like a whole neighborhood of haunted houses. Yet it¡¯s the earth below that¡¯s truly haunted.