by Dean Koontz
By no means continuous but nevertheless frequent major building projects of a high-security nature were undertaken on the grounds of Fort Wyvern by military contractors whose laborers were reportedly sworn to secrecy and remained, for life, at risk of being charged with treason for a slip of the tongue. According to rumor, because of its proud history as a center of military training and education, Wyvern was chosen as the site of a major chemical-biological warfare research facility constructed as a huge self-contained, biologically secure, subterranean complex.
Given the events of the past twelve hours, I felt confident in assuming that more than a scrap of truth underlay these rumors, although I have never seen a single thread of evidence that such a stronghold exists.
The abandoned base offers sights that are, however, as likely to amaze you, give you the creeps, and make you ponder the extent of human folly as anything you will see in a cryobiological warfare laboratory. I think of Fort Wyvern, in its present state, as a macabre theme park, divided into various lands much the same as Disneyland is divided, with the difference that only one patron, along with his faithful dog, is admitted at any one time.
Dead Town is one of my favorites.
Dead Town is my name for it, not what it was called when Fort Wyvern thrived. It consists of more than three thousand single-family cottages and duplex bungalows in which married active-duty personnel and their dependents were housed if they chose to live on base. Architecturally, these humble structures have little to recommend them, and each is virtually identical to the one next door; they provided the minimum of comforts to the mostly young families who occupied them, each for only a couple of years at a time, over the war-filled decades. But in spite of their sameness, these are pleasant houses, and when you walk through their empty rooms, you can feel that life was lived well in them, with lovemaking and laughter and gatherings of friends.
These days the streets of Dead Town, laid out in a military grid, feature drifts of dust against the curbs and dry tumbleweeds waiting for wind. After the rainy season, the grass quickly turns brown and stays that shade most of the year. The shrubs are all withered, and many of the trees are dead, their leafless branches blacker than the black sky at which they seem to claw. Mice have the houses to themselves, and birds build nests on the front-door lintels, painting the stoops with their droppings.
You might expect that the structures would either be maintained against the real possibility of future need or efficiently razed, but there is no money for either solution. The materials and the fixtures of the buildings have less value than the cost of salvaging them, so no contract can be negotiated to dispose of them in that manner. For the time being, they are left to deteriorate in the elements much as the ghost towns of the gold-mining era were abandoned.
Wandering through Dead Town, you feel as though everyone in the world has vanished or died of a plague and that you are alone on the face of the earth. Or that you have gone mad and exist now in a grim solipsist fantasy, surrounded by people you refuse to see. Or that you have died and gone to Hell, where your particular damnation consists of eternal isolation. When you see a scruffy coyote or two prowling between the houses, lean of flank, with long teeth and fiery eyes, they appear to be demons, and the Hades fantasy is the easiest one to believe. If your father was a professor of poetry, however, and if you are blessed or cursed with a three-hundred-ring circus of a mind, you can imagine countless scenarios to explain the place.
This night in March, I cycled through a couple of streets in Dead Town, but I didn’t stop to visit. The fog had not reached this far inland, and the dry air was warmer than the humid murk along the coast; though the moon had set, the stars were bright, and the night was ideal for sightseeing. To thoroughly explore even this one land in the theme park that is Wyvern, however, you need to devote a week to the task.
I was not aware of being watched. After what I’d learned in the past few hours, I knew that I must have been monitored at least intermittently on my previous visits.
Beyond the borders of Dead Town lie numerous barracks and other buildings. A once-fine commissary, a barber shop, a dry cleaner, a florist, a bakery, a bank: their signs peeling and caked with dust. A day-care center. High-school-age military brats attended classes in Moonlight Bay; but there are a kindergarten and an elementary school here. In the base library, the cobwebbed shelves are stripped of books except for one overlooked copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Dental and medical clinics. A movie theater with nothing on its flat marquee except a single enigmatic word: WHO. A bowling alley. An Olympic-size pool now drained and cracked and blown full of debris. A fitness center. In the rows of stables, which no longer shelter horses, the unlatched stall doors swing with an ominous chorus of rasping and creaking each time the wind stiffens. The softball field is choked with weeds, and the rotting carcass of a mountain lion that lay for more than a year in the batter’s cage is at last only a skeleton.
I was not interested in any of these destinations, either. I cycled past them to the hangarlike building that stands over the warren of subterranean chambers in which I found the Mystery Train cap last autumn.
Clipped to the back rack of my bicycle is a police flashlight with a switch that allows the beam to be adjusted to three degrees of brightness. I parked at the hangar and unsnapped the flashlight from the rack.
Orson finds Fort Wyvern alternately frightening and fascinating, but regardless of his reaction on any particular night, he stays at my side, uncomplaining. This time, he was clearly spooked, but he didn’t hesitate or whine.
The smaller man-size door in one of the larger hangar doors was unlocked. Switching on the flashlight, I went inside with Orson at my heels.
