Chapter 21

The doorway opening in the basement wall broke Cooper and I out of whatever state we'd been in and suddenly everything returned to normal. Well, except for their being a door to nowhere in the wall.

"Enter," Bud said dramatically.

"Its dark," Cooper pointed out.

"There was a flashlight in the utility room," I offered, remembering seeing it sitting on a shelf by the fuse panel while we'd been in there with Bobby yesterday. I walked back and grabbed it, realizing it was one of those rechargeable ones that stayed plugged in until you needed it. Good, we wouldn't have to worry about the batteries dying while we were in the tunnel. I brought it back and flipped it on then stepped through the door.

Inside the door the tunnel was about 4 feet wide and eight feet high. The tunnel continued into the side of the mountain beyond where the flashlight could reveal anything. There were smooth domes in the ceiling of the tunnel spaced every eight feet or so. They looked to be about 4 or 5 inches across. They looked like lights, but I didn't find a switch on the wall anywhere.

"Where's the switch?" Cooper asked.

"You'll find it like you found the doorknob," Bud answered smugly.

We stood and scanned the walls, trying to see it the way we'd seen the basement wall, but didn't find anything. I shrugged my shoulders and started walking down the tunnel. The tunnel ran in a straight line about a thousand feet and then stopped at another door.

"Another door?" I asked

"Same deal as the first one," Bud answered, not surprising us at all.

"Okay then," I said, and Cooper and I began focusing on the door. We found that feeling of being side-by-side very quickly and within minutes the symbol resolved itself and we twisted. The door in front of us opened silently. I walked in and was met by darkness.

"hmmm ... I heard Cooper think aloud.

"What?" I asked.

"What were you focusing on back when we were trying to turn on the lights?"

"The wall," I answered.

"Yeah, me too." he agreed. "Why?

"Why?" I began, but then it occurred to me, as it obviously already had to him. We'd been focusing on where we expected a light switch to be, rather than on the lights themselves. "You're right, lets try."

I walked back to the tunnel and pointed the flashlight up so we could see one of the smooth little domes. I focused on that and the side-by-side feeling showed up almost instantly. There wasn't a symbol this time so much as just a point of – I don't know – cooperation, was as close as I could come to what it felt like. We focused on that for just a second and suddenly, there was light! I unfocused and looked around. All the lights were on.

"They must be linked," Cooper thought to me.

"Guess so. That last one sure focused easy, didn't it?"

"It did, Bud interrupted. "Your minds are getting used to finding the necessary state. That is good, as it it is the key to where we will ask you to go and what we will ask you to do in the future."

With the lights on we found that the big black empty space behind the second door was still a pretty big empty space. A huge cavern deep inside the hillside behind the house.

"The cave was already here," Bud said as we walked around it, listening to the echo of our footsteps bouncing off the walls. "We expanded it, added a secret entrance only you could use on top of it, smoothed out the floor and added the lights. Additionally, the walls are coated with a substance that makes it undetectable to ground penetrating radar, or even the modern tools designed to detect gravitational anomalies caused by subsurface chambers."

"Awesome," we both said together. "But what is it for?"

"Every super hero needs a secret base, don''t they?" Bud said.

Well it took quite a while for the big stir that pronouncement caused to settle down, but mostly because Bud refused to talk about it any further, at least for the time being. "Each step along the path must happen in its own time," he said, which seemed odd for the agent in charge of facilitating the whole thing to say.