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 desire 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 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 us ovoid,
a hundred by corridors and smaller rooms. It is an enormo 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 feet 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 ted to
return to this place where I’d found my Mystery Train in 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