The Forbidden Zone

by Whitley Strieber

  "Nate, I want you to investigate that root cellar over on the terBroeck place."

  "Where we found Bob? I took a look around there. It's nothing much. An old root cellar built over an even older mine shaft."

  "How did he come out of it? Where did he come from?"

  "Look, I'm gonna tell you the same thing I told that Gazette lady—"

  "Ellen Maas?" Loi asked.

  "Her. He didn't come out of the thing, he was going in."

  "You know that?" Brian asked.

  "Well, it's obvious. Where would he be coming from, a mine that's been abandoned for two hundred years or more? I don't think so."

  "The presence of that mine could explain the screaming on the mound. That's reason enough to investigate right there. Maybe somebody got themselves trapped in there."

  Nate sighed. "We did that two days ago. You know what we found in that mine? A shoe. A button shoe, in fact, with a big cut right down its side. Damn thing was probably a hundred years old."

  "You might have a dead body back in there somewhere."

  Nate's eyes narrowed. "Yeah, Brian, maybe we were just too damn dumb to find it."

  "I didn't mean it that way, Nate. I only meant that a mine like that's a honeycomb."

  "Well, we searched every inch. I guess your bugs ate your dead body."

  Brian opened his mouth, closed it without speaking.

  Nate went on. "The Gazette lady told me all about them. How they got in her—between her legs—excuse me, Loi. For God's sake, Brian, I think you'd better forget about these bugs. The wasps are heavy whenever we have a humid summer."

  "Ellen Maas is a smart woman," Loi said. "She didn't lie to you."

  Brian glanced at her. His wife was softening to Ellen.

  "I wasn't implying that," Nate said. "But from what I hear around town, the Gazette's on pretty shaky ground. If this was a really sensational story, she could sell it to other papers, bring in some dough."

  "That isn't her style," Brian said. "She's very straightforward."

  Loi gave him a sharp look, then slipped her hand into his.

  "Look, I don't begrudge her the story. But she's gone a little bananas about it. At least, that's my impression. I don't know if you're friendly, or what."

  "She's a levelheaded woman," Loi replied, much to Brian's surprise. "If she tells you something, you've got to think it's true."

  "You'd have to show us some evidence."

  Brian broke the silence that followed. "There's something out there, Nate. No doubt it's entirely explainable. But whatever it is, one person was roughed up by these things and another one's been hurt pretty bad. Others may have been killed."

  "Again, I have to see something. I mean, the mound area is clean. That hole the things supposedly came out of—clean. So what do you want me to do, send up smoke signals? Rattle beads?"

  Nate's hands were tied, and there was no use arguing. Brian got up to leave.

  Back in the truck, he made a decision. He had to face his old life, at least enough to return to the physics building and see what in the world was being done in his facility.

  "You are feeling OK with this?" Loi asked as they reached Ludlum University's tree-shaded gate.

  "Not really. But it has to be done."

  He guided the truck through the gate and up the winding street that led around the main building and curved past the physics building behind it.

  The old Gothic castle was as forbidding as ever.

  Loi said nothing as they went toward the building, but her eyes were big, taking in everything.

  "Lovely, isn't it?"

  "It's so big."

  "Not actually. We needed more space three years ago. It must be bursting at the seams by now."

  He took her up the herringbone-patterned brick walk, between the familiar rows of flowers.

  Bill Merriman was at the proctor's desk in the central hall. He looked up in surprise as Brian came forward, then his face erupted in a smile. He got to his feet, his big glasses glistening in the sunlight that was streaming in the door.

  "I don't believe it, Dr. Kelly!" Merriman's voice thundered like a foghorn.

  "Hi, Bill. Bill, I'd like you to meet Mrs. Kelly."

  There was just the slightest hesitation, as Bill quietly acknowledged the passing of a beloved friend. Then the smile resurfaced. "I'm so pleased to meet you, Mrs. Kelly. I just can't tell you how pleased I am." He pumped Loi's hand until she began to vibrate. Then he stopped, gave Brian a sly, twinkling look. "Am I the last to know?"

