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.”
For the first part of his extended prison stay, so he related, Shaver suffered incessant mental torment courtesy of the dero. (“I know those dero only let me live because my life was a burden to me,” he declared, “and because my torture was a delight to them and they feared no retribution.”) Finally, however, the harassment ceased suddenly. He felt better but still was uneasy about the prospect of its resumption. Then he had a vivid dream of a woman who sat on the edge of his coat as he slept. “Her features were not out of the ordinary,” Shaver related, “but strangely and beautifully exaggerated. … She had that strange, wise quality men have sung of as the witch maid’s alone since Time began.” Shaver realized that she was blind.
In their conversation she promised him freedom if he did her bidding without question for a year. In the morning, when Shaver woke up, he found on his bed the pale ribbon she had worn in her hair—proving that she was a real woman who in some unexplained fashion had been able to get past the prison walls and bars. She returned frequently, sometimes “just a kind of protection,” but at other times “her sweet, actual body lay in my arms, I swear.” He called her Nydia, after the blind heroine of a Bulwer-Lytton novel (The Last Days of Pompeii) that he had once read. Shaver learned that his situation had changed because the tero had succeeded in driving out a dero colony which had been situated immediately beneath the prison.
Just before dawn one day soon afterwards, Nydia showed up in apparitional form with a hypnotized prison guard, who unlocked Shaver’s cell door. Shaver was led into a nearby forest, through which the two passed for miles until they reached the side of a mountain. There they came upon a door, well concealed behind bushes, and on the other side, they entered the cavern where Nydia and her fellow tero lived.
He met the real, physical Nydia—of whom the “Nydia” he had known was only a psychic replication—and consummated their relationship in the tero equivalent of a marriage. She was one of 20 tero and one of six who were blind because of the darkness and dim light to which they were constantly exposed inside the cavern. “We are different from the kind of human you are used to,” she told him. “We need men like you to aid us in our constant struggle with the living devils that inhabit [many] of these underground warrens.”
Shaver was shown the wonders abandoned by the ancients. They included distance-ray beams which could see through miles of rock. In the first demonstration, Shaver observed a “scene of utter horror … a real Hell,” with scenes of stomachturning torture of human victims of the dero. “From immemorial times,” Nydia said, the dero “have had such Hells in the underworld. … You see, you surface Christians are not so far wrong in your pictures of Hell, except that you do not die in order to go there, but wish for death to release you once you arrive.” Via abuse of the ancients’ “beneficial rays”—”ben rays” for short—the dero are able to keep their tormented victims alive for as long as 20 years.
Shaver had a dream of a beautiful, but blind, woman, who asked him to do her bidding for one year without question (iStock).