Fear Nothing

from the rack.
        Orson finds Fort Wyvern alternately frightening and fascinating, but regardless of his reaction on any particular night, he stays at my side, uncomplaining. This time, he was clearly spooked, but he didn't hesitate or whine.
        The smaller man-size door in one of the larger hangar doors was unlocked. Switching on the flashlight, I went inside with Orson at my heels.
        This hangar isn't adjacent to the airfield, and it's unlikely that aircraft were stored or serviced here. Overhead are the tracks on which a mobile crane, now gone, once moved from end to end of the structure, and judging by the sheer mass and complexity of the steel supports for these elaborate rails, the crane lifted objects of great weight. Steel bracing plates, still bolted to the concrete, once must have been surmounted by substantial machinery. Elsewhere, curiously shaped wells in the floor, now empty, appear to have housed hydraulic mechanisms of unknowable purpose.
        In the passing beam of my flashlight, geometric patterns of shadow and light leaped off the crane tracks. Like the ideograms of an unknown language, they stenciled the walls and the Quonset-curve of the ceiling, revealing that half the panes the high clerestory windows were broken.
        Unnervingly, the impression wasn't of a vacated machine shop or maintenance center, but of an abandoned church. The oil and chemical stains on the floor gave forth an incenselike aroma. The penetrating cold was not solely a physical sensation but affected the spirit as well, as if this were a deconsecrated place.
        A vestibule in one corner of the hangar houses a set of stairs and a large elevator shaft from which the lift mechanism and the cab have been removed. I can't be sure, but judging from the aftermath left by those who had gutted the building, access to the vestibule once must have been through another chamber; and I suspect that the existence of the stairs and elevator were kept secret from most of the personnel who had worked in the hangar or who'd had occasion to pass through it.
        A formidable steel frame and threshold remain at the top of the stairwell, but the door is gone. With the flashlight beam, I chased spiders and pill bugs from the steps and led Orson downward through a film of dust that bore no footprints except those that we had left during other visits.
        The steps serve three subterranean floors, each with a footprint considerably larger than the hangar above. This webwork of corridors and windowless rooms has been assiduously stripped of every item that might provide a clue to the nature of the enterprise conducted here-stripped all the way to the bare concrete. Even the smallest elements of the air-filtration and plumbing systems have been torn out.
        I have a sense that this meticulous eradication is only partly explained by their desire to prevent anyone from ascertaining the purpose of the place. Although I'm operating strictly on intuition, I believe that as they scrubbed away every trace of the work done here, they were motivated in part by shame .
        I don't believe, however, that this is the chemical-biological warfare facility that I mentioned earlier. Considering the high degree of biological isolation required, that subterranean complex is surely in a more remote corner of Fort Wyvern, dramatically larger than these three immense floors, more elaborately hidden, and buried far deeper beneath the earth.
        Besides, that facility apparently still operative.
        Nevertheless, I am convinced that dangerous and extraordinary activities of one kind or another were conducted beneath this hangar. Many of the chambers, reduced only to their basic concrete forms, have features that are at once baffling and-because of their sheer strangeness - profoundly disquieting.
        One of these puzzling chambers is on the deepest level, down where no dust has yet drifted, at the center of the floor plan, ringed us ovoid, a hundred by corridors and smaller rooms. It is an enormous ovoid, a hundred and twenty feet long, not quite sixty feet in diameter at its widest point, tapering toward the ends. The walls, ceiling, and floor are curved, so that when you stand here, you feet as if you are within the empty shell of a giant egg.
        Entrance is through a small adjacent space that might have been fitted out as an airlock. Rather than a door, there must have been a hatch; the only