The Web

34

"The original construction plans," said Robin.

"Can you make any sense of it?"

She took the blueprints and studied them. All those months at the jobsite in L.A. reading plans…

She traced lines, came to a stop.

"Maybe this?"

Guiding my hand to a rough spot- a pimpling of the paper, like Braille.

"Pinhole," I said.

"Right in the center of this building here- his office. And look at this leading out of the office." She ran her finger along a solid line that continued off the paper.

Due east. Out of his bungalow, through the neighboring buildings, past the border of the property, straight into the banyans.

"A tunnel?" I said.

"Or some kind of underground power cable," she said, flipping the sheet and examining the back. "This has to be it."

A circle had been drawn around the pinhole.

"A tunnel under his office," I said. "That explains the night I saw him go in there and turn the lights off. He went underground."

She nodded. "He's got a secret hiding place, and he's inviting us to see it."

She lifted Emma from her shoulder, talked soothingly to the spider, and stroked its belly. Eight limbs relaxed and stayed that way as the animal was returned to its home. Pausing a moment, Robin smiled.

"Nothing like new friends," I said.

"Careful or I'll take her home with us."

I folded the blueprints, tucked them in my waistband under my jacket, and we edged out of the insectarium.

The rain had lightened a bit and I could make out the shapes of shrubs and trees.

Nothing two-legged… then I heard something from behind and froze. Scraping- a tree branch rubbing against something.

We pressed ourselves against the wall and waited.

No human movement.

Moreland's bungalow was just a short walk under swaying trees. Off in the distance the main house was visible- lights on. Pam and Jo back?

We made a run for it.

The door was unlocked, probably from Pam's initial search. Or had Moreland left it that way for us?

Double-sided key lock. Once inside, I tried to bolt it with the key to my office and when that didn't fit, the new one. No go. We'd have to leave it open, too.

And the lights off.

The door to the lab was closed. Moreland's desk was clear as it had been this afternoon, except for a single shiny object.

His penlight.

Robin took it and we crouched behind the desk and, shielded by wood, spread the blueprints on the floor. She shined the light on the plans. The ink had run. Our hands were indigo.

"Yes," she said, "definitely from behind there." Pointing to the lab door.

She gave an uneasy smile.

"What is it?"

"All of a sudden I have visions of something disgusting on the other side."

"I was just there, and there was nothing but test tubes and food samples. Nutritional research."

"Or," she said, "he's feeding something."

The lab looked untouched. Keeping the penlight low, Robin walked around, pausing to consult the blueprints, then resuming.

Finally, she stopped in the center of the room and stared, puzzled, at a black-topped lab table with a cabinet below.

"Whatever's down there would have to start here."

A rack full of empty test tubes and an empty beaker sat on the counter. I placed the glassware on a nearby bench, then pushed the table. It didn't budge.

Wheels at each corner, but they weren't functional.

No sink, so no plumbing.

But attached, somehow, to the floor.

I opened the cabinet below as Robin aimed the penlight. Nothing but boxes of paper towels. Removing them revealed a metal rod running the height of the rear wall.

Springs, a handle.

I pulled down, encountered some resistance, then the rod lowered into place with a click.

The table shifted, rolled, and Robin was able to push it away easily.

Underneath was more concrete floor. A five-by-two rectangle. Etched. Deep seams.

A concrete trapdoor?

But no handle.

I stepped down on a corner of the rectangle, pressed and removed my foot, testing it. The slab rocked a fraction of an inch, then popped back into place, giving off a deep resonant sound, like a huge spinning top.

"Maybe it needs more weight," said Robin. "Let's do it together."

"No. If Moreland can move it by himself, I can, too. I don't want to trigger it too hard and have it slam up in our faces."

I toed another corner. A bit more give, the slab bounced back again.

Pressure on the third corner caused it to yield further and I caught a view of the slab's side, at least half a foot thick. More metal underneath- some kind of pulley system.

Moving to the fourth corner, I felt myself being lifted and jumped off.

The slab rocked hard, stopped, then began rotating, very slowly. Barely making a full arc before continuing until it was perpendicular with the floor.

It came to a halt, shaking the floor. I tried to move it; locked into place.

Rectangular opening, four feet by two.

Dark, but not black- distant illumination from below.

I got down on my belly and peered down. Concrete steps, similar to those in the insectarium. Thirteen again, but these were striped with green.

AstroTurf.

Leading to grayness.

"Guess this is why they call spies "moles,"' I said.

Robin's smile was a faint courtesy. She brushed wet curls away from her face and took a deep breath.

