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Location: beneath County Roscommon, probably.
Depth: impolite.
Weather: now occurring indoors.
Boots: still absent.
Big coat: increasingly theoretical.
I have continued down.
This may have been a mistake.
The entrance has long since disappeared behind me. I tried marking the walls, but the marks moved to a different passage during the night. I tried counting my steps, but some of them came back ahead of me.
The compass now points towards singing.
This is less useful than it sounds.
I have begun measuring the cave by other means:
I do not know what θ measures.
Nobody has explained θ.
θ continues regardless.
The rain has followed me underground. I am from Stalybridge and therefore thought myself reasonably qualified in rain, but this is not proper rain.
Proper rain ruins an afternoon, gets into one sleeve and generally observes the laws of gravity.
This falls upwards, backwards and at several distances simultaneously.
At least the weather at home generally has the decency to remain outside.
The court did not.
I reached a hall cut into the rock, larger than anything which could reasonably fit beneath the hill. Pillars burned without being consumed. Harps played open strings somewhere above the ceiling. Drums answered from below the floor.
Iron struck iron beneath the melody, as though the royal musicians had been forced to share a room with a failing mill.
The Queen spoke.
Later, a lower and considerably less reasonable version of the Queen also spoke.
I have recorded them as the Queen and the Goblin Queen for clarity.
Neither has approved this arrangement.
The Daoine Sídhe appeared beyond the hall in a cavern shaped like a valley. They were smaller than expected, although this did not make them reassuring.
Their wings moved too quickly to see. Light dragged behind them in red smears, and their bodies broke into little squares whenever I tried to look directly at their faces.
A black stag crossed between them without making a sound.
I saw it again three chambers later.
There was no connecting path.
The cave has stopped keeping things where I found them.
Mushrooms grow sideways from the walls in great leaning shelves. Some pulse. Some glow. One appeared to turn and watch me pass, although this may have been fatigue or the lingering effects of travelling any significant distance without a packed lunch.
Beyond the fungus I entered a tunnel made entirely from stars.
There were no walls, only tiny square lights rushing past in complete darkness. For a moment I believed I had found the surface.
Then the stars began loading in horizontal bars.
The cave became red and black.
Pieces of it shifted into hard blocks. Ancient signals chattered through the stone while voices, breathing, heartbeats and wounded instruments moved around me.
A guitar chord sounded from very far below, lowered until it resembled a gate opening under the earth.
I would have preferred a bus home.
There was not one.
This was unsurprising.
The Court of Bargains stood beneath the signal.
Five objects waited on a table:
The Queen instructed me to choose one.
I will not record my choice here. The cave already knows, and one of us keeping quiet seems sensible.
Whatever is removed from the table subsequently appears elsewhere.
This is not metaphorical.
Keys produce doors and locking rhythms.
Apples return as fungus and heartbeats.
Coal starts machinery I have not located.
Cups interfere with reflections.
Crowns cause distant halls to assemble themselves around people who have no business sitting in them.
Effects may occur before the choice which caused them.
The cave remembers the bargain and applies it retrospectively.
I have raised no complaint because I am uncertain where complaints are currently being processed.
Further down, geometry has become unreliable.
The rock now contains coastlines within coastlines. Spirals produce smaller spirals, which produce smaller ones again.
Repetition is no longer decorative.
Repetition is now geographical.
Towers assemble from red lines and collapse before I reach them. Animals pass as black silhouettes. Processions gather whenever I stand still.
I have named this region the Wrong World.
It contains pieces of everywhere I have already been, but joined together incorrectly.
The Queen's torches burn beneath black water. Mushrooms grow from court pillars. Stars move through animal bodies.
The music remembers its earlier melodies but returns them bruised, detuned and accompanied by machinery.
Navigation has become largely ceremonial.
I cannot recommend attempting it alone.
Tonight I reached a mouth inside the mouth.
It had assembled itself from everything behind me: court stone, broken signals, animal tracks, fungal threads and fragments of red geometry.
The Queen spoke clearly enough that I could no longer blame the acoustics.
She said the cave remembered me.
Three paths appeared:
I asked whether these were the only available options.
No answer was provided.
Returning leads to the field above, although the stars are wrong and the grass already knows my footsteps.
Descending leads beneath the last floor into an underworld of endless spiralling rock and iron noise.
Leaving the road open allows the waiting procession to follow.
For the first time since I entered Oweynagat, everything has stopped.
I have not answered.
The Otherworld is not a place one visits.
It is a place which learns how to visit back.
Still no coat.
Further investigation required.