A vast, indoor mockup of a sleazy medieval slum, shrouded in perpetual darkness, in which a vast and perpetual game of live-action D&D is played. I stumbled upon this phenomenon somewhat by accident, joining with a band of six or seven adventurers including Charlie Finlay as human ranger/party leader and Toby Buckell as disgruntled halfling thief. (Note disturbing parallels to Order of the Stick throughout.) I played (surprise) a dwarf fighter pretending to be a burglar.

In the absence of moderators or DMs, the adventuring and combat systems were based on a set of tradable cards printed with objectives and spells and combat regulations. These cards also functioned as currency; accomplishing an objective was worth certain stated quantities of gold and XP.

On my first attempt I rather made a mess of things; my objective was to retrieve some pulsing blue orb from the hoard of a rival band of adventurers who were hoarding it. The card was worth quite a lot, but what with my clumsy misunderstanding of the rules and my general roleplaying rustiness I severely fucked up my group’s chances, leaving Tobias, if not the rest of them, rather resentful.

I vowed to improve.

I returned the next night with a newfound resolve and a black cape lined in red silk slung over my shoulders. Again my allies made sharp remarks about my poor performance, though Finlay, being a good leader, remained diplomatic. I kept silent, resolving to prove my worth by actions, not words. Our objective that evening was an ambitious one: to infiltrate and loot our rival band’s very lair: an expansive set of apartments next door to a popular and thoroughly raunchy cabaret theater.

As our band made its way through the evening’s crowds, I jostled my way to the front, paying only half attention to their debate of the strategies of frontal assault and subterfuge. Being the newest member of their band, I knew I was the least recognizable, and relying on my high charisma and dashing black cape, I figured I could infiltrate and scout their stronghold without their ever catching on to my malicious intent.

In retrospect, I should have given my fellows more credit and let them in on my plan. As it was, I assumed they wouldn’t give me the chance, and anyhow they’d probably still be arguing by the time I got back. Alas, I failed to anticipate how well my ruse would work.
I was making for a side entrance to our enemies’ compound, running over plausible excuses for my intrusion in my head, when one of their number reached over the railing of a low balcony to pluck at my cape. I recognized her: a low-level witch draped in flimsy black gauze (played here by Natalie Portman), who, by her dress and demeanor, seemed to have taken advantage of her proximity to the cabaret by offering her services as a lady of the evening.

She invited me to join her. Not wanting to seem too eager, I declined. “I am going to the cabaret,” I told her. She made a pert face and released me.

I strolled on to the cabaret box office and made brief perusal of the bills pasted in the window. Then I returned to the foot of the stair that led to Ms. Portman’s aerie. “This evening’s show has already sold out,” I told her.

“What a shame,” she said, and held out a hand.

As she led me in through the balcony door, I craned my neck behind me to search for my allies in the crowd. They were nowhere to be seen.

Our arch-rivals’ lair resembled one of Tufts’ Hillside Apartments. Every available surface was cluttered with pizza boxes, empty two-liter soda bottles and fake weapons. A television flickered in the common room; a few of her housemates lay sprawled on the couches, oblivious to our presence. Realizing I was as-yet unarmed, I plucked a plastic basket-hilted dagger from a countertop and slid it through the back of my belt.

Natalie’s room was actually on the ground floor; at the top of the stairs she turned to me, wrapped her fingers in my cape. “So I hear you’re a burglar,” she said.

“Not tonight,” I answered. “Tonight, I’m a kidnapper.” I lifted her up in my arms and carried her down the stairs.

Near the bottom, an enormous foam-sheathed broadsword leaned against the wall, as tall as Natalie herself. I set her on her feet and reached back to grab it; just as I did so she caught me by the other wrist and pulled me into her room.
She kissed me.

My response might have been more convincing had there not at that moment been a loud crash, followed by shouting and the clash of plastic swords. Over her head, through the half-open door, I saw Charlie and Toby and the rest of my crew battling their way past. Apparently they’d chosen the brute-force option.

Natalie pushed me back towards the bed. I sat down, resting the broadsword on the floor between my legs. The plastic dagger in my belt dug into my back. She got down on her knees, wrapped her hands pornographically around the hilt with an utterly mischievous expression on her face.

Then the door swung wide, one of her housemates toppled through it to the floor with Toby roaring on top of him, and I started awake.

