Speaker 1: When I found what was left to my grandfather. He
didn't look like he was any closer to God, his
flesh creaking like the bows of a tree. I might
not have recognized what I was looking at if he
hadn't whimpered at my light. I'd only met him once
before that I was about ten or so. I had
no idea about this strange man who turned up claiming
he was my grandfather. For someone who believed cavemen rode dinosaurs,
Elijah wasn't as weird as you might think. He tracked
us down when I was thirteen and came over to
Britain to visit us. Dad had never mentioned his biological father,
and while the old man seemed regretful about the lost time,
he didn't sit around crying about it either. He was
courteous but distant throughout, and he and Dad parted ways
after those two days and never spoke again, at least
not in person. He did invite us to see him
some day in Texas as he left, but it never
happened Other than that. I remember that he sat me
down one night that talked me through my maths text book,
told me about imaginary numbers and string theory heavy stuff,
but he made it accessible through his simple yet earnest passion.
It was only after he'd gone that Dad told me
the old Man was a young Earth creationist, believed the
Earth was around six thousand years old, and that every
last solemn word in the Bible was meant to be
taken literally. Twenty eight years later, and I was standing
in the lobby of Elijah's privately owned museum that had
passed to me after my father's death. Dad had never
told me about either the museum or Elijah's own passing,
but going through his estate turned it up, and I
was as surprised as any one to find out I
was now the owner of sixty acres on the other
side of the world. The whole place was dedicated to
teaching biblical science of the world's creation. I saw stone
slabs with human footprints displayed like great treasures, some of
them sixteen inches healed to toe and with little placards explaining
that the rocks were proof of humans co existing with dinosaurs.
There was a whole jungle room with plastic cavemen versions
of Adam and Eve crouched over paper cut out fire,
while on the opposite side of the room, a badly
made stegosaurus watched Caine push Abel to the ground, Although
the most ludicrous was the one where two generic looking
cavemen u used to wraptor clause the harvest wheat. It
was imaginative, I'll give him that, but it wasn't especially convincing.
How or why Elijah was so obsessed with creationism was
something of a puzzle to me. He'd begun his career
with a pH d in mathematics and a short stint
teaching at a local college, and part of the reason
I spent so much time in that museum packing up
his things was to try and figure him out. During
that time, I learned three key things. First, Elijah argued
furiously with every other creationist he could find, and burned
every bridge there was. Without their support, he had almost
no visitors during the thirty years the museum was open.
The second was a cutout of a newspaper I found
on Elijah's desk, showing him grinning next to a dinosaur footprint.
The article talked about how he'd gotten lost in the
wilderness and taken refuge in a cave full of old fossils.
I recognized the land in that photo as the place
he'd later built his museum on, so it must have
been important to him. I hadn't seen any cave in
my wonderings, though, but I figured if I kept looking,
i'd come across it sooner or later. The final piece
of the puzzle was Elijah's letter to my grandmother. I
never knew he'd reached out to her. All we knew
was she slept with some American gi and never wanted
to see or speak to him again. The letter was
a proposal, and I was initially surprised she'd shown no interest.
Elijah was wealthy, intelligent, hard working, and, based on his photos,
a good looking and athletic man. But then I got
to the last page or so ethel, I can offer
you more than just a good life. I can offer
you an eternal one. I'm sure I told you by
the time I hurt my leg hiking in the wilderness
and was forced to take shelter in a cave until
the storm passed. There, I found many strange and curious fossils,
and I took the first steps on this strange hobby
of mine. But what I haven't told the others is
that I saw more than just a few old rocks.
I found a way down, down, down, down, Ethel. I
went deep in the earth, and there I found a paradise,
a peace of the world that had been preserved as
it was before the great flood. And I saw early
Man still living as he did in the days of Eden,
ten feet tall and a thousand years old, and speaking
the tongue of God handed down before the fall of Babel.