Stepped toward the opening.

I blocked her and went in first.

The tunnel was seven feet high and not much wider, tubular walls of reinforced concrete, trowel seams marked by steel studs. The light I'd seen from above came from a caged mining fixture wired to the ceiling forty paces in the distance.

The astroturf lay over dirt, ending at a railroad track that bisected the tube.

Narrow track with polished pine ties. Too small for a train. Probably designed for a handcar, but none was in sight.

No rain sounds. I touched the ground. The soil was hardpacked and dry. Perfect seal.

Rapping the walls produced no tone either. The concrete had to be yards thick.

I told Robin to wait and returned to the tunnel's mouth. The slab loomed like a gigantic stiff lip. From down here the lab was a black hole.

I climbed the stairs, tested the slab a second time. Just as immobile- set into place by a mass of gears and counterweights, responsive to a special series of pressures.

Probably a safety feature installed by the Japanese army to prevent crushed fingers or accidental imprisonment. Probably some way to close it safely from below, but I didn't know it and we had no choice but to leave the entry exposed.

Maybe the best thing was to get out of here and wait till morning.

I climbed back down to Robin and offered her the choice.

"We've come this far, Alex. Let's at least follow it for a while and see where it leads."

"If it extends past the property line, we'll be under the banyans. Land mines."

"If there are mines."

"You have doubts?" I said.

"If you wanted to hide something, what better way to discourage intruders than a rumor like that?"

"You want to test that hypothesis?"

"He's down here." She gazed into the tunnel. "He clearly wants us there, too. Why would he want to hurt us?"

"He wants me," I said. "He brought me over for this."

"Whatever, it's important to him. Look at all the precautions he took."

"Cryptic messages. Voices of wise ones… bugs- he's like a big kid playing games."

"Hide-and-seek," she said. "Maybe I'm way off but I don't think he's a bad man, Alex. Just a secretive one."

I thought of Moreland and Hoffman and their wives playing bridge on the terrace. Hoffman cheating. Moreland never letting on.

"All right," I said. "Let's play."

We walked along the track, passing under the glow of the caged light and slipping into darkness. A hundred paces later, the glint of an identical fixture came into view. Then another.

The monotony became pleasant- the tunnel was more pleasant than I'd imagined: warm, dry, silent. No bugs.

"What do you think it was, originally?" said Robin. "An escape route for the Japanese?"

"Or some kind of supply channel."

We reached the second light and were nearly out of its glow when we saw something against the wall.

Cardboard boxes. Scores of them, piled neatly in columns. Just like the case files in the storeroom.

Confidential files? Was this what Moreland wanted me to see?

I pulled down a box. The flaps were folded closed but unsealed.

Inside, zip-locked plastic bags.

Dried fruit and vegetables.

I tried another carton. More food.

A third contained pharmaceutical samples and bottles of pills- antibiotics, antifungals, vitamins, minerals, dietary supplements. Then bottles of something clear- tonic water. The antimalarial properties of quinine.

Another carton. More dried fruit. Gatorade.

"Dr. Bill's secret stash," I said. "He grows stuff in his garden, preserves it, and brings it down here. Maybe we're dealing with a survivalist. The question is, what's his Armageddon?"

Robin shook her head and fished out canned goods from another box. Beef stew, chicken and rice.

"So much for vegetarianism," I said.

She looked sad. "Maybe Armageddon's the destruction of the island. Could be he's planning to stay underground."

"Under the forest," I said. "Protected by those mines, real or phony. It's pretty nuts, but there are bunkers full of folks just like that all over the States. The problem is, they also tend toward hair-trigger paranoia. A lust for the big battle."

"That doesn't seem like Bill."

"Why? Because he says he despises weapons? Everything the man's said or done is suspect- including his altruism. Aruk imports food at two, three times the usual cost. Bill helps out with occasional handouts but stockpiles all this stuff for himself. If he's been planning to go under for a while, that would explain why he hasn't been more aggressive promoting business for the island. Maybe he's given up on Aruk- on reality. Maybe he's concentrating on creating his own little subterranean world. Came up with the idea after finding the blueprints somewhere in the house. Eventually, he discovered the tunnel: instant caveman."

She took something else out of the box. A foil packet with a white label.

" 'Freeze-Dried Combat Meal,' " she read aloud. " 'Segment B: reconstituted carrots, beets, peas, lima and string beans, soya protein'… then a whole bunch of vitamins… United States Navy issue… oh, boy."

"What?"

"The date."

