Now, fast forwarding past the pilot program, past Iceland, past the tunnels, out to the house out on Topsail Island... I imagine this is the place Steffi and/or Farthington choose to fully enter the waters.Possibly inside the house there is a hole dug down through the floor of the inner room with a huge, water-filled hollow in the sand below. The implication is that whatever was dwelling in this house has become some kind of monster, entering the waters offshore.
Attacks on human beings would be good at this point and a hunt for a rogue great white might commence. Perhaps they succeed in tagging the beast, which is something a lot worse than a great white. It would be fun to see where and how fast the beast swims. Does it suddenly disappear from the tracker, having dove too deep, and then suddenly reappear directly beneath the boat, headed toward the surface at some ridiculous speed?
Farthington could return at this point with much fanfare (why not?!), claiming to have the skills and knowledge necessary to combat the beast. I've always wanted him to have a submarine, sort of like L. Ron Hubbard had a fleet of ships. The name of his submarine is the Ericsson--Google Voice's mis-transcription of something in my calls, but also significant because it is seemingly a failed attempt to render Leif Erikson's (or Ericson or Eriksson) name, who I say is the progenitor of the American Dream.
He had originally wanted to use the submarine to bring up some kind of glowing lodestone that had been launched into the ocean (or into orbit) by the volcano blast. This could be what the both of them are now after. A critical idea at this point is that there is a beast underground and a beast underwater--I don't know what the significance of that is, but we can't drop the ball with that. Similarly, the lodestone, which was originally in the heart of the volcano, is now in the waters (or in orbit). There, you've got your 4 elements again! What I like is that this lodestone--so primordial, pagan, and nefarious--is the true power behind the American Dream, that it has surfaced in other contexts and epochs in history, threatening the beauty of humanity and creation with utter destruction.
Heck, anything could happen at this point!
Aliens could come back to get the lodestone too and Armageddon break out with angels and archangels battling aliens and devils. And maybe some lone figure standing on the rim of the volcano playing an acoustic guitar. A funny ending would be him/her finishing the song, then launching the guitar into the caldera--all in slo-mo of course, suggesting that this is somehow going to bring an end to the chaos--but then have it land and sink into the lava and nothing happen. Then, you could have a whole succession of things get thrown into the caldera: the tapes, drivers licenses, everyone's clothes, a couple self-sacrificial characters, etc. Maybe something finally works. Maybe the whole earth blows up. The end.
Whether any of this sticks, I like workshopping some ideas that might be going on in Arthur White's head. In our interview with Scott, I liked how Will and Art were always in separate realities, always pulling in separate directions.
If nothing else, I'd like to get some of this material out in an interview at some point. Maybe that's the only way we hear about the buried worker, the beast, the jawless Steffi or Farthington, the lodestone, the submarine, the apocalyptic battle. Kind of like Narnia is in one sense a child's imagination trying to come to grips with the terrors of war and the reality of evil. This story is a mentally destroyed man's way of making sense of what has happened to himself and to the world.
You could use the deus ex machina that all of this happened in the short span of time during which Arthur was being zapped, sort of like Tobias Wolff's story "Bullet in the Brain."
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