Crackpot Palace

by Jeffrey Ford

  In the hidden place where they keep John F. Kennedy’s “missing” brain, an underground warren of a hundred miles of crisscrossing tunnels and cavernous storerooms, there exists an eight-foot Plexiglas tube filled with chemically treated water the color of piss. Floating in it midway between top and bottom is a gray, five-and-a-half-foot misshapen body. The figure appears to have human attributes, but the face is erupted into a moonscape of huge cysts, and there are smaller bumps and warts everywhere on the skin. The staring eyes are bright orange; the hands and feet webbed and clawed with points of bone, not nail. It’s a female, with what appear to be human sex organs. The posture of the body is slightly bent and twisted at the hips. The left shoulder carries a huge upheaval of flesh. Her hair is sparse and green—long strands of gauzy seaweed. And then there are the fins on her wrists, by her ears, on her back like small wings, and a ridge of short spikes projecting from her vertebrae, gill slits on the neck just beneath the jawbone. A brass plaque affixed to the metal base of her container holds a twelve-digit number that’s her official title, but one of the MPs who guards the tunnels, a man of a poetic frame of mind and plenty of time to daydream, calls her Sirena, and that’s how she’s generally referred to among those who patrol that subterranean hive of secrets.

  The paperwork on this living curio, for the thing is not dead, but kept in a drug-induced coma, fills an entire wall of filing cabinets in the facility’s vast document repository. The drawers are crammed with the results of a million tests, reams of learned commentary, and the testimony of those who captured the creature. Stacked atop as high as the rocky ceiling sits a paper trail of what was and should be done in the name of obliterating all knowledge of her. Besides the president and the joint chiefs, few are privy to this information. It would take an intelligent person reading for a solid decade to finally get somewhere near the heart of the gray enigma, but these certain people I know have skills that allow them to always strike first at the heart.

  Sometime during the month of January 1975, while some of my friends’ friends were being investigated due to the furor over Watergate, a small, clandestine band of hand-picked, highly trained government operatives was sent to a remote mountain location in northern New York state near the Canadian border. Atop that mountain, referred to as Hag’s Peak in the official documents, there existed an abandoned development of houses that had originally been constructed a decade earlier as living quarters for the families of those workers who toiled at a highly classified research facility some fifty miles due south.

  The place, known as Chanticleer, was like a suburban community from Long Island—half-acre yards with manicured front lawns and split-level houses, a school, a playground, a post office, a movie theater, a small village of stores—physically torn up by the roots and transported to a vast meadow bordered by woods on the upper southern face of a mountain. At the center there was a helicopter pad big enough to accommodate three birds at once, transportation for the scientists’ commute to the lab four times a week. The entirety of Chanticleer was surrounded by a fifteen-foot brick wall with a band of electrified razor wire running along its top. It was said that to have been there on a normal day, though, after the helicopters had departed, was to walk the streets of some upper-middle-class American neighborhood, dogs barking, the sound of a lawn mower, kids playing.

  The whole thing was a tidy little covert setup built and funded by money surreptitiously funneled out of the Social Security pension fund. The research scientists, working on a project that some said had to do with time travel and others have told me was definitely a particle-beam weapon, simply knew too much. As an alternative to shooting them at the end of every workday, Chanticleer was conceived of and built as a way to accommodate decent lives for them and their families as they devoted their years to furthering the deadly power of those who run those who run the government.

  All well and good but for one tiny worm in the apple. In an effort to avoid any bill of sale and ensure the secret nature of the development, the land it was built on was purchased from a conglomerate friendly to those in power. You may have heard of it, National Product Inc. As it’s said in the business world, “NPI grows the food you eat, owns the trucks that move it, makes the refrigerator you store it in, the stove you cook it on, the fork you eat it with, the plate you eat it from, and the porcelain bowl you crap it into.” Unfortunately, they also ran Haulaway Technologies, the largest waste-disposal company in the free world, collecting, moving, and dumping the country’s garbage. When I say garbage, think big. It not only whisked away potato peels and coffee grounds but also the festering sins of the Cold War.

