She took a piece of paper and the pencil stub from the table. For a second, she seemed to study the pencil in her hand, and then she turned to him again. “You’re sure you’re interested?”
Lawson gave a slight shrug. “It passes the time. And I like hearing you talk.”
He saw her blush. Cora lowered her head and drew a diagram on the page. “It’s called a superior mirage, which means that it appears higher in the sky than the original object. You tend to see them in cold climates, over something like an ice sheet. It causes a layer of cold air to form under a warmer area, which is the opposite of the usual arrangement. A thermal inversion.”
As she spoke, the weariness seemed to leave her voice. “Light from the object is refracted when it hits the inversion, which bends it along the curve of the Earth. If you’re in the atmospheric duct, you can see it from hundreds of miles away.” She put the pencil down. “That’s what Willoughby saw.”
Lawson pretended to study the drawing. “And what was the object behind it?”
“Maybe nothing. A Fata Morgana can be caused by as little as a stretch of coastline or a land formation. The spires that people see are produced by turbulence in the air. Nothing more to it than that.”
He decided to play his last card. “That’s a pretty good story. Now tell me the truth.”
Cora looked up sharply. Something was stirring behind her green eyes. “Excuse me?”
“The truth,” Lawson repeated. “You didn’t come here for a mirage. When I asked for the money for the charter, your husband didn’t blink. He thinks there’s something real here. I’m not saying I believe it. But if you’re serious, you need someone like me to help you.”
Cora continued to look at him. Finally, she seemed to decide. “Have you heard of a man called Charles Fort?”
Lawson remembered the name from the book on the table, but he decided not to mention it. “I don’t think so.”
Cora turned toward the fire. “He was a writer, too. Like Sam, but more so. He spent his life in museums and libraries, looking for accounts of unexplained events. There was a club that got together at his apartment to talk about the unknown. Fort didn’t welcome the attention. He didn’t like being held up as an authority. But Sam cared about him a lot. And so did I.”
In the firelight, her face was difficult to read. “Fort died seven years ago. He just collapsed. Leukemia. I went to see him in the hospital before he went. It’s where I met Sam. All I knew was that he wanted to take up where Fort had left off. Fort never traveled or did any investigations on his own, and he tried to cover too much at once. Sam thought that you should focus on one problem at a time. The silent city seemed like a good place to start. Fort even gave him his blessing.”
“If he’s spent years looking into it, why is he coming up to Alaska only now?”
“You shouldn’t underestimate him. Sam wanted to put together all the pieces before he came. And he realized from the beginning that there was more to the story than even Willoughby knew.”
Cora went to the table and pulled out the picture of the silent city. “Look at the photo. It’s an obvious hoax. An ordinary picture of Bristol. But before Willoughby started selling it to the tourists as the real thing, other witnesses had already claimed that the city was Bristol, too. Bristol is more than four thousand miles away. There’s no way that a mirage could come even a tenth of that distance. So what was it about the city in the sky that reminded them of it?”
Lawson looked at the picture again. He saw no more there than before. “You tell me.”
“Bristol is a city of spires. Some eyewitnesses even claimed to recognize a church called St. Mary Redcliffe. It’s got a row of pinnacles and a spire with a cross. Like this.” Cora sketched a vertical column with four smaller lines projecting from the top. “The accounts differ. But they all mention the spires.”
“You said that the spires were probably just caused by turbulence in the air.”
“That’s true of some Fata Morgana images, but it doesn’t make sense here. A cold mass of air over ice would be relatively still. All of the accounts say that the city was stationary. It would hang there in the sky for more than twenty minutes. And it appears in late June and the middle of July, near the summer solstice, when sunset lasts the longest, which would draw out the phenomenon. The men who witnessed it weren’t fools. Whatever they saw was real.”
Lawson began to see that she was just as cracked as her husband. “So what was it?”
“There are plenty of descriptions, but they don’t agree. Some witnesses say that the city looked like Bristol, but there are others who compare it to Montreal, Toronto, or even Peking. Others say that whatever it was, it wasn’t European. You know what that says to me?”
Lawson had a hunch, but he was more fascinated by the light in her eyes. “What?”
“It reminds me of a famous detective story. Maybe you’ve read it. A voice is overheard arguing in a room. One witness thinks it was talking in German, another in English, another in Russian. None of them can speak the language themselves, but they think they can recognize it by the sound. The speaker turns out to be an orangutan.” Cora smiled. “And if people say that a city looks like Bristol, Montreal, or Peking, they’re really all saying the same thing without knowing it. It’s something strange. Alien. Or from another time. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
This last question took him by surprise. He wanted to warn her not to throw away her life on this, but he only shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”
“I don’t mind.” Cora regarded him with evident amusement. “I’ve been doing all the talking. Tell me. What made you come out to Alaska?”
He had rarely been asked this before. “There wasn’t much for me on the outside.”
“That’s what I thought. It draws people who have been pushed to the margins. They have nowhere else to go. The same is true of ideas. Some of us end up on the fringes. It can become a sickness. You know why prospectors go mad? It’s because you have to be nuts to go looking for gold in the first place. You could say the same thing about writers. Sam and I both know this. But I love him, and I don’t want to lose him. Anyway, you knew all this before I even said a word.”
Cora held up the pencil. “You went through my papers. Did you take the money?”
Lawson felt his face grow warm. “You can count it. If I looked at your notes, it was because I wanted to know what the hell I was doing here. I stand to lose a lot on this trip, and I had to know why.”
He came forward until they were close enough to touch. “If it matters, I believe you. Or at least that you’re telling the truth. Hell, for all I know, maybe Willoughby really did see a city from the past—”
Behind him, the door of the cabin opened. When he turned, he saw the shape of a man outlined against the darkness.
“You’re wrong,” Russell said. “It wasn’t a city of the past. It’s a city of the future.”
III.
In the New York Times, October 31, 1889, is an account, by Mr. L.B. French, of Chicago, of the spectral representation, as he saw it, near Mount Fairweather. “We could see plainly houses… and trees. Here and there rose tall spires over huge buildings, which appeared to be ancient mosques or cathedrals…. It did not look like a modern city—more like an ancient European city.”
Russell lowered himself into the nearest chair and began to unlace his boots. Lawson saw that he was carrying his right leg stiffly, and that something had been bound around his knee so that it strained against the fabric. Russell noticed him looking and grinned. “Give me a hand with this, will you?”