The Downside Manuscript 1980:

The Diary of Walter Ash (A Work in Progress)

DRAFT: 9/20/26
DRAFT: 9/27/26
DRAFT: 10/4/26
DRAFT: 10/11/26

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. A reedy tremolo from his damaged larynx made his words drone and shimmer at the edges. He deployed the hypnotic effect to its full advantage by speaking softly and slowly, projecting his faintly buzzing voice with the calm and steady patience of someone slowly casting a spell upon you. 

We spoke first thing each morning while I worked on his historical authentication project, and our conversations followed a scripted order. First, I shared my progress in anchoring his moldy trove of recovered documents to the past. Next, he responded to whatever questions I raised about the mysterious manuscript, its inconsistencies and fantastical assertions. Lastly, by contractual obligation, I recounted whatever dreams had occurred to me from the night before. 

In each of these exchanges, I invariably found myself giving away far more than I intended, while learning almost nothing about the broader context of the project from Glass. He had set me up in complete isolation within an abandoned underground bunker beneath the riverbank mills. My makeshift laboratory was set back from the busy highway, bordering the polluted water that runs through the center of the forgotten, post-industrial town of Downside, Maine. 

Originally a modest farming town nestled along the banks of the Wiparama River, which found a market for its unusually thick and pure winter ice, Downside had transformed itself into the undisputed titan of the nation’s commercial ice industry by the late 19th-century. It rapidly developed a sophisticated supply chain network of railroad and telegraph lines, which spurred a broad range of adjacent innovations in less promising domains like moth research and coil mechanics. The history of these latter technologies, which at one time seized the country’s imagination but eventually proved utterly useless, has virtually disappeared from public memory, just as the ice industry could not survive the invention of refrigeration. 

Today, all that remains of Downside’s legacy is the unfortunate human and ecological toll of mothdust addiction and the spectacular clouds of bird murmurations that fill its sky. Crooked telephone poles, fallen wires, collapsed hoist cranes, and rusty railroad tracks enclose miles of empty and abandoned brick ice-storage facilities. But now enormous trees of aspen, spruce and maple grow in the center of empty streets and alleys. They have broken through and now rise high above the collapsed rooftops. Each season new waves of moth infestations fill the tree canopy with their white silken tents, nourishing vibrant bird and bat populations who devour the moth pupa, then launch into tightly orchestrated formations of dark, mutating cloud shapes day through night. 

Of course, the clearest reason for the town’s rapid decline was the onset of the strange meteorological events that now occur regularly in Downside, which rendered the town uninhabitable. It’s astonishing to consider the sheer number of anomalies and catastrophes its population suffered over the last half-century. As if nature had declared war on a single municipality for no apparent reason. Scores of frozen summers, a haunting series of solar and lunar anomalies, and the ineradicable lightning storms, proved that even the staunchest New Englander could not suffer forever. 

Despite competing theories on what caused the random lightning strikes, and their increasing frequency over time, nothing could be done to stop them. In the end, no one really cared whether it was particulate matter in the clouds from industrial pollution, or the unique character of the guano mineral deposits in its soil. By mid-20th century the simple threat of becoming the next victim of scores of lightning strikes each week kept everyone away. 

A recent restoration movement, however, led by the Downside Historical Society and financed through a philanthropic organization called the Advocacy, had established a new highway exit and underground tunnel that allowed visitors to safely enter the town. Through projected magnetic fields and steel air terminals, they had also established an eight block perimeter impervious to lightning strikes in the center of town, which allowed for a complete revitalization of the city square and surrounding buildings. 

Rewarded by an impressive restoration and a series of well-orchestrated public relations campaigns, Downside had recently began attracting new visitors through a clever combination of novelty tourism and technical business conferences. Hoping to kickstart my own professional second act from the shambles of my career and perhaps pick up a new client, I signed up for the country’s most expensive and prestigious certification body dedicated to the art of forensic document investigation. 

Not long after, I found myself on an evening bus watching distant flashes of electrical discharge on the approaching horizon. To enter the town of Downside from the south requires driving past the full length of the small city and curving back across its northern tip to access the sleek new concrete tunnel built on opposite inland side. 

Feeling upbeat for the first time in the two weeks since the accident, hopeful that I might turn this whole situation around, I got up from my seat and headed to the bathroom, where I took a small pinch of mothdust and listened to the splash of my stream in the chemical basin of scented wastewater. As the effect sharpen, the dribble of drops starts to slow and slow further, like a stretchable audio taffy pulled apart, until I can hear the silence between each drop and the moment expands in time. That’s when I start to notice the low rumble of thunderclaps, a volley of at least a half-dozen in quick succession. 

I carefully make my way back down the center aisle, tightly gripping each seat I pass as the bus weaves through traffic, mesmerized by the scene unfolding outside. We’re nearing the town and its skyline has become a stark black silhouette without any visual depth, a japanese papercutting. The dramatic remains of the sunset are a dim incandescent pink and orange that’s quickly fading into deeper edges of purple and blue. Gigantic tree crowns puncture the long horizon of flat rooftops, spreading majestically and launching clouds of birds that swirl overhead like thick trails of dark ink released into water.  

As we drive past the mile-long stretch of red brick mill buildings that overlook the Wiparama, I notice a series of empty billboard signs mounted consecutively along the rooftops. For an extended moment, also enhanced by the mothdust’s time dilation effects, I’m looking down a tunnel of shifting scaffolding. 