One of these great men sat me down and told
me the secret histories of the world. I've kept this
knowledge to myself for so long, but I know I
can change the world, and it begins with this new
book I'm writing. After that, a museum to display all
the proof I've gathered. It isn't just about history, Ethel.
It's the future that at stake. Down there I learned
how to put a stop to it. All the wars
and the fighting, hunger and deprivation, it can all be
a thing of the past. And I believe it's God's
will I do this. I can change the world, Ethel.
I want you by my side when I do it.
There it is, I muttered quietly to myself as I
read the letter by the tim light of Elijah's old desk. Lamp.
That was why my grandmother had not responded to his letters,
and why my father did not meet his father until
Elijah tracked him down decades later, six weeks in the
dusty ruins of Elijah's seldom visited museum, and I finally
felt like I understood my grandfather, intelligent, stubborn, possibly mentally ill.
Over the next few days, I continued to pack up
his things and found myself often feeling sorry for him.
It was lonely out there, and it made me uncomfortable
to think of how an old man painstakingly painted little
plaques no one wanted to read, or planning the best
place to build public toilets for field trips that never came,
and he just kept at it right until the end.
It was like I was walking around the physical manifestation
of someone's delusions. But then I found the door behind
the bookcase, and I discovered that Elijah had built two museums.
Whole time i'd been in that place, i'd felt a
kind of quieter ease, but I'd put it down to
the circumstances packing up a dead man's things, or so
I thought. But as soon as I pulled on that
little locking mechanism, and the shelf popped free with a
puff of stale air. I understood I'd been sensing something
else entirely. It was the darkness that stood out to me,
or maybe the smell. Hard to say, since I'd never
breathed air like it before or since, and looking back,
I think I might be overstating just how black the
darkness at the bottom of those stairs really was. But
just the sight of it made something inside me want
to turn and run, not just out of the building,
but out of the damned country, back to the airport
and home again. I'd no idea what was going to
be down there, but for some reason I was scared witless.
Just the dark, I told myself, before forcing one foot
in front of the other and making my way down.
Wasn't far before the plaster shipped away and there was
nothing but bare rock for walls. Turns out I hadn't
been able to find the cave on Elijah's land because
he'd build the museum on top of it. And down there,
in a large chamber bigger than most school gyms, was
a whole other set of displays, eight large glass tanks,
each one bigger than a car. I quickly realized what
I'd been smelling the whole time was from aldehyde, and
it had turned those glass tanks into green and murky
pits where my light revealed only the occasional glimpse of
what lay within. Whatever Elijah was planning on showing off
down here, it wasn't fossilized rocks. There was flesh and
bone in there, exposed muscle, all white and wriggly. I
moved quickly at first, shining my light into each one
and squinting. I was skittish and in a hurry, not
sure what I was going to find. But then I
looked into one and saw a fist sized eyeball staring
back at me, and I cried out in terror. It
was the suddenness of it that got me that, and
it was housed in a socket of rotting flesh, unfamiliar
in color and shape. I couldn't have told you if
it belonged to something that slithered, swam or flew. But
as I walked around the case, I did find a
hand curled up in one corner, with fingers all different
lengths and shapes. What was Elijah planning to do? Down there?
In that hidden room? There were no plaques, no explanations,
only those eight tanks that took up most of the
enormous space, each one raised so the bottom was about
chest height, ready for someone to wander around and marvel
a god knows what. The floor had been covered in marble,
so he clearly had grand ambitions. Now there was only
dust and sandy pebbles littering the floor, but everything upstairs
had been hooky and cheap, the kind of evidence that
was going to convince the already convinced. But down there
in the dark, where I could just make out the
great shapes floating in the murky dark, there was the
sense of something electric in the air, a feeling of
revelation that wormed its way up through the ground, through
my feet, and into my chest, where it settled like
a kind of slow panic. I couldn't stop myself wondering
about Elijah's belief and how it factored into that strange place.
