Lost in the Roxbury/Jamaica Plain area of Boston (terraced rows of streets along diminishing ridges, brown multi-family houses , busy streets and little corner stores), I somehow stumbled across the Orange Line rails and into a trackless fen where dwelt a neo-tribal society bent on bringing down traditional civilization. They lived at the abandoned concrete biological research facilities of a long-destroyed UMass Boston, experimenting with biological weapons–on their own ignorant people if they had to, but preferably on fools who stumbled into their clutches from the outside world.

Fools such as I.

They captured me aimlessly wandering one of the upper-story corridors, peeking in doors at ramshackle drifts of equipment, trying to understand. They brought me down to the water, to an industrial dock where they’d gathered everyone to watch–perhaps two dozen all told, raggedly dressed, lounging, dangling their toes inches above the water, none older than thirty or younger than nineteen, laughing and talking among themselves as though I were no more than another member of their crew. They strapped me to a kind of neuvo-medieval witch-ducking device–a long pole on a pivot they could use to submerge me deep in the fen.

The first time, I plunged down perhaps eight feet. The water was murky, certainly unclean; the deeper one went the thicker it became, to the point that at the nadir of my plunge I felt as though I were swimming in sludge. Then they pulled me back up, spluttering, protesting. “If I go any deeper than that I’m likely to get stuck.”

“That’s the point,” said a red-haired girl, whose job it appeared to be to placate me with her perky cuteness, keep me from getting unruly. Played by Kylee from Firefly.

They adjusted the pole, moving me further from the pivot, and dunked me again. This time I went down twenty feet, plunging into sucking muck that was most reluctant to release me. I was on the point of drowning by the time they decided to hoist me free, covered head to toe in green-brown gack.

Two burly guys escorted me up to one of the labs, where under blue light a skinny guy, without even bothering to clean me off, pronounced me infected with some fine contagion or other. Then they took me up and put me on an Orange Line train and told me I was free to go.

And I went, and likely brought doom to us all.

A hornet’s nest that looks like a skull.

Had a fine one last night about hunting a supernatural artifact.

I also uploaded a good 15 or 20 into the archives. Such classics as Refugees on the Red Desert, A Rod, a Staff, and a Wand, and Collective Dreams of a Sentient Mountain.

A clandestine pseudoreligious order offered me a substantial sum of money and hinted at information leading to the recovery of a mysterious puce-colored jewel, if in exchange I would courier a certain black hardcover book to a contact in Atlanta, GA.

Two connecting flights and a long walk later I arrived at the Emory campus during a lot of rallies. Perhaps it was homecoming. I was supposed to meet my clandestine contact in the bleachers of an auxiliary gym, but they’d warned me I only had a fifteen minute window. I was early. The gym was empty, though a crowd of marching revelers was making all kinds of noise as they trooped past the door. I waited around a couple minutes, but still no show. The fifteen minutes were up, so I took my book and went home.

For security purposes the trip home involved another plane flight, then a ride on a cruise ship. Sitting in the airport waiting for my flight, however, I started to wonder about this book I was carrying, and to doubt my clandestine contacts’ repeated warnings not to open it. Were they playing me? Maybe the answer was right in these pages: the location of the legendary puce jewel. I took out the book and ran a hand across the glossy black cover. Ostensibly it was a copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but contained inside was the vivid, sordid legend of the Jewel. It had changed hands many times. Mystery and doom surrounded its owners.

In the middle of this chronicle, however, the narrative shifted gears without warning. Instead of the jewel, it began to follow the history of a certain sarcophagus of ghastly blue teak, more appropriate to a bowling alley lounge than a museum of antiquity. I read the transition over and over, and grew firm in the conviction that its abruptness was deliberate, that this sarcophagus and the puce jewel were somehow one. And the book revealed exactly where this sarcophagus could be found: right where I’d begun, at hte private collection in Boston where I had first encountered the representatives of the clandestine organization.

It was with firm conviction and determination that I boarded a vessel bound for Boston. En route, however, I realized I’d been discovered. The ship swarmed with representatives of the organization. For a time I eluded them, but at last they forced a confrontation. Several of them were drowned; I lost the book, but it made no difference now. I’d already read it–and reading it had apparently supplied me with more advantage than time. Somehow I had attained a new relationship with time–an unnatural capacity to remold the rules of motion, the demands of Newton’s Laws. On two occasions I withdrew revolvers from men’s hands before they could pull the trigger. I flipped people over guardrails as though they were made of straw.

By the time I had arrived in Massachusetts Bay I had acquired the gait and bearing one most often associates with cultured fiends, with Jack the Ripper, Professor Moriarty.

Outside the private gallery in question a low, wrought-iron fence lined the sidewalk, with a well-kept, if yellowed lawn beyond. I vaulted this fence, but was seen. Three men and two attack dogs met me on the sickened grass. They said nothing, but attacked. The gentleman in the lead carried a long, mahogany staff with a forked head. I wrested this from his grip with minimal effort, and swinging it with preternatural brutality and speed, left all five of my opponents lying unconscious.

