Meanwhile in the World where Kennedy Survived

by Lacey Ann Carrigan

  Chapter Twenty

  At a Tulsa, Oklahoma children’s hospital, thirteen-year old Ronnie Lewandowski lay in a coma. Three weeks before he had ridden his moped, which he had bought through money earned over two summers, very fast on a busy street. He turned a corner at a high speed and crashed head-on into an oncoming car. The front wheel of the moped had caught under the car’s grille and front bumper, the force from the sudden, jarring stop catapulting him skyward. He rolled off the top of a pickup truck cab and fell to the pavement, his left shoulder hitting first, his skull following.

  He was not wearing a helmet.

  He lay on the hospital bed in the Intensive Care unit, eyes slightly open, still and calm. A ventilator helped him to breathe. Casts held his shoulder and right leg, which had shattered on impact. Cardiac monitors showed that his heart was beating at a steady, healthy rhythm.

  Ronald’s mother stayed with him continually, sometimes sleeping over on a cot the hospital provided, while her husband would only be able to visit after a long day’s work at the plant. Alma Lewandowski held tightly onto a handkerchief, which she would often cry into. “The doctors say that there is brain activity,” she said to her husband, looking at him out of glazed, red eyes and a washed-out, pale face, her normally neat honey blond hair disheveled.

  George, her husband curled an arm around her and pulled her in close to him for an instant. The brief, simple gesture never failed to calm her. “Then there’s hope, right?” he said, voice gravelly from a cigarette habit he’d picked up while overseas during World War II. They looked down at their son, who seemed as innocent as a newborn.

  “G, what are we going to do?” Alma said, in a voice that creaked and crackled with the exhaustion of leftover, wracking sobs.

  He could only sigh. They stood there for what could have been an hour or just fifteen minutes. When Alma lifted her head from his shoulder she saw a violet dusk sky outside the window. Moments later a nurse appeared. This one seemed more mature and self-assured than the other caregivers. She was about average height and sturdily built with a calm yet intense demeanor that had probably seen more than its share of crises in a nursing career that may have spanned a couple of decades. The nurse glided to Ronald’s bedside and in fluid motions checked his temperature and pulse and listened to his heart. She blithely acknowledged Alma and George.

  To Alma, the nurse seemed efficient, yet approachable. She continued on, jotting notes onto a chart, inspecting Ronald’s tubing and the monitor sensors while his mother searched for the appropriate question. “Is there anything at all we can do for him?”

  The nurse, whose tag read “Diane” glanced down at her patient and then looked at his parents. “Well, he knows you’re here,” she said. “Go ahead and talk to him.”

  “Talk to him?” Alma was incredulous. She had assumed that Ronald was unconscious, asleep.

  “Sure,” Diane went on. “He can hear you. He can understand you. Tell him anything you would tell him if he were wide awake and sitting up.”

  George seemed suddenly sheepish to Alma, the way he often did at emotionally charged times. Such as the time he proposed to her while they drove home from a VFW dance in 1949. “Well, I’d feel kind of silly just talking to him, if he can’t answer me,” he said, softly.

  The nurse smiled. “Just a word here or there,” she said. She glanced around the room and noticed a television on its perch above them, in the corner. “Does he have a favorite TV show? You can turn on the television and he might be able to enjoy it.”

  George and Alma looked at each other again. “What shows does he watch?” he asked. “Seems like he likes that one with the monster family.”

  “The Munsters?” Alma said. “I think they took that one off the air.”

  George strode toward the television, searching for an “on” button or knob. “Hell, let’s turn it on anyway. If he’s awake and understanding things like this nurse says then maybe he’s getting bored to death if nothing else.”

  The second the words escaped from George’s mouth he winced, his skin turning red around his temples. Alma’s heart had skipped a beat and she instinctively clutched at her chest, gasping. Diana said “There’s a remote switch at the end of a cable on Ronald’s bed. That’s how you turn on the TV.” She reached for it and plunged the button down, the picture on the color set rapidly materializing. Within a few moments, the sound of a commercial jingle filled the room.

  When the nurse left, Alma felt grateful for the diversion of the television show. “George, let’s sit down,” she said and they both found institutional vinyl stuffed chairs and slid them across the linoleum toward Ronald’s bed. Alma reached for her son’s hand and held it as the opening credits flashed across the screen for a show entitled “Galaxian.”

