(05) The Chamber


"I can't help it," Legggs said, when the fit of laughter finally subsided. Jukebox had turned around and looked at her with the left side of his mouth turned up and the right side unaffected, which had triggered the laughing fit. "If I don't get rid of the anxiety by laughing then I have a panic attack, like I did in the cafe when you came in. When I start laughing like that I can't stop until my stomach calms down."
"Is it calmed down some now?" Jukebox asked.
"Um hum," she said, and another spasm escaped her. "Excuse me. I really am okay now."
"Then let's see where this leads," Jukebox said. Ahead of them the tunnel opened into a cavern of unknown size and composition.

Once he had begun to allow himself to feel the energy of the tunnel without being on yellow alert, Jukebox's body seemed hungry for more of the electric current that moved like music through him, tuning his cells to its secret source. He had been trained to never relax beneath a yellow alert. It was part of the Kyle training program that every situation required a yellow, orange, or red alert. Yellow alert was a state of attention, anticipating danger. Orange alert was an elevation of attention to high focus, in preparation for combat. Red alert was full on combat.

"If you don't maintain yellow alert in your daily life," his combat instructor had told him, "you have already lost if the situation moves to orange. By the time you move up to yellow alert, your opponent will be at orange, and you'll be dead or captured." But now there was an odd contradiction to his focus. He was alert, and he was ready for unanticipated trouble, but his body wasn't interested in what his head was doing. It was going off on its own, as if it was being pulled along by some force larger than itself, and with more authority than his Kyle training.

"What is this feeling?" he asked. "Have you ever felt anything like it before?"

"Um hum," Legggs said. "I have. But I couldn't remember it until I felt it again." She moved close behind him so that they stepped out of the passageway and into the cavern together.

"Holy shit," Jukebox whispered. Legggs clutched his arm and stifled the growing urge toward hysterical laughter when the image of Popeye came to mind. The chamber was a perfect dome, the circumference a thousand feet and the dome itself arching upward with such spectacular majesty that the mountain containing it had to be a covering shell of natural camouflage. But the most captivating feature of the dome was its coloration. It was a shiny black, veined with the pearlescent, glowing material of which the passageway was composed. The floor of the dome was done in tiles of black and white, perfectly laid. In the center of the floor was a square object about twenty feet per side, veined in black and white like the dome. In the side facing them there was a round opening which appeared to be about the same circumference as the passageway itself. It glowed with a deep, greenish coloration, but didn't seem to be solid, rather it seemed to shift and change, as if it was an opening into a deeper mystery.

"Who built this?" Legggs whispered.

"No contractor I know about," Jukebox said aloud. "Let's stop whispering."

"What if somebody hears us?"

"That would be a relief, to tell you the truth," Jukebox said. "I don't think this was built by human beings."

"You think it was built by aliens?"

"You know as much about it as I do, but what kind of equipment would it take to make this? For a contractor to build this, they'd have to have built it and then put a mountain around it, and I can guarantee you we're not talking Bechtel or Halliburton or any company I know about. Let's take a look at that centerpiece." He moved across the glowing, soft floor, noticing that his feet seemed to sink in like he was walking on plush carpet, but left no indentation or print. As he approached the green door, as he had begun to think of the round opening, the physical effect on his body suddenly intensified dramatically. "You feel that?"

"Oh, yes I do ..." Legggs was having an ecstatic moment. "Oh my God." Then she began to laugh, pausing only long enough to imitate Jukebox's voice, "Do you feel that?" But instead of an uncontrollable spasm of laughter she tapered off into small, mewing sounds and began to shudder with involuntary bursts of pleasure.

"Maybe we shouldn't get too close to this thing," Jukebox said. "We don't know what it might do to us."

That sent her into a squeal of laughing so intense she dropped to the floor and held her ribcage in place by wrapping her arms around herself. It didn't last long. All of the expression drained from her face, leaving it as open as a sleeping child's face. "Uh oh," she said. "You've got to try this."

Jukebox's head was trying to follow his Kyle training, and move him from yellow alert to orange alert as the pleasure of the adventure intensified. He was trying to approach the unknown as a potential threat to his life, as he'd been trained to do, but his body was having none of it. His body was feeling safer and more carefree than it had felt since he was a boy, and he'd forgotten that feeling. Now it was back, lost memory of childhood, and of a body without shame or embarrassment in the face of intense pleasure. His head insisted that the urge to give in must be resisted at all cost. As if she could see his struggle, Legggs pulled herself back to her feet and walked over to him. She looked into his eyes and smiled at him. "Goodbye, Mr. Head," she said.

For a moment he forgot to be on yellow alert. It only took a moment. The space inside it began to expand and envelop him and he felt himself expel the breath he had been unconsciously holding. His entire body turned to bubbles and dispersed so that he couldn't tell his own form from the awareness in the room. And sure enough, it was at that moment that the threat materialized, a high pitched whining sound coming from the passageway. Something was coming through it, and whatever it was, it wasn't human.

"Ah, fuck," Jukebox said. "I knew it was too good to be true, and here I've turned to bubbles."

Posted: Sat - May 14, 2005 at 02:12 PM