I then proceeded upstairs to the sarcophagus. With the staff I smashed apart the face of the tasteless thing, whereupon within, protected by a membrane of transparent mucus, I found a large, periwinkle-blue brain, which I grasped in my hands and ripped apart. The Puce Jewel was buried between the two lobes. It was large enough to fit comfortably in my palm, diamond-cut, its edges bound in delicate silver filigree, somewhat tarnished. I took it and left.

Out on the lawn I paused, studying the jewel in some confusion. Now that I had it, I wasn’t sure what I’d expected or planned to do with it. I couldn’t very well sell it, given the horrors I knew it had wrought. I didn’t want to sell it, come to that. I wanted to keep it. It was so lovely. Just like a giant piece of pink rock-candy. The richest, most expensive piece of rock candy anyone had ever seen.

Overcome by giddy humor, I popped it jokingly into my mouth, sticky though it was with mucus and the slime from the surface of that hideous blue brain. I sucked at it, finding it flavorless, yet somehow satisfying. This is silly, I told myself. Spit it out.

Then the Puce Jewel began to dissolve…

Our family in transit over hilly fall countryside. The leaves that rich yellow that seems lit from within. The air a faint blue as though the world is caught in perpetual morning just in time for the frost to disappear but the chill and the damp to remain.

We have been traveling what seems a long time, living out the upper halves of bags, using only what we can reach. An extended vacation, then. A caravan of cars. My sisters, my cousins, my grandfather…the last autumn of his life.

With a kind of exuberant, almost magic realist sadness, a giddy fear, I am climbing trees in no waking, physics-bound fashion, but with a kung-fu aesthete’s disregard for gravity. The trunks are rough beneath my half-numb fingers, the branches thin, the clouds of leaves thick as a bamboo jungle. The sun is always just beyond the next tree, lighting everything yet never seen.

Then I am called from below by my sisters, my cousins, my mother. Grandpa is waiting at the foot of the tree, and suddenly I realize I am sixty feet in the air, and gravity exists, though I still can defy it. I make my way down with a thrill in my belly, collect my backpack stuffed with wool socks and warm layers, and rush off after the others towards the cars.

It snowed in October. It didn’t just snow, it blizzarded doomsday. Airports shut down. Cars utterly ceased to function. Nobody said anything about fallout, about the electromagnetic pulse result of a high-altitude nuclear detonation…but the effect was the same.

It felt like losing a limb–like an important part of my body had disappeared. I kept trying to flex fingers I didn’t have.

I spent hours sitting in an airport lounge with Sawyer from Lost, trying not to let things deteriorate into frustrated shouting. At last we gave up waiting for the schedule monitors to come back online. We bade each other courteous goodbyes and went out to try to figure out what the hell to do withourselves.

I ended up staying with my family in the house of a kindly old lady we didn’t know. She tried gamely to fix us meals from canned food and leftovers, while outside the level of panic and desperation rose steadily. We went out one morning (it was still snowing), to find people packing canoes and small rowboats with all their worldly possessions and setting off down the rivers. We asked what they thought they were doing. “Getting away from the tribes,” they said.

Tribes?

I ought to note I’d been reading Wizard and Glass. Midworld was caught in the throes of post-apocalyptic power struggles for control of what technology still functioned. So apparently was this world. An absurdly large angry mob was approaching our position from the west. The locals who were left began to organize defense. One rather goofy-looking guy with military training (resembling Joxer from Xena) took the responsibility of planning our defense. He wanted us to keep 80% of our forces in reserve, engage them with skirmishers, make them commit, then hit them full force.

It was a fine idea, but we needed scouts. We needed to know their strength well ahead of time. “Anybody want to volunteer?” asked Joxer.

I did.

Horribly underdressed for winter travel, I set out nonetheless, slagging westward across the suburbs through two-foot drifts. The enemy, as it turned out, numbered in the tens of thousands. Nothing we could do had a chance of stopping them.

The last thing I remember is standing on the front lawn of an abandoned house, looking up at a maple tree, its foliage blazing orange against the snow.

I am back, my allies. Boy has it been awhile. Post-Odyssey Slump felt like it segued quite seamlessly into Computer Hit by Lightning. Things got a bit tight. Better now.

So! A fun bit of publicity for me–Gwyneth Marner’s radio show “The Grain of your Voice”, on Valley Free Radio at 8 AM on Mondays, recently was so kind as to air a story of mine–William-o the Pirate King in: “Of Mice and Machinations.” I have an mp3 of the recording here; drop me an email if you’re interested in hearing it.

Lots more new stuff to come. New pictures, the rest of the dreams. Maybe me figuring out what the heck RSS is.

I carved a pumpkin:

I dreamed of riding a storm wind over the campus of St. Anselm College.