  George wrinkled his nose while gazing up at the images. A narrator with an exaggeratedly enthusiastic voice recanted the events of the previous week’s show while excerpts of it played out on the screen. To Alma it looked like a bunch of grown men in identical bright red knit shirts in some type of cops and robbers game that took place in outer space. There was a beautiful woman in a skintight tiger-striped costume who glowered down at them from a throne. “These costumes on these shows are getting kind of racy,” she said. “That looks like it’s painted on her.”

  “I know this one,” George said. “This is the show that don’t make no sense. Just those guys blasting off here and there, running around all over the place, always getting in trouble or something.”

  “See what else is on,” Alma said.

  George pressed the button on the remote switch and discovered that “Bonanza” was playing on the other station while the third played a dry-looking news program about patients in mental hospitals. “Well, what do you think Ronnie likes better? Cowboys or astronauts?”

  “Put that space show back on,” Alma said. “The music is livelier. Maybe he’ll be able to hear it better.”

  George complied, and after the opening credits of “Galaxian” faded, a commercial about a furniture spot remover appeared. Alma glanced down at her son’s calm, peaceful face. For an instant she thought she could see one of his eyelids twitch. She leaned forward to examine him more closely. Her husband asked “What’s the matter, honey?”

  After that her son lay completely still. Alma concluded that she must have imagined it in her desperation to bring Ronald back around. “Nothing,” she said. “I thought I saw him twitch, but I must have just been imagining it.” She settled back into her chair for the beginning of “Galaxian.”

  The intense brunette woman with the costume cat ears was sitting at a conference table with a group of strange alien creatures and two of the Earth men wearing bright red knit shirts. “That’s Jacy Rayner,” George said. “Heard some of the younger guys at the plant talking about her, all ga-ga like.”

  Unknown to both of them, Alma’s prayers were about to be answered. Jacy Rayner, as Empress Tigra, was about to get through to their son. This is how it happened:

  Ronnie woke up. The first thing he was aware of was that he was sitting on his haunches. If he had been sleeping, he thought, he should have felt groggy or had problems focusing his vision at first. Yet he could see as clearly as if he had been awake for hours. He saw sand and pebbles in the bright sun. Where was he? The last he knew he had been on his moped rounding a corner, but that seemed as if it had happened days, weeks ago.

  When he stood and raised his head to survey his surroundings he realized that he was not at home. Tulsa was flat, with trees and farmland to go with ponds and rivers. He found himself in a bright, barren land with mountain ranges in the distance with glassy, craggy peaks. Most of the ground beneath him was covered by the same sandy, pebbly soil on which he stood but strangely his line of sight was broken up by strange forms of vegetation. There were thatches of spiny turf which may have been a type of grass except it was in the strangest color he had ever seen: lavender.

  He saw trees also, but they were quite different fro
m anything he had ever seen at home or even during the time he had driven out west with his family to see the Sequoias in California. They were short, only about ten feet high at the tallest, and the tree trunks glistened like snakeskin. The trunks were usually about the thickness of a telephone pole and complex networks of branches and twigs would fan out from them. The branches carried large iridescent leaves which would twinkle and glisten. A small breeze would rustle them, revealing silvery greens, muted pinks, and red vein like threads.

  Ronnie was on a hillside and in the valley below, about a hundred yards away a crystalline stream babbled. He had never seen water that clean before, outside of a pool. He could see rocky prominences below the surface which reminded him of an underwater river that ran in caverns he’d visited with his parents when they went to St. Louis. How did he get here? He was reminded of the scene in “The Wizard of Oz,” when Dorothy lands in an enchantingly colorful place after having been dropped there inside her house, by a tornado.

  She says “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” Partly because he wanted to make sure his voice still worked, and partly because he wondered how his voice would carry in this strange environment, he said the words out loud: “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” After pausing for a moment, he added “But where are we?” And why weren’t there any other people around?

  He didn’t know whether to head toward the pure, crystalline stream or to the strange thatches of grass but decided to inspect one of the vivid leaves from one of the serpentine trees. Once he started to walk he felt that his footsteps were unusually light. When he would lift on his toes to propel himself forward it felt as if he went airborne for a millisecond or so and then his foot would gently impact the ground. In gym class at the end of last year he’d weighed about one hundred and fifteen pounds but thought that in this strange place he probably weighed about half that. Compulsively he broke into a run on the hillside, amazed that with the slightest effort he took great leaps and bounds and felt that he had to grind his heels into the dirt or else he would bypass the tree.

