by Byron Craft
“Always be prepared, gentlemen,” proclaimed Eastwater. “I learned that as a tenderfoot. Boy Scouts 101.”
Ironwood remained startled but not by the light, he was seeing the tunnel for the first time in its entirety. Before he couldn’t discern its shape and size with only the light pouring in from the hole above, only slightly augmented by Willett’s lamp, but now he could make it out in every detail. Even after his close examination of the wall tiles, he had still maintained a subconscious mental image of a roughly square shaped mine shaft with crudely rounded corners. His mind had not been prepared for the five sided, perfectly formed tunnel that stretched out in both directions. The floor was approximately ten feet wide with the walls leaning away from each other at about forty-five-degree angles, lending more width to the tunnel; then about half way up, the walls doubled back in on themselves to form an apex or a point at the ceiling.
“Will you look at that!” exclaimed Lieutenant Riggs with an expulsion of breath. “It looks like modern architecture.”
The tiles on the wall now looked a dirty ashen color under the prevailing white glare of the LED lantern. They had looked yellow before thought Ironwood, but that was by the light of the battery powered lamp. They would be able to tell their true color when they took some samples above ground and examined them under normal conditions, under daylight. But he imagined that the hue he saw now was probably the correct one.
Eastwater and Stream seemed more interested in the pile of rocks and sand that terminated the end of the tunnel. Pressing his left hand against a large boulder as if to test its weight, the congressman leaned to his right and whispered something into Eastwater’s ear. The captain nodded.
Ironwood glanced over at Admiral Hawkins who had been quiet all this time. His gaze was fixed on the pair at the end of the tunnel. Ironwood wondered why Hawkins had been so laid back, letting Eastwater take charge. Maybe he felt that it was the captain’s project and he was trying not to interfere. Maybe not.
Willett stepped up behind Lieutenant Riggs and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Quite a mystery, isn’t it Jason? This polygonal shape is extraordinary. Nothing like any of the tunnels or caves around these parts.” Ironwood guessed that they had worked together before. The population of Ridgecrest, including the Navy base, was over 25,000, but considering how related and specialized their fields were, that made for a very small town by comparison.
“I wonder who’d ever want to build something in an area like this,” Riggs asked to no one in particular, not expecting an answer.
“It’s probably an old Indian excavation of some kind,” replied Eastwater from his end of the tunnel.
“Created for what purpose?” challenged Alan Ward. He’s becoming awfully bold, thought Ironwood. Probably seeking revenge for the indignation he had suffered at the hands of Eastwater earlier that day.
“I believe I mentioned that earlier,” returned the captain, his legs taut with clenched fists at his side.
“You mean a sewer?” he countered raising his voice.
Careful Alan, careful, worried Ironwood to himself.
“Yes. . . a drainage canal of some type.” Marching the length of the tunnel, he faced the frail man head on. “It’s the only conclusion that makes sense.”
“I believe your thinking becomes more asinine as we go along,” Alan grinned back. Ironwood was surprised that he held his ground. Eastwater was so close to him that he probably could tell what he had for lunch.
Only microseconds elapsed before the captain’s reactor went critical. “And may I remind you that you are on government owned property under the command of the United States Navy. You are out of here mister!”
Little droplets of spittle flew from the mouth of the captain, but Alan Ward braved the shower and held his mark.
“It is time for you to leave Mr. Ward,” interrupted the admiral tired of all this confrontational chatter. “You have your own transportation?”
“Yes Admiral,” answered Alan politely. “I followed one of Marinus Willett’s employees here.”
“Then I’ll arrange for you to follow one of my men off of the base.”
“No need to Admiral,” volunteered Willett. “It has been a long day for me. My work is done here. He can follow the survey crew and me out.”
“Very well, but no side trips Mr. Ward. Do you understand me? You will drive straight out of here without stopping or taking any detours. My security checkpoints will be keeping an eye out for you.”
“Yes Admiral,” looking like a school boy who had been told to stay after class.
“And one more thing, Mr. Ward. Every time you are around here, fireworks seem to go off. I can’t have that on my base. There will be no more archeological passes for you at the gate from now on. I don’t mean to be harsh or unfair with you sir but we all have a job to do here, and you are in the way.”
