There is a place where time stands still. Every one who goes there feels unsettled. Its as if a pitcher of water cracked and allowed centipedes and biting worms to molt their corpses into a stagnant miasma of brackish stasis. Property records for the great house that exists there are nebulous, military owned it for decades. It was likely built as a Russian fishery. The cement layers of toxic debris, ebbing in the tide and leaving broken stone and rebar out in the miles of silt and mire. The windows make you feel like the entire structure, hundreds of thousands of tons was picked up and set back down at perverse angle.

This may be the worst place to search for missing persons. The military abandoned this howling decay of silos, fish processing plants besides the flooded Dunich-Metcalf salmon cannery when the base became a superfund site in the 1980s. It was easier to let it silt over than decontaminate. The depression era sign of a dancing fish with a top hat and violin is still visible under years of cryptic HP Lovecraft and Led Zeppelin graffiti. Everywhere you look glass bottles are in piles several feet high from horizon to the sea. Tin cans floating in the tide, heavy machinery stripped to bones and air craft all lie open to the elements. What isn’t turning green with moss is totally broken open with oxidization and wood beetles.

Among the ruins, willows growing from crawling pools among over turned freighters, shredded train cars and stands of invasive trees reclaiming the edges of reality. Rumors of blind and rabid people… animals prowling the fringes of the former base have persisted from even before ww1. There are rumors once this was a mind control testing site, where Naval Intelligence shared facilitates with the Airforce but no one can remember a time where the base was actually open despite pictures in the mayors hall and police station of trucks with missiles being offloaded cargo planes.

Deputy Ch'ák’ couldn’t stand the frogs. So many frogs screaming from the bogs, accusing the tide of abandoning them far inland where bird estuaries have replaced runways, munitions ranges for tanks and helicopters discarded in states of undress. There is a shrill whistling here of coastal violence where rusted metal screams towards dark skies and sporadic lightning. Sound here is strange. In one spot you would be terrorized by rusty sheet metal windmills making a sound like nails on a chalk board, 5 feet to the left dead silence. Not even your heart beat, just nothing like the vacuum of space. Crows that live here are territorial, swatting and pecking at the search team. One of many anomalous oddities around here.

The Dust House was an opulent palace stripped by centuries of vandals harvesting copper from the onion domes and minarets. Cast Iron statues accusing eyes glare at the Sheriffs as they violate decades of bird shit and feathers. Something instinctively harmful was in the air. Like years of fur and dander in a cat ladies house. Every surface was covered in a noxious powder that makes the eyes and throat chalky. Like prison soap or primitive lime for dissolving bodies in a mass grave. Furniture was smashed to pieces, likely for firewood as the chimney was the the only thing in functional state. The place had some charm, candelabras, silver tea sets from imperial Russia and odd art left to be slashed up and spray painted by teenagers.

The missing person was a toddler named Timmy Toolman who was playing nearby on the causeway where his mother pulled over to smoke a cigarette. They were on a trip from the Yukon to find the boys father who was a local fisherman but spread a rumor among the people back home he had died, despite their shared bank account still buying booze and cigars. The causeway they had been approaching the middle span was more than ten miles long. Spotted by nearly a dozen tidal islands that were underwater by dusk. The child had been playing with toys from Clash of the Titans and Tron. This had happened around Autumn 1983.

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The renewed interest in the case came from the mother telling a drifter she had drowned her son and hid his body. The mother Nhean “Cynthia” Malvo was a refugee of the Cambodian genocide. She was half Danish, had come to the pacific north west and lived with her parents who were killed in a mugging in Seattle in the early 80s. Making her somewhat of a street urchin, con artist, prostitute and heroin addict. Giving conflicting statements it is thought she was either lying for attention or had a subconscious urge to be executed by the state due to depression. Assisted by the mother, she had obviously been taking pills all morning and kept falling on her face in the mud by dusk. Soaking wet, she was wearing a Deputies jacket and trying to sabotage the search.

There was a stench in the air. Not quite of fish or rot, but of half submerged deteriorating trees. Coming to what looked like a crater, there was an elephant graveyard. Knowing this was a problem that would have them dealing with state red tape from archeologists and universities, the Sheriff wrote it off and continued into the ruins. Things here were odd, sea shells turned into glass, carbonized trees and whale bones making the horizon seem otherworldly. The Dust House was smoking as if it was burning. Which proved to be an optical illusion. Something on really cold days gives a “black wind” its like the actual light is affected by little glitches in the spectrum, like pieces of the universe are bleeding through the fabric of time. It only happens in violent rain or times when the wind is hard but snow flakes are so fine they streak past like little golden drops of honey.

The mother was babbling about seeing a giant bird take her son, about drifters walking beside rail road tracks jeering at her and a cop car that followed them at a distance and came to a stop when she did. A gas station attendant who saw them earlier said he thought she was stealing and when confronted she kicked the antique gas pump over, ripping the hose out and kicking a pail of rain water and cigarette butts into his expensive sneakers. This area was known only as the “outskirts” where only an abandoned housing development came any where close to. This was a forgotten hobble of factories, scrapyards for ships and full of drifters who came walking down the causeway fleeing some crime spree on the mainland.

Inside the body was there, almost as if every one who came there had missed it. In a bathtub dragged into a victorian greenhouse, it rested on a little island in a large empty fountain in the wrought iron atrium. Inside was the corpse of the little boy, still holding his action figures but with out several organs. The body was well preserved but bleached completely white from years and dust. His empty eyes showed some kind of pecking, birds must have got to him, but there was no denying the other signs showed a human hand. Medical equipment for surgery was still pulling back the skin of his exposed chest cavity. There is no way this body had been in a place full of parties, hobo bon fires and junkies for over 10 years. He had hemostats that dopers use to smoke joints spreading his chest cavity open.

Scattered among the rubble were giant animatronics with rubber skin and fur falling off them. Some were dinosaurs, others neanderthals and mammoths. Likely from the abandoned theme park but it always gave you a startle to see these skeletal shapes standing in the the gloom. Maybe the place was the maintenance mans work shop. There was a performance art group that rented the space in 1985 called “Level 6 Network Men” that built props for several cyber punk tv shows like “Max Headroom.” Thats just as likely this was the lair of a thief or terrorist who was scavenging parts. The overall mood they set where horrifying. Seeing neolithic cave people that had decayed into the visage of mummified corpse, giving off odors like a dentists office when you get new fillings. Calling for an airlift for the corpse and the other cops leaving to return to duty. Deputy Ch'ák’ sat on broken glass and pieces of chipped pottery on the edge of the fountain while he fought the urge to light up a smoke. He had quit over and over but still kept a pack just in case the job was so overwhelming he needed one.

Thinking he was alone he lifted his ass to pass gas and heard a giggle from across the room. Embarrassed but still in the cloth of authority. He chastised the mother for not returning with the police, but he realized if she was still here they either didn’t consider her a suspect or didn’t care enough to keep tabs. She asks for a cigarette seeing him flipping the pack over between his fingers and he gives her the whole pack still shrink wrapped. Now she is asking for a light. He says, “You want me to smoke it for you too?” She is attractive but with an air of untrustworthiness like she would spike your drink and take off in your car. Going through her story, he doesn’t hear any distinct clues that lead her to have murdered her son. Taking a close look at her, he sees extensive skin grafts on her neck and chest. When she notices him looking she shyly pulls the deputies jacket closed in the cold. She whispers something about a car crash and doses off leaning on his shoulder.