It was quarter to seven. I went back to sleep, and found myself seated in the lair of my own adventuring party with Charlie and Toby. It was morning, with sun streaming in through the windows. They were about to critique a short story of mine. I was nervous because basically what I’d done was a complete retelling of one of Toby’s old stories. But we never got the chance to discuss it, because just then another member of our party burst in with some kind of security tape of what had happened the night before. It showed the melee in Natalie’s room, just after I had woken up. It showed me pulling the dagger from my belt, grabbing Natalie around the waist and slitting her throat. Absurdly bright red blood flooded everywhere.

I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. I had no memory of what I was seeing, and I couldn’t believe I would have done such a thing. We fell to arguing. Every few minutes somebody else from the group would arrive and the argument would escalate. Before long everybody but Charlie was shouting themselves red in the face.

Then Natalie herself came in, and there was silence.

I am writing/reading/experiencing a story/film/dream written by Neil Gaiman/myself/a mysterious third party, in which the main character, a college student played by myself/Tom Cruise, is haunted by by a series of increasingly intense and insidious specters, including a befuddled, gray-bearded homeless man, a guy in a white bunny suit and a guy in a black gorilla suit.

Part of the action of the dream was contained in a nondescript black hardcover book/manuscript whose text veered wildly with the turning of the pages between a pleasingly large, semibold serif font, neat, almost feminine handwriting, and a dense, ash-black, angular block-print that looked as though it had been carved into the page by a fiery claw.

As I pinballed about campus between classes and dorms, library and bed (I was taking five classes all loosely related to science fiction, writing and literature, one of which was taught by John Fyler of Tufts), I would in any spare moment I could find take up this book to read or write.

Nate Gurevich was my roommate. We shared a room with twelve other guys, who slept all crammed in a row in one long bed. Because there was so little space in the room, I kept my walking-sticks (both the dragon-engraved Purpura staff and the Blackthorn cane) leaning in the hallway outside my door. They seemed always to be there when I wanted them, but it became apparent others were borrowing the sticks for their own purposes. Every morning I found the purpura staff in worse and worse shape, until one day it appeared that someone had snapped it into quarters over his knee, then pathetically attempted to reassemble it using rubber bands and splints. It resembled one of the Roman fasces, the rod-wrapped ax symbolic of enforced peace and grand authority.

The alarm clock which awoke me for classes every morning was a magical pint glass with a radio somehow embedded in the glass. At the appropriate, and often other, inappropriate times, it would begin to emit the strains of anthemic rock songs, which could only be silenced by pressing the red ink decorations on the glass, causing them to dilate or contract. It angered my fellow-roommates to no end.

At one point I passed a mirror and realized my hair had grown long again.

The book was about transformation. It conspired with the specters of the bunny and gorilla to goad its reader/protagonist towards some monumental change. At its climactic moment I was lifted up out of my university setting and deposited on a rutted road of worn, cracked asphalt that led across a windswept highland field. I was chasing the gorilla, which had itself been transformed into a massive, faintly iridescent black geological being reminiscent of the Thing and the Spirit of the Forest from Princess Mononoke. It could fly, or rather it could jump as though it weighed nothing, as though the Earth’s gravity was to it as that of the Moon was to men. Its sheer power taunted me; in my present form there was no way I could catch it, yet everything about this place, about the ashen text that had preceded it, told me I could take another form if I only had the strength of will. The man in the bunny suit appeared beside me, trying to explain this, trying to prod me onward and upward. I shrugged him off. I didn’t want his help. Yet when I did so he seemed to fall right out of existence. His body, or what was left of it, crumpled to the fallow ground by the roadside among the stumps of last year’s corn. And I realized he had left his bunny suit behind. I picked it up, put it on and resumed the chase. Still, I couldn’t close the gap. But I was motivated now. I engaged the full focus of my consciousness on the task. I envisioned myself changing, my body growing large and dense and yet weightless, ascending into the upper air. But with the bunny now my ally, I realized a direct transformation wasn’t the way. My path must be unique.

An infinitely long chain of hobo circus clowns (evoking the homeless graybeard of the university) descended towards me out of the clouds, each gripping the ankles of the next.

The nearest one gripped me by the hands and drew me upwards into waking.

A ramshackle, dust-coated world filled with tradition and suspicion, a la that of the inestimable Cathy Perdue. In the woods, dark and choked with clutter as though long abandoned, a brown clapboard house, low to the ground, but many-gabled.

I’m lost, wandering, with no idea where I am or how I got here. I find the door hanging loose from the hinges, clear myself a place on the floor in the living room and take up residence among the mice and spiders.

