The frozen waterfall rippled down the cliff face in a silver-purple torrent, like Rapunzel hair. It was a mild, pearl-grey day, the temperature well above freezing, and it wasn’t ice that had arrested the flow but calcification.
Decades of steady seepage had veiled the quarried limestone with a thin stalactite curtain. Cold and silky to the touch, its chilly oddness evoked the apocalyptic sci-fi horror film made on Portland in the early 1960s. The Damned stars a young Oliver Reed as a leather-clad gang hoodlum who becomes involved in rescuing a group of strange children imprisoned by the government. Contaminated by nuclear radiation, the children are stone cold to the touch.
