Goblin Gulch - The Curious Story of Milton, Nevada

[JayRay]

Chapter 4: A modern day Atlantis

"You see my good friend, Milton was, how do you express the incredulity of such a place? Milton was beyond even our greatest advances. The silver trade, copper and even gold from the old Janson's Range brought hundreds... even thousands of souls into what was at first only a miniscule oasis on the long trek from Lubbock and Amarillo to San Francisco for the cattle traders. With the advent of Steam, more and more fantastical architecture and culture came to the thriving boontown. It turned from a few scant saloons and hotels to a veritable city in a matter of years. Steam powered. Hot water, cool bathhouses, A virtual 'Atlantis' of the modern times! I..."

I paused for just a brief moment, first to quaff another gulp of the Schnapps, and then to give my new colleague the benefit of a reprieve of my usual longwinded banter. It seemed that he had a bit of a reserved approach, leaning back in his chair to 'take it all in' as they would say. I then continued.

"I would dare say that if the events of September 7th, Eighteen hundred and eighty eight had not occured, Milton could have one day become another Chicago, or St. Louis, but malicious forces had set in motion events that would, well, ultimately lead to the downfall of the great city."

Albert paused, tilting his head with a bit of a quirky grin on his face. "Downfall?" He asked in one word, a definite contrast to the waterfall of verbal descriptions I had just orated for him.

"Downfall. Well, at first it started with the flashes of light in the skies north of Milton. Not like lightning or any desert St. Elmo's Fire, but something more. Photoelectric, I believe the term you used? Where lights can... emit, from two universal points?"

I had to admit to myself, that using such scientific terms in front of a well-educated doctor of mathematics and physics was like a layman telling a butcher how to get the best prime cut of steak from a cow, and the words coming out as though I had asked him to sliver it off of the hind-end of a horse.

Albert sat back up, and picked up his glass of schnapps. The glass in his hand hovered above the tiny leather-clad and dark mahogany table for what seemed like easily have a minute, before he sat it back down, opting to not sip for a moment. Instead he took a puff on his pipe that had been awaiting his inhalation for a while.

"You speak of light-borne electrical impulses... and say that someone caused the phenomenom to erupt with merely a gesture. Let's say for a moment I grasp what you're saying. The power needed to create such a thing, would be... well, it would be not possible with our current sciences."

Even though Albert's brain was stirring, I knew there was a tiny bit of dismissal in his truncated response.

"And of course..." he continued "You said that... goblins... were able to walk from another place into this world through..."

He paused once more, taking another puff of his pipe.

"... this curtain of light? Zat would mean that in the constant, two bound electrons that were allowing passability through the effect would have been allowing photovoltaic particles to interact with the electron, and were then spit back out from the same interact with ze bound electrons. A bridge, between places so to speak. In the furthest stretches this might be possible for light, or something without mass, but... Herr Clemens, I'm afraid I can't fathom any possible way that anything of tangible form could make such a journey."

I remembered one time, in my sojourns in New York, on a Broadway exposition, where someone had used mirrors and light to divert the image of a person below a stage to a ghostly apparition above the stage, viewable just on the other side of a pane of glass...