Foreword: As it turned out and overall, I like this story. Originally written in 1996, in the years 2001 through 2004 it was 'papered over' a bit and thus was given the 'palimpsest' nomencalture. In re-reading it now, at least some of it comes off as being highly sure of certain so-called, 'truths.' To witness a further development of the views I've entertained, one would have to reader later works such as Nexus, Ouroboros, The Mini-Mart, Checkmate, and perhaps last but not least the short piece, Otto Kumm Recollects.
At the time of its 'completion' in 2004, this story was the best overall that I had written. There are yet a few half-completed, never-released manuscripts on digital media about my abode. There a couple of others which were 'completed' and actually released in print form, detailing my experiences as an employee in the world of computer software during the 'go go 90s.' None of these are available online at the moment. Suffice it to say that this story, along with the others that followed; they all fairly well combine in any event to, 'fill in' several 'gaps.'
Despite the often preachy tone of this particular work, I enjoy a great deal of the rest of it. It could very well be that, what is true for some people really isn't true for others. At this point, I'm in no position to give anyone any kinds of definitive answers regarding anything. That is to say that each of us is left to try and decipher on our own, what the truth of any given matter might actually be. In any event, it would appear that I digress, or am running off on a tangent of some sort. So without further ado, make what you want of the following; that is, if you will.

Lucid Dreaming (A Palimpsest)
By Andy Thomas
2004

Lay upon the wheel
Spin and you will feel
All of the things that used to be
Back when you were free

Walking through the woods
Far outside of Hollywood
A certain part of you is a luddite
But not borne out of spite

But rather pure frustration
At your hopeless situation
And corporate welfare reigns
And causes much of your pain

The queen of the school prom
Was simply ultimately wrong
What do you care any more
At least you were rarely a whore

If you could just have someone like Magdalene
The world would be fair again
And all of the cruelty would fade
Leaving you only jaded

But now those days are gone
And you're the chosen one
And all those days are past
And you're contented at last

11) Matter is without substance. Substance is without matter.

Not that it mattered, but Yaacov had ostensibly found the secret of the star. In any event he could hope that everything would change and nothing remain the same.
As for the mark of cain; how funny it was about the star and its hidden meaning. Of course those other than Yaacov who also knew could rest assured that his knowledge of such - assuming he were correct - would nonetheless remain invisible to whole of uninitiated humanity. And of the initiation, who but a zero could - or would even dare - face it?
In any event the Tetragrammaton was not the demiurge; not that such necessarily had much of anything to do with the star. Yet somehow within Yaacov's battered psyche the two had intertwined.
In Yaacov's day the democrats would all argue about freedom. Yet though democracy was ultimately a lie, its ideals were corrupted yet further given that it was as in the days of Shamgar, Son of Anat - and all high roads had been forsaken. None of this had given pause to those who had sought culpability in the actions of their "elected" leaders.
And of poverty - that thing which democrats without exception ostensibly seek to eradicate: there are ways other than material with which to be stricken with such; and perhaps no one can say whether any personal shortcomings are - be they animal, vegetable, or mineral; chemical, particle, or wave - ever ulimately externally induced; that is to say poverty really comes from within; and it takes many forms, perhaps in truth the least of them being a lack of running water. 
Nonetheless the fanatical belief in such tomfoolery as "democracy" or "free health care" for example were endemic to Yaacov's day and age; and for that he had suffered. Nonetheless, after a time one simply stops throwing pearls before swine and instead finds initiation within the only true sect.
Yaacov was in a passage. Ever since the discovery of the j x eleven twenty-seven cult - and perhaps from even before that - some part of Yaacov had been there in those darkened and dreary confines; only now it was real whereas before it had been but an oft-forgotten phantasm; and the knowledge of the containers had not been erased from his consciousness.
Thus the Process; the Chemical Christiana; the j x eleven twenty-seven cult (cult of nine); without exception these had been all too real. Of course it was nothing of import; at least once one had accepted it; which for better or worse was not entirely the case with Yaacov; thus his from time to time seemingly unmitigated terror. At least the beauty provided some small solace. Of course we need not ponder suffering for it is simply a given in a universe of motion.
And of the diary Yaacov had once found and purused; the one which wouldn't escape his mind; it had all simply been the ravings of a madman; or so Yaacov would tell himself over and over again.
There beneath the desert - and it didn't matter where that desert might "really" have been - Yaacov fathomed the corporation and the secrets of building seven; and building seven was never to be confused with gary seven.
In any event, in the end what was anything corporate other than a charade? By then Yaacov gave legitimacy only to the cult of nine. But the cult of nine was from the other world. And the teachings and their ultimate meanings were only to be gleaned through the sightings of spectres belonging to the cult, though however fleeting amidst the confusion caused by ongoing situation with the memes.
And the memes of the priests have always - at least through recorded hystory - worked fairly well, for nearly all if not everything of this, the ersatz world exists only to oppress, all the while pretending to enlighten or liberate. Certainly many throughout time had been enlightened and liberated from the fruits of their labors, not to mention their very lives. 
Yaacov thought that perhaps someday everything might change and nothing remain the same. Of this world, one thing is for certain; for throughout all of recorded hystory, and right through the present times; the greatest evil will always ultimately win.
He thought of his own civilization; the greatest propaganda machine of recorded hystory but not necessarily all time; a civilization perhaps itself the embodiment of the fabled antichrist; but in contrast the beast would have been too benign; too foreign. No, it was something more terrifying; something more elaborate; something only true faith in the laws of man could bring. Nonetheless Goebbels would have been proud, especially at the Hegelian aspects; the "dialectic" - to put it simply - of it all. By then They had covered Their tracks; still that wouldn't save Them. Some could see. Nonetheless sometimes it appears the YHVH is nowhere to be found, when to simply wrestle with Such would have been of greater comfort than complete abandonment by the Same.
As for that bizarre corporation: Where is it written in the laws of the universe that binary media has any intrinsic value? And what of binary media? The universe itself is binary; only the fine granularity of it all disguises this fact and has scientists calling it "analog." Regardless of any of that, who but the YHVH holds the copyrights on any of it, whether ultimately binary or analog?
And of the corporation, only the secrets of building seven actually held sway there; and how does any corporate body ever succeed, without first having the blessings of They?  
But in the end even the blessings of They and the illusory laws of the culture could not surmount the strangeness of Yaacov and his ilk; not even haarp could ultimately forestall the inevitable; and Forrestal had known of the plot and they had killed him for it. Certainly he hadn't been the only one.
Nonetheless the star would fall to earth and find the key to the bottomless pit. Then perhaps everything might change and nothing remain the same.
The lady from the East had been one of Them. As a matter of fact, Yaacov's path was literally and liberally sprinkled with the memories and the ghosts of members of the clandestine luciferian freemasons. 
Yet in contrast the members of the cult of nine had by then only appeared in his dreams; in any event the cult of nine should not be confused with Them; rather a more apt association would be with the church of the sub-genius.
Regardless of all of that, a man who is also a sire cannot be the Beast. This is what made so many of them fools. A being given any more than a shard of female affection cannot ultimately find the key to the bottomless pit. So in his own personal insanity and in pursuit of the key Yaacov had foregone his most favorite of all things; female affection. Certainly that had been his curse. And the Process and interaction with the Chemical Christiana; all of that had over time impressed upon him the mark of the beast. He had given up so much just to see; sometimes Yaacov longed for the ignorance of the happy people.
During the passage of certain silent moments, Yaacov would almost miss his most bitter rivals from the past; for many of them may have died but perhaps he, Yaacov had suffered a fate worse than death. In this way his victories over them were bittersweet at best. And the battle against the clandestine luciferian masons was ongoing; for they were everywhere and involved in everything; one would be vanquished only to be replaced by another; and until then Yaacov had been on the wrong end of hystory.
They worshiped the architect; Hiram Abiff. To Yaacov Abiff's plan was at fault. Perhaps it was only Yaacov's insistence on being - for lack of a better word - iconoclastic - that he could see the sheep needing a good fleecing yet by the same token refusing to himself participate in any of that; perhaps he was a eunuch.
In the end there is only predestination. In all of that there are only terror and beauty; and when terror and beauty are combined there is only suffering. And without motion there is no suffering. 
The civilization in which Yaacov had once lived had been the mere figment of someone else's imagination; for the earth will always get its blood; and poverty and starvation are the result of procreation; related to but not the ultimate machinations of They. And in his day, all of the talk of freedom and democracy was just so much luciferian sophistry; right up there with concepts such as "free health care" and - whether enforced or simply coerced - "compassion." Ultimately, procreation begets violence and vice versa.
Yaacov looked at his hands; one palm bare and the other grasping a CZ-52 pistol. He was in a dream; or was he dead? Perhaps he had killed himself and was in some kind of afterlife. Of course all of us without exception kill ourselves, for in life, every action leads only to death. It is all a simple matter of choosing one's preferred poison. Some people call it "passion" but death is no less the ultimate result. Perhaps indeed death is ecstasy.
As for Yaacov, his life could have only been described as Lovecraftian. Ever since his introduction to the Process - and more than likely since his ostensible birth - he had lived the horror every minute of every hour of every day. Even in his moments of joy and appreciation of beauty, the horror had always lingered there at the edge of his consciousness. At best it was simple anxiety. But it rarely had it ever entirely left. Yaacov attempted to salve his suffering by supposing it was due to his own blasphemy; and of course he savored those moments of actual peace of mind; where he rode that wave and needed nothing; just for a single moment here, a single moment there. That kept him going.
As for the "good things in life," Yaacov had once - for just the tiniest fraction of a moment - tasted the sweetest honey. And after tasting the sweetest honey how can anyone ever again settle for aspartame? Let the sheep have their diet soda drinks; Yaacov needed ambrosia; and without it he sometimes wondered if he were dying. At least his demons were always there for him. He was careful to keep that to himself. Hopefully the haunted look in his eyes would not awaken anyone from their sleepwalking state.
The guitar was sounding in his head; it was one of the only things which had perhaps ever mattered to him. When Yaacov played the guitar he would listen and tell himself, "take me home." Sometimes his dreams held such at once sensual and ethereal soundtracks; when he was lucky he would remember parts in his waking hours. In any event, whenever Yaacov would play, his demons would gather about. 
The demons really liked his music. As Yaacov's life gained in years, he had played and sang about the cult of nine. Perhaps he had yet fulfilled his purpose; this despite the emptiness of craving liberty in a world of the enslaved; and at that, enslaved pretending to be at liberty. Perhaps Yaacov had always purposefully made music only for the consumption of spirits as lost and as empty as he sometimes sensed himself to be.
Regardless of whether it were the dream or an afterlife, something was egging him on, whispering in still silence that he must continue onward, downward; through the passageway. Even with the monster lurking below, Yaacov needed to descend; delving further into that dripping, moss-covered abyss which itself stood in stark contrast to the desiccated lands on the surface above him.
He knew it was a dream yet everything was crystal clear. Bits of his past - the life he'd lived in the "real world" then and there so distant - seemed to come and go with regularity, passing through his mind like so many will-o'-wisps. However, like no other dream, this was real; perhaps it were purgatory instead. If he were to die "there," would he somehow awaken "here" in a place of his "real life," or would he truly be dead in every sense of the word?  If he were to truly die, what would that mean in any event? Of course if he were already dead, then the unconsciousness - the adventist damnation of his humble upbringing; the motionlessness - he had so often sought had again eluded him.
One of the oddest parts of the experience was simply that Yaacov was also having memories of previous events from his dream world. So while the whole of such recollections flashed - sometimes one by one and other times simultaneously but always with rapidity - all of it seemingly at random through his mind; of course none of it was real; or perhaps it should be written that none of it was any more real than anything else.
Of one thing Yaacov was certain; no matter what event or where it ever had occurred, there were nothing more to his existence than - at its core - terror and beauty; and in the end, perhaps suffering. Despite all of that he had remained in motion. 
Yaacov smirked as the phrase "war on terror" passed through his mind. Then the thoughts of "freedom and democracy" and "security" gave him more laughs.
Yaacov gripped the CZ-52 as though his very life depended on it. Perhaps - even within the realm of the dream or the thereafter - it did. The slim reliable piece - the most accurate high-powered pistol in the world - might then and there have been his only possible "material" salvation. 
How could he have foreseen that terrifying turn of events? Yaacov should have known all along; given his own predilections and his subsequently having acted upon them, the ensuing pursuits could have had no other outcome. He had joined the Process - or it had absorbed him - at the age of eighteen. Only later had he realized he was the human founder of the cult of nine. Of course in the meantime he had been a follower of the Chemical Christiana. Some have said that the Chemical Christiana is the high priestess of both the Process and the cult of nine; others have speculated that she might have been Tyra Banks; or that when the day is ripe she will inhabit the spirit of most every woman everywhere, all at the same time. 
Most likely the Raven lived within many women; those who know how to ignite male desire without ever fulfilling it; leaving the unrequited lover with eternal want for that exquisitely sensuous female flesh, adorned in satins and sheers like a haughty courtesan; serving no purpose but pleasure yet always one step out of reach as a featured component in someone such as Yaacov's ongoing and never-ending delicious misery; She given over to her sensual and sexual whims; he as her humble eunuch.
Terror was but natural; Yaacov knew this. Facing The Terror; embracing the terror is one of the few acts of meaning in a person's life, for each of us will eventually meet The Terror; it is an inevitability which no human law - no fine-sounding words uttered or written by priest or politician within a culture of lies - can ever alter. Perhaps being who he was Yaacov had an advantage over the "average" plebe in that regard. Of course it is a huge mistake to believe in such as thing as, "the common man."
In any event, for as much as Yaacov had pretended during so much of his own life to have been nothing more than white trash, there were those there and about who had whispered to themselves that he and the fallen star in search of the key to the bottomless pit were really one in the same. Ultimately there could be no doubt by then that members of the clandestine luciferian masons had at times tried to gain his allegiance and at other times attempted to destroy his very soul; not such were necessarily mutually exclusive.

10) The Tetragrammaton is not the demiurge.

