Spelunking: Part II

Journal Of Dr. Ashley Mitchell

October 24, 2009

Today we started our attempts at opening the doors.

Everything we tried was futile.

As goofy as it may seem to say, we think the doors are locked.

At first we thought that the massive size of the door was keeping us from successfully just pushing or pulling them open, but we ultimately decided that it might just be that whoever was capable of building such massive doors, may have been capable of creating a massive key and lock to go with them.

The runes continue to concern me the most. Whatever is with the door definitely lies with whatever is written on that door. If I had known I would be trying to identify ancient script, I would have brought along some of my texts from my office, but I had not and so did not. 

The symbols seems strange. In some places they are very jagged, while at other times they appear very fluid and loopy. I can’t even say, that when looking at them, that I’m even slightly reminded of anything other type of written languages known to man.

Mark tried dynamite on the door. I was just slightly disappointed that it didn’t work. Not that I had wanted the door to be blown to smithereens, but I had hoped that it might have gotten us a way into whatever is behind the doors. The strange thing is that the dynamite didn’t even leave a mark. I hadn’t expected it to work, seeing as the material the doors are made of seems unnaturally hard, but I did expect that the dynamite would have at least left a scratch or some residue, or something, but it didn’t. The smoke cleared, and there stood the doors, as though nothing had happened at all.

Mark grumbled and said that we should just try more dynamite, which he then showed, and shocked me. How he carried that much with him all this time is beyond me, but we talked him out of it.

There’s got to be another way for us to get through. I know there has to be.

October 25, 2009

We have decided that we need to be creative. 

I think being away from fresh air and the sun, and the lack of food, is starting to get to people. I woke up this morning to the sound of one of Rachel’s students screaming, “Open Sesame!” in front of the doors, repetitively. I had to pull her kicking and screaming from the doors. 

I tried to get a sample of the material that the door is composed of, but my knife was unable to cut away even a fraction. 

Rachel, being the voice of reason, has started talking about going back; pointing out that if we stay down here any longer, we’re all sure to die.

Her suggestions all continue to be ignored.

The draw of the door is far too strong.

Mark suggested another dynamite idea, and we took him up on it. The doors are obviously too solid and hard to be blown up by themselves. So he came up with the idea to blow up the cave around the doors.

This was a very dumb idea, in all reality. We listened to a mad man holding sticks of dynamite, suggesting that we blow up the cave walls around us. This plan could have resulted in the entire cave falling in on us, killing us all very quickly, yet painfully. However, we took him up on the idea.

We decided to line the one door as high as we could with dynamite as well as some c4, hoping to get some affect. We succeeded.

The explosion was massive, and I was glad that we had chosen to stand very far away. The explosion cleared away a good amount of rock alongside the one door frame. We ran over to it quickly, but were disappointed to see that the door was very thick, and there was still further to go. We quickly turned to Mark. He pulled out some more c4 and a single stick of dynamite. He explained this would be our final attempt, and went about putting it inside the small passage the first explosion had created. 

After the second explosion, we knew we had gotten through by the hiss of air that streamed out. 

We all ran to the side of the door and felt the hot air rushing from the room beyond. The hole was small, and looking through, we couldn’t see that much. From what we could tell, it looked just like more of the same tunnel, but we refused to turn around now.

One of Rachel’s students pulled out a pick, and we went at it. Eventually we had a hole large enough to fit through.

Once on the other side, things changed.

I don’t care if you believe me or not, but this is where I am currently and what happened. 

Hell is very real, and I am proud to be one of its discoverers.

Rachel, Mark and her students are unfortunately no longer with me, well, that is to say, they’re no longer with me in the human sense.

Pluto, Hades, Satan, Osiris, whatever you chose to call him, he is more massive and horrifying than you can imagine. His image changes every second, every one more terrifying than the last. He looked upon us when we first entered the chamber with a sense of amusement. He moved his arm in a grand sweep in front of Rachel, Mark and the students, and their bodies simply fell to the ground as wisps of smoke came up from their bodies, twisting in between his fingers. Their screams mixed together as he blew lightly at his hand and they drifted off into the distance into apparently whatever hell they saw fit. 

There are no flames here, like in drawings. Rather, it seems that Hell is what you make of it. Imagine the underworld of Ancient Greece. The land changes before your eyes so you cannot see exactly one thing. It’s as though there are many different locations superimposed over one another. If you focus hard enough on one place, than you can see a beach more gorgeous than those of the Caribbean, or a desert more barren and deadly than the Sahara. 

What you must be asking is why I was not swept up into Satan’s grasp, and the answer is not quite simple. 

I have always been proficient at languages, and moments before Mark set off his last explosion, I finally understood one symbol on the door. I’m not sure where I had learned it, but I knew it, and once I knew that symbol, I was able to read the rest. It read: “Those who read these words and enter shall find safe haven from the master of the chambers beyond.”

There was more written that I was unable to decipher, but in that moment that his hand swept up the others, his eyes fell upon me and his many faces seemed to smile.