King of the Dark Mountain (9 page)

Hez took a deep breath and pressed his lips together. At that moment, he looked a lot like his sister. He threw a sharp glance at the young woman at his side, “You swear there’s no risk?”

“There’s no risk,” Sara said smiling. “I want to show you more of the facility so would you like to get dessert or go ahead?”

“Let’s go. I am curious to see what kind of a setup this place really is.” Hez said and stood up. Sara led him back to the elevator. 

“We’ll start at the top,” she said pushing the elevator button to number twelve. They moved at lightning speed. When they reached their destination, they stepped out into a room, which contained what appeared to be a white tanning bed. Looking at it more closely, he saw that it wasn’t made of plastic but of some substance that might be rock. Sara lifted the top carefully with both hands, so easily it showed it wasn’t rock however.

She gave him a grin and slipped inside; in a moment the room they were in filled with an unusual sound. The “tanning bed” or whatever it was began to glow and become translucent, as the sound became louder. He bent down so he could look inside. Sara was lying rigidly within the bed, her eyes were closed. She reminded him of Snow White, lying inside the glass coffin. After a few seconds, the hum began to fade and with it the “coffin” became opaque. Sara opened the lid and jumped out. She put the lid back in place and turned to him.

“Wow,” he said, “that was really something. What was it?”

“Want to give it a try?”

He laughed, “No way, what the hell is it?”

“It’s a transforming unit, a different version of what Ellie will use when she starts the project.” Hez gingerly placed his hand on the top of the device. It was cool to the touch.

“What kind of material is that? I could see you when that racket got really loud. Did the sound do that?”

“Partially. It really does feel very wonderful. You should give it a try.” She said tossing her dark hair back and giving him a coy smile. It seemed to him that there was an erotic charge in the air. It made it hard for him to think clearly. He squatted down and pressed his head against the side of the unit. Sara opened the lid, so that he could no longer see her face. “Just try it,” she said softly. He gingerly stepped into the thing as though it were a hot tub. “Just lie back, it will be fine,” she said. He lay back and folded his hands over his stomach. She slowly lowered the lid.

He thought he would feel claustrophobic when the lid closed but on the inside it was like looking up at a planetarium. There were no stars, but the space itself seemed expansive as that for some reason. He did not hear any sound but there was definitely a vibration. He turned his head to see if he could see through the walls of the thing, but he couldn’t see anything. He turned back around and allowed the energy to flow through him. He felt like he was moving on some unseen current, it was like drifting on a float in the river.

Suddenly he wanted to go to sleep, but that didn’t seem possible because the vibration was so strong. It kept him alert although he was also strangely relaxed. After what seemed like only a few moments, the lid was opened in a jarring mechanical type of motion. He sat up in the device and looked around. Sara was nowhere in sight. He got out of the device and looked around the room.

He rubbed his eyes; the room was not arranged the same way as when he came in. Given the strange alterability of the device he had just emerged from, it occurred to him that the room might be equally changeable. Maybe so were the people, could that coat rack looking thing over there be Sara? It was about her height. He was feeling groggy and making feeble attempts to joke himself out of his growing sense of alarm. He spoke her name out loud, the bed-like device buzzed in response. 

He looked down at it. It was now an opaque shade of green. Hadn’t it been slate colored when he first stepped into it? Maybe changing colors was just the way the damn thing cooled down. He was starting to feel irritated with it and everything in this infernal place. The coat rack device with its out-cropping of metallic arms began to whiz around. It started moving towards him. He backed away from it and bumped into the wall. As he did so, he passed out of the room into another.

At first he thought the wall had just dissolved behind him, but he realized he had opened a type of door, that snapped shut. He could hear the coat rack buzzing behind it, making a drilling type of sound. He turned around and found himself staring at several men in beige uniforms. There was a cylindrical device over the breast pockets of their matching suits. One of them was furiously typing into a tablet laid out on a high table. 

“What the hell?” Hez said

One of the men came towards him, hand extended, “No need for profanity. Everything is under control,” he gave him a quick twitch of the lips that must have been intended as a smile. “You must come with me,” he said, dropping his hand. Hez thought he detected some type of European accent, was it Swedish? He was walking across the room. Hez followed him, after throwing a brief glance at the other man, who continued furiously typing into the tablet. Another door appeared out of the smooth surface of the far wall, it reminded him of the disappearing gate at Ted’s estate. There was the same seamlessness about the aperture.

