CRIPPLEGATE, LONDON, ENGLAND | 1953
The Sun uncharacteristically beat down on the still-broken streets of London’s Cripplegate as a call went up among the children gathered in a bombed-out corner lot slowly on its way to being reclaimed as a proper English garden.
“What time is it Mr. Wolf?” The small gang inquired. The wolf in question turned slowly, leering at the tasty morsels who dared to edge ever closer to his imagined fangs and deadly claws.
“One o’clock,” the wolf replied, in this case, the wolf being a snap bean of a nine-year-old boy named Lucious Cole. An illicit thrill surged through the assembled sheep as they crept nearer to their natural predator who eyed them hungrily in turn.
“What time is it Mr. Wolf?” The question was restated, this time, with an undercurrent of trepidation.
“Two o’clock,” the wolf replied, carefully watching the crafty sheep who, to be fair, had designs of their own. The neighborhood variant of the game called for a quick reversal of fortune if any of the flock had the luck and temerity to touch him before he uttered the magic phrase, thus releasing his baser instincts, and allowing total carnage to commence. The wolf might decide to feast anytime between one and twelve o’clock, causing the sheep to scatter with the carnivore in reckless pursuit. The last sheep standing, would then become the wolf, and the game would start again.
Once again the query was raised, the flock ever closer to the ravenous engine of their own destruction. “What time is it Mr. Wolf?”
“It’s… time for dinner, and I am going to eat you all!” The wolf proclaimed mid-jump, the sheep running for their wooly lives. Giddy with chase, Cole cut through an uncleared corner of the lot, hoping to cut off a few of his fleeing cohort when, from below his feet, came a hollow cracking.
As a stout young man named Chas Woodrow would later tell the constabulary, it was if Cole had just disappeared. One moment he was in hot pursuit, the next, vanished into the foxgloves and delphiniums. It wasn’t until the sheep stopped running and turned around to investigate that they found the hole and, at least three-and-a-half meters below the brick-strewn ground, a prostrate Lucious Cole.
“Go get help!” Woodrow commanded his friends as he simultaneously shouted down into what looked like the deep basement of a building long knocked flat. “Louie! Y’alright?”
Cole, hearing the voice of his best friend, sat up, shook his ringing head, and looked around his new environment.
“A-OK!” He called out, his own voice echoing into the dark. “Nothing broken as far as I can tell.”
“Oi! Catch!” Woodrow tossed Cole the precious Zippo lighter he had inherited from an American GI. “I’m going to see if I can find a rope or something.”
“Ace,” Cole answered as he caught the Zippo. Stepping out of the shaft of sunlight now streaming into the forgotten room, he flicked open the lighter and upon striking flint was bewildered by what he saw. The underground bunker he had so ungracefully entered appeared to have been a laboratory of some sort. Exotic-looking electrical equipment ringed the perimeter of the room, thick cables running from tables crowded with dead meters of every kind. The wires that led down across the floor were all covered in thick dust, attesting to their disuse at least since the German Blitz had buried the whole operation.
Cole followed the closest rat’s nest of cable through a reinforced exit, the heavy steel door designed to keep something well out, or in; but judging from the dog’s dinner of wires crossing the threshold, had never been used for either task.
The adjoining space was nearly the same size as the one he fell into, with one important difference that made it seem much larger. Whereas what he was already thinking of as the lab looked like a yard sale at Dr. Frankenstein’s flat, the new space was spotless except for a massive riveted spiral of sheet aluminum resting up on one flat end.
As Cole approached the structure, his distorted reflection gazed back at him in the convex side of the standing silver surface, the tiny flame from the Zippo dancing hypnotically in the mirror. His twisted twin looked at as much of a loss as he felt. Peering into the open end of the structure, Cole felt an intoxicating buzz, recalling the time that he and Woodrow broke into his uncle’s liquor cabinet and each had their first nip of gin.
Bolstered by the exciting feeling, Cole followed the curved panel inward and found himself surrounded on either side by the reflections the lighter threw against the polished walls. The further he walked into the spiral, the better he realized he could see. Against his own better judgement, Cole snapped the Zippo closed and could immediately discern a dim glow emanating from further within the assembly. It was as if the thing was responding to his presence and was somehow powering up.
Forgetting about the rescue that was surely about to notice that he was missing, Cole felt drawn to the center of the contraption. He ignored a growing feeling of agitation, chalking it up to having fallen down the proverbial rabbit hole into one of the science fiction pulps that he favored. A loud buzzing assailed his ears as he turned the final bend into the center of the spiral. At what he would later learn was its mathematical origin point, sat a simple metal chair, and having nothing better to do, he sat.
The dim light suddenly intensified as if the act of occupying the proffered seat had completed some secret circuit, awaking the mysterious machine from its slumber. Cole gazed at his reflection in the concave side of the polished aluminum wall, and straightened his dirty blonde hair, thinking that he looked pretty good for having dropped a fair piece into some dusty nightmare.
“The hair looks good, kid,” came a voice out of nowhere. “Always has.”
“Bloody hell!” Cole cried out as the wall in front of him began to fade into a foggy chimerical forest scene where a disturbingly familiar-looking older man sat cross-legged in the grass.
“There you are,” the phantom spoke. “I have waited a long time until things on this end were just how I remembered them. I have so much to tell you.”
“Who the hell are you, then?” Cole demanded.
“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together,” the phantom sang.
“What are you on about, mate? What’s your game?”
“Oh, that’s right,” the figure remembered, “you wouldn’t have heard that one yet. Forget I said anything.”
“Forget? You haven’t said a single word that has made any sense at all. None of this makes sense.”
“You always were a cheeky little bastard. Look, they are going to find you down in that hole any minute, now. Listen very closely to what I am going to tell you, and most importantly, don’t tell a soul.”
Román Leão 