"Do me a favor, Bernard. Bring him the book. Lovecraft pulled off an amazing feat of literary magic. He wrote something that was simultaneously a horror story and a tale of visionary enlightenment, and your experience of it is entirely a matter of the beliefs that you bring with you into that cave. Which is precisely what happened to the people in the meltdown mob. They found a horror. I found enlightenment. But the event itself was neither. And both."
Katzmarek turned to look back at the gym doors, and then outside, at the array of angry protesters. "And you think it will happen again?"
She smiled. "I do. Does that make me a ghoul?"
"No. And to answer your question, I don't think drugs were involved."
"Good. So what was your question?"
"Back there," he said, indicating the gym, "I was going to ask you whether it would be possible to repeat the event under controlled conditions as proof of Farragut's innocence. But now..."
"Yes?"
"Now I think I'm more interested in taking that trip myself. To experience what you did. Well, what the meltdown mob did, but with what you brought to it. I'd like to have the transcendent, not the horrific. Is that possible?"
"I think so, yes. But to do that, you'll need a strong grounding in ways of looking at the world, and of understanding what happens in it, that might run counter to whatever religious training you may have had. Are you game for that?"
He stared at the floor for a long moment. It had been years since he'd regularly attended church, but the memories were all there -- the battery of questions, the ready answers. It was the basis for an awful lot of choices he'd made, and for how he looked at everything, at matters of life and death, of economic policy, and even the course of his career. How could it be? How could any of that cause him to see unspeakable horror in an event that she might see as ineffably illuminating? And yet, that's exactly what she had suggested.
"You're asking a lot," he told her.
"I am. But is it too much? What's really important to you?"
A pedestrian stopped to speak with a few of the protesters. Katzmarek pushed the door open to listen. He stood there for a moment, frozen in indecision, and then turned back towards her. "The adventure," he said. "The adventure is what's important to me. How do I start?"
"Well," she said, stepping past him, "we could go and talk to these people for a while. If you're going to follow Randolph Carter and discard your sense of self in a dive through the limitless fractal void at the edge of some mindless mob mentality, then you'll need to be able to swim on both sides of the divide."
He actually had to look down at his left foot, the one still inside the building, before it was willing to release its figurative grip on an old reality, so that he could step into a new one. He took a breath, and strode towards the angriest member of the group, a man brandishing a sign that had the word 'change' in a crude red circle with a slash through it.
"What sort of change are you opposed to?" he asked, as non-threateningly as he could.
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