Cradle (36 page)

Carol slowly removed both her mask and her regulator. She had a dazed look on her
face. The two of them looked around. The ceiling was about ten feet above them. Overall
the dimensions of the chamber were roughly equivalent to a large living room in a
comfortable suburban home. The walls, however, were quite unusual. Instead of being
flat and forming nice right-angle joints at each of the intersections, the walls were
made of large, curved surfaces, some concave and some convex, that were alternately
coloured red and blue. Without thinking, Carol began walking around, slowly because
of the bulky diving gear, and taking photographs.

‘Uh, just a moment, Miss Dawson,’ Troy said with a hesitant smile. He pulled off his
flippers and followed her. ‘Before you take any more pictures, angel, would you kindly
tell this unsophisticated black boy just where in the fuck he is? I mean, last I knew,
I was going down under the boat to look for a hole. I think I found it, but I must
say it’s a trifle unnerving to be visiting someone and not know just who it is. So
could you stop with the journalism bit for just a minute and tell me why you are so
calm.’

Carol was right in front of one of the concave blue wall panels. There were two or
three indentations in the wall structure, at about eye level, that formed circles
or ellipses. ‘Now what do you suppose this is?’ Carol wondered aloud. Her voice sounded
flat, as if she were far away.

‘Carol,’ Troy almost shouted. ‘Stop it. Stop right now. We can’t just blissfully walk
around here as if this is a typical afternoon stroll through a model house. We have
to talk. Where are we? How are we going to get out and go home? Home, remember the
place? I guarantee you it’s not under the ocean two hours away from shore.’ He grabbed
her by the shoulders and shook her.

She started to snap out of her daze. She looked slowly around the entire room and
then back at Troy. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘And shit.’ He saw her tremble a little and
stepped forward to hug her. She indicated for him to leave her alone. ‘I’m all right.
At least almost.’ Carol took a couple of deep breaths and then smiled. ‘Anyway, I’ve
sure got one hell of a story here.’ She looked around the room again. ‘Uh, Troy,’
she said with her brow wrinkled, ‘how did we get in here? I don’t see a doorway or
an opening or anything.’

‘Good question,’ Troy replied. ‘A very good question, to which I might have the answer.
I think these crazy coloured walls move around. I believe I saw the walls rolling
into place when I was under the water. So all we have to do is push them aside and
find our way out.’ He tried to wedge his hands into a crack that was a connection
between a red and a blue piece of the wall structure. He was unsuccessful.

Carol left Troy and started to pace around the perimeter of the room in her ungainly
diving apparatus. She quickly stopped and took off everything except her bathing suit.
She seemed intent on both examining and photographing every single panel in the wall.
Troy took off his own air tanks and buoyancy vest as well, dropping them on the light
metal floor with a clank. He watched her for a minute.

‘Carol, oh Carol,’ he said from across the room, a big fake grin spreading across
his face. ‘Would you like to tell me what you’re doing now? I mean, after all, angel,
I may be able to help.’

‘I’m looking for something that says “Eat Me” or “Drink Me”,’ she replied with a nervous
laugh.

‘Of course,’ Troy mumbled to himself, ‘that was absolutely obvious.’

‘Do you remember
Alice in Wonderland
?’ Carol asked from the opposite side of the room. She had found a long, thin protuberance
that looked like a handle sticking out from the centre of one of the red panels. She
waved and he came over. The two of them tried to twist and turn the handle. Nothing
happened. Carol became frustrated struggling with it.

Troy thought he saw a first sign of panic in Carol as her eyes frantically scanned
the rest of the room. He pulled himself up and stood at attention, military style.
‘Speak roughly to your little boy… And beat him when he sneezes… He only does it to
annoy… Because he knows it teases.’

The deep furrows in Carol’s face showed that she thought Troy had temporarily lost
his mind. ‘That was the Queen of Hearts, I think,’ Troy laughed. ‘I’m not sure exactly.
But I had to learn it for a play when I was in the fifth grade.’ Carol had relaxed
and was also laughing in spite of her fear. She reached up and gave Troy a kiss on
the cheek. ‘Careful, now, careful,’ he said with a twinkle in his eye. ‘We black men
are easily aroused.’

