Jonglor Centennial Exposition

The Jonglor Centennial Exposition was a vast world's fair held once every hundred years in the northern city of Jonglor, commemorating the anniversary of the city's founding. The Fifth Centennial Exposition, which opened for a three-year run, was said to be the greatest of all, a mini-city of spectacular architecture, fountains, arcades, and towers of iridescent stone-hard plastic, displaying art treasures from every province of Kalgash alongside the latest industrial and scientific marvels. Hundreds of thousands of visitors strolled its glittering boulevards and avenues, making it one of the marvels of the world.

The Tunnel of Mystery and Its Aftermath

The Exposition's amusement area featured the Tunnel of Mystery, a ride that took passengers in small open cars through a mile-long tunnel of total darkness for fifteen minutes. The ride proved catastrophically popular: on its opening day, a lottery winner named Harrim 682 took his entire family through the Tunnel, and they all emerged with severe psychological damage. Harrim himself, a powerful longshoreman, was reduced to a state of babbling hysteria by the experience, developing first acute claustrophobia and then a claustrophilic fear of the outdoors. Other victims included Gistin 190, a schoolteacher who could not stop sobbing, and Chimmilit 97, a high school athlete who tried to hide under his bed at the mere sight of the afternoon sky. Several people died of shock during or immediately after the ride. Despite these casualties, the Tunnel remained open for weeks, its popularity actually boosted by the danger; the Exposition's lawyer Cubello 54 explained that people were fascinated by the instinctive fear of darkness and assumed they would be tough enough to withstand it. The ride was only shut down when the municipality faced the ongoing expense of hospitalizing the traumatized survivors, which proved more costly than the one-time indemnities paid to the families of the dead.

Sheerin's Investigation and the Ride

The Jonglor Municipal Psychiatric Institute's director, Kelaritan 99, summoned Sheerin 501 of Saro University, an expert in darkness-induced disorders, to investigate the phenomenon. Sheerin interviewed the victims and found them profoundly disturbed; even the strongest among them, like Harrim, had been shattered by the experience. Despite his professional knowledge and personal confidence, Sheerin himself agreed to take the ride. He was given an abort switch that would bring the car back early, but he threw it away in a moment of bravado. The fifteen minutes in total darkness proved to be the worst nightmare of his life: he experienced sweating, shaking, a pounding heart, and the terrifying sensation of falling into an infinite abyss. He emerged shaken and perspiring, and afterward told the Exposition's representatives in no uncertain terms that the Tunnel was deadly and must be shut down permanently, warning that even the strongest psyche would take a terrible battering and that reopening the ride would fill every mental hospital in four provinces within six months.

Lingering Effects and Significance

Sheerin suffered lingering aftereffects from his ride: for days afterward he experienced claustrophobic episodes, feeling the darkness closing in on him even in his hotel room, and he began sleeping with an auxiliary godlight in case the first one failed. The experience permanently changed his understanding of the human mind's vulnerability to darkness, and he later used his firsthand knowledge to predict the catastrophic psychological effects of the total eclipse of Dovim. The Tunnel of Mystery thus served as a microcosm of the larger disaster to come, demonstrating that even a brief period of total darkness could shatter the sanity of people who had evolved under conditions of perpetual sunlight.