Ever since having been taken into the confidence of the rabbi; ever since the rabbi had revealed to Yaacov the legend of the ancient Lost Sphere of the Tetragrammaton, Yaacov had become obsessed with the thought of finding and "possessing" IT; that rumored timeless fount of ultimate power; a virtual perpetual motion machine; the thing which at once both differentiated and separated the divine from the demiurge; that is to say assuming such were possible or even desirable.
Playing at the star who had fallen to earth, Yaacov knew the Sphere to be what he had always sought - the key to the bottomless pit. With it perhaps nothing would be the same and everything would change. Perhaps the pharisees - those priests whose pronouncements had haunted and enslaved mankind since the dawn of recorded hystory - would finally meet their "end." Of course Yaacov wasn't going to bet on that, chief among his reasons being that most people were simply happy to be out of their other containers, and in these ones instead.
In any event Yaacov had wondered if indeed he really were the key to the bottomless pit. Perhaps the star who fell to earth and the key to the bottomless pit were one in the same. Perhaps Persephone was the star and he the key. Perhaps he was lost in his own schizophrenic world of delusion; that certainly would have been the most logical explanation.
Regardless of anything, Yaacov had always ultimately known himself - or at least had pretended as much - and in that knowledge he had always thrown caution to the wind; for destiny - even a destiny which is a caricature of itself - would never be denied, regardless of its inherent meaninglessness.
Yaacov was again awash in a flurry of new recollections. More than anything, the beauty of the female form came to haunt him.  Waves of curved flesh passed through his mind, draped in shiny and sheer fabrics - the properly adorned female - and with sweet-scented words whispering unearthly pleasures while the clicks of stiletto heels and painted nails rolled onward and lilting voices sang at once a song of ultimate seduction and male self-destruction.
So much magic Yaacov had spent on procuring a reliable supply of female pleasure; all in the end for naught; for how many men other than kings have ever had the female - any and every female - on demand?  Yaacov was no king; if anything he was the star who had fallen to earth in search of the key to the bottomless pit; and for that perhaps he was the king of nothing; and perhaps that would have been something; but it certainly had not gained him the favor of women he'd so often at least feigned interest in.
Regardless of any of that how many men - men better than Yaacov - had succumbed to the promise of female pleasure, only to see in the end that it was a trap - a trap which would ultimately cost them their lives, but in the meantime the esteem of the very women they had desired as well as their own self respect?
Perhaps only too late had it become obvious to Yaacov whose world it ultimately was, and how They would choose to run it. Perhaps only too late it had become obvious that - at least for his own kind - getting any kind of "good deal" out of the distaff gender was indeed nothing more than a pipe dream. How many men had Yaacov seen, destroyed by their own passion for women and the culture of female vapidity from which he himself had also ostensibly arisen?
In any event the death of and by the erotic is certainly preferable to the stifling taxes and cuckoldry of the welfare state; not that, as a rule such are mutually exclusive. 
At least Yaacov had found his place in relation to women. In contrasting his own experiences with those of others ostensibly born male, Yaacov could rejoice in being bittersweet on that count; for from what he had seen the fate of certain other men at the hands of the "fairer" sex had been - to put it charitably - hideous.
As for the women, Yaacov had set it up: He was their turn-on, but never their lover. He would meet with them and they would want him to "take" them as had always been their wont, but he was outside of that and as a result each of them would always unfailingly go elsewhere to fill that need. 
He did however enjoy studying their form; especially when properly adorned; and in his day and age the asian women had perhaps known the most about this.
All of that being in reality neither here nor there, the memories of the heartbroken, failed feminine magic faded and there were only the recollections of that beauty over which he had always held so many vastly conflicting emotions. In the end they had not destroyed him yet Yaacov had destroyed himself. Ego death had always been his calling.
Yaacov ultimately believed in but a few things; music, the psychedelics, the sensual ideals which had formed the music, and finally the demons who had always listened to and enjoyed his music.
Everything else was a lie. 
In Yaacov's day many people worshiped many different gods; and as in the day of Shamgar son of Anat - all high roads had been forsaken. For the gods of Yaacov's day were - no matter how passionately advocated by their followers - invariably false; democracy, peace, security, safety; the common good; the greater welfare; health care; public schools; psychiatry; central bankers; on and on; all false gods.
Yaacov's social pondering at least momentarily finished, he again thought of where he was and what was before him; of that thing which he had always strived for, despite the fact that until then it had not had an apparent name or even form.
If he were to merge with IT he would be home; or as far away from home as is possible; or perhaps both at once. Despite his pedestrian upbringing, he had always a lover of the esoteric. He knew that prayer and meditation were never without their effects; of course none of it would change predestination. 
Yaacov wanted the world to go away; to die; for there to be an absence of all motion once again. He was only curious about what would come next. All of that garbage about things such as "environmentalism" and "saving lives" he had by then left to the small-minded; just a couple of the myriad of icons in the false churches erected by those infected by the likes of haarp and the killer memes.
Kaasteen of the Tlingit had done it. How could he be the same in relation to his own culture? Certainly he had broken enough taboos. But was he secretly of merovingian blood or rather just a pauper?
He remembered the thing about his idea of power and how such contrasted with others' ideas of the same. Of course power is not spoken of in polite society. Yet everything nonetheless ultimately kills everything else. 
Who - or what - was ultimately behind the cult of nine? Of course sometimes YHVH is sixty-three and Azathoth ninety-nine. And by the same token Kari Hall is seventy-two; and how he would still dream of her from time to time. Perhaps indeed aside from everything she were the high priestess of the cult of nine. Certainly, in his time Yaacov had crossed paths with various and sundry powerful priestesses; but he could never bring himself to love one over all of the others; his nature was to have all of them or to have none of them; but never simply one of them.
Yaacov could remember his first introduction to the cult; the room with the dangling stuck pigs and the demons blissfully torturing one another; some sort of perhaps Balthaazar sitting in a tub; the polished private school hallways and then the room with the cult members; all pointing to he as terrestrial appointee. Perhaps instead he was simply mad. 
He instinctively knew that the cult of nine went far deeper than just the initiation. It had started with the abduction by the Process and then the seeming failure before the Chemical Christiana. Somehow the silver star entered in; yet always in passing.
Only then had Yaacov begun to embrace the Terror; to accept the idea of possession; of the giving over of his being to the idea of a larger concept. After all, what is the individual but a projection? And further, how has any pontification on the merits of libertarianism ever prevented even a single sheep from having been fleeced? It would appear that we are all really just facets - regardless of how bright or dim in our various aspects - of the YHVH.
Nonetheless perhaps - in the end - just as the Tetragrammaton were not the demiurge - the Beast was not the Beast; and the YHVH was certainly not the YHVH. Certainly the succession of Process to Chemical Christiana to cult of nine had been unchangeable. Yaacov had continually paid the price. Yet who had not?
And who could ever know the true nature of the YHVH, except to observe that the snake will always eat its own tail? Yet Yaacov had wanted to ensure that nothing would ever be the same and that everything would change; and slaughter sometimes went by the number one-hundred and eleven.
Yaacov had been a sometime quistian, but had ultimately decided he didn't like quist. Yaacov knew that this dislike might one day translate into his own doom, yet he had to be true to himself. Of course being an on-again and off-again quistian can tend to be overly costly in any event, for changes in "alignment" - whether successful or not - result in the heaviest spiritual baggage one might have to endure.
At times Yaacov dreamt of one day reuniting with the Chemical Christiana, for in his mind he had been at least in some way "with her" once; and as well - even if it were much more often than not seemingly some kind of a curse - she would always be with him in at least some small way.
Certainly all of the episodes of demonic possession which haunted his own dreams had given him pause; and there had been the dream lovers; all reflections of Christiana.
As for the quistians and their prayers; by then Yaacov often cursed the holy spirit in an attempt to keep their forces at bay. The end result had been his own unfathomable loneliness in the face of greater humanity; but the prayers of the quistians were trying to block his predilections; at least he still had his demons. And there are no choices in life; only chances.
According to the cult of nine, procreation was the only sin. Yaacov saw no need for more sheep needing fleecing. And his blood being ostensibly red rather than blue, he could see what his own marriage and mating would have amounted to. Instead he had pretended to have been a kind of eunuch or homosexual, yet even that had not really been the truth. But he had fooled enough people to have escaped his day and time without having left any offspring; of course due in part to his failure or refusal to procreate he had also gained the mark of the beast.
To Yaacov, natural sexual desire and the urge of most everyone to couple; that and society are the twin tricksters which set the trap for those who would procreate. Yaacov had escaped that trap, but at what cost? At least again there were his demons.
In days far past he had at times wished for a lack of critical thought; that naturally inbred optimism which might have made him happy in the context of the world. By then though he was glad he had persevered; for he could read the proverbial writing on the wall and it mightn't be long before he were to see his own death; and for all of his failings he had remained fairly true to himself.
He knew at least that matter was without substance. Perhaps possession of IT would indeed allow him to ensure that nothing ever remained the same and that everything would most definitely change.
Among other things the salvia had shown him the snake. Also that delicious, dark yet glowing mischief beyond the experience of the mere plebian had been unmasked, along with his own futility of course.
In any event his world had simply once been woven out of the spiraling, snaking fabric of both the light and shadow of nothingness. And of course it would one day return to its own original form. And what was IT aside from yet another term for the seeming chaos which underlies all of this world of illusion?
The snake would certainly eat its own tail. And of the god Yaacov had so long before been given, he could only curse. One of the most fascinating things to Yaacov was how so many people knew for certain that so many other people had either already been - or would yet be - sent to everlasting hell. At least adventism had been different in that regard; and the adventist damnation had given Yaacov hope in the end to suffering; the lack of motion; the ultimate unconsciousness.
Yaacov thought of the zeitgeist of "saving lives," then he wondered what exactly those lives were being saved for. He thought it odd that none would ever say; perhaps stranger still was the fact that no one of his day and age had ever even bothered to ask. But conventional wisdom was that the "saving" of a single life was always worth abrogating the rights of everyone else; this belief being in and of itself merely yet another golden calf.
It interested Yaacov that the world could rise up out of the sprawling interactions between - for lack of better terms - Thoth Yagog and Erzithoth. Was the YHVH simply the sum total of these other two? Was the YHVH even the YHVH at all? Further, who would ever care save Yaacov himself? Perhaps that was the mystery of the cult of nine; that from the ranks of humanity only Yaacov would ever join it; and even in that joining he would never have anything more than a hazy understanding of the inner workings of the cult. Of course perhaps it had always been this way with secret societies and even "mainstream" religions; perhaps it had always been that such had never been understood - realized in all their ramifications - by their human practitioners. And for all he knew this was the way things were meant to ever be. At least there was the church of the sub-genius from which Yaacov might theoretically draw compatriots. For again what ultimately was the cult of nine but a facet of the other?
What human sense will detect that spiraling background upon which our world of illusion is built? How will such ever be seen outside of helpers like Salvia Divinorum or DMT? And how many humans would ever dare wander outside the arena of intoxication prescribed for them by their earthly authorities? Perhaps long ago - or far in the future - it would have been or might someday once again be different - but in Yaacov's day and age the sheep would only be fleeced. For it was in Yaacov's day as it had been in the day of Shamgar, son of Anat - all high roads were forsaken.
Yaacov had his own chants, sacraments, and icons. He knew that the Process had weaned him of the mundane world and that in truth he had been a lifelong devotee of next the Chemical Christiana and presently the cult of nine. Only in his thirty-ninth year had he come to discover the existence of the cult. 
Something had driven him into membership in the cult. He could have so easily died when he was eighteen. Perhaps in truth he had died, and the past twenty-some years had been but a sort of purgatory or even hell. Certainly some spiritual force had kept its proverbial knee upon his neck. By then though it didn't matter. Whether already dead or not; Yaacov was ready to die; again if need be.
Too bad for he and his compatriots; too bad for their enemies. In any event the stellar wars (ragnarok) were about to heat up again, and for several months previous, Yaacov had nightly been trained by the unseen leaders at the center of the cult of nine. They would come into his dreams and shatter him; then remake him again; over and over. At times, when Yaacov would get too close to the ultimate state of being, something would inevitably awaken him; it might be a knock on the door of his room; or a helicopter or train passing by outside his window; but whenever that moment of truth would arrive something would always awaken him first; as though that ultimate psychic orgasm were simply outside of his mortal reach. 	
Nonetheless he knew that the end of civilization was at hand; and nothing could stave this off; neither the willing obedience of the sheep nor the greedy machinations of their all-too-ready masters; even the two combined could not stop the slaughter which was to consume the very reality of this world and plunge it once again back into its primordial mode; and of course that would mean that the snake had eaten its tail. Yaacov could only hope that it would then follow that everything would change and nothing would ever quite be the same. 
But what of the chilling possibility that the earth was - and continues to this day to be - simply a laboratory for alien scientists; that many varieties of "man" - or to generalize, bipeds - had come and gone, each one having proved unsatisfactory to "The Creator" and having been replaced each time by, "a newer and better model?" It would simply be another way for the snake to eat its own tail; at least as far as humanity were concerned. 
Yaacov was daydreaming within his dream. Inside his dream, Yaacov caught himself; bringing his mind back from its meandering and perceiving instead that directly confronting him.
Quickly drifting again, Yaacov pondered how an astral scientist such as himself could never truly know the current state of Aiwwai; or for that matter, any of the other gods. The being some call "YHVH" or "god" was known, not only from Yaacov's particular upbringing, but from ancient and maddeningly circumspect transcripts as having been the only one a human could know outside of the usurpers - at least in those hazy days of yore, where admittedly the texts had perhaps been written by at once diabolical and alien pens. Nonetheless, there was the rumor of the Sphere - IT. Perhaps it was only that the Sphere was the key to the bottomless pit and somehow Yaacov had been chosen to play the part of the star who had fallen to earth.
Yaacov knew by then that one goal of the cult of nine was the eradication of the world. Perhaps "eradication" is too strong a word but at least the onset of ragnarok was a chief goal of the cult. Thoth-Yagog was one-hundred and twenty-six and Erzithoth was one-hundred and twenty-nine. Together they were two-hundred and fifty-five and averaged they were one-hundred and twenty-seven point five (six apiece).
Yaacov knew that there would always be a world; one or another race of bipeds; as before and as in the future, intent upon religion, ceremony, civilization, and sacrifice. It appeared to him only that his own world had run its course. For as in the days of Shamgar son of Anat - all high roads had been forsaken.
None of that would alter the knowledge that the Tetragrammaton is not the demiurge.
As for Yaacov, for much of his so-called life had he experienced being like a piece of metal bent back and forth, made weaker and weaker until he might - according to the allegory - break. By then he was in many ways malleable to the terrifying ways of the universe. Diminishing social status was no longer a threat; there was no great loved one whose potential loss might cause him pause; there was no way to embarrass, ashame, or humiliate him any further for he had been through all of that. By then he was simply a vessel for the machinations of the cult of nine. Perhaps he was perfectly demonically possessed. 
One thing was for certain; the gods were teasing him with obscurity and poverty; at least he could laugh about it some of the time; especially in light of those who had actually been chosen for fame and adulation.
No matter what the case, Yaacov knew that "the answer" was there, deeper within the confines of that tunnel, with its mossy walls broken up by alien markings and made all the more foreboding by the subtle yet constant dripping of the water from its ceiling. Even the volumes of water, dripping down the walls and running in little rivulets along the sloping stone floor, were a mystery to Yaacov. This was supposed to have been dry bedrock. He had not known of any water tables in Sedona, or for that matter Cydonia. Then again what could he have possibly known of Cydonia?
How would Yaacov stand in the face of the challengers, should such an encounter arise. Were the minions of those ancient ones already meandering there in the depths before him? 
The power of IT was worth the risk of any encounter. And even if he had been reluctant to forge ahead down the passageway, there was that aforementioned "something" compelling him all the same. Free will was not an option at that point; as if of course it ever had been; which it had obviously not. If Yaacov were to have IT, then IT would also belong to the cult of nine. Of course Yaacov was spooked but he wondered again when such had ever not been the case.
The memories came back; thoughts of tortured social settings; unrequited love; and his own conversion.
What of all the burned bridges; the Satanic pact; the Process and then the Chemical Christiana? It was all coming back. In a way neither it nor she had ever left him; even though perhaps the reciprocal had not always held true. 
There was more to his story; the high school and college teachers from the secret occult societies; the corporation based secretly upon some ancient mysticism, contained there within the walls of the ostensibly invisible building seven; his dream encounters with IT or those from the hierarchy; the ongoing experiences leading to the initiation and ongoing membership as the "earthly founder" of the cult of nine.
Of his music the demons had truly loved it. Outside of the music he was simply another statistic; another survivor from the early days of the advent of the personal computer; another once decently-paid American having lost his job to an overseas market; by then competing for menial jobs with hoards of immigrants; latin americans, eastern europeans, africans, and asians. Fortunately for him he held none of his own circumstances against them. It was simply a fact that once the information industry had begun its international outsourcing that competing in the lower end jobs had become more difficult due to the ever-more-crowded field of job applicants.
Of course he was at least partly to blame; he could have kept the mysticism at bay; could have pounded his keyboard all day, every day, and into the night, every night, and thus retained a job in information technologies; of course that was a joke. He knew in his heart that nothing could have been any different. And even if it had; pounding the keyboard might not have saved him in any sense of the word. For what is life but decay; for some instant and for others such as himself a meandering, mostly downward spiral unto death? And what is death but exquisite sensual pleasure?
Yaacov knew the corporation to be a sham. What galled him even more was that he had in large part helped build it; and almost no one had ever acknowledged his contribution. He realized though that the success of the corporation - and others - was based upon the need of the sheep to be fleeced; but the secret in building seven had certainly assisted the ostensibly zionistic, autistic figureheads of the corporation in their rising to "prominence."
In a way Yaacov felt used and then spit out; but in another way the whole thing was simply hilarious. Perhaps it is a great gift not to take oneself - or anything or anyone else for that matter - too seriously.
In any event Yaacov's humiliation at the hands of the corporation, and the subsequent and precipitous loss of social status - assuming he had ever had such to begin with - had been at least sometimes tough to take. Regardless of all of that he was then exactly where he needed to be, there at that moment in that tunnel.
So the thoughts came and went; the realizations about the media; the remembrance of the defrocked priest; the accusations and insinuations of demonic possession and exorcism; the lsd trips; on and on.
Of course there had been the drugs and the prostitutes; and after entry into the Process and encountering the Chemical Christiana nothing would have changed any of that. But of the drugs and the whores, Yaacov knew which of the two he preferred in the end; Yaacov knew who his best friends were. Either way his debauchery as a youth, then as an employee of the corporation, and even after that as he fell through society's cracks; all of it had been fairly extreme. But it was never as though humanity itself were not in a state of constant slaughter; and that thought put everything else into perspective. 
Of course the use of psychedelics might be considered by some to be debauchery, but perhaps in truth it is "wrong" only outside the context of the Process, or the Chemical Christiana, or the cult of nine. 
Who was he kidding? Psychedelics had done so much to make him who he was; and even if he were to be the all-time loser his perhaps greatest gift was in knowing that in the end he had no desire to be anyone other than himself; which is not to say that he had always been the same, for life has a way of twisting and tearing at people; constantly changing them.
Yaacov had taken recourse against the world of the demiurge. He thought of Azathoth and ninety-nine; YHVH and sixty-three; computer, mark of beast, chris g'ines, slaughter, vaccination, kissinger, tyra banks, and tinkink as one hundred and eleven; persephone as one-hundred and twenty-one. Current events were the same racket they had always been, yet scarlet garden was one-hundred and twenty-three.
CIA, GRU, or the Mossad: They were all part of the mob. Of course the mob could not for a moment survive let alone thrive without the willingness of the sheep in their own fleecing. And what was nine one one but a singular precursor to the fleecing of the sheep on an unprecedented scale? And of the mob; for as long as there will be egos involved, such will never be monolithic. Perhaps that was what made the cult of nine different.
Waxing philosophically, Yaacov pondered that freedom was non-existent; in its place were but consequences; and that in the end only the inconsequential could be free. Perhaps this meant that unconsciousness was the only real freedom; but was death unconsciousness or simply a rebirth into this - or perhaps some other - world of illusion?
What of the witches which littered his own path? What of their curses? He thought of Juliet Landau and how if "a" equaled negative thirty-three and if one incremented every letter after "a" by nine that letters comprising her name would total six-hundred and sixty six. Whatever the value of that knowledge she looked so like someone he had seen before; someone he had always wanted; would always want; someone he could easily die for; over and over again. 
Would the beast know the identity of the beast? Would the beast instead wander, always empty? Just as the quist might be full, might the antiquist be empty? And of the quist - in all his fullness - advocating a welfare state, democracy, and fawning obedience to said state where taxes of course must always be paid; isn't the beast at least somewhat preferable even in his own empty way? If the quist wants to take away the salvia and the mushrooms and the weed; and instead replace it all with prozac; is not the beast better than that? Who needs a quist who advocates democracy, prohibition, and the welfare state; a quist who wrings his ostensibly holy hands over cigarettes; a quist who wants to throw away all of the guns? Isn't a beast superior to that? 
Perhaps then the Chemical Christiana is sublime; or if nothing else eminently preferable to a quist. Indeed, a Chemical Christiana is far superior to a prohibitionist quist; and a beast is simply a way of being.
Yaacov knew that somehow the Chemical Christiana was part of the Process; part of the cult of nine; he was definitely going her way. For quist may have been ruler of the universe, but as a matter of principle Yaacov could not go along with democracy; and the quist was a democrat or so Yaacov had been told.
So who indeed was the beast? Were she - the Chemical Christiana - and it one and the same? Of course how could the Raven be the beast?
In his time Yaacov himself had met - or at least stood face to face with - three or more self-described beasts. They had without exception been at least as insane as he. Yet perhaps he understood and they apparently had not; on the other hand it may have simply been a shared madness resulting on all of their parts from individual encounters with a sprawling meme. 
Nonetheless how could they have known the emptiness? Yaacov was certain that he himself had always known the emptiness inherent to the antiquist; and quist could keep everything as long as Yaacov could hold onto nothing. 
Once again cognizant of his immediate surroundings, Yaacov realized he had earlier caught a glimpse of the monster. He had known intuitively that it was one of the "Cemonculus," but Yaacov could not fathom where he'd gotten the word from; how he could have possibly even known of such a creature, servant of ToZ. Even the name of ToZ and how he'd come to have known that; all of it remained a riddle.
Why did Yaacov suddenly know the names of ToZ, Llethrotep, and Vutvko? These were so alien yet so familiar. Could he indeed have had a past life or could the information have been passed by some spirit, from the so-called ether and into the flailing neurons within his own mind? Perhaps his experiments with psychedelics had permanently altered his brain chemistry to where he was no longer all here; wherever "here" really might have been in any event.
Yaacov had to doubt his own sanity - of course sanity is almost never anything more than a given social or behavioral code within a "civilization." Nonetheless, there in the tunnel he was seemingly the prey, in danger of being consumed by the riddle. Perhaps even so his luck might be with him and there below would be some answer to his lifelong intellectual and spiritual thirsting and consequent torments. The riddle was there before him: The Tetragrammaton is not the demiurge. Why did Yaacov wear the mark?
It was clear that only the terror and beauty would survive society; or indeed there might for even just a moment once again be motionlessness.
The malevolence was overwhelming just then. But it no longer held Yaacov firmly within its grasp. There was something greater which drove him into those ancient, inhuman depths.

