Will = The Beast?

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 26 March 2014.

A manticore

That's a great idea.

What I originally imagined was an actual beast/sphinx-like animal as in Yeats' "Second Coming." A portentous sign of the Apocalypse that these kinds of things are traipsing around the steam tunnels!

I like all historical/geological/mythical/religious understandings of the underworld blending together. The underworld is where epic heroes go to "harrow hell"; the underworld is the symbolic location of the Christian Hell, pagan Hades and Tartarus, Jewish Sheol, etc.; the underworld is the location of Earth's hot magma core; the underworld is where we, in a sense, travel through time, back through accumulated layers of fossils and sediment; etc., etc.

But I like the idea that we have a perfectly rational explanation for what happened to Farthington:

Will, having been prevented by Farthington from fulfilling his promise to his mom (totally sufficient motive, by the way), goes down into the tunnels and shoots Farthington in the face. Farthington doesn't die but lives on. Perhaps he sourced the story about the beast.

I do, however, want to always maintain the possibility that Farthington is operating on a level where he could very well encounter an actual demonic beast. He's pushing that envelope.