The Big Meow

The quake would later be referred to in some parts of the neighborhood as “that really long one”, as its severity had increased slowly over several minutes, and it had reached a point where people started getting really frightened and the screaming broke out from those who’d run into the streets. Some of those who weren’t entirely focused on the ugly and insistent way the earth was moving also noticed a strange cold that settled over the evening, and more than the usual amount of dust kicked up, so that everything got very dim for a while.

But then suddenly something broke, something changed – a shift in the whole atmosphere, the way a thunderstorm changes the whole feel of the air when it finally breaks and lets loose with the lightning. This effect was particularly noticeable down by the corner of Wilshire and South Curzon, where a lot of people who’d run into the park were sitting out on the open ground waiting for the shaking to stop. And it did – but not before something else happened.

Some of them thought lightning actually did strike the small Page Museum facility across the street, and the little fenced-off patch of open ground next to it. Lightning wasn’t unheard of during earthquakes… but what followed struck even the seasoned Angelenos watching as unusual.

The open ground had a low wooden palisade around it, just enough to keep people from falling into the sticky ooze inside. Though there was no light or fire or anything that could normally have been associated with an explosion, nonetheless an explosion happened, throwing mud and water and other noisome-smelling muck for many yards out onto the streets. As usual, the curiosity of a few people overcame their concern over any possible danger, and they ran across Curson Avenue to see what had happened.

The sight of a huge reptilian form shouldering its way up out of the very disturbed contents of the La Brea Tar Pits made most of these people stop right where they were and stand very still to watch… for even the least scientifically-minded of them understood that this was absolutely the reverse of the way things could normally be expected to go. The massive creature was plainly a tyrannosaurus of some kind – an impression reinforced by the fact that they couldn’t see its striking orange, red and yellow stripes, these being almost completely covered by tar.

The man who’d ventured closest to this apparition while it was still standing in the pit and trying fruitlessly to scrape the tar off itself was absolutely sure about the tyrannosaurus part, especially when – while looking around itself as if trying to figure out where it was — it noticed him noticing it, and bent down over him. For a terrible moment the man thought his curiosity was about to be the end of him. As he found himself staring into huge toothy jaws nearly the length of his upper body, the man – a gas station attendant from Pasadena who’d taken the Red Car into town for a night out at the local bars – wondered if he was finally going to find fame and fortune in a manner he’d never contemplated.

The tyrannosaurus, bent down even closer and fixed him with one golden eye. “This is most unfortunate,” it said in a gentle and cultured voice, “most unfortunate. I seem to have disrupted something, but it seems also to have disrupted me. Could you kindly point me, sir, in the direction of Hollywood?”

The man pointed.

“My thanks,” said the tyrannosaurus, walked away up Curson for a few strides, then said something under its breath that the man didn’t understand, and vanished.

The gas station attendant stood there for a moment, flummoxed. Then he muttered to himself, “Typical. Everybody wants to be a star…”

In the Silent Man’s house, it was as if nothing whatsoever had happened: not so much as a glass had walked off the shelves in the kitchen pantry. When Rhiow and the group returned, they found the Silent Man rather more disturbed than this than they’d expected. The neighbors’ places all have cracks in the sidewalks and the walls, he said. You should do something about the sidewalk, anyway… treat it the same. Otherwise people are going to think I’m even weirder than they think I am already…

Urruah laughed at that. “We’ll take care of it.”

So what happened?

“That’s going to take a night’s worth of telling,” Rhiow said. “We didn’t exactly get out without a scratch… but our problems are small compared to what we stopped from happening.” She flopped down on the floor, glad to take the weight off her hind legs: they were still bothering her. “And we’ve brought you another house guest, though only temporarily. After her injury has a little time to stabilize, we’ll need to install some false memories in her to match what the authorities will find once they start cleaning up the site at Dagenham’s.”

“It’ll make sensational reading,” Urruah said, “we can tell you that much. The scandal rags will have a field day with it… at least, the parts they can figure out…”