They were in a narrow corridor, tilted downward. The ceiling arched over their heads at least twenty feet, but the room itself was much narrower. It gave the sensation of being in a cathedral. The man came abruptly to another of those magic doors and they entered another room. It was much smaller than the corridor, and had faintly rose colored walls, which did not seem to be solid but made of light. In front of them was an impressive metallic looking chair.

It might have been made of copper, judging by the color. “I need for you to sit please,” the man said indicating the steps leading up to the chair.

“I don’t want to sit,” Hez said calmly. He thought of what he could use in any of his pockets for a weapon. There was a pocket knife in his left pocket. He moved his left hand down to his belt. He was wondering if he could get the knife out in time before the guy could call for back up. If he threatened him with it, maybe he would just let him go. He doubted that, but he had no intention of meekly ascending those steps to what could very easily be an electric chair. The man turned towards him and gave him an exasperated look.

“You Americans are such children,” he said. He climbed the steps and sat down. “This is an ascender unit. It enhances mental faculties, that’s all. There’s no danger, of any kind.” He pushed a button on the arm of the chair, “Now ask me a question, some difficult math equation,”

“I don’t want to play games. I just want to know where I am and what happened to Sara and how long I was inside that magic box on the 12
th
floor.”

“Okay you want to know the square root of 12. It’s 3.46410162

“Damn it, I want to know what is happening to me,” Hez yelled.

The man swaggered down from the chair and came up to him, “Please hand over the pocket knife. I can dissolve the metal right now inside your pants, but that would be most uncomfortable. You’ve seen enough of the capacity of this facility surely to know that transformations of almost any type are not difficult.”

Hez backed away from him. He removed the knife and opened it. Instead of the metal getting melted, two men appeared behind him. One of them pulled his arm back and removed the knife, which caused him to wince with pain. The other one jammed a needle into his arm. It knocked him out in a matter of seconds. The last thing he saw before he passed out was the beautiful rose light of the ceiling.

Chapter Eight

Ellie and Ted were seated back to back inside the crystal cube. Their breathing was synchronized and rhythmic. There were a few lab technicians seated at work stations at three corners of the auditorium, far enough away so they were not visible to the two meditators. It was early afternoon; a tuning sound accompanied the exercise that Hez would have recognized. It helped them stay relaxed yet focused. 

Soon Ellie found herself floating above her body in a kind of white mist. Some lights went on at a workstation but she wasn’t aware of that, her attention was engaged with watching Ted rise up into the mist with her. They joined hands and the auditorium vanished. The vapor dissipated and they were standing overlooking some rolling hills above a seascape. She looked down and saw that she was wearing a gown of some luminous material that glowed in a color only seen at sunset, a cross between orange and pink.

Ted on the other hand was arrayed in some iron colored material that included a hood. He had a two pronged beard of nearly the same color. This is the real Ted, she thought and I have known him for a long, long time. He raised his hand and pointed out at the horizon. There was a ship far out to sea, with white sails. He started descending the hill, she followed, thinking that if they boarded the ship they would never return to the world again. A terrible longing filled her soul to be aboard the ancient ship. She knew all its lines and contours well, like the body of a beloved. It or one very much like it had borne them to this place ages before. He led her to an amazingly large oak tree, so immense it seemed to block out the western sky.

He sat down beneath it and leaned against its massive trunk and beckoned to her to join him.

“We have to forget our modern thoughts now, Eleana. We must return to this time and place where we buried the knowledge long ago.” She sat down beside him, and waited. She wanted to tell him that this was a place long buried under the waves, something lost forever. Her life as Ellie McCane was the real world; this place was the mere shadow of a forgotten time.

“It’s a dream we left behind long ago,” she said, “We must not linger here too long.”

“Yes, you are right, but we must remember something we left behind in this ancient space and time. Do you recall the way to query an ancient oaken master such as this one?” She nodded and leaned her head against the body of the trunk. She waited for the trees fragrance to engulf her senses. In this way she knew the tree was ready to convey what it had to tell them. Its words were pictures.

First it showed her its kind and many other species of trees blasted by the millions in undulating waves, which she understood to mean century upon century. At last, there were no oak masters left upon the earth and to the tree it looked like a barren planet, but Eleana recognized it as the modern world. There were still a few old growth forests, but to this tree it seemed that even those of several hundred years were scarcely begun to grow. Then another image arose above the blasted scenery of a million dead trees, a roaring wave burst down and washed away the debris, and in its place a majestic cedar bigger than all the fallen trees pierced the sky.