Admiral Hawkins walked past Alan and climbed up the ladder like a young man of twenty.
Alan, still looking the part of a disciplined school boy, turned to Ironwood, “Well, I guess I have been dismissed.”
Ironwood yawned and stretched, he felt unusually tired. Looking at his watch, he was surprised that it was only three o’clock in the afternoon. “I guess so,” he answered. “I feel like calling it a day myself. Say,” he said struck with a sudden thought, “where are you staying now, Alan?”
“At the Red Mountain Inn.”
“Not anymore. You are staying with me. I have a little place that will make you forget California.”
“That’s a generous offer,” he smiled, looking grateful.
“Good,” said Ironwood. “Excellent.” Behind him, he heard Willett collapsing his specimen table and gathering together his equipment.
“Jason,” the ponytailed scientist muttered, “could I get some help getting this topside?”
“No problem,” volunteered the young lieutenant. “I’ll get a rope down here right away.”
Ironwood turned around in time to see Willett put a handful of small flat stones, each the size of a nickel, into a clear Tupperware bowl. His eyes caught the glint of green. “What are those fragments, Professor?”
“Another mystery,” he answered opening the container he had just snapped closed, holding them out for Ironwood’s close inspection.
Ironwood took one out and held it up to the light streaming in through the ceiling. It felt greasy, and he detected markings or scratches on its flat surface. For a brief instant, before returning it, he thought he saw the faint impression of a face on the stone. He had seen one of these before. A fellow he knew that was in the Miskatonic University relocation program, by the name of Faren Church, kept one with him at all times. He believed it to be a good luck charm.
“They’re green soapstone,” the old man added. “All badly chipped, I’m afraid.” He stared at Ironwood for a bit, then rattled the plastic container and its contents under his nose resembling a beggar with a tin cup. Ironwood reluctantly dropped the small stone back into the bowl. Willett snapped the lid back into place and put it into a drawer in the specimen table all with one swift movement.
Ironwood felt it was time for him to leave as well.
Professor Ironwood climbed back up the ladder and was greeted by a perfectly immaculate blue sky dotted with puffy white cumulus clouds. All he could hear was the wind whispering across the sand. He walked over to the shade by the side of the transport truck and sat down on a packing crate.
On the other side of the road, Stream and Eastwater had become a coalition of two again and stood talking quietly to themselves beneath the shade of several Joshua trees. Besides the Joshuas and the military hardware there was nothing else around him but a litter of black rock, creosote brush, and a haze of salt; a landscape that continuously fell back upon itself, one spot indistinguishable from another. The black, jagged hills of the Argus Range broke up the monotony of the Mojave’s horizon, with the Maturango Peak, the highest in the range, almost 9,000 feet above sea level, reflecting
the afternoon sun’s glare, looking down on Ironwood like a stone sentinel. Nothing but barren rock, hot sun and whining wind and we find what looks like the Holland tunnel beneath all of this. It certainly was a mystery, he thought.
Alan clambered up the ladder and joined Ironwood in the shade just as a seaman started to hoist Willett’s specimen case upwards on a long line of heavy nylon rope.
“I’ll be by after seven if that’s all right?” said Alan squinting against the sun until passing into the shade.
“That will be fine,” replied Ironwood plucking a sand burr from his pants cuff. “I’ll write down some directions. It’s a little tricky to find.”
The activity around the hole increased, followed by muffled cursing. Ironwood and Alan looked up in time to see the seaman, now joined by Lieutenant Riggs, struggle with the rope. The specimen case wouldn’t fit through the hole in the tunnel’s ceiling. There was a general commotion among the men above and below. After several minutes, Riggs ordered two of his men to fetch some shovels, and they started to widen the opening.
“Difficult to account for something like that,” mused Alan. “How do you suppose it happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“The case,” he replied pointing to the group of struggling seabees. “We brought it down through there earlier today. Now it won’t fit through the hole.”
“I don’t know. This area frequently experiences earth movements. Maybe the ground has shifted minutely in the last few hours.”