This hangar isn’t adjacent to the airfield, and it’s unlikely that aircraft were stored or serviced here. Overhead are the tracks on which a mobile crane, now gone, once moved from end to end of the structure. Judging by the sheer mass and complexity of the steel supports for these elaborate rails, the crane lifted objects of great weight. Steel bracing plates, still bolted to the concrete, once must have been surmounted by substantial machinery. Elsewhere, curiously shaped wells in the floor, now empty, appear to have housed hydraulic mechanisms of unknowable purpose.
In the passing beam of my flashlight, geometric patterns of shadow and light leaped off the crane tracks. Like the ideograms of an unknown language, they stenciled the walls and the Quonset-curve of the ceiling, revealing that half the panes in the high clerestory windows were broken.
Unnervingly, the impression wasn’t of a vacated machine shop or maintenance center, but of an abandoned church. The oil and chemical stains on the floor gave forth an incenselike aroma. The penetrating cold was not solely a physical sensation but affected the spirit as well, as if this were a deconsecrated place.
A vestibule in one corner of the hangar houses a set of stairs and a large elevator shaft from which the lift mechanism and the cab have been removed. I can’t be sure, but judging from the aftermath left by those who had gutted the building, access to the vestibule once must have been through another chamber; and I suspect that the existence of the stairs and elevator were kept secret from most of the personnel who had worked in the hangar or who’d had occasion to pass through it.
A formidable steel frame and threshold remain at the top of the stairwell, but the door is gone. With the flashlight beam, I chased spiders and pill bugs from the steps and led Orson downward through a film of dust that bore no footprints except those that we had left during other visits.
The steps serve three subterranean floors, each with a footprint considerably larger than the hangar above. This webwork of corridors and windowless rooms has been assiduously stripped of every item that might provide a clue to the nature of the enterprise conducted here—stripped all the way to the bare concrete. Even the smallest elements of the air-filtration and plumbing systems have been torn out.
I have a sense that this meticulous eradication is only partly explained by their desir
e to prevent anyone from ascertaining the purpose of the place. Although I’m operating strictly on intuition, I believe that as they scrubbed away every trace of the work done here, they were motivated in part by shame.
I don’t believe, however, that this is the chemical-biological warfare facility that I mentioned earlier. Considering the high degree of biological isolation required, that subterranean complex is surely in a more remote corner of Fort Wyvern, dramatically larger than these three immense floors, more elaborately hidden, and buried far deeper beneath the earth.
Besides, that facility is apparently still operative.
Nevertheless, I am convinced that dangerous and extraordinary activities of one kind or another were conducted beneath this hangar. Many of the chambers, reduced only to their basic concrete forms, have features that are at once baffling and—because of their sheer strangeness—profoundly disquieting.
One of these puzzling chambers is on the deepest level, down where no dust has yet drifted, at the center of the floor plan, ringed by corridors and smaller rooms. It is an enormous ovoid, a hundred and twenty feet long, not quite sixty feet in diameter at its widest point, tapering toward the ends. The walls, ceiling, and floor are curved, so that when you stand here, you feel as if you are within the empty shell of a giant egg.
Entrance is through a small adjacent space that might have been fitted out as an airlock. Rather than a door, there must have been a hatch; the only opening in the walls of this ovoid chamber is a circle five feet in diameter.
Moving across the raised, curved threshold and passing through this aperture with Orson, I swept the light over the width of the surrounding wall, marveling at it as always: five feet of poured-in-place, steel-reinforced concrete.
Inside the giant egg, the continuous smooth curve that forms the walls, the floor, and the ceiling is sheathed in what appears to be milky, vaguely golden, translucent glass at least two or three inches thick. It’s not glass, however, because it’s shatterproof and because, when tapped hard, it rings like tubular bells. Furthermore, no seams are evident anywhere.
This exotic material is highly polished and appears as slick as wet porcelain. The flashlight beam penetrates this coating, quivers and flickers through it, flares off the faint golden whorls within, and shimmers across its surface. Yet the stuff was not in the least slippery as we crossed to the center of the chamber.
My rubber-soled shoes barely squeaked. Orson’s claws made faint elfin music, ringing off the floor with a tink-ting like finger bells.
On this night of my father’s death, on this night of nights, I wanted to return to this place where I’d found my Mystery Train cap the past autumn. It had been lying in the center of the egg room, the only object left behind in the entire three floors below the hangar.
I had thought that the cap had merely been forgotten by the last worker or inspector to leave. Now I suspected that on a certain October night, persons unknown had been aware of me exploring this facility, that they had been following me floor to floor without my knowledge, and that they had eventually slipped ahead of me to place the cap where I would be sure to find it.
If this was the case, it seemed to be not a mean or taunting act but more of a greeting, perhaps even a kindness. Intuition told me that the words Mystery Train had something to do with my mother’s work. Twenty-one months after her death, someone had given me the cap because it was a link to her, and whoever had made the gift was someone who admired my mother and respected me if only because I was her son.