Its beauty was so great, she cried out. It was bedecked with jewels that looked embedded in the bark in a pattern that seemed at once natural and devised by a master crafts person. On its body was written some marvelous mystery. She wanted to get closer and try to decipher what was written upon it, but suddenly the vision went dark. Ted regarded her closely; then he stood up and gave her his hand. “This is enough,” he said. She thought he was wrong, but she was suddenly overcome with world weariness. The thought of the beautiful ship so close by filled her again with such poignant desire that she would almost have run over the hill and down to board it, but Ted held her hand fast and drew her back to the brow of the hill.

As they turned away from the vision of the beautiful ship, she was suddenly brought back inside the cube with a jolt. It was like awakening suddenly from a vivid dream. She stared at the now clear paneled walls in front of her and took several deep breaths. Ted sat rigidly behind her and did not move. She stood up and stepped out of the cube, feeling a little faint. A woman with the name tag, Cynthia Woods pinned to her lapel came up to her and handed her some water.

“That was wonderful,” she whispered and turned away. The other technicians stared at her and she hurried away towards the little cubicle that was now her room. She wanted to reflect upon the vision of the marvelous tree, before it had a chance to fade. She lay down on her bed and tried to focus on the words or symbols written on the body of the tree.

She suddenly realized that she would probably be able to look at it on one of their screens. She would review it in time with Ted, but for the moment she wanted to try to understand it in her own mind. She could still see the towering height of the magnificent cedar, but the marvelous jewels that glowed in soft shades of rose, amethyst and sapphire on its surface were fading in her memory already. If I could stand beneath that tree, I would be completely free, she thought.

Ted appeared at her door. “May I come in?’ She nodded. “That went marvelously well; we’re all so pleased and proud of you.”

“Of me? It just happened.”

“No, you have been training for this all your life, though you didn’t know it.”

“I wanted to linger for a while, but you made us leave,” she said with regret.

“I think we have to take small steps at first. There have been cases of people whose minds have been trapped in the past; we don’t want any harm to befall you in this process.”

“Wasn’t it marvelous?” she asked, still lying on her side on the bed.

“I’ll let you rest now. We’ll have dinner in a little while.” She closed her eyes and drifted into a light slumber very quickly. Ted turned off the light and walked jauntily down the corridor. It had gone just as he had hoped. They would have the information they needed and in short order he had no doubt now. Just the cursory view he had gotten of the vision’s imprints confirmed him in this optimistic view.

*

“I don’t know why you didn’t just sit. You would have all your old negative thought patterns purged and we’d already have you primed with the master program.” It was the man from the chair chamber speaking. Hez tried to get up from the floor, but his head began to spin. He slumped back down. He was suddenly pulled up and pushed into a plastic chair. For a moment, he thought he was going to wretch, but managed to grip a nearby table and hold back.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” he said between clenched teeth. The man motioned with his head to one of the men behind him. He dragged him out of the chair and escorted him down a corridor. Another corridor, the place was a damn maze, Hez thought. 

“Make it quick,” the guy said, again in some northern European accent, Hez couldn’t identify. Once inside the small cylindrical room, Hez splashed water on his face and stared into the mirror. His eyes stared back at him, haunted; already a stubble of beard was showing. Hadn’t he shaved that morning?

He took a leak, and the toilet flushed itself. He felt a little more normal when he pushed open the door. He managed to walk on his own back the way they’d come. Inside the interrogation room, it looked amazingly similar to the one at the Quentin Police Station; he calmly took a seat at the table. In front of him was a tablet. Just the high tech version of the same old paper crap, he thought.

“We just want you to answer a few questions. It won’t take long. There’s a keyboard located under the table if you prefer to use that rather than the onscreen version.” Hez gripped the table in front of him, a mixture of anger and some lingering effects of whatever chemical they’d used to knock him out with caused another round of vertigo. When it passed, he stared at the guy, “I’m not answering any questions, until you answer some for me.”

“You wouldn’t have to answer anything, if you had cooperated from the beginning.”

