place.”
“You can almost feel…an energy in it.”
“There’s no electrical power here, no gas. No furnaces, no boilers, no generators, no machinery. All stripped away.”
Bobby rose from a squat and walked deeper into the chamber, playing his flashlight over the floor, walls, and ceiling.
Even with two flashlights and the unusually high refractivity of the mysterious material, shadows ruled the room. Tracers, blooms, girandoles, pinwheels, lady ferns, and fireflies of light swarmed across the curving surfaces, mostly in shades of gold and yellow but some red and others sapphire, fading to oblivion in far dark corners, like fireworks licked up and swallowed by a night sky, dazzling but illuminating little.
Bobby said wonderingly, “It’s as big as a concert hall.”
“Not really. But it seems even bigger than it is because of how every surface curves away from you.”
As I spoke, a change occurred in the acoustics of the chamber. The whispery echoes of my words faded away, swiftly became inaudible, and then my words themselves diminished in volume. The air felt as if it had thickened, transmitting sound less efficiently than before.
“What’s happening?” Bobby asked, and his voice, too, sounded suppressed, muffled, as though he were speaking from the other end of a bad telephone connection.
“I don’t know.” Although I raised my voice almost to a shout, it remained muffled, precisely as loud as when I’d spoken in a normal tone.
I would have thought I was imagining the increased density of the air if I hadn’t suddenly begun experiencing difficulty breathing. Although not suffocating, I was afflicted severely enough to have to concentrate to draw and expel breath. I was swallowing reflexively with each inhalation; the air was virtually a liquid that I had to force down. Indeed, I could feel it sliding along my throat like a drink of cold water. Each shallow breath felt heavy in my chest, as if it had more substance than ordinary air, as though my lungs were filling with fluid, and the moment I completed each inhalation, I was overwhelmed by a frantic urge to get this stuff out, to eject it, convinced that I was drowning in it, but each exhalation had to be forced, almost as if I were regurgitating.
Pressure.
In spite of my rising panic, I remained clearheaded enough to figure out that the air was not being alchemized into a liquid but that, instead, the air pressure was drastically increasing, as if the depth of the earth’s atmosphere above us were doubling, tripling, and pushing down on us with crushing force. My eardrums fluttered, my sinuses began to throb, I felt phantom fingertips pressing hard against my eyeballs, and at the end of each inhalation, my nostrils pinched shut.
My knees began to quiver and then buckle. My shoulders bent under an invisible weight. Straight as plumb bobs, my arms were hanging at my sides. My hands could no longer grip the flashlight, and it clattered to the floor at my feet. It bounced silently on the glassy surface, for now there was no sound whatsoever, not even the flutter of my eardrums or the thud of my own heart.
Abruptly, all returned to normal.
The pressure lifted in an instant.
I heard myself gasping for air. Bobby was gasping, too.
He had dropped his flashlight but had managed to hold tight to the shotgun.
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“What was that?”
“Don’t know.”
“Ever happen before?”
“No.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah,” I said, reveling in the ease with which I could draw cool, deep breaths.
Though our flashlights were at rest on the floor, an increasing number of Roman candles and pinwheels and serpents and sparklers and spirals of light spread across the floor and up the walls.
“This place isn’t shut down,” Bobby said.
“But it is. You saw.”
“Nothing’s what it seems in Wyvern,” he said, quoting me.
“Every room we passed, every hallway — stripped, abandoned.”
“What about the two floors above this?”
“Just bare rooms.”
“And there’s nothing below?”
“No.”
“There’s something.”
“Not that I’ve found.”
We picked up our flashlights, and as the beams moved across the floors and walls, the flamboyant eruptions of light in the deep glassy surface multiplied threefold, fourfold: a dazzling profusion of fiery blooms. We might have been in a Fourth of July extravaganza, suspended from a hot-air balloon, with barrages of rockets bursting around us, whiz-bangs and cracker bonbons and fountains and fizgigs, but all silent, all marvelous glistering light and no bang, yet so reminiscent of Independence Day displays that you could almost smell the saltpeter and the sulfur and the charcoal, almost hear a stirring John Philip Sousa march, almost taste hot dogs with mustard and chopped onions.
Bobby said “Something’s still happening.”
“Split?”
“Wait.”
He studied the ceaselessly changing and increasingly colorful patterns of light as though they held a meaning as explicit as that in a paragraph of prose on a printed page, if only he could learn to read them.
Although I doubted that the astonishingly luminous refractive bursts were casting off any more UV rays than the flashlight beams that produced them, I was not accustomed to such brightness. Radiant whorls and drizzles and rivulets streamed across my exposed face and hands, a storm of scintillant tattoos, and even if this rain of light was washing a little death into me, the spectacle was irresistible, exhilarating. My heart was racing, powered partly by fear but mostly by wonder.
Then I saw the door.
I was turning, so enthralled by the carnival of light around me that my gaze traveled past the door, distracted by the pyrotechnics, before I realized what I had seen. Massive, five feet in diameter, of matte-finish steel, surrounded by a polished-steel architrave: It was similar to what you would expect to see at the entrance to a bank vault, and no doubt it established an airtight seal.
Startled, I swung back toward the door — but it was gone. Through a pandemonium of gazelle-quick lights and pursuing shadows, I saw that the circular hole in the wall was as it had been when we entered through it: open, with a dark concrete tunnel beyond, leading to what had once been an airlock.
I took a couple of steps toward the opening before I realized that Bobby was speaking to me. As I turned toward him, I glimpsed the door again, this time from the corner of my eye. But when I looked directly at the damn thing, it wasn’t there.
“What’s happening?” I asked nervously.
Bobby had extinguished his flashlight. He pointed at mine. “Douse it.”
I did as he asked.
The fireworks in the glassy surface of the room should have at once vanished into absolute darkness. Instead, colorful star shells and chrysanthemums and glittering pinwheels continued to arise within this magical material, swarmed around the chamber, casting off a farrago of lights and shadows, and then faded away as new eruptions replaced them.
“It’s running by itself,” Bobby said.
“Running?”