9) The sheep must be fleeced.

Some journey; some quest had driven Yaacov away from the gilded cage of the corporation; there with its insipid malefactors of great wealth and the hidden Thing which drove them; those symbols and artifacts occupying building seven. 
Yaacov had been introduced to that corporate sect; welcomed at the party as a minion; and Yaacov had puked on the proverbial carpet which had there been laid out before him; cast to the winds of fate the fortune it had attempted to bestow upon him; and all at such a social cost. Of course the price of staying put would have ultimately been greater; for the monster in building seven does not sleep; and ultimately it devours its supposed beneficiaries.
Nonetheless the sheep needed their fleecing yet Yaacov was not the one to do it. Of course in his more base moments Yaacov would look upon much of humanity with contempt; for the mass media had done such a good job of convincing everyone of their need for the state; of their need for "safety" and "guarantees" and regulation. In the end though the state really served to devour their dreams. But by then it was too late. Civilization had devolved to the point of no return; only the destruction of the current model would do. Whatever his own regrets or misgivings, Yaacov knew that the goal of the cult of nine was the destruction of the old model and the introduction of the new; at the very least, ragnarok. 
On the one hand the reality of that was hideous; on the other it was simply the snake eating its own tail; and the snake eats its own tail over and over again; forever and forever. And the Tetragrammaton is not the demiurge but it doesn't even matter. At least sadness will always be a person's friend.
There are things outside the realm of normal human sense; things which if they were to be known would - within an instant - drive most people truly mad; insane beyond any social sense of the word. Some had seen; most of these had gone mad indeed; only a few could withstand the bludgeon of ultimate reality. Terror and beauty are preeminent; only the suffering gives clue to this. For as long as there is motion, the suffering will never abate. What would drive a person to deny this? To those who know, pain is but a gift. This is why they remain in motion. And as for most all of supposed madness; it is but more or less the loss of social conditioning; an ultimate refutation of the high priests of any given age.

8) Without booty there cannot be a proper war.

Yaacov stood in the dampened hallway, pistol in hand as he stepped forward, after the monster. Yaacov thought of the ancient burial grounds ostensibly above him. Yet again he could not force himself to turn around and to go back upward and toward the entrance. Perhaps in some phantasmal fashion he were beneath both Cydonia and Sedona at once.
But how could that have been? Of course, it being at least somewhat of a lucid dream perhaps he himself could decide upon the milieu. Certainly during his waking hours his likeness had never haunted either Arizona or Mars - at least not outside of his own remote viewing experiments. 
From those he knew at least of the caves; the cave of Sedona and the cave of Cydonia. That wasn't so remarkable; any fan of late night AM talk radio would have known the same. In any event it was too bad about them; it seemed the spooks had covered Their tracks there. Of course who had the spooks not gotten to? For it was just like the days of Shamgar, son of Anat - all high roads had been forsaken.
And sometimes it seemed Yaacov could remember nothing They had not wanted him to remember. It all went back to his involvement with Project Monarch; but by then who had not been a subject of either that, MKULTRA, or most commonly, haarp?
Suddenly a grim determination gripped him, and he lost all thought but instead took action, keeping his pistol at the ready as he started at once gingerly yet speedily down the dank passageway.

7) Comfort is never to be confused with truth.

Whatever the ultimate truth of past, present, or parallel realities, there in that passageway Yaacov knew rabbi Michael Levin to presently have been dead. And the monster had been exceedingly strong; at least the eighteen/seventy-six of a vampire. And Yaacov thought of the creature as inhuman because from what had been left of Michael's body - then a hundred metres above and behind Yaacov in the passageway - it had appeared as though only something utterly alien could have done such a thing.
In any event Yaacov thought he'd seen razor-sharp claws and teeth, then heard the screams of the rabbi and the hideous sounds of rending and such.
Yaacov cocked the CZ-52 and made his way through the widening, mossy, ancient passage. All recollections - dreamworld or other - fading; over and over again almost giving form within his thoughts then disintegrating, only to nearly re-assemble in yet another guise, Yaacov noticed that sparse and "alienesque" markings continued to line the walls. Like his thoughts they seemed to disintegrate as he descended.
The passage steepened and the nameless oppression thickened, threatening to suffocate him were it to increase by even an iota. As it were, at the present levels it was almost too much for his physiology to bear. He fought back against the palpable nausea and plunged into the depths, hunting something more than likely physically much stronger than he; facing somewhat certain death if he were to encounter it face to face; yet he was driven by the hazy legend of the Lost Sphere - IT; or at least so he thought.
The Lost Sphere, mentioned in the Necromonicon; the legendary sought-after tome of those same aboriginal American shamans who were whispered in numerous and nameless other, olden texts to have fabricated the burial mound ostensibly above; the salvia-soaked, otherworldly wanderers of ancient Earth who had for whatever reason touched down upon those sun-parched hills in the almost forgotten days of yore; at once alien magicians and tribal wise men who had lived in some remote age hundreds or even thousands of years before; progenitors of Qetzalcoatl and the Toltecs. Yaacov somehow sensed that the Sphere must be nearby. An otherworldly sensation rose from his feet and upward; as if, within that dank passageway the very ground he walked upon were giving off some kind of at once unfathomable yet definitely discernible emanation.
Yaacov's growing yet wholly undefined sense that the Sphere might be within grasp was heightened by some previously eerie premonitions which had overtaken at least some small part of his very being over those days previous to his presently perilous descent. Yaacov was driven relentlessly downward. 
Of the Necromonicon; circumspect and perhaps alien tomes procured in various libraries and studies had all mentioned that the human scribes of such had without exception gone mad. Of course again society usually defines madness but in the case of the compilers of that decrepit text there had been no doubt; for their madness had been even greater than that; as if, after their writing their eyes had without exception held view of an irretrievably shattered universe; a worldview ground into the tiniest of shards by something far greater and menacing than any byzantine legal codex.
Somehow - aeons after the fact of the translations - the Rabbi and Yaacov had gained access to one of the surviving copies. Yet though Yaacov could remember having translated passages and the meanings gleaned, he could not for the life of him recall just where or when such activities had taken place.
Yaacov could neither remember the place nor time of the translation work but he could remember inklings of at once vague and obscene passages contained therein; verses containing commentary on that grand experiment - humanity - and the dual meaning and meaninglessness of such a fantastic pursuit. Had such been a hoax? Indeed, what if anything was not at its root a hoax? 	
Nonetheless he wanted most of all to erase; to forget the origins of humanity as he had discovered them from within those dank pages. Yet so very many times the snake had already swallowed its tail; and it would again; and it was too late for Yaacov; or even his ostensibly own kind.
On some level he longed for the simple humanity of normal people; the quistians and others of undying, simple faith; the lovers of democracy; fawners over malefactors of great wealth; the obedient; the sheep who demand their own fleecing and experience such with untold joy.
Of the creature Yaacov pursued; could it have been a Cemonculus (and again, how did he know that name?); amphibian straggler across the ages; creature and servant of ToZ, sullen and shimmering water god?
Could Yaacov at that moment have been chasing an actual, surviving Cemonculus, minion of ToZ? 
What contorted chaos had ToZ and his compatriots - Vutvko and Llethrotep - once wrought?
The long-lost sources had hinted haltingly at secrets beyond the stars in connection with those three despotic gods; forbidden secrets so vile and decadent that no human could possibly stand alone in the face of their ancient, purported truths. That is why nearly all texts, tablets, scrolls, tomes, and the like are for the most part nameless and hidden to this day; the notable exception having been the Necromonicon, whose mysterious name was changed somewhat and slightly popularized as the "Necronomicon" in a certain particular - and perhaps also peculiar - circle of human speculation. Regardless of any of that, according to many of those same, unnamed sources, the three usurpers, ToZ, Llethrotep, and Vutvko had been once and to this day imprisoned within both the inner and outer spheres. The linchpin of this phenomena was the very IT Yaacov was seeking. IT would bind the usurpers throughout yawning and shifting eternity.
Yaacov broke from his then-current speculation and realized he'd again stopped walking for a moment or two. He then continued to plunge forward, rouding a bend in the passageway until the creature - the apparent Cemonculus; a hideous, living relic from antediluvian times - was upon him. 
Yaacov screamed in terror as he emptied the eight-round, thirty-caliber (seven point six two by twenty-five) magnum pistol into the beast as it rushed him from a mere few paces and the creature itself fell into an at-first eerily moaning, then silent hulk on the passageway floor, its - well over two-metre - lifeless frame to never again traverse either the ages or Yaacov's dreams.
From all indications, looking at the twisted corpse on that slippery slope, it was indeed a Cemonculus; at least in comparing the visage of the bullet-punctured beast on the floor to memories of descriptions Yaacov had once gleaned from only god knows where.
Indeed, the claws and teeth, and the tentacles hanging from what was left of the alien face where it remained intact; those all looked like the odd statues that human tourists had been buying and oft-referring to as "cute" in the crafts stands of some off-the-beaten-track Pacific Island carnival. Where had Yaacov seen a caricature of that creature before; at which locale had he spied such a trinket; Borneo, Palau, Guam, or somewhere near the island group known as Truk? Yet Yaacov had never been to any of those places; of that he was almost certain. Yaacov decided then and there to try and forget where the memories and knowledge were coming from; he set about to instead simply use the information he'd been given; and to thenceforth recall such in any manner which might prove useful within the context of his trip.
At any rate Yaacov was near the end of his own proverbial tether. The ringing in his ears, drowning out the dripping sounds in the otherwise silent passageway; the lingering echo was only a minor irritant compared to his increasingly desperate awareness. Some ancient and alien curse seemed to haunt the macabre passageway. It were as if the "feeling" actually poured forth from not only the floors as before, but from the very walls and the ceiling; as though the passageway were haunted by something totally alien to his own - arguably shattered - humanity. 
Perhaps Yaacov was simply in need of some "acclimation" to the inhuman and terrifying, and then he would be "all right." Perhaps Yaacov could lurk within that passageway for a few hours and the oppression - so thick in the air at that moment - would leave him. Yes, perhaps mentally and emotionally he would only have to deal with the death of Michael and the ensuing encounter with the Cemonculus. Yaacov further thought that he could recover from those, in their "triviality;" next to meaningless in the sense that the very structure of the universe wasn't (yet) in question, but instead "only" the loss of a couple of lives, albeit one of them inhuman.
Who ultimately - one way or the other - cared about the universe? His sentimentality had almost gotten the best of him. Yet he harbored the thought; the idea that if he were to find IT he could ensure that nothing would be the same and that everything would change. Perhaps then in his own bizarre way he - if no one else - gave thought to the universe.
If Yaacov could remain in that subterranean vault for just a few hours, and somehow forget the eerie stifling energy of the hallway whilst losing his nostalgia about so-called universal ramifications of what he was attempting to accomplish, he might be all right with just the thoughts of his dead friend and a hideous alien encounter. 
Had Yaacov by then gone insane already? Any more, where was the line to be drawn? Perhaps there indeed did exist a real, identifiable insanity outside of the scope of social mores. Yet in the end, Yaacov wondered if he really had any choice over anything, for one thing was for certain; he could not yet bring himself to turn around and flee back upward to the "light of day."
The Cemonculus twitched as it died. Yaacov realized that the thirty-caliber had been good enough. In any event, he didn't guess that his luck was going to hold out much longer. The Cemonculus lay there with claws and teeth and a hideous face. The tentacles hanging from the face were truly ghastly and nearly beyond description. The dead yet ageless monster gave off somewhat of a stench, lying there at Yaacov's feet with dark liquid oozing down the passageway behind it. Certainly his experience with the beast had been more frightening than even the most disturbing episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; of course sans the beautiful females.
Yaacov stepped around the Cemonculus and felt his pockets for an extra magazine. Coincidentally Yaacov found several loaded magazines in side pockets to his army-style trousers. Working the latch on his pistol, Yaacov flicked the empty magazine away and with a fresh magazine reloaded the CZ-52. He took an inventory of magazines and discovered that there were three more.
Yaacov's ears were still ringing from the shots just moments before, yet he couldn't be certain whether he heard a faint low murmur, as if it were miles away, deeply wavering in some unearthly, subtly hypnotic tune.
The stifling, invisible presence in the passageway - beyond his comprehension and perhaps that of all of humanity - faded into the background, albeit steadily and slowly; in any case as he continued downward it had ceased to be the focal point of his mental meanderings; as if the spot near the deceased Cemonculus had been the "center of the alien energy field" and such were now fading as he wandered past it, then away and into those abysmal depths. 
In the meantime his mind had found a way to concentrate on any possible movement that might be further down the passageway, waiting for illumination before the slightly dimming maglite. Yes, Yaacov was paying as much attention as possible to the turns in the passageway; the hollows that he came across, and niches in the construction which had broken down and left piles of loose stones on the floor which made for possible hiding places for inhuman savages which might find it attractive to lie in wait through the passing of unspeakable ages; sitting like silent sentries for the ultimate, present-day arrival of some intruder such as Yaacov to maul into oblivion.
Yaacov stopped again and realized he had a small backpack. Out of curiosity he put the flashlight between his legs and the pistol into a holster there on his belt and took the pack off, then inspected its contents.
There were a bottle of water and a bottle of something reddish and with the apparent consistency of a milkshake. Additionally, there were two sandwiches in wax paper, some chocolate chip cookies in the same, and a couple of bags of barbecue potato chips; also there were spare batteries for the maglite. There were tobacco and rolling papers, and some blue ringers in a baggie. Yaacov immediately ingested the blue ringers. 
He noticed what appeared to have been a folded up map. Again Yaacov's curiosity got the best of him and, putting the other items back into the pack he unfurled the map. 
The map showed the ground above him. It looked like an old map of Arizona, yet it was overlayed by other lines indicating some other place; it were as though its lines were combining to compare and contrast two places in one. Then Yaacov began to again consider that he was indeed locked in some kind of parallel reality; that he was indeed beneath both the sands of sleepy, modern-day Arizona on the one hand and a forgotten landscape of Mars on another. Oddly enough, Yaacov found that he could translate some of the text. 
There he was taken aback. It was the same thing he'd "seen and heard" a couple of times before; "The Tetragrammaton is not the demiurge."
In his shock and amazement Yaacov nearly dropped the flashlight, and the map and the pack with its other contents, yet something inside of him rose up and allowed him to keep his cool. He muttered in near silence, "That's the riddle of my life; and even with the knowledge of that statement - assuming it is true to begin with - what does it really mean?"
By then he noticed something else in the pack; a spice jar with some salvia inside. There was also a pipe. He loaded a bowl and took a few hits, holding each one. The music was inside him. There were ancient voices egging him on. He was either corporeal or ethereal or something - perhaps indeed nothing. The snakes were swirling about. Slightly regaining his senses, he hastened down the hallway with mischief on his unraveling mortal mind.
As he went he hurriedly stuffed the map back into the pack and closed its drawstring, saddled it back about his shoulders and took the flashlight back into his hand, once again unholstering his pistol; all whilst walking at a brisk pace, ever downward and to perhaps his ultimate doom.
As the salvia faded further back, he noted that in addition to the decaying brickwork of the passageway - with its piles of rubble there and about - there were random archways into rooms off of the passage on either side. Peering into such with his maglite, he would invariably see skeletal remains. He even entered one of the rooms and found some rags on the floor; rags so old they fell into dust at his touch.
He couldn't determine the age of the stonework in passageway, the adjoining rooms, the metal implements which held some of the skeletons, or the cloth which would crumble to dust; yet all of it was decrepit. He could neither determine the identities of the various non-human beings represented by some of the skeletal remains.
What sort of secret society had built those passages and when? During the heyday of the shamans, had such simply found other nameless sources of information, and known well enough to build their burial mound near the opening to that very passageway? 
Speculation aside, in a way it had been fortuitous - despite the loss of the rabbi and Yaacov's own ambling in apparent great danger down the passageway - that the ancients had done what they'd done. How else would the rabbi and he have ever found the place? What nameless rumors would have remained unwritten had the ancient and ostensibly human visionaries not attempted their own great work? Yaacov supposed that at that very moment it yet remained to be seen whether the rabbi's life had been lost in vain; whether Michael's death had been worth whatever it was Yaacov were to find in his own continued descent; or if in the end it would prove to have been simply a waste of the rabbi's lifelong research; however heretical that may or may not have actually been. The confusion of the situation was certainly nowhere near letting up. Yaacov simply had to laugh at his own thoughts and emotions as they cycled continually throughout the gamut between something like horrified veneration on the one hand and humorous indifference on the other.
As for the passageway itself, it was unknown outside of esoteric circles, and unmentioned except in nameless texts. The alien hallway is only whispered of during certain dark rituals performed by strange keepers of olden and hidden traditions, and rumor has it They cannot number more than a few dozen - or a few hundred at most - at any given time in human hystory. No one else either inside or outside of that locale, those hundreds of feet in elevation above him as he strode deeper down into that dank, diabolical hallway had ever known of the place. But again, how did Yaacov know all of this? How had the totality of the terror and the beauty fallen utterly and completely upon him?
Yaacov steeled himself and continued downward, bypassing the various broken-down niches and alcoves on the sides of the passage. The entrance at the pyramid above had long been demolished, perhaps by the ravages of centuries of wind, snow, and rain across that Martian plateau. Perhaps vandals had sacked the tomb centuries before. 
Of the remains in the alcoves and chambers; those which had not been readily identifiable as homo sapien had rather been hideous in their inhuman deformity. Had such been the offspring of the ancient nephilim?
In his anxiety Yaacov surged ever downward, and oddly enough the oppression seemed to fade and the curious odors dispersed as he went. In a thirst he paused and opened the pack to get a drink of whatever was in the bottle. It was a strawberry smoothie. Perhaps it was laced by a proper dose of some psychedelic such as lsd; certainly, in due time he would know one way or the other. In any event, as the salvia faded the psilocybin began to take effect.
Yaacov put the drink away and reshouldered the pack, even as his maglite began to dim. He figured he'd better get every last ounce of power out of the batteries which were already in use.
How far had he gone? How far did he yet have to go? How far was it; straight up to the surface?
He paused again, realizing that the construction of the passageway was by then undeniably alien. Not even ancient human mystics could have conjured such a thing. The inscriptions on the walls were telling a story.
Yes, the only anomalies other than the bizarre and ongoing inscriptions upon the walls had been those apparently single rooms off of the main passageway - somewhere up and behind him by then - and Yaacov calculated that, were he eventually enabled to retreat - and were he to actually take that action - that he could easily find his way back up and out of the passageway.
Yaacov checked for a hand grenade, and indeed there was one there in the pocket on the leg opposite the one with the pocket containing the ammo magazines for his pistol.  He re-holstered the pistol and gave it a rub, realizing that the trusty CZ-52 had saved his life. Yaacov might need it yet again, yet for some reason his sense of imminent danger had at least momentarily subsided. 
For the last five-hundred meters the tunnel had been simply cut into the rock; there were no seams, and though the hieroglyphs were etched into the walls there and about, the rest of the passageway - floor, walls, ceiling - were all completely smooth. To add to the impression there continued to be "rivulet beds" carved into either side of the floor; there where water trickled down alongside. For that five-hundred meters the construction had been utterly alien. Not even ancient human mystics could have created such a thing. Certainly it had been extraterrestrial magic.
That last, perfect section of passageway gave out to what amounted to a subterranean hillside; suddenly the smooth surfaces gave way to a rock-hewn cave. The descent also steepened.
Yaacov paused as his thirst was getting the best of him, and took further nips from the bottles in his pack. He decided to try a sandwich. The sandwich was fish and onions with cheddar cheese; his favorite. His clothing was drenched in sweat. 
Contrasting with the construction of the passageway above and behind him; in the area of the tunnel he presently traversed, it were as though the finishing work had never been completed, and the hole served no purpose in ornamentation, but rather in facilitating the movement of perhaps hideous creatures to and from the surface to wherever that yawning gap might have been ultimately leading him. 
He stumbled downward through the opening. By then he truly had no idea how deep he was, or how far he had gone laterally. Suddenly he wished he'd picked up the rabbi's flashlight so that he might then have more light. His maglite went dead and he fumbled in the pitch black for more batteries out of the pack. As he struggled in the darkness, he heard the faintest sound from below. It was like a will 'o wisp of some alien music. It reminded him of the earlier sound of the salvia.
In any event Yaacov wasn't too worried about light; all in all he had three sets of batteries and only one was spent. The thought of everything which had passed spooked him, not paralyzing him but instead egging him further downward.
So that was where his lifelong pursuits had led; into an encounter with a grotesque, antediluvian being; the discovery of old, apparently human skeletons in long-lost prison cells, and the revelation of further remains so hideous that the revulsion he had toward the mere thought of them was beyond words. Finally, there was that presence which had been so heavy and disorienting up near the entrance, and which had ebbed away during the intermediate part of his descent, but which was then returning, seemingly without rhyme or reason. For lack of a better description, the rough walls were haunted. The goose bumps on his flesh were testament to the strange energy which permeated the place, possibly emanating from a source outside of time and space.
The hole had actually opened up and the "ceiling" was then a good twenty feet high and the "walls" thirty feet across. There were boulders in the path and it was steeper than forty-five degrees. 
Yaacov was beginning to wonder about triggering a rock slide, but gingerly yet earnestly worked his way downward, into the ever warmer hole. It must have been a good thirty degrees celsius, a temperature nearly matching the barren landscape which was then but a distant memory - so far behind him - there on the surface where the people of his day and age concerned themselves with the mundane matters of collapsing currencies, making payments on their insipid houses and SUVs, and living in the terror that their politicians and priests would provide them with daily; terror which they themselves would welcome that they might never know any kind of real truth; this that the children might grow to share the ignorance and slave-like status of their parents. Of course ignorance is bliss so it did no one - including Yaacov - any good getting indignant at the way things might have been for the greater part of  humanity. 
Nonetheless to those who cared to pay attention, democracy was but one of many false gods. Suffice it to say that of democracy in particular, the crowd is always wrong.
Something entered the scene; something Yaacov had not anticipated. It was a return of the sound; a low but wavering sound; almost inaudible, but like some kind of pre-ancient music. There weren't individual "notes" per se but there was a strange "tune" nonetheless. Even as he continued downward for yet another thirty minutes, the hum didn't increase appreciably. Then Yaacov knew for certain that whether he were in a dream or not, he was in grave danger. And it wasn't as though the danger were so much physical as it were metaphysical. Perhaps some psychedelic from his drinks was kicking in; or maybe it was simply the psilocybin.
At that point Yaacov had an hour or two of light in the then-current battery set as he had been traversing the tunnel for close to a total of four hours. It began to dawn on Yaacov that he might never see the sunlight again, and there was an ember of real madness - an ember which might at any moment erupt into and all-consuming fire - in him because of what he'd seen to that point; the events and curiosities of within and around the passage; the malevolence emanating both from the walls and from below; the then-increasing yet indecipherable moan. Thus he was driven by the desire to find out what, if anything lie at the bottom of that tunnel - by then nothing more than that hole in the earth - everything else be damned! 
And of course it could have been said that everything "else" was indeed damned in any event. Of course there would always be suffering. The ultimate goal of entry into the cult of nine was for the initiate to at some point realize that pain was in actuality a gift from the universe to be relished by the so afflicted. Life has little to offer for already dead. Perhaps that is the true meaning of freedom.
Presently a dim light appeared down the hole in the distance. It looked to have been a couple hundred metres below. After stumbling down over the boulders and loose rocks, the faint source of light became apparent. Yaacov was then standing in a passageway, built of gargantuan stones, the seams of which indicated they were at least five metres square. The ceiling was about ten metres high and the passageway was also about ten metres across. The floor was level.

