The smell of rot hits you in a rushing wave before your eyes can even adjust to the darkness. Decay and something else, something just as vile that you cannot identify. You fight back the urge to vomit and turn back to the elevator. There is only featureless stone and slime, no doors, no buttons, no sign telling you to use the stairs in case of an emergency. The slime on your hand begins to burn and you wipe them on your jeans. They will not come clean.

You swallow hard and your ears pop. You wonder how far down you are. You begin to pick sounds out of the darkness. The clinking of chains. Murmuring. A drum. A sound that reminds you of a trip you took to the ocean, a sound you heard in the night, trying to fall asleep in a strange bed where the sheets always seem to be a little damp. As your eyes adjust, there is a nacreous blue glow ahead.

The stone floor has a path worn into it, smooth, easy to follow it to the blue glow. The murmuring grows louder and soon you can pick out words, clearly what are words, but in some language you don’t know. The speaker sounds like they are in pain while making them. The blue glow is finally bright enough to see there is a ledge at the end of the path. You get down as you get near and crawl the last few feet to peer over the edge.

Hooded figures in a semicircle around a crude stone altar, the blue glow seems sourceless. A black pool of water beyond them surges upward and drains back in the ancient rhythm of the sea. The smell of rot and salt intensifies. A natural cave, nothing had the look of being fashioned by human hands except the altar, a flat top carved out of an upthrust belch of stone. And behind it, a screaming face, protruding like some vast demon being pushed out of the raw rock. You cannot tell if it is carved or a natural feature. It is the evilest thing you have ever seen.

The murmuring is now a chanting of just a few words over and over, inhuman, deep and guttural, imperatives, commands. It grows louder and louder and louder and then stops. Your ears ring in the silence.

One of the figures steps forward and says, “Bring forth The Soiled One!”

Four of them split off from the semi-circle and go to the pool of water. Something drips on you and you look up. A stalactite is directly above you. You see another milky pearl of water forming and you shift over. You hear dripping everywhere and the maddening clinking of chains. The four at the pool are kneeling and humming and swaying from side to side, then humming louder and swaying faster all the time. Eventually, they simultaneously reach into the pool and drag a naked woman from the water, each one holding a hand or a foot. She struggles weakly and mewls as they placed her on the altar.

“The Soiled One,” the leader says.

“The Soiled One,” the rest repeat.

“Hold her,” the leader says to pool flunkies and produces a long curved knife from their robe. The voice is maddeningly familiar.

“OH, GREAT CTHUGHA, I CALL TO THEE!” the leader says. “CTHUGHA, THE LIVING FLAME, HEAR MY VOICE. CTHUGHA, BURN THE BALLOTS OF MY ENEMIES!

The figure steps forward and sheds her robe. Knobbly, bumpy, pendulous, rippled, grotesque–that poisonous toad face, the hunched posture, the condescending whine of her voice.

“I OFFER THIS SOILED FLESH OF THE INTERN!”

DO YOU confront Hillary Clinton and attempt to stop the ritual by rescuing the sacrifice? TURN TO PAGE 55

DO YOU remain quiet and hope to find some means of escape? TURN TO PAGE 60