This is what I wanted to believe: that there were, indeed, those involved in this seemingly impenetrable conspiracy who did not see my mother as a villain and who felt friendly toward me, even if they did not revere me, as Roosevelt insisted. I wanted to believe that there were good guys in this, not merely bad, because when I learned what my mother had done to destroy the world as we know it, I preferred to receive that information from people who were convinced, at least, that her intentions had been good.
I didn’t want to learn the truth from people who looked at me, saw my mother, and bitterly spat out that curse and accusation: You!
“Is anyone here?” I asked.
My question spiraled in both directions along the walls of the egg room and returned to me as two separate echoes, one to each ear.
Orson chuffed inquiringly. This soft sound lingered along the curved planes of the chamber, like a breeze whispering across water.
Neither of us received an answer.
“I’m not out for vengeance,” I declared. “That’s behind me.”
Nothing.
“I don’t even intend to go to outside authorities anymore. It’s too late to undo whatever’s been done. I accept that.”
The echo of my voice gradually faded. As it sometimes did, the egg room filled with an uncanny silence that felt as dense as water.
I waited a minute before breaking that silence again: “I don’t want Moonlight Bay wiped from the map—and me and my friends with it—for no good reason. All I want now is to understand.”
No one cared to enlighten me.
Well, coming here had been a long shot anyway.
I wasn’t disappointed. I have rarely allowed myself to feel disappointment about anything. The lesson of my life is patience.
Above these man-made caverns, dawn was rapidly approaching, and I couldn’t spare more time for Fort Wyvern. I had one more essential stop to make before retreating to Sasha’s house to wait out the reign of the murderous sun.
Orson and I crossed the dazzling floor, in which the flashlight beam was refracted along glimmering golden whorls like galaxies of stars underfoot.
Beyond the entry portal, in the drab concrete vault that might have once been an airlock, we found my father’s suitcase. The one that I had put down in the hospital garage before hiding under the hearse, that had been gone when I’d come out of the cold-holding room.
It had not, of course, been here when we had passed through five minutes ago.
I stepped around the suitcase, into the room beyond the vault, and swept that space with the light. No one was there.
Orson waited diligently at the suitcase, and I returned to his side.
When I lifted the bag, it was so light that I thought it must be empty. Then I heard something tumble softly inside.
As I was releasing the latches, my heart clutched at the thought that I might find another pair of eyeballs in the bag. To counter this hideous image, I conjured Sasha’s lovely face in my mind, which started my heart beating again.
When I opened the lid, the suitcase appeared to contain only air. Dad’s clothes, toiletries, paperback books, and other effects were gone.
Then I saw the photograph in one corner of the bag. It was the snapshot of my mother that I had promised would be cremated with my father’s body.
I held the picture under the flashlight. She was lovely. And such fierce intelligence shone from her eyes.
In her face, I saw certain aspects of my own countenance that made me understand why Sasha could, after all, look favorably on me. My mother was smiling in this picture, and her smile was so like mine.
Orson seemed to want to look at the photograph, so I turned it toward him. For long seconds his gaze traveled the image. His thin whine, when he looked away from her face, was the essence of sadness.
We are brothers, Orson and I. I am the fruit of Wisteria’s heart and womb. Orson is the fruit of her mind. He and I share no blood, but we share things more important than blood.
When Orson whined again, I firmly said, “Dead and gone,” with that ruthless focus on the future that gets me through the day.
Forgoing one more look at the photograph, I tucked it into my shirt pocket.
No grief. No despair. No self-pity.
Anyway, my mother is not entirely dead. She lives in me and in Orson and perhaps in others like Orson.
Regardless of any crimes against humanity of which my mother might stand accused by others, she is alive in us,
alive in the Elephant Man and his freak dog. And with all due humility, I think the world is better for us being in it. We are not the bad guys.
As we left the vault, I said “Thank you” to whoever had left the photograph for me, though I didn’t know if they could hear and though I was only assuming that their intentions had been kind.
Above ground, outside the hangar, my bicycle was where I’d left it. The stars were where I’d left them, too.
I cycled back through the edge of Dead Town and toward Moonlight Bay, where the fog—and more—waited for me.
FIVE
NEAR DAWN
30
The Nantucket-style house, with dark wood-shingle siding and deep white porches, seems to have slid three thousand miles during an unnoticed tipping of the continent, coming to rest here in the California hills above the Pacific. Looking more suitable to the landscape than logic says it should, sitting toward the front of the one-acre lot, shaded by stone pines, the residence exudes the charm, grace, and warmth of the loving family that lives within its walls.
All the windows were dark, but before long, light would appear in a few of them. Rosalina Ramirez would rise early to prepare a lavish breakfast for her son, Manuel, who would soon return from a double shift of policework—assuming he wouldn’t be delayed by the extensive paperwork associated with Chief Stevenson’s immolation. As he was a better cook than his mother, Manuel would prefer to make his own breakfast, but he would eat what she gave him and praise it. Rosalina was still sleeping; she had the large bedroom that had once belonged to her son, a room he’d not used since his wife died giving birth to Toby.