I’m careful. I know that people in this age (whatever age it may be) don’t take to strangers. I only go out at night. In the woods, in the dark, in some abandoned ruin, I figure I ought to be safe.

But I get caught. A fat bald guy with a shotgun and a giant flashlight warns me off his land, suggests I get out of town altogether. I’m ready and willing to take his advice. It was a nice place, a relief from wind and waking up with frost on my clothes. But these things are temporary, as are all comforts. I walk on–or I start to.

My dad steps out of the wooded shadows and stops me before I get 20 yards. He points out an even more ramshackle, even more ruinous outbuilding to the dark ruined house–just a shack, really. A single room. Inside, however, is a stairway leading down into a vast, high-ceilinged basement. A gas lamp casts unsteady light across drifts of abandoned crap. My dad shuts the door, leads the way down, and gets back to work.

I find myself helping him to clear space, to clean and organize and forge some kind of living space from the chaos. He has found an old upright vacuum cleaner and is tinkering with it, trying to make it work.

“So what happened here?” I ask him. “Is this supposed to be some kind of post-apocalypse?”

He gives me a look that says “No kidding,” and sends me off scavenging for power cord.

Half the people disappeared from the world. Inexplicably. There was no apocalypse. No alien invasion or war to end all wars. People were just gone. Streets empty. Maybe it was more than half. Those of us who were left had no way of counting. At first, we couldn’t have if we tried. We were all too busy grieving.

It happened on a balmy, overcast summer night in Boston. I was standing on a crowded subway platform under orange halogen lights–the red line, Charles St., the river north, rows of little shops leading south towards the Common–when the eerie keen of collective loss arose all at once from those around me, and I turned to find Erin gone.

I retraced my steps, walking over every inch of ground we’d travelled that night, stopping at every corner, every store window. The whole way I had to fight against everyone else. They were all as distraught as I was, all occupied in the same task. But the people we were looking for weren’t there. Finally, again collectively, we all accepted they were gone. People sat on curbs staring into the silent streets, speechless. I got up sooner than the rest, resolved to systematically seek out every person I cared about, in order of shortest distance. Somewhere I found a bike. I rode across the bridge to Medford, but Amy wasn’t at her house. Who knew where she might be. So I took my bike and got back on the T, which was still crowded, though quieter now. I went to Brighton.

I found Diana sitting on the floor outside her room. She’d just come from home. My parents were gone. She didn’t know where Amy was, or Udi. So we got up and went into her room and just kind of sat there on the bed, listening to mp3s from her computer. We talked about how weird it was that everything still worked even though there was nobody to run it or use it. We could ride the subway and surf the internet, but the quiet and the mass grief had impressed upon us a sense that the world had ended and was empty, that we who were left didn’t count.

We decided we’d live together from now on. Exhausted from our search, emotionally drained, we agreed to go to sleep. She got up to take a shower. I lay down on the bed.

I sat in a burgundy leather armchair in the study of my parents’ Norwood house, drinking tea and shuffling through old magic cards that had never existed. It was Christmas Eve.

My father came in. “Merry Christmas,” he said, tossed an envelope into my lap, then headed off to bed. A letter? Who knew I was here? Someone named Okami, apparently. The letter contained a single, typed sheet of notepaper in which Okami invited me to submit to a new magazine he was starting. He wanted something quick and dark, and he wanted it soon.

I had just the thing!

Ecstatic, I turned the envelope over, and realized I knew the return address. It belonged to an anime, comic and gaming store in an underground mall. It closed at midnight. If I hurried, I could make it. I shuffled through papers, found the story, pulled on coat and scarf and took a last look at the address.

Along the bottom of the page, I noticed a line of writing in a thin, feminine hand: a warning. “Don’t come after dark.” I shrugged it off, tossed the envelope onto the chair and headed out. I was just going to drop of the story and leave.

Danielle was sitting on the kitchen counter in her PJs, playing with her laptop. “Where you going, Boon?” I told her. “Can I come? I’m bored.”

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”

#

The mall was a series of angling, claustrophobic corridors connected by stairwell after stairwell leading down, then up, then down again. The walls and the floor and the ceiling were all white, all windowless. Who knew how far we were underground? Every shop window was dark. We hadn’t passed a single person.

“Where is everybody?” said Udi. “The mall doesn’t close for half an hour. It’s Christmas Eve!”

She was right. I was beginning to worry about that warning.