Carol slid her arm through Troy’s as they finished walking around the rest of the
room, searching the walls for any sign of an exit. Troy’s banter made Carol feel comfortable.
‘When I was in the eighth grade a black teacher of mine told me that
Alice
was a racist story. He contended that it was very significant that it was a
white
rabbit that Alice followed. He said that no nice little white girl would ever have
pursued a
black
rabbit down a hole.’ He stopped in front of another red panel. ‘Well, well,’ he said.
‘What have we here?’

This red panel looked just like the rest of the wall from a distance. But up close,
within a range of a couple of feet or so, all kinds of patterns, made with small white
dots, could be seen stippled on top of the red paint. An array of consecutive rectangular
sections outlined by the white dots highlighted the centre of the panel. ‘Hey, angel,’
Troy said, pushing on the sections at random, ‘don’t you think this looks suspiciously
like a keyboard?’ Troy began to push on the keys at random. Carol joined him. It became
a game. The two of them stood at the red panel for almost a minute, putting their
fingers into every outlined section and pushing hard.

Suddenly Carol backed away from the panel, turned around, and started walking directly
across the room. ‘Where are you going?’ yelled Troy, as Carol, spinning around to
answer, nearly stumbled over her diving gear on the floor.

‘I have a crazy idea,’ called Carol. ‘Call it feminine intuition. Call it psychic
if you will.’ She had reached the red panel where they had struggled with the handle.
Now she pulled it down easily and immediately heard a creak. She jumped back, startled,
as the entire panel folded back and away from her, revealing a dark opening large
enough for a truck to enter. Troy came over beside her and the two of them stared
into the void.

‘Holy shit,’ he said. ‘Are we supposed to go in there?’

Carol nodded. ‘I’m certain we are.’

Troy looked at her with a curious expression. ‘And just how do you know that?’

‘Because it’s the only way out of here,’ Carol replied.

Troy cast one final glance around the strange room with the curved and coloured walls.
There was an indisputable logic to what Carol had said. He took a deep breath, held
Carol’s hand and walked into the black tunnel.

Behind them they could barely see the small shaft of light coming from the room where
they had left their diving gear. Inside the pitch-black hallway they moved very slowly,
cautiously. Troy kept one hand on the wall and the other clenched around Carol’s.
The sound of their laboured breathing, heightened by the constant fear and apprehension,
reverberated off the rounded walls. They didn’t talk. Twice Troy had started to sing
a few lines from a popular song, to assuage his own disquiet, but both times Carol
stopped him. She wanted to be able to hear in case there were any other noises.

At one point she squeezed his hand and stopped. ‘Listen,’ she said in a whisper. Troy
held his breath. There was utter silence, except for something very soft that he couldn’t
quite identify, far off in the distance. ‘Music,’ Carol said. ‘I think I hear music.’

Troy strained to identify the sound just below the threshold of his hearing. It was
useless. He pulled on Carol’s hand. ‘It’s probably inside your head,’ he said. ‘Let’s
go.’

They had made a turn and the light behind them had disappeared. Altogether they had
been in the tunnel for about ten minutes. Carol was becoming despondent. ‘What if
this doesn’t go anywhere?’ she asked Troy.

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ he replied quickly. ‘Somebody built it for some purpose.
It’s obviously a connecting passageway.’ He fell silent.

‘Who built it?’ Carol asked the question that had been troubling both of them during
the long tense walk down the dark hallway.

‘Another good question,’ Troy replied. He hesitated just a minute before continuing
with his answer. ‘My guess is the United States Navy. I think we’re in some kind of
top-secret underwater laboratory that nobody knows about.’
Of course
, he thought, not saying it out loud because he didn’t want to disturb Carol,
it could also be Russian. In which case we are in deep shit. If the Russians have
a large, secret laboratory this close to Key West, they are not going to be happy…
.

‘Look, Troy,’ Carol said excitedly. ‘I see a light. There is somebody here after all.’
The tunnel was about to split into two parts. At the end of one of the forks, the
one angling sharply to the left, a patch of illumination could clearly be seen. Still
holding hands, Troy and Carol walked briskly toward the light. Troy was aware that
his heart was beating very rapidly.