  "What?"

  "Are you coming back with us, Doctor?"

  "Bill, I'd just like to take a walk through, have a look at my old facility."

  "Well, I suppose you can do that. It's off clearance, so I don't have to follow you around with a gun." He chuckled. "There's no classified work being done here now, not since you left."

  "None?"

  He shook his head.

  "You're sure it's OK for me to go in?"

  "Oh, absolutely. That'd be Dr. Robinson's lab now."

  "Active?"

  "Under construction until the fall term begins. But there's not much of your stuff left. You know, when the funding went—"

  "I know, my immortality went with it."

  Bill laughed. "I wouldn't say that, Doctor."

  Loi looked like a small child, peering up at the foyer's faded grandeur. Before them a wide staircase soared up to a wall of stained-glass windows depicting the achievements of practical physics circa 1897, the year the building was completed. A blast furnace belched fire, electric lighting dotted a cityscape, a locomotive came roaring out of a tunnel.

  "I'm afraid we descend into the Stygian depths," Brian said as he led her around the staircase to the rickety iron steps that led to the basement labs. "In the old days there was nobody in the basement but us trolls."

  He had been trying to push the memories of Mary aside, but the smell coming up from the basement brought them flooding in. That familiar odor of slightly damp concrete—he hadn't recalled that until just this moment. He'd smelled it a thousand times through their life together, working down here.

  Behind him Loi negotiated the steps with exaggerated care. As best he could, he helped her down the thirty feet. The basement was deep, its ceilings high. Originally, it had been a dormitory of some sort. It must have been a depressing place to live.

  Brian's big steel door now had ROBINSON stenciled on it in black, but it was still possible to see where the KELLY & KELLY plate had been—brass, bought at the Door Store in Albany.

  Brian opened the door, reached in and turned on the lights. As they always had, they glared down out of cheerless metal gratings. Brian looked up, and when he did his blood almost stopped in his body: the red tinsel they'd hung as a joke during the 1987 departmental Christmas party was still there.

  "All right," he said, looking around the room, "let's see what's going on in here."

  "This was your lab?"

  "This was our lab." He pointed to a wall now covered by shelving. "Our control console was over there." The steel hatch in the floor near it looked much the same. "The waveguide was underneath."

  "What is that?"

  "An esoteric particle generator—or rather, detector. Although detection and generation would have arguably been the same event, in this case."

  "I don't understand that."

  "It was my main piece of equipment. The barrel of my rifle."

  "The barrel isn't the most important part of a rifle. That's the firing chamber."

  "Oh, OK. Then it was my firing chamber."

  The work being done in here now clearly had nothing to do with particle physics. When he opened the hatch, he was going to find a ruined waveguide, blue pipe and all. "The service facility is just under the floor, and the device itself eighty feet farther down."

  He went over to the hatch, which was partially occupied by the leg of a chair. "We used to call this place the forbidden zone."

  "Because it was se
cret?"

  "Because a forbidden zone is an area near a very powerful object that you can never escape, once you enter it. In a forbidden zone the laws of physics become deranged, everything changes, the world is turned inside out. You reach a point where time runs backward and you end up forever remembering that you've been destroyed, but never actually dying. That's the paradox of a forbidden zone."

  Loi had twined her arm in his. "Step back," he said, "I'm gonna open the hatch."

  "Is there danger?"

  "It's just a ruin, it seems."

  He lifted the ring, pulled. The hatch was sheet steel, but not particularly heavy. Disuse made it creak, but it came up easily. An odor rose, of mildew and dust tinged with sewage.

  The service facility was pitch-dark. All he could see were the first two rungs of the ladder that led ten feet to its floor. It was here that he and Mary had gone to adjust the polarity of the waveguide, or aim it. The guide had to be absolutely straight or there would be dropoff when it was activated.

  "Be careful, Brian!"

