The Lurkers Below

by Keith Robinson

  Just when he thought it would never answer, a familiar girl’s voice whispered, “Hello?”

  Liam almost dropped the phone. “Maddy? Is that you?”

  Chapter 11

  Ant watched the trees rushing past his window as the limousine cruised along the winding lane. Barton’s story was becoming more and more bizarre.

  “The police pounded on the door. I always kept the house bolted in case the police, taxmen, or even criminals came sniffing around, so I had a few more minutes to spare. I told Caleb we needed to leave this place behind, that we needed to escape. I asked if he wanted to play a game. Well, of course he did. He treated it like cops and robbers.” The hint of a smile crept across his face. “You see, Master Anthony, I always knew how to manipulate Caleb into doing things he wouldn’t necessarily be interested in otherwise. I made things into games, and I praised him every chance I got.”

  He went on to explain how he’d taken Caleb into the laundry room and asked if he could make a hole in the floor, a tunnel to escape through. Caleb had been delighted, because it was something he’d never been allowed to do before.

  “So he made a hole,” Barton said. “The floorboards just came loose. I pulled them out of the way, which itself was remarkable since they were supposed to be tongue-and-groove fitted. They came up a little too easily. Underneath was a roughly square hole through the subfloor and foundation. It led down into an elevator car.”

  “What?” Ant exclaimed, unable to contain himself.

  The man smiled. “Yes, I know, but bear with me, will you? You see, Caleb told me he’d always wanted to be a miner. I think he’d watched a TV show a few days before. Anyway, he got the idea of an elevator leading straight down to a mine far, far underground. So as we stood there in the laundry room with the police banging on the door, he closed his eyes, and I heard that whispering sound—the same sound I always hear when he creates something—and suddenly there it was, an old mining elevator beneath our feet. He remembered all the details from the TV show he’d watched.”

  “Wait, hold on a minute,” Ant said. “I don’t buy it. He remembered how to build an elevator? All those working parts, all that detail? He just remembered it all?”

  Barton tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he picked up speed on a straight stretch of road. “You’ve heard of regression by hypnosis, yes?”

  “Uh . . . sure.”

  “Let’s say a witness to a murder can’t remember anything useful about the crime. He could be put under hypnosis, and while in that relaxed state, he manages to recall details that had eluded him before. Tapping into the subconscious mind can be a very valuable tool. The conscious mind is a busy, bustling, noisy place, full of readily available information . . . but only the things you choose to remember, what you think of as the important stuff. How many stairs are in your house?”

  The question threw Ant for a loop. “What?”

  “It’s a classic Sherlock Holmes question: How many stairs are in your house? Come on, now. Think about the flight of stairs to your bedroom. You walk up and down those at least twice every single day. You’ve lived in that house all your life. That’s . . .”

  Barton drummed his fingers again, his lips moving soundlessly as he worked it out.

  In the end, he shrugged. “Well, it has to be at least six thousand times. Maybe ten thousand. Anyway, the point is, you go up and down every day, but you don’t know how many steps there are. You see, but you don’t observe.”

  “So?” Ant muttered.

  “So, if you were put under hypnosis and asked to recall how many steps there are, I’ll bet you could do it. Your subconscious mind is far more powerful than your conscious one. Every detail is stored there whether you know it or not. Everything you’ve ever seen and learned is right there. We just find it hard to access it.”

  “But Caleb can?” Ant guessed, seeing where Barton was going with this.

  “I don’t understand how, and nor does he, but he recreated that elevator perfectly—at least as far as the TV show permitted. He never saw the elevator motor system above, so he had no concept of how that worked or even that it existed. He created an elevator with fuzzy areas. It worked perfectly, but it really shouldn’t have. It was literally below the floor of the laundry room, and we dropped down through its ceiling. There were no cables, not even a motor room. If I’d pointed out the flaws in his logic, the elevator wouldn’t have worked.”

  Ant spent a long time digesting this, and he was glad Barton paused to let him. “Like a cartoon, then,” he said finally.

  “Exactly like that!” Barton exclaimed, and Ant looked at him in surprise. “Like Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, his favorite show. The coyote would run off a cliff and only start falling when he realized there was no ground under his feet.”

  Oh boy, Ant thought. He was conflicted. He wanted to believe Barton, probably did believe him on some level, but the man’s story just seemed too fantastic to be true. This fell way outside the realms of science. Allowances could be made for super-advanced alien technology; even Earth would have hover cars and laser guns one day, just like in the movies. But a boy that could conjure things out of thin air? Create tunnels and working elevators just by thinking really hard? That was magic, pure fantasy.

  “I worried that the police would follow us down,” Barton continued. “Caleb laughed, saying there was only one elevator. I said, ‘Yes, but they’ll know where we are, and they’ll follow us somehow.’ Caleb grew serious and pondered for a second, then smiled and said he’d put the loose floorboards back over the hole in the floor and glued them. I had to trust him, but I guess the police were utterly mystified by our disappearance. We’d literally been swallowed up by the floor. Meanwhile, the elevator descended for several minutes, which in elevator terms is a very long way indeed, even for old designs.”

