Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 27

Shaver was always—no doubt necessarily—unspecific about dates (surely in the interest of obscuring his actual whereabouts in the periods in question), but the alleged experiences in which he is introduced to the reality of the Cavern World are apparently set in the late 1920s or early 1930s, though Shaver’s claim cannot be incorporated into any real-world chronology.

In the version he usually told, he had spent an evening reading Lord Byron’s Gothic dramatic poem Manfred (1816). The hero is a tormented soul who is seeking death. Shaver’s eye fell on lines like these:

Ye spirits of the unbounded Universe

Whom I have sought in darkness and in light!

Ye, who do compass Earth about, and dwell

In subtler essence! ye, to whom the tops

Of mountains inaccessible are haunts,

And Earth’s and ocean’s caves familiar things….

Finally, he dies, and as evil spirits descend to claim his soul, the ghost of Astarte, the woman he had loved in life, rescues him. Highly popular in the nineteenth century, the poetic drama inspired compositions by the heavy-duty likes of Schumann and Tchaikovsky.

In Shaver’s account, he found himself thinking that “Byron was not, strictly speaking, writing fiction;” more likely, the poet was hinting at some deep, sinister reality he could not reveal outright. After turning out the lights, he impulsively beamed a telepathic message into the ether. To his shock, an apparitional woman appeared to him on what looked like a screen. As she gazed at him with an expression of supreme assurance, he sensed that she was reading his thoughts, and then her confidence buckled. “She seemed suddenly to realize that she had made a mistake in answering my call,” Shaver would write, as her telepathic probing told her that he was not, as she presumed, one of those in the know. She vanished in an instant.¹

The encounter with the apparitional woman in the night had catastrophic consequences. It tipped off evil forces to Shaver, who was quickly seen as what might be called a security risk—in other words, as one with the potential to expose their secrets. In the weeks and months that followed, inside his brain he felt dim presences weighing, judging, probing, and talking about him. In time, specific presences, both benevolent and malign, came to the fore and grew ever more tangible.

While he was employed as a welder on the assembly line at a Highland Park, Michigan, auto plant, voices began sounding clearly and audibly inside his head. It took him awhile to realize just what they were: the private, unspoken thoughts of his fellow workers. As he would write, “The welding gun was, by some freak of its coils’ field attunements, not a radio, but a teleradio, a thought augmentor of some power.” Before long, he was hearing other voices, frightening and unpleasant ones, coldly vicious and cruel. There were screams, evidently of human beings, most of them women, undergoing hideous torture. Less alarmingly, but no less mystifyingly, were references to spaceship flights—actual, not imaginary, ones.

The encounter with the apparitional woman in the night had catastrophic consequences. It tipped off evil forces to Shaver….

Unnerved, Shaver quit his job, but the torment did not end. He allegedly hit the road, wandering and taking jobs wherever he could find them, all the while undergoing persecution by underworlders, who he now believed had murdered his brother and were determined to destroy him as well. This period of his life was also subject to varying recollections, and Shaver historians and fans tend to the presumption that in reality he was institutionalized. Shaver, however, had it that he was arrested and imprisoned for “many years”—a hard-to-credit chronological claim, as we shall see—for some shameful crime which the malevolent invisibles caused him to commit.

In his correspondence with Palmer, in the series of stories he would publish in Amazing, and in the anecdotes he would relate the rest of his life, a complex and not entirely coherent alternative reality unfolded. Few would believe that it literally existed, and even some of those few were inclined to the view that the Cavern World must represent an alternative, astral or visionary reality, though Shaver, firmly materialist and atheist in outlook, always insisted that the caves and their inhabitants were no less physical than the familiar world. But one thing on which just about everybody, skeptic or believer, agrees: for all the contradictions in his testimony, for all the wildly implausible, frankly crazy tales he told, Shaver was basically, almost inexplicably, sincere. The bulk of the controversy about sincerity has focused less on Shaver than on Palmer, his — one might say—enabler.

To understand Shaver’s story, one has first to appreciate his notion that “all matter—all things—are a mixture of energy, part of which is integral and part of which is disintegrant.” Shaver chronicler Bruce Lanier Wright summarizes the concept: “Detrimental energy, variously called de, der, dis, or d, represents entropy, evil, destruction; integrative energy, called te, ter, or t, is the life force, health, youth, vitality, sexual potency. Shaver’s key discovery was that entropy is not a universal, unavoidable phenomenon. All winds down, it seems, only near a degenerate sun. Like ours.”

But it was not originally degenerate. In fact (or at least in Shaver’s imagination, leaving unaddressed the question of what its own sun was), it was once a planet whose atmosphere was dense with clouds. Finally, when a meteor struck, the effect was to ignite the world, turning it into an immense fireball—a sun, in other words. Out of this cosmic collision a solar system was formed. The resulting planets, including Earth, basked in its health-giving, warming energies. The earth caught the attention of the Atlans and the Titans, two Elder races passing through space, and tens of thousands of years ago they settled here. The dis-free Atlans and Titans never stopped growing over the course of the years, decades, and centuries of their all-but-immortal lives, and many were gigantic in stature. They possessed beam technologies with various functions: healing, creativity, sexual stimulation, remote viewing, telepathic communication, teleportation, and more. In other words, they lived in something of a paradise. But as with all good things, this one was not to last.

Memory of the Titan race was preserved in human mythology, including the story of the Titan Enceladus, buried beneath Mount Etna for defying Zeus (Mary Evans Picture Library).

When the “carbon shell” protecting the sun collapsed 20,000 years ago, the sun began shooting out dis rays. As they washed over the earth, generating death and disease, the Elders were driven into a vast subterranean Cavern World—as Shaver had it, “tier on tier of cities, endlessly vast, the homes of giants … a maze, a catacomb, labyrinth”—which at its height housed 50,000,000,000 Atlans and Titans. Even here the deadly energies penetrated, and as the centuries passed, life grew ever more intolerable. Finally, 12,000 years ago as many Atlans and Titans as could boarded spaceships and departed from Lemuria to seek out younger stars or “dark worlds”—sunless planets artificially heated—where another cosmic race, the Nortans, dwelled.

Those who remained on Earth suffered three fates. One group became us: humans who had adjusted to the rays sufficiently to roam the surface, even at the cost of death and disease. These people, our ancestors, lost access to the supertechnology of the ancients and would recall the Titans and Atlans only in legends of the gods who had once ruled Earth. Two other groups—the tero and the dero—lived on in the Cavern World as damaged goods.

The dero were and are a loathsome bunch: sadistic idiots devoted to debauchery and torture enhanced by the “stim rays” from the machinery left behind in the cosmic exodus thousands of years ago. They also kidnap surface humans and are the cause of misery among surface humans, ranging from nightmares to airplane crashes. They live “mostly in caverns close to cities,” according to Shaver. “The dero get much, if not all, of their supplies from the surface, particularly food. Meat especially”—from their human prey.

The tero, an embattled and shrinking minority, are the good guys who, against immense odds, do battle with the dero and their evil schemes. The tero still have their own human forms, but abuse of stim rays and the effects of dis rays from the sun have combined to turn the dero into mutants of hideous appearance, resembling, Shaver wrote, “fearfully anemic jitterbugs, small, with pipestem arms and legs, pot bellies, huge protruding eyes and wide, idiotically grinning mouths.”