by Byron Craft
“I take it you have met Mrs. Murchison?”
“Yes,” he answered, still grinning. Is she your. . .?”
“Housekeeper,” he said firmly, finishing Alan’s sentence. “Then, seeing you are settled in, there is only one thing left to do” he crowed giving Alan a playful shove towards the open door. “Let’s eat! I’m hungry as a bear.”
CHAPTER 11
AFTER MIDNIGHT
Gwen Gilhooley sat in the dark; her skin was all gooseflesh. The hair on the back of her arms stood straight up; something had startled her. It was an invisible force that had dragged her into an upright position. The bedspread was draped across her legs. Something had awakened her, but she couldn’t remember what it had been. Her hands and face felt charged with static electricity.
Taking only short, shallow breaths, afraid to make a sound, she looked around the dark bedroom. What the hell was the matter with her? She probably lived in one of the safest places in the country! The security was great. Especially at a weapons testing center where everything is top secret, including your bra size. Even though the accommodations weren’t the best in the world, she preferred living on the base. She grew up on Navy bases all over the world. Being on base, to Gwen, was like being at home.
Some light from Nimitz Boulevard filtered in through her bedroom window. She knew that her “neighborhood,” as she thought of it, was a bit creepy at first sight, but she had grown accustomed it. It was like living in a ghost town. Originally there had been 13,000 civilian employees and assigned military personnel living on the base. In the 1970’s that changed when the FHA accepted a statement of permanence from the Navy and military personnel were no longer required to occupy government quarters. As the years passed, more and more people bought houses in Ridgecrest and the surrounding area, and now the majority lived outside the gate. Family housing on base dwindled from nearly 2,700 units occupied in 1976 to just over 800 units in residence today. Gwen lived in one of these units. A two bedroom, yellow, wood-frame with red trim and brown asphalt shingles. The style of architecture was post World War II housing, and there were rows of them along Nimitz Boulevard. Unfortunately, two-thirds of them had their windows and doors covered over with plywood. While some were converted to temporary storage facilities or office space, most were unused. Gwen didn’t have any next door neighbors. The houses on either side of her were unoccupied. No one would hear her if she screamed for help.
Damn it, girl, cut it out! She scolded herself. Get a grip, gal. Gwen massaged her hands and then her face dispelling the feeling of static electricity. She was getting her calm back. She still wished she could remember what frightened her so. Could it have been a noise? There weren’t any sounds right now coming from outside. Well, get up girl and look out the window. Maybe somebody is trying to steal your car! Although why anybody would want to rip off a 94 Dodge Neon was beyond her.
Gwen threw back the covers and started to get out of bed when she heard something that made her stiffen. The sound wasn’t coming from outside. It came from somewhere within her bedroom. It was a creaking sound. Very low, but a dull squeaking, like the rubbing of dry leather against wood. The door to her closet was closed, but the light inside was on. She had forgotten to turn it off when she had gone to bed. She hoped. A faint pencil thin radiance shone beneath the door. The constant abrading sound continued. Gwen cocked her head from one side and then to the other trying to locate its source. It was in the room with her. Tuning in on the sound, she sensed that it was directly in front of her. It came from behind her closet door.
Gwen swallowed hard and slowly. Quietly she reached for her bedside table drawer and slowly slid it open. Her hand immediately fell on the loaded Glock 30. She snapped the weapon up in the dark. Her reflexes were automatic. She had practiced for many hours with the 45 caliber subcompact and was capable of placing a 5-shot group inside a 2.5-inch circle at a range of 25 yards. The clip was full, and she always kept one in the chamber. A total of ten rounds. She wasn’t about to waste valuable time or give herself away in the event of danger by cocking the breach to prime the weapon. Her dad had taught her well. Her father started her target shooting when she was ten, and he had instilled in her a respect and a healthy fear of a loaded gun. She wished he were with her now.