  "It's OK, I know the terrain like the back of my hand." He descended the ladder and reached for the light switch. He flipped it, and the fluorescents flickered on. Two of them did, anyway. In the old days, they'd been able to flood the place until it was as bright as the surface of Death Valley on a sunny day. A good bit of their work involved extremely fine wires, which were always getting lost. They manipulated these wires with tiny padded tweezers called picks.

  He had not expected the place to have been stripped to the bare walls. Every single piece of equipment had been removed, even the conduit that had housed the cables leading to the waveguide.

  Most extraordinary, the foot of the guide was gone. In its place was nothing but the original well, now empty of the blue tubing that had housed the guide and its supporting cables.

  Brian looked into the well. About ten feet down he saw concrete, and embedded in that concrete, the heads of ten massive bolts. "It's been sealed!"

  "Brian, are you OK?"

  He backed out of the hole. "I'm OK, I'm fine. But the guide— everything's been ripped out. And it's been sealed." He returned to the ladder, climbed up, closed the hatch. "Sealed like an atomic containment."

  Her hands drifted to her belly. "There's radiation?"

  "No, no. Our work didn't involve radiation. High-energy plasmas were used in the waveguide, but there was no radioactivity."

  Brian stared at the closed hatch, confused—and for a moment, horrified—by a glow emanating from around its edges.

  Again he opened it—and went back down to turn out the lights.

  "You won't stay down there?"

  "No." He climbed out.

  She wrinkled her nose. "That place stinks, Brian."

  "There must be some sort of mildew in the walls. Maybe down in the well."

  "It stinks of the demon."

  3.

  He went upstairs. "Bill, where's my waveguide?" "They took it out about a year ago." "Who took it?"

  Bill only shook his head.

  "Don't tell me it's still classified."

  Bill's face was reddening; it was obvious that he knew more than he could say, and he was extremely uncomfortable with this. When his beeper went off, he lunged with relief for the phone. "Excuse me," he said, dialing. He spoke earnestly into the phone. "This is Bill Merriman of the Physics Department. May I help you?"

  Brian did not want to embarrass him further, and he knew there was no point in pressing the man. Merriman would never divulge a secret. "Thanks for all your help, Bill."

  Bill cupped his hand over the receiver. "I wish I could do more, Doctor. It's not a day passes that somebody doesn't mention you—" He did not finish the sentence.

  "You mean my work is still discussed?"

  Bill shook his head, went back to his call. Brian could see that he wasn't going to get anything more.

  When she was finally sitting in the truck again, Loi sighed with relief. "I am tired of carrying you," she said to her stomach. "You must come soon, my baby Brian Kelly."

  Brian drove almost blindly. His facility hadn't been abandoned, it had been taken. And those bolts—dear heaven, what did they mean? Why would they see the empty well as so dangerous that they had to sink a million-dollar containment vessel to seal it off?

  "We are not going home," Loi said as they passed the Northway exit to Route 303.

  "Not just yet."

  "Brian, I must go to the bathroom."

  Brian felt urgently compelled to go back to the spot where Bob had disappeared. The state police had searched it thoroughly, but not for things like insect legs and bits of broken wing, things that would prove something to a scientist.

  It wasn't hard to find the spot. Locally, it was a famous place, where the highway came down off the high ridge of the Jumpers into the Cuyamora valley. From where Bob's truck had stopped you could see twenty miles and more on a clear day.

  He pulled over onto the shoulder. "This is where it happened," he said.

  "I don't want to be here." Her voice was tight and high.

  "I just need to take a look around."

  She folded her arms. "Please hurry, then. This is a place of misfortune. Not a good place to bring an unborn child."

  He'd never encountered anybody before for whom superstition was fact, and had no real idea of how to deal with his wife.

  He got out of the truck.

  Flooded with summer sun, this certainly seemed an ordinary enough place.

  "Brian, I must pee now."

  "You can go over there." He pointed to a clump of bushes.

