The Temple

The Temple: Chapter 3

The temple was silent. Somehow its builders had perfected their knowledge of acoustics so they had managed to soundproof the building by geometry alone. As soon as Hoefflin entered he was struck by a terrible awe quite so he forgot about his pursuers.

Every surface was covered in intricate design and murals. The moat round the outside of the building continued a foot into the room and made Hoefflin suspect that the temple was in fact built on the site of a small lake or pond. The light offered from rancid yak-butter candles was golden and reflected off the water in otherworldly swirls and ripples almost bringing a life-like effect to the murals on the walls. The air was thick with yak-butter stench and noxious incense that made one feel light headed and giddy. Hoefflin noticed that each little set of eyes in the murals had been coated in gold leaf as to reflect the golden light's flicker like they were winking, blinking and glaring at those who dared to walk in this horrendously sacred space.

Somehow Hoefflin knew that the physical harm from the monks outside no longer held any danger in this place; it had been replaced by a far worse cosmic spiritual danger that lay in wait in this most heinous of places.

It reminded Hoefflin of the torture rooms of the Spanish inquisition he had once visited, or Auschwitz; now a harmless museum, but the walls still stood steeped in the evil they had witnessed, oozing with the dark and foul knowledge that no place on earth should ever contain. He would rather spend the night alone in those places than continue in here in broad daylight but something drew him onward. Perhaps it was the seductive nature of evil, of learning the unknowable and sinister truths that lay behind it, or perhaps it was some outside force that acted on his mind like a candle to the moth.

He felt especially drawn toward the prayer wheels that ran along the inner wall of the passage. These were vast clunky brass affairs that seemed older than the rest of the building as if the rest of the structure had been erected around them. Each one was covered in ugly jagged script that Hoefflin did not recognise but also had other scripts including runes, Greek characters, Arabic, Hebrew, cuneiform and Sanskrit. Dominating each wheel was a relief of peculiar style that looked slightly Indian, but also had some qualities that Hoefflin recognised as Mayan. The pictorial renderings were done so that each one represented a recognisable scene and as Hoefflin turned more and more of the wheels he realised that in anti-clockwise order around the circular corridor, the wheels began to tell a story, or perhaps a history.

There was once a race of immortal beings which were masters of their domain. They lived in happiness until their world started to change around them. It became clear to Hoefflin that they did not replicate and evolve in the same manner as humans but rather duplicated like splitting cells, each one an exact copy of the last. And though they were immortal, they became impotent in their surroundings. But the beings were advanced in their technology and weren't prepared to accept their fate. They used their knowledge to create vehicles that would enable them to carry themselves about this new world they found themselves in. Special evolving organic machines that were capable of highly complex interactions with each other and their world; most importantly in this story these machines could self replicate, and had systems within them for automatically controlling the more rudimentary functions of their daily mechanisms.

Happy with their apparent success, the immortals rested for some time allowing the machines to replicate to accommodate all the members of the immortal race.

But when the immortals returned from their resting place they had found that the rudimentary intelligence they had placed in the machines to govern the mundane aspects of their maintenance had evolved something even the near omniscient immortals had never anticipated: civilisation. The immortals were slow to react, but they settled on a plan to implant the first immortal into a specially created vehicle in order to interact with the other vehicles on their level and ready them for accepting hosts.

At first this plan seemed to be successful, however the now aggressive civilisation of the vehicles reacted violently and bound the vehicle host of the first immortal to a tree for some time until the vehicle was destroyed and the First had to leave it or else die with it.

And so the immortals went into hiding again.

The reliefs seemed to end with a typical prophesy that some day the immortals would return.

Hoefflin failed to understand what relevance this strange tale had to the worshippers outside or to anyone for that matter. There was no concept of rewards for good or bad behaviour, no promises of an afterlife, no religious structure to it at all. It was just a random string of events. A sci-fi fairy tale all the more strange for its complete irrelevancy to the human race in general.

As Hoefflin pondered these paradoxes he noticed that although he had travelled in a circle, he had not arrived back at his starting position; an oddity which could only be explained by the slight angle of the floor. The temple was of the form of a large spiral stair-case or ramp leading downwards towards a deeper central chamber. Hoefflin turned a corner and saw what was at the dark heart of this malevolent temple. A large gold statue of a man dressed in robes, eyes closed and an elaborate hat on top on his head. Hoefflin looked about him at the offering bowls in front of the large figure, his spider like hat, the reverence in which the three metre tall statue was being kept, and a placard in front of it that took him by surprise. It was surprising in that it contained a large number of different languages and symbols for the god-form, one of which was English. It stated in scratchy block capitals “THE IMMORTAL SOUL”.

It was at this point that Hoefflin understood the murals and the prayer wheels and the idol in front of him and was filled with a dizzying cosmic terror and existential nausea that hit him like a punch to the guts.

The thing above the figure's head was not in fact a hat at all, but instead the main subject of the sculpture. It was this thing that was the focus of all the religious fervour and worship. It was a model of a human being with its skull cleaved open bearing host to some hellish and ungodly parasite living out of its brain. The vehicles in the story on the prayer-wheels... they were mankind; and the creatures, our creators had a name, a name half remembered down through the millennia; The Immortal Soul.