  From the mid to late fifties Haulaway hauled away hundreds of tons of nuclear waste and weapons-grade biological material. A lot of it was buried on the southern-facing slopes of Hag’s Peak, especially beneath a certain meadow bordered by woods. Blue steel barrels, a containment solution for a Norman Rockwell past, could never be expected to hold for long the fierce demons of America’s will to power. In mere years that glowing stuff left those barrels looking like lace and leeched into the soil. Haulaway executives were eventually informed of this. As a precaution they covered the meadow over with fresh dirt hauled in from a New Jersey landfill at the taxpayers’ expense and moved on to besmirch some other pristine site. Time passed. No one cared. You’ve heard of Love Canal, a disaster that would make the headlines a few years later? Love Canal, my friend, was a valentine compared to Chanticleer.

  So, on that cold night, in 1975, a fine snow falling across the mountainside, those operatives I mentioned earlier, dressed in Hazmat gear and brandishing Nod-X74s, short-barreled automatic weapons that fired a barrage of tranquilizer rounds, came to the wall that surrounded the top-secret community. There was no entrance, because when the place had closed down some years earlier any openings were bricked over. They blew the wall with plastic explosives.

  The team had been briefed as to the fact that they might encounter a “hostile entity” but were given no indication as to what or who this entity might be. That information was, as the government official told them, strictly on a need-to-know basis. The operatives felt they needed to know, so before the mission, their leader contacted certain people he knew who knew certain things and was told that the brass didn’t have a clue about the nature of the threat. What could be told was that at the end of the summer of ’74, two local deer hunters working the southern slope of Hag’s Peak were attacked and killed by what was generally believed by the public to be a bear. When the autopsy on their remains was completed, though, the coroner in Darton Mills, the largest small town close to the mountain, made a call to Washington, D.C., only hours before he disappeared from the face of the earth.

  The Hazmat gear they wore was no doubt hot and prohibitive of vision and movement, but they’d been warned not to remove it. What they saw through night vision goggles behind their visors reinforced that warning. They’d memorized the layout of the streets and locations of each residential, municipal, and commercial building, but nothing had prepared them for the sight of the riotous growth of vegetation that appeared to flourish—massive twisting roots and limbs, tentacles of vines hung with enormous fruit like pale deformed pumpkins—in the freezing mountain temperatures. I was told, “It was like a Mayan ruin covered with growth only it was really a suburban neighborhood.” Here’s how another of my contacts had put it: “Did you ever see Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, where the wicked queen casts a spell and these thorny vines burst out in all directions to cover the palace in a web?”

  With weapons slung over their backs and fifteen-inch survival knives in hand, they hacked their way through the tangle and found Freedom Street, the main thoroughfare, which was cracked and broken, a type of glowing flower sprouting in bunches from the fissures. Snow swirled around them as they advanced into the lonely heart of the place. The tranquilizer rounds tipped them to the fact that they were after some kind of animal. If the possible hostile had been known to be a human, they’d have defi
nitely been outfitted to kill.

  They turned onto Liberty Road, toward the school, making their way around and through a hedge of bramble to where the street was fairly clear. On one of the lawns there was a bicycle, laid down as if a kid had just dropped it. There was a lawn jockey, a ride-on mower, a covered swing, a tattered flag hanging outside a front door. At the school, they fanned out, each taking a hallway, and they passed room after room of empty desks, the vines having invaded from cracks in the floor and shattered windows. The blackboards were still filled with assignments and class notes. On one was written, in pink chalk, the phrase “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Books lay open, coats still hung in the closets, bag lunches with kids’ names lined the shelves. Two operatives met at the gym and stared into a gigantic box of roots, a thicket that reached above the basketball rims. Strange, brightly colored mice with feathered wings moved amid the mesh of branches.

