Dead Light

The air continued to put up more and more resistance, and the noise got louder. The landing was a hard one, but he somehow survived with no serious injuries. He had passed through the root of the volcano and was now on the dyke floor, which spread out through several tunnels in different directions. He checked his backpack to make sure his instruments weren’t damaged, and was relieved to find them intact. Being stuck on the volcano bottom without the things he needed to carry out his plan would have been a cruel irony after he had come so far.

The air was heavy, but at least he could breathe. He didn’t really know what awaited him in the pit when he jumped in, which retroactively made him even more concerned about his own sanity. He could hear the trickling of water in small rivulets along the igneous floor, which was a relief, he would have drinking water, and he was lucky that the stream wasn’t a river to wash him away into an underground sea. The leap of faith seemed to have paid off.

While he had packed a flashlight, he was surprised that he could see inside the volcano unaided. The walls emitted a faint green glow, which seemed to intensify in the direction of one of the tunnels. Though the light did conjure images of a fantasy dungeon, there was also something unhealthy and industrial in its tint. He walked for a while in the direction where the light intensified and started to get dizzy. Realizing he hadn’t eaten since the day before, Ore decided to make camp for the night. After a light dinner of dried fruit and granola bars, his body felt like it was shutting down from exhaustion. Before going to sleep, however, he decided to perform the necromantic ritual again, to see if there were any ghosts here that could give him direction. After pouring the water, wine, milk, and honey, into a small pit, he reopened the wound on his hand, adding a couple of drops of blood, and went to sleep, with his head pointing towards the offering.

When he entered the necromantic dream space, he was surrounded by three women, who looked to be in their early 20s, dressed in old-style working clothes. All three emitted the same faint glow as the cavern walls. In step, they slowly circled him in a counter-clockwise direction. One of them looked like a fresh-faced, young woman, with lush hair and a beaming smile. The second one seemed tired or ill, with dark circles under her eyes, thinning hair, and narrow, chapped lips. The third appeared on the verge of death, with dark spots and open sores on her skin, and most disturbingly, her jaw bone had all but separated from her face, hanging on by a thin strip of bleeding flesh.

Ore recognized them as three of the Radium Girls, who held something of a mythic hero status in New Jersey history. Starting in 1917, in the town of Orange, the United States Radium Corporation opened a plant for creating luminescent watch dials, under the brand name Undark. The 70 women hired to paint the dials with powdered radium, mined in Colorado’s Paradox Valley, were not told of the radioactive element’s dangers, and instead were instructed to use their mouths to “point” the paint brushes, to make a fine tip, as using cloth and water was seen as too time-consuming by the management. Over time, most of them developed severe health problems, and within ten years, 50 of them died of radiation related ailments, the most horrific of which was “radium jaw.” To add insult to injury, the company hired medical professionals to falsify diagnoses, and attribute the health problems to syphilis instead.

In the highly publicized trial that followed, the papers would call the Radium Girls, “The Living Dead” and “Doomed Women,” and even though the company would be forced to provide the five surviving litigants sizeable financial settlements, all five were dead by 1930. Nonetheless, this trial ended up establishing the right of workers to sue corporations over labor abuse, and is considered a big step in the labor rights movement, health physics, and women’s rights.

The three women continued to circle Ore silently, as if waiting for him to speak first. Something about them reminded Ore of the Fates in Greek mythology, the goddesses in charge of human destiny, though it made Ore uneasy seeing that the third one, who’d be in charge of cutting the thread of life, would not be able to speak because of her jaw.

“Where am I?” Ore asked.

“Before the underworldly gates,”

“Where unlife to undeath relates,”

“…”

The three answered in sequence, before speeding up the pace of their movements.

“Is the philosopher’s stone here?”

“Follow the glow, undying rocks,”

“Our slayers, land of paradox,”

“…”

The circling quickened, starting to make Ore dizzy again.

“Will I find her?”

“She waits for you, inside your mind,”

“But your love is deaf, dumb, and blind,”

“…”

Now they were spinning so fast that their faces blurred into a single superimposition bearing all the marks of youth and decay.

“Will I be able to bring her back?”

“Not only you must pay the price,”

“To see, unveiled, love’s paradise,”

“…”

The spinning now blurred into a luminescent fog, Ore was sick. His head felt like it was splitting, his eyes burned, his ears rang. The glow intensified until it flared up and then suddenly went out with a pop, like an overloaded light bulb.

He awoke back on the volcano floor, and threw up.