The hall branched off into several rooms, each stocked with other detritus of human life. One room contained a quicksand of watches: digital, analogue, calculator; men’s, women’s, kids’; and so many of them that you’d have to wade waist-deep through the glittering moat. Another room was filled with fans: dust-coated ceiling fans, plastic desk fans, big industrial fans that stood on thick metal poles. Cords from a few wreathed up into the tracery of pipes and wires, and those fans were on, the blades clanging and the gears grinding with every oscillation. The last room I dared look inside was the worst: refrigerators, maybe fifty of them in every condition, standing like headstones in a grassless graveyard.

The end of the hall opened into a spacious cavern lit by a bright fire, though I struggled to make out any details through the rain of fetid water dripping from the towering entryway—a stone arch that looked as if it had been grafted from a sixteenth-century church. I began to pass through but paused in astonishment, the oily water weighing down my hair.

It was a cathedral of junk. Everywhere I looked, piles were gathered against grimy brick walls, these artifacts even more frightening because they were the stuff of kids. There was a mountain of cheap toy weapons. Jumbled in a corner were a thousand mismatched roller skates, one or two of which were squeaking as they rolled across the uneven floor. There were two dueling towers of lunchboxes emblazoned with happy cartoon faces. Most disturbing of all was the gigantic pyramid that dominated the room: bicycles, hundreds of them dissolving into rust, tangled together and reaching twenty feet into the air.

Clusters of flickering fluorescent lights were bundled together with wire and rigged into some source of stolen power. But their sick blue glow paled next to the hot white fire that burned from an oven at the far side of the room, crackling as if recently fed. I could not resist walking toward it as humans had done since the dawn of time.

A butte of discarded dolls blocked my view of the oven’s mouth. I began to circle my way around the dolls when the flames revealed a large stone mural carved into the wall. It was rough-hewn but of jagged complexity. On the right it seemed to depict a series of beasts exiting from beneath a series of bridges to board a large sailing ship. This same ship was present on the left of the mural, with more beasts departing and ducking beneath new bridges.

Spanning across the entire ocean was a rendering of what seemed to be the most important bridge of all. Carvings of grasping hands, paws, tentacles, and claws all reached up toward the central stone, which depicted a horrid lording figure with six arms. Its eyes were uneven: one was a sparkling ruby embedded in the stone, the other a gaping abscess.

Those details were lurid, but what was carved beneath them was worse. It seemed to suggest a war between beasts and humans so tumultuous that you could not tell where one raised club melded into another firing gun, or where one biting mouth blended into another swinging axe. I averted my gaze to the border of the mural, which was made up of portraits of individuals I could only assume were important figures. All of them were hideous. One had a dog’s snout and fangs. The next had practically no head at all, its beady eyes centered upon its smooth chest. The third had scarlet eyes, eight of them on long stems.