6) There is no freedom; there are only consequences. Only the inconsequential are free.
 
On the walls there were more alien glyphs, similar yet somehow uncannily different from the ones he had seen in the other finished hallway up above. The present passage was not damp like the other passageway. Instead it was dry, almost as if the floor of it were covered by a fine, ancient dust, undisturbed through the ages save for Yaacov's own two or three footprints behind him, visible in the dim rays of the flashlight and the pale green glow from the other end of the hall. 
Here there was no moss, and the smell from above had finally died out. Instead there was some kind of sweet scent coming from ahead, where the dim, emerald light shone. Could a certain type of underground mineral deposit have radiated such light?
He switched off the maglite and in the glow could see without it. There was a small stream gushing from a hole in the wall and Yaacov's senses somehow told him he could trust it for drinking. There he replenished himself. The water streamed down the wall and emptied into a hole in the floor directly below the spout, leaving no other trace of its ancient flow on that previously unexplored floor. Yaacov drank until he was again hydrated, sensing the water disperse into his body as he partook freely from the spring, itself evidence of ancient and alien plumbing techniques.
Yaacov felt strangely intoxicated but subdued, not edgy or near panic as he had been just hours before when Michael had died and he had sought out and dispatched the loathsome Cemonculus. It were as if Yaacov had partaken of opiates.
The ancient, oppressive energy seemed to emanate from the opening at the opposite end of the passageway. Somehow in his trance and in the excitement of it all, Yaacov stumbled forward with renewed vigor and fingered his pistol, all the while wondering with slightly growing trepidation what might lie ahead, after untold ages of sleep or imprisonment awaiting to at best ambush and consume human flesh. Yaacov shuddered to think of the worst that could be.
It was apparent from the slight footprints he was leaving behind him in the fine dust on the floor; that such were proof that the Cemonculus he'd seen so far up above had been stationed; perhaps in the first alcove below the tunnel opening above it; perhaps there in an eternal sleep, awaiting that fateful moment for an intruder to step just inside that antiquated opening.
With near certainty no being - human or inhuman - had in recent times crossed the presently dusty and ageless floor; or at least none had left any footprints which Yaacov could readily discern. He thought back and indeed, Michael had been the first into the hole. The attack had arrived just seconds later. So the Cemonculus had been right inside the opening up above. 
Yaacov walked the mystical gallery, for as the green glow gained slightly in illumination, he saw elaborate mosaics, depicted using stones not more than six millimetres across, covering entire walls for ten and twelve metres of their length at a time, from floor to ceiling. Elaborate pictures of undiscovered dimensions glowed in the ghoulish, greenish light. An alien, inhuman, flesh-tingling presence emanated from those presentations out of some forgotten age. Perhaps the images - the seven or eight of them that aligned the two walls - were elaborate renderings of outer worlds, left there in that outpost the way humans would send a capsule into space in order to try and make tenuous contact with some cosmic race. Perhaps those mosaics were warnings from a prehistoric, priestly order to then future and now present travelers of those antediluvian depths.
What could the light at the end of the tunnel contain; what esoteric key to the images that adorned those walls, images so bizarre that the mention of some of the scenes might have sent a human of normal social sensibilities into permanent hysteria? He would have attested that the scenes were gruesome and did indeed depict some human life, but not in the form as we currently know it. If a person thinks a human tyrant can wreak havoc upon the population and is fearful of such, that same person wouldn't want to contemplate the images on those walls, at once so foreign and terrifying in their implications. Of course in the end what human tyrant is without his unseen and inhuman accomplices?
Yaacov inched along the floor of the hall, into the pale emerald glow, into the sweet ancient smells, the creepy oppression filling the air like an invisible, suffocating smog, the low wavering dirge beckoning, playing on some pre-human percussion instrument in the depths of his being, perhaps in the primal part that lies hidden beneath the ostensibly civilized gentleman that he knew only on the surface of his self. 
Continuing along; fingering the CZ-52, flashlight tucked into his belt; Yaacov swallowed to keep from retching at the hideousness of the discovery and continued down the ancient and foreboding passageway.

5) Your freedom will cost you everything. Your slavery will cost you only your freedom.
 