  All the while he glanced all around him to try to find any other sign of life besides the plants and the river. He reached up to tug one of the leaves from the tree, surprised that it held fast. He pulled down on it harder, hearing a “pop” when the leaf was freed from the branch. With the leaf nestled into his palm he inspected it, tracing a fingertip over the vein like ridges. As he turned his palm, the colors of the leaf turned first a yellow green, then tinged with pink to a darker fuchsia and then finally to red. When he would turn his palm the other way, the sequence would repeat in reverse until he was once again looking at a yellow-green leaf. “Where am I?” he asked, in a confused, hushed whisper.

  His words seemed to have been heard by someone further down in the valley because a man’s voice shouted out the command “You there! Stay where you are!” The sound echoed, coming from all directions at the same time but Ronnie looked down along the riverside and saw a grotesque apparition, a large man with a bushy head of hair, and from the waist down, the body of a horse!

  Ronnie instinctively ran in the opposite direction. To his horror, he could hear the strange equine creature chasing him, hooves pattering on the ground. He reached the crest of a hill and realized instantly how limited his scope of vision had been. The hill descended the other side into a sprawling plain and a sparkling city miles in the distance, buildings made of a translucent glassy material that shone pink in some areas and sapphire in others. The sun shone down from beyond the buildings and at first washed out the details of the three men and one woman climbing the hill, wearing glistening, supple armor. Frantic, Ronnie looked back the other way to see the man-horse closing in on him, the sun shining from over his shoulder. It was impossible! He shifted toward the plain and the city first, then back to the hoofed creature that gained on before he could confirm that yes, there were two suns shining.

  When the horse creature neared him, Ronnie could see the details and expressions of the man’s face and saw a wizened look of caring and kind compassion. He instantly felt his anxiety evaporate when the man said “I won’t hurt you boy, just stay where you are.”

  The four armored warriors reached them just moments later. Ronnie thought it was weird that none of them wore helmets but each one wore a belt with several small objects attached to it. While he was still surveying the faces of the strangely pacific looking knight like people, the man-horse said something in a language Ronnie could not understand. It sounded like a rapid succession of clicks, squawks and gurgles to him. The largest of the knights, a man with auburn hair, pale skin, and wide shoulders nodded, taking in the information, seeming to understand. That man pulled one of the objects off the belt’ it was the size of a small walkie-talkie, and sure enough, he talked into it, using the same type of language as the man-horse.

  Centaur, Ronnie realized, was the name for the half-man, half-horse creature in his midst. He asked “Where am I anyway?”

  A woman’s voice answered, the lone female knight who’d ascended the hill. “You are on the planet Abscaria, summoned for special audience with our Empress.”

  “How did I get here?” Ronnie asked, looking at the faces of the other knights, realizing that somehow, everybody present knew English along with the other strange, gargle-sounding language. “I don’t remember getting onto a spaceship or anything. And it would take a long time, wouldn’t it?” He looked in front of and behind himself again, at the two suns.

  One of the other warriors spoke up, the smaller one, with the low forehead. “You were riding your bike and you got lost,” he said.

  “You mean my moped,” Ronnie corrected him.

  “Come on, we’re going to take you to the empress,” the man-horse said, trotting toward the glass city down in the valley. Ronnie again looked at the hooves of the man, amazed. They clip-clop, clip-clopped just like horses he had seen back home. When he started to descend the hill with his strange new companions, he realized that no one had ever told him how he’d ended up there.

  “I got lost,” Ronnie said, “but how did I get here?”

  “You had a bad fall,” the woman said. Feathers that had been stitched into her coppery hair glistened in the light.

  Ronnie suddenly remembered his last moments on the moped. He took a turn, saw a glimpse of oncoming traffic and discovered that he could not stop. “Oh no,” he said, instinctively looking down at his hands. “Is this a dream?”

  The warriors all stopped and the Centaur tumbled for a moment on some loose rock when he tried to slow down. They looked at each other and then at Ronnie. With all the attention, he suddenly felt queasy at the pit of his stomach.

  An even brighter light, the brightest light Ronnie had ever seen in his life, flashed in the distance, behind the glass city. Once, when he’d tagged along with his father to a diesel repair shop, he’d seen a man weld two pieces of metal together with a torch. The spark at the end would melt the metal so he could fuse the pieces together in the same way he had used model glue to put the fender of a plastic car onto its chassis. They stood about fifty feet away from the man, who wore a full face helmet to protect himself while welding the metal.

