treat him and could find no woman to love or who would
love him. He was so restricted in his physical existence
that he had to turn to theory and intellectual search to
find an answer.
GODGODGODGOD … trapped in a cavern to tell
answers . . . GGG . . .
I followed the thoughts to their end; I was swept along
with them against my will. I never should have listened in
the first place. It was the ultimate theory, and he had
proven it beyond a doubt.. ..
He had tried to contact God.
He had found the whereabouts of the Supreme Being,
the plane of existence upon which He lived.
He asked what meaning there could be to life and to
the chaotic world in which man lived. And he was an-
swered; he solved his problem.
He asked what was at the center of creation. And he
found out.
And now I was trapped down there.
There were three of us.
Child, Simeon, and God.
And we were all three quite insane.
TWO
Humanity
Restored…
I
Trapped within the convoluted miasma of Child’s mind,
I eventually lost all consideration of what was real and
what was not. Here, in the fascinating chiaroscuro ruins of
his subconscious mind, the shattered mental analogues
were every bit as concrete as the world I had known
outside of Child. The stones were textured by the weather
as they were in the world beyond; the trees had as many
leaves of as many different shades of green as any I had
seen before; the wind was not a constant, but changed
from bitter cold to almost suffocating warmth, and was
moderate more often than not. There were birds and a
wide variety of land-bound animals, which, though subtly
different or wildly mutated from their “real” parallels,
were always believable, detailed and rich with color and
habits. At first, I catalogued the differences, the fine points
of distinction between the real world and this analogue of
Child’s interior, but that only made me melancholy, unsat-
isfied, and soon had me acting like a manic-depressive. I
realized that, if this were to be my home for the remain-
der of my days, I would have to forget the other world I
had known. And for my own peace of mind, I would also
have to forget that when Child died, we all died, trapped
here inside him. It was bizarre, but it was my new reality
and required my swift adaptation.
So I adapted.
At first, there had been a time of madness. When I
recovered my wits, I did not know how much time had
passed, and I could not remember much of what I had
done. I remembered running along canyons of stone which
shimmered and changed colors around me, thrust up, dis-
solved, formed new projections, a living rock that sang
mournful dirges and sometime burst into long, wailing
screams that made me fall and cover my ears and scream
in sympathy. There were visions of mottled skies that were
sometimes all shades of yellow, sometimes all shades of
red, sometimes an ugly whirl of black and brown. I had
climbed in cold places and had followed descending trails
into warm ones. I had been on strange seas with waters
thick like syrup, and in lakes where the surface reeked of
brandy. I had seen dark shapes, like huge spiders, dancing
along endless webs of sticky white thread, and I had seen
maggots crawling in the walls, disappearing in the stone
when I came close enough to examine them. At times, a
force of monumental strength passed me, a whirling mad-
ness of surging energy, which was He, which was God, the
maddest of the three of us. And then I was sane, lying on
the floors of a wide tunnel, stretched full length, as if I
had fallen while running from something that terrified me.
I sat up, looked around me, knew that it was so, that I
was trapped here, and decided there was nothing to do
but make the most of it.
Besides, I nurtured a grain of hope. Perhaps the mind
of the wizened boy, this Child, would regain its sanity.