Carol almost raced into the new room. She had expected that they were about to be
found, that this mysterious adventure was now going to end and everything would be
explained. Instead, as she looked around her in a small, oval chamber with the same
bizarre panels for walls (except these were coloured brown and white, instead of red
and blue as in the previous room), she felt a tremendous confusion. ‘What is this
place?’ she asked Troy. ‘And how are we going to get out?’

Troy was standing in the centre of the room with his head tilted back as far as it
would go. He was staring up at a vast arched ceiling some thirty to thirty-five feet
above them. ‘Wow,’ he exclaimed, ‘this is one huge place.’ The muted light illuminating
the room was coming from slabs of partially translucent material, possibly glass crystals,
that were embedded in the ceiling.

The brown and white panels forming the walls for the particular room they had entered
were only ten feet high, but they were high enough to prevent Carol and Troy from
seeing out. They had a strange sense of both freedom and confinement. On the one hand,
first the tunnel and now this small room, the size of a child’s bedroom in a small
house, had made them feel claustrophobic; however, the sense of space conveyed by
the cathedral ceilings was liberating.

‘Well?’ asked Carol, somewhat impatiently, after waiting a few moments while Troy
walked around and surveyed the room. He was observing that the brown and white wall
panels were only slightly curved and were thus much closer to normal walls than those
in the initial room had been.

‘I’m sorry, angel,’ he replied, ‘I forgot the question.’

She shook her head. ‘There is only one question, Mr. Jefferson. I believe that you
asked it of me on our last tour stop.’ She looked at her watch. ‘In about fifteen
minutes, we will have exceeded the maximum time for our air supply. Unless I miss
my guess, our friend Nick is probably starting to worry right now. But we still have
no idea… What are you doing?’

She interrupted herself when Troy bent down to pull a small knob on one of the brown
panels in the corner of the room. ‘These are drawers, angel,’ he said, as the bottom
part of the panel came out several inches from the wall. ‘Like a dresser.’ He opened
a second drawer above the first. ‘And they have something in them.’

Carol came over to see. She reached into the second drawer that Troy had opened and
pulled out a rust-coloured sphere about the size of a tennis ball. The surface of
the ball was very curious. Instead of being smooth and regular, it had grooves cut
into it, mostly on one side, and tiny bumps, like those on the surface of a pickle,
around and next to the grooves. In other places there were poorly defined indentations
as well. Carol examined the sphere in the weak light. ‘I’ve seen something like this
before,’ she said. ‘But where?’ She thought for a few seconds. ‘I’ve got it,’ she
announced, pleased that her memory had come through. ‘This looks exactly like the
model of Mars in the National Air and Space Museum.’

‘Then I must have the Earth,’ Troy replied, showing her a mostly blue sphere the size
of a softball that he had removed from the top drawer. The two of them stood together
in the dim light, looking back and forth at the spheres they were holding in their
hands. ‘Shit,’ Troy shouted eventually, spinning around and looking at the ceiling.
‘And double shit. Whoever you are, we’ve had enough. Come out now and identify yourself.’

A partial echo of his voice came back to them. Otherwise they heard nothing. Anxious
to be doing something, Carol continued her search of the room. She found another group
of three drawers in a nearby brown panel. While she was opening the first of these,
Troy playfully hurled his blue ball at what appeared to be an exit, a dark opening
between panels on the other side of the room. The sphere hit a white panel near the
exit with a thunk and started to fall to the floor. However, just before it touched
the ground, the sphere lifted up, as if pulled somehow from above, and stopped in
the centre of the room about five feet above the floor. It began to spin.

Troy’s eyes opened wide. He walked over to the sphere and placed his hand between
the ball and high ceiling, trying to find the strings. Nothing happened. The Earth
sphere continued to spin slowly and inscribe a circle in the air in the middle of
the room. Troy pushed the ball lightly. It moved in response to his push, but after
his applied force was removed and the effect had dissipated, the sphere returned to
its previous location and continued its earlier movement. Troy turned around. Carol
had her back to him and was searching unsuccessfully for another set of drawers. The
Mars ball was still in her left hand.