  Ronnie’s father told him not to look at the end of the torch once the man started welding, because the light was so hot, bright, and intense. Instead, he did the opposite, his attention riveted onto the end of the sticklike torch as the man turned a knob and gas escaped from a tank with a whooshing noise. The small, bright light had been so intense that he had to look away immediately, even when watching from a distance of fifty feet. The light in the sky that Ronnie saw at that moment was like the light from that torch, amplified about a hundred times. Strangely, however, he could look at it without blinking when he could not stand to look at the sun for more than two or three seconds.

  The light traveled, coming toward them, and for a moment Ronnie thought of Tinker Bell. He looked down at his hands again, slapping them together, feeling sharp pa
in as his fingers and knuckles knocked together. He also jumped up and down to stamp his feet on the loose ground but felt frustrated since he seemed to float a little when he jumped up which made it difficult for him to come down with any force.

  Ronnie had had vivid dreams before, some of them pleasant, like the time he rode the back of a benevolent dolphin in the ocean, just like Bud did on “Flipper,” but then there were nightmares, too, such as the time he dreamt of playing soccer with his fourth grade class and when he kicked the ball toward the goal, Craig Musetti tripped him. It caused him to fall and break his leg into a grotesque, impossible angle. This strange land, was not a dream in the sense that those other experiences were dreams. But what was it?

  He looked up, into the light and details of a human body started to materialize. Ronnie recognized a head and shoulders, and then the chest appeared. The man in the light seemed to be headed directly toward him and details of a face gradually appeared until at once a giant being in the sky looked down at him. The head was the size of a house and while the man looked down at him calmly, Ronnie felt like a bug on a twig. The expression of the face was kind, however and made him feel comfortable even though right then another part of him knew that he should have been screaming or something. The warriors and the man-horse stayed in place, right where they were. To Ronnie that was strangest.

  “Are you God?” Ronnie asked, and the giant man chuckled softly, and Ronnie knew immediately that he must not have been. God, the all-powerful, would have been fiercer than this.

  When the man spoke back to him the words came to him from the inside, reverberating through him. “No, I’m not,” he said. “But I was sent by your father.” Ronnie’s knees felt weak, and then he suddenly, magically floated into the air to become one with the giant, angel-like being. He remembered the pictures of winged creatures he’d seen during Sunday school. To Ronnie they looked ineffectual, with their horns and their robes. To be lifted into the air with angel was exhilarating.

  The only other experience he’d had to compare it with was when his uncle Hank took him for a ride on his small airplane at the Muskogee airport. Of course that time he’d been surrounded by seat cushions and aircraft metal. This sensation was like being lifted up by the most gigantic Ferris wheel in the universe where, on the other side of the arc he was gently placed down on the ground in front of one of the glass buildings.

  A man with gray hair and a beard met him in front of a door that must have been fifty feet high. Ronnie thought that he looked like the kind, unassuming type of man who would umpire at a tee-ball game. “Who are you?” Ronnie asked.

  “My name is Warberg,” he said, calmly and politely. “I’ll be taking you inside.”

  Ronnie balked at going inside the building, however. To him, the gentleman appeared to be further up the strata than the soldiers back on the hilltop (who were probably following some sort of an order) or the Centaur (who might have also had half of an equine brain). “Maybe I can ask you,” Ronnie started, as the man took his hand off a lever that probably opened the door. “Where am I?”

  The man named Warberg looked down at him before offering an answer. He had the firm, appraising manner of a school principal or a policeman. He swallowed briefly before speaking. “You are on a planet in another solar system and another galaxy. The planet has a name but it is in a language that is different from any on Earth and it would be difficult, if not impossible for you to pronounce.”

  “But the lady back there said I was on the planet ‘Abracadabra’ or something,” Ronnie said, but Warberg walked on, ignoring him. Before he could respond, though, Ronnie jumped ahead to his next thought: “If it is in another galaxy and another solar system, how in the world did I get here?” The question seemed to disarm the gentleman. He glanced around at the hard pavement beneath them and took Ronnie’s arm as he guided him away from the wall.

  When Ronnie turned, he saw a delicate, ornate bench a few feet away. The only other place he’d seen one like it had been in a city park. There was a fancy, wrought iron one there where the metal had been forged into an elegant pattern of flowers and leaves.

  While that one had been solid black, this one on the strange planet appeared to be made of solid gold, glistening in the light. Ronnie swore to himself that it had appeared out of thin air. When they had passed that way only moments before the broad expanse of pavement surrounding the building had been completely empty.

  “Maybe we’d better sit down,” Warberg said.

