On the opposite wall there was a very large rectangular glass like display, about eight feet long and four feet tall, framing an indistinct map of something. I walked up to it and looked carefully. It was a map of London England but being very dark and obscure, it was hard to make out any details. Dead center of the screen itself was a small recticle with crosshairs.
Sitting down at the desk, I stared at a brass leaver with an ornamental opal knob at the end. On the desktop adjacent to the lever was a shiny flat polished metal plate with a delicately carved out wooden border that seemed to be inlaid in the desktop. I touched it with no response and was about to grab the lever, passing my hand just over the metal plate. This seemed to suddenly activate the large glass map display on the opposite wall, which lit up with a strange winding noise and then stopped. It was a marvel! The window was some type of screen that had lit up and was now bright and clear and I could easily see the streets mapped out for London now, all detailed with street names and addresses.
The target recticle was over a factory and I could read the name of the street― Thames Pkwy.
Taking hold of the lever, I moved it to the left ever so slightly. The map then moved to the left revealing another set of streets to the east. I moved it slightly to the right and watched as the map seemed to track to the right. All of the streets looked rather current and very detailed.
At first I was completely baffled by the whole thing; then after thinking for some time, somehow, it all began making more sense. The chair must be directed by this machine to wherever the map targeted, probably to the very crosshair position maneuvered to on the map.
Once the target recticle was maneuvered to a location, whoever sat in the chair was then transported there immediately, as I was from my flat. When I sat in the chair it seemed to automatically return to this platform.
I opened the door of the room leading into a rather large cavern and about 25 yards away was the mouth of the cave open to the sea with the waves pounding at its entrance. Just then my head felt a heavy blow and everything went black. Later, when I came to, I found myself tied up and sitting on the floor back in the strange room. As I was returning to my senses, I heard footsteps approaching; they were the quick short steps of a female.
When she came into view her arms were folded. She was wearing a brown leather belt strapped around her waist with a holster at her side holding a strange weapon that I had never seen before.
She had striking chin length ragdoll blonde hair, some of it being pulled back into a short pony tail over the rest; an obvious athletic body, wearing a form fitting black sweater-over which was an earthy suede and lambs wool vest, with a shearling fur border and slim light brown leather riding pants that tucked into her ankle boots.
“Who are you and what are you doing in this room? Where did you get that chair?” She demanded.
“Hold on there sweetheart, one question at a―”
“Don’t call me sweetheart!” she shouted, pulling her weapon and pointing it directly at my head.
The handgun was something of a new design unrecognizable to me. It was manufactured in such a precise way that it did not have a cylinder holding the bullets. It was hefty with a long thick square barrel and was intimidating to say the least.
She kept pacing back and forth with an angry look. “You had better have a good explanation as to where you came about this chair and what you did with the owner!”
“I do have a good explanation for it all, if you’ll just have a little patience, I will explain.”
“Well go ahead,” she blasted again, her eyes full of fury.
If she hadn’t been so irritatingly insistent, she might have looked very attractive even in her angry state.
“My name is Richard Cantwell and I purchased this chair at an estate sale.”
“Right, you simply bought it at an estate that owned this chair for year’s right?”
“Actually, no. They had recently acquired it at an auction. I brought it home and was going to use it as a favorite in my living room, but when I sat down… well it’s obviously not just any chair is it, and here I am; where am I anyway?”
“That chair, Cantwell, or whoever you are, belongs to my father and you somehow managed to take it from him, so you better start talking and tell me where he is,” she glared.
“Hey, untie me; I assure you I don’t know your father or where he is!”
“You’re going to stay just as you are until I get the right answers.” She holstered her weapon, waved her hand over the shiny plate on the desk turning off the map light and stormed out of the room.
Minutes later two men came through the door dressed in some type of black uniform with side arms similar to the woman’s. They roughly grabbed me and stood me in front of her.
“Put him in the tank till we can verify who he really is,” she directed.
I knew then she must be in some type of authority wherever this place was. She was also concerned about her father, whoever he was and I could tell she was going to take no pity on any one responsible for his disappearance.
“You’ve got to believe me, my name is Richard Cantwell and I don’t know anything about whoever this person is that’s missing, I only−”
“We’ll have to see about that and until we do, you’re going to need to stay locked up,” she fumed. She now seemed to have an ever so small hint on her face in possibly half believing of my story. I’ve always been pretty good at reading faces; it’s just one of my abilities that usually never lets me down,” she added.
With that, they dragged me out of the room and into the cavern. There was a large metal door built into the wall of the cave, which opened when one of them passed his hand over another one of those small shiny plates. They seemed to be the method of control, much as an on- off switch of some type, pretty cleaver I thought.
It was an elevator thoughtfully constructed which moved quickly and opened up to a hallway with several heavy wooden doors. One of the men opened a door and motioned for me to enter which I did. After closing the door pressing my ear to the door I could still hear their voices.
