part 2

If I shone my light down at the pools of water, they cast an entrancing play of light and shadow onto the ceiling. It was sort of like a naturally occurring planetarium. Apart from the importance of keeping the details of rituals a secret, I could see why Mithraeums were always underground.

Shining my light at the walls, I was alarmed to see something a lot more detailed and involved than the runic symbols. It looked like red and blue lines, some dotted others solid, intersecting shapes here and there. Some human shapes, others just squares, triangles and so on. They pulsated intensely, like circuitry throbbing with current. I began to interpret them as instructions drawn in a combo of blood and "spirit".

Part of those instructions demanded my involvement but swore me to secrecy. This too sailed right into the huge perpendicular tower of "nope doesn't work that way" in my brain as I am not a dualist. However I wanted to go with the flow it always ran into these huge rectilinear blocks of blinking neon "physics doesn't allow this" that I couldn't rid from my mind. I looked more closely at the ghostly blue "ink" half the lines consisted of. "Here I am!" it seemed to say. "Spirit essence. Can you deny it?" but all I could think about was "How can I see this right now? Photons would have to bounce off of it, then hit my retinas. If spirits are immaterial, how do photons bounce off of them? And if not, then I cannot see them, so whatever this is, it's not spirit energy but something I am hallucinating."

I felt a strong reverberating sense of frustration and disgust. It's very familiar to me as I encounter it a lot from romantic thinkers. I do not mean to irritate them, I am just not configured the way they are. The instructions only became more urgent as I grew more dismissive. "I'm half native American, is that it? I've never done a vision quest or whatever. I look like any other white guy with black hair as I never let it grow out. If that's your angle, it's a dead end."

I got up and began to explore. There were places with a ridge, like a second story elevated up above the normal route, accessible if you felt like climbing some boulders. And I did so I climbed the fuck out of those boulders and just let myself enjoy it. As practice. It went pretty well. I resolved to do that more. This is when things took an unwelcome turn.

There were others in the cave with me. I saw a pair of wobbling head lamps approaching. I couldn't imagine how to interact with them, walking mass of electronics with a head full of psychedelics as I was. I was self aware enough to intensely appreciate that very big differences existed between how they thought and how I was thinking right now. Also while sober but for different reasons.

They passed right by me with a wave and a "How do you like it down here?" I waved back and said "Love it, I come every year. Just resting a spell." Total bullshit but exactly what they needed to hear to leave me alone. I felt guilty, like I was a replicant faking my way through the Voight-Kampf test but anything was preferable to strangers learning that I was leaving no ball untripped in a subterranean cavern with them. Tasers if I was lucky. A knee to the ol' mean bean machine if I wasn't. They bought it though. And didn't notice when I got up, all lights turned off, and began following them at a distance.

I couldn't tell you why at the time, just that I was doing it. I also found myself trying to work out the dude's body mass, probable calories expended to disable him and then chase down the girl, or if it was more efficient to kill her so she didn't run and then take on the dude she was with.

I recoiled. Why was I thinking this? I don't have a violent bone in my body. I use no-kill mousetraps and apologize if I have to swat a bug. It was just not me. And then as if the jig was up, something separated from me. I'd glimpsed it earlier, flowing along with the 'spirit circuitry', almost indistinguishable from it, but implanting the instructions to kill and be secretive about it.

"Alright, there's something here other than me. Show yourself." A few moments of silence, then chuckling. "You really are no fun. I'll bet nobody loves you out there. You'll be perfect for this. I'm going to level with you. From this day forward, you're going to hide just inside this cave waiting for people to enter. When they do, you'll follow them in, get them alone if there's a group, and kill them one by one or in pairs if you have to. Then you'll bring the bodies further into me, eat whatever part of them is necessary to keep you going, then tomorrow you'll do it all again."

Up until now I was reasonably sure I'd avoided a bad trip. And even at this point I couldn't really tell if it was going bad. I didn't feel frightened, just disgusted. "Fuck you. Why would I do that?" I felt some unseen mass swirling around me. "Because if you don't, I'll find a new instrument. He'll kill you, move your body further into me and eat you over the course of several days to keep his own body working so he can continue to do this for me."