  Ronnie felt wary of sitting on an object that had just materialized out of nowhere. He reached out and touched the bench, lightly grazing it with his fingertips at first, and then pressing down on it with his palm. Meanwhile Warberg bent at the waist and sat down, the bench holding steady. Ronnie followed, sitting at the other end, opposite him. He looked away pensively, narrowing his eyes. “So tell me,” Ronnie said, leaning forward, thinking he might have to wave at him to get his attention. “What am I doing here? How did I get here?”

  Warberg inhaled deeply before he spoke. “You were brought here by Empress Tigra.”

  “I don’t remember getting on any flying saucer or anything. And even if I did, wouldn’t it take me a long time to get here? The last thing I remember was riding my moped out near the Ribbon and a car was coming from the other way.” Then with a blinding flash, he suddenly assumed the worst. “Wait a minute. Am I” and he felt the words stick in his throat as the rest of it was just too overwhelming to contemplate.

  Warberg looked across and him and smiled faintly. “You’re alive. You were badly hurt when your motorized bicycle collided with that other vehicle. But you’ll be fine.”

  “You know? How? What happened to me?”

  “Your skull was fractured and you also broke your collarbone, your arm and several ribs. Your leg was shattered and the doctors had to put it back together with metal pins.”

  Ronnie instinctively reached up to touch his scalp and found that it was the same as always, clean and unbroken, covered with thick hair. “That’s impossible,” he said. “And how was I able to walk around back there? He quickly stood, jumping up and down, flexing his knees. “How could it have gotten better so quickly?”

  Warberg reached out to him from the bench and gently grabbed hold of his hand. “Your body is healing back at the hospital near your home.”

  “Well then, how could I be here, too?”

  Warberg closed his eyes briefly, once again apparently searching for an answer. “The mind and your soul are larger, vaster than you can imagine.”

  Ronnie was looking back at Warberg and felt his arms and legs freeze up. Warberg’s eyes seemed to tell him more than his words were saying. The eyes were the color of the sky, the ocean, and the brilliant twilight all at once. He still looked at him even as Warberg rose from the bench, still clasping his wrist. A moment later, though, he let go and stepped forward, patting Ronnie on the back, urging him toward the giant door. “Let’s go in.”

  Ronnie peered inside as the door swung open all the way and in keeping with everything he had encountered in this strange world so far, saw the inside of a building like none he had ever seen before. Not even in any dream he could remember. At first it reminded him of the funhouse hall of mirrors at Lake Texoma amusement park, with all their glass surfaces and distortions. People walked in different directions, criss-crossing paths with each other, some toward them and others away from them. Ronnie wondered where he and Warberg would walk. He let the old man lead the way.

  While they walked in he looked upward. The ceiling was solid and appeared to be fifty feet above them. The air swirled in the room, circulating, rushing into his mouth and nostrils, invigorating him. Their footsteps and those of all the other people echoed gently through the floors and walls. It reminded him of a large, spectral library without books.

  Ronnie knew that one part of him greatly wanted to know more about this strange planet and the way they’d somehow summoned his soul across the galaxies. He wanted to know w
ho this “Empress” was and what her plans for him were. Here, billions of miles away from Earth, they all knew how to speak English and he wondered how that was possible. Yet he pressed on, walking behind Warberg, finding a sense of trust in him after looking into his eyes a few moments earlier.

  Ronnie was to learn that the city unfolded in onion like layers as, when he followed Warberg through the labyrinth of glass and passers-by, they came to another portal. A giant puffed frame surrounded an opening which was large enough for a truck to pass through. Ronnie thought the frame looked like a giant doughnut but then he realized that it actually stretched out and formed the walls of a tunnel beyond them. Bright violet light flashed on them when they walked through and Ronnie felt the fuzzy hairs on his arm stand up and a stat icky warmth buffet him when they both neared the end. From behind, as they neared another opening, an older woman scurried past them. She was shorter than Ronnie, with black hair slashed with neat white and gray stripes. While she appeared frail, she moved quickly and gracefully, like one of the girls at Ronnie’s school.

  The tunnel ended at what first seemed like a courtyard to Ronnie. When he looked up, though, he realized that at first there appeared to be no ceiling. Instead, he discovered that it was hundreds of feet upward, at the top of the structure. Ronnie was trying to both keep up with Warberg, who kept a brisk stride, and take in all his new, fantastic surroundings all at once. He immediately noticed tubes overhead, which ran from one glass wall across the open courtyard to a wall on the other side.

