by The Web(Lit)
Springs, a handle.
I pulled down, encountered some resistance, then the rod lowered into place with a click.
The table shifted, rolled, and Robin was able to push it away easily.
Underneath was more concrete floor. A five by two rectangle.
Etched. Deep seams.
A concrete trapdoor?
But no handle.
I stepped down on a corner of the rectangle, pressed and removed my foot, testing it. The slab rocked a fraction of an inch, then popped back into place, giving off a deep resonant sound, like a huge spinning top.
"Maybe it needs more weight," said Robin.
"Let's do it together."
"No. If Moreland can move it by himself, I can too. I don't want to trigger it too hard and have it slam up in our faces."
I toed another corner. A bit more give, the slab bounced back again.
Pressure on the third corner caused it to yield further and I caught a view of the slab's side, at least half a foot thick. More metal underneath some kind of pulley system.
Moving to the fourth corner, I felt myself being lifted and jumped off.
The slab rocked hard, stopped, then began rotating, very slowly. Barely making a full arc before continuing until it was perpendicular with the floor.
It came to a halt, shaking the floor. I tried to move it; locked into place.
Rectangular opening, four feet by two.
Dark, but not black distant illumination from below.
I got down on my belly and peered down. Concrete steps, similar to those in the insectarium. Thirteen again, but these were striped with green.
Astroturf.
Leading to grayness.
"Guess this is why they call spies "moles"," I said.
Robin's smile was a faint courtesy. She brushed wet curls away from her face and took a deep breath.
Stepped toward the opening.
I blocked her and went in first.
The tunnel was seven feet high and not much wider, tubular walls of reinforced concrete, trowel seams marked by steel studs. The light I'd seen from above came from a caged mining fixture wired to the ceiling forty paces in the distance.
The astroturf lay over dirt, ending at the beginning of a single railroad track that bisected the tube.
Narrow track with polished pine ties. Too small for a train. Probably designed for a handcar, but none was in sight.
No rain sounds. I touched the ground. The soil was hard packed and dry. Perfect seal.
Rapping the walls produced no tone either. The concrete had to be yards thick.
I told Robin to wait and returned to the tunnel's mouth. The slab loomed like a gigantic stiff lip. From down here the lab was a black hole.
I climbed the stairs, tested the slab a second time. Just as immobile set into place by a mass of gears and counterweights, responsive to a special series of pressures.
Probably a safety feature installed by the Japanese army to prevent crushed fingers or accidental imprisonment. Probably some way to close it safely from below, but I didn't know it and we had no choice but to leave the entry exposed.
Maybe the best thing was to get out of here and wait till morning.
I climbed back down to Robin and offered her the choice.
We've come this far, Alex. Let's at least follow it for a while and see where it leads."
"If it extends past the property line, we'll be under the banyans.
Land mines."
"If there are mines."
"You have doubts?" I said.
"If you wanted to hide something, what better way to discourage intruders than a rumor like that?"
"You want to test that hypothesis."
"He's down here." She gazed into the tunnel.
"He clearly wants us there too. Why would he want to hurt us?"
"He wants me," I said.
"He brought me over for this."
"Whatever, it's important to him. Look at all the precautions he took."
"Cryptic messages. Voices of wise ones... bugs he's like a big kid playing games."
"Hide and seek," she said.
"Maybe I'm way off but I don't think he's a bad man, Alex. Just a secretive one."
I thought of Moreland and Hoffman and their wives playing bridge on the terrace. Hoffman cheating. Moreland never letting on.
"All right," I said.
"Let's play."
We walked along the tracks, passing under the glow of the caged light and slipping into darkness. A hundred paces later, the glint of an identical fixture came into view. Then another.
The monotony became pleasant the tunnel was more pleasant than I'd imagined: warm, dry, silent. No bugs.
What do you think it was, originally?" said Robin.
"An escape route for the Japanese?"
"Or some kind of supply channel."
We reached the second light and were nearly out of its glow when we saw something against the wall.
Cardboard boxes. Scores of them, piled neatly in columns. Just like the case files in the storeroom.
Confidential files? Was this what Moreland wanted me to see?
I pulled down a box. The flaps were folded closed but unsealed.
Inside, zip-locked plastic bags.
Dried fruit and vegetables.
I tried another carton. More food.