At the end of the passageway, he came to an opening; an opening with a sizeable, curved archway constructed of large stones above. From the lip of the opening, on a sort of stonework patio extending out beyond the ancient archway as the hideous hieroglyphs then faded back into the tunnel; all he could see was a vast cave in that unwavering emerald light with the strangely familiar low moaning music in the background. 
No imagining of Yaacov's own had ever begun to approach what next fell before his eyes. He was standing on a patio overlooking a cavern several kilometers in depth and breadth, and several hundred metres in height. Dumbfounded, he stared into the abyss.
Yaacov stood there for an indeterminate amount of time, forgetting the violence of the hours before; intoxicated by the sweet ancient smell, the subtly changing glow of the emerald light, and the omnipresent low voice; speaking in some distant, alien tongue; perhaps itself mumbling an incantation of sorts which in any event somehow served to put him into some strange and entirely foreign mental state. 
Yaacov forgot for a moment the repulsive evidence resting amidst the darkness behind him and simply pondered the lost city which could very well have been the remains of one of those ancient abodes which were purported in some ill-reputed nameless scroll to have been built and inhabited in some bygone pre-human era by none other than perhaps Llethrotep and his minions! Which forbidden scroll had it been? 
Could Yaacov name that scroll in his mind - there and then that he had confirmed the fact of the existence of at least one such city - despite the writing's ultimate ill-repute? What of the other things described in that decrepit scroll; not the least of which being allusions to nameless points of terror in the outer reaches of existence? 
Of course, the Scroll had been related to the Necromonicon. Yaacov had later learned that it was the Esoteric Knowledge of the Nomad Manichean; the scroll that had turned up at a Turkish flea market just after the Second World War. Back in the eighties at a distinguished but nonetheless little-known university in New Delhi - between stints as a mercenary - Yaacov had done some translation work on microfiche copies of that particular scroll. 
So the rumors of vast underground cities, and the attendant inhuman legions walking, flying, and swimming - as well as haunting the dimensions sight unseen and in between - during  some antediluvian time might have been at least partially true? 
Yaacov wondered where in G-d's name such memories were coming from, for in his waking hours his life had been quite different than all of the recollections which flooded and nearly overwhelmed his mind at that moment. He was in the midst of a mental and spiritual palimpsest!
In any event the evidence was clear; there was an ancient and gigantic city on the cave floor! Again, the fear began to creep over him. What was that low, humming "dirge" which seemed to sing an eternally hypnotic yet nihilistic tune? What was the origin of that malevolence behind him emanating from the giant alien mosaics on those walls? 
Was he being watched? What kinds of beings had built that place? What alien eyes might have been watching him then? Could some god - perhaps a usurper - peer out at him through matter itself, assuming perhaps that its place of eternal imprisonment were there, "nearby?" 
Could Llethrotep have been buried in some nether region, perhaps within that very milieu? Could such a hideous being have been - at that very moment - gazing through time, matter, and space upon Yaacov as he - a solitary human sojourner from the albeit bogus material plane - at that moment prepared to invade the monster's abode in the same?
Yaacov snapped out of his trance, brought back by the same uneasy feeling that he was being watched; observed by something literally buried within the grotesque mosaics in the walls behind him as he stood perched at that opening.
Yaacov again fingered his pistol as he pondered what race of creatures could have constructed such a place, again recollecting passages from the Necromonicon.
Had it really been Llethrotep and his minions, the Nuphnareloteph? Had the legendary ancient servants of respectively ToZ and Llethrotep - the Cemonculus and Nuphnareloteph - been foot-soldiers in some ancient forgotten battle for the cosmos, created and conscripted among other things for the construction of the diabolical city below?
Had the place been built by the legendary Nephilim of yore? Was Yaacov the star who had been cast to earth; the star whose only quest was to find the key to the bottomless pit; to find the key that he might then release Abbadon from the bottomless pit that Ragnarok might then - once again - occur?
Yaacov gazed upon the ageless city, once again losing himself in the glinting reflections of apparently untouched age-old polished stonework, sparkling up at him from below in rich colors as if to indicate the movement of some half-visible entity about the floor of the fantastic fortress there beneath him.
Again regaining his concentration Yaacov glanced left and right, and to the former there was a gradually descending stairway carved out of the apparent granite wall, winding down and around the edge of the cavern. He could see it following the wall of the cavern; down, down, around the periphery of the city, until it curved around and fell out of sight behind some ancient spires below.
The decrepit staircase, still upright after apparent aeons of disuse, looked to him to be the only practical entrance route to the city; the stairs themselves being only a metre or thereabouts in width, and littered with rocks which might cause his boot-clad feet to falter on the fairly well preserved and otherwise surprisingly smooth stonework, which itself was glyphed in some apparently ancient numerals, perhaps measuring height from the floor of the cavern; or perhaps the actual number of stairs. As he counted them on the way down, every ninth stair appeared to have been marked in such a manner. As he descended, he remembered that in some circles of satanism (mercyful fate), nine had been the number of lucifer.
Parts of the stairway were completely worn or broken away. As he leapt across the gaps in the - by definition of its very existence - antediluvian monument to some inhuman race, Yaacov wondered if he were indeed approaching true insanity.
It was a dream that he could not awaken from, and that something - invisible yet irresistible - was a constant; pushing him downward; ever downward, to the mystery of the city floor. Some of the gaps; for all their narrowness were dozens of metres in depth; so the consequences of missing such a jump would have been certain "death," but fortunately for Yaacov there were only a couple of those very deep gaps, and they were invariably amongst the narrow ones, and were thus relatively easy to cross. Perhaps those deep but narrow fissures were evidence of prior earthquake activity.
The primeval music waxed subtly in the background and in his descent the oppressive presence from the tunnel faded. He wondered if his thoughts were his own (as though such had always or even once ever actually been the case), or if the events, the smells, the sounds, the sights of that "expedition" had caused his then apparent fever; his meandering madness. He stopped and smoked another bowl of salvia; sitting there on the steps; the music became a part of him and the center of the valley below a mass of swirling tentacles; all of it - the sound as well as the sights - with its basis somewhere between light and shadow. After a few minutes Yaacov could and did continue. 
He laughed for a moment as he wondered where salvia might take him since he was "already there." Certainly the snakes were emanating from within him.
The heat had probably reached about thirty-five degrees Celsius, and the humidity was moderate. In any event Yaacov wasn't acclimated and the heat - along with the slight humidity - served to make his descent all the more miserable, yet the awe of the very discovery of the city itself had since dispelled any of his fearful, hopeless, or complaining mental attributes; with the thankfully waning presence which appeared at that point to have been emanating from its apex about hideous drawings on the walls of the passageway, by then several hundred metres above and behind him.
Indeed, Yaacov's entire being was suddenly alight with the excitement of the discovery - as though it had once again first dawned on him - of that unfathomable city with its equally incomprehensible architecture. The towers and spires looked so impossible; so outside the realm of any human engineering; with their hundreds of feet in height and shapes which should not have been standing by any measure of human science. He was intoxicated by something he could not describe; something just outside of his sense of reason; something beyond any psychedelic he had ever known. Perhaps it was samadhi or even kundalini; at the very least it was his own namaste.
Over ages past, how many other human travelers had reached that point? What kind of incredible secret might have been waiting to be unearthed in one's ultimately reaching the floor of the city? What age-defying watchmen were then standing guard over such vast and unspeakable mysteries? What ancient tomes might lie beneath the stonework in the remains of some forgotten alien terrace, tucked into a corner or jutting from a tower dozens of metres in the air from the floor of the cavern? Would there be decipherable etchings on the walls of some decrepit place of worship left over from pre-human hystory? Had any human previously ever seen the place, or was Yaacov indeed, "the chosen one" - at least in that regard?
Indeed, who of humanity could have possibly known of that fantastic milieu, but perhaps for the shamans of centuries past who might have once visited the place? Conceiving that it had indeed once been traversed by humanity, had the place by the same token swallowed every soul who'd ever dared enter it? Whatever the case might ultimately have been, Yaacov continued downward across the antediluvian staircase.
Yaacov reached the bottom, and despite his jubilance at having stepped into "the home of the gods" he was nearly exhausted, his canteen almost empty and his strawberry smoothie gone. The trip down the staircase had taken him over an hour and he figured that he'd crossed two or three kilometers in that final descent.
The dirge was a bit louder; just enough to - like a drug - further hypnotize while somehow magnifying all of his thoughts and sensations. Nothing moved but he was better able to observe the structures, dizzying in their very stature. The stairs had ended in a dirt area, away from edge of the city by perhaps fifty metres. 
The outer area of the cave floor was comprised of boulders, rocks, and dirt, but without hills. Inside of that outer ring of geological debris was the city proper, itself rising from a smooth, flat stone floor. The stonework and the unfinished area shared an abrupt border, and from where he was standing, that appeared to have been the case for as far as he could see, around the edge of the cave floor. He walked across the open ground; approaching, then stepping upon those ancient inhuman stones.
He was finally on the floor of the valley and standing like a dwarf amidst the ruins of some gigantic and extinct alien race. Large creatures the size of the Cemonculus and other remains he'd witnessed above him could have easily lived there with little difficulty. Yes, a humanoid two-and-a-half to three metres in height could have navigated those depths with ease. Like the entire staircase twisting lazily around the cavern wall, all of the steps chiseled into the various shapes, sizes, and colors of the stone buildings were large; sized for beings of such stature.
The stonework was better than most any product of engineering he'd ever before inspected; even from the memories of his prior personal inspections of the structures all over the world; Machu Picu; the Taj Mahal; Angor Wat; and Cheops to name several. More than any of those so-called wonders of the world ostensibly above him, the stones comprising the structures of the forbidden city showed tighter fit, smoother finish. To further feed his incredulity, some of the stones were enormous. There was one stone at the base of a spire perhaps two-hundred and fifty metres in height. The single stone at the base was a shiny green, almost like some foreign rock or mineral he was not familiar with; but it could have been dark emerald or jade. Upon his circling it whilst in a state of utter and complete awe, the single block of stone had appeared to have been fifteen metres in height, and about seventy-two metres square about its base; roughly eighteen metres per side. Where could such a colossal, monolithic piece of stone have been obtained, and what had been the method of transport into that forgotten nether region? What inhuman, suffocating, crushing - yet at the same time incredibly exacting - force could have had the power to have built that city, let alone the fabrication of that very stone?! 
Twice Yaacov circled the stone, inspecting it for gaps indicating the presence of more than one rock in its construction. There were no cracks. Even through the ages the surface of the foundation appeared shiny and smooth, all the way around its gargantuan dimensions. He found an archway, made of maroon stones which contrasted nicely with the hues of the major stone. Walking through into a large hollow room; one with no staircase, but a ceiling built onto the base and reaching perhaps a hundred metres toward its pyramid-shaped inner apex; he furthered admired the construction. As if that weren't enough, on the floor - composed of the same sort of emerald-like material as outer shell of the structure - were mosaic patterns much like he'd seen so far above in the passageway at the entrance to the city. These patterns were however without any trace of the hideous projections of that maddening, revolting energy he'd found up above.
Nonetheless, there in that room, what dark rituals had once taken place on those still ominous hieroglyphic floors, in ages visible only to Thoth-Yagog, in Its infinite all-seeing state from the center of creation, fanning ultimate chaos in a tangent of an attempt at stabilizing the universe? 
Yaacov sat, rolled and then smoked a cigarette. Somehow it satiated him as he sat within that extraterrestrial lobby and pondered. Soon he left and was back out amongst the thoroughfares.
Of that forgotten city; of what did it have - if anything - to do with Thoth-Yagog of yore?
Back out on the "street," the fairly open air was a sort of relief. Once again he was taken aback by the numerous spires chiseled out of various rocks and minerals; some pointing multiple hundreds of metres into the seemingly still, enclosed space; monoliths adorned with glistening alien designs; patterns out of inlaid mosaics of otherworldly glass, stone, or ceramics. The next nearest spire rose from a base which itself was probably forty metres across. That particular spire appeared to have been something like limestone and the base was circular and the spire itself was a vast cone. He found an opening; and inside there was a staircase, presumably running around and around to the top of the spire above. The stairs were about six decimeters in height and depth. Certainly some race of giants had once haunted the place.
In his ever-increasing exhaustion, even the exuberance over the monumental discovery could not override Yaacov's ancient and predictable built-in needs; the increasing hunger and then-rabid thirst. He opened the pack and finished his water, and ate the other sandwich - this time peanut butter and jelly - and consumed a cookie and a bag of potato chips. For a few minutes he rolled another cigarette and smoked. Two cigarettes so closely together was unusual for him; perhaps it was indicative of his own level of anxiety.
After finishing the smoke and re-shouldering the pack, the distant sound of running water cut through the continuing low moan in the background. Yaacov ran toward it, through oversized walkways underneath impeccable archways and past buildings whose at once alien and inexplicable stone architectures were like something almost as though out of Lovecraft.
He could see it then; a fountain with a pool. He ran toward it and took off his boots and socks. The walls to the pool stood about one and a half metres off of the ground, and the pool was a good twenty-five metres in diameter, and its walls were built out of some maroon-tinted rock, perhaps a form of "dark quartz." He laid down all of his gear; pack, boots, clothes, maglite, holstered CZ-52, the chain with its marks of cain, and his watch.
Climbing to the edge of the pool, he dove in. From what he could tell it was simply fresh water. Yaacov drank as he swam, wondering if the water sprang from some source below which had fed that oasis since its own inception at the appendages of those ancient inhuman minions. In any event, at no time in his life had water been so refreshing.
The pool - with its moderate outside walls - appeared within to have been quite deep. As an experiment he had plunged downward to try and find the bottom. As clear as the water was, in the fairly dim light Yaacov couldn't see it. 
A pipe of some odd construction ran up through the middle of the water and provided the source for the eternal fountain. He could not speculate the exact nature or origin of the eldritch plumbing artifact.
As it was, Yaacov could only ponder the unseen depths below, and he wondered what water-breathing creature might lurk in those hoary shadows, awaiting down through the ages like an alien sentry for some sort of awakening; a kind of alarm or signal from an inhuman force to the then-hidden minions of the seemingly bottomless pool; the proverbial secret tripwire which might awaken the denizens and have them pouring forth from the archaic, watery orifice. 
Of course it was only a daydream; yet upon reflection the Cemonculus he had slain hours before could have ultimately come from that very fountain during some ancient, decadent, era; so his nearly idle speculation may not have been particularly far off. 
He left the water; not at all out of fright, but rather refreshed; once again thirst-quenched, and clean; at least outwardly clean in any event. He put the dirty, dusty, sweaty clothes back on, along with his holster. Opening the pack, he refilled the two bottles with water from the pool. Then he re-shouldered the pack and picked up the flashlight and wrapped the watch back about his wrist, then pocketing the chain with the stars of solomon, rather than wearing it about his neck. The watch had since stopped but somehow that didn't matter; as though it were a reminder of the world of the mundane - a world which Yaacov might then never return to or of which perhaps he had never been a part of - which seemed to steel his own resolve.
His hunger fairly satiated by the food consumed just awhile before, Yaacov was ready to continue his quest. His logical mind wanted to leave to the place from whence he'd arrived, but again just as "something unseen" had literally coerced  him down the passageway from above, that same "something" was pressing him to stay within the city. 
He wondered then what immemorial feasts had been thrown in that place and what kinds of players had played all of their games? What kinds of fools had provided amusement? Would an inhuman race laugh at anything, or would it simply demand the right to dominate, to expand such dominion, to increase its holdings, to increase its profits, to use lesser beings as slaves and even as a possible source of food? Were such things, in and of themselves beyond the worry of the members of such an alien race? Perhaps the unicameral mind cannot fathom them.
Even though Yaacov was temporarily without physical hunger, he was thinking ahead and he wondered if there might have been any source of sustenance there. He had found the pool. What if he were to find an ancient orchard or vineyard, still producing bizarre fruit beneath that emerald glow? Perhaps he would never have to awaken from that dream. Perhaps he had indeed found his, "home."
He had seen plenty of stone, and with the discovery of the pool, water. Beyond the green light there'd been nothing but stone, hieroglyphs, and then water, and the droning low wailing in the background; there with its mesmerizing tones, hovering over the city like an ancient, regulating dirge. 
Whatever "civilization" it had been, the only traces were those fantastic buildings and various other structures, but nary a piece of fabric, of metalwork, or woodwork had he spied, save for the petrified doors about certain structures. Yet he hadn't toured the entire city; he had not investigated the interior of every building; and he had not traced his way around the outer edges of the place. Perhaps indeed there might have been some source of human sustenance there. However if there were not, perhaps that would have meant something.
In any event Yaacov began again to wonder; what connection - if any - did the city have to the Sphere itself? Certainly he had seen and killed that lone Cemonculus, and that had been some connection. Nonetheless, where would an object like the Sphere have been kept? He had always imagined that the Sphere would reside near the - for lack of a better word - "prison" of one of the usurpers.
Mankind holds the key to his own creation. He also holds the keys to the destruction. Thus the snake is destined to eat its own tail.
 Simian-like pets humanity might once have been, yet deep in their construction were rumored to have been the keys to all mysteries; the wonders and horrors, not only of this world and its cosmic venue, but of untold countless worlds across the vast reaches of the seemingly unending universe in its entirety. Conscious knowledge of such secrets would drive the man of normal sensibilities utterly mad; thus the hiding of the keys within the human subconsciousness.
Certainly humanity had in any event been an interesting prospect. And as well the chance of an overmind preeminent diminishes with the passing of time from the end of one kalpa to the to the beginning of the next.
Nonetheless, curious non-linear allusions to YHVH as the creator of our physical world were found in more than one ancient text or tablet. Similarly, scrolls of unknown origin have described an entity whose name had a similar spelling and pronunciation - albeit in various languages - as having created as well the many creatures inhabiting the planet, which itself admittedly amounts to nothing more than an illusion upon another illusion; a series of chemicals and waves. 
And our science is but new lies for old while our religion is always the same old lies. In any event as the age of "original sin" had passed, Yaacov had come from the era of "eternal indebtedness." To say which of the two ideas foments the greater human tyrrany; well that is a question for all time.
In any event a myriad of ancient, unrelated, hidden and nameless texts tell of the ageless power of the YHVH, and modern science has only served to befuddle - whilst pretending to illuminate - the wicked; for to the scientific humanist it is inconceivable that any self-respecting god could possibly be capable of violence. Really the whole mental deficiency of those who believe in a peaceful utopia is the simple fact that suffering is at the center of everything. Only adventist damnation - unconsciousness - can override this suffering; and such damnation is really but motionlessness. So the choice is really between suffering and unconscioussness. There is nothing else.
In any event monotheism had always been a powerful driving force in the current model of bipeds. It is certainly reassuring that an irresistible force might be on one's side; on the side of someone not so certain of themselves or anything else, but with existence rooted in the simple belief in an all-encompassing being. Certainly, like almost anything else monotheism does require the embracing of paradox; but such unpleasant paradox indeed; at least that had always been the case with Yaacov's idea of quistianity.
In the end the fool can agree with the wise man - and the illiterate with the man of degrees - that it is only faith which moves mountains. Verily, a thing truly believed cannot be a lie. This is the basis of everything here in the lesser world; here in the world of ultimate illusion; here in the world where suffering is the honest truth. Perception is reality.
And those who fear death continue to live; and those who fear not death are already gone; and the snake will eat its own tail; over and over again. Of course sometimes the greatest faith is met with the most bitter disappointment, and the fullest skepticism or even outright blasphemy given the sweetest reward. The principles of suffering are beauty and terror; and for these motion is always required.
So many wish only to be taken care of, or perhaps along the same lines, to be reassured. Such only causes one to lose sight of the Process. Embracing the chaos is then the mark of acceptance.
Some say god loves only the well to do. Yet wealth is in many ways but a curse. Only those who know can understand this. Perhaps the most incredible waste of time is to sit around lamenting one's position in life, for fate is fickle yet not without its own peculiar sense of humor. If one looks carefully around, one can see that god really loves no one.
Some see the natural order in the pyramids. These selfsame blasphemers postulate there is a purpose in the pyramid's design; a guidepost of sorts for the ordering of a proper human society or civilization. Who could argue with any of this, for the world is like a pyramid. The little people will (gladly) pay. The sheep will (gladly) be fleeced. The real struggle has been, is now, and will always be; between parents and children.
In truth, to look too deeply into the actual goings on is to be driven mad, or at the very least be turned into an idiot - or literally someone who is anti-social. The only answer one can ultimately give the universe is a hearty laugh. Perhaps humanity was only first doomed when it traded the Chemical Christiana for the prohibitionist quist.
Yaacov's day and age marked the end of human liberty; if indeed such had ever existed beyond the words of a philosopher or politician. Of course that was perfectly normal, for there is no freedom; there are instead only consequences.
Nonetheless in Yaacov's day the stifling of reason was well underway. As part of a particular series of waves or chemical reactions, the zeitgeist of his era was compelling unreason; and this is always the case just before the next kalpa; just as the snake is once again eating its own tail. The only consistency thus being that everything is inconsistent.
The state would demand the lives of all it had ensnared; and it had by Yaacov's day and age cast its net far and wide. If a person weren't starving from birth they were probably instead living some kind of empty, feigned existence. Freedom would cost everything; slavery would cost only freedom; and most people - democrats all - would prefer the latter.
Some say the Luciferian societies had won out. Indeed, the minions of nameless forgotten and sinister tribal gods are said to still wander the earth to this day, carrying out their dark traditions in the wee hours of the night, and such plotters may even sit on PTA boards, city councils, in the halls of parliaments and congresses throughout the world; especially in the hallowed halls of academia, Hollywood, and Wall Street do the dark servants of unspeakable ancient powers supposedly spend their daytime hours. Of course quistianity - especially its catholic derivative - was often the biggest luciferian cult of all.
The cult of nine was different from all of those others in at least one respect; for if nothing else it was utterly anti-democratic; and "democracy" was the mantra of the Satanic cults in their dissemination of ideals to the overall population. It had reached the point where quistendom itself had become plagued by the very idea of "majority rule." They had forgotten their own quist and had taken up worship of the state of democracy, somehow having been convinced along the way that such were one in the same. Of course after having read their book, who could blame them; for in the final analysis the bible condones human slavery.
Yaacov was happy to have discarded quistianity; or at the very least willing to accept if he'd ultimately been mistaken. The main thing was that Yaacov didn't like the idea of a quist - any quist other than Wodhanaz; and with that there was no way he could ever in good conscience attend church again. At least he was left with his knowledge of the chaos spiral.
In any event how can one have quistianity without also having satanism? Where would one be without the other? It was best for the powers that be to muddy the waters and make them one in the same through the holy mantra of democracy. And the crowd is always wrong. 
Certainly, regardless of authorship the protocols of the elders of zion had been enlightening. Of course things were not turning out exactly as planned in that screed. Regardless of that, In Yaacov's time it was as in the days of Shamgar, son of Anat: All high roads had been forsaken. 
It was the kalpa. It was time for the YHVH to introduce yet another new model; time for the twilight of the gods; Ragnarok. Only egos could not understand any of that.
Where was IT? Was there perhaps a temple there somewhere? Was there a place where the minions of some ancient unspeakable gods - perhaps the very usurpers - had in the days of human prehystory carried out fantastic and callous rituals, with humans as ostensibly innocent sacrifices, and living, breathing, gargoyles in attendance? What might the appearance of such a temple structure have been? Perhaps it would be an ominous and silent cavern, sitting there empty amidst the towers, stadium-like in its appearance, filled with eerie glyphs from some extraterrestrial race dead since aeons long past, the unspeakable monolith thus sitting silent save for the low wavering moan in the background; the moan itself running as if from some timeless extraterrestrial machine, meant to sing the praises of some hideous and nameless, sadistic alien god throughout the vast reaches of forever. 
Perhaps there would be an altar, once bloodstained by those same human sacrifices, themselves brought unwillingly from their simple hunting and gathering existence to die there - thousands of meters below the surface; shedding their mortal coils at the hands of nightmarish ghouls who in those distant, misted aeons had inhabited that once bustling, inhuman underworld.
Once again Yaacov began wandering the empty streets, speculating anew as to which untold relics might lie in small dank rooms behind ancient sealed doors. What scrolls might rest there in some unbroken jars, detailing prehistoric events, recorded in alien symbols, awaiting the discovery of some "lucky" archeologist, and what beast would sit eternally vigilant over such treasures, just as the Cemonculus apparently had over the opening those seemingly unfathomable kilometers above? Yaacov continued to wander the avenues.
Certain color schemes and hieroglyphs somehow forcibly averted his gaze. Near wretching he would wander aimlessly and as he did his strength would wax again. Then he with newfound determination he would stalk the thoroughfares. He laughed as he thought there was a noticeable absence of pastels under the green glowing light of the ungodly, phosphorescent canopy.
Nestled amongst what had at first appeared to have been a large percentage of looming towers, there were - in some of the shadowy areas back toward the far wall of the cave - low-lying buildings which squatted along the "sidewalks" in almost every conceivable shape; circular, pentagonal, square, hexagonal, triangular, yet all of them sharing the same unintelligible hieroglyphs and ornamentation as the larger structures first visible from the opening so far above; again all of them also asleep after unknown passages of time; sitting there without blinking as his human visage approached them along the open avenues. Somehow his revulsion at certain symbols and color schemes ebbed, and he was able to scan everything about the place without detriment.  He was fairly stoked.
In one "residential area," - somehow pedestrian with its low-lying architectures - there was one large structure, standing out in contrast to the others. It wasn't simply that it was the largest structure in that low-lying area of the city of ancient giants. Rather, while most of those buildings were remarkably intact - a testament to both their isolated and protected locale and the quality of their original construction - this particular building was in a state of decay not exhibited by any of the other structures of the city. At some point its ceiling and roof had apparently collapsed.
As he approached that large structure - with what he spied as a single large room perhaps a hundred metres in length and fifty metres in breadth - underneath the rubble wreckage from the collapsed ceiling were the remains of stone benches. The wreckage from the roof had also spilled over onto the streets outside of the place. There Yaacov identified chunks of stone and petrified wood, showing that the "cathedral" had not necessarily "imploded" but instead might have "exploded," sending excess debris into the surrounding streets.