  Several of the tubes branched out from the walls. Some of them appeared to reach straight across the courtyard, but others angled downward or upward. All of the tubes carried people and appeared to be several feet taller than a man and wide enough to accommodate strange, hovering scooter-like vehicles that people rode by straddling them and holding tight, riding from one side of the building to the other. Many people just walked through the tubes, and Ronnie wondered if any of the scooters had ever slammed into one of the walking pedestrians. He realized that it was like looking at a giant version of the most complicated and intricate hamster cage imaginable.

  Warberg suddenly reached out again to clasp Ronnie’s shoulder and stop him. “Now stand still,” he said, stepping behind him and steadying his other shoulder as Ronnie heard a series of clicks and buzzing. At their feet a clear, circular wall sprung up out of the floor. Ronnie watched this wall grow and materialize, forming a two-inch thick barrier around them, rising up until it reached over Ronnie’s head and stopped growing when it had reached a height equal to the top of Warberg’s head. Ronnie reached out to touch the walls of pale green glass and found them smooth and rigid.

  They had been walled into a tube which left them with a circle to stand in measuring about a yard and a half wide. The circle then rose out of the floor with a whooshing sound and was beginning to carry them upward. Strangely, Ronnie found that he could not react to the strangeness of the fantastic situation in a way that he thought he should. Part of him shouted out inside at the shock and thrill of an elevator growing around them but something in the air, something about the way the lights, the subtle sounds, and Warberg’s reassuring voice and eyes caused him to keep quiet. It reminded him of the way he felt in the winter, when he had a cold and his mother would spoon him out various kinds of cough syrup. There was always the side effect of slight disorientation and wooziness.

  Ronnie watched layers of the building float past them and felt as if he were gazing out on fantastic terrariums of human activity. The floor was solid and since they were walled in, he had trouble seeing how far upward they had traveled. Straight up, out of the opened tube, he could see the ceiling. As they had loomed closer to it he realized that it had been constructed of an elaborate honeycomb and that reflected sunlight through its surfaces hurt his eyes if he looked at it for too long. He knew they were almost half way up the building as the ceiling drifted toward them with each passing second. The elevating action of the floor and the tube slowed down right then, as Ronnie noticed that the floors and beehives of activity had flashed past them at a lesser speed.

  Another loud buzzing and stat icky sound like bad radio reception amplified by hundreds filled Ronnie’s ears. There was a series of loud clicks and a loud pop as the part of the tube directly across from and behind them dissolved instantaneously. They had apparently connected with one of the tubes running across the building, their elevator burrowing up to it in some way. The floor beneath them disappeared: it was no longer the solid pavement they had stepped on but somehow dissolved into the tube running across, between the courtyards of the building. Warberg gently nudged Ronnie so that he would walk the fifty feet to a portal on the other side, high up on the walls of the massive building.

  When they walked through that portal, the wall sealed behind them and suddenly Ronnie found himself in a room which had been much more typical of those he had seen back on earth, during his life. White, solid walls, the line broken by translucent windows at precisely spaced intervals. A couple of male warriors approached them from the other direction, one of them large and hulking, the other shorter, but still stocky and powerful-looking. Their faces showed a single-minded, resolute quality that reminded Ronnie of those pictures he’d seen from England, of the red-coated Buckingham palace guards with their high, puffy hats and their swords.

  Ronnie discovered that the end of the wide hallway led to a cavernous room, like the inside of an arena. It seemed dimly lit by flickering lanterns or candles but he could see so flames. Once Warberg and Ronnie cleared the threshold, they saw a dais raised on a pyramid shaped platform fifty feet above them. A throne sat atop the dais, occupied by a woman who languidly draped herself across it, like a cat napping atop a sofa. Ronnie could see from the distance that she wore a close-fitting striped garment.

  “Come here, young Ronald,” she said, in a rich alto that reverberated off the stone and glass of the cavernous chamber, sparking a light of tingling warmth inside of him. “I am Empress Tigra. I do not bite.” Both Warberg and Ronnie hesitated at their portal. Ronnie glanced back for a moment at the bright light of the entranceway. The chamber before them was dim, but the Empress was enveloped in bright, warm light which seemed to glow from beneath and above her, bathing her. Warberg moved first, striding toward the steps of the dais. As they climbed, she gazed down at them calmly, but with intense eyes. The warm light lit contours of her high cheekbones and arching eyebrows along with the ornate plume of her thick hair luxuriously emanating from her crown, which had bundled it behind flashing jewels and gold lattices.

  As they rose toward her, Ronnie felt that he should feel frightened. He thought about turning back, but somehow calmly persevered. Something inside of him told him it was the right thing to do. And what other choice did he have?