What had he preserved for decades in that chemical filth.
I left after only ten minutes. I returned to the
normal world above, where I spent a good hour sitting
in the sun, hoping that tex and warmth would purge
the dirty feeling that dark room had left me with.
I briefly made arrangements to return home, but quickly canceled.
Elijah was insane, so I told myself there was something
down there, and it was a damned sight, more compelling
than a bunch of cheap forgeries. That night, I stayed
in the same room I always had, and lay tossing
and turning beneath the moonlight, unable and unwilling to simply
let the thoughts of that room fade away. I was
wide awake when I heard the sound of something moving
around the rooms below. I was alone out there, far
from civilization. The sheriff had spoken to me a fair
bit about trying to get a hotel, and for the
first time I wished i'd taken his advice. He was
mainly concerned about squatters, and that's what I told myself.
Must be out there, despite the danger, I got up
to check on it. Anyway, the thought of a whole
night spent hold up in that room waiting for some
crack attict to come stumbling in didn't seem much better
than going out there and confronting them. But of course
there was more to it than that. I had strange
ideas floating in my head, left over from the short
time I'd spent wondering those great glass displays. Every time
I closed my eyes, I saw images of strange, shadowed
things floating within. I wanted to bury those thoughts as
quickly as possible and put an end to fancy notions
of monsters lurking in the dark. At first, the museum
looked much like it always had. There were boxes of
artifacts and books I'd spent the last few weeks putting away,
and quite a few displays still left standing from where
I'd yet to get to them. In the jungle room,
I walked past those funny looking cavemen and plastic dinosaurs
hiding behind fake fo and stopped briefly to examine the
serpent that tented passers by with an apple in its
child sized fist. It was a cheap looking creation, with
a strange childlike face rendered in fiberglass scales and beady
yellow eyes. I disliked it from day one, and catching
it in the dark that night made me hate it
even more. But this time I stopped and re read
the plaque beneath. I remembered the words Elijah had written
for it, and at the time, I dismissed them, but
some strange feeling made me revisit them. In that moment.
Creatures alive to day, such as snakes and lizards, looked
very different under conditions of the pre flood world, where
the air was alive with powerful static, and water did
not fall from the sky but seeped upwards from the
ground as a kind of condensation. The serpent was probably
not like any snake we'd see to day, but perhaps
an altogether different creature whose bones continued to confound the
non believer scientists who studied them. Only through the Bible
can we realize what such fossils truly represent. This is
only one interpretation of what the serpent that tempted Eve
may have looked like. When I looked up, another pair
of eyes were gazing at me from over the mannekin's shoulder.
I could not see the face that hid behind the
fake plant, but there was no denying the two yellow
reflective points that fixed me momentarily before blinking one at
a time. I froze, terrified by such primal sight as
a pair of predatory eyes gazing at me from the dark,
and watched in terror as they slinked away and disappeared entirely.
There followed the sounds of a few rapid and wet
footfalls across the tile floor, as something in that room
crawled quietly into the shadows. That night, I barricaded my
bedroom door, and come morning, when I felt a little
braver in the daylight, I checked the jungle room and
found wet and slimy tracks leading to Elijah's office, where
they disappeared behind the bookcase and into the cave below.
It was crazy, I told myself, all of it was madness,
but I couldn't shake my curiosity, and if you were me,
you wouldn't have been able to either. This was like
seeing the ice wall in the Arctic, proof of some
mad conspirital gibberish that we've all been peddled for years
through rapid fire YouTubers who talk about at earths and
giants under the pyramids. It was as if I'd felt
what Elijah had spoken of. The air really was electric
down there. The ground was different. But as much as
I hated to even give his beliefs the tiniest iota
of credit, I could think of no other way to
describe it than I had briefly stood in the conditions
of another older world. I had to make sense of it.
