Cue “Twilight Zone” theme…again

Just for variation, here is a post that has nothing to do with politics whatsoever. 🙂

The book I’m currently finishing, The Longer the Fall, has been marked throughout its evolution by a series of “life imitates art” coincidences, some of them downright eerie. Things I write in the story keep on cropping up in real life, sometimes literally, sometimes in analogous or similar forms. It just happened again.

I’m using a repeating theme in which the main character, Diana, has visions or dreams of a tidal wave engulfing her, as an omen of disaster looming ahead. I wrote the following, which is part of a dream sequence, a couple of months ago:

“Gods, what is that awful smell?” They’d stopped at the end of the concrete ramp, which was farther than they should have been able to walk. The Bay was no longer there. The water was gone, and there was nothing but dry sea-floor between them and Isleboro Island. Mounds of seaweed glistened under a bronze-colored sky, and fish flopped sluggishly in the mud. The air was filled with sea gulls, circling silently like buzzards. There was an overpowering stench. Moira gazed serenely out over the devastation.

“It’s the end of the world, kiddo. You really did it.”

“Where’s the water?”

“Oh, it’s coming back. You see–there it is.”

Diana followed Moira’s pointing hand and saw a long shining line rising up behind the island. As it grew higher, she saw that it was a great wave, dark below and sunlit above, about to pour over the entire island and crash down into the empty basin of the Bay. It rose and rose above the treetops, dwarfing the misty green island, rising taller than Mount Batty, the peak that overlooked Camden, and still growing. There was a deep roaring coming from beneath her feet, a sound that had begun below the threshold of her hearing and was slowly rising in pitch. Diana’s bones were vibrating with it. “Moira, we’ve got to run,” she shouted, hardly able to hear herself over the din.

The story is set in a fictional town on Penobscot Bay in Maine, which is not noted for tsunamis (that’s the whole point, of course, the vision can’t be something real). In yesterday’s Globe, I found this story:

Massive waves a mystery at Maine harbor

There are times when I wonder what is going to happen when I actually finish this book. 🙁