Chapter Twenty-One
His pulse quickened as they neared her. Within moments they came upon the dais. The Empress was as close to him as if she had been a guest at his family’s Thanksgiving dinner. He could reach out and touch her if he wanted to. Warberg had stepped aside so that he could approach, but at first Ronnie could not speak. Empress Tigra was easily the prettiest woman he had ever seen, even prettier than Elizabeth Taylor or Audrey Hepburn from the movies. Her skin was smooth and seemed to glow with an inward light, especially when she smiled at him, her eyes glistening, sparkling, as she said “You’ve come a long way, child.”
Her smile calmed him but he was also aware of an aching at his chest, a mysterious longing, and almost painful connection to her. Warberg’s hand pressed lightly against his shoulder, which further encouraged him, and one by one the questions bubbled up from the wellspring of his troubled consciousness. “Did you bring me here?” he was able to ask, his words coming out in a tight throated whisper.
She nodded.
“Why?”
“You were in trouble,” she said, barely above Ronnie’s whisper. The precise and melodic way she enunciated every syllable kept Ronnie spellbound in rapt attention. It nevertheless occurred to him to bombard her with questions such as how he had traveled this far, what was the purpose of the man-horse creature, and who was the giant who’d plucked him from the front of the meadow and lowered him down in front of the city containing her palace. Yet the hall around them changed suddenly, distracting him. The walls containing them had somehow dissolved and sunlight entered, as if they’d all been transported magically to a mountaintop somewhere.
Curiously, the pillars of the arena remained, and beyond their framework Ronnie could see the scenery down the mountainside and beyond, into a valley. He recognized a few of the tall buildings of Tulsa in the distance and a church steeple and a radio tower from his own neighborhood.
How could that be? Ronnie kept glancing from the buildings and faraway activity of his hometown and the Empress sitting on her throne in front of him. The pyramid and the dais, surrounded by the pillars of the hall, had wound up somewhere in Oklahoma, resting atop a mountain. But the land was flat; his mother used to clean the house singing a song about “the wind rustling in from across the plain,” and while on vacation with his family one summer, they’d had to drive nearly a whole day before they reached the mountains of Colorado.
Ronnie stepped to the edge of the dais, to gaze around in all directions at the panorama beneath him. “How did we get here?” he wanted to know. He thought he heard the Empress laugh at him, in a kind way, the way Glinda the Good Witch of the North did when she explained to Dorothy that “only bad witches are ugly.”
The Empress lifted herself off the throne and gestured toward the scene below them. She was quite tall, Ronnie noticed. Towering over her mother, and quite possibly, even her father. “While it appears quite real to you,” she said, “It is just an apparition, a spirit of the city where you live. The one we must return you to.” With a flourish of her hand, the dimness returned as if an eclipse had blocked out the sun. The stone and glass of the walls inside the chamber re-materialized.
Ronnie realized that it must all be part of some kind of an elaborate trick, the way she was able to make it appear as though they’d been transported to a mountaintop overlooking Tulsa. Still, it left one question unanswered. “How will I get back?”
The Empress seemed to take much longer to answer the question than Ronnie would have thought was necessary. She gazed away in the distance for a moment, as if pondering what she would say. Finally she turned to him and said “Do you want to go back?”
Ronnie chuckled. “Of course.”
The Empress smiled. She said “Follow me.”
She stepped past them and descended the steps of the pyramid supporting the dais. Over her shoulder she said “Warberg, get the room ready.”
Warberg agreed and when they reached the floor at the bottom of the pyramid, he walked toward the opposite direction, encircling the pyramid and choosing a door on the other side of the hall. Ronnie and the Empress walked through the portal back into the bright light of the building. At first it occurred to Ronnie that it seemed odd for such an ethereal, powerful being to have to walk. At the very least, he thought that four burly guys would carry her on the throne, holding it up in the air atop two poles, the way he’d seen in biblical epics at the movies. He stared down at her feet. She wore sleek boots with a slight shine and smaller tiger stripes. Once she had her back to him while they walked, he could see that a cape like garment draped down her back from her shoulders. It billowed out in folds and swirls like an opened parachute canopy which has fallen to the ground. He wondered if it could spread out from her like wings and enable her to fly. If any living, breathing being could fly on its own, he thought, this woman could.
They ended up back in the strange courtyard, with its ascending and criss-crossing tubes. Before stepping onto a tube, the Empress held out one hand, palm up, long fingernails pointed downward. At that point Ronnie saw something that he hoped he would never forget. Tiny symbols emanated from her palm and trickled down into the air, vanishing like bubbles. A crossing tube opened for them right at that moment, and Ronnie was sure that the little characters flowing out of her hand had caused that to happen. “What is that?” he asked. “What are you doing?”
“It’s a communication device,” she said calmly, as she led him out onto the tube to cross the courtyard.
“How do you make those numbers, or letters, or whatever they are come out of your palm like that?”