I'd spent weeks putting away badly made fakes and forgeries,
footprints with visible tool marks, badly arranged dinosaur bones, and
diorrhamis of raptors in Noah's Ark. Elijah had found something,
all right, but I was certain it wasn't proof of
his worldview. I just had to understand it on my
own terms. Despite every bit of apprehension, I went back
down the staircase. This time I took a crowbar and
slipped a claw hammer in one belt loop, just in case.
I also brought a few wide floodlights and set about
lighting that main room up so I could get a
proper look. It didn't help me see what was in
those cases any better. If anything, the bright lights scattered
even harder in the filth, and it all looked like
a kind of pale green jelly. But I did find
two doors I hadn't noticed the last time. One was
a simple wooden one that led into a small closet
full of old journals and cassettes. The other was like
a metal bulkhead, the kind that i'd be used on
a ship to seal a flooding hallway. I know at
some point I was going behind that door, but for
the time being I settled for reading some of Elijah's
old journals. It seemed like the easier of the two options.
Specimen one rat failure. Died after only a few hours.
Preserved and put aside for further investigation. Specimen two sheep
partial failure. The wool continued to grow at unusual pace,
small buds flowers we'll see. Preserved and put aside for
further investigation. Specimen three cow failure. If size is anything
to go by, the ark must have been colossal. Perhaps
these creatures are the origins of the fossils so many
scientists attribute to wooly mammoths. Attempted dissection but proved too difficult.
Specimen has been preserved and put aside for further investigation.
Specimen four successful A truly prehistoric creature. It returned to
its aquatic roots and lived for many days in its
tank before dying during an escape. Attempt to think these
creatures once swam in the oceans. I have preserved the
specimen for further investigation. Specimen five lizard success. The primitive
attempts at speech were a promising sign. Euthanizing it proved difficult,
but ultimately necessary. The things it said could not have
been permitted in a god fearing society. Reserved for further investigation.
Specimen six cactus house plant success. Question marks relatively unchanged
in outward appearance, but dissection revealed the insight it developed
to meet like appearance continues. The grow des de spite
best efforts. Preserved in the hopes the formeldehyde will kill it,
but must keep a close eye on its display. Specimen
seven blue catfish success. The origins of the Great Leviathan
perhaps lie within creatures such as this. Its growth was extraordinary,
and it will be a struggle to fit the beast
inside one of the displays. I do not envy the
ancient sailors who encountered one of these in open waters.
Specimen eight sparrow failure, dreadful mistake. Euthanize itself while screaming obscenities.
The things is said were extremely blasphemous. Preserved and put
aside for further investigation. Specimen nine. Despite my best efforts,
exposure to pre flood conditions has begun to affect me.
I'll have to join the Great men below. If they
will have me, I will not be able to continue
my great work, and that saddens me deeply. Not a success,
but not a failure either. At least I can take
solace in knowing this will bring me closer to God.
I looked at the tanks and suppressed a shudder. Were
these Elijah's failed experiments? And if so, what on earth
had he been doing to them? There was no scientific
equipment down there, no mad scientist laboratory with bubbling vials
and buzzing tesla coils. That I had been the size
of a cantelope and could not have belonged to anything
on that list, at least not in its natural state.
But Elijah's notes hinted strongly at him having changed them somehow,
a kind of mutation, I wondered, perhaps even a form
of radiation. For a moment, I considered going through the
rest of the notes, but that was just delaying the inevitable.
I was impatient, curious, and desperate to make sense of
these things. So I approached the great metal door and
reached for the lock, but hesitated when I heard a
sound on the other side, a gentle susceration. I leaned forward,
and listened intently as I could. Jacob opened the door.
It was not a sound. It wasn't I could not
tell you the tombre of the voice, the volume, or language.
It had none of those things. It was inside me,
and it hurt like hell, a hammer swing to my
core that left my mind ringing. My sight turned into
a slide show. Blood sprayed from my nose and mouth.