The mesmeric pattern of all those criss-crossing diagonal bars inside the receding square tube of one long empty sign looks to me like a sort of miracle architecture. Its rapidly shifting inner geometries, interconnecting and overlapping each other, becomes a mechanized view of the inner workings of what I’m convinced in that moment might actually be a giant time machine hiding in plain sight. 

Strobe flashes of lightning light the sky with each new round of strikes. The low-toned murmur of conversation gives way to quiet fascination and then suddenly we’ve entered the whoosh of the tunnel. 

Part Two

He claimed to be overseeing the upcoming celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Pierce & Cygne Ice Corporation, the monopoly interest that essentially took over the town, and sponsored the growth of the conclusively useless scientific innovation that preceded its downfall. 

I had always been curious about the murmurations, watched a few televised documentaries about the ice industry, and like many had acquired a light mothdust habit to stave off boredom, but never gave any thought to actually visiting the town. An unfortunate series of events led me to where I am now, sitting on my bunk and waiting for Glass’s morning phone call. 

With some effort I can reach out and swing open the large rusted steel panel that allows me to look outside onto the river and across the frozen water. A faint light paints the stark outline of tree silhouettes, and in the distance the highway traffic is picking up.

I thought that attending the conference represented a chance for me to start over, but arguably the trajectory of my entire career has been one continuous mistake, with each new turn compounding the error of the last. I cannot really explain why a person in my vocation might consider inserting forged information into newspapers a hobby. But in my defense, altering minor details of inconsequential articles in a local newspaper is at worst an act of historical graffiti, barely qualifying as a legal misdemeanor. 

I now understand, however, that the production of truth is a complicated business and one trifles with its hidden mechanics at their own risk. In this light, the odd combination of chance and circumstance that led to my discovery is nothing less than the pure manifestation of a much deeper architecture that runs beneath us all, this whole business that we have decided by consensus to call reality, and my story is a parable on the peril of discovering what you seek. 

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 far wall.

Two desks and a 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. On the other desk 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 strange manuscript that I’ve been hired to authenticate sits, and where I work, suspended above the enormous puddle over which I work. 

Outside, it’s almost sunrise but the sky is a dull gray of cloud cover and the sun just a thin zone of orange incandescence on the horizon. Already the construction crew for the centennial preparations has begun work. The occasional gust of wind sounds the hollow clank of a pulley against an empty flagpole. A crow calls and another responds. I sip my coffee and smoke a small pinch to offset the rising dread of knowing that Glass will call at any moment. 

One of the known side effects of mothdust is its ability to amplify dreams, rendering them so vivid in the mind and so easy to recall, that they are difficult to differentiate from reality. Cognitive science calls this a source monitoring error. It turns out that forgetting one’s dreams is a critical function of the mind. Otherwise one is left with a mental library full of spurious information, and dreams interleaved between pages of waking life.

This problem has become acute for me since I’ve begun working for Mr. Glass and Downside Historical Society, because I’ve spent so many evenings wandering and exploring the dark tunnels of this bunker in my dreams, and these memories are so brilliant and vivid, that I cannot easily separate them from the truth. I’m haunted by the memories of what I’ve seen beyond this room, in the dark corridors that surround me. What’s most troubling is how these images tend to layer and reinforce and bring to life what I’m reading in the documents, while also intertwining my own life into the narrative.

There is, for example, the wreckage of my car. I have seen it glowing in the dark in a large hangar like the one I’m in now, in another part of the mill complex, much deeper underground, perhaps below the river. It has a phosphorescent glow and its frame is crushed from a catastrophic collision. From earlier dreams, I have witnessed the accident, and this is above all the dream that I cannot share with Glass. 

In the dream, I’m trying to escape from Downside but I’ve taken a wrong turn. I’m heading in the wrong direction. I’m heading back to the bunker to recover something I’ve left behind. I’ve taking too much mothdust and I shouldn’t even be driving in the first place. The sunlight is failing and a thin layer of ice is forming over the highway, and beyond all that I’m in a chemically induced dissociative state— but it still feels urgently important for me to be getting away. 

Which is strange, because in this recurring dream I’m actually returning to the bunker from which I had earlier fled. Returning because I’ve forgotten something important, which I can’t actually recall through the fog of the mothdust dose — but I’m certain that I’ll remember when I get there. Perhaps it’s the postage stamp, I often think to myself. 

It’s very hard to concentrate in the dream because Glass is always speaking over my own thoughts through the car radio, with that faintly buzzing voice. He’s impersonating a newscaster rolling through the evening’s stories, and he’s narrating a particularly painful episode from my recent past. It’s what actually brought me here, to this dream moment, trying to flee Downside for good and end my illegal engagement with Mr. Glass and the Advocacy. 

Now the bridge is approaching. My exit has arrived. But there are pylons that appear from nowhere, and there’s a road crew waving flags, and I feel the sickening slowdown and loss of control on the ice. The bridge barrier is missing, that’s what was being repaired and now I’m airborne. The vertigo drop as I fall. The brief sight of Glass looking at me from the bunker, lighting a mothdust cigarette as I fall. 

I feel the fall but never the contact or the cold. Instead I always return to where I am now, suspended above a pool of water, surrounded by my equipment, on this platform, beside this river, with these journals from another time, laboring to understand what happened here a century ago, if these journals are to be believed, and how two men invented the secret history of the modern world.