4) Religion is always the same old lies.  Science is but new lies for old.

Yaacov wandered to the inside of the wrecked building. Once inside the structure, he was amazed to see a large pentagonal bas-relief on the far wall, behind where the "pulpit" appeared to be. It was a five-pointed star!  
Suddenly he was on the surface of a planet. He was ostensibly in the desert, but he could not tell whether it were Sedona, AZ, or Cydonia on Mars. There was a city in the distance, but his attention was immediately riveted upon the twilight skies above him, for once again - as in so many of the dreams he'd had throughout his life - the alien craft were there. Such craft were shaped like large, four-sided diamonds. They must have been literally hundreds of metres from "bow to stern," with the widest point being about two thirds of the way toward the "stern." They were "here" at last!
Again, just as suddenly as he had been transported away, Yaacov was back within the "temple" in the city, and pondering the structure about him; in particular the pentagram on the wall.
Unnamed tomes through time immemorial have written of the pentagram, its properties, and its rumored connection with certain dark and unseen forces; forces brought forth by covens of black magicians whilst chanting insane dirges out of lost pagan tablets on nights falling far less often than even once in a blue moon. 
Of the pentagram; what are the properties of this strangely natural symbol, with arguably one point on it for "each" appendage common to all humans; a head, two arms, and two legs? In any event several corroborating texts have mentioned the pentagram as being the "human" symbol, but in the context in which Yaacov was seeing it at that very moment, something unearthly and inhuman was certainly "hovering" like an ancient oppressor in the air around that bas-relief as the low moaning continued to permeate the air about him, all of it giving him severe doubts about the credibility of the pentagram as a "human symbol." On the other hand, "They" had built the pentagon; the Chinese, Russians, and Americans had all used it in some capacity or another; every heavy metal or industrial band had probably tinkered with it, and every witch and warlock haunting the new age bookstores was probably also intimately familiar with it. 
What of the five-pointed star? What of the "elder sign," that "thin thread" by which certain isolated and decadent New England communities had hanged from, in throughout the centuries warding off unnamed and alien age-old monsters? 
Regardless of any of that, Yaacov remembered his own star; the six-pointed star of Solomon - the Sign of Cain. Yaacov could not then quite fathom the pentagram. It were as though the universe were split into but two significant factions, and he was of the one opposite the other. 
He looked past the bizarre, familiar yet disturbing symbol, and walked out onto the sloped floor of "the cathedral." 
That was it! That was the cathedral he had wondered about in the daydream only - what was it? - a few days before. 
What sort of freakish events had gone on there, in the starless silent eternal emerald twilight of the forbidden underground city, in ages long past; ages forgotten by the ignorant humanity above, save for the asocial scholars spending their days searching through musty tomes in the dark storage rooms of the world's private libraries and museums, revealing the esoteric evidence of the existence of such mysteries, yet only to themselves?
Like everything else in the city, the benches were oversized; perhaps fifteen decimeters high and a metre wide on top, without backs. Each bench appeared to have several, unique symbols along its top, apparently seat markings as in today's human monoliths; the domed stadiums with the bench seats and the tiny numbers on them. The major difference was one of scale; the unique markings on the tops of the benches occurred every fifteen decimeters or so.
What eldritch sport had perhaps been played out in that gathering place; what fundraising function had flourished; what dispute debated; there in that decrepit room where the ceiling was then open to the glowing green of the cave ceiling, and boulders lay in disorder about the ancient floor, leaving crushed bench sections and pock-marked glyphs on the once-smooth surfaces? 
What sounds had the creatures emitted, and what was the purpose of the eternal low dirge coming out of that hidden spot, somewhere from within elsewhere about the city? What words or phrases had the creatures spoken, and what had been their plans? Were they simply another part of a going concern, with vested interests; a concern bent on destroying all opposition in order to further its aims? What was the level of their depravity, or indeed do winners write the hystory books? Why are certain surviving nameless tomes so circumspect in describing those ancient beings? What bizarre black secrets hovered over their past? In particular, which secrets so threaten the existence of humanity that all known references to them were without exception couched in strange twisted symbolism any time the subject were broached, even within esoteric academic, political, or religious circles? Certainly - and especially in so-called "modern times" - every attempt had been made to keep the "little" people from knowing anything of them. Yet even to the so-called moron the clues were always everywhere.
Directly in front of the "back" wall with its looming pentagram pattern, there was a stone "table" or "altar" on a raised platform or stage. Amid the dust and rocks littering the gently sloped floor and the alien benches standing in silence save for that background dirge, Yaacov crossed the "sanctuary."
Haltingly he semi-ciphered the glyphs on the benches; at least where they'd not been completely marred by the apparent "collapse" of the ceiling; glyphs even at that moment seemingly alive, emanating some strange, inexplicably suffocating energy which filled that formerly ceilinged room - then instead like an open-air arena - with a foreboding, unfamiliar tension. 
Once past the last (front) row of benches, Yaacov reached the platform on the far end, and stepped onto a level, flat floor. Between that row of benches - the last row he had passed - and the platform, there were a good ten metres of bare, flat floor, cluttered only by the silent stones sitting in various odd positions, left by their respective falls from the apparently once poorly-designed, nonetheless then-collapsed ceiling. He leapt up onto the metre-high stage or platform, and studied the "pulpit" with its further bizarre ancient occultic inlaid symbols, and almost thought they looked like some glyphs he had seen an ancient Khazakian tablet, itself rumored to have been discovered in the Pripyet marshes near Kiev. 
The pulpit and the "altar" were both chiseled from black and white granite; in contrast to the rest of the structure, which appeared to have been made of highly cut and polished large (fifteen decimeter cubed) gray stones. The walls were probably thirty metres in height and uneven at the top due to the aforementioned destruction of the ceiling, perhaps itself due to a subterranean earthquake, or perhaps a sort of "lightning bolt" cast in that abyss against the roof of the building by some angry forgotten god, in the days where inhumanity had actually sat upon those benches, perhaps gathered within that hall, and haunted the ponderous thoroughfares of the city outside.
One would have to have seen the place to have truly shared Yaacov's awe at his own - however temporary - haunting within that titanic monstrosity, another monument to ghastly pre-human inhabitants perhaps that very moment awaiting their re-awakening and renewed despotic dominion over the creatures of the world above. Of course it weren't as if the creatures above had ever in any real way possessed any liberty to begin with; well at least not since "god" had long since cursed them. After that, life had become a series of chances, but never choices.
Nonetheless Yaacov then sensed that the very act of entering the place - making his way over decrepit littered benches, realizing that the structure walls were at least fifteen decimeters of solid ancient stone in thickness - had given him some kind of insight into the way those inhuman, still nameless creatures had once thrived; as though regardless of his own will that living, breathing presence which permeated the room were making him a part of itself, even as the low moaning dirge from some forgotten corner of the city was calling him into still other ancient hypnotic states, promising liberating intoxication if only he would give in to the bygone and nefarious machinations behind its sound. The invisible presence in that apparently once-hallowed hall - even with the open, fallen ceiling; unseen yet spine-tingling - combined with the dirge from outside and the still faint "pushing and pulling" of the ominous, vague pressures emanating from the mosaics at the entrance hundreds of metres above; all of it combined to put him into an supernatural, bicameral state of being, his sanity hanging by a narrow thread in connection with what then lingered of his remaining human consciousness. It were as if all of the inhuman, alien energies of that forgotten fortress were conspiring to make him "one" with them, to put him into a trance-like state without volition; as if some alien and forbidden force were calling him into an involuntary, extraterrestrial servitude.  
In any event Yaacov fingered his pistol as he inched across the raised area, toward the altar that sat there. Yes, even with the overwhelming antique machinations of unseen and unmeasured ancient powers, he managed to keep his wits about him to at least a degree that he could continue to observe and explore without otherwise completely losing himself. He did sense though that, if he were to retain his sanity - indeed his very, albeit tortured humanity - that he must momentarily exit the remains of that structure; as if that very thread to his own consciousness were being irretrievably unraveled then and there by those same immeasurable alien currents. The only way to truly regain his unicameral mind would be to leave that accursed place.
On the altar there were blood stains! Yes, even after aeons the blood had not disappeared. It was crusty and dark, almost black but certainly slightly crimson; they well could have been the stains of human blood. Again he began to see fantastic visions of Cemonculii like the horror he had encountered what had seemed like so many hours before; hundreds of individual Cemonculus sitting there on those benches and spouting barbarous alien obscenities as part of their blasphemous religion, rapt in their attention to the otherworldy pagan priests on the platform, themselves with daggers raised over wriggling, restrained humans, perhaps naturally innocent in their prehistoric bicameral minds. Whispering in his ear, he could almost detect an audible alien chant, and at that moment was loathe to turn and look back at the benches out of fear of what he might see; perhaps through some hidden magic an intact place of worship inhabited by literally hundreds of the dreaded servants of ToZ. What strange force was giving him those feverish hallucinations of otherwise unrecorded ceremonies?  He dared not turn and look at the benches for fear that his premonition might be true. Instead he gathered what few wits he had left about him and studied further, the ancient and caked altar. 
Despite his immediate misgivings, he picked a bit of dried blood off of the altar. There was no way of telling for certain whether it were human but there was a chill in his spine; a chill beyond the unseen pressure which filled the ancient crumbling cavernous structure itself, and somehow he flashed back to the hideous skeletal remains he had encountered in the alcoves off of the passageway on the journey down; remains of some upright creatures but with features utterly foreign to earthly life. 
His mind returning to his immediate surroundings, Yaacov turned slightly and viewed the side walls of the large, raised alcove where the pulpit and the altar had been built. On the side wall of that "stage," there was a bas-relief, and it had to have been an image of one of those creatures whose ghastly skeletal remains he had stumbled across in the passageway up above. It had to have been one of those creatures, only the bas-relief rendition was of such in the flesh and it was staring - as if it were alive - directly at Yaacov. Upon his first glance upon the thing, for a moment his heart must have surely stopped. It had to have been an image of one of the Nuphnareloteph, servants of Llethrotep. The creature depicted in the bas-relief was loathsome in any event. A part of him had to laugh. It may have simply been an inkling of ultimate insanity; that which goes beyond being a blasphemer or outcast.
It stood; not completely upright, but slightly hunched over, with arms and legs like a human, but with a tail which pointed like a wide arrowhead and horns on its head. It had the red-orange appearance of a salamander. In one of its long bony hands it carried a spear and in the other it carried some kind of amulet. Its nose was large with flared nostrils, and the mouth had a couple of large visible canine teeth.  The eyes were red with green in the irii. There was almost a physical sensation of something creeping up his back, behind his left shoulder. It was a chill, but it was deeper than any he had experienced simply reading about that sort of thing. It was the same chill he had gotten when once viewing a particularly well-made horror film at the theatre; that same chill which had then followed him for months thereafter.
At that moment, for some reason he had serious doubts about his sanity, and doubts of whether he would ever awaken from that dream without first "dying." The invisible rancorous presence of that ancient, crumbling hall up above continued to push him into an apparently extraterrestrial madness, and the hideous visage on the bas-relief stared back at him and seemed to plumb the depths of his soul - even in the picture's inherent lifelessness - through the eyes of an age-old depiction of a cruel, torturing minion of the one known only in musty, circumspect tomes as Llethrotep. Indeed, those supposedly lifeless eyes were simply not that, and he proved it to himself by jumping up upon the ancient, blood-stained altar and hopping to and fro about its approximately four-metre length, watching the very eyes of the forbidden bas-relief follow him as he moved. Yaacov wasn't sure what other unsavory properties the bas-relief might contain, and decided to leave the area posthaste as the at once unique yet stifling immediately local energy was becoming too much for his unraveling sense of self.
Without examining the opposite wall, he jumped first from the altar, then from the raised stage upon which the altar and pulpit sat, not bothering for a second to glance back at the terrifying image of an apparent Nuphnareloteph; a Nuphnareloteph by imperfect memories of dusty Tramanglian manuscripts he had once translated in a forgotten library in a lazy, little-traveled section of old Baghdad. He streaked past the benches, over the boulders, further disturbing the ancient dust in bounding across the sloped floor, up to the entrance from whence he'd arrived. Even then he didn't turn to glance upon the symbols in that place, the portentous five-pointed star at the very back of the raised stage, and the probable Nuphnareloteph whose visage he would've barely seen in any event from that awkward angle at the arched opening, had he never first bothered to have entered and examined that accursed place in detail.

3) Just because something is written does not make it so; quite the contrary.