The floor was suddenly inches from my face, and then
my hands were reaching for the locking wheel. I dragged
myself to my feet and gripped it steadily. I was
going to open it, even as my mind finally caught
up and I was flooded with a terrible panic, a desperate,
feral need to get out of there. But I couldn't
stop myself. Resisting became a kind of physical impossibility, as
out of bounds as flying or walking on the ceiling.
The loss of control was haunting, and I would have
opened that door were it not for the sound of
splashing water behind me. Something about it scared me enough
that the spell was broken, and I regained some of
my senses. I managed the glance behind me, and my
light caught a glimmer of something black and oily slithering
in one of the tanks. That sight alone turned my
blood to ice, but it still paled in comparison to
the force radiating from beyond that door. I could feel
it still there on the other side, a white hot
aura of domination that threatened to unravel me like a
piece of thread. I'd never experienced anything like it before,
the kind of terror that nearly had me mewing like
a beaten child. Before the thing could speak again, I
ran screaming from that room and out into the open
air with a shock finally hit my nervous system like
a freight train, and I passed out. When I woke up,
my mouth was gummy with dried blood, and the sun
had burned me badly. On one side, a black boot
was nudging me gently in the side. You're okay down there,
I looked up, and a policeman had once spoken to
not long after arriving in Texas, was squinting down at me.
I'd just about managed to remember that Wheeler was his name.
You need help, well, he repeated, and I tried to answer,
We've got a mouthful of dust. It wasn't until I
sat upright and coughed most of the dust back up that.
I managed some kind of response. No, I'm not okay,
no sign of a break in. I looked over to
see another officer step out of the museum. Some one attack.
Wheeler asked, who was it? Crackhead sheriff told you it
was a bad idea to stay out here all alone.
We got to get out of here. The deputy put
a hand on his holster and unclipped it. Don't you worry.
You're safe now, he said, Rifle through your things. The
second officer added, as he arrived beside Wheeler, we'll need
you to come look and see if anything's missing. No, no, no,
I said, stumbling to my feet. No, we gotta go,
We gotta leave. Take me to the airport. Calm down now,
Wheeler said, as the two men exchanged the funny look,
you ain't even got your passport. Why don't we go
in and take a moment. Maybe let us get a statement. Besides,
Taylor and Keen here have done a thorough sweep of
the place, right yep, the other man smiled. I think
he was trying to reassure me Taylor's just finishing up
in that basement. Elijah Shaw was a funny feller hiding
all that down there. No, no, no, I stammered, or
moving towards the parking lot. We gotta leave, we gotta
leave now, there's something you plan on walking out of here.
Wheeler's hand was on my arm, looking concerned more than angry,
which gave me pause. Whoever left you in the dirt
smash the hell out of your car, he added, that
thing ain't going nowhere. Look, we'll give you a ride,
but first things first, let's go inside and get a
couple of your things. Dejected, and let them lead me
back inside. Before I made a bee line to my room,
I didn't do much, packing a single suitcase with everything
I needed to get out of that damn place and
back home. I also took a minute to call my
wife and let her know I was fine. My failure
to call her at the regular time had led her
to phoning the police. Without that, I don't know how
things would have panned out. At the time, I was
deeply thankful just to have her looking out for me,
and all I wanted in the world was to get
back to her and put an end to the whole
weird episode. As soon as I was packed, I ran
back downstairs, where I found Wheeler, who was ready to
enter Elijah's office. Keene went to get Taylor a short
while ago. He said, getting tired of waiting, so you
just stay here while I go round them up. Before
I could beg him to stop, he stepped inside and
I raced after him, but I was too late. By
the time I reached the stairs, the only sign of
him was the light of his torch, already fading. With
him went the keys to the only working car in
that place. I had no choice but to follow. As
soon as I took the first step down, I felt
that strange but familiar energy, only this time it seemed
a thousand times more powerful. It run through the air
like a kind of vibration. Sounds seemed both muted and amplified.