“Think he’s in with Anders and Paxton?”
“I dunno he seems genuine enough, but then some can put on a show whenever they need to, you know how that goes.”
“Yeah, I know. It’ll be up to Ara to decide.”
Anders, Paxton, who were they? I had to find out; and Ara, she must have been the one questioning me. What was this bizarre place the chair had taken me to? Wherever it was, they were obviously advanced in their development; but how and when did they acquired this knowledge, I also had to know.
I remained in the cell for I don’t know exactly how long, but it was enough time for them to decide I wasn’t the enemy. The Door suddenly swung open with the two guards standing there like robots. This time they had a more pleasant look on their face and I was feeling a little more at ease.
“Follow us Mr. Cantwell,” one of them motioned with his hand as they led the way to the elevator.
“Where is this place and who are you people?”
“Ara will answer all of your questions.”
She was waiting for me when I entered the room again and this time she seemed to have somewhat let down her guard.
“Sorry for the trouble Mr. Cantwell, but we can’t be too careful. Your story appears to check out and you’re probably wondering, being from the outside, what all this is about.” She walked over to a credenza and took out two glasses.
“Join me for a glass of wine in a truce?” She smiled pouring both glasses and handed me one.
I took one sip looking at her. “So you must be Ara?”
“Yes, and you’re Richard Cantwell.” She smiled again taking a sip of wine. “Well Richard Cantwell, to answer the question as to where you are; you’re on an uncharted island in the Pacific Ocean. As to how you got here…” she looked over at the chair. “That’s what brought you here. It’s what the chair was made too do; we call this room the “condui
t”. The chair can travel to any place in the world and will automatically return to this room on that center platform with the compass face.”
“My god, that is incredible! If I hadn’t traveled here with it myself I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“The problem is that you should never really have been able to acquire the chair and now we need to decide what to do about it.”
“What about your father, he is missing isn’t he?”
She looked down at the floor. “Yes he is. Professor Timothy Gratten, my father, has been using the chair to work in London England for research on many related projects. His co-workers have affectionately given him the title of professor because of his self taught knowledge in scientific endeavors. It was he that was supposed to return in the chair when you turned up.”
“Why don’t you just go back to England and get him?”
“I only wish it were that easy. Unfortunately there’s more to the story you need to be made aware of; but we’ll have to leave it for now. While you’re here you will have to stay somewhere and it might as well be my father’s apartment in the sanctuary.”
“The sanctuary?”
“You’ll see; there is a great deal for you to discover here, but it will have to wait till tomorrow.
CHAPTER
THREE
She walked over to the teakwood desk and opened one of the small drawers at the bottom, closed it and opened it again. Suddenly, one of the walls in the room began sinking into the floor revealing a hidden tunnel with some sort of refined wooden vehicle sitting on a tramway.
“This is my father’s private transport; it’ll take us to his apartment,” she said, pointing to the metal hatch door.
“This is really quite something, but who built all of this?”
“I’ll explain it all in time Richard; please sit down and fasten that shoulder harness around you.”
I sat down looking through a glass window to a long dark tunnel ahead. Ara sat on the opposite side facing me with a smile on her face, as if anticipating my upcoming reaction to the trip we were about to take. She strapped herself in and pulled the hatch of the transport closed. The wall separating us from the map room began closing again and there was a slight winding sound as the lights on the transport lit the tunnel walls surrounding us; we jerked slightly just before beginning to move, sluggish at first and then slowly gaining momentum. I could tell we were moving up a grade. It traveled along fairly smooth with a buzzing whirring noise as the walls of the cavern moved by growing darker ahead by the second.
“Is the tunnel long?”
She looked around and then back at me with a smile. “No, we’ll be coming out of it any moment.”
No sooner had she spoken those words than the tunnel seemed to be growing lighter and brightness from the mouth of the cave suddenly lit up the transport as we broke free from the darkness out into the light of day; the track emerged from the tunnel on a high cliff and the view was breathtaking.
Palm trees lined a canyon floor as we began a gradual descent along the track. I looked to each side of us and the cliffs rose up as walls surrounding the canyon, green and lush. Large wooden trestles supporting ridge crossings were scattered all along the canyon and wound around the cliffs supporting the tramway, it was dazzling; I’d never seen such a sight. As we slowly descended we could spot various homes just below, built into the smaller hills against the canyon walls. Animals were sheltered in fenced areas and I could see children playing here and there, running down roads connecting the homes in small farming communities.
Then moving forward at a quicker pace and leaving the lush green, we passed over limited desert like terrain with spreading sand dunes, green vegetation and boulder like projections protruding from the landscape. Passing a group of nearby palms, a flock of colorful birds took off as if they had been unexpectedly disturbed. I could just catch a glimpse here and there of the ocean surrounding us as the transport made its way through the island.
