Pulp Cereal part three

Old Rome was not our destination, of course. It was merely the first door on the road. The doorway we sought lay far ahead and below us, and even in Roman times it had been thought a myth.

We had weeks of travel before we would reach it. Down massive smoothly hewn tunnels, wide roadways leading ever onward, no doubt to eventually curve back up, for all roads lead to Rome, even under the earth. Over bridges that spanned vast chasms, shrouded by mist from waterfalls and underground rivers. Through cities long abandoned but still grand and majestic in size and stretch. Some were rooms carved into tunnel walls, some were buildings erected in the hollows of caves.

One such city sat on the edge of a lake, and here we found a Roman boat, and to our amazement, it was intact. Nothing swam in that lake, no fish or even plankton, and to this Gary Dirin attributed the boat’s good health. Still, on the crossing of the lake, I and the Spaniards were ever wary of the dark shapes we sometimes thought we saw moving far below us.

We took a river tunnel for some days until it emptied into an even vaster lake, this one in a cavern even larger and more majestic than the last. Although there was a vast shoreline curving along the edge, and even a massive island in the center where an entire city could have been erected, we saw no evidence of roman occupation of this cavern. The cave was lined above and below with teeth: massive stone spikes that stretched up from the depths to stop just above the waters surface, or down from above to stop nearly there.

And from all of those upper teeth, there came a steady drip drip drip of water running down them and filling the lake below. We had a suspicion that this lake cavern actually lay below the one from which we came. Gary had read in his books that such cave formations were caused by water seeping through the rock from above. It was impossible to tell, of course: the river tunnel had gradually curved downwards and to the left, but all sense of scale was thrown off in such places, and time as well. It felt like a journey of days between caverns, and I slept three times, but I cannot say for sure.

Whatever the source of the dripping, I suspect few have ever seen this effect on such a vast scale. On the far side, we could not see in the darkness, but soon discovered as we traversed the lake, the teeth had in fact grown so close together that they touched, point to point or overlapping as a beasts fangs do. As we entered this maze of stone columns, a bizarre and twisted Venice, I was indeed struck by the vision of entering a vast mouth of fangs, on our way into some vast monsters belly. I do perhaps now know how Jonah felt, as he was swallowed by the whale…

We were soon lost in the dark, in the silence. If ever on this adventure I wondered why no one had sought this route to the riches that lay beyond, here I had no doubts. No sound we made carried far, not even an echo returned to us from the far side, so thick were the columns grown. And the steady drip drip of the water, which had accompanied us all the way across the lake, now fell silent, for none of these columns still waited above the water. Even worse, not a drop of light extended very far in any direction. Here I was in the largest cavern I had ever imagined, and I could barely see the length of the boat without my view being blocked as in the deepest darkest forest.

But Gary Dirin never faltered once. He even kept his smile most of the way, for we had a map in the book, and he called out directions, and marked the way as he could, for the dripping of the spines would wash away or cover any marking he could make. He was perfectly calm, until we came around one final column and our boat stopped dead with a sickening groan from below the waters surface.

For a moment we simply prayed. Gary had spoken during the long journey that the greatest danger was that we would take a wrong turn and run aground on a spine that had been submerged by the steady drip of the water, and that the ship would sink with our provisions, and we would swim but never reach either shore again, not that we could survive without our supplies in any case. When the ship came to a lurching stop, we assumed this was what had happened and we sat and waited for our fate to consume us.

But some time passed and still the boat did not fill with water, and our lantern still burned and we were still alive and dry. And Gary laughed, and he told the the elder of the brothers to fire off a shot above the front of the boat. And Domingo took up his rifle and fired a shot, and the flash illuminated three things for us. First, that the waters edge was approximately two feet from the boat. Second, that there was a stairway beginning another dozen feet from there that led up a short ways to a wall that stretched to either side as far as we could see. And third, that inset into that wall was a massive doorway made of some reflective metal, which we discerned from the sound when Domingo’s shot hit it, and from the reflection it gave of the flash.

Gary Dirin stood then and took his pack in hand and leaped from the boat to the steps in a single bound, taking them three at a time, and he set his lantern down on the platform there and gazed up at the doorway and he laughed. He was still laughing when Domingo and his brother and I had joined him on the platform. Domingo took out his jewel which glinted in the lantern light like a star, and we gazed at our reflections in the polished metal of the doorway, and we laughed too. We had made it. We knew this was only the first step of the journey, that the true perils lay beyond. But so did the riches, and in that moment, they seemed to be wholly within our grasp, there for the taking.

Finally, Gary stopped laughing, although he was still smiling, and he pushed on the door, and it opened. It made no noise, it had no track or guide or apparent hinge, but it simply opened. And there was a great orange light from within, and we saw a roadway stretching out before us, across a stone bridge and under a massive carved stone archway, carved into the very wall of the chasm — far grander than anything we had seen so far, and the Romans had had a penchant for grandness.

So it was that the four of us stepped through a doorway long forgotten even in Roman times, across a threshold no man had laid eyes on in five thousand years, and into another age. Gary Dirin, his smile stretching as far as it could, stepped forward onto the long forgotten road, and he beckoned us to follow, and started across the bridge. And that is when things started to go wrong.