Gwen slid noiselessly out of bed. She wasn’t wearing anything. She always slept in the nude, come summer or winter, but now she felt uncomfortable about it. It made her feel vulnerable. The cool carpet fibers welled up between her toes, and cold chills ran up the backs of her legs. Walking towards the closet door in a slight squat, she gripped the Glock out in front of her with both hands. Gwen was tempted to spray the closet with all ten rounds knowing that the 45 caliber slugs would turn the door into splinters but she felt that it would be prudent to see who or what was on the other side first before firing.
The creaking friction continued. Gwen imagined the finger of a hand, gloved in leather, stroking the doorframe. She transferred the gun into her left hand, grabbed the knob with her right and yanked the door open. The light from the 60-watt bulb made her flinch. She dropped to one knee and resumed her two-handed grip on the Glock.
***
Alan sat up in bed with a start. His vision and his mind’s eye fought against one another for control of his senses. Portions of an alien city with spiraling towers in night black masonry shimmered briefly and then folded in on itself, leaving only a faint memory of its existence. A painted wicker chest of drawers and a dressing mirror gradually filled his field of vision. “I am back,” he said between gasps for breath. He knew where he was this time. The return was quicker than others trips had been. Alan was in the guest room at Ironwood’s house. His entire body shivered uncontrollably even though the room was warm. His pills were at his bedside, and he slipped one under his tongue. The bone-numbing chill he was experiencing frightened him even more. He was afraid that there might be a failure in his circulatory system. Pressing two fingers against the artery just below the jaw line he located a faint pulse that grew with each succeeding beat. Some warmth returned to his hands, and he relaxed against the headboard. Each dream seemed to suck him down further. Each time the dream world that he occupied every night made it harder and harder for him to return.
In his dreams, he is always in the same place. A primal city far beyond anything the human mind could comprehend. A dark city constructed with enormous blocks of stone. His first memories of these dreams included a view from a great round window overlooking titanic flat roofs and endless leagues of giant buildings stretching to the horizon. He had been dreaming about this foreign city for almost seven years and as time went on more details became apparent to him. He eventually realized that he never saw any steps or stairways. Walkways were abundant though, some in the form of elevated tubes going from building to building, while others were just simple paved sidewalks at ground level. Then there were the towers. There were thousands of them everywhere he looked. Narrow cylindrical structures that shot up between the buildings into the steamy gray heavens. He didn’t recall ever seeing the top of one because they all disappeared into the clouds.
Later he began to have visions about exploring the lower depths of the city. Sometimes he would wake up in the early hours of the morning with the memory of it fresh in his mind. Other times the memory of these things would fade rapidly after waking, and all he’d be left with were abstract images rolling around in his head breeding nonsense and muddled confusion. It wasn’t until after years of therapy and self-discipline that he was able to preserve these images within his conscious mind. It was only then that he could recall, with any relevance, the multiple levels of black vaults below and the work he did there. He remembered row upon row of charcoal metal boxes, each one engraved with curvilinear hieroglyphs. The metal boxes, or file drawers, were stacked at a great height and each continuous row was separated by narrow tables running parallel to them. It was at one of these tables that he stood and wrote. He remembered a loneliness so painful that his writing was his only co
nsolation. His solitude was augmented by the echo of his pen scratching across its writing surface. A surface that did not seem to be ordinary paper and a pen that did not seem to use conventional ink.
He wrote about himself. Nothing exciting. Nothing exciting ever happened to him except in his dreams. All the same, he wrote about the life history of Alan Parker Ward. He did this; he believed because he had been instructed to do so. By whom he could not recall. He did remember that one of the boxes was his and he had vague recollections that his writings were stored there when he wasn’t working on them. All of the other file boxes, in the thousands they must have numbered, held dim suggestions of dark perils.
Alan had little sensation of “self” in his dreams. He wasn’t disembodied, rather he felt displaced from his physical being. He fought to try and acquire a mental picture of himself in the dream world, but it was only until recently that he was able to come to grips with it. For six of the seven years he spent in and out of the dream world, the image of himself eluded him until now, and it only served to heighten his fears of his nightmares.