Again out in the open and upon the alien walkways, Yaacov picked his way through the boulders and into the clear; onto the thoroughfares astride the other buildings, none of which were in any kind of decrepit state even approaching that of the stifling cathedral he had just exited. 
As he walked briskly away from the hall with its secrets mainly yet kept to itself, by chance he glanced up at one of the spires elsewhere in the city. The spire he spied was not the largest, but it was one of the most unique. From where he stood on the floor, the tower had what appeared to have been that aforementioned lattice work in its abundantly-sized windows. 
The lattice work of course had been common to many of the other structures there, but the really odd thing about that particular tower was a strange, blinking whitish glow from the top of it. It were as if - at its apex - something or someone were alive. The blinking was not extreme, but more of a pulse which seemed to go at about the rhythm of someone breathing. IT would shine bright white yet not pierce his eyes, then would fade over several moments to a dull grey and then complete blackness, oscillating back around again until IT was bright white.
He hastened to walk toward the tower, sometimes losing sight of it behind other, larger structures, but continuing to zig-zag across ancient, empty courtyards and through the silent streets save for that continuously wavering, humming hypnotic sound. 
The low moaning was seemingly cosmic in implication, never creating a truly uneasy sense, but rather persuasively mesmerizing in its effect. Unlike the oppressive and spiteful energies of the mosaics in the passageway above, or the strange, sinking, stifling energy of the cathedral, the low moaning dirge was more than anything else, simply haunting. It was almost as if it weren't inhuman after all, but rather it was tapping some overlooked root in his genetic memories; some disposition or predilection unbeknownst to Yaacov, but shaded in that wintry human past of which so little is known, outside of the hearsay of the nameless and neglected tomes, tablets, scripts, and scrolls of long-forgotten prehistoric sages from the ages of yore; the bicameral mind. 
At that very moment, in his state he wasn't consciously aware of the hypnotic aspect of the "music," but it was indeed having its effect upon him. In retrospect, at that point he was not entirely in control of his own body. It were almost as if that same invisible compulsion was pulling him toward that haunting light in the tower, singled out amidst the larger, more elaborate structures in that forsaken cavern, stark in its oscillating mystical light in the shaded emerald shadows of greater, more fantastic monoliths.
He reached the base of that otherwise innocuous tower and found an entryway; a large gilded archway leading into a lower chamber; the gold a reminder of some ancient and pitiless splendor. As he fingered his pistol, Yaacov passed through the archway and once inside, checked every nook and cranny of the forgotten foyer. Suddenly the thought seized him; what if he weren't within a lucid dream, but all of the newfound memories of the preceding hours were truly of his own life, and they were resurfacing in the way an amnesiac might recover them; by recreating the milieu of an original disaster? Mentally it was nearly too much to bear. He fought free of the inexplicably conflicting memories, and somehow emptied his mind completely, as if he were then in some sort of sorcerer's trance.
The ever-present glyphs adorned the walls and the floor, alight in some of those eerie alien colors which had earlier spooked him so. He sauntered about in the incredibly-aged space, noticing nary a loose stone about the shiny alien floor. In contrast to the shambles inside of what had been that terrible temple on the other side of the lost city, the floor of this tower was wholly preserved, as if it were under some hoary, saving incantation, protected still by a spell cast, once in the unremembered past by bizarre alien mutterings which had to that moment held the structure pristine, as if it were some beacon out of a misty, forgotten pre-human era; as if it were a mechanism, sitting otherwise idle with the pulsing light atop it, awaiting the day where some unwary soul such as he might discover some hidden switch somewhere within those walls and re-activate whatever arcane machinery may have been hidden there in the foyer, or at the top of the steps near the light on the roof.
After inspecting the floor of the building, he stepped outside into the avenue again, and turned and looked at the outer walls of the spire. Indeed, other surface areas of those steep, smooth outer walls were as flawless as the interior had been. Even through ages of sleep the building was as new as if its construction had been completed just a moment before.
As he looked around at some of the other buildings, he saw a contrast. For the first time he noticed that many of them - at least in that locale - were pock-marked and worn, as if winds had somehow howled through the cavern; or as if chunks of the ceiling had fallen over the ages and thus marked those buildings so. For the first time as well he noticed emerald chunks of the ceiling lying about the avenues, the streets themselves marked there and about as the buildings were. But of the building which stood before him; it was flawless.
At that moment his singular task was to re-enter the building with its light ebbing and flowing from the top, out of the green glow and into the shadowy darkness of that antiquated, alien lobby. He re-entered the edifice and once again spied the inner walls, and the staircase winding lazily up around the sides, around and around the wall of the coned spire, inner edges appearing all the way to the top of the monolith as it would wind higher and higher, that inside edge of the staircase always visible from below, and seen as some nearly infinite spiral from that eerie point of observation. Just a sliver of the black-to-white light filtered through from the top and into the macabre lobby.
Yaacov mounted the first step. Like everything else about the city, these steps were no exception; apparently not contrived for humans but perhaps for someone - or something - inhuman. The steps were about six decimeters high and deep, and the staircase itself was about fifteen decimeters wide. The oversized steps stretched the overworked muscles in his legs, reminding him that he was in an isolated and dangerous situation. He was careful to stay near the lattice work, to the outside as he had no inclination to look over the inside edge into the foyer, which fell further and further below. 
He fingered his pistol then handled the grenade, and not a movement was seen save for the eerie oscillating light from above as it twisted its way through the lattice work and into his vision; and not a sound was heard save for his rubber-toed boots on the pristine staircase, and that at once insidious and beckoning low wavering dirge bouncing to and fro across the valley floor outside. He continued upward - step by step - and was perhaps a thirty metres above the floor of the valley or the base of the tower, when Yaacov paused and peered out into the still land of forgotten spires and contemplated his increasingly tenuous situation, regardless of the fact that he was apparently - at least for the moment - more or less safely alone.
Yaacov could only hope that he would not awaken some hideous, ghastly sleeping gargoyle; that he would not at some point cross the threshold into a chamber full of ancient, sleeping beasts and awaken them, full of their blood lust; but instead that he would be able to explore the place at his leisure and make it back out of there in one piece, trusting that his companions from there on out would be only his scattered thoughts, the seemingly inevitable and vaguely appealing low-pitched unfamiliar music coarsing throughout the valley, and perhaps the Sphere, should he find IT and indeed be able to tote IT away from there. 
Yaacov realized a slight change in his situation; he was free to leave the city. That thing; that presence which had plunged him forward those hours before; it was then gone. Presently he could sense that he could have left the place had he but his own volition to do so. By then though his curiosity had gotten the best of him, and it was at that moment that which drove Yaacov higher; but he nonetheless noted the distinction. Dream or not, he had regained his freedom of action.
This tower was not the largest, but it had probably been thirty metres across the foyer at its base, judging by his estimates when he had examined it. Of the interior of the tower; the extent of altitude change traversed by the staircase probably reached ninety metres from the city floor. 
Yaacov was once again fairly stoked as he fingered his pistol in its holster and mounted the staircase. 
As he went he looked out through the openings. In and of itself, the lattice work was unfamiliar, with thick patterns crisscrossing the wall aside the staircase. The wall appeared to have been around a metre thick; generally thicker at the base of the structure and becoming narrower as he climbed. The lattice was generally about half the thickness of the rest of the wall, and built in the center of the same, leaving a smooth, slanting, spiraling ledge, both above and below it.
He panted as he tired of climbing the blocks of stone; formerly stairs for a lost race. The lattice work was truly amazing; where he stood, six decimeter lines of stones crossing in x-patterns over openings overlooking the city from the staircase. It gave him vague trepidations about the stability of the structure, but being literally ageless it had probably stood the test of time. Truly, that building and the structural viability of its decrepit design were the least of his worries. Even as he traversed the stairs, he checked the walls, some of the lattice work, and even the steps, and every glyph upon them appeared shiny and untouched; every crack between stones was still snug, even after untold ages. It were as if the interior of the building had been finished only the day before, and all of the bizarre hieroglyphs were easily accessible yet utterly alien to his translator's mind. The colored stones making up those infernal internal designs probably shone as brightly then as they had in the inhuman days when that megalith had served its presently unidentifiable original purpose.
He thought of the grisly bas-relief from the "church" and renewed his climb, even though the thirst was returning and there were hunger pangs deep within his all-too-human stomach. He stopped and took off his pack, gazing over the city through the openings as he drank some of the water in one of the bottles. He finished off the potato chips and the cookies. For the time being he held off on the salvia or another cigarette. 
As Yaacov was re-shouldering the pack he thought he heard a boulder fall, an afterthought of a sound occurring off in the emerald shadows amidst some low-lying section on the other side of the vast spooky city. Moments later he heard the shuffling of feet like leather - closer still - from beyond the edge of a particularly tall group of spires, through the latticework across from him in the then seemingly never ending giant staircase. He was about two-thirds of the way to the top.
Again, the still silence below save for the neverending dirge was pierced faintly by the shuffling, clicking feet; clicking as if clawed and leathery. Scraping sounds mingled with his confusion as he headed up the last laps of the spiraling staircase track, serving its purpose as an excruciating exercise machine in his mad regimen, the increasingly nearer yet unseen sounds of shuffling, clicking, and scraping bouncing off of the cavern walls in a quiet alien cacophony, again with the constant of the low wavering hypnotic hum, further broken by his own feet slightly squeaking on the shiny antiquated steps, themselves as polished and smooth as glass.  
The staircase wound ever tighter in its traversal of the monolith's interior walls. He continued up - so close to the top - lost in the alien sounds and made dizzy by the spiraling ascent into the dull white pulsing light which filtered down intermittently from its position atop the cone through the slanted lattice work.
Again he paused and took another look out amidst the impeccable alien towers and other nameless, twisted and inhuman shapes. Yaacov could detect no movement, though the shuffling, scraping, and clicking sounds drew seemingly ever nearer. Judging then from the sounds, they were at that moment coming from the opposite side of the building, from a place he couldn't directly observe.
Yaacov rushed up several more stairs and around to the building's opposite side, and peeked out through the lattice work, somewhat higher because of the extra steps he had taken. He looked down again, outside into the apparent source of the approaching sounds, then for the first time he crept to the inside edge of the staircase; the staircase with no bannister. He knelt on all fours and stuck his head over the side, peering down nearly ninety metres onto the design on the floor so far underneath. Again, from there he could clearly see a hexagram - mark of cain - in inhuman colors drawn in the floor below. The symbol had not been apparent from his ground view, nor had the colors been so alien and disturbing.
Then and there he was trying to speculate outside of what he might have once read in nameless crumbling tomes. He suddenly wondered if indeed humans weren't the progeny of one named Aiwwai, but that we might have other origins, perhaps entirely alien. The thought sent him reeling from the edge as he sprang upright and dashed up the final group of stairs to the chamber at the top of the spire.

2) Ultimately, only the YHVH holds the patents and copyrights.  Any other concept of "intellectual property" is simply absurd.

Once within the upper chamber, he pondered how the stairs could have been built the way they were while the only sound remaining was that low oscillating hum; the clicking, scraping and shuffling having died away. What had been the distant, falling boulder sound? What of the scraping - since having died away - below? 
In the chamber at the top of the tower, some ancient glyph was inscribed in the floor - again in some ghastly alien color - and within moments his newfound revulsion had him averting his gaze. The walls bore foreign glyphs, but in contrast to the colors of the rest of the city, these were mostly in various shades of grey; from black to white. 
The walls of that top room were vertical where they'd been slightly sloped throughout the rest of the structure below him. The roof was a spire at the fairly steep angle of about forty-five degrees. Apparently for the purpose of lighting the chamber, the ancient architects had created large holes, like windows looking upward, not to the stars, but instead to the emerald cavern ceiling. Rounding the base of the roof, they were circular holes about seven decimeters wide with about a metre between them. From its source at the peak of the tower the pulsing light poured eerily into the room, no brighter there than it had been from several hundred meters away.
The light was nonetheless slightly somniferous but at the same time, invigorating. The light began to lose its pleasant aspects and the narcotic effect of it was being edged out by strange, disruptive visions which would appear especially as the emanations peaked every few seconds; visions which would dissipate to nothing as the light would go dark. Yaacov noticed though that even in its darkest state, that the source of the light was emanating something; something more than just darkness.
Of the visions themselves; Yaacov couldn't even identify them except to note that they were as disturbing as anything he had ever seen.
Yaacov - being less than two metres in height - was barely able to stand at full height in center of the chamber. He set down his flashlight and his pack, then fingered the CZ-52 for a second, and checked for the grenade in his pants. He stretched through one of the circular openings and managed to reach the outer edge on the roof, gaining a finger hold by which he pulled the rest of his body up into a sort of balanced position hanging out of the hole, approximately a hundred metres above the floor of the city below. 
The hair on Yaacov's spine pricked up. He was hungry and thirsty. Suddenly the humidity was stifling; his clothing drenched in sweat, beads of perspiration pouring off of his forehead and dripping over the outer shell of the spire roof. 
Forcing back the sensations of helplessness he used his arms to pull his body through the hole, twisting around - thankful he had once been a gymnast - until he was face down at the lip of the sloped roof of the spire, the tops of his feet "hooked" on the lower lip of the hole he'd just shimmied through.
The roof was climbable yet smooth like the inside walls. He was able to right himself, and was then standing upon the lip at the lower edge of the roof, peering through one of the circular holes at his backpack and flashlight on the floor of the chamber below him. Luckily, the rooftop was encircled by rings of stone - rising approximately fifteen centimeters off of the roof proper - and these made for excellent foot and handholds.
He was sprawled on the roof of that haunted tower, perhaps itself left over from the reign of inhuman alien despots and their denizens, then extinct or asleep after many forgotten epochs. But what of the Cemonculus? Just how "extinct" had that monster been?
Panting for breath he moved up the roof, stone rung to stone rung. His CZ-52 clanked in its holster against the stonework, as did the hand grenade through his pants pocket.
With another two or three metres to go to the top, he looked up once again. There at the pinnacle of the tower, the light was emanating from a stone, about the size of a grapefruit, set in gold like the pearl on a lady's ring. Strangely it wasn't blinding, even from that tiny distance. For all intents and purposes Yaacov thought it to be of the same intensity it had been when he had noticed it outside of the ruined hall so far below. The fixture for the Sphere appeared to be of solid gold, and both the fixture and the Sphere appeared to be intact; like the rest of the structure unharmed by falling rocks over the otherwise silent, yawning spans perhaps just short of eternity.
What was it about gold that even ancient alien travelers had apparently seen fit to use it in their hoary mechanism, namely the setting for that apparent Sphere of the Tetragrammaton, which if his translations of hideous nameless tablets were correct, at that moment pulsated something stranger than eerily, there atop that prehistoric tower with his insignificant human frame perched atop its mammoth, monolithic dimensions? 
With a burst of energy he scrambled up to the top. Then with trepidation he gingerly reached out and touched the stone in its alien and immaculate perch. Presently it appeared that lights - whose sources were inexplicable - were touched off between all of the tower tops in the cavern, creating the effect of something like a three dimensional spider web, pulsing in a million alien colors before settling into a diffused reddish glow, supplanting the emerald his eyes had grown accustomed to.
He scanned the ceiling and in the diffused, dull red light was a fantastic alien holograph through which he saw at once wondrous and hideous things. In those cascading visions there were far-off stars and planets, fantastic cities resembling the one he was in - yet hundreds of times larger - sprawling over the faces of nameless and unknown places. Creatures wandered over the myriad distant worlds. The visions of familiar yet alien locales populated by seemingly almost-human simians gave him some slight pause for reflection but those visions were to swiftly be replaced by something darker, more alien, more terrifying.
There was that music, only it was louder by many times, as if someone had turned the volume knob on a stereo from "one" to "ten." It was nearly deafening in any event. In his hand, the Sphere began to hum and vibrate at a high frequency as Yaacov continued to look above. He felt as though his ears were being pierced by the then painful aural pulse.
He continued to gaze upward. There he saw the most awesome and hideous vision of all. The vision was of such depravity and torture that it cannot even be described with words; unfortunately, unlike some of the earlier visions with their limited or non-existent form or substance; this one he understood.
With that he took his hand off of the Sphere and the vision left as the dirge itself died down. Yaacov shuddered to think that such diabolical occurrences as had been revealed by the vision could exist at all.
In any event, he was physically shaking from the phantasm he had just beheld. Had he seen some sort of hell? Yaacov's body was dripping sweat and he literally pulsed in the unfolding realization that he was perhaps in the midst of the greatest discovery of all time. What could the Sphere in front of him be except - IT? What other milieu but the city below and the passageways leading in or out would harbor a breathing, living, killing version of the ancient servant of ToZ, the Cemonculus he had earlier slain? What other locale would have featured those hideous remains in those decrepit rooms off of the passageway above; ghastly, wicked, ancient mosaics overlooking the only obvious entrance from the surface, and the blood-curdling bas-relief in the collapsed cathedral? What other place would contain a glowing Sphere at the top of a tower, which when touched would produce hideous and vast visions of alien worlds? Soaking in sweat he fingered the CZ-52 and even its leather holster was drenched. 
The low wavering dirge continued in the background. Was he being driven mad by the sound? Had it caused his most recent hallucination - or the series of them; the dizzying variety of milieus which had passed before his unbelieving eyes in those frantic seconds, culminating in a scene of human despair beyond description? Perhaps he could have found out if he had dared put his hand back on the Sphere, but he didn't. He stared at it, its light still at the same level it had been from afar, shifting black to grey to white but in the process never too bright for his eyes.
IT must have been the Sphere of the Tetragrammaton! What an irony it was; an irony to have confronted the source of his lifelong quest, only to think it just out of reach, not literally, but certainly figuratively. At the moment, in Yaacov's mind there was no way he was going to risk touching the Sphere again, lest the ultimately accursed visions might return and drive him into that dreaded state of pure insanity from which no soul would ever return.
Nonetheless, he couldn't leave. Suddenly he tore the shirt from his body and threw it over the Sphere, then with all of his might he wrenched at the Sphere through the cloth, this time without the light show, increased volume of the music, or the apprehension-laden apparitions.
With a fantastic groan the Sphere came loose from its resting place. As the thing was ripped from its alien setting, Yaacov nearly fell backwards off of the roof of the Satanic spire. At that moment, all hell seemed to have broken loose. Suddenly the cave was filled by literal lightning bolts of green energy, and the sounds increased again, in their crescendo nearly breaking his eardrums. The earth began to shake as Yaacov gathered the thing in his shirt, quickly clamoring back down the roof and jumping through one of the holes and into the floor of the chamber. Along with the maglite he quickly put the thing in his pack and shouldered it. Then he dashed from the platform and back down the staircase.