“Unlikely, but possible. I think I’ll. . .”
Alan’s voice trailed off leaving his sentence incomplete. Ironwood noticed that he was no longer looking at the struggling seabees. He followed Alan’s gaze to the stand of Joshua trees. He knew what had distracted him. It was the same thing he had wondered earlier when he sought refuge from the sun alongside the truck. The raised but muffled voices of Eastwater and Stream filtered softly through the afternoon haze. They seemed amused by the activity around the hole. Their laughter beat against the twisted shadows of Joshua tree, what were those two up to?
CHAPTER 7
DARWIN
It was a “Close Encounters” kind of road, thought Alan, as he guided the rented Taurus along the white line that stretched toward the black horizon.
He had been traveling the lonely desert highway for over an hour, and streetlights had become scarce. The last one he had seen marked the turnoff to a small desert town by the name of Keeler. The light pole stood in front of an old style, one pump service station. A Jeep, painted Desert Storm brown and tan, was parked beneath its canopy. The gas station was closed for the night. All the lights inside were off. He probably would have passed it by without giving it a second look except for a flurry of activity that caught his attention outlined in the halogen glare.
Slowing almost to a stop, he watched with fascination through the car’s windshield as a coyote caught and then ate moths the size of silver dollars. Hundreds of the nocturnal winged insects irresistibly drawn to the light flew around and around in circles. The coyote, the moths, and the ground around them were all painted a moon-white glow. Reaching up into the swirling flurry with a front paw, the coyote would swat one of the helpless insects driving it downward. The stricken moth would bounce and then momentarily flutter on the gravel parking lot until the hungry snout of the prairie wolf lapped it up. The coyote continued his feeding activity until Alan let up on the brake and allowed the car to creep closer. Alerted to his presence by the advancing Taurus, the coyote stepped back disappearing amidst the shadows and waited for him to leave. That had been several miles back and now, beyond the range of the Taurus’ headlamps was total darkness. It was Alan’s first time out west. He felt like a space explorer piloting a small shuttlecraft across an alien landscape. The moonless night added to the illusion. The evening stars did little to illuminate the desert expanse that he knew lay hidden under a veil of darkness so complete that when he extinguished the headlights of the Taurus, he became blind. It was a childish thing to do, he knew, but the temptation had been irresistible. The first time he did it the car had been moving. It was foolish. Foolhardy, to be precise, but when he found himself plunged into a black emptiness, traveling over sixty miles an hour, he quickly turned the lights back on. The high beam stabbed the night, the white line down the middle of the road reacted like phosphorus, and the warm green glow of the instrument panel dispelled the current of fear that shot through him.
Had that merely been a trick played upon his eyes? Was the darkness truly that complete? After all, his eyes hadn’t had time to grow accustomed to the change. It demanded another test. Pulling the Taurus onto the road shoulder, he put the car into park and shut off the motor. He hadn’t seen another car for miles. The highway had been empty in both directions. The car softly chattered as the engine cooled. Reaching towards the dashboard, he switched off the lights. Everything became black. He sat quietly in the dark waiting for his eyes to adjust. The retinal after-image left by the extinguished headlights teased his eyes briefly and then subsided. Nothing came into view. Modern twenty-first-century man very seldom finds himself surrounded in total darkness. There are normally streetlights or the lights from buildings and houses to mark your way. Even within the closed and shuttered existence of one’s bedroom, there was normally the luminous face of an alarm clock to dispel the oppressive blackness. After a while, he thought that he detected the faint outline of the steering wheel in front of him but came up a couple of inches short when grabbing for it. He literally could not see his hand in front of his face. After several more seconds, he was able to perceive a scattering of stars. The view offered by the windshield was narrow and limited and made him curious to see the entire star field. Fumbling for the handle, he opened the car door and stepped outside.
