Page 3 - Unlikely Stories 5

The Forteana Suppressor

the leftover half-burrito he was saving for breakfast. It probably
would keep.
“Now, what is this all about?”
Larry tensed in his seat as Spiro’s old station wagon rattled their
bones. They had immediately turned off the main highway running
through Desperia, heading into the desert on a barely-maintained side
road. Maps of this part of the county were sketchy: navigation by
landmark and odometer was the best choice, and Keith had been
concentrating on not missing the easily-missed junction.
“Okay. I have the name of the old buzzard who gave me this story,
Salvator Monella, although he might be hard to find again. He looked
like one of those prospectors who don’t know when to quit: a bit
wild-eyed but perfectly articulate. He was in town to stock up on
corn pads. Anyway, he came across this other guy, Potter Femilius,
out there about fifteen miles past the old Devil Tree Hot Springs
ghost town. He stopped to share some food and swap stories for a
couple of days. So he got an earful and an eyeful of what Femilius
was doing out there.”
Larry wondered if he should take notes now or wait until he could
get the information more directly than third-hand. No way to do that
in Keith’s car on this road!
“Which was?”
“Now you have to pay attention. You know about Forteana?”
Larry pondered, unwilling to let his friend one-up him. “You mean
the bizarre phenomena Charles Fort wrote about?”
“That’s right. He collected reports of weird things that went on the
world, apparently with no satisfactory explanation. That was over a
century ago, when people were less scientifically sophisticated—so
was science itself, for that matter—and newspapers were happy to
publish accounts of what are now called anomalies. Fish and frogs
falling from the sky, objects found in places where they couldn’t or
shouldn’t be—that sort of thing, often witnessed and attested to by
otherwise sober and reliable citizens.”
“Right. And today nobody takes all that stuff seriously, mainly
because it isn’t happening much anymore. So it’s easy to ignore it all
and conclude that a credulous population suffered mass delusions in
those cases as much as in seeing manifestations of angels and

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