Tiny numbers at the bottom of the label. February 1963.

"Sixty-three was his last year in the Navy," I said. "He bought the estate that year- he's been doing this for thirty years!"

"Poor man," she said.

"He's obviously quite content. Damned proud of what he's accomplished."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because now he wants to show it off."

Six more ceiling lights, two more large caches of food and medicine.

We kept walking, automatically, like soldiers, drained of further conjecture, track and ties slipping past hypnotically.

My watch said we'd been underground nearly half an hour, but it felt both longer and briefer.

Time's deceit.

Another caged bulb.

Then a patch of green just beyond.

Another AstroTurf strip.

Another flight of stairs, fifty yards ahead.

Thirteen steps up to a metal door.

No handles or locks. I pushed, expecting ponderous weight, another tricky leverage system. It opened so easily I had to stop myself from falling forward.

On the other side was an upsloping concrete ramp lit by a weak bulb.

We climbed till we came to yet another door.

Metal grillwork- radiating circles of iron crisscrossed by spokes. Beyond it total darkness.

I knocked and pushed but this one didn't give. Then my brain put the grill design in context.

A web- what had Moreland called webs-a beautiful deceit.

Enough.

I turned to head back down the ramp.

Saw the first door closing behind us, rushed to catch it and failed.

It slammed shut, refused to yield.

Trapped in the ramp.

Ensnared.

Moreland's thin face appeared in my head. Long, loose limbs, fleshy snout, pouchy eyes, loping walk- arachnid walk.

Not a camel or a flamingo.

Predators…

Robin put her hand to her mouth. I stopped breathing; panic became a tight necktie.

Then light appeared behind the web, letting in a draft of very cool air.

The same chill I'd felt coming over the walls from the banyan forest.

The webbed door swung open. I saw walls of hewn stone, then blackness.

A cave.

The choice was to stay there and risk another entrapment or step through and take our chances with whatever was on the other end.

I stepped through.

A hand settled lightly on my shoulder.

I spun around. "Damn you, Bill!"

But the eyes that stared back weren't Moreland's.

Dark slits- at least, the left one was. Its mate was a wide-open, milky-white crescent, drooping heavily, tugging at a ragged lid.

No iris. The white was shot through with capillaries.

The face around the orb was white, too.

The eyes lower than mine, set into an elliptical, neckless head that rested on meager, sloping shoulders.

Misshapen and hairless except for three patches of colorless down.

Ridges of skin in place of ears.

A mouth opened. Less than a dozen teeth, some of them no more than yellow buds. Framing them was a pouchlike, puckered aperture: no lower lip, the upper one thick, cracked, liverish- a smile? Why wasn't I screaming?

I smiled back. The hand so light on my shoulder… an inch of downy skin separated the mouth from a nose that was two black holes under a nub of pink-white flesh, twisted like a pig's tail.

Wens and scabs, keloid tracks, and crater scars danced across the face, a moonscape in closeup. A sharp smell fumed from the skin. Familiar smell… hospital corridors- antibiotic ointment.

The hand on my shoulder sat so delicately, I barely felt it.

I looked at it.

Four stumpy, broad-tipped fingers, the thumb clubbish and spatulate, no nail on the index finger. More of that soft, downy hair. Dimpled knuckles.

The wrist thin and frail, laced with baby-blue veins and scabbed heavily, disappearing into the cuff of a white shirt.

Clean, white oxford button-down.

Khaki trousers cinched tight around a thin waist, the cuffs rolled thick.

A man, I supposed… protruding from under the cuffs, brown loafers that looked new.

A boy-sized man- five feet tall if that, maybe eighty pounds.

"Hhh," he said. "Hhhii."

Whispery rasp. I'd heard voices like that before: burn victims, the larynx and vocal cords seared, learning to talk from the gut.

The pouch-mouth stayed open, as if struggling for speech. More medicinal smell- mouthwash. The single eye watched my face. The pouch twisted upward in what might have been a smile.

"Hi," I said.

The eye studied me some more. Blinked- winked? No eyebrows, but the skin above the sockets creased into deep dual crescents that simulated brows.

Neckless, chinless, that congealed-fat complexion. But soft… I thought of the baby octopus in the lagoon.

The hand slid off my shoulder.

The mouth closed and pouted- sad?

Had I done something wrong?

I tried smiling again.

The arm hung loosely.

Very loosely. An invertebrate grace.

Fingers curling in ways that normal fingers couldn't.

Serpentine- no, even a snake had more firmness.

White and flaccid-

Wormlike.