  She glared at him. Angry but helpless, she moved off into the brush that bordered the shoulder. In a moment the forest had swallowed her.

  He walked up and down, looking for some critical fragment. He and Bob had fought the insects fiercely. They must have broken a few of them, there must be some remains.

  Soon he came to the place where they'd seen the hole, and noticed that the gravel here had a light, friable quality. It looked stony, but would crumble between your fingers. Clay, really, that was all it was. Nothing unusual about that, though. He couldn't bring the authorities out here and show them a little clay in a road shoulder otherwise composed of gravel.

  The sun bore down on his neck, white clouds drifted lazily in the late-morning sky. From far off came a deep mutter—thunder back in the mountains. Day after still, quiet day the storms had been building back in there, and at night they marched forth like a discontented army.

  He could see the thunderheads already bulging upward toward the stratosphere, a wall of mysterious caves and ranges.

  Then he turned his attention to the ground.

  On his hands and knees, he crawled slowly along, examining every detail. Bits of tar, stones and clay presented themselves, along with dandelions, teasel and other weedy plants, but nothing that seemed in the least unusual.

  He extended his search back away from the gravel, into the cut part of the shoulder. There were slow grasshoppers grinding in the thick air, and quaking aspen rattling at the edge of the woods.

  Another, softer sound penetrated Brian's consciousness only slowly. Without quite realizing why, he paused in his work. He found himself watching the aspens. Behind them was a thick stand of scrubby white pine, then the taller forest.

  He began to listen, gradually becoming aware that he was hearing somebody breathing.

  "Loi?"

  No answer.

  He peered into the forest, but could see only leaves and close-ranked pines. "Loi?"

  Far off, a car was droning closer, its engine straining.

  He went toward the woods. How long had she been in there, how far back had she gone? "Loi!"

  The car screamed past so fast Brian couldn't tell the make.

  In the silence that followed, the breathing became more distinct, and Brian realized that it wasn't Loi, couldn't be. This sounded like some kind of machine.

  He heard a rattling sound, almost a sizz
le, as if an electrical circuit was sparking.

  Without wasting another moment, he went tearing into the woods, calling her at the top of his lungs. His voice shattered against the dim forest silence. His own crashing blotted out any other sound. "Loi, Loi!"

  "Brian, yes!" She came rushing out from behind a tree, still pulling on her floppy maternity pants.

  He grabbed her, threw his arms around her, kissed her hard. "Oh, God, I thought—" He stopped, fought for control. "I don't know what I thought."

  "You scared me yelling like that."

  "You were gone for so long. And I heard—sh!"

  It was still there, only faster. And louder—it was getting louder. The rhythmic breathing was big, the crackling was sharp and steady.

  They ran, both of them, ran headlong and jumped in the truck. Frantically they rolled up the windows and locked them. Then he started the engine and hit the gas, turning around in a flurry of dust and gravel.

  When he looked back, he thought he saw what might have been a thick, black cable emerging from the grass onto the gravel shoulder. But he couldn't be certain, and he didn't linger.

  "What do you think it was, Brian?"

  He shook his head.

  "It was horrible!"

  He was beginning to feel the awful desperation of a child whose innocent play has unaccountably set the house afire.

  The material world was very different from its appearance, very much less stable, he thought.

  —There are an infinite number of possible universes. Reality appears as it does because of the way we look at it.

  —Communication with past and future is happening all the time, and we know it. But we can't talk about it because we don't have the right verb tenses.

  —The river of time runs between banks of chaos.

  What hath God wrought? Or you, Brian Kelly? "What have I done?"

  "You?"

  "I think maybe so."

  The sound of his own words reverberated in the jittering cab.

  "I don't understand you."

  There are messages everywhere, messages from other worlds. That breathing—one, two, one, two—perfectly timed. The insects lined up along the window, as if they knew in advance that he would open it.

  The brain is a quantum machine, filtering reality out of chaos. Rockets screaming in the sky, bombs sailing, children playing, cats screaming in the night—