The mass was not reptilian, amphibian or anything else familiar to me. Based on the sounds it was making, I want to say it was something like an immense cockroach. But when it settled in behind me, its breath hot on the back of my neck it was like some great beast, a wolf or bear or something, sucking in the cool air and exhaling hot smelly breath all over my back. Of course I immediately thought of turning around.

"No, don't look. The moment you look, I find a new instrument. The distinction between you and the meat which protects you at present will disappear. You know what that means, don't you?" At this point I felt very disturbed but not fearful. I don't think I really process fear correctly. I understand on a conscious level the possible consequences of doing something dangerous but it isn't "real" for me in a way that makes me feel anything. I had to be kept away from cars, trains and so on as a small boy because of this.

I guess to some extent it's why I find myself gettin' weird on high doses underground or for that matter under a lake, wearing a DIY diving helmet. I know full well it has backups upon backups and that A breach of physics or an extremely improbable series of failures has to happen for me to be in any danger. In a sense it's like I'm daring that to happen.

Like taking potent psychedelics and going caving, although I'd taken no end of precautions for that too. I could devote a whole post to my "magic bag" aka the "in case I am too high to find the car by sundown and have to spend the night in the wilderness" bag. It's got fuckin' everything, not just for survival but keeping shit charged so I am entertained. It isn't anything like a real bugbout bag, more of insurance against being hungry, cold and bored all night.

So I'm following those poor people, and this great beast is crawling behind me, its mouth/nostrils just inches from my shoulder. "Why are you doing this?" I quietly asked. "I'm no ghoul if that's what you're thinking. Just the Earth trying to balance itself. I'm the one you met in the forest." I thought back to the beautiful, bossy, mischevious forest entity that I'd encountered several times while thinking of the forest I often trip in as a boltzmann brain consisting of trees as neuron analogs, exchanging pheromones to signal everything from danger to lust.

How could it be? She was so boisterous, upbeat, raunchy maybe but well intentioned (being an embodiment of nature she was very preoccupied with reproduction and why I hadn't done so yet). Yet here was this gargantuan nightmare, either dwelling within the cave or the cave itself, demanding that I feed it corpses. It didn't match up. The forest entity I remembered had a doting, motherly affection for humans.

"It was a lot more special when it was just me and maybe five thousand of you. But now I'm absolutely caked with primates. I don't mean to come off all captain planet or anything but you've nearly killed off all edible wild fish stocks and acidified the ocean so that only giant jellyfish will thrive. The clathrate gun's in the process of going off and almost none of you even know what it is. I've tried everything. I had high hopes for Ebola but it's looking like you'll science that shit to death like you did the rest of me. I figure it's time to stop being subtle about it and just have a couple hundred thousand of you worldwide start feeding the rest of you into me until everything stabilizes."

Where before I'd thought of the cave as a lung or esophagus, and as a great artery I now recognized it for a digestive tract. That I myself was deep inside of. They say there's always a light at the end of the tunnel, but not this one. Just keeps getting narrower.

"Now you understand why you must do this. Kill those two. Don't waste energy, you need to live off of their meat for a while. There'll be an investigation. You can leave my confines during that if you must. But return afterward and repeat the process. Kill those who enter, cervical dislocation works best. You're surrounded by rocks dummy, use one of 'em. Then move their bodies deeper into me, there is plenty of room for at least a million. Then eat whatever is necessary to keep you going. Then do the same thing the next day. This is your life now."

I was on the verge of tears at the needless, absurd monstrosity of what it commanded me to do. I set off running away from the couple and back towards the entrance. I could hear the creature clamoring down the tunnel after me, outraged that I would defy it. I began seeing skeletal apparitions wherever I shone the light. Finally, I was delivered. The picturesque entrance to the cave was before me, in all of its captivating beauty. The looking glass through which I could still escape this subterranean nightmare. But something nagged at me. The thing that refuses to leave well enough alone: I looked back.

"BOO! :D Ahahaha boogity boogity! Got you didn't I? You completely bought into it. I had to make it a lot more complex for you but it really did the job."