Cristal

Lamp

by Vivian Darkbloom

Moths fluttered around the buzzing bare lightbulb. The fixture, white, dirty and cobwebbed looked something out of a 1950’s service station. It featured a metal art-deco half-spherical shade, also painted white, and filthy with the collected grime and slime of the steaming jungle around. It was mounted on a dark green metal pole in the shape of Bo-Peep’s crook, or maybe a flamboyant candy cane, in the twilight. The sun had only recently just set.

Set to the effervescent blur of chirruping insects and birds, whirring and clicking in a fierce array of syncopation, along with the buzzing sixty cycle hum, and the faint hinted mechanical chopping of a whirlybird in the distance.

The drama of mothly desire and burning persisted in the presence of nobody. The solitary light lit its little realm within the forest, but there was no human around to see. In olden days, the illumination might have emanated from a torch, and the bare flame would have accelerated the actor’s lines. The moths desiring most that which spelled their doom. The advance of technology had for once slowed down the script. Now, instead of being scorched to death after only a few encounters, the moths could flutter away all night, batting themselves against the glass again and again without being significantly harmed. And who would ever know?

Nobody was present to muse over the ironies of this scene, the lamp standing alone across from the grey stone wall.

The wall was modern, six feet thick and a hundred feet high. Though recently built, the jungle vines had already left their marks, scaling and decorating with their own stylish elegant scribble across the blank page, the gigantic steel-colored cement blocks. The wall stretched in either direction as far as the eye could see, vanishing into the trees on both sides.

And off center of the light, a bit to the right if you were facing the wall, was a metal gate. Or you might call it a doorway. About the height and width of an ordinary room door, but much thicker and of hardened steel. And it was seriously locked, with a latch that extended from a steel bar all the way across. A circle of black buttons perched to the side of the closed doorway, on the wall, a circle about the size of the dial of a princess telephone. Encased in clear plastic.

And nobody noticed how quickly the helicopter emerged from the canopy overhead, and settled down gently on the circular pad nearby, the singing blades slowing and coming gradually to a complete stop as the pilot killed the engine, leaving relative silence.

Two humans had been in the helicopter, a man and a woman. The man remained, executing the final items in the shutdown procedure, while the woman disbarked. She was tall and longhaired. He short but muscular.

“I tell you, you’re crazy,” he was telling her. “I wouldn’t go in there without one of these —” and he gestured by picking up some form of large weapon, the kind the men all carried in these parts. She had never memorized the names, but would simply tune out in a glaze of boredom when they sat lovingly caressing the model numbers and specifications of their various phallic weaponry.

She glanced over at the one he held. It looked like a fat, black rifle, with some sort of automatic machinery.

“Of course you wouldn’t go in without one of those. Because you are a baboon.”

“You know it turns you on,” said Flavio, the man. “You know deep down you love me. That’s why you’re always giving me shit about my heat.”

“In fact, I don’t,” replied Danielle, the woman. At which point she refrained from saying any more: he could be useful at some point later on. And really, was he worth the effort it would take to offend him?

“I know you love it. All the ladies do. It’s part of my charm, the weapon. It’s why they all fall in love. But, my dear, they fall in vain, for I only have eyes for you.”

Danielle cringed to hear his crass plagiarisms, as he thrust the key into the door of the small outpost building below the lamp, slamming the door open as he dove inside.

A smile played on her lips as she glanced up at the light, thinking of the moths fluttering against it.

She remembered a story she had once heard of an outcast moth. The one who followed only the stars. The other moths laughed cruelly at this stupid moth, who had never proved himself before the great electric light. Legend had it that, free from the lightbulb and torch burns, the star-seeking moth lived forever. While the rest lived and died. Perhaps the eternal moth was here even, at the edge of the clearing, flying upwards, ever soaring.

“I don’t know why you do it,” Flavio prattled on, emerging with a lit cigarette, the pungent stench of which pervaded the whole area. “Do you love being in there with those things? They can’t be paying you enough. Man, I seen a film of what one of them critters can do. Ain’t pretty. They lost plenty of workers, building that wall.”

She shrugged. “You need the weapon because you are afraid. I am not afraid, so I need no weapon.”

He collapsed in a metal folding chair he had brought out, exploding in a burst of laughter. “Right, Yoda. There’s logic for ya. Whether you look like lunch or not, that’s the question.”

“In your case, that is true.”

“And how did it happen anyway, that you got to be the special one they choose for all these missions?”

She shrugged again. “Some kind of craft went down in there. Somebody needs to investigate. I am qualified, so I was chosen.”

“Doesn’t it ever bug you, wondering if that little magical trick you use to charm them might not work one day? Then what? Don’t you think you ought to take one of these?” He again lifted his weapon, which he had now set leaning against the wall as he sat smoking.

“And you’re certain that your fancy projectile launcher will always be effective?”

“Truth be told, I wouldn’t go in there, even with my buddy here.”

“Well then. I guess it will have to be me.” She picked up her knapsack, testing the flashlight by shining the beam over to the doorway. “After forty eight hours, if I have not come back, you may leave. But stay within radio range, please.”

“Of course darling,” he blew a cloud of smoke. “I do it all for you. Oh, and the money, of course, which isn’t much. So mostly it’s for you. I know you adore me.” He grinned.

She hoisted the knapsack onto her back — it was not heavy — and strode over to the doorway, where she flipped up the plastic cover and punched a combination of seven numbers.

“You should tell me the password, in case I have to come in after you!” he shouted over.

“Forty eight hours!” she replied, as the bolt slid back with a heavy clank, and she wrestled the door open, walking through into the blackness beyond. Moments later, the automatic machinery hissed the door shut, and the bolt slid back with another clank, followed by a click which spoke of finality.

Flavio gave a low whistle, then disappeared once more into the outpost shack. It was too stuffy to stay in there yet. The place needed to air out. He set the portable TV on the little folding table he had brought out, and sat there smoking as it chattered away with the baseball game.

There was a rustle of leaves from behind the wall. A loud rustle. He could have sworn he saw the treetops swaying above the edge of the wall in the fading light. Then there was the haunting cry of a predator. It sounded something like a cross between the honking of a goose, the howling of a coyote, and the growl of a lion. Whatever it might have resembled, it sent his heart into his throat, and chills up his spine. He snapped the TV off suddenly.

There was a loud thud, then a sound like one boulder grinding against another. Had the wall just moved, or was it his imagination? Was it really true that they couldn’t climb out of there? Sure, nobody had heard of it happening, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t. If they would even let on about it anyway.

He spat out little spicy bits of tobacco onto the ground.

Faint rustling, was all now, behind the wall, then only the insects. That was it. The infernal insects. He swatted another mosquito.

For a long time, he couldn’t find the motivation to turn the game back on, but just stood there, watching the metal doorway.



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