A third contained pharmaceutical samples and bottles of pills antibiotics, antifungals, vitamins, minerals, dietary supplements.
Then bottles of something clear tonic water. The antimalarial properties of quinine.
Another carton. More dried fruit. Gatorade.
"Dr. Bill's secret stash," I said.
"He grows stuff in his garden, preserves it, and brings it down here. Maybe we're dealing with a survivalist. The question is, what's his Armageddon?"
Robin shook her head and fished out canned goods from another box. Beef stew, chicken and rice.
"So much for vegetarianism," I said.
She looked sad.
"Maybe Armageddon's the destruction of the island. Could be he's planning to stay underground."
"Under the forest," I said.
"Protected by those mines, real or phony. It's pretty nuts, but there are bunkers full of folks just like that all over the States. The problem is, they also tend toward hair-trigger paranoia. A lust for the big battle."
"That doesn't seem like Bill."
Why? Because he says he despises weapons? Everything the man's said or done is suspect including his altruism. Aruk imports food at two, three times the usual cost. Bill helps out with occasional handouts but stockpiles all this stuff for himself. If he's been planning to go under for a while, that would explain why he hasn't been more aggressive promoting business for the island. Maybe he's given up on Aruk on reality. Maybe he's concentrating on creating his own little subterranean world. Came up with the idea after finding the blueprints somewhere in the house. Eventually, he discovered the tunnel: instant caveman."
She took something else out of the box. A foil packet with a white label.
""Freeze-Dried Combat Meal,"" she read aloud. '"Segment B: reconstituted carrots, beets, peas, lima and string beans, soya protein'... then a whole bunch of vitamins... United States Navy issue... oh, boy."
"What?"
"The date."
Tiny numbers at the bottom of the label. February 1963.
"Sixty-three was his last year in the Navy," I said.
"He bought the estate that year he's been doing this for thirty years."
"Poor man," she said.
"He's obviously quite content. Damned proud of what he's accomplished."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because now he wants to show it off."
Six more ceiling lights, two more large caches of food and medicine.
We kept walking, automatically, like soldiers, drained of further conjecture, tracks and ties slipping past hypnotically.
My watch said we'd been underground
nearly half an hour, but it felt both longer and briefer.
Time's deceit.
Another caged bulb.
Then a patch of green just beyond.
Another astroturf strip.
Another flight of stairs, fifty yards ahead.
Thirteen steps up to a metal door.
No handles or locks. I pushed, expecting ponderous weight, another tricky leverage system. It opened so easily I had to stop myself from falling forward.
On the other side was an up sloping concrete ramp lit by a weak bulb.
We climbed till we came to yet another door.
Metal grillwork radiating circles of iron crisscrossed by spokes. Beyond it total darkness.
I knocked and pushed but this one didn't give. Then my brain put the grill design in context.
A web. What had Moreland called webs a beautiful deceit.
Enough.
I turned to head back down the ramp.
Saw the first door closing behind us, rushed to catch it and failed.
It slammed shut, refused to yield.
Trapped in the ramp.
Ensnared.
Moreland's thin face appeared in my head. Long, loose limbs, fleshy snout, pouchy eyes, loping walk arachnid walk.
Not a camel or a flamingo.
Predators...
Robin put her hand to her mouth. I stopped breathing; panic became a tight necktie.
Then light appeared behind the web, letting in a draft of very cool air.
The same chill I'd felt coming over the walls from the banyan forest.
The webbed door swung open. I saw walls of hewn stone, then blackness.
A cave.
The choice was to stay there and risk another entrapment or step through and take our chances with whatever was on the other end.
I stepped through.
A hand settled lightly on my shoulder.
I spun around.
"Damn you, Bill!"
But the eyes that stared back weren't Moreland's.
Dark slits at least, the left one was. Its mate was a wide-open, milky-white crescent, drooping heavily, tugging at a ragged lid.
No iris. The white was shot through with capillaries.
The face around the orb was white, too.
The eyes lower than mine, set into an elliptical, neck less head that rested on meager, sloping shoulders.
Misshapen and hairless except for three patches of colorless down.
Ridges of skin in place of ears.
A mouth opened. Less than a dozen teeth, some of them no more than yellow buds. Framing them was a pouch like puckered aperture: no lower lip, the upper one thick, cracked, liverish a smile? Why wasn't I screaming?
