Even a four-year-old would have had difficulty escaping that crib, Andrew thought. Evidently, Krystyn had no intention of letting her charges climb out of the crib and hurt themselves. The black walnut rails gave Andrew the eerie feeling that the crib was more of a jail cell mounted on a wooden sleigh than the place of rest and refuge for an innocent infant. Against the wall stood a playpen of similar design with the same cage-like atmosphere with dark, dusky-blue plastic padding. Andrew felt his eyes drawn inexorably back to the heavy slats of the dark crib. If an adult had been somehow forced to sleep in the crib, Andrew had no doubt whatsoever that the unfortunate person would have nightmares that he was being transported in the dead of night in a somber Siberian prison sleigh to some shadowy snowy gulag in the Russian wilderness where privation and isolation made escape impossible. The thought made a chill of anticipatory horror run down his spine. Andrew shook his head to throw of the wintry sensation that crept down his spine and circumscribed the crack between his cheeks to make the guts in his lower abdomen churn as his testicles drew close to his body for protection. He knew that his recent reading of “Dr. Zhivago” was to blame for his condition. He had lain in bed at nights with the book he had borrowed from the library and shivered in sympathy when the innocent Doctor had been sentenced to Siberia.
After a few moments, the chilly sensation passed and Andrew fell into his normal mode of observation. He looked up at the “Guardian Teddy Bears” mounted on the walls and noticed an oddity that he hadn’t seen at first glance. There were thin fabric-covered boxes behind each of the Teddys. Moreover, for the first time since he had been in the room he realized it was filled with the soft strains of consoling cradlesongs that came from no particular direction. The sight of the crib had so disconcerted him that he had totally missed the music. Obviously, the nursery had a surround sound system built-in utilizing the newest omnifocal piezoelectric speaker system manufactured by Noise Cancellation Technologies that he had read about in a technology awards issue of Discover Magazine. From what Andrew had read, the speakers didn’t have a “sweet spot”, instead they turned the entire volume of the nursery into a “sweet space”. Andrew couldn’t see the stereo console, but the speakers that were half-hidden behind the teddy bears mounted on the wall were clue enough to its existence. Apparently Krystyn never turned it off; soft, relaxing melodies of lullabies were playing in the empty nursery even though the room had no occupant.
The nursery had it’s own bathroom, with a built-in changing station and baby bath equipped with a hand sprayer on the counter at waist height as well as a normal sink. To the side of the changing station stood the same sort of diaper pail that was in the nursery proper. Oddly, there was a mirror in front of the baby bath so the baby could see itself, but there was none in front of the sink. Andrew could not imagine why it was so important that the baby should see itself that a mirror had been mounted in that particular place. He guessed that it was intended to distract the babies with their own image to make bathing them easier. Like the nursery, the area to each side of the mirror had open Elna shelving units built into wells in the wall where the accoutrements of a baby’s bath were stored. He noticed that the racks were filled with neat stacks of washcloths and towels for baby’s bath in addition to unopened and opened packages of disposable diapers, spare plastic tubs of Pampers baby wipes, bottles of Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo, conditioner, lotion, and oil as well as a stack of bars of Johnson baby soap, and two jars (one open, one unopened spare) of vanilla-scented nursery vaseline. The aroma of the opened packages of diapers pervaded the bathroom with an attractive clean, sweet, smell of baby powder instead of the slight reek of disinfectant and cleansers one normally encounters in bathrooms.