kagablog

(part one)

It took some time to overcome the crippling fear. Each time I left my body I became painfully aware of its vulnerability. I had a friend once who also used to leave his body. We met from time to time in the library, the small one near the park. You may not know this library. In a way it was hardly a library at all, more an enormous car garage packed with mouldy boxes of books. The place had a specific smell as well. A smell you couldn’t quite place, one which had nothing to do with tattered books or the large succulent leaves pressed like palms against the misted windows. It was always cold in there. No-one was ever in attendace. Once I saw someone who seemed to be in charge, but when I approached them they merely pulled on a raincoat and faded away into the park. I don’t know how my friend and I came to meet there. I think that we met once in a disturbing dream and somehow arranged to continue the association in reality. Or perhaps that was simply the plot of some faded yellow paperback I found in the library one slow afternoon. My memory isn’t what it used to be. I keep making assumptions and seeing juxtapositions in random objects and situations. It’s the dreams and habitual migration from my body. It’s the books which don’t seem quite real and the way my phone rings in the middle of the night. I answer it sometimes. And its almost as if I can hear a voice on the other end; a tiny voice occluded and obscured by static, like a crossed line out there in the ocean. Someone who isn’t talking to me at all. The line always goes dead after a few minutes and the phone doesn’t ring for days. It’s hardly surprising. I mean I’ve been using another phone for months now. I stopped using the other one because the video camera in it’s hood died when I tried to film an owl flying across the park. I can still hear the owls at night. The ring like distant telephones in the fuzzy heads of dark trees. I’m quite alone these days. The camera is broken but all the telephonic functions are still in operation.

But I digress. I digress. I was in fact speaking about the crippling fear, the one I had come to associate with out-of-body activity. This fear found it’s source in my friend. More particularly in a story he had once told me. You see he and I were at the library, smoking cigarettes in the large ferns which huddle coldly outside the garage door. It was winter and a light, freezing rain was dappling the heavy trees and distant swan pond. He was speaking about leaving his body. He told me that once he was feeling particularly adventurous. In fact he was feeling so adventurous he decided to leave his room. Previously he’d only floated about like a jellyfish, examining his sleeping self and details of the subtly shifting room. I could never tell whether he was lying or not, but somehow enjoyed the stories all the same. Perhaps he’d never left his body at all. Perhaps he was just some stranger I met in the park, another lunatic whose phone rang in the middle of the night. It was just like him to expand on a concept which I’d introduced into the conversation, slowly annexing it, cultivating it until it seemed as though it had originated with him. These flamboyant expansions of his would multiply bacteriologically over the original story and pretty soon it was all he could ever talk about. I didn’t even know his name. The library was close to the hospital so there was a strong chance that there was something wrong with him. Though I don’t know much about hospitals. Whether or not they would allow lunatics out like this was quite beyond my realm of speculation. Perhaps he was sane, merely haunted, humoring my peculiar state of mind out of boredom. But again, I digress.

He had decided to leave his room, via the window. He told me that he sort of swam across to the curtains. A form of ex corpus movement which I understood, having experienced it first hand. He described the bright, shifting lights which were circulating beyond the gauzy drapes of the window. He said that they were moving around like searchlights across water. Far from evoking fear, they seemed to instead create a sort of fascination, like a light at the far end of a dark cave, something you naturally wanted to investigate. So he melted through the curtains into the wave-forms of the light, expecting to find a hallucinogenic view of his garden, the familiar scape of trees, chimneys and tiled rooftops. He was instead greeted by an unfamiliar vista, a white tundra not unlike what you would expect to find in the Arctic Circle. He told me that he even experienced a sort of coldness there. His first sensation of temperature in an out-of-body state. I smoked my hand rolled cigarette and listened to all of this, attempting to discern the lies from the truths. It was night across the tundra and the white plains sang out evenly in all directions. Across the sky shifted the nebulae of what appeared to be the Aurora Borealis. He claimed to have drifted for hours across that stellar waste, utterly raptured by the enormous formations which constantly shifted their glowing plumes, like milk mixing against the pure blackness of the sky. The sheer beauty of this alien firmament eventually caused him to lose track of himself and his situation. After awhile he suddenly began to get a panicky sensation, a sort of prickly sensation around his throat and face which he interpreted as a sign to return to his body. Of course he had lost track of the portal he had crossed through. He couldn’t even remember whether it was a window he was supposed to be searching for. All he could see was trackless snow stretching off for miles in all directions. In a fever of panic he began to ’swim’ desperately through the frigid air, searching here and there for the entrance to his room. At length he saw a fluttering of curtains, far out across the featureless waste. A small square of fabric billowing red against the horizon. As he approached it he could immediately sense that something was very wrong. He passed through the drapery in a state of psychic exhaustion. The sight which greeted him was far from pleasant. Glutinous snow had billowed in through the window, coating everything like pale scum at the bottom of a pond. An infestation of whiteness which seemed to be slowly erasing his room and all that lay within it. But this wasn’t the worst of it. A thin, naked man with blue skin and a pendulous pot belly was squatting over his body and attempting to claw open his mouth with a pair of long, boneless fingers. Stricken with fear, my friend flew to the bed and began to wrestle the blue man away from his inert body. He told me that the man was hairless and slippery, like a frog. He was also possessed of enormous strength and inhuman flexibility. My friend understood that the blue man was attempting to crawl into and seize control of his body. An action which would leave him stranded alone on the shore of a far world. Considering the situation, my friend fought with every ounce of strength he had, battling to wrest the tentacular blue fingers from his sleeping body’s mouth. The pair strained against one another like that for what seemed like hours before my friend was able to awaken, shaking and sweating in the darkness of his room.

