How we came to that blasphemous place is a tale so unworthy of the appalling events that succeeded it that I hesitate to offer any word on the subject at all. Suffice to say we were retained through intermediaries acting on behalf of what they would only describe as “a party most interested in commentary”, though on what we were left to speculate, and who insisted on paying in units of twelve dollars, American.

But the commission! For such as we – half a dozen or so of us, at the start, documentarians, academics with a fondness for field research in unlikely, not to say dangerous, places, and the hardened, capable roughnecks who are essential to such work; in another century we would simply have been called ‘adventurers’ – it was such a contract as comes along once in a lifetime.

It had been some years since rumors seeped out of the darkest corners of the world, whispers uttered by shattered men from the bottom of a bottle that in a secret place, forgotten by time and cursed by gods long dead, there is, or was, a professional football team. We were sent to find the truth of this, or return to testify that the mind of man is still capable of envisioning horrors not yet visited upon us. Would that we could!

Of our journey through the stinking wastes of that place I can only be brought to speak through force of what fractured will I yet retain. We thought it initially a human city; in form and construction it seemed familiar to our eye, but as we wandered we became increasingly aware of a sickening wrongness, a vile disorder that revolts against intelligence, against sanity itself, a madness that placed a gravel pit next to what we took to be a school for the infants of the creatures who lived there, next to what no force of reason or hope of humanity could convince us was not a building housing a joint liquor and firearms dispensary. No, no, no! I will not speak further of that yawning, godless horror that knows neither reason nor zoning!

We passed through trackless miles, breathing air rendered noisome by oil refineries and garbage fires, our eyes focused on a looming construction in the distance, grander than any other feature in that desolate place. A temple, we agreed, or at any rate a great center of power.

At last we came to it. Towering and elongated, we knew it for it was – a coliseum to put the Eternal City itself to shame. The truth broke upon us like the sun that had long since forsaken that blighted land. It was true! It had to be! The monstrosity that loomed above us, sealed against the light of day and the silver of night, was a stadium for a professional football team.

Our minds reeled, and reeled too far. One of our number dropped to his knees then and there, gibbering and shaking, laughing and weeping. We did what we could to recall him, but to no avail, and eventually it was agreed he should remain, with one of us to mind him, there at the gate of the domed and doomed colossus into which the rest of us ventured.

The air within was close and fetid, reeking of failure and despair and processed meats. Peering through the dimness we could see that every wall bore strange markings in the form of the severed head of a creature like a bull with a single, sparkling eye. Would that I could erase it from my memory.

Through the caverns of that grotesque expanse we trekked unto exhaustion. We fell to arguing, convinced by the unnatural geometry that we were going in circles, or perhaps we merely were. We might have slept, or we might have walked in dream, as time seemed to bend and then slip away like a fish before a net. And always that hideous bull’s head with its leering, unblinking eye.

How long this went I cannot say. We all suddenly came to, as if from a sleep, in near-total darkness. Our food and water were gone – whether eaten, or discarded, or taken from us by some means, our memories would not tell us. Hungry and racked with thirst, we resolved to abandon our exploration and flee that place immediately. Let others, better prepared for what awaited, continue what we had begun. We hurried through the dark tunnels, until we heard a sound.

You will judge us for what we did next. But only those of you who have known thirst, real thirst, the kind that scorches your throat and frays your mind, will understand the irresistible pull of what we heard then: the sound of running water, behind a closed door.

Abandoning our flight we charged heedlessly through the door and found ourselves in a long room. There were raised platforms, long and narrow, padded – almost like beds, but not such that would give a mortal man a comfortable sleep. And along one wall – vast tubs that even now filled with water. Ice water! It was from here that the sound had come! We rushed to a tub and began to slake our thirst when a sound that death alone will banish from my mind brought fear down upon us again.

It was slow, and tortured, a moaning and a tearing and a scraping slither, the sound of something being dragged along the floor behind us. We turned, and beheld such a thing as every prayer uttered since humanity found speech has begged our gods to guard against.

Like a man, it was, but twisted, broken, and frayed. It shambled toward us, its arms outstretched, but its legs a mass of ripped tissue, each step an evident agony, accompanied by the sounds of tearing flesh. On it came, and in the gloaming I could make out markings upon its chest that seemed to read ’23’. It gave voice, but we did not choose to hear, dashing in such headlong flight as only real fear can spur, its voice a fading mutter about veganism.

We ran then. Oh how we ran. But the vile catacombs that held us would not let us go, not before it showed us more. And such things I have seen! Such things that I must not describe! I will not! You cannot compel me, even now, to relate more than a fraction of the horrors that I witnessed around each corner of that monstrous den!

I have seen the ghastly grotto where a demonic shepherd calls “That’s good for another Houston Texans…” and a band of glass-eyed imbeciles chant “first down!” as if that were some kind of accomplishment instead the sound of the laughter of cold and distant gods raining their scorn down on this forlorn emptiness! Seared into my mind is the vision of the Pit of Endless Futility into which these awful creatures cast the best years of the career of Andre Johnson! I have known the pillow-infested house in R’lyeh where over the sound of a thousand alarm clocks dead Ryan Mallet lies dreaming!

When at last I tore out through those blasphemous gates I did so with no one, and found no one waiting. What became of my companions I do not expect I will ever know. Judge me if you like, you who can still sleep the night without your mind crawling with images of Schaub! Schaub of the Infinite Interceptions! Forever doomed to chase a sleek and spectral defensive back into the endzone!

Yes, I fled from that place, ran until my lungs burned and my heart would burst. Only then did I turn. In the distance that obscene temple seemed to taunt me, and above it, shimmering in the air, rose an image: the bull’s head! Its unblinking eye fell upon me and I could see…no, I must not describe the horrors I saw within that dreadful eye! A sudden storm eclipsed the awful vision and a thunderclap broke my consciousness and preserved what was left of my shattered sanity.

When I awoke, the vision was gone, and the coliseum seemed somehow diminished, distant, merely another scar on a defiled and blasted waste. Even now I do not know that I would give my oath that there is a professional football team in that accursed place.

But I cannot forget, no matter how much I pray for it, I cannot expunge the last images of my time in that loathsome charnel house. For I have seen, oh gods forgive me I must say it, I have seen what spews from the tunnels onto that appalling field, a ghoulish horde of bovine simpletons lowing and tramping and led by a swift and terrible giant who bears the number 99. As I stood in mute horror he led his charges toward me, thundering, “I am not going to find a sack in a bar! I am not going to get a touchdown in a club!” as his vast herd mooed “M-V-P! M-V-P!” at me in horrific and asinine unison. “Act like you’ve been there before!” he boomed, and as terror at last released my feet from its hold and I flew toward the gates of that accursed coliseum, his words rang in my ears, “This is the NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE!”