On a bed, two naked female mummies lay beneath a naked man. In another bed, a man touched two naked children, male and female. Elsewhere, a naked man lay face down over a table while another naked man lay over him. Further on, a man had congress with a dog.
“It seems Reverend Pentecost had sexual hang-ups,” Amanda said.
A woman sat before a dusty mirror, a hairbrush and containers of dried makeup before her. A man lay face down on a table, a hole in his temple, a revolver in his hand. A mummy played a fiddle while a man and woman danced in a close embrace that seemed impossible until Balenger realized that they were nailed to a board positioned between them and held up by a base of rocks.
Everywhere Amanda turned the flashlight, similar tableaus came into view.
“Music and dancing? Pentecost considered a lot of things to be sins,” Balenger said. The flashlight revealed a camera attached to a wall. Taking angry steps toward it, he asked the Game Master, “Aside from the man with the bullet hole in his head, how did all these people die? What was this, a mass suicide like what happened when Jim Jones made his people drink poisoned Kool-Aid?”
“Flavor Aid,” the Game Master corrected him. “The poison Jones used was cyanide. His church was the People’s Temple. More than nine hundred of his followers committed suicide. At Jones’s urging, they claimed to be protesting ‘the conditions of an inhumane world.” In recent times, it’s only one of many mass suicides motivated by religion. In the late 1990s, the members of the Order of the Solar Temple Movement killed themselves to escape the evils of this world and find refuge in a heavenly place named after the star Sirius. The Heaven’s Gate cult drank poisoned vodka so they could go to paradise by being transported to a space ship concealed behind the approaching comet Hale-Bopp. But my personal favorite is the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. They had visions of the Virgin Mary and believed that the world was going to end on December 31, 1999, the eve of the recent millennium. When the apocalypse didn’t arrive, they recalculated and decided that March 17 was the true date for the end of the world. More than eight hundred people died in anticipation of what they believed would be the end of worldly time.“
“So I’m right,” Balenger said. “This was a mass suicide.”
“No. Not even the man with the bullet hole in his head is a suicide. The shot was delivered after he died.”
“Then…?”
“A mass murder,” the Game Master said. “Pentecost killed all two hundred and seventeen townspeople, eighty-five of them children. For good measure, he included family pets.”
“So many people against one man.” Balenger could barely speak. “Surely they could have stopped him.”
“They didn’t know it was happening. Pentecost convinced them to come here on New Year’s Eve of 1899 because they believed they were going to be transported to heaven. They believed it so strongly that they braved a storm to get here. The mine, Pentecost assured them, was the appointed place. He needed this cavern. It was the only way he could kill everyone at once.”
“How?” Amanda insisted. “Poison? Was there enough food or water for him to poison all two hundred and seventeen of them? How could he have poisoned it without them noticing?”
“Not in food or water.”
“If he didn’t shoot them, I don’t see how he could have killed so many people at once.”
“Arsenic is an interesting substance. When heated, it doesn’t liquefy but instead transforms directly into a gas.”
“Pentecost gassed them?”
“It smells like garlic. It came from a sealed chamber with hidden air vents, so they couldn’t stop it from filling the mine. After Pentecost started the fire that heated the arsenic and released the gas, he went outside and locked the entrance to the mine. Back then, the buildings at the bottom of the slope were intact. He waited out the storm in one of them. Then he opened the door to the mine and let a ventilation shaft dissipate the gas. Later, he arranged the tableaus. He wanted the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires to be a lesson to the future. When he fulfilled his mission, he arranged his own tableau, then poisoned himself, and went to what he believed was heaven. As you noted earlier, mines and caves don’t have many insects and microbes. Along with the cold, that’s one reason the bodies were mummified. But this mine did have some insects. The reason those few insects couldn’t do their work is that the arsenic on the bodies killed them.”
Balenger surveyed the tableaus in disgust. “While I was on my way here, you told me the Sepulcher would show me the meaning of life. I don’t see what that is, unless the truth is everyone dies.”
“But not us,” Amanda emphasized. “At least, not this evening. We found the Sepulcher before midnight. We won! We get to leave!”
The Game Master didn’t respond to her statement but instead told Balenger, “The meaning of life, the hell of it is that people believe the ideas in their minds. Worse, they act on those ideas. Consider the great mass murderers of the previous century. Hitler. Stalin. Pol Pot. Millions and millions of people died because of them. Did those men consider themselves insane? Hardly. They believed that the agony they caused was worth the result of implementing their visions. The ancients thought that the sky was a dome with holes through which celestial light glowed. That was their reality. Later, people believed that the sun revolved around the earth, which they thought was the center of the universe. That was considered reality. Then Copernicus argued that the earth revolved around the sun and that the sun was the center of the universe. That became reality. Reality is in our minds. How else can anyone explain what happened in this cavern? Reverend Pentecost and Jim Jones and the Order of the Solar Temple and the Heaven’s Gate group and the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. Their thoughts controlled their perceptions. A space ship hiding behind the comet Hale-Bopp? Hey, if you can think it, it’s real. Poison two hundred and seventeen people so they can be a lesson to the future? For Pentecost, that was the most obvious idea imaginable. ”We create our own reality,“ an aide to the second President Bush once said. The truth of the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires is that ideas control everything, and all of it is virtual.”
“Which means that your idea isn’t any better than anyone else’s!” Balenger’s voice rose in outrage. “Your thinking’s as flawed as Pentecost’s! So is your game! But now it’s over! We won! We’re leaving!”
The Game Master didn’t reply.
Balenger motioned for Amanda to turn the light toward the exit. They stepped toward the other chamber in which Reverend Pentecost had stood for more than a hundred years, waiting to greet the future.
Balenger felt the punch of a shockwave. His muscles compacted as the rumble of an explosion reached him. The walls trembled. Rocks fell. He almost lost his balance.
“No!” he shouted as the reverberation lessened. He and Amanda ran to the tunnel, but thick dust blocked their way. Coughing, they staggered back.
Amanda spun, looking for a camera. “You son of a bitch, you told us you didn’t lie! You swore you never created a dishonest game! You promised we could leave if we won!”
The Game Master remained silent.
Gradually, the dust settled. Balenger and Amanda went cautiously forward, aiming the flashlight toward the continuation of the tunnel. They came to where they’d left Ray’s body. A barrier of fallen rocks now covered him.