Ever since I heard this story I have been stricken with a crippling fear of being out of myself for too long. I tried to avoid leaving my body, but there is little control with things like that. Who knows when a traveling-fugue may come, blowing me out of myself like a cloud of seeds from a dandelion. But this was almost a year ago. Now it is winter again and the world is still and I am less afraid. It snowed again last night and the park outside was a silent wonderland of blurry shapes. I ventured out at three o’clock in the morning and even the owls were quiet. The whole world seemed wrapped up in a blanket, lost in the intoxicating dream of itself. I went to sleep in the blackness of pre-dawn and left my body without premeditation. I recall floating above myself with a sense of playful, underwater ease, feeling somehow safe for the first time in months. At times I would circulate like a breeze beside the large windows which overlooked the park at night. I was severely tempted to venture out into that wonderland, in my astral form. But I managed to resist the urge well enough and soon slid back down into the feverish kaleidoscope of billowing dreams.

My fear was closely tied to the appearances of my friend. Perhaps this was a co-incidence. But when I had experienced the greatest periods of fear, I would always see him down in the park or en route to the library. He was always wearing a suit, the colour of which I could never place when asked to recall. When peace reigned in my life he would never really be around. Occasionally I saw others in the library, but no-one seemed to know my friend so I never enquired as to his whereabouts. Though after the pleasant experience of vacating my body during the snowfall, I decided to seek him out and relate my newfound feelings of ease concerning the subject of psychic projection. Perhaps the conversation might lighten the mood of our previous astral anecdotes. I went down to the library, my boots crunching in the hard snow. Snow was rare in these parts and it had already begun to melt into long swords of wilting whiteness. The gutters were black with it’s passage. Soon the world would return back to the way it had always been and my mood of lightness would dissipate. But for now I was still in another realm, as though I hadn’t quite returned to myself.

When I arrived at the library, the garage door was up and the familiar subaqueous light filtered through the many plants clustered up against the windows. The long linoleum tables were arranged in even rows on the raw concrete, receding into gloom. I wandered between the tables, absently picking at soft, worn paperbacks, drifting into the further regions of the library. I would always randomly open the books I chose, softly bury my face in their aged paper and breathe in the fragrance of the book. For a moment the smell would transport me to another place, as though the entire history of the book’s travels were contained in it’s fragrance. I had even ceased to look at the covers or skim the text. Now it was only the aroma of a book that seemed to matter to me. It also helped to mask the pervasive and yet somehow indescribable scent of the library, which had nothing to with the books, plants, tables or raw concrete and engine oil. I was in the process of sampling various literary perfumes when the title of a book caught my eye. It was an old hardcover edition, probably from the Victorian era. The book was bound in hard cloth which was inlaid with curious patterns, not unlike the Norse swirls you will see on ancient relics from Scandinavia. The title of the book was: ‘The Fallen House of the Spider God’. I was curiously drawn to this book and was about to pick it up when I noticed another person in the library with me. I looked up and saw an old, hunched woman perusing some dusty magazines in an old cardboard box. She had her back to me and her long, stringy hair hung down her back in colourless strands. A floral print dress from a bygone decade sat awkwardly upon her shoulders. Usually I would not approach another person in the library, but due to my light mood and the dreaminess of the day I decided to ask her if she perhaps knew my friend. I circled the long table, forced into an irregular orbit which took me some distance away from her before I was able to close the gap. She still had her back to me when I finally drew close to her.