  It’s believed she struck from behind while they stared in wonder, and there are those who interpreted that as a sign of intelligence. Others disagreed, but there was no question that she was fierce. Those bone nails were ostensibly claws, and the wounds found on the operatives’ bodies indicated she had great strength. A few minutes later, she killed another, ripping out his throat in one swipe, and attacked a fourth before the remaining two men could pump enough tranquilizer into her to put her down. From then on she would be imprisoned in sleep.

  None of the government’s top scientists knew what she was or where she’d come from. They brought in the alien specialists from Groom Lake because her gray coloring put some higher-up in mind of a pair of dead space beings the navy had pulled out of a craft that had crashed in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Madagascar. “You’ve got a different bag of lint here,” said one of the specialists. “From the DNA evidence, this looks homegrown.” Her DNA was, at base, human, but then outlandishly mutated. The reigning theory for a very long time was that some years after the community was evacuated a female vagrant had found a breach in the wall and entered Chanticleer. Recon teams that investigated after the creature’s capture did note two breaches in the wall—the one blown by the operatives and another where a huge pine had fallen across it, obliterating a five-foot section. So this vagrant moved in and lived amid the rapidly changing environment, herself rapidly changing. It was thought that she no doubt lived during the early part of her stay on canned foods left behind, and then, when her claws came in, she hunted deer in the surrounding woods. They’d found a bone heap of animal remains just outside the wall where it had crumbled beneath the fallen tree.

  If they could have nuked Chanticleer, they would have. Instead they decided to pump concrete over the closed wall and bury the place. Before that operation was to begin, though, they allowed a five-person team of scientists two weeks to study the new world that had sprung into being. Two weeks was barely enough time to scratch the surface, so the research party decided to spend the time taking as many samples as they could. Among the five who went into Chanticleer, one was a young botanist, Rabella Cayce. In the first few days of her stay within the walls, she took up the practice of climbing through the branches as a way to reach certain spots unattainable due to tangled barriers of roots. It was difficult going with the burden of the Hazmat suit, and she’d discovered a kind of large white squirrel that could be aggressive. More than once she had to use her Taser against them.

  One of my contacts met Ms. Cayce a few years later when she was on the run from those who’d sent her into Chanticleer. He’d infiltrated a small group who knew her story and were trying to help her, but that’s all I can say about how she’d come to him. The months of frantic escape, never staying in the same place two nights in a row, had left her drained, and when he told me about their meeting he said he could still recall the dark half circles beneath her vacant eyes. Her hair was long and frizzled and appeared as if it had begun to fall out. It was a shame, for, as he said, “I could tell she’d once been a good-looking woman.” On a beautiful fall evening, they sat on the darkened porch of his log cabin retreat at the edge of Lake Salamander, and she told him her story.

  On the third day that she was traversing the branch web that ensconced much of Chanticleer’s neighborhood, she came upon a spot where beneath her she saw a backyard uncluttered with roots or vines. She hung down from the canopy above it and let herself drop onto a concrete patio next to an in-ground pool. The water in the pool had gone black and was covered by the odd, perfectly round yellow leaves of the mutated branches. Those leaves were disturbed by a constant bubbling at the center of the watery rectangle. There were lawn chairs and a redwood picnic table with benches; a frayed umbrella sticking through its center. Lying on the grass, which had taken on the consistency of fur, next to the barbecue, she discovered what looked like a book. She picked it up and saw that the cover of it had patches of mold and a rash of barnacles. The pages were rippled with water damage, but as she flipped through them, she noticed that they were handwritten instead of typeset. What she had in her possession was a diary, and that diary told the woeful tale of the demise of Chanticleer.

  Over the remaining days of the two-week research stint, she’d read the thoughts and experiences of Henrietta Wilde, a wife of one of the researchers, a physicist, Dr. Mason Wilde, who’d been employed by the government to help engineer weapons of merciless destruction. Rabella never informed her superiors about the diary, although she was aware that her silence on the subject, if discovered, could mean her job. When she left Chanticleer, she snuck the book out in a sample case and eventually smuggled it away from the realm of government influence to her apartment in Washington, D.C. The reading of those pages, the plight of Henrietta Wilde, so affected her she felt it her mission to get word of the atrocity out to the public, to anyone who would listen. When she didn’t show up for work one day, they went looking for her. As they trailed her back and forth across the United States, hints of the existence of the book surfaced.

