Clifford turned to regard the middle-aged woman with an expression of mild curiosity. Dressed in a brown jumpsuit and pocketed apron, with her salt-and-pepper hair bound beneath a bandana, Miss Anna was anything but imposing. Yet Clifford looked at her with an expression that, to Constance’s eye, looked remarkably like suspicion. This sudden change in mood struck her as odd.
“What is it?” He asked.
“You said something before about a cloud of witnesses,” Miss Anna reminded him, stepping forward a pace. “What did you mean?”
“This place is not silent,” Clifford explained. “It speaks with a thousand thousand voices. It speaks to She who listens.”
“The radio,” Lamont said, his eyes sparking. “You mean all those signals being projected across the electromagnetic spectrum.”
“He who has ears, let him hear,” Clifford nodded.
“Who are they?” Miss Anna asked. “What do they want?”
“They want us to add our voices to theirs,” Clifford intoned, “to rouse the Sleeper with our song and bring her back to us.”
Lamont pursed his lips grimly and put his hand on Clifford’s copper-suited back to guide him toward the column in the center of the space. “Look, mate, you and I are getting on that elevator right now. And if you don’t start talking like a normal bloke, only one of us is going to leave it standing.”
Constance noticed that his English accent had taken on a decidedly cockney lilt. He was angry, she thought; quite unaccountably so.
“Come off it, Townsend,” Clifford protested, his voice losing some of its dreamy quality. “There’s no need for aggression. Can’t you see that everything is going to be alright now?”
“As far as I’m concerned, Doc Faust will be the judge’a that,” Lamont glowered. “Now come along; we’re burning starlight.”
The spectacled crew member shrugged and followed Lamont into the elevator. When he was inside, Lamont stood in the center with his back to the wall. His eyes locked on Constance’s with a grim expression. And then he was gone, replaced by a featureless white column that rose like a giant tree trunk through the center of the garden.
Constance turned to Miss Anna, feeling suddenly weak. What in the world had they gotten themselves into? “Are we all going to be like that,” she asked, her hands trembling, “after spending a few days in this tower?”
Miss Anna’s pale blue eyes gazed at the central column as if she could see through it to watch the elevator make its descent. “It ain’t a tower, girl,” she said quietly. “I see that now. It’s a steeple.”
Very nice to see this story progressing again, still curious after all these years to see where it leads. And for me it was the notifications dropping in my (promotions folder of my) email again that drew me back.
Now you've just got me wondering about the difference between a tower and a steeple :) (as a non-native but pretty fluent English speaker/thinker)