“Can you see it yet?” she asked anxiously.
“See what? Oh yes, those buildings ahead!”
“That’s it, our sanctuary…Oceanus! It was named after the ship that brought the original colony here over a hundred years ago.”
I marveled. “You people have been here a hundred years?”
We began moving closer to the edge of a largely dense urban community with oddly shaped buildings constructed low to the ground some round some oval and some rectangular, but all very neatly laid out with carefully laid out streets. Oceanus had been very efficiently planned out down to the small innovative wooden carts pulled by oxen here and there.
The transport then took a dive once more down under the tops of the foliage, along a stream bed swallowed up into another tunnel that seemed to be headed straight in the direction of what she called the sanctuary.
This must be the private entrance to his flat, I thought, as we moved steadily along the dark tunnel only illuminated as we moved along by this remarkable machine. The whirring noise seemed to subside and the machine was now coming to a standstill. The lights from the transport were still illuminating the tunnel as another wall moved to the side, revealing the private entrance to her father’s apartment. We both climbed out and I could see through the room to a large window on the other side of it; it was overlooking what appeared to be the very central area of the sanctuary.
Ara motioned for us to enter. “Well this is it, my father’s apartment. He wanted to be in the heart of the sanctuary and continually be able to observe what was going on.”
I walked over and stood by the large window peering down at the populace and commented. “Yes, certainly is a great vantage point, to be sure.”
The flat was very nicely laid out with plenty of light streaming in; the furniture was luxurious similar to the conduit, with a bar on one wall and a large couch with a plush carpet at the foot of it facing the huge window. There was another room that appeared to be an office or study of some type. Walking over to it, I quickly glanced inside. World maps of every sort were on all of the walls, several of which were marked with red pins denoting places either already traveled or possible future destinations. Then I noticed a second desk with a most interesting object sitting on top; an extremely detailed model of three chairs. One of the chairs, the one in the middle, was an exact scale model of the chair I arrived in and the other two on either side of it being a little different and smaller in size.
“Sit down Richard, I apologize that you’ve stumbled into all of this quite by accident, but there is much more that you need to know.
“This island began for our people as a place of refuge for several families long ago when their ship was driven off course and shipwrecked here by a fierce hurricane while on a scientific expedition.
“They were sent from a British colonial research institute in Australia years ago and the ship was a rather large experimental hybrid steam and sailing ship, the Discovery-Oceanus I mentioned to you earlier.”
“They would have been certainly reported as missing. Didn’t they send other ships to search for them?”
Her eyebrows rose. “No one ever found out; and from what we’ve been told, there has never been a rescue ship sighted in all these years.”
I got up and started walking in circles reasoning it out. “Probably didn’t want to loose another ship, I imagine, or maybe they weren’t sure in which direction to search.”
She raised her hand massaging her neck. “Evidently those that were originally waiting for rescue were also very resourceful; there were engineers, geologists, scientists and naturalists, who ended up building a small community here. All this was just prior to the amazing discovery that changed everything for us here impressively.”
“Discovery? What kind of discovery, you mean gold or silver?”
“Something much more valuable than that― power.”
“Power Ara, you mean a new power source?”
Standing up, she walked over to the window. Her demeanor was mu
ch more pleasant now, but still serious in her description and she was somehow slowly becoming, very attractive to me. I’ve never been the type to fall for the first beautiful girl to cross my path and I needed to put that thought out of my mind as quickly as I could; the thought of Catherine not being able to find out what happened to me was what I needed to focus on.
Ara answered, quickly bringing me back into the conversation. “Not that kind of power Richard, I mean power over people and things and places.”
“So what do you mean then, what kind of discovery?”
She walked back to the couch, sat down crossing her legs and began describing more of the island’s history. “Long story short, the father of Bradley Dunford, who still resides on this island, was one of the original crew shipwrecked here. When first exploring this island he had, quite by accident, stumbled upon a cave concealed in the side of a cliff. The story goes that upon entering the cavern, he found the three chairs sitting together on a stone ledge covered in cobwebs, yet still inexplicably in very good condition. The huge window and controls were also in an adjoining chamber of the cavern hooked up to strange batteries which had long since been drained of power.
“After moving everything to his own quarters and laboratory set up, he cleaned up the chairs and sat down in them. When sitting in the main chair he blacked out and when coming to, suddenly found himself in South America. It was only by accident that hours later he once again sat down in the chair which immediately returned him to the point of origin in his laboratory. No one has yet to find the connection between the display controller and the chair’s, it all remains to this day a mystery.
“From there the facts become more interesting in both constructive and destructive ways, but let’s take a break and I’ll show you around.”
We walked out together on a veranda overlooking the populace of Sanctuary Oceanus. I was thinking this was all too much; it was exiting and at the same time unnerving. I had to get back to Catherine and explain to her what had happened; but was it possible?
The Chair Page 2