Bethlehem was the name that the developers gave to the town. What the area had been called before those developers had arrived was largely forgotten or ignored by the tourists. The California coast was lined with all sorts of resorts and tourist destinations, but the majority of them catered to the very rich and they tended to be exclusive. When Bethlehem opened up, with its reasonable prices and beautiful beaches, people from the suburbs came in droves to see it. The cottages were filled immediately and stayed filled all through the summer months. Nevermind that they were poorly constructed, so that the wind ripped through them at all hours and the sound of the waves was akin to a constant, enormous gnashing of teeth. And nevermind that the end of the cliff was little more than several yards from any of the houses and that the ground felt dangerously unstable. You couldn't beat the prices. In the first and only really successful summer at Bethlehem, five pregnant women who had come to the town on vacation miscarried. Another woman, who was in her third trimester, went into early labor while there. It was that incident which ended Bethlehem's short period of popularity: the woman had given birth to a massive amount of mucus, hair and teeth in place of anything vaguely human. There was no cement explanation, but everyone blamed the water. The Bethlehem developers got nervous by the rumors, and tried to pay the woman off to say that she didn't think it was the water, or anything else having to do with Bethlehem that caused the freakish miscarriage. Of course, that only confirmed in everyone's mind that it was Bethlehem's fault.
My family's vacation that summer was, despite the miscarriages nearby, a quiet and pleasant one. We spent the days lounging on the beach, or looking around the little shops. One day my father and I went into a bookshop, where I happened to find a book of ghost stories from the region. I scanned through. Most of the stories took place in or around Mendocino, though there were a few from further down the coast. There were pictures in the book, and one of them caught my eye. It was a shape, a crude line drawing of a shape that had unusual proportions. At first I thought it was an optical illusion, but as I looked at it I felt certain that I could almost make sense of it. I turned the book upside down and squinted at it. I remember feeling irritated...as if there were something in the shape that I wasn't perceiving. Perplexed by the shape, but intrigued, I read the story. It was about a little town that no longer existed, which was called "Barthlin's Mill."
The story was based on the account given by the one and only survivor of the town, a man named Coyle. It started out with some history: The town had been founded around a mill that processed lumber, which had been founded by its namesake, a man named Winfield Barthlin. Barthlin and his son Howard had come out from someplace back East, though it wasn't until late in his life that Winfield talked about the circumstances of their migration. And even then, the old man had not said much, just that something terrible had happened and that he had lost Howard's mother to it and had been compelled to flee as far West as he could go.
The younger Barthlin was dismissive of his father's story, and when the old man passed away he began to talk about the events that he had witnessed as a very young boy with a certain openess and analytical interest. His father had been a professor at a school in New England, where certain innovations in charting the farther, more theoretical reaches of space had gained the school some notoriety. It was in that sort of scientific advancement that the young Barthlin was most interested in, and he made a large show publicly of advocating science and innovation in the local schools. He cleared out one of the basement store rooms in the mill, and began to spend all hours working on his own innovations. He became completely consumed in his work and began to appear less and less in public.
It was then that the miscarriages started to occur. First was the Donley baby, who was delivered stillborn and covered completely in a thick, gray fur, like a rat. The Burgers wife went into labor a month early and gave birth to the skeletal remains of three birds. There were other events similar, which Coyle knew about but had not been privy to the details of which. A panic spread among the people in Barthlin's Mill, and rumors began to spring up about Barthlin having a hand in this unnatural events. People began to talk. He had been spotted around town, always wearing a heavy overcoat and a hat, no matter what the weather was like. He had made a big show about sending his sincere condolences to the mothers who had miscarried, and there was rumors that he had sent a large sum of money to the Burgers woman. The town's grocer said that Barthlin had stopped coming in to buy food, but that the owner of the mill came in once a week to purchase new notebooks and pens. The grocer never saw Barthlin's face and he had begun to suspect that the man was suffering from a degenerative disease. Around his neck, as if taking the place of the cross, was a medallion of brass cut into a fascinating shape. It was here that the picture I had seen earlier was inserted into the book...it was a drawing that Coyle had done, to imitate the bizarre shape that Barthlin had worn.
I skimmed through the rest of the story, fascinated. Coyle had apparently decided to go out and find the authorities. He hadn't wanted a mob scene to erupt at the mill, even if he distrusted Barthlin as much as anyone, and decided to take it on himself to get the police involved. Since the only phone had been at the mill, he took a carriage and began to make the trip north to some town up the coast where he could use a phone. As he was leaving that morning, the mob scene he had predicted was building. People were plotting to go and confront Barthlin, and there was even talk of setting fire to the old mill to drive out whatever devil Barthlin had summoned up. Coyle got just over one mile out of town when he heard a horrific roar behind him. He turned back and saw a darkness like the black of night surround the town. He rushed back...he declined to tell anyone what he saw there...suffice to say that his family, his friends and all of his town was gone and never coming back. There was a picture there, of the town before the incident. I stopped and stared. There were the black cliffs, upon which were built small houses for the mill workers rather than beach cottages for tourists. There were the little storefronts, different buildings than the Bethlehem shops, but right there all the same. And there, where the hotel was in the center of town was Barthlin's Mill.
I told my father, but he dismissed the coincidence. He said that the Barthlin's Mill story was probably exaggerated. All the same, he bought me the book, though he clearly didn't like how I obsessed over it. A week later, the news of the bizarre miscarriages broke and we, along with most everyone else decided to leave Bethlehem.
I've lived a decent, productive life. I went to school and studied Physics in college. I worked for some time as an engineer. For the past ten years, I've been coming back here to Bethlehem...I had been trying to reconstruct the actual shape that Coyle attempted to draw in his account of the Barthlin's Mill Tragedy. At first, I thought that Coyle had merely done a poor job in rendering the shape, and I did not think it would be very difficult to discover what it was that poor, demented Howard Barthlin wore around his neck...I've been trying for these ten years and more. I started coming back to Bethlehem as my interest in the shape grew, and I found that my ability to work out the shape's proper dimensions improved the longer I stayed here. Sometimes I wonder if it is actually an optical illusion, and if I'm attempting to complete something that is already complete and meant to irritate the mind and eye. More recently, I've started to theorize that I may not have the right tools to solve it's shape. I've started to think that the human eye might not be able to gaze on it...I've started to draw the shape on pictures of the night sky...I suspect sometimes that it might be a chart, or a diagram that I don't quite understand...I sometimes hear a scream far off as I work late into the night, a sound that seems to come from some sub-zero reach of space...like Howard Barthlin before me, I have stopped needing to eat or to drink in order to survive...something is sustaining me and so I no longer leave here, for fear of being cut off. I strain and strain to perceive it as it roars through the cosmos. I fear it terribly, but I can't draw myself away. I can't stop trying to see it...I continue to stare into its shape. And I begin to make out something massive in the lightlessness.
"What?" Sheba asked.
