Chapter 6 - Part I
Madness
We were spit out of the lake to a small underground cave. It was clammy, moist, and no larger than two square meters. The ground was mud and the ceiling was covered with dark rock stalactites. The pocket cave was closed on all sides by walls that dripped of mud except for one side that was open and welcomed a pinkish hue that gingerly lit the moisture in the clammy compartment. It was pretty but not pretty enough to dissipate my horror. My senses slowly started coming back, I could feel my heart beating fast.
“That’s an underlake air chute.” Said Shai.
“Why is it pink?” I let out a forced whisper.
“I don’t know, but without it you would not be able to see your own two hands.” Shai rubbed hands together to get rid of the mud. “We didn’t come from there if that is what you’re wondering, the air travels up into the lake.” Shai took off her shirt to reveal a sweaty tank top. She tore a piece of cloth from her shirt and bandaged her leg.
“Shit! Are you-“
“I’m fine,” she snapped. “We came from there.” She pointed above to a gaping hole in the ceiling of the cave, between the dark-rock stalactites. Its lips surged inwards and outwards, contracting and retracting like the breathing rectum of the devil. “We traverse through mud tunnels, not the air chutes, though they sometimes run close to each other. This is why you need to follow me. It is easy to get lost.”
She squeezed the last drops of crimson water from her dark cascading hair. “We need to keep moving. You better get a hold of yourself fast, you cannot be here long, this place accumulates dust. Let’s go.” Shai pointed to a hole, murky and abysmal, in the mud covered ground. Not a second passed and she disappeared into the it, leaving a mustard-like dust unfurling behind her. I coughed.
“Jump!” She echoed from the abyss. “You’ll lose me if you don’t!”
I peered into the tunnel, the darkness of it was brutal. My heart’s little sinewy arm reached my inner ear and with a small angry fist started beating on my eardrum. The mustardy powder that had not yet dissipated stung my face, as if I was not adequately fucked up from the poison in the lake dive. I looked right to left, blood pumped through my veins… faster and faster… I grasped out with my arm… for something… something familiar. At last the disorientation overwhelmed me, the monotonous rhythm of my drumming heartbeats became a new realm of silence. I fell to my knees but my knees did not hit the ground, and the next time I awakened I was kneeling face down inside a thin tunnel like the intestine of a beast. I could touch the wall from every angle around me.
My lower lip burned, I touched it - wet… My hands were filled with mud, it could have been the mud - No, it had the taste of salt in a syrupy texture. Blood. I had fallen down and hit my face, most likely on the edge of the entrance to the tunnel and tumbled down - but how far? Two meters? Two hundred? Had I been knocked out? If so, for how long?
I got up and walked forward. In a hurry to catch on to Shai I tumbled again. It was like falling down stairs that were covered in a thick sticky substance. I was bruised but nothing was broken. My face was down in the mud again. I would have cried if I could breathe but instead I let out a sharp cry into the suffocating ground.
I raised my head into utter darkness and crawled forward like a depraved animal. The tunnel seemed endless; in its infinite darkness my vision again gave way to imagined things. First the apparitions were simple grey lights, pirouetting in the peripherals of my vision, meaningless, phantom-like, and in my perverse state I was unsure of their subsistence. That feeling of uncertainty towards a vision being embedded in reality or outside of it instigated an anxiety that gnawed at my insides like a rabid wolf. And the anxiety, in sync with the abnormal grey lights, consumed my vision until all I saw were a few strands of my brown hair dripping crimson mud drops in the small circle of reality, my final wafting veil of sanity. Then it was gone.
For a moment all I saw was grey, and then, in another flickering moment, a moment one cannot reflect back to with all available mental faculties, the colors changed to crimson and then back to grey, interchanging iterably and in changing patterns until again I was in a vertigo similar to the one I had during the lake dive. I tried to look straight ahead, relying only on the nerves of my neck, checking that their positioning on my shoulders was centered. I preferred the darkness to that madness of fluttering colors.
And then it, too, was gone, giving way to something much more dreadful, much more terrifying and chaotic that I sincerely wished for the darkness and the solitude of the pocket to reach their hand unto me from above and take me back to their relative serenity.
Colorful phantasmagoria prevailed in my vision for only so long, and soon gave way to other apparitions. In one of them I witnessed a dark figure, lean as a gymnast, and standing in a pathetic wilt, like one who recently had admirable looks and became horribly disfigured in a freak accident, in one of the endless corners of the disfigured and discolored geometry that pervaded the mad space of my mind’s eye. I only saw his silhouette but he was letting me know he was there with his fiery eyes and we were connected through pain and the chaos of providence, the ways of luck in this world, guided by threads whose beginnings are so far away and so intertwined with others that they essentially become a glistening grain of dark rock in the sand beneath the vast ocean. He moved slowly toward me in the flickering mayhem of the colors. The corner in which he stood spun around him like a pendulum, forward and back, and every other corner in every dimension spun likewise. My neausea increased as he came closer and peaked when his body engulfed me altogether. The last thing I remember was a scream, as if from a distant room, locked, of a sick patient inside screaming for help.
As I noticed that I somehow managed to advance through the tunnel, the hallucinations eased and took a more pleasant tone. One of these pleasant dream states conveyed small clouds hovering calmly over South Lake, the light of the moons above shining through and giving the crimson lake a lighter tint. A cool autumn breeze brushed my face softly. Then a thing of harmonious beauty happened whose memory I will never forget until the day I die, and only becomes more vivid with age. The autumn breeze carried under the clouds, and in an undetectable moment to my limited senses, turned into music, though it kept that fundamental substance of breeze within the music. Then a soft and subtle voice joined and commandeered every frequency of the music. The singing was only louder than a hum, yet it was arrant and angelic.
Mhmhm, dadadum dum
Folly is where folly lies
Mhmhm, dadadum dum
Underneath green sand eyes
Mhmhm, dadadum dum
They promised me, a land
Beyond the seas
mhmhm, dadadum dum
Follow the breeze,
To tents broached in flames
Behind Syracuse trees
Mhmhm, dadadum dum
The tune and the words changed with every iteration so that after a dozen times the lyrics were all together altered with a different rhythm, composition, and meaning. Shai turned out to be the singer conducting the autumn breeze, the red scenery of South Lake, the serenity of the murky maroon water of a phosphorescent evening double sunset - the rays of the moons overlap on the lake if you are sharp enough to catch it, for it happens in a temporary evening minute in which the largest moon rays overlap, for that was what the shape of the volcano and the inner cities, with their horizontally built structures, permitted.
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Coming Next Monday! 👻