He wasn’t physically alone in his dreams either. Although he hesitated to think of his companions as “people,” they treated him with great kindness. Kindness, he eventually decided, similar to the way we treat our pets. Calling up memories as transparent as smoke, he retraced several of his dream journeys below the mystery city, and in all such cases, they had followed him. One lucid moment, he retained the memory of walking or what seemed more like gliding, because his movements were so fluid, along a narrow tiled passageway. He had the acute sensation that he had traveled the corridor many times before. At both ends of the corridor, several of the city dwellers either waited or followed. He guessed then that his companions were probably his keepers.
The first time he saw his keepers, he woke to fits of screaming. His cries were so loud and desperate that later it took him almost ten minutes to convince his landlady not to call 911.
It was at the end of that tiled corridor, in the room housing the file drawers, that he retained his first mental picture of them. Each had a collection of bulbous eyes that never blinked, mounted on thick fleshy stalks, turned and looked at him when he entered. The stalks were attached to immense elliptical forms. Sunken veins, with elevated spaces between, covered their bodies. A pair of bulky but limber arms protruded from the middle of their girth and terminating them were pincer-like claws. The beings used these claws in conjunction with a half a dozen windpipes jutting from a raised spine that was comprised of pink gristle entwined with a thin twisting of muscle fibers to communicate. They did this by a series of whistles and clicks. At the base of each stalk, where a head should have been, was a pulpy mass that sprouted a collection of tentacles and tendrils. It was these they used to perform functions requiring tools and dexterity.
When the sight of these entities no longer frightened him into the waking world, he began to concentrate on his physical form while in the dream world. Although Alan did a lot of writing while there, he could never recall what his hands might have looked like in his dream world. As fragmented as most dreams are, he never remembered seeing any mirrors that could have reflected his image. As his deep fantasy sleeps continued over the years, he was able to exert some measure of control. Primarily he was at his strongest while traveling the long corridor to the file room. Many a time he had taken that journey, and many times he tried with a great force of willpower to look down at his feet. Always when his eyes would slowly move the distance towards the floor and before he was afforded a view of his feet, he would wake up in a cold sweat.
Alan took another deep breath and decided not to try to go back to sleep but to wait for dawn instead. He didn’t have the strength tonight for another drop into the mystery city. Sometimes the transition from the dreams to the waking world grew more difficult because they seemed more like memories than fantasy.
***
Lieutenant Jason Riggs channel surfed for what felt like an ungodly length of time. The cable TV service that was available in his apartment building offered over a hundred stations, and he had zipped by them all twice. It never ceased to amaze him that with all those channels to pick from that there was nothing worth watching. It was past 10:00 p.m. Pacific Time and Jimmy Fallon had signed off. He should have gone to bed hours ago, but he couldn’t sleep. He had a full day ahead of him tomorrow. Even though he was exhausted, he couldn’t shake the feelings of apprehension that haunted him about leaving Chief Mercado, Dexter, and Rinaldi down in the tunnel all night. The place gave him the creeps during the day, but at night it must have been suffocating down there. Not that there was any difference in the quality of air at night as opposed to the day. It was because Jason Riggs was claustrophobic.
He enjoyed the bright, sunny open spaces the Mohave provided. He didn’t even mind that it was hotter than blazes in the summertime and as cold as the North Pole at night in the winter. He enjoyed the duty, as well as the open-air benefits it gave him. His career in the Seabees, so far, had primarily dealt with road building and earth moving. But now, he had to deal with that narrow space beneath the earth. The thought made his mouth go dry. Not all close spaces bothered him. Elevators, for one, didn’t upset him because most of them had well-lit interiors. A good dose of bright lighting always helped to dispel his morbid fear of confined places. That was why he had ordered his men to string so many electrical cables in the tunnel. When lit up, he hoped it would be as bright as daylight down there.