“Excuse me,” I murmured, clearing my throat.

She seemed quite shocked to hear another voice and turned abruptly. I caught a glimpse of rheumy eyes and a toothless, hanging mouth.

“I was looking for a friend of mine…”

“I don’t know anything!” she almost shrieked, her voice resonating strangely in the confined space.

I was taken aback by her outburst and must have retreated a step or two. She immediately returned to a sort of ovine docility, peering at me with her goggling eyes.

“Why don’t you try the library notice board,” she ventured in a confused tone, returning to her outdated periodicals.

Somehow this statement disturbed me more than her scream. The notion that the library had a notice board was somehow unnatural and uncanny to me. I had never seen one. Come to think of it, as far as I knew, I was the only person who referred to this place as a library. It was almost a private joke which my friend probably mimicked in conversation.

“Where can i find this notice board?” I asked her coldly.

She vaguely indicated the narrow mouth of a passage, partially hidden between an pile of dusty trunks and an old tool shelf. This discovery also surprised me, as I was fairly certain that the garage door was the only way in or out of the library. I thanked her and approached the entrance to the passage, circumventing several long tables in endless figure eight loops.

The passage was something of a service shaft, lit by naked bulbs. These dangled at irregular intervals down a seemingly endless corridor. I say ’seemingly endless’ because the shaft tilted upward somewhere along it’s length. This, and the featureless repetition of the corridor, gave one the impression of those infinity mirrors you sometimes see in hotel elevators. The indefinable smell of the library was strongest here. The air was also very still and undisturbed, noticeably colder, almost pressurized. I drifted into the passage feeling my ears pop slightly. I drew my coat around me, moving from pool to pool of yellow light, losing myself a little in the slices of dimness between. After about ten meters or so I noticed a previously unnoticed tunnel leading off to my right. It was a short little run-off from the passage, terminating in a wall upon which was fixed an old cork backed notice board. The board was illuminated by a tired old lampshade and some dog eared notices hung drearily from it. Sparing a glance down at the endless passage I entered the short shaft and approached the board. The notices seemed relatively arbitrary upon first inspection, pinned to the cork with brassy old drawing pins. One of the notices offered lessons in dead languages, for academic purposes no doubt. Another was an advertisement by a local piano and harp tuner. This was pinned beside a one-room vacancy note. I scanned across these suburban pamphlets until my eyes stopped short on a photocopied picture of my friend’s face. The caption’ HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?” was printed above the grainy monochrome photograph. Below was a telephone number with an unusual foreign dialing code. No other information was available. I stared at the picture. His dot matrix eyes hovered above a frozen smile. In this instance it seemed the sort of face you glimpse in ancient periodicals and newsreels, the forgotten face of a stranger. This new development perplexed me utterly. I spent the rest of the day wandering around the melting snow in a sort of daze, drinking coffee out of paper cups and pondering the fate of my friend. I returned home when it was dark and dialed the number on the phone I had stopped using. Outside the owls had started up again.

After dialing, there were long periods of broken silence. I think this was due to the unusual dialing code and the number of connections which would have to be made in order to place my call. The line hiccuped, went dead and then became swamped by analog noise and intermittent beeping. These interruptions were further enhanced by long periods of blankness in between. At one stage a tape-recorded operator message began repeating an urgent message in some indecipherable language. I waited patiently and eventually the phone at the other end began to ring. I waited by the windows, gazing out into the darkness of the park. Somebody answered and almost instantly hung up. I put the phone down and smoked a cigarette on the tiny balcony, listening to the birds. Late that night my phone began to pulse quietly. I was so used to the anonymous calls that I had left it permanently on silent.

“Hello?” I answered, my voice breaking the stillness of the night.

A girl’s tiny voice spoke, after a lengthy pause.

“Hello,” the voice whispered, through a wash of static. “Who is this?”

“I’m calling about the poster you put up in the library,” I explained.

“What library?” she murmured in a dense, angular accent which sounded vaguely Eastern European.

It seemed as though she had freshly awakened from a deep sleep. I almost apologized for rousing her when I remembered that it was in fact she who had called.

“I’m not sure,” I floundered. “It’s just that the person you are trying to get in touch with happens to be a friend of mine.”

“Oh, I think I know what you mean,” she replied, seeming to stretch and half yawn.

“The only problem is that I’m also trying to get in touch with him,” I said.

There was a long pause. I thought that for a moment that the line had gone dead.

“Hello?”

“Sorry,” she replied vaguely. “I thought I heard a noise.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to this and hesitated for a moment before responding.

“A noise?”

