Join My Cult - Original Falcon Press

elieve that spiders were supposed to be symmetrical. The legs on the
left side of this specimen were longer than those on the right, and seemed
to have too many joints. As it feebly waved its forelegs in Jesus’s direction,
a wave of nausea swept over him. It’s lived its entire broken life
down here—what’s the point? Jesus panicked and fled, not noticing at all
that he had been a girl since he’d passed through the light-eating doorway
that had long since vanished from his memory.
Brushing the last of the spider webs out of her hair, Jesus surveyed her
surroundings. The small concrete box tunnels had disgorged her in a
nexus of sorts. Pipes and corridors ran in every direction. This room was
at least 30 feet tall, and she could barely make out the stars though the
metal grate that served as a ceiling. Valves and hideously tangled
plumbing clung to the walls, while smaller pipes led out from this knot
through a number of openings—from the size of a normal door to spaces
that could barely accommodate a prone human. The tunnel she had originally
come from opened high above the floor, too far to reach back up to,
so she followed the largest path out of the junction room—an arched
brick tunnel with a few inches of slimy water in the bottom.
This was a truly unpleasant passage. Mud sucked at Jesus’s boots as
she made her way around the damp strings of moss that hung from the
ceiling. Here and there, bricks had fallen from the loose and crumbling
mortar, leaving holes in the arch. Gnarled roots had grown through some
of these holes, white sickly things that looked as if they deserved to be
down here. Jesus shivered as she picked her path carefully—there could
be deep holes concealed underneath the oily black slime she trudged
through. Every so often the archway spun off corrugated iron side tunnels,
but Jesus didn’t think her shoulders would fit.
“Besides,” she said to herself, “if I were to get stuck in there, I’d have
to back out the whole way.”
She shuddered at the idea of being trapped down here, screaming herself
hoarse while the world carried on above. Jesus briefly wondered if
the security guards even knew these tunnels existed. Guys like that took
their paychecks and went home to beer and television, never wondering
why anyone would want to see Pennhurst from underneath.
What a place it was, though! The brick archway began to widen, and
despite her dim light, Jesus thought she might have seen a glimmer of
incandescence up ahead. Up until now the moss had been tolerable, but
in this end of the archway entire sheets of the stuff hung all the way to
the floor. As she began to round the heaviest of the moss, Jesus noticed
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