I smiled back. The hand so light on my shoulder... an inch of downy skin separated the mouth from a nose that was two black holes under a nub of pink-white flesh, twisted like a pig's tail.
Wens and scabs, kelo id tracks, and crater scars danced across the face, a moonscape in closeup. A sharp smell fumed from the skin. Familiar smell... hospital corridors antibiotic ointment.
The hand on my shoulder sat so delicately, I barely felt it.
I looked at it.
Four stumpy, broad-tipped fingers, the thumb clubbish and spatulate, no nail on the index finger. More of that soft, downy hair. Dimpled knuckles.
The wrist thin and frail, laced with baby-blue veins and scabbed heavily, disappearing into the cuff of a white shirt.
Clean, white oxford button-down.
Khaki trousers cinched tight around a thin waist, the cuffs rolled thick.
A man, I supposed... protruding from under the cuffs, brown loafers that looked new.
A boy-sized man five feet tall if that, maybe eighty pounds.
"Hhh," he said.
"Hhhii."
Whispery rasp. I'd heard voices like that before: burn victims, the larynx and vocal cords seared, learning to talk from the gut.
The pouch-mouth stayed open, as if struggling for speech.
More medicinal smell mouthwash. The single eye watched my face. The pouch twisted upward in what might have been a smile.
"Hi," I said.
The eye studied me some more. Blinked winked? No eyebrows, but the skin above the sockets creased into deep dual crescents that simulated brows.
Neckless, chinless, that congealed-fat complexion. But soft...
I thought of the baby octopus in the lagoon.
The hand slid off my shoulder, slowly, gracefully.
The mouth closed and pouted sad?
Had I done something wrong?
I tried smiling again.
The arm hung loosely.
Very loose. An invertebrate grace.
Fingers curling in ways that normal fingers couldn't.
Serpentine no, even a snake had more firmness.
White and flaccid Wormlike.
35. He scratched a thigh, a cuff rode up, and I saw something shiny atop a loafer. Brand-new penny.
He saw something behind me and his head lowered shyly.
"Hi," I heard Robin say.
Then I saw something behind him.
Another man emerging from the shadows, even smaller, so severely hunchbacked his head seemed to protrude from his chest.
Red-and-black plaid button-down, blue jeans, high-top sneakers.
Two good eyes. One ear. The eyes soft.
Innocent.
Curling a finger, he turned his back on us and stepped further into the cave.
The first man's forehead creased again and he followed.
We tagged along, tripping and stumbling as our feet snagged on bits of rock.
The little soft men had no trouble at all.
Gradually, the cave turned from black to charcoal to dove-gray to gold as we stepped out into a huge, domed cavern lit by several more of the caged fixtures.
Rock formations too blunt to be stalagmites rose from the floor. A bank of refrigerators filled one wall. Ten of them, smallish, a random assortment of colors and brands. Avocado.
Gold. Hues fashionable thirty years ago. The wires met at a junction box attached to a thick black cable that ran behind a crag and out of the room.
In the center of the cavern were two wooden picnic tables and a dozen chairs. Shag area rugs were scattered over a spotless stone floor. A whirring, humming noise came from behind the junction box a generator.
The rain slightly audible, now. A tinkle. But everything was dry.
Moreland came in and sat at the head of the table, behind a large bowl of fresh fruit. He wore his usual white shirt and his bald head looked oiled. His hands took hold of a grapefruit.
Four more small, soft people filed in and sat around him. Two wore cotton dresses and had finer features. Women. The others were dressed in plaid shirts and jeans or khakis.
One of the men had no eyes at all, just tight drums of shiny skin stretched across the sockets. One of the women was especially tiny, no larger than a seven-year-old.
They looked at us, then back at Moreland, their ruined faces even whiter in the full light.
Place settings before each of them. Fruit and biscuits and vitamin pills. Glasses of bright orange and green and red liquid.
Gatorade. Empty bottles were grouped in the center of the table, along with plates full of rinds and pits and cores.
The two men who'd brought us stood with their hands folded.
Moreland said, "Thank you, Jimmy. Thank you, Eddie."
Rolling the grapefruit away, he motioned. The men took their places at the table.
Some of the others began to murmur. Deformed hands trembled.
Moreland said, "It's all right. They're good."
Runny eyes settled upon us, once again. The blind man waved his hands and clapped.