The illumination from the car’s interior light dilated his pupils and made him squint. Alan slammed the door behind him and was plunged once again into darkness as thick as layered gauze. A glorious array of stars mapped out the heavens but the radiation they gave off was too weak to illuminate the surrounding desert plain. Looking up and walking away from the car gave him the feeling of floating in space. The night air was still. It was warm, probably eighty-degrees or so. There were no sounds. He was floating, afloat in his mind like someone in an isolation tank; eyes blindfolded and submerged in a lukewarm, buoyant, salt water solution. The only thing you can hear is your breathing through a snorkel, except here he had the stars. A wonderful field of stars.
Looking straight ahead where the horizon should be, he felt lost. At eye level, once again, was the black nothingness. He had walked several steps when struck by a chilling thought. Making an about face, he confronted his fear only to have it confirmed. He couldn’t see the car. He couldn’t see the road, for that matter, although he could feel its smooth surface beneath the soles of his shoes. The Taurus, the road, and any details of the surrounding landscape were hidden from him. The stars didn’t shed enough illumination even to see a few feet. Alan was pretty sure that he was facing in the right direction. The car should be straight ahead, and as long as he kept the blacktop underfoot, he probably wouldn’t get lost. There may not be another car on the road for hours to help light his way. He felt terribly alone. There was a prickly sensation at the back of his neck. It was the feeling he normally had when he was coming out of one of his nightmares.
Immediately, after he had made the mental comparison, something gray and slimy came out of the darkness. It was charging down at him. He looked over his shoulder, and he watched it propel itself towards him with gray-green ropes for arms. It moved quickly. A jellied thing with the arms of an octopus and a face, a horrible face that made Alan gasp for air. He found it hard to draw a breath as if the darkness itself had begun to flow into his mouth, his lungs, he was suffocating. In that one petrifying moment, he realized that he was in the tunnel and he was running out of air. Gasping again he ran forward, stumbled, and came upon the front bumper of the Taurus. Groping blin
dly, frantically, he reached the driver’s side door and yanked it open. He slipped back in and had the engine started with the headlights back on before he closed and locked the door.
An empty road stretched out as far as his high beams could reach. Nothing pursued him. It had come from out of his subconscious, not the desert night. He turned the air conditioner on high and directed the vents towards his face. Sucking in the cool air, Alan swallowed hard before moving the shift lever to “D” and negotiating the car off of the shoulder and back onto the road.
After a few minutes with the doors locked and the seatbelt and shoulder harness holding him snug, he felt secure. The road he was traveling was Route 190 and fifteen miles out of Keeler he came to the Darwin turnoff. Alan reduced his speed and watched the road in front of him steadily incline upwards. After about a quarter of a mile, the road began to dip down, and he saw lights ahead. Not very many, but a few that looked like they could be street lights or lights from someone’s windows. They disappeared when the Taurus climbed another hill in the asphalt. To his left, a round metal sign glared back at him under his high beams. It read, “The Blue Ridge Mining Company.” Alan had done a little reading about the surrounding Panamint Range. The great silver strikes of long ago had been in Cerro Gordo, Greenwater, Skidoo, and Darwin. Today all of these mines were shut down. The cost of the ore was less than what it would cost to get it out of the ground. No sooner had Alan started to wonder if he was following Ironwood’s written directions correctly than a green and white highway sign loomed up out of the darkness. “Darwin,” it read.
Alan sighed with relief. The lights from Darwin came into view again as the road leveled out. There were two streetlights. Large halogens mounted on electric poles. One was in front of a low wood and stone structure and the other farther east at the intersection of two streets. Hundreds of moths swam in the white glare like the street lamp in Keeler only minus the coyote this time. Off to his left, he could make out three or four houses scattered here and there with lights in the windows. The rest were dark. Some weren’t even proper houses. Quonset huts with the windows boarded up, small houses the size of fishing shanties, some with the doors missing and others that looked like they had been pieced together out of sheet-metal and old boiler plate. Two houses he noticed, as the Taurus crept along, looked like they may have been substantial in their day but the roofs had fallen in a long time ago and all the glass was gone from their windows. Almost unconsciously, he checked the lock on the car door next to him. He had slowed to about fifteen miles per hour by then. The low wood and stone structure he had noticed when first approaching the town was immediately on his right now. “Darwin Historical Museum,” a sign hung out front read. Its windows were dark and shiny like black Visqueen.
