With the fading of the final notes the saxophone player turns to me. Its baleful, otherworldly gaze bores into my soul. It lowers its instrument to the disc and extends a podgy, grey hand to point at me. It looms closer, its head expanding, arm elongating. A clammy digit brushes the tip of my nose and a tingling numbness spreads over my face like an ice-cold spider web. A voice like the rustle of dried leaves whispers inside my head: “Forever…” The last syllable stretches, just like my grandfather’s dying breath.And the beady, black orbs are no longer eyes but deep, obsidian pits…

A crush of bodies surrounded the featureless monument. The enraged dead clambered atop their ghastly kin. Caiaphas tucked his knees to his chest and hugged his legs tightly, staring at the scores of ragged, flailing hands as they scratched for purchase over the edge of the cylinder. Metal thrummed and thunder roared, filling his head.Now there were words within the deafening roar. “Straaaange,” they seemed to say. “Daaaace…”“Straaaangerrrr…”Then a quick, awful chant: “CAIAPHAS! FOREVER! CAI—”And with a piercing whistle it ended as his eardrums burst.

The vibrations he felt in his sleep had nothing to do with his soul easing out of his body as he dreamily thought; they came solely from the weight and motion of the freight train rolling north to deliver fuel, furniture and other items having no relevance to Elijah’s life or his dreaming. On the metal rail his arm itched like a nose with a feeling that something bad was about to happen. In another life the sound of the train would have been reminiscent of certain songs by Muddy Waters or even Bruce Springsteen but not in this one. In this life the sound stabbed viciously against the night exactly like a human being demonstrating flawless disrespect for the life of another human being.--from short story ELIJAH’S SKIN

Ah, Drilos. I wanted someone to talk to, but I never counted on a conversation quite so hilarious. Not only are you saying I’m the multiverse, but also that I’m becoming something devoid of existence? Ridiculous. Right now I’m just a disembodied consciousness, but as long as I exist in a void then the void won’t be a void. Right now I consist of energy rather than matter; it’s just nature’s way of compensating for the random space-time shifts of a being it apparently doesn’t want to die. Fission, fusion – I don’t make up the laws. The where and when of me are easy questions to answer. What am I? That’s a bit more difficult, but ultimately I was born a human, and nothing can change that. The how and the why of me – now there are two questions that are impossible to answer.

Quinn seemed to have become one of a jaded philosophical society, a group of arcane deviates. Their raison d'etre was a kind of mystical masochism, forcing initiates toward feats of occult daredevilry - "glimpsing the inferno with eyes of ice", to take from the notebook a phrase that was repeated often and seemed a sort of chant of power. As I suspected, hallucinogenic drugs were used by the sect, and there was no doubt that they believed themselves communing with strange metaphysical venues. Their chief aim, in true mystical fashion, was to transcend common reality in the search for higher states of being, but their stratagem was highly unorthodox, a strange detour along the usual path toward positive illumination. Instead, they maintained a kind of blasphemous fatalism, a doomed determinism which brought them face to face with realms of obscure horror. Perhaps it was this very obscurity that allowed them the excitement of their central purpose, which seemed to be a precarious flirting with personal apocalypse, the striving for horrific dominion over horror itself.("The Dreaming In Nortown")

I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata.Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten. Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.

Το όνειρο είναι μια δεύτερη ζωή. Δεν κατόρθωσα να διασχίσω αυτές τις πύλες από φίλντισι ή κέρας που μας χωρίζουν απ' τον αόρατο κόσμο χωρίς ν' αναρριγήσω. Οι πρώτες στιγμές του ύπνου είναι η εικόνα του θανάτου, μια νεφελώδης νάρκη αιχμαλωτίζει τη σκέψη μας, και δεν μπορούμε να προσδιορίσουμε με ακρίβεια τη στιγμή που το εγώ, υπό άλλη μορφή , συνεχίζει το έργο της ύπαρξης. Πρόκειται για έναν ακαθόριστο υπόγειο χώρο ο οποίος φωτίζεται σιγά σιγά, και όπου βγαίνουν απ' την σκια και τη νύχτα οι επιβλητικά ακίνητες χλομές μορφές, που κατοικούν στο ενδιαίτημα του Καθαρτηρίου. Έπειτα σχηματίζεται ο πίνακας, μία νέα λάμψη καταυγάζει και κάνει αυτές τις αλλόκοτες οπτασίες να σαλέψουν: - μας ανοίγεται ο κόσμος των Πνευμάτων.