The Empress shook her head as she stopped them about halfway to the courtyard, lowered her palm down and bubbled more characters out into the air before them. That time, Ronnie bent down to try to get a closer look, wondering if it was words or numbers she was emitting from her hand. He discovered that it was individual characters like none he had ever seen. All kinds of points, sharp edges, and whorls. The only lettering he’d ever seen to compare with it had been the sample of Chinese writing from his Social Studies textbook in the eighth grade.
A small round platform appeared which brought them down. Ronnie looked at the Empress and shook his head. “I have a question for you,” he started. “If the only thing you wanted to do was help me get back home, why did you take me there in the first place?”
The Empress smiled wryly, acting as if the question had slightly stumped her. She then answered him with confidence, speaking softly. “Ronald, your body is back at the hospital bed.”
Ronnie felt slightly frustrated. He thought that people sure liked to talk in riddles in this strange place. He slapped his arm again, feeling the same sting of pain as he had before. “But I’m here,” he protested. “How can I be in two places at once?”
The Empress paused again before speaking to him. The platform had slowed, which meant that they were probably nearing their floor. She said “Ronald, the mind, the soul is a very mysterious thing. It’s better if you learn the answer to that later.”
“Okay. I guess.”
The platform stopped, having intersected with another horizontal tube. It seemed to Ronnie that they were re-tracing the route and Warberg had taken when they went to the hall of the throne. While they were walking along the tube, another thought occurred to him: if she could conjure up a complete likeness of the entire city of Tulsa somehow, then she could probably come up with a way to show him his sleeping body in the hospital bed in Tulsa. It would surely stump her. He waited until they reached the building again before he said anything and then decided it would carry more weight if he worded it like a command.
“You were able to show me the whole city of Tulsa at the bottom of a mountaintop. Why don’t you show me in the hospital bed?”
Ronnie thought the proposal would shock, or at the very least dismay her, but she grinned knowingly, as if his request were part of a grand plan. She angled her palm downward again, this time pointing it at a door that loo
ked like it opened into an office. The characters again flowed out of her, disappearing into the air. This time Ronnie noticed that they were slightly larger, darker, and more pronounced. More of them came out of her palm and for the characters lingered visibly for a longer period of time than before.
When the flow of characters ceased and she closed her palm, she turned to Ronnie and said “Okay. Now open that door.”
At first, Ronnie was hesitant. He reached toward the doorknob, which wasn’t a knob at all but was a lever. His fingers glanced over it, as though he expected it to generate heat. Out of a corner of his eye he could see the Empress looking on, patiently. When he realized that the metal of the door was not going to scald him, he reached out and grasped it. A rectangular pane on the door was translucent and the room behind it seemed to be lit but before he opened the door he could not see any shadows of objects in there. He pressed down on the lever, heard a clunking sound and pulled the door open. When he saw what lie beyond the threshold, he gasped.
The image seemed to materialize before his eyes the split second the door had opened for him. At first he saw what appeared to be a bed with a lumping of pillows on it. A box sat atop a pole on a pedestal of wheels beside the bed. On the front of it he saw a screen with a squiggled line that moved across it. He had seen screens like that in submarine movies that showed radar images of approaching subs. An even stranger machine flanked the other side: it contained a pump that pushed up and down with a rhythmic, whooshing sound, like a heartbeat and pushed fluid through a tube.
The Empress loomed gently behind him as he crept into the room. She placed a hand gently on his shoulder as the lumps on the bed grew more detailed the closer he came to them. He realized that the lump at the head of the bed was a pillow and he looked down at his face and head as it had sunken into the linen and goose down. Throughout his whole life he had seen pictures of himself and home movies and he looked at himself in the mirror every morning. Yet to himself his own countenance looked vulnerable and innocent as he lay there, unconscious, the machines around him whirring and whooshing. “This doesn’t even look like me,” he said. “I look like a baby.” The Empress nodded at him, gesturing as if to encourage him to look at himself more closely.
Ronnie realized that the other lumps coming out of his body casts. His whole right side had been covered in plaster. A cap like bandage covered his head. Before the accident on the moped his hair had started to get long, like a British rock and rollers, his bangs nearly covering his eyes. The doctors and nurses had either pushed his hair back beneath the cap or they had cut his hair, possibly shaving it all off. Yes, they had shaved it all off, he discovered when he leaned to the side and saw stubbles of it at the base of his skull, below the cap.
His chest rose and fell with his breathing, and he thought he could see his own eyelids flicker. This caused him to jump back. What if he had somehow awakened and saw himself standing in front of the bed, looking down at...himself? The Empress reached around behind him and held his shoulders tenderly, the way his mother sometimes did. “Be brave,” she said, softly.
Ronnie turned, his nose bumping into the Empress’ chest and neck. He could smell something that reminded him of the cool, rainy spring when he would walk home from school and pass the trees in the park with their lavender blossoms. “I’m scared,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
The Empress led him back through the door.
