On the under-place

On the under-place

Below the worked stone, beneath cellars and the deepest mines, the world is wrong.

We write this carefully, and have rewritten it more than once. Many of us have stood at the lip of such a wrongness. Some of our correspondents have descended. The letters from those who descended grow strange, and then they cease.

What we have heard from those who returned: stone weeps. Lamps gutter without wind. Sound carries sideways. Animals will not enter places they would otherwise hunt through. Companions become unrecognisable, or become unrecognised, or both. Time runs unevenly. The body of one who has spent too long below does not return to itself when brought up.

There are things that live there. They are not, we think, demons in the sense the orthodox theologies use the word. They are something older. The accounts speak — when they speak at all — of fire-shapes bound to deep fissures and chambers, that hurt because they are bound and extend that hurt outward; of things that wear the wrong faces, hollow inside, the eyes set wrong; of pack-hunters at the lantern’s edge who hunt by mind before they hunt by body; of bone-choirs that sing in dead languages in the still rooms below dead cities, and sometimes the song is answered. We do not write more about what they are because we do not know — and because we have made it a discipline of this correspondence not to invent where we cannot report.

We write only that they are real. That they should not be sought. That nothing we have catalogued in these pages prepares the would-be visitor for what is met below.

If you can persuade your neighbours not to dig deeper, we suggest you try. Most will not heed you. The attempt remains virtuous.