Jason surfed to CNN for the third time and watched a taped delay of a debate that had occurred the day before on C-Span between Neville Stream and Elliot Granger. Elliot Granger, a congressman from Iowa, opposed the recent cuts in military spending and what he called “excessive base closings.” It looked for a while that he might have the upper hand in the debate when he pointed out the lack of base closings in Congressman Stream’s district and accused him of trading his vote on health care to save them. Stream ignored the accusation and cut Granger to ribbons for not realizing the strategic quality and high tech value of the Navy and Air Force bases in his California district. He compared them to a base that Granger fought to keep open that he said, “Guarded the shores of Lake Michigan against Indian uprisings.” Jason thought that this was the spot that they should have inserted a laugh track. Neville Stream was eloquent. He delivered each retort with an off-handed cleverness that seemed a little too off-handed and a little too clever as if the whole thing had been scripted.
When Stream became dramatic and started to defend his patriotism, outlining a military record of six years in the National Guard, all six of which no enterprising reporter on CNN would bother to mention occurred during the Vietnam War. Jason surfed to another station in disgust.
The young Lieutenant’s mind shifted back to Mingo and the guys. Did something else bother him about the tunnel? The whole idea that it was a leftover from some ancient civilization disturbed him even more. The confined section of the tunnel had been closed up for hundreds, probably thousands of years. If they hadn’t have stumbled on to the thing, it would have remained buried forever. Like a sarcophagus, a coffin. Jason hated coffins. Especially ones made of steel. Plain metal with handles on the side and the top bolted down. His father had been shipped home from Vietnam in one of those. When his dad had left for his tour of duty in Nam he had told seven-year-old Jason that he was the man of the house and that he was to take care of his mom while he was gone. When it became apparent to Jason that Dad would never be with them again, he knew he had to be strong. Dad had stepped on a land mine in Nam, and the sergeant who had been in charge of the disbursement of the coffins had recommended to his mother that it not be opened. Little Jason, at the time, wanted his daddy more than anything and knew that if they had just let him out of the box, everything would be, “all right again.” He carried that feeling to the graveside where he watched them lower the coffin into the cold ground.
Jason did not have a fear of enclosed spaces right off, that all changed
when his father died. He dwelled on his father being locked in a box.
There was a steel dumpster at an apartment complex next to their property. The rusty thing was a good six feet tall. One afternoon in August, when he saw thunderheads collecting in the east, he climbed over the side of the giant trash receptacle and closed the lid after him. The dumpster was emptied earlier that day, but it still smelled of garbage.
When the storm rolled in, he was squatting in the bottom of the container trying to shield his nose from the stench. But his child’s mind imagined that the odor was that of rotting flesh. He also imagined dark crawling things inching their way towards him. He held onto his father’s words to bolster his courage. Just as he thought he heard claws scurrying across the metal floor of the tomb he now occupied, several of loud thunderclaps rocked the dumpster. A furious outpouring of rain fell. The lid of the dumpster leaked in several places pouring streams of chilling water over his head. Some of it ran down the back of his neck feeling like cold squirmy things crawling down his back. He held on steadfast in his determination to not only ride the storm out but also his fear of the closed space. It was all over in fifteen minutes, and he had received a good drenching.
He thought he would catch hell from his mother when he returned home soaking wet. Annie Riggs surprised him when she greeted him at the door with a warm towel and a dry change of clothes that day. She was abnormally quiet and had never asked him where he had been. After he had changed, she brought him into the kitchen and served him a steaming bowl of tomato soup. The hot soup warmed his insides and dispelled the chill. When the soup was nearly gone, she casually asked him if he felt better. He nodded the affirmative realizing the full depth of her question. A half a dozen cherry and apple pies, for their church bazaar, were cooling on a wooden sideboard. Annie Riggs had been baking pies all day, and she would have had a clear view of the dumpster from their kitchen window. Jason loved his mother more that day than ever before. She had been a young bride when his father had married her, but she was wise beyond her years. It was probably for that reason that for years to come he always felt comfortable in coming to her for advice.