“I’m not letting you wipe my mind and replace it with some ‘master program,’ that’s never going to happen.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We could strap you into it this very minute and it would be done in five more. You’ve got no bargaining chips here, so you need to start cooperating.”

“May be you could do that, but I think there’s a reason you need my cooperation. I want to know what this place is and where you’re holding Ellie.”

The man turned his back on him. Suddenly the wall in front of him was lighted and filled with numbers. He spoke some words in Swedish, Hez was fairly sure that’s what it was, and the numbers began to spin. Finally they resolved themselves into an image. It appeared to be a more stylized form of the coat rack looking object, except with more prongs high and low. It began to throw beams upwards and downwards out of its appendages. “Nice coffee maker,” Hez said

“It’s our latest defuser and it can…” he paused, “You tell me, Mr. McCane, what does it do?”

Hez looked at the spinning image on the screen. It was rotating more quickly now so its arms were blurring together. It reminded him of a metallic woolly worm. “It crunches matter so that you can have all these doors that disappear into walls,” he replied.

“That’s more like a parlor trick compared to what it can do, though you’re right in a way. It can remove space between atoms. In fact, it has reduced a mile wide asteroid to the size of a barn. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

“It could save us from getting smashed by a planet wrecking rock?” Hez asked

“Exactly. We will have security from that threat very shortly. All we need to finish the program is information.”

“What kind of information?”

“Information which some people can provide.”

“Some people meaning people like Ellie,”

“There are various candidates who we’ve invited to join the project. Most of them are honored to be a part of such an important scientific endeavor. They don’t seem to have your over-arching paranoia.”

“They just hopped right into the magic chair and got wiped clean of all their old personalities is that right?”

“It’s nothing of the kind. The chair merely removes cognitive and emotive patterns that inhibit full mental flowering. Once they let go of their fears, and receive the template containing the highest thought patterns, they are transformed into…”

Hez leaned forward and said, “Gods?”

“You may scoff, but in terms of their former selves, you would say so. It’s the difference between the rudimentary ape-man humans once were to what they became.”

“So you’re giving evolution a little nudge with the chair.”

“It’s what we’ve been doing for the past five hundred years. From the time of the Italian Renaissance until the present day, it’s all been movement towards the goal of improving the species.”

Hez shook his head, “You would think that. You know what I think? I think guys like you and whoever runs this setup want to improve the human race, because you don’t have any idea what it means to be a human being to begin with.”

“And I suppose you think if we were all simple farmers like you, the world would be ideal.”

“Well it wouldn’t be on the verge of annihilation would it?”

“It’s a temporary glitch.”

“You think so? You guys go out and dig holes inside mountains and try to make out signs in the sky, but ultimately, you’ve already doomed us all to destruction with all your tricks. This is just another twist in the knot around all our throats.”

“Mr. McCane, I don’t expect you to understand the bigger picture. You can only see what your past experience allows you to see. I think you need some time to reflect on your situation and weigh your options more carefully. We’ll have a further discussion about this tomorrow,” he said in a flat tone. Then in a higher pitch, he yelled, “Erickson!” Immediately a man emerged out of the appearing doorway and pulled Hez up by the arm. Hez kicked over the chair he’d been sitting in and stumbled after him.

He was led to an elevator, which descended rapidly for six floors. Once they stepped out of the elevator, Erickson spoke into a device and a door opened. He motioned for Hez to step inside. When the door shut behind him, the room was very dark. Hez felt along the wall and waited for his eyes to adjust. In a few moments, he saw that there was an ambient light that seemed to be emitted from the walls themselves. It wasn’t very bright so he took out his cell phone to use to see more clearly.

The room itself, from what he could make out, looked hollowed out, not constructed at all. There was something that might be a mattress of some kind across the room. He started to move in that direction when his foot seemed to fall through the floor. He reeled backwards and fell hard. He managed to hold onto the cell phone. He used its light again to look at the floor. He saw that he had nearly walked into a hole of some type. His heart was pounding.

He sat a few more moments, and then gingerly began to make it across the room by hugging the wall until he reached the mattress. He kicked it a few times to make sure it was solid and safe. He gingerly eased down onto it. It smelled a little musty, but it seemed okay. He tried to sleep, but his mind kept returning to the hole in the floor. Had they intended for him to fall into it? He shuddered. It was like that story about the pit and the pendulum. He trained the cell phone towards the ceiling. Nothing up there but some rough looking masonry as far as he could make out.