[Original Novel] The Eternal Mysteries of Vril, Part 8
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Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
“Here, put this on. You can change in the shower stall. There are lockers on the other side to leave your clothes and bag in.” I came at him with an explosion of questions. “What is this place? Has it always been part of the monument? Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner? Who are these people? What’s going on?”
He embraced me for a moment, which calmed me down somewhat. “Just shower please. You cannot enter into their presence unless you’re as clean as possible, they hate our typical body odor.” They? Presence? He herded me into an open shower stall before I could pepper him with more questions.
Unsure what else to do, I undressed, piling up my neatly folded clothing just outside the stall along with the robe. To my left and right, over the dividers, I could see other women just like me. Same color hair, same color eyes. All of them over six feet, slender, physically fit and conventionally attractive.
I tried asking them questions. Once or twice they glanced over at me, obviously uncomfortable, then resumed bathing. I watched as they dried off, then donned their black robes. I donned mine as well, but then set about putting my clothing on underneath it. Neil came over and reached over the divider as if to stop me.
“Neil!! Don’t look!” He averted his gaze, but urged me to leave my clothing in the locker as instructed. “But...then I’ll be naked under the robe.” He nodded, poker faced, as if unclear on what my problem with that could possibly be. “You’ll need to leave your earrings behind too” he added.
The other women were all now finished bathing, forming into a line, descending the next section of the spiral staircase further into the Earth. “Neil, this isn’t some...pervy sex shit, is it? I mean, like Eyes Wide Shut. At the bottom of that staircase there’d better not just be some decadent fucking Roman style orgy dedicated to some wrinkly old guy you all worship as the supreme enlightened master or whatever.
That better not be what this is. I mean I’m no stranger to recreational nudity. You can’t be a leggy blonde for this long without getting up to some shenanigans. If this is just streaking, or the naked mile or whatever you can tell me, I’ll be down for it. All this nonsense, if it’s just a frat, or a cult or whatever-”
He held out a ring. Same as the others I saw, bearing the circular insignia resembling a broken wagon wheel. It glowed faintly with a familiar soothing golden light, presumably from a tiny embedded vial of the stuff just behind the insignia. “Die schwarze sonne” he whispered.
Without even asking if it was for me, I slipped it on. It just felt so unquestionably right. Anything which got me closer to that golden light felt automatically self-justifying. Still painfully aware of my cold, naked body under the robe, I nevertheless formed up behind the other girls and descended the stairs.
There was no banquet hall at the bottom. No decadent Roman orgy. That I could have at least wrapped my head around. Instead the staircase exited into a chamber the floor, walls and ceiling of which were made from the same pale, yellow alloy as the ring Neil just gave me.
Everything was wrong. For one thing, the chamber was enormous, and the doorway to a corridor in one wall seemed designed for someone nearly twice our height. There were horribly uncomfortable looking angular thrones, with V-shaped control consoles of some sort before them.
As the procession marched solemnly by, I noticed the control panels were smashed, the lights in them long since gone out. Cobwebs spanned the empty seats. When I tried to question Neil, I was brusquely shooshed and hurried along.
The corridor was stranger still. I’ve never seen any architecture remotely like this. Most things I’ve seen are based on right angles, forty five degrees, or circles. Domes, cylinders, whatever. If it isn’t a rectilinear house or skyscraper, it’s some curvilinear postmodern art museum.
But never anything like this. So severe. Steep, swooping angles. A series of recursive, stabbing V-shaped pointed arches. Every other one up facing, with those in between inverted. All of it made out of that alloy which, until today, I thought was so rare as to exist only in the lab and the private collections of wealthy eccentrics.
It was ice cold beneath my bare feet as I walked. But I could also feel a rhythmic hum from some unseen, distant source. I felt absolutely dwarfed by the proportions of the corridor as we passed down it, then even more so once we reached what could only be an elevator.
For cargo or something. It would have to be, as it was far and away larger than necessary. All of us fit on the triangular platform with room to spare. One of the robed men, boosted by another so he could reach it, inserted his ring into a pedestal as comically oversized relative to us as the lift itself.
I gasped as it began to move. Descending smoothly, silently further into the Earth. Every step along the way I felt sure there would be some sort of punchline. Some big “gotcha” moment. The nigh-tantric anticipation of finding out, for real, what all of this is about pushed me forward.
The feeling of rhythmic machinery droning on grew stronger and stronger on the way down, as if we were descending into some vast mechanism I had yet to glimpse the gears of. Speak of the devil, the lift abruptly emerged from the shaft into a vast rocky cavern into which literal enormous gears were embedded.
Slowly they turned, seemingly in relation to our rate of descent. My suspicion was confirmed when the lift finally reached the floor of the cavern, as the tremendous gears shuddered to a stop, their deep groans reverberating up my spine.
The centerpiece was a mechanism beyond anything I have any basis of comparison for. If I were to draw any parallels at all, I would say it resembled something like a gyroscope or model of the solar system, countless smaller and smaller rings nested within one another.
The rings were mounted at an incremental offset such that as they all slowly rotated about the only axis they were able to, the effect was the apparent extrusion of a solid sphere out of a ring. Engulfing its hollow core of cold cavern air, then coming flush once again to the form of a ring before doing it all again.
I whispered to Neil. He elbowed me. But I was persistent enough that eventually he relented, sidled up very close and whispered to me in a voice just barely audible over the distant echoes of dripping water and throbbing machinery.
“It’s a mechanism which channels some sort of ambient energy from space, sending it to the black sun. We are the order sworn to guard it. Not to maintain or repair it of course, for the technology is beyond us, and they would never entrust that level of knowledge to one of our kind. Our role is only to watch over it. To kill any intruders who would loot this place or reveal its existence to the uninitiated, and to supply Vrilerinnen for the ceremony.”
The...Vril...Vrilern...ninnen? I studied the other robed women in front of me, intuiting the meaning of the word even before Neil clarified. “Vril maidens, which you may soon count yourself among.” I asked how he planned to talk me into that. He sighed. “When you see them, I won’t have to.”
He left it at that, despite continued pestering. At least this time our passage was aided by a moving walkway. Upon reaching the end of the cavern, we entered another corridor. Unlike the one before it, this opened to one side affording an unobstructed view...of row upon row of flying saucers.
I balked, sputtering. On top of everything else...fucking UFOs? I thought there was nothing more I could see today that would surprise me. A fleet of actual UFOs, parked in a subterranean hangar. “I just…” I muttered, at a momentary loss for words.
“...I just thought you were...I mean, you could have faked the pin. The monument could just be some secret society thing, I didn’t...Are those models? Painted fiberglass or something? There’s no way they actually…”
Stay Tuned for Part 9!