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Given the events of the past twelve hours, I felt confident in assu that h I have never seen a single thread of evidence that such a stronghold exists

The abandoned base offers sights that are, however, as likely to aive you the creeps, andyou will see in a cryobiological warfare laboratory I think of Fort Wyvern, in its present state, as a macabre theme park, divided into various lands much the same as Disneyland is divided, with the difference that only one patron, along with his faithful dog, is admitted at any one time

Dead Town is one of my favorites

Dead Town is my name for it, not what it was called when Fort Wyvern thrived It consists of es and duplex bungalows in which married active-duty personnel and their dependents were housed if they chose to live on base Architecturally, these humble structures have little to recommend them, and each is virtually identical to the one next door; they provided thefamilies who occupied them, each for only a couple of years at a time, over the war-filled decades But in spite of their sah their empty rooms, you can feel that life was lived well in thes of friends

These days the streets of Dead Town, laid out in a ainst the curbs and dry turass quickly turns brown and stays that shade most of the year The shrubs are all withered, and many of the trees are dead, their leafless branches blacker than the black sky at which they seem to claw Mice have the houses to themselves, and birds build nests on the front-door lintels, painting the stoops with their droppings

You ainst the real possibility of future need or efficiently razed, but there is no money for either solution The s have less value than the cost of salvaging theotiated to dispose of the, they are left to deteriorate in the ele era were abandoned

Wandering through Dead Town, you feel as though everyone in the world has vanished or died of a plague and that you are alone on the face of the earth Or that you have gone rim solipsist fantasy, surrounded by people you refuse to see Or that you have died and gone to Hell, where your particular damnation consists of eternal isolation When you see a scruffy coyote or two prowling between the houses, lean of flank, with long teeth and fiery eyes, they appear to be demons, and the Hades fantasy is the easiest one to believe If your father was a professor of poetry, however, and if you are blessed or cursed with a three-hundred-ring circus of a ine countless scenarios to explain the place

This night in March, I cycled through a couple of streets in Dead Town, but I didn’t stop to visit The fog had not reached this far inland, and the dry air arh the ht was ideal for sightseeing To thoroughly explore even this one land in the theme park that is Wyvern, however, you need to devote a week to the task

I was not aware of being watched After what I’d learned in the past few hours, I knew that I must have been monitored at least intermittently on my previous visits

Beyond the borders of Dead Town lie nus A once-fine commissary, a barber shop, a dry cleaner, a florist, a bakery, a bank: their signs peeling and caked with dust A day-care center High-school-age ht Bay; but there are a kindergarten and an elementary school here In the base library, the cobwebbed shelves are stripped of books except for one overlooked copy of The Catcher in the Rye Dental andon its flatalley An Olympic-size pool now drained and cracked and blown full of debris A fitness center In the rows of stables, which no longer shelter horses, the unlatched stall doors sith an o each time the wind stiffens The softball field is choked eeds, and the rotting carcass of a mountain lion that lay for e is at last only a skeleton

I was not interested in any of these destinations, either I cycled past the that stands over the warren of subterranean chambers in which I found the Mystery Train cap last autumn

Clipped to the back rack of ht with a switch that allows the beahtness I parked at the hangar and unsnapped the flashlight fro and fascinating, but regardless of his reaction on any particular night, he stays atThis time, he was clearly spooked, but he didn’t hesitate or whine

The sar doors was unlocked Switching on the flashlight, I went inside with Orson at ar isn’t adjacent to the airfield, and it’s unlikely that aircraft were stored or serviced here Overhead are the tracks on which a one, onceby 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 hydraulicbeaht leaped off the crane tracks Like the ideograe, they stenciled the walls and the Quonset-curve of the ceiling, revealing that half the panes in the high clerestory ere broken

Unnervingly, the impression wasn’t of a vacated machine shop or maintenance center, but of an abandoned church The oil and cheave forth an incenselike aro 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 mechanis fro, access to the vestibule once h another chamber; and I suspect that the existence of the stairs and elevator were kept secret froar or who’d had occasion to pass through it

A formidable steel frame and threshold reone With the flashlight beas froh 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 ork of corridors and less rooht provide a clue to the nature of the enterprise conducted here--stripped all the way to the bare concrete Even the s systems have been torn out

I have a sense that this meticulous eradication is only partly explained by their desire to prevent anyone froh I’ 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 cheical warfare facility that I ical isolation required, that subterranean complex is surely in a er than these three immense floors, more elaborately hidden, and buried far deeper beneath the earth

Besides, that facility is apparently still operative

Nevertheless, I aerous and extraordinary activities of one kind or another were conducted beneath this hangar Many of the chambers, reduced only to their basic concrete for and--because of their sheer strangeness--profoundly disquieting

One of these puzzling chambers is on the deepest level, dohere no dust has yet drifted, at the center of the floor plan, ringed by corridors and smaller roo, not quite sixty feet in dia toward the ends The walls, ceiling, and floor are curved, so that when you stand here, you feel as if you are within the eh a sht have been fitted out as an airlock Rather than a door, therein the walls of this ovoid cha across the raised, curved threshold and passing through this aperture with Orson, I swept the light over the width of the surrounding wall,at it as always: five feet of poured-in-place, steel-reinforced concrete

Inside the giant egg, the continuous s is sheathed in what appears to be lass at least two or three inches thick It’s not glass, however, because it’s shatterproof and because, when tapped hard, it rings like tubular bells Furthermore, no seahly polished and appears as slick as wet porcelain The flashlight beah it, flares off the faint golden whorls within, and shimmers across its surface Yet the stuff was not in the least slippery as we crossed to the center of the chamber

My rubber-soled shoes barely squeaked Orson’s clawslike finger bells