When they were both out in the hallway, the white haired, bearded man Warberg reappeared. He said “The portal is ready.” The Empress nodded in acknowledgment. Ronnie remembered that “portal” was a word they used a lot in television on futuristic space shows and science fiction movies. He thought he had heard it on “Forbidden Planet.”
“What’s going on?” he asked her. “Am I going to get onto a spaceship or something?”
The Empress smiled wryly again, causing a dimple to appear beside her lips. “Something like that,” she said, then dropped her wrist down again to aim some more complicated looking characters out into the air. The edges of a wheel appeared to them. It looked like a bicycle tire. The Empress grasped it, tugging it toward herself. Ronnie watched with rapt attention. As she pulled it closer, he saw a connecting bar appear, then a seat, a crossbar, and the handlebars. She was pulling the bicycle out of thin air the way a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.
She presented the strange-looking bicycle to Ronnie and he grabbed hold of the handlebars to examine it. The seat appeared to be exactly the correct height for him yet instead of pedals, two foot stands jutted out from the frame. The front tire fork and the crossbar seemed thicker than any other bike he had seen on earth but he could not find an engine. The bike was a gaudy, fire-engine red color with yellow accent stripes. He reflected that he would never pick out the color for himself. It looked like a girl’s bike. Finally, there was a light housing on the center of the handlebar and when he glanced down at the wheels; he noticed something curious about them. There were no spokes! The bike frame appeared to be suspended in mid-air. Ronnie reached toward the wheel center, where the spokes normally would have been. When his fingertips bounced against an invisible resistance, he leaned forward for a closer look. He realized that there were, in fact spokes on the wheel but they were microscopically thin, thinner than the strands on a spider web.
He had kneeled down to take the bike into his hands and look it over and from that low vantage he looked up at the Empress, who beamed down proudly at him. “What am I going to do with this bike?” he asked.
The Empress replied, calmly “You will ride home on it.”
Ronnie looked up at her for a few moments. What she had said seemed incredible to him but when she looked down at him she smiled slightly, without opening her lips to reveal teeth. A light seemed to radiate from just beyond her shoulder and he had to look away. She was holding out the bike for him, offering it. He grabbed hold of the handlebars and she released it to him, stepping back.
The Empress said “Sit, Ronald,” and helped him onto the bicycle. It fit him perfectly, as if someone had adjusted the seat height and constructed the frame as an exact match to his body. There were still so many questions to ask, but before he could speak the Empress leaned down to gaze deeply into his eyes. He felt as if she could read his thoughts and expected her to respond to them. To be that vulnerable felt slightly awkward, even embarrassing since Ronnie often had thoughts he couldn’t understand and wasn’t sure if he wanted anyone else to know.
“We’re going to the portal now,” she started. “Ronald, you must be very, very brave.” She pointed to a button on his handle bar. “This will accelerate your vehicle when you press it in with your thumb. A light perched here will illuminate your path. Press the button, Ronald. Try it. For me.” Ronnie stared down at the button on the handlebar, at first afraid to touch it. This, after all was a world where elevators appeared beneath your feet and entire replicas of cities could be created. The Empress nodded, smiling, gently urging him on.
Finally, he touched the button with his thumb and the bike lurched forward as though it had a rocket pack mounted on the rear. Bright light exploded from the housing, washing out all the details of the doorway before them. When he lifted his thumb from the button, the tires screeched on the floor and the bicycle stopped abruptly, bucking Ronnie out of the seat for a moment.
“Wow,” he said. “Do I get to keep this when I get back? Nobody’s going to believe it unless I show them.”
The Empress appeared to ignore his question. She was looking over his shoulder at Warberg, gesturing him toward the doorway with a tilt of her head. Ronnie saw Warberg angle his arm downward with his palm opened and little characters flowed from the skin of his hand as they had with the Empress. The symbols he formed seemed more faded and broken, however. The doorway then opened in layers of wall spreading apart, like the aperture on a camera lens. Ronnie felt his heart race in anticipation of what the parting layers would reveal. What he saw at first looked like a cave, l
eading into a dark tunnel.
Ronnie looked into the abyss, which was only let at the mouth from the light of the hallway. “I’m supposed to ride through there?” Ronnie asked. “It looks like I’d be riding off into nothing. I can’t do it! I’m scared!”
The Empress closed her eyes, nodding deeply. “I understand,” she said. “It’s the only way. You must be brave. Remember, I will always be there.”
He eyes and the soothing way she spoke calmed him. His fear suddenly evaporated. She laid her hand on one shoulder and Warberg laid his hand on the other and together they gently led him to the tunnel. Ronnie looked up at the Empress, then at Warberg as they beamed down proudly at him. Swallowing hard, he then gazed ahead at the black opening and pressed down on the button with his thumb. The cave, however, suddenly looked like a huge, gaping maw. Ronnie looked up at the Empress and said “But I can’t...”
Then the ground collapsed beneath him, jolting him forward into the tunnel. Before he plunged into the darkness, he looked up at the Empress’ eyes one last time.