I shoved the story under my arm, fumbled in my pockets for something reassuring.
My fingers found the smooth, textured handle of my scrimshaw penknife. I wrapped an arm around my sister’s shoulders. We walked faster.

We were almost to the comic store by the time we noticed the two white cats following behind us.. It wasn’t clear how long they’d been there, but all of a sudden they were desperately friendly, pawing at us, rubbing against our ankles as we walked. I stopped to pet one and it jumped up into my arms. Udi tried to ignore hers. It was freaking her out.

At first glance, Okami’s was as dark and dead as all the other stores. Ultra-violent, ultra-cute anime girls on comic covers lined the walls from floor to ceiling. A cardboard stand-up of a cartoon dragon. A glass case, where they kept all the really rare and valuable stuff. More magic cards that didn’t exist. And behind the glass case, blending in so well with her surroundings I hadn’t noticed her until I looked her in the eye, a skinny asian girl in a ponytail, dressed all in black, with an expression of blank astonishment on her face.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I got your call for submissions letter. I was in town. I just came to drop this off.” I slid the story towards her across the glass.

She stopped it, turned it around and slid it back. “I can’t take this now.”

“What? But your letter said–”

“Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t take it. We closed early today. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to come here at night? You can bring it tomorrow. During the day. Now I think you’d better go. Quickly, all right? Get out of here.”

I was confused. I wanted to protest, to ask her to explain. I wanted to give her my story. “The Nine-Tailed Cat”. I knew they’d like it. I knew it was right up their alley. But the look on her face made me back away, grab Danielle and rush back the way we came.

Luna (for the cat in my arms was surely Luna, Singing Brook Farm’s fuzzy white female demon) yawned and pawed at my chest, claws poking gently through my shirt and into my skin, her unmistakable, eerily humanoid fifth claw sticking out like a thumb. It was like she wanted to reassure me, convince me things would be fine. I wasn’t convinced. Udi’s cat kept pawing at her, meowing plaintively.

“God,” she said finally, after the white mall corridors had blurred past us for who knows how long. “Aren’t we at the end yet? Why does this mall have to be so big?”

“We’re getting close,” I said. “Five more minutes.”

“Oh, fine!” Udi gave an exasperated sigh and scooped up the second white cat.

We were almost to the entrance. One more flight of stairs…

She screamed and dropped the cat. It must have clawed her or bit her. It ran into a corner and sat down licking its paws. “Ohmigod, Boon. Something’s happening to me! Help!” She held up her arm. It was thinning, elongating before my eyes. White tufts of cat hair sprang up out of her skin. Her hand was shrinking. She was turning into a werecat.

I put Luna down with an accusing look. Her green-white eyes were reproachful.

I fumbled in my pockets for the scrimshaw knife. A sailing scene carved in the handle, a ship and a rocky shore. I’d bought it on a stupid impulse at a tourist trap in Newfoundland. In the real world, it was already many years lost.

I flicked it open, locked it in place. The blade was a warm, clean gleam under the mall’s ghastly pale fluorescent lights. Pure silver.

I gave it to Danielle. “Prick your finger with this. It’s silver. It might help.”

Her hands were shaking. She crouched down, put her hand on the floor, palm facing up, and raised the knife. I was afraid she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t press hard enough.

She grimaced and brought the knife down. It pricked her finger. I saw a little smear of blood.

“Did it cure you? Did you feel anything?”

Udi nodded, face pale, lips hanging open. “Bliss. Relief. Understanding. Complete understanding of everything in the universe all at once.”

I thought she must have been joking, playing bitter sarcasm for all it was worth. Maybe the catness was already taking over her mind. But the way she said it sure didn’t sound like it. And her finger looked better. Pink and healthy.

“Then do it again,” I said. “Harder. Cut deeper.”

She shook her head. “You do it,” she said. She gave me the knife.

Five minutes away from the exit.

I ran my thumb across the blade. There was a catch at the very tip, a tiny, sharp burr I could never get out no matter how many times I tried to burnish it away with file or stone. That burr was what had pricked her. But I needed more than that now. I got a good grip on the handle. I held her wrist tight against the floor, positioned the knife just over the marks of the bite, right along the meat of the palm.

I gritted my teeth and tensed my muscles to slice–

And I woke.

I posted twelve more dreams from the back catalog, most from the period between Spring 2003 and Winter 2004, including some of my most profound experiences with lucid dreaming, superhuman powers and dream control.

I particularly recommend The House Was a Clockwork Automaton, perhaps my most thematically coherent dream ever.

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 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.