“Wh-wh-what’s happening here? Have I been hypnotized?” Roger asked, half to himself.
But, instead of a reply from Mavis, it was Mary this time, calmly answering his question, but not by speaking in his head like the Dragon had. Mary was in fact very excited and very relieved to talk to Roger again at all. For a while there, she’d thought she’d never see or be able to speak to anyone else ever again, so she now gushed out her news to him.
“Well, I heard Mavis saying, ‘Little human, little human, come on, wake up, wake up,’ over and over, and when I’d opened my eyes, there she was; Mavis, gazing intently at me. But somehow, I didn’t feel at all scared; she’s got lovely, gentle, amber eyes, you know, so I could see she was a very kind and… well, a concerned sort of person too, I s’pose.”
Mary quickly told Roger how she’d felt herself being slipped onto the hard cavern floor. Then Mavis had blown a cool, blue flame into her face and had cleared away the last tendrils of grey smoke that had hung about her. She’d coughed and spluttered and then Mavis told Mary her own story, telepathically of course. And now, she reckoned, it was Roger’s turn.
“Yes. child There are things you must be made aware of in the short time we have left together. Now, look into my eyes, young human,” Mavis gently and telepathically told him.
“This isn’t hyp-hyp-hypnosis, is it?” squeaked Roger again, very nervously.
Mary took his hand and assured him, “Don’t worry, Roj, it’s not hypnosis, I promise.”
“Do not worry yourself, Master Roger,” thrummed Mavis, softly in his mind, “this form of communication is much more like waking up from a deep sleep and then being able to clearly see and understand things for the first time.”
Roger screwed up his face and his courage too and looked fearfully up at the great Dragon.
Her huge, amber eyes shone down upon his boyish, soot-stained face and he seemed to feel himself being pulled right into them as if he was being sucked down into a whirling, round, golden vortex of warmth and light.
He now fell head-long and heart-full deep into her steady, wide-eyed gaze and soon found himself feeling very peaceful and calm. As if floating in a lake of thick, warm cream or on a soft, woolen cloud full of blue-white light and gentle warmth.
Roger realized this was indeed a far superior intelligence; Not just some wild and savage beast, only interested in feasting on the flesh and blood of its cornered prey. And he could ‘see’ her thoughts too now, just like picture-stories in his head. They were so vivid and clear; It was even better than the Movies; Better for Roger even than the Xmas Royal Academy Science Lectures that he loved listening to so much every year on the Wireless.
“This is like, well, like actually and for real, fully being here, right where I am!” he thought. But the ‘here’ where he was, was the him now looking out at the world from Mavis’s eyes. From inside her head as it were. He could see all around the great cavern, very clearly. He could even see through the smoke-cloud above him right up to its rocky, high-arching roof, festooned with its many sharp, pointed stalactites, hanging like hundreds of dangling daggers.
“Now, dear children, I have been expecting you and this will be explained in due course. Firstly though, I must show you some of my own world and my own long and ill-fated past; And all the better for you to understand your present and your unfolding future, yet to be,” Mavis thought-cast to them enigmatically.
And so, Roger now began a mind-traveling journey beyond his imagining together in the company of Mavis and Mary. But this wasn’t their traveling as physical bodies; Now they were moving through the Under Erf as disembodied spirits. They were freely roaming phantoms; just ghostly entities, being guided along by the Dragon Queen and traveling down through the vast network of underground Cavern-Worlds. The hidden worlds within the World, ruled by the True Dragons of the Under-Erf; worlds never before seen by humdrum eyes.
They were witnessing a magical world of worlds within the World itself; being a vast and secret domain the Dragons had maintained peace and prosperity in for thousands of years, and all these many worlds together were called the ‘Under-Erf. The only world that Roger and Mary knew, was just the single surface world of their Planet Erf, and the Dragons knew this as simply the 'Over-Erf.’
Roger could see the Under-Erf was a far more interesting and more varied place than even the Humdrum’s surface world of the Over-Erf. To really and fully know a whole World, you needed to get under its skin and plumb its deepest, darkest depths. Then you could really understand it much, much better. Just like you did when getting to know new people and friends, or even alien races and unerfly creatures, for that matter.
Roger at first felt giddy and sick, but after a while got used to the strange, flying sensation.
“This is just what being a bird, or even better, an angel, must feel like,” he thought.
“Or a Dragon!” came Mary’s thought, giggling gleefully into his head.
“Hey! I can hear you, Mary! Can you hear me?”
“Yes, of course I can silly,” she replied telepathically, “we can telepath to each other now that we’re with Mavis.”
“Oh, my Jumping James Joule!” Roger cried out in alarm. “But t-t-telepathy doesn’t…” But he couldn’t finish his thought. He was a scientist after all, and the fact was, he was now actually and for real, telepathing his thoughts, as well as, more wondrously, ‘spirit-walking.’
The Under-Erf was a network of an untold number of worlds, many miles beneath the surface of the Erf and so was a gigantic place and much, much bigger than the Erf’s surface was. The Under Erf had thousands of worlds, all within the one world of the Over Erf.
Roger, being clever, at once understood how this could be. Just how the inside could be much bigger than the outside. Just like it is with Dr. What’s Tardis! he thought.
And the answer was very simple. On the outside of the Erf, all the Humans along with most of the animals and plants lived on just the one single surface. And as large as that one surface was, it was always only the one. But this was not the case for the Under-Erf.
“You now see below you many worlds within the rocky mantle and the magma of the Erf,” Mavis said, “you are passing by hundreds and hundreds of miles, and layer after layer of mantle rock, but within this rock and magma there are hundreds of these vast Cavern-worlds. The Under-Erf has many surfaces within; as with the rings of an onion, or as a better description, the many chambers in a beehive.”
“Wow! It’s just fantastic,” Mary murmured, getting a vivid idea of the true structure of the whole Erf, as the many layers and unfolding terraces of the regions of the vast ‘Under-Erf’ went by, ever deeper and deeper. And as they flashed by, becoming increasingly stranger and ever more ‘Un-Erfly.’
Mavis informed them that there were several regions of the Under-Erf that no Human Being could ever hope to visit, let alone survive, as they were completely alien and therefore deadly to normal Humdrum life. But the very worst and weirdest of these were all a very long way down, being inside or very close to the Erf’s Core itself.
Mavis then explained to them that the Erf’s Core was a region of unimaginable Hellish qualities, where you would think it would be completely impossible for any form of life to live at all.