  The night after she stayed with my contact at the cabin on Salamander Lake, Rabella left before sunup in an old Honda Civic, whose license plate number he’d recorded. One of my contact’s contacts paid handsomely for that information and any hints she might have dropped as to where she was going. Eventually, I read online that her headless remains were discovered in a dry streambed on the northern boundary of the Mojave Desert. I have it from reliable sources that the diary was never recovered. So, as was expected, she was silenced, but not before she told the story of Henrietta Wilde, the same one that was told to me.

  Henrietta Wilde’s title in the parlance of the late sixties would have been “housewife.” She was twenty-six when she went to live at Chanticleer along with Mason, her husband, and their three-year-old son, Henry. It’s not known what she initially thought of their move to the slope of Hag’s Peak, for she didn’t start recording her life until well into her second year there, but by the time the diary picks up, in her first entry, she admits to being “bored stiff” and “losing her mind to the monotony.” Unlike most of the other wives in the neighborhood, she’d been to four years of liberal arts college and had a degree in literature. Upon graduation, she’d had ambitions to become a writer like the great Shirley Jackson, but after marriage and the birth of her son, she’d put those ideas to rest, convincing herself of their silliness.

  The long hours of the afternoon, while Henry napped, a seeming eternity before the helicopter would return with Mason, as she wrote, “made my soul itch.” She hated television, had already read all of the novels worth reading in Chanticleer’s tiny library, and couldn’t stand the company of the other wives, who spent an inordinate amount of time shopping in the small village for clothes and shoes and handbags with which to dress up and go nowhere. Their conversations were primarily about the plots of soap operas, the brilliance of their children, and how smart their husbands were. When drunk, they grew morose and talked about sex. To fight the long hours, she bought a blank diary one day. In her first entry, she wrote about the f
act that inserted between two pages of the book was a mimeographed reminder that anything written by one of the citizens of Chanticleer during their stay would need to be destroyed upon leaving.

  She’d loved her husband, but as the time went by and he became more deeply involved in the difficult work he was doing, he grew increasingly distant from her and their son. Henry was her one pleasure. In her fourth entry in the book, she wrote, “I feel like a prisoner here, but to see Henry’s eyes filled with the wonder of the world is a secondhand freedom I’d die without.” She spent the mornings and the time after naps with the child, pushing him in his stroller up and down the few streets of town, watching him at the playground, bobbing in the backyard pool, or reading to him, sitting on a blanket in the meadow out behind the post office where the cool mountain breezes swept down from the peak.

  When Henry started kindergarten the days became even longer and lonelier. To stave off madness, she started an exercise regimen of sit-ups, push-ups, jogging around the perimeter of the circular wall, and swimming laps. Every weekday afternoon, she’d arrive at the school at least fifteen minutes early and pace back and forth until Henry came running out. She never told Mason but it was around this time that she took up smoking. She’d sit at the picnic table, go through half a pack of cigarettes, and fill the pages of her diary. Two pages of the book, written at this time, were taken up with a plan (including a map) for escape. She wrote nothing to make one believe that she was being ironic, but she must have known it was impossible.

  In the middle of the following summer, two children from the neighborhood were diagnosed with leukemia. Henrietta reported that everyone used the same phrase in reference to the diagnosis—“a tragic coincidence.” When two more little girls displayed symptoms of the same disease in late fall, she knew it was no coincidence. Although she’d not spent time building any friendships among the other women to this point, she began to approach them one by one and whisper her theory to them. “It’s no fucking coincidence,” she said and she was surprised to find that each of them agreed with her. The shopping trips to the little village gave way to meetings, under the guise of tea parties, in a different house two afternoons a week.