After hours at Dockside, the yard lights are off and the tide is dropping, but Finch keeps a burner going on the dock. He feeds Charles, Anna, and Todd mackerel fresh off the pier with vegetables Anna grabbed from Pier Street Market, and he talks the way he rarely does Continue reading
On a late July day, Charles Mandrake moves to East Bay, Maine, a coastal town where life runs on tides, weather, and routine. Behind his new house sits a locked observatory everyone calls the Pibbles place. Most people treat it like a landmark. Charles treats it like unfinished work.
Inside, the building is wired for more than stargazing: labeled consoles, binders of logs, a shortwave radio annex, and a diesel generator that never should have been installed. Then Charles finds the notes. Measurements. Warnings. A numbered sequence written like a procedure.
With Anna Ko and Todd Baskerville, Charles begins restoring the observatory piece by piece. The work refuses to stay ordinary. Lights flicker at the same steps. The mount returns to north on its own. A low hum settles into the floor when the generator takes load. One pilot lamp keeps glowing even when everything else is dead.
Myles Pibbles vanished in 1969, and East Bay chose the simplest explanation. The logs suggest something else, and the observatory starts responding like it recognizes what they are doing.
Whatever Myles built was never meant to look into the heavens.
It was meant to open a way.
And once it does, the hard part is deciding whether to step through.