  “So you’re saying that the massive hole in the ground back there is an elevator shaft?”

  Barton screwed up his nose. “No, not exactly. There was an elevator shaft there, but it couldn’t have been more than four feet wide when Caleb and I used it. Now it’s fifty feet across and circular. It’s been . . . widened.”

  Widened, Ant thought. Just like that.

  “I asked Caleb how deep we were going, and he didn’t know, but we arrived eventually. We stepped out into a huge tunnel heading downhill—square and neat, clearly manmade . . . except it wasn’t. Caleb had made it.”

  “Where did it lead?”

  “That’s what I wondered,” Barton said. “It was very dark, so he lit it up with gas lamps—the part leading downhill, anyway, where we were headed. The tunnel was nice and smooth, and we walked for a while before I asked him where it led. He hadn’t decided yet, but he suddenly smiled and asked if I wanted to ride. Before I could ask what he meant, we came across a couple of bicycles, one big enough for me. He took off laughing, and I had to hurry after him. We tore down that tunnel for—oh, I don’t know, many miles I should think. In the end I stopped him and said we’d be in the center of the planet before long, and that was when his eyes got all big and round.”

  Barton shook his head. Ant sensed his story was about to get even more unbelievable.

  “Caleb did his thing, and the whispering started. The lights just ahead suddenly went out. When I went to investigate, I stopped at the edge of the darkness. The tunnel now led into an immense cavern . . .”

  He paused again, and Ant squirmed impatiently. He appreciated that Barton wanted to give him time to absorb the story, but these breaks were beginning to get annoying. “And?” he demanded a little more abruptly than he’d intended.

  Barton didn’t seem to mind. “It took a while to figure it out because it was absolutely black. I could sense that this cavern was massive. I was standing at the edge of a cliff. The tunnel we’d cycled down emerged from the cliff face, and there was a sheer drop below. I asked him what this place was, and he said it was a big, round cave.”

  “Oh—like a sphere?” Ant said
, caught up in the fantasy of it. He still couldn’t bring himself to truly believe it, but he figured Barton had a point to all this.

  “Exactly like a sphere. I asked Caleb to give us some light. ‘Light the whole place up so I can see,’ I told him. And he did. It was blinding. Took a minute to stop squinting through my fingers.”

  Ant found that his heart was thudding. “What did you see?”

  “What did I see?” Barton murmured, drumming his fingers again. “Imagine a completely spherical cavern with smooth walls all around. Imagine that it’s three miles across.”

  “Three miles?”

  “Between the elevator shaft and the downward sloping tunnel, we must have descended at least a mile and a half. This place, this spherical inner world, had to be sitting right below the surface. Imagine a miniature sun at its center, just hanging there.” He turned to Ant with a wide-eyed look of awe. “It looks the same size as the sun as we see it in the sky, which is to say it’s the size of a coin held in front of your face . . . but since this cavern is three miles across, and the sun is suspended in the center, that means this ball of fire is only about one and a half miles away. So it’s tiny compared to the real sun, but it’s still a huge ball of fire. And it’s bright enough that you can’t look at it directly.”

  Ant said nothing.

  “Caleb stepped out of the tunnel before I could stop him. But instead of falling down the rounded cliff face, he . . . he kind of stood on it. He stood there horizontally, at right angles to me. And he just started walking. I leaned out to watch him in amazement, and as I did so, I felt strange, like my personal gravity had altered. Caleb laughed at me and said it’s okay, we can walk around the inside of his new world, even upside down at the top.”

  “He created gravity?”

  “I don’t know where he learned about it. I don’t think he consciously grasped the concept, but he must have learned about it on TV in some form, something that clicked in his mind so he had a basic understanding of it.”

  “He created an underground inside-out world,” Ant whispered.

  Barton nodded. “Yes, and one that Caleb would spend the next few months filling with grassy hills and fields, a river or two, even a waterfall. This was a private world that nobody could ever reach, where Caleb could go wild with his imagination, a place he would be safe. We built houses together, an entire village, and started populating them with people. Not real people, you understand, but facsimiles, rather like androids. I could finally let Caleb run around unsupervised, teach him how to interact with people without endangering anyone, let him make mistakes and learn from the consequences, prepare him for the real world. Pretty amazing, I think you’ll agree?”

  “Yeah. Except . . . I don’t believe a word of it.”

  “Ah,” the chauffeur said with a half-smile, “but you will, Master Anthony, you will. We’ll be there soon.”

  The winding road stretched ahead. Barton had the limo’s headlights on full beams to better anticipate the sharp bends.

  “Where are we going?” Ant muttered.

  Chapter 12

  Liam distinctly heard Madison gasp on the other end of the phone.

  Then, tentatively, she whispered, “Where are you, Liam? Wait, never mind. Head for the waterfall, and I’ll meet you there.”

  “What waterfall? What are you talking about?”

  “The waterfall.” Her voice was low and urgent. “On the hill near the forest. Just look up and you’ll see it. Meet me there, okay? Hurry. Watch out for Caleb. He’s dangerous.”

  “Why do I need to—” Liam started to ask, but there was a click and the line went dead. He stared in amazement at the earpiece again, then slammed the receiver into its cradle. “This place is nuts,” he said simply. “Even Maddy’s caught the crazy bug.”

