Notes
Soundtrack suggestions:
In the museum:
- No such thing as scaring too much - Michael Giacchino, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
In Benjamin Lockwood's room:
- Maisie and the Island - Michael Giacchino, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Up to 00:50).
-o-
"Maisie!" Iris' voice shouted inside the manor. "Oh, Maisie! Damn, that girl is asking for trouble. Maisie!"
Looking for the girl, the governess entered the museum, where Maisie often hung out. She scanned the huge hall and its exhibits. Nobody. A heavy silence prevailed there but suddenly it was broken by the rustling of leaves in one of the dioramas. Iris followed the direction of the noise and then her gaze stopped on one of the dioramas on the northern side of the museum, the one with the two dilophosaurs and the small prosauropod. She began to stare at the adult dilophosaurus because a monkey cuddly toy was hanging from its mouth and recognizing it, Iris sighed. Then she heard footsteps, footsteps approaching, approaching fast. Before she could react, a creature suddenly burst in front of her.
"Boo!" Maisie shouted.
Iris jumped, frightened by the girl's little joke.
"You fool!" she exclaimed.
Maisie laughed.
"You'll be the death of me, you know that," the governess added. "One day, my heart might really stop. What would you do? Would you go live in the forest with the lions?"
"There are no lions in the forest, Iris," Maisie chuckled.
"And what are cougars? Alley cats perhaps?" Iris retorted sarcastically.
She leaned over and started adjusting Maisie's hair and clothes.
"Your grandfather wants to see you," she informed her.
"Really?" she asked with interest.
"Go see him and then go straight to your bath," Iris ordered.
"I don't want to take a bath," the girl sighed.
The pronunciation of the word bath caused Iris to pause. Whereas she had spoken it with Received Pronunciation, an accent she inherited from her father, Maisie had said it with an American accent.
"What?! The Queen's English, young lady. Bath."
"Bath," Maisie said lazily, still in her native accent.
"Bath," the governess insisted with a received pronunciation.
"Bath," the girl said at last in the required accent.
"Bath. Not bath, you're not a savage."
Maisie startled Iris again by roaring at her.
"Now calm down," she told her. "And you better behave yourself in the presence of your grandfather."
They left the museum and headed for the southern tower, as Benjamin's room was at its summit.
"Hi Grandpa," Maisie said as she entered.
Benjamin Lockwood was sitting in his bed, opposite of the door. He was connected to a monitor which showed his life signs. In his hands, a scrapbook was open. He raised his head and looked at his granddaughter.
"Ah, here you are," he welcomed her, putting the scrapbook aside. "Come and sit next to me. I missed you."
Walking around around the coffee table and its chess set and the small couch that stood between it and the bed, Maisie moved closer and sat down next to him.
"I went back in time to the Triassic, passing through the Cretaceous and the Jurassic, all in a single day," she said.
"Oh my! What did you see?"
"Only herbivores. There was one T. rex though. There were casualties of course."
Maisie turned to Iris, smiling. Lockwood looked at her too.
"Ours included. She had the fright of her life," she added.
He laughed softly.
"You have your mother's wicked sense of humor."
Maisie looked at the closed scrapbook her grandfather was holding.
"Do I look like her?" she asked.
"Oh yes. You are the same."
She smiled and then looked behind her to her left.
Atop a table was a model of Jurassic Park's Visitor Center and its surroundings. In front of this large building with three thatch-covered conical roofs, there was a pond with water lilies and between the pond and the center, some kind of rail passed, skirting the center before going around the pond and then bifurcating before crossing a tall electric fence at a large gate built with black basalt. Benjamin had told his granddaughter that the gate was inspired by the one that could be seen in the first King Kong, the one released in 1933, a film of which he and John Hammond had been fans. The huge wooden panels of the gate were open, letting two green and red Ford Explorer pass. Beyond, the rail passed through a bucolic plain populated by dinosaurs. Near the fence were a pair of ankylosaurs with black armours and mauve faces; to the left of the rail, there were a few Gallimimus with brown and orange scales; on the right, a group of greenish Parasaurolophus with black stripes; near a small lake and a grey jeep with red stripes, were three apatosaurs with light grey bodies and dark blue mottles; and at the other end of the plain, at the edge of the jungle, a brown tyrannosaur with grey stripes on its back was on the lookout. Those who had made the model in the very late eighties did not know it then, but in their specifications, Hammond and Lockwood had provided them with precise descriptions of the clones that InGen was breeding at Site B on Isla Sorna,
However, the model didn't turned out to be a completely faithful representation of reality. Unlike its successor, Jurassic Park never housed apatosaurs and ankylosaurs, the distance between the visitor center and the main gate was larger, the bucolic plain and the waterhole which inspired those of the model. were actually two or three kilometres southeast of the center, and near this iconic building, the park's management had to build a containment pit for raptors, which turned out to be a serious mistake during the 1993 incident, during which they killed two of the employees and tracked down the survivors inside the visitor center itself.
But no matter, Maisie knew that there was now nothing left of Jurassic Park, as its few remaining ruins have been destroyed during the volcanic eruption which, along with the terrible Indominus rex, had caused the collapse of Jurassic World. For her, that place, that bygone world that no longer existed except in the minds of those who knew it, was as distant as the England of Richard Lionheart, the Egypt of the pharaohs, Ice Age North America, or even the world at the end of the Cretaceous could be. However, Maisie was surprised to feel a form of nostalgia while contemplating the model, as if Jurassic Park evoked happy memories for her even though she had never visited it.
"Did my mother visit the old park?" she asked her grandfather.
"Once," Benjamin Lockwood replied with a sad face. "A long time ago. If she was still with us, she would have gone to Costa Rica to help them. She would have helped them all..."