(03) The Entry


"That old jukebox keeps playing, a honky tonk wedding, with a road house preacher and a four piece country band." Legggs was laughing again. The song didn't really mean anything to her except that it had the word "Jukebox" in it, and now every association with Jukebox was getting increasingly hilarious.

"Is that a real song?" Jukebox said, "or are you just making it up?"

"I'm just making it up," Legggs said. It was strange how she went from hysterical laughter to a perfect moment of calm during which she replied, and then, as if that was the funniest thing she'd ever thought to do, she lost control of herself again.

When she finally calmed down to sporadic bursts of laughter, punctuated by quiet reflection, she had to come back to the hole in the ground. She and Jukebox seemed to be able to walk up to it and look at it, but when it came to actually stepping inside, they were instantly distracted by some foolishness. "It's something alive," she said.

"Maybe it is and maybe it isn't," Jukebox said. "A rabbit's alive and seaweed's alive, but they aren't much alike. It might be some kind of life, but that don't mean it can think the way we think or feel any pain."

"I still don't want you to cut into it with a goddamned knife, Jukebox. What's wrong with you?"

"It depends on who's deciding what's right and wrong, Legggs, so in order to avoid confusion I decide for myself instead of taking a fucking opinion poll, and I decided I was going to take a sample of this thing. Think of it like a biopsy."

"Please don't do that," she said, pleading and flirting at the same time. He almost instantly reddened and laughed self-consciously.

"Well I don't have to," he said. "I just thought of it as a way to start figuring out what we're dealing with here, because to tell you the truth there's something in my body that's like an animal balking at going into a cave. I don't know if it's something I smell or some sense of danger ..."

"It's the unknown, just like you said. We're both afraid of it, but that doesn't mean we should attack it with a knife."

"I wasn't going to attack it, I was going to take a sample of the material."

"It wouldn't know the difference. Besides, what would that tell us anyway? It's like looking at a sliver of wood to try and figure out what a chair is. If you don't know the purpose of it, you don't know what you're dealing with, and the only way we can find out the purpose of an entry into the earth is to enter it."

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

"Well, at least that's something we can do."

That struck Jukebox as funny. "That's the core of Kyle training, is that you always have to know what you are going to do next and focus on it, so that you don't get overcome by fear. I just realized I couldn't go in there because I didn't have a plan of action. I would be reacting, and maybe to something that did have a plan, like luring us in there and just digesting us."

"Where do get this fixation on being eaten?"

"It's not a fixation, it's just that if you go inside something else and you don't know what it is there's always the possibility, and you can observe this in nature all day long, goddamnit, there's always the possibility ..."

"That you're being eaten alive!" Legggs shrieked, jumping at him and startling him into taking a step backward. He turned around and looked into the perfect circle placed on the base of the hill like a spotlight. Except that it wasn't a spotlight. It was an entry. He hesitantly reached inside and placed his hand on the side of the entryway.

"Doesn't it feel like flesh?" Legggs asked, approaching and putting a hand near his.

"Not exactly," Jukebox said, "but I know what you mean. There's a softness to it, like it could be hurt."

Legggs had a little fit of laughter because she looked down and saw the knife on his belt, and she thought about his wanting to cut a chunk out of this smooth membrane of unknown origin and unknown purpose. "Let's just follow it a little ways in and then come back out," she said, "so that we feel okay that we can get back out if we go inside."

"That's at least a plan," Jukebox said. "We'll count a hundred steps in, and then we'll turn around and come back out. You go first."

"Me? You're the one that's the size of a jukebox."

"If it closes behind us you'll want me to be in front trying to get us out of here. Go on."

It didn't close behind them. Legggs silently counted her steps, but with each step she took she was further entranced by the soft glow of the inside of the strange membrane, glowing with pearly awareness that seemed to be giving her body energy. Neither of them spoke. When she had counted ninety steps she began to count aloud, so that he would know she was at one hundred.

The fear was gone and in its place was a feeling that they were being tuned to the vibration of what they were exploring into. She wanted to just continue on, but he had already turned around, and now spoke sharply to her. "Let's go."

He walked out more rapidly than she had walked in. When they had stepped outside, she said, "That's about the nicest feeling I can imagine, being inside there. Didn't you think so?"

Jukebox stretched his neck to the right and then to the left and flexed his oversized muscles. "You trust it?"

"Do I trust it? What would turn you on, Jukebox? Maybe some poisonous secretions and a flash flood of digestive juice? It was giving us energy! Didn't you feel it?"

"Sure I felt it," he said, looking away, as if studying to position of the moon on the horizon.

"And you didn't like it?"

"I'm not sure I ought to," he admitted. "It's sort of unnatural to feel that way about a hole."

"A hole? You sound like you found a drainage ditch here. This is something that you yourself admit you would never have seen if I hadn't shown it to you. You were standing right there in sight of it and you never saw it until I went over to it and made you touch it."

"And you never would have seen it if there hadn't been that trail of white stones leading up to it. That wasn't an accident, those stones being there. How did they get there and where did they go? Something or somebody came out of that thing and lured you to the entrance. I'm betting that if we follow that passageway we'll come to a chamber of some kind where there's somebody, or something, that knows we're here and is waiting for us. What I'm thinking is ..."

"I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that pleasure is a trick to lure you to your death."

"Kyle training. We're taught to get pleasure from denial of pleasure. We call it self-control."

"I don't care what you call it, to the rest of us you're being taught to be assholes. I'm going back in there and I'm going to find out where this leads. You can go or not go because I'm not afraid anymore."

"You're actually safer without me. That Kyle team wasn't guarding this location, they were following me. That means they were monitoring my net communications. Everything you and I wrote to each other might have been monitored, and probably was."

"I was encrypted."

"We all are, sweetheart. But the government has the encryption codes for national security purposes, and Kyle Security is so bound up in government contract work they are the government. They couldn't understand what you were writing about and so they think it's code for something else. They're following me to see what we're doing."

"I still want you to go with me." She placed the palm of her hand against his heart. "But only if you want to go with me."

Jukebox looked down at her hand on his heart and his mouth dropped open as if he was astonished. He said, "I'll go first this time."

They passed the first hundred steps, which Legggs counted off silently, and then were past it, not counting anymore. "It's like walking in the middle of a moonbeam," she said.

"That's the best feeling I ever felt," Jukebox said.

"I hope that doesn't disturb you too much."

"Not too much. Better get your wits together, because the terrain is about to change right up ahead. We're coming out of the tunnel into something bigger."

Posted: Wed - May 11, 2005 at 12:40 PM