The Downside Manuscript 1980:

The Diary of Walter Ash (A Work in Progress)

Part One

The man whom I came to know as Mr. Glass always spoke in a quiet and unhurried manner with an oddly strained voice from what sounded like a damaged larynx. A reedy vibration in his throat made the sound of his words drone and shimmer at their edges. He deployed the hypnotic effect to its full advantage by speaking softly and slowly, projecting his calm and faintly buzzing voice with the steady patience of someone who is slowly and confidently casting a spell upon you. 

I conversed with him daily by telephone during the several weeks that I worked on his authentication project for what he misleadingly called the Downside Historical Society. He had set me up in almost complete isolation within an abandoned underground bunker beneath the riverbank mills. My makeshift laboratory was set back from the busy highway on the opposite bank, bordering the dismal, polluted water that runs through the center of the forgotten, post-industrial town of Downside, Maine. 

Founded in 1776, Downside was by the late 19th century the undisputed titan of the nation’s commercial ice industry. It had rapidly developed a sophisticated supply chain network of railroad and telegraph lines, spurring a broad range of adjacent innovations in less promising domains like moth research and coil mechanics. The histories of these latter technologies, which at one time seized the country’s imagination but eventually proved utterly useless, have virtually disappeared from public memory, just as the ice industry could not survive the invention of refrigeration. Perhaps only mothdust cultivation and addiction will be remembered as Downside’s legacy to American history. Its crooked poles, fallen wires, and rusty tracks enclose the abandoned brick mill and storage buildings, and each fall the seasonal moth infestations fill the surrounding tree canopy with silken tents, which its vibrant bird population in turn devours. 

Of course, the strange meteorological events that befell Downside were the most obvious reason for town’s rapid decline, rendering it virtually uninhabitable over the course of a decade. It’s astonishing to consider the number of catastrophes suffered by its population in such a short period of time. As if nature had declared a targeted war of attrition on a single municipality for no apparent reason. After a dozen frozen summers, a haunting series of localized lunar anomalies, and culminating with the ineradicable lightning storms, even the staunchest New Englander could not suffer forever. 

Despite competing theories on what had caused the onset of the random lightning strikes, and their increasing frequency over time, nothing could be done to stop them. Whether it was particulate matter in the clouds caused by industrial pollution, or the unique character of the mineral deposits in its soil, by mid-century no one cared. The entire population had abandoned the town, for fear of becoming the next victim of sometimes a dozen lightning strikes per week. 

But a recent restoration movement, led by the Historical Society and financed through corporate sponsorship, had established a new highway exit that allowed visitors to safely enter the town, and established a perimeter around the town’s center, through the use of magnetic fields and lightning rods, which allowed for a complete restoration of several blocks near the town square. 

That’s how I ended up visiting Downside, and it’s where I first met Glass. I was attending a well-known conference for forensic document specialists, called Authenticity, and he was overseeing the upcoming celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Pierce and Cygne Ice Company, the monopoly interest that basically owned the town. 

I thought that attending the conference represented a chance for me to start over. It turned out instead to be a trap, which is very much in keeping with my string of bad luck. The last few years haven’t been easy. Arguably the trajectory of my entire career has been one continuous mistake, with each new turn compounding the error of the last. 

In my own defense, I had every reason to believe that the forgeries and microfilm insertions that I pursued in my spare time were not simply trivial, but virtually untraceable. To alter minor details from inconsequential articles in a local newspaper is at worst an act of historical graffitti, barely qualifying as a legal misdemeanor. I considered my hobby more of an embarrassment than a crime. 

I did not realize back then what hidden forces my actions set in motion. I now understand the unfortunate constellation of circumstances that led to my discovery, to actually be the manifestation of a much deeper architecture. The manufacture of truth is a very complicated business, and one trifles with its mechanics at their own peril.

It’s now been three weeks in the bunker. I rise from my bunk and look over my surroundings. 

I’m in a large hall, long and wide, like an abandoned subway station. Exposed pipes have fallen through rotten parts of the ceiling and shattered tiles litter the floor beneath. Improvised railroad tie supports lay wedged against certain sections of the walls, which seemed to have buckled under strain, to prevent their further collapse. From cracks in the walls leak small rivulets of groundwater, winding in slow streams of running water through the corners. Large piles of rubble have been deliberately cleared to the corners, and in the middle of the room, resting in the center of an enormous puddle, stands a large and freshly built elevated platform, the size of a small stage, built from a set of interconnected aluminum trussing and scaffolding. 

The stage is bridged by a wide plank and staircase that provides safe passage to and from a separate mezzanine area in the large hall, where I sit on my cot. An old porcelain sink and toilet, stained heavily with rust, where the enamel had chipped away, are affixed to the wall, with a large plastic basin for bathing beside it. A refrigerator, small cooktop, and card table have been set up provisionally on the other side of the bed. The entire setup, kitchen and office, is powered by a thick power cable that hangs suspended from the ceiling, and snakes dubiously into the darkness at the fall wall.

Two desks and a remarkably comfortable office chair are at the center of the stage, surrounded by work site lamps. On one desk sits a small authentication station with a binocular microscope. a stationary camera with vertical tripod, a mass spectrometry unit, and several other quite sophisticated testing machines. The lab would rival any modern law enforcement facility.

The other desk is empty. But atop it sits a large old suitcase, the kind you’d expect to see in an antique store or emerging from a steam train. This is where the manuscript that I’ve been hired to authenticate sits. 

Outside, the centennial preparations continue. It’s time to return to work, so I prepare some tea and with some effort swing open the large rusted steel panel that allows me to look outside onto the river. 

The sky is a thick, dull gray of cloudcover, the sun a thin zone of incandescence. Bare tree branches reach towards the sky. The occasional gust of chilly wind provokes the hollow clank of a pulley against an empty flagpole. A crow calls and another responds.