lost religions, then into a broad paved area that might have been a
parking lot or a staging area for trucks delivering freight.
I had run a considerable distance, leaving the pavement and plunging
through knee-high grass lush from the recent rains, when the moon rolled
over in its bed. By the light that came through the disarranged covers,
I saw ranks of low structures less than half a mile away.
These were the small houses once occupied by the married military
personnel and their families who preferred on-base living.
Although the barking had stopped, I kept moving, certain that Orson and
perhaps Jimmy could be found ahead. The grass ended at a cracked
sidewalk. I leaped across a gutter choked with dead leaves, scraps of
paper, and other debris, into a street lined on both sides with enormous
old Indian laurels. Half the trees were flourishing, and the moonlit
pavement under them was dappled with leaf shadows, but an equal number
were dead, clawing at the sky with gnarled black branches.
The barking rose once more, closer but still not near enough to be
precisely located. This time it was punctuated by yawps, yelp sand then a
squeal of pain.
My heart knocked against my ribs harder than it had when I’d been
dodging the two-by-four, and I was gasping for breath.
The avenue I followed led among the dreary rows of decaying,
single-story houses. Branching from it was a large but orderly grid of
other streets.
More barking, another squeal, then silence.
I stopped in the middle of the street, turning my head left and right,
listening intently, trying to control my labored wheezing. I waited for
more battle sounds.
The living trees were as still as those that were leafless and rotting.
The breath I’d outrun caught up with me quickly. But as I grew quiet,
the night grew even quieter.
In its current condition, Fort Wyvern is most comprehensible to me if I
think of it as a theme park, a twisted Disneyland created by Walt
Disney’s evil twin. Here the guiding themes are not magic and wonder but
weirdness and menace, a celebration not of life but of death.
As Disneyland is divided into territories main Street USA, Tomorrow land,
Adventure land, Fantasy landwyvern is composed of many attractions.
These three thousand small houses and associated buildings, among which
I now stood, constitute the “land” that I call Dead Town. If ghosts
walked in any neighborhood of Fort Wyvern, this would be the place where
they would choose to do their haunting.
No sound was louder than the moon pulling the clouds around itself once
more.
As though I had crossed into the land of the dead without having the
good manners to die first, I slowly drifted spirit-silent along the
starlit street, seeking some sign of Orson. So profoundly hushed and
lonely was the night, so preternaturally still, I could easily believe
that mine was the only heart beating within a thousand miles.
Washed by the faint radiance of far nebulae, Dead Town appears to be
merely sleeping, an ordinary suburb dreaming its way toward breakfast.
The single-story cottages, bungalows, and duplexes are revealed in no
detail, and the bare geometry of walls and roofs presents a deceptive
image of solidity, order, and purpose.
Nothing more than the pale light of a full moon, however, is required to
expose the ghost-town reality. Indeed, on some streets, a half-moon is
sufficient. Rain gutters droop from rusted fasteners.
Clapboard walls, once pristine white and maintained with military
discipline, are piebald and peeling. Many of the windows are broken,
yawning like hungry mouths, and the lunar light licks the jagged edges
of the glass teeth.
Because the landscape sprinkler systems no longer function, the only
trees surviving are those with taproots that have found some deep store
of water that sustains them through California’s long rainless summer
and autumn. The shrubbery is withered beyond recovery, reduced to wicker
webs and stubble. The grass grows green only during the wet winter, and
by June it is as golden and crisp as wheat waiting for the thresher.
The Department of Defense doesn’t have sufficient funds either to raze
these buildings or to keep them in good repair against the possibility