1) The earth will always thirst for blood.

Skipping steps as he fled, Yaacov fetched the pistol from its holster. Then came the noises again, like scraping and rocks being flung about below, on the stone walkways of the city. The stairs shook and through the lattice he could see the ongoing lightning storm, with bolts hitting and demolishing parts of the ancient structures.
Even above the din, the shuffling was there, as was a faint, faint clicking; as if one or more creatures in tap shoes were trying to tiptoe around, then at the base of that tower. How was he to exit? ...never mind the godforsaken Sphere. 
He paused to catch his breath amidst the cacophony, and peered out through the lattice work and - there in the flesh - he spied four or five of the hideous demonoid creatures - Nuphnareloteph - as depicted in the bas-relief from the cathedral.
Indeed his worst nightmares were being realized. He had not perished in any number of other previously imagined ways. Miraculously, none of his previous activities or explorations had ever brought death his way, but at that moment of ultimate frenzy he had the distinct impression that his luck had finally run out.
Right there he almost "lost it;" he supposed he could have simply drawn his pistol and shot himself, but although suicide had, at certain times in his past seemed like a real option, he dismissed the thought as quickly as it had come to him.
Continuing to peer out through the opening, the apparent servants of Llethrotep, the Nuphnareloteph were there alive and in the flesh. The hunting monsters looked up at him, shaking staffs and howling in some shrill inhuman tongue as they ran out of sight underneath him, probably into the gilded entrance to the tower's foyer below. Right there he froze and thousands of thoughts seemed to pulse through his maddening brain, fevered by the physical hunger and the emotional and mental strain of the incredible events of the preceding several hours. The lightning storm and the aural assault continued, and the stairs themselves shook as if there were by then an ongoing earthquake. A bolt of energy hit the top of the tower within which he stood, and though nothing fell through the opening or the staircase above, chunks of rock fell just outside the wall where he stood. Through the lattice, small stones rained upon him as the larger pieces of debris passed outside.
As he paused, certain key passages from numerous hidden tomes and tablets assailed his consciousness - all fighting for precedence - as though each were the final piece to a fantastic jigsaw puzzle, each recollection crying to reach the forefront of his thoughts. That dizzying array of ancient and haunted references flooded his mind. What was he witnessing there? All of the evidence pointed to a dark and dismal past for the human race, and perhaps an equally foreboding future, were he correct in his speculation, and were certain conditions or elements to simultaneously fall into place.
He pondered the immediate situation, forgetting hoary references to fabled slave societies, ghastly in their wanton disregard for human "dignity;" ruled by alien misfits who had never seen humanity as anything more than an afterthought. He thought of those hideous ancient servants and how they then must have been climbing the staircase to meet him, and he continued down the staircase. At least what they represented - even in all its craven depravity - was better than any of the aforementioned false gods of his own age; or at least so he thought.
Whatever the case of the superiority of one false religion (and all religions save for the cult of nine are false), one tyranny, or one suffering over the other, Yaacov decided it was time to meet his fate and reached for the pistol as he ran headlong down the stairs, around and around, vaulting downward over those inhumanly large steps. Analysis - and thus its inherent paralysis - was beyond him. Yaacov's warrior spirit arose from within and at that very moment he was in the perfect state for a confrontation, consequences be damned. Internally, he began his battle cry.
As Yaacov descended headlong into battle, he spotted the leading hellspawn on the staircase, across from and below him.
Yaacov aimed and the CZ-52 rang out, barely audible amidst the din. This time he only used two shots. One hit the monster straight in the chest and sent it reeling around, its staff clanging wildly off and down the staircase behind the decrepit and then-twirling servant of extraterrestrial ancient masters, itself spinning out of control, first into the outer wall of the far side of structure from his position, then towards him back across the staircase sideways and off into its apparent death twenty metres or thereabouts below, howling like a banshee until going quiet upon the thudding sound of impact. Again across and below him, another hellspawn darted by, bounding over the alien blood where its doomed compatriot had stood not a moment before, up the stairs and toward Yaacov. Yaacov turned from facing across the way to facing down the stairs and the thing was there directly in front of him, its pointed tail dragging and making those scratching sounds on the stone, one decrepit hand outstretched and wielding a staff, the other free and clenching its ancient fist with alien intensity. The staff whizzed through the air and the monster's tail came around, making wooshing sounds as it sliced the thick air. The tail's triangular end grazed Yaacov's holster and just about cut it clean. The apparently razor-sharp edge of the hideous creature's tail left a small cut on his thigh just below the holster, also leaving a gash in his pants and the beginnings of a bloodstain from the wound.
Yaacov broke from the momentary trance of witnessing the attack and let out six more shots using a fast-firing technique. The creature stumbled backward down the steps, even as Yaacov was making spaghetti of its chest in that seemingly eternal, single second of his blazing, pistol firepower. Indeed, six thirty-caliber magnum rounds had been efficient in destroying that day what those inhuman gods had apparently wrought, those distant ages before; that member of a cabal of fiends spawned in some distant, pre-human age, apparently having wandered that vast cave over the gaping chasms of time, content in that dismal emerald world, incredibly living without food because of some alien design but in any event being glad at the chance for a kill, even after hundreds or perhaps thousands of years since having last eaten of unfortunate human carcass; or perhaps just then awakening from an age-old sleep which was rudely interrupted in some way by Yaacov's own machinations; or having stepped through a dimensional door just moments prior, out of some parallel universe. 
In any event it made no difference in the fight. The smell of blood in any event was of "it," for Yaacov would have hesitated to have called anything so alien "he" or "she," and Yaacov was at that moment an avenger, perhaps dealing a blow to the seeming invaders, even if it were presently he who were trespassing upon their territory and not the other way around; he who were ranging about that hideous cavern and somehow symbolically acting on behalf of an unknowing, apathetic human race but nonetheless thankful even in that desperate moment that he was the one doing the killing and not the one being killed. 
The bloody stinking brute from an ancient craven world crashed backward down the stairs, ending lifelessly about five metres below as its staff continued tumbling along the staircase, at last falling over the ledge and into the foyer below. The stairs before him were smeared in that alien blood, not crimson like that of a human but of a color that - if it were to be named here - would be shocking in its implications. You might ask what implications there could possibly be in revealing the color of an alien creature's blood; to that this author must simply state that it is better to leave the question unasked and by definition, unanswered.
Suffice it to say that Yaacov had to contain his own surprise and continue to act as rationally as possible, even if the revelations of that moment were so hideous in their implications that he was past the point of madness and perhaps salved instead by some mental circuit breaker mechanism; a self-saving switch which kicks in during such times of crisis, and which was perhaps installed in humans as a race back in those freakish alien laboratories of yore. The whole world collapsing about him, Yaacov changed directions and reached for one of his remaining clips, running back up the stairs as he reloaded.
The wound on his thigh was just a nick, but the holster barely hung there after the clean cut of the Nuphnareloteph's tail. He needed to reload quickly as, at any moment then the others would be appearing from below. Yaacov shook as he fumbled with the clip, and not all of the shaking was due to the tremors rocking the city. He was down to sixteen shots; eight in his pistol and one remaining clip in his pocket. He ripped the then useless holster off of his waist and started back down the staircase. With the gun loaded he ratcheted the slide and was ready, despite the enveloping madness, for whatever might come next. His ears were ringing; not so much then from the shots, but from the sounds of the ongoing storm and the raised volume of that maddening music. 
Having reloaded Yaacov whirled around to the nearby sound of those tails and claws scraping and clicking on the rock of the staircase. He then couldn't fathom why the steps of the monsters were so clearly heard amidst the din, but he had little time for contemplation.
Suddenly there were three of them below on the staircase before him. As quickly as he could, he retreated up the grand steps and let out four rounds into the lead monster, then four more rounds into the next one, again using the fast-fire technique. He had emptied the clip in just over a second, including the short pause he had taken to whip the pistol from one target to the other. The two leaders staggered but continued forth with the third monster gnashing about trying to get at him through its wounded and hobbled inhuman siblings, its staff poking with futility between the two who'd been mortally wounded that moment before.
Yaacov - his legs weakening beneath him - had just enough time to turn and bolt back up the stairs, as he heard claws swiping at the space fractions of an inch from his ear. 
The gargoyles-come-to-life were slowed by the two dying ones in front.  Those two were without staves, and were simply swiping their claws and their razor tails at him as they stumbled forth, blood gushing from their wounds, painting the stairs in streaks of that portentous alien color as the unwounded one behind them exhorted them all in some hideous heterogeneous tongue. Against the sounds of tails scraping stone, Yaacov ran as fast as he could, the pathetic cries of the wounded hellspawn, and fanatic, warlike yells of the unwounded one in the back following him up the staircase. 
Presently he turned as the cries of the dying ebbed away and he then heard only the remaining one in pursuit, its war yell mixing with the sounds of the storm and the dirge outside.
Yaacov ejected the empty clip from the practically antique firearm, then fetched the last magazine from his pocket and fed it into the then hot pistol. Yaacov completely emptied the last remaining clip into its gnashing form, spraying eight penetrating thirty-caliber magnum cartridges into the hellspawn's hide. Again, alien leather was no match for hot pistol lead.
Just as had happened to the others, the war cry turned into an agonized yell. Again alien blood was everywhere and, due to his close proximity to the monster, drops of it splattered over Yaacov. The monster stood up stiff and silent, and then its carcass fell like the others, over the side of the spiral staircase and onto the floor below.
Yaacov was winded and on the verge of collapse, but nonetheless he knew he must flee. Reaching for his last reserves of strength, Yaacov ran down the stairs, over the dead bodies in the foyer and out onto the ancient streets. 
There were new sounds; sounds beyond the raging storm, and Yaacov instinctively headed back toward the foot of the staircase leading back up to the tunnel. The lightning bolts were still in effect, and shards of rock and boulders fell, almost like rain. The ground itself continued in its tremors. Suddenly there was silence and an absence of motion. The music had stopped. The ground was firm. The lightning bolts and their attendant rain of rocks; all of it was suddenly gone.

0) Better to die in the infantry than to live a life of adultery.

On his way to the stairs leading out of the lost city, he came across the fountain where he had refreshed himself seemingly ages before. This time though there were a swarm of Cemonculii emerging from the pool.
Getting his bearings once again, Yaacov looked above, scanning the walls of the cave to see the opening and the slope of the staircase winding upward around the outer edge. By looking again at the slope of the stairs as they disappeared behind a spectacular series of cones, he extrapolated mentally to where he thought the path of the staircase would meet the floor of the cave and ran off in that general direction, dashing in and out of narrow quiet lanes, perhaps once crowded and bustling with alien life. He ran, with the gurgling, amphibian voices in pursuit, their wet legs pattering on the old stone thoroughfares. 
It were as if they'd been asleep for a very long time; as if they were groggy, and even though each of them was well over two metres in height, Yaacov was able to gain separation from them as the chase continued through bygone thoroughfares. At the same time Yaacov was getting quite dizzy and nausea was setting in; the visions of everything he had seen to that point combining to create multiple dismal images in his head, threatening to send him reeling off into real insanity at any moment. Yaacov could not fathom what might happen to him should he go utterly mad. He was in no mood to find out what might transpire should he lapse into such insanity, stop his running, and fall to the ground in a complete mental, emotional, and physical breakdown. Something as well was then pulling him out of the place; the force extracting him being equal to the force which had originally coerced him there to begin with.
He reached the foot of the stairs; stairs which would hopefully carry him back up to the surface above; above where there might be simple things, and simple folk blissfully ignorant of that teeming underworld. He needed to find some way of keeping the two worlds separate; the dark inhuman world of that cave and the somewhat hopeful albeit ignorant world of humanity ostensibly above.
Again though what if all that were above him were the desolation of the Martian Cydonia, and not the charming desert of the American Southwest? There wasn't a single moment to ponder that in any event.
Where the steps on the cave's outer wall were decrepit and crumbling he took less caution on the flight up than he had on the way down. He almost dared not look behind him but he had to see where those dripping minions were. They were at the base of the stairs, and he thirty metres or so above them, perhaps ahead of them on the staircase by sixty metres.
Yaacov was lost in memories brought by the delirium of the situation. His mind flitted between blasphemous and incomplete social theories to other disjointed topics, all in the blink of an eye as he spent more and more attention simply navigating the large stairs leading to his hoped-for escape. At one of the wider breaks in the staircase, he jumped across the gap and hit his shin on the opposite side. He cursed and continued up the steep stairs, smarting from not only that bruising, but from the constant wear on his legs over the preceding hours. 
Those hoary alien horrors - the Cemonculii - were good climbers, and they were slithering up the staircase, pattering along with gummy feet below him, gaining on Yaacov every time paused for a second. Again he turned and looked back after crossing a particularly unstable area of the staircase. The abominations continued their climb behind him. 
Yaacov pulled the pin on the grenade and threw - or rather rolled - it down after holding it for a couple of seconds. He immediately dove to the staircase. His lying flat on the angled staircase kept him out of the blast of the grenade, but his eardrums were seemingly completely shot by then, as if he had been next to the P.A. system at a rock concert back in the seventies. 
As a result of the explosion, several of the slithering minions fell from the staircase and to the valley floor. Still others - in a seemingly stunned state - stopped their pursuit of Yaacov.
Those survivors glared at him with blank eyes and began grunting in some ancient forbidden language, yet for whatever reason they broke off their pursuit. Yaacov turned and kept climbing; despite the hunger, the aching limbs, the throbbing, bleeding shin, the returning thirst, and the low wailing which had returned in the background, and the howling and grunting of the reptilian creatures behind him. It were as if, there on the staircase the creatures were bound by some invisible line and could not cross it. Instead they began picking up rocks and throwing them at him. He was lucky the rocks failed to find him as he climbed up and away. A couple landed nearby, but they bounced harmlessly off of the stone without hitting him.
Yaacov was presently on that patio overlooking the city, and even though - after he had escaped the Cemonculii - he had gained some slight calm on the way up the staircase; as he reached the patio that terrible oppression - seemingly emanating out of the walls within that entrance - came over him again. 
He reached into the pack and procured the maglite. He decided to leave it off for the moment as he was determined to get as much use as possible out of the receding emerald light from behind him as he entered that chilling passageway.
Yaacov resisted the inexplicable energy of the mosaics. He hurried along the cavernous corridor until once again he was climbing through the unfinished tunnel which connected to the passageway above. Again as before - but now in the opposite direction - he was thrust upward and away from the city of mystery. The light from the city having finally died away, Yaacov used his maglite as he managed to navigate around the boulders and loose, smaller stones. Once again avalanche was at the forefront of his thoughts. The dirge from the city was slowly dying away. Yaacov was nearly exhausted as he paused and from his pack drank the last water out of the bottles. He didn't dare yet touch the Sphere wrapped inside of his shirt. Even in the heat of the tunnel a cold sweat wracked his body. Exposure was surely setting in; exposure perhaps to alien and inhuman elements of antiquity but exposure nonetheless.
Replacing the pack about his shoulders, Yaacov gingerly made his way up the remainder of the unfinished section of the passage. Just as he'd reached the finished section and stepped a few metres across its stone floor, the earth again shook. For those seemingly unending seconds, Yaacov held his ground, and when it was over he looked behind him to see that the entire opening had collapsed into rubble, leaving at least that particular entrance to the city impassable.
At least he could continue forward, and Yaacov did just that, again being propelled by something unseen, as if indeed he were once again within at least a semi-lucid dream. Upward and onward he trudged; vaulting past the side openings into the chambers, until after uncounted hours he finally saw a sliver of light up ahead.
Finally reaching what he'd hoped to be the exit to his dream turned nightmare, Yaacov bolted out into the open ground. He was in Cydonia all right; it was however Cydonia, Mars. The face winked at him from across the plane, and the planet sat still save for the whirlwinds which animated the dust there and about.

Prologue: The whole of the universe is like a snake; eating its own tail.

There outside the opening to the then - for all intents and purposes - impenetrable tunnel Yaacov sat on a stone bench. For a moment he caught his breath and then he turned and noticed something behind him; a crystal clear pool of water. Not asking himself about the various vegetation which marked the otherwise barren land; not asking himself why the atmosphere was breathable, Yaacov went to the water and drank. 
As if, by partaking of the water he had been completely restored to sound mind and body, only then did Yaacov sit himself back upon the bench and un-shoulder his pack. As he went to remove the Sphere from within its cloth, Yaacov noticed a small booklet, black in color and marked with its ribbon, much the same as a Sunday school bible from his childhood. He opened to the marked page, and surprisingly, although the text was in some ancient language of hieroglyphs, Yaacov understood the script.
Undaunted by the strange turn of events, Yaacov began reading to himself. The script fairly read, "shatter the sphere to release abbadon." Perhaps indeed by then Yaacov was really the star who had fallen to earth; and he had at last found the key to the bottomless pit; the Sphere; IT.
Without further ado Yaacov stood and slammed the Sphere down upon the bench. Even in its cloth wrapping IT shattered into innumerable tiny shards.
Then there was pure chaos; complete motion. Like everyone and everything else, Yaacov himself was shattered into a trillion shimmering pieces.
Then there was silence; motionlessness; unconsciousness as light and dark were separated.
The snake had once again swallowed its own tail; and then the dance would begin anew; and once again everything was a possibility. 
Ultimately though, nothing had changed and everything had stayed the same.
.