underworld

In the basement of my new house, I discover a crawlspace. So I wriggle on hands and knees down a narrow canal of pink clay where I find a world: a cozy chapel carved into cave, colored light piercing impossible stained-glass windows. Down a staircase, red-carpeted empty foyers with golden lamps hanging on the walls. Who does this place belong to? Through heavy doors, an empty theater with vast burgundy curtains swaying as if recently closed. A stairwell twists around fathomless darkness up from which blows an icy wind. I find a neon arcade, maze-like, connecting to a movie theater hallway, lined with posters for films unknown, that widens into a glass-domed mall, empty and insulated. An elevator leads down to a dusty library, ancient aisles lined with grids of metal walkways, ladders descending into darkness, and great tomes with intricate wooden covers. A red glowing exit sign leads me into tangled industrial tunnels where I'm lost for hours in the hollow bones of the world, forgotten but beautiful in their decay. A staircase erodes into stone that winds onto a rocky mesa surrounded by black sky empty of moon or stars, then to cliffs that lead to the very bottom: the solid bedrock of my mind, nothing beneath but nonexistence. And there, I gape at throngs of bare-skinned people crossing a churning green river, swimming or using precarious rafts. The acid water burns their skin, but they paddle forward, desperate to reach the far shore where caves are carved into impenetrable rock and scorched survivors roll aside round boulders and disappear into smoke and screams and silence. Have I gone too far? No, I have to cross this river eventually. Acid scars my skin as waves lap at my little raft, but out I crawl onto the opposite shore, victorious. I breathe deep and roll aside a heavy stone and surrender to the hellish cleansing mists within.