A legend or two is always good for business.

Historic buildings lined the seven hairpin turns that formed Gothic’s backbone, a hodgepodge collection of restaurants and art shops that catered to whatever hardy tourists made the trip from the Salinas Valley along the narrow, winding Nacimiento-Fergusson highway on its way west to the coast, or north and south on the Pacific Coast Highway.

Today there was no traffic in Gothic; the Nacimiento-Fergusson highway was open, but the Pacific Coast Highway was washed out again and had been for months, and when it was closed, the village businesses saw bleak times.

Gothic residents were a hearty bunch of loners and eccentrics, artists and fortune-tellers. People who came to Gothic and stayed...stayed for a reason.

Adam Ramsdell’s reasons were his own.

2

A Morning in February
Gothic, California

THE STORM OFF THE Pacific had been brutal, a relentless night of cold rain and shrieking wind. Adam Ramsdell had spent the hours working, welding and polishing a tall, heavy, massive piece of sculpture, not hearing the wailing voices that lamented their own passing, not shuddering when he caught sight of his own face in the polished stainless steel. He sweated as he moved swiftly to capture the image he saw in his mind, a clawed monster rising from the deep: beautiful, deadly, dangerous.

And as always, when dawn broke, the storm moved on and he stepped away, he realized he had failed.

Impatient, he shoved the trolley that held the sculpture toward the wall. One of its claws swiped his bare chest and proved to him he’d done one thing right: razor-sharp, it opened a long, thin gash in his skin. Blood oozed to the surface. He used his toe to lock the wheels on the trolley, securing the sculpture in case of the occasional California earth tremor.

Then with the swift efficiency of someone who had dealt with minor wounds, his own and others’, he found a clean towel and stanched the flow. Going into the tiny bathroom, he washed the site and used superglue to close the gash. The cut wasn’t deep; it would hold.

He tied on his running shoes and stepped outside into the short, bent, wet grass that covered his acreage. The rosemary hedge that grew at the edge of his front porch released its woody scent. The newly washed sunlight had burned away the fog, and Adam started running uphill toward town, determined to get breakfast, then come home to bed. Now that the sculpture was done and the storm had passed, he needed the bliss of oblivion, the moments of peace sleep could give him.

Yet every year as the Ides of March and the anniversary of his failure approached, nightmares tracked through his sleep and followed him into the light. They were never the same but always a variation on a theme: he had failed, and in two separate incidents, people had died...