Crackpot Palace (12 page)

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 fact 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.

Of course, the sick children and their families could not leave Chanticleer. A field hospital was set up within the boundary of the wall and that's where they were treated. It was made evident to the fathers of those affected that they were required to continue working. The women, though, had formed a bond of solidarity and felt strength in their numbers. Henrietta wrote about the other women to say, “I underestimated them. Any one of them has as much if not more courage, cunning, and love for their children as me. When we drink now, we talk of escape.” They approached the lieutenant colonel in charge of the community and demanded that tests be done to determine what was causing their children to become ill. He agreed to their demands but took no action. Then right around the time the first child died despite the doctors' treatments and their predictions (they'd never seen a form of the disease so virulent before), a rash of cases broke out, and not all were children this time.

Mason contracted something. The doctors weren't sure what it might be. He turned a shade of gray, and lost his nails and hair. Large lesions formed on his back and chest. When not caring for Henry, Henrietta spent all of her time at the field hospital. The women of the community whose families had not been affected stepped in to help her with child care. Mason died a month into his illness and was buried in a makeshift cemetery on that piece of meadow where she'd once read to Henry. And then Henry became sick, and before five months was up, he was buried alongside his father in the poisoned earth that had killed them.

The lieutenant colonel finally ordered a full evacuation of Chanticleer. Henrietta signed the sheet that assured she was accounted for in the helicopter, but at the last second ducked away. When her name was called before liftoff, one of the other women shouted, “Present,” in her voice. She hid in the basement of her house and listened to the choppers carrying the survivors away. Only when the workers came two days later to brick up the opening to Chanticleer did she wake from her stupor. She spied on their progress from her attic window, watching carefully their every move. And then they left. The sun was setting, and the only sound was the mountain wind.

When the community was evacuated, everything was left behind. Only the citizens were taken out. Henrietta had no way of knowing what I know, that every last one of them was killed execution style, duct tape wrapped around the wrists and ankles, a kneeling position, one bullet to the base of the skull. The cover-up of that killing spree was funded by a federal sales tax put on alcohol. Instead, she lived on inside the walls of Chanticleer. She found generators and manuals about how to employ them. There were years of sustenance in the canned goods left behind, and a king's ransom in wine and bottled water. She scavenged the neighborhood, invading houses and stores.

As to what her solitary existence was like in the seasons that followed, you can use your imagination. In one particular entry in her diary she writes that if she were to ever try to sell her story to Hollywood, she'd pitch it as “
Robinson Crusoe
meets ‘Rappaccini's Daughter.' ” She survived on her imagination, her writing, and the ritual of exercise. As a way to fill her days, she began invading the homes of her neighbors and tried to read the nature of their families like an archeologist might, sifting through the artifacts left behind. She discovered hidden letters that told of secret affairs, and sinister photographs of wives in bondage, heartbreaking artwork of children, and then the mundane remains of fashions in the closet, curtains, the things that filled their refrigerators, that hung on the walls in their bedrooms. “I feel like a ghost sometimes,” she wrote. “It's as if I, like Mason and Henry, died and am held here to bear witness to all that's been left behind.” Sometimes her discoveries would fill her with a mild excitement, for instance, “Today, I came to the realization that Margi Nelson was a transvestite and that her husband was well aware of it. I sat in the shadows of their living room, staring out at the late-afternoon sky, and imagined for hours the story of their lives.”

Three-quarters of the way through the diary, Henrietta made her first entry concerning changes at Chanticleer—“Almost overnight, great disruptions of the earth with thick roots poking through everywhere.” Soon after, she noted that a fissure had formed in the bottom of the swimming pool. She feared that she'd lose the water, but didn't. Instead a glowing light shone through the crack and formed a cloud of phosphorescence down deep in the twelve-foot section. “When I swim through that bright plume, it feels like I'm out in the sun and its rays are leaching into me, burning away my misgivings.” A month following, she commented on the ashy shade of her complexion.

As Henrietta continued to record the process of her metamorphosis and the mutation of the world around her, her writing slowly became more disorganized, her expressions more erratic. Her penmanship debilitated from a neat script to some private system of slash marks and poorly formed circles. Before her entries fell completely into the incomprehensible, she confessed to spending more and more time in the pool. “The crack in the bottom has opened up into a rock tunnel through which I can swim to the other pools in the neighborhood,” she wrote. Of course, I have doubts about the actuality of the pool-tunnel system, but to whom would she be lying? I believe she was beginning to lose her human sense of reality at this point. The last thing she recorded that makes sense is a dream she had while floating in the light at the deep end. “The sky was blue. White clouds. Henry in my arms, giggling.”

The day after Rabella Cayce and her four colleagues left Chanticleer, the community was covered over with a few million tons of concrete, like cake mix poured into a giant pan whose edge was the circular wall. A modern village of Pompeii, it waits for future generations to reveal its secrets. How little they will understand about the nature of their find. The strange life forms will be evident. The radiation and the viral strains should still be a nasty brew for thousands of years. They may understand the point of the community, and, in reviewing existing documents, who ordered it built, but what they'll miss, as we miss even now, is the reason for it.

Don't ask me how I know this, but under the influence of a long-distance mind-control expert, a psychic known in the black-ops community as Garland, a certain MP of a poetic frame of mind who guards a gray figure will, on an appointed day, at a given hour, draw his sidearm and shoot out the glass of Sirena's cylindrical tank, freeing her from the prison of sleep. He will then turn the gun on himself. She will awaken to roam the dim tunnels of the hive of secrets, free to hunt and feed, desecrating the most sacred heart of our nation. My contacts and I have estimated that she'll kill dozens before they stop her.

A Note About “The Hag's Peak Affair”

The initial spark of this idea came to me many, many years ago, during a long stint on the overnight shift at a central security station in a town in upstate New York. My job was to sit in front of a big board with audio speakers and lights, listening and watching for warnings of break-ins at homes and businesses around town. The place was located at the end of a hallway that ran the length of the back of a mostly boarded-up strip mall in a part of town that had fallen on hard times. The only two businesses still operating in the mall were a doughnut shop and an X-rated bookstore.

In my security station (more like just a concrete bunker), there was a video monitor that watched that hallway 24/7. The security company actually had a lot of high-end customers (well, as high-end as that town could muster), and night-security personnel had to be vigilant about the security of the central station as well as the properties of the clients around town in case bad guys stormed the station and took us out in order to run rampant, looting the town.

My boss really got into this scenario, and every night before he left and I started on my eight hours of staring at the board and snoozing, he'd recount how it would all go down. “They'll come in with guns blazing,” he'd say. He was a kooky guy and had a lot of weird bullshit stories. One I remember was about some Czechoslovakian twin doctors who created a cure for cancer out of horse hooves, but were forced out of business by a nefarious conspiracy concocted by the AMA because doctors didn't really want to cure cancer.

In any event, the door of the central station was only stormed once, and that was by my boss's wife, whom he'd caught cheating on him with a guy who sold cheese to grocery stores. He had called me and told me not to let her in the station, even though she was actually part owner of the security company. That night she came by and pounded on the outer door and demanded through the intercom that I let her in. Of course, I let her in. What did I give a shit? I wasn't going to hassle his wife just like I wasn't going to throw myself into a hail of bullets for minimum wage.