Join My Cult - Original Falcon Press

mind! God our Father, why art thou drinking? Delusions of grandeur!
Such a thing for those doctors to say about your reborn martyr son!”
He pocketed the file for later examination, blushing, and headed
towards a nearby stairwell, switching on his carefully reddened light. The
air coming from the stairwell was cooler, wetter, somehow more rotten
than the already thick atmosphere of the building. Graffiti covered the
walls here, in magic marker, nail polish, mustard, betadine—whatever
was handy to those souls who walked these halls before. Scrawled in red
chalk on a support beam was the phrase, “Abandon hope all ye who enter
here,” with an arrow pointing down the narrow, dank hallway. A few
empty offices flanked the hall, but Jesus had his eyes on the hall’s far
end. He knew there was a doorway there, he could see it in fact, yet he
saw it as an absence. Windows were few down here, and his flashlight
didn’t provide much illumination, but whatever lonely photons made it
down to the end of this corridor were swallowed up by the doorway. As
Jesus inched toward it, he noted with some satisfaction that insulated
pipes ran down toward the dark doorway.
My tunnels await!
There wasn’t much of a room behind the doorway’s outline. The
space opened up into a concrete closet, 6 feet on a side. Cracks riddled
the surfaces, and cobwebs shared the ceiling with a bare, broken bulb
dangling on its cord. One of the walls held a barred set of institutional
double doors, the other a cast iron door that looked to Jesus like the door
on his Uncle’s wood stove. It was roughly two feet by three, and several
inches thick, stamped with the name Morven Foundry, Chicago, IL.
Jesus turned the stainless handle and eased the heavy door back, showering
his high boots with flakes of rust and dried mud. Something unpleasant
coiled in his stomach as he felt the cold air roll past him, heavy with
moisture. He crouched obscenely, and taking care not to bump his head
or dirty his hair overmuch, waddled in.
The tunnel itself was a simple box, smooth, regular, and seamed every
few feet. Jesus shivered in the damp air, his light playing out only a few
feet in front of him. Every so often the squared tube turned 45 degrees,
branching off at these angled junctions into the darkness beyond. Jesus
stopped, not quite sure why he did so. Something nagged him at the
corner of his vision. His eyes searched the corridor, found a green blob
roughly the size of his hand nearby, and focused. A translucent green
spider hung inches in front of him, its inner workings laid bare, backlit
by his flashlight. While he was no arachnologist, he did know enough to
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