[Sorry these updates are running a little slow—chemo kicked my ass this week]
You decide that you are not quite ready to meet possibly hostile denizens of the labyrinth, and quickly douse your lantern. In the ensuing darkness, you see the faint glow of a light in the direction of the voices.
Without being asked, Jimmy hops between the bars in the direction of the voices. You briefly see his silhouette, black on dark gray, then he vanishes into the gloom.
You wait. The argument reaches a crescendo, assuming it’s actually an argument and not just one of those languages with a lot of aggressive emphasis. Someone spits a final phrase and you hear footsteps and see the light coming in your direction. A moment later Jimmy lands on your shoulder and presses a wing down.
The pressure is negligible but the message isn’t. You hastily flatten yourself against the wall below the level of the bars. Striped shadows flare on the opposite wall, then pass by. You breathe again.
After about five minutes of silence, you creep the rest of the way down the hall, until the floor drops away. (You tell yourself that no one is watching you in the dark. You tell yourself that very firmly.) Kneeling, you grope around and detect a further flight of stairs leading down. You go partway down, far enough to hopefully be hidden from the rooms above the sunken hallway, and re-light your lantern.
To your great relief, you’re on stairs made of perfectly ordinary concrete with the occasional scribble of graffiti. Jimmy lets out a relieved whistle.
“I couldn’t see much,” he says, “but I didn’t like the way they looked. They were too long.”
Long?
“Um. Long. Tall. Stretched?” Interpretive dance has its limits. Jimmy flaps his wings in frustration. “Look, boss, if humans were like normal birds, those guys would be herons or storks or egrets or something. Stretched. And pointy. And I didn’t like it.” He fluffs his feathers. “Sorry I can’t explain it better. But it was pretty dark, so maybe I was just seeing things.”
You reassure Jimmy that he explained it just fine, though secretly you’re a bit baffled by “stretched and pointy.” You share the remaining half of the open granola bar with him. Then you stand up, brush off crumbs, and try to figure out what to do next.
With some trepidation, you make your way down the stairs at the end of the hall. They descend only half a flight, into another long hallway. This new one, however, has a set of bars on either side, starting at about shoulder-height and running up to the ceiling. Through the bars, you can see the floor on each side, though your light doesn’t go far enough for you to make out any details. It appears that you’re in a partially sunken area, though you don’t know whether there’s one large room above you or two separate ones.
You’re maybe thirty feet down the corridor when you hear voices.
It’s so startling that you freeze, listening. You can’t make out the words, but it sounds like a heated, possibly angry conversation between two people. It’s coming from the room on the lefthand side.
People are like “these animals have exoskeletons and these ones have endoskeletons” but no. It’s all exoskeletons, your exoskeleton is protecting your bone marrow which is where your soul (which is you) is. The rest of the stuff is extraneous decoration that Big Pharma wants you to think is important/
Why do you think there’s so few ghosts around? Why are most ghosts
people who died violently? You gotta crack the bones to let the soul
out. Most souls are trapped alone in the dark and silent ground (or
teaching hospitals) for hundreds or thousands of years until the bones
eventually start to break. People who are cremated get their whole soul
released and it can reincarnate. But if someone dies violently then
maybe only a couple of their bones are cracked and a little scrap of the
soul escapes but it’s incomplete and confused. Can’t figure out how to
leave, gets obsessed with its own circumstances, repeats actions, CANNOT
be reasoned with. PROOF that the soul is in the marrow.
See I know what I’m talking about.
Sin is stored in the teeth btw which is why young children are innocent (they’ll get a do-over with replacement teeth) and the elderly are shameless (once you have no teeth to remember your sins, you have nothing to fear).
Upon review I think that maybe vodka isn’t for me.
