Underneath Ganga Ram

Coming in, you would not think that this was a mental hospital if you never met the patients. Even if you spent time with most of them, not too much, just a little, you would not think this were a mental asylum. They were soft spoken, calm, eyes did not flit around. Most of the time. They were perfectly normal. As they spent more time in this place, they became crazier. No one could prove it, of course. But they did.

The lodestone stood underneath the building, he was standing by it. For some reason, he was protected by its glow. From his understanding of the texts, he sighed and wished he could have had read the Original, from his understanding of the texts that spawned from the Original, knowledge of the stone protected people from being affected by its glow. This stone was precisely placed, precisely made, you would not guess it. It was cracked, had lines going down in various, seemingly random places, it seemed to seep into the ground flawlessly, like it was not a stone placed in the ground, but a tree rooted in it, creeping in, slowly, steadily. The air throbbed with a soft hum, the ancient tunnel was dark and musty, he smiled, that meant no one had been here since fourteen hundred years ago. The last recorded time man had entered the Site. this one, his visits would not be recorded. This was the last time anyone would enter, if all went well. Well, the last times. He was not done visiting this obelisk to the occult.

It was plain, black, a blue light seemed to throb within its heart. Yet it did not seem all that different from some of the gems that were dug out from the earth. It was not. It was the first one. It had spawned all the others. Gems were just clues all pointing to this location. Man did not have the foresight to map out the position and directions that the gems had showed before excavating them. Man’s greed ignored the signs. And yet this stone, it kept on spawning more. Birthing them through itself, through the interconnectedness of earth. 

It lit up the corridor with a blue glow, electricity cackling softly in the air. The ground was charged, throbbing, massaging his bare feet. The air smelled of the things he liked mingling with the things he was terrified of. A thousand different smells. Heaven and hell. He could not place just one. Just the feelings, the sensory overload. His fingers hummed along in the air. 

This lodestone was the reason he had bought and furnished the manor upstairs. No one else knew. No one else could. When the relatives, the few that actually cared, came to him, concerned that the patient they had enrolled in this place seemed madder, he explained calmly to them that they had to get worse before they became better. Simple, meaningless sentences. He could not tell them that the purpose was to make them worse. He could not tell them about the lodestone. There were far greater forces at play here.