My footsteps were silent, but my breath was like thunder.
The effect was claustrophobic, like the world was closing in
on me. By the time I arrived at the bottom,
I had already felt like it was too late to
turn back. I nearly cried out when I saw that
the great metal door was already open, no sign of
the men. For meldehyde lay pooling on the floor where
it mixed slowly with a puddle of fresh blood, although
I had no idea who it belonged to. The tanks
remained intact, which I was thankful for. But it troubled
me to think of how that fluid got splashed around
so violently, And the lights I set up had been
knocked over in what must have been some kind of struggle,
and now they cast long and frightening shadows. Wheeler had
never been more than a couple seconds ahead of me,
and yet he was nowhere to be seen in that room.
But I already knew that every question racing through my
mind could be traced to a single place. Where had
the men gone, What had caused such violence and mayhem?
Why are my ears ringing? Why are my feet moving
of their own accord? What had Elijah found in the wilderness?
What had changed those animals? What had spoken to me
from the other side of a foot thick steel doorway.
What it compelled me to be drawn helplessly towards the
strange and corpulent mist that role to the black abyss
and beckon me deeper into the depths of the earth.
The answer to every one of those questions was the same,
and it was all due to the force that lived
on the other side of that door. It must have
surely affected the policeman in the same way it had
affected me. I was no more than half way across
the room when it felt like I was actually falling
towards an open vault. After I crossed the threshold, I
seemed to lose all sense of time and self. God
knows what it must have been like for Elijah, all
those years ago, lost in the wilderness. I don't know
what it was he found, but I still think he
was mad and naive to genuinely think it was anything
to do with God. Even now, glimpses of the journey
down echo in my mind like snap shots in the dark.
I remember heat and light. I remember pale mist that
curled around my feet, lit within by some impossible light.
I remember wondering vast caves larger than any stadium. But
most of all, I remember the air and the way
it crackled with skittish electricity. I could feel it across
my skin like a gentle sunburn. There were buildings down there,
and as I went deeper, over what might have been
hours or maybe even days, I saw the air filled
with glowing mists so bright it was more like day
than night. And it was in one of those buildings
I found my long lost grandfather, or what was left
of him. I guess, of course, I say that, but
he was alive. He made noises, so he must have
been alive. The building was enormous, larger than even the
cave above, but poor Elijah had still grown to take
up nearly a third of it. He'd grown taller, like
he believed would happen, and I bet he was longer
lived too. But I don't think the conditions of that
cave had made him into something divine. If anything, he
looked to me like he was breaking down, melting in
slow motion. Made me think of the elephant's foot in Chernobyl.
Someone or something had also staked bits of him into place,
and tied some of his limbs to the vast rocky
beams that supported the building ceiling. There was a touch
of cruelty about it that I couldn't quite place at
the time, but would later attribute to the brand burned
into his flesh at semi regular intervals. If he had
a mouth, I've no doubt he would have begged me
to kill him. But my mind was not my own
at that time, and I left that place and went
back to wondering the mist in search of something I
could not understand. I was merely compelled to go deeper
towards some strange force that beckoned me onwards, working my
feet and body like I was nothing more but a puppet. Eventually,
during my journey, I heard a voice who was wailing
and sobbing, and he came screaming out of the mist
and ran right into me. Something about the collision shocked
both of us enough that it seemed to break the
cave's effect on us. He looked as surprised to see
me as I was to see him, and for a
brief moment, we both lay on the floor and stammered
desperately in an attempt to speak. Eventually I managed to
ask what the hell had happened, but he jumped on
top of me and climbed a hand around my mouth.