  But the name Caleb gave him pause. Was Barton’s long-lost son here?

  Liam ground his teeth. A few things seemed a little clearer now. Caleb was, according to Barton, a very special and powerful boy. His involvement in this place remained a mystery, but there had to be a connection. Based on Madison’s whispered message, she’d already met him.

  So not a Government operation, then. Not a secret underground experiment. Just Caleb.

  Before Liam left the phone booth, he attempted to call home. It didn’t work without coins, so he ended up banging the receiver hard on the glass and then letting it drop so it dangled helplessly on its cord.

  Leaning against the glass, he took a few deep breaths, then wrinkled his nose with disgust. The telephone booth really did smell like a restroom. He pushed open the door and stepped outside. All was quiet. He briefly wondered if the woman with the grocery basket was still in Buns In The Oven, then decided he didn’t care. She was as crazy as the Chinese woman trying to sell him fish and chips, and the old man insisting that he wasn’t interested in door-to-door salesmen.

  Liam turned and looked upward. There was plenty of forest up there, and a long line of grassy hills. Madison had mentioned a waterfall, but he couldn’t see any such—

  Oh!

  He stared hard. There it was. One of the hills ended at a rocky cliff, and a fine mist of water poured off its edge into a small pond below. From this distance, the waterfall looked like a solid white sculpture, unmoving. It looked pretty big, though, judging by the tiny trees that stood nearby. “The waterfall,” he murmured.

  He had no idea how far away it was or how long it would take to get there, and he wasn’t sure he relished the idea of straying so far from the tunnel from which he’d emerged. He glanced down the street and across the rooftops, seeking the three trees and blackened stump. Between them lay the entrance to his tunnel. That particular area was pretty ugly, an expanse of scrubland compared to the lush green landscape everywhere else.

  Liam chewed his lip. The tunnel was his only way home, yet as he stood looking across the rooftops, he came to the conclusion he didn’t relish going back into that awful darkness.

  The waterfall became his primary focus, at least for a while. And Madison.

  With a sigh, Liam set off. He could tell at a glance that the road leading out of the village would take him where he needed to go. He’d pass that abandoned car on the side of the road. Then he could either continue on the road around a ridiculous number of hairpin bends, or leave the road early, cut through a small section of forest, and follow the hills to the cliff where the waterfall flowed. How long would it take? An hour or two? Longer?

  As he padded along the road, unconsciously following the white lines in the center, he wondered why on earth Madison had suggested meeting in such an odd place. Where exactly had she been at the time of the call? Why had she answered the phone at all when he’d been trying to call the police?

  Questions, questions.

  He wondered what time it was. The fake sun over his head offered no clue as to whether it was morning or noon. There were no street lamps anywhere outside the village that he could see, and he guessed it would get pretty dark at night across the fields and in the forests—

  He checked himself. Night? This place had no sky, just a glaring sun in the center. How could it get dark? The sun was unable to sink below the horizon because there was no horizon.

  It was pointless trying to think about it. He concentrated on walking, one foot after another. The faint breeze barely moved the long grass. The place was pretty, he had to admit—a picturesque landscape of rolling green countryside. It could be worse. Still, there was something surreal about the grass and bushes . . .

  It took him a while to put his finger on it, but it was blindingly obvious once he did. It was all too perfect, too uniform. At first glance the long grass seemed wild, part of nature, but now he realized it was all the same length, the exact same shade of green, not a single blade out of place and no weeds to be found. Real grass wasn’t that perfect. Real fields had high and low spots, grass of varying shades, weeds, dandelions, daisies . . . and insects.

  Liam paused. It was true—there were no in
sects here. That was why it was so unnaturally quiet. There were no birds either as far as he could tell. No wildlife at all.

  He continued walking. Even the road was perfect. The paved surface was dark and unmarked, not a pothole or crack in sight. The white lines were neatly painted—too neatly. Everything in this place was fake.

  It occurred to him that the three people he’d met so far were also fake. He didn’t know how that could be, but he knew in his gut he was right.

  Robots.

  The idea hit him like a thunderbolt, and his mind went into overdrive. He’d seen robots before, and had even been one for a while, but these were different. These were androids, extremely realistic human facsimiles with simple programming to make them act like ordinary people. The question was whether Caleb had created them. And what about this crazy inside-out world?

  He drifted back to the secret Government base idea. Yes, this was a Government operation, an experiment of some kind, and Caleb was part of it. Scientists had found out about his superpower, whatever it was, and were using him somehow. Perhaps he could create wormholes and nab technology from other worlds. If so, America might be far more advanced than it had any right to be.

  Maybe scientists were testing lifelike humanoid robots and needed to place them in a realistic environment. That was what the village was for. Heck, that was what this entire world was for. The robots needed to learn how to interact with each other, how to live in a human environment. Maybe the Government planned to release androids into the real world aboveground, probably in foreign countries where they would walk among the cities, pretend to be real people, perhaps replace important officials and politicians . . .

  Excited by his new theory, Liam was busy staring at the ground when the entire world plunged into total darkness.