He held me there for a few seconds, his wide,
terrified eyes imploring me to stay quiet. And then I
heard the footfalls of a giant, and I felt its
mind looking for us, and I caught glimpses of the
world as remembered by that man shaped creature, the contents
of his mind spilling outwards into me. I saw the
great flood, the ark a world with wondering Seraphim, and
the great Tannin, the Behemoth and Leviathan. But more than that,
I felt a kind of seething contempt in his feelings
towards us, a burning distance for the lesser race that
had inherited the surface. I don't know how to fully
describe it, But whatever that thing was, I don't know
how Elijah could have possibly mistaken it for benevolent. Perhaps
he had seen only what he wanted to. Perhaps it
had read within him a desperate need to believe and
used that to manipulate him. God knows what would have
happened if Elijah had actually managed to fill that hidden
room with people and open the door. Whatever lived within
that cave would have had ten times the number of
victims it had claimed so far. Only Elijah's arrogance and
obstinace had saved him from playing right into its hands. Eventually,
the creature moved away from us. I'm not sure how
or why it couldn't find us. The spelled cast seemed
to come and go, and in that moment, the only
thing I could be sure of was that once free,
I had every intention of getting the hell out of there.
Wheeler and I seemed to share this understanding, because as
soon as it was saved to he let me go,
and the two of us wordlessly began to skulk back
the way we came. It wasn't as long back as
I feared it might be, Although it's still hard to
be sure of the time. What I can be sure
of is that it was a special kind of nightmare
to leave that place. The mist made it impossible to navigate,
and if it wasn't for the tracks we'd left in
the strange wet ground, we would have been lost forever
down there. Even then, we often got waylaid and had
to take hours just to find our way back to
the track, and more than once we found ourselves forced
to hide in crevices and caves as terrible things drifted
close in the fog, drawn perhaps by our scent or
some other strange force. But eventually we found ourselves hiking
upwards at a steep and familiar incline, where the mist
thinned out almost entirely. By the time we were finally
stumbling back out into the hidden room with the class tanks.
I had managed to grow a fair bit of stubble,
and I noticed that what was once fresh blood had
now congealed into a dark, rust colored brown. Had a guess.
We were down there for a good two or three days.
I'm only thankful our memories of it were so broken.
Wheeler almost immediately made a beeline for the exit, but
I grabbed him and pulled him back the door. I
gasped while grabbing the locking wheel and trying to push
it shut, but I was weak, and he took both
of us, trying with all our might to finally swing
it closed. Once the mechanism clicked into place, I tried
to turn and run, but something in me gave out
and I collapsed to my knees, where I began to
heave and cry. Wheeler placed one hand on my shoulder
and slowly pulled me back to my feet. What the
hell was your grandfather up to out here, he moaned,
as we both limped towards the exit. God knows, I muttered,
and as I placed my foot on the first step up,
I felt the deepest relief I've ever known flood through
my body. Wake Up. The voice was as clear as
day for this time, there was no pain. I looked
Wheeler to confirm that he he'd heard it too, and
sure enough, he was staring at me with a horrified expression.
But the command made no sense, and it seemed to
be distant, almost thinned. Was it the distance, I wondered,
or the door. Elijah must have put the barrier there
for a reason, but I couldn't be sure. That was
the only reason that the voice felt different somehow. But
then I heard the sound behind me, and I realized
why there was words had been so strange. The command
wasn't meant for us. The glass tankers broke one by one,
and Wheeler and I both turned to see the room
flood with formeldehyde and slick, oily flesh. The smell alone
was enough to make me recoil and cry out. But
then I saw them, the creatures within God, most of
them merely thrust around. I don't know what that was.
I simply don't know. Something fish like, I suppose, screamed
in an almost human voice and rolled around in the
slick waters. Another thing was pulling apart its face with
a starfish shaped hand. One was just a pile of
legs that wrapped around the central mass, but one of
them was rising to its feet, two yellow eyes glaring
back at me from the dark, the irises glowing with
a sickly rage. It almost looked human. Before I had
time to react, the creature leaped up both of us
and sent us both sprawling onto the steps, where I
hit my head. For a few terrifying moments, I felt
myself being dragged slowly down into that disgusting liquid, where
strange tentacles and insectile legs threshed violently for some kind
of purchase. I remember something hairy and kiteness brushing against
my cheek, and the disgusting sensation was enough to bring
me back to my senses. When I looked over to
where Wheeler was being pulled right beside me. It was
semi conscious and groaning, and I realized it was up
to me to try and get us out of there.
I kicked violently at the strange thing pulling us. It
was smaller than I thought, a bit bigger than most children,
but it held onto my leg with an iron grip.
But my movement woke Wheeler, who finally coming around, began
to fight back. Both of us kicked as violently as
we could, and seemed to enrage the monster that was
fighting to pull us towards the door. A strange hiss,
he let go and turned towards Wheeler, lashing out with
a single swipe of his hand. Almost immediately, there was
an arterial spray of blood and a death rattle from
the officer's lips that made my blood run cold. For
a few desperate seconds, the dying man seemed to fumble
towards his belt and grabbed something in his fist. I
hoped it was a gun, but instead his limp hand
fell open and revealed a beaten old zippo lighter and
his car keys. I don't know if he meant to,
but in that moment, Wheeler saved my life. I grabbed
both items and ran as quickly as I could, reaching
the steps and refusing to look back for even a second.
I lit the zippo and tossed it behind me, praying
to God that this final gambit work. Something took a
swipe at my back, a hot, burning sensation, followed by
a warm trickle that ran down my legs. My final
memory before I stumbled face first and hit my head
again was one of light and heat. A blinding flash
and a terrible warmth that pushed the last glimpse of
my consciousness aside and left me drifting in the dark.
I never recovered from my time in Elijah's museum, and
I never even made it to the car. Please found me,
having crawled just outside while the entire place went up
in flames. The plume of smoke was what caught their attention,
and when they arrived, I was soon rushed off to hospital.
The death of Wheeler was attributed to a violent attacker,
mainly an account of the damage to his body, and
they pulled it out of the fire, not just burns,
of course, but the slash throat and damaged vertebrae. Taylor
and Keen, while never recovered, were both considered victims of
the same attacker. For my part, I never contradicted this theory,
but I never could quite bring myself to outright say
some crazy addict was the reason for the fire and
the men's deaths. Besides, I had my own issues to
deal with, third degree burns over most of my back
and damaged to my spine that left me with severe
nerve damage. It'd be a lifetime of work just to
get back at my feet, so the doctor said. Back then.
As for the museum, I'm glad it went up in smoke,
and I'm glad the explosion caused the cave in down there.
My memories of the cave itself are still quite fuzzy.
Of course, I've relayed as much as I can. We
went down, we saw things, then came back. The images
the giants pushed into my mind. I'm still not sure
how trustworthy they are. I still don't believe Elijah's interpretation
of that cave was correct. I don't think the Earth
is only six thousand years old, or that the Bible
is meant to be taken literally. Will they say humans
evolved over a million years ago? I guess there's a
lot of history that got lost along the way. As
for Elijah's theory that the conditions of the cave would
cause some divine change in humans, well, I can remember
him clearly enough to know there was nothing godly about
what happened to him. And as for me, the doctors
keep scanning me. It was once every six months, then three,
then one. Then I was being called into the hospital
damn near every other day, and now they won't even
let me out of my room. They won't tell me
what's wrong. Why. I sometimes wake up to find my
back itching like it's covered in a thousand ants, while
the last nurse who gave me a sponge bath ran
out sobbing halfway through. They took me in for surgery
a few days ago, and when I woke up, they'd
amputated something from my leg, but they wouldn't tell me what.
I'm lucky my wife managed to sneak this phone in.
It's the only communication I have with the outside world.
I'd like to see her again, but I'm not sure
I will. I guess I was down in that cave
for too long, but I know it's getting worse and
that I don't have much longer. The last doctor who
came in wore a hazmat suit, and I'm pretty sure
when he left he was still coughing out blood.