“I think it’s alright now…”

I heard a scuffling, then subsequent footsteps. The acoustics changed as she moved from a confined space to a much larger one.

“I’ve gone outside,” she stated quietly.

I could hear her monophonic footsteps, trudging through dense snow.

“Are you in danger?” I asked, unsure of my ground.

“I think its alright now,” she repeated more decisively.

I thought that I should attempt to broach the subject once more.

“About the poster…”

“Oh yes,” she sighed, her voice obliterated for a moment by a fluff of wind distortion. “Have you seen him?”

“No,” I answered. “I was hoping you could perhaps give me some information…Who he is exactly, his work, that sort of thing.”

More scufflings filtered through. Then the acoustics changed again. She seemed to enter another space.

“I’m in the big tent now,” she said quietly.

“The tent?” I frowned. “What tent?”

“The tent outside,” she replied quietly.

“Where are you exactly?…If you don’t mind me asking that is.”

She stopped walking and there was a loud creaking of wood. I could tell that she had either sat or lay down on something.

“A house some distance outside Lujavri,” she replied incoherently. “It’s an old, rundown place, there are noises.”

“Where is Lujavri?” I asked, mispronouncing the name despite my best effort.

“It’s a village in Murmansk Oblast district on Kola Peninsula. Lujavri is the old Sami name, Russians call it something else.”

“You are in Russia?”

“Yes.”

“How far is the village?”

“Quite far.”

“Are you Russian?”

“No, I don’t like Russia so much. I’m staying at this house for awhile, but I can’t leave the grounds.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I wish I could get out.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Everyone else has left and I can’t leave the house untended. Also its very very cold outside. Very far to walk anywhere. I’m stuck here till someone comes.”

“That sounds terrible. How long have you been marooned there?”

She paused for a long time, seeming to forget my question.

“Long time,” she eventually breathed.

I could hear her scuffling around.

“It’s lonely here.” she mumbled vaguely. “All the trees are dead.”

“Why are you looking for…” I paused, remembering that I did not yet know my friend’s name. “Why are you looking for the man in the poster?”

“He’s a some sort of travel agent,” she replied. “He’s supposed to book me a trip, supposed to get me out of here.”

“Oh right I see, when last did you hear from him?”

“Long time now.”

There was another long, yet not uncomfortable silence. The sort of silence you expect to interrupt a conversation in the middle of the night. It was after all quite nice to talk to someone else at this ungodly hour. The nights can be so long.

“I’m lying down now,” she whispered.

“In the tent?”

“It’s a very large tent, almost a…how do you say? Marquee”

“Why is there a marquee outside the house?”

“It’s traditional in this part of the world. It’s an old house, has old customs.”

“I see, it must be cold in there.”

“It is. Very cold.”

“Why don’t you go back inside?”

“Cold there too. Sick of being locked up. So bored.”

“Doesn’t the place have heating?”

“It’s a very old house. But I don’t mind the cold so much. I come from a very cold place.”

“Where do you come from?”

“I’ve never left Arctic Circle.”

“Your English is very good for someone who has never left the Arctic Circle.”

She sighed dolefully.

“I listen to radio. I read. English not so hard. There are harder languages. Dead languages much harder.”

This seemed to chime a faint bell in me, something which made me doubt her claims.

“You know I saw a notice up for a dead language tutor, on the notice board in the library,” I said. “Did you see it when you put up your poster?”

This elicited a giggle.

“I’ve never been to this library you keep talking about,” she smiled.

“How do you suppose your poster got up there?”

“I gave plenty of posters to my friends, the ones that travelled out before me,” she explained. “They must be trying to help me.”

I began to feel bad for mistrusting her. Her situation sounded far from enviable.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“It’s nice to talk to someone.” she said quietly. “I phone my friends a lot, but they have all moved on in their new lives. They don’t always like to talk to someone who…someone who stayed behind.”

“Someone will come, they won’t leave you there forever.”

“I hope not. It’s so cold.”

“Maybe you should go back inside.”

She suddenly breathed in a sort of fright.

“What is it?” I whispered nervously.

“I thought I heard that sound again…” she breathed after awhile.

“What does it sound like?”

“It’s probably nothing.”

“Is it an animal do you think? Are you in the wilderness?”

“There are no animals here.”

“What do you think it could be?”

There was another substantial pause.

“It’s probably nothing,” she said in a somewhat bored fashion.

We stayed silent for a little while.

“I could go to sleep right now,” she mumbled.

“Maybe you should,” I replied. “But go inside first, you’ll freeze out there.”

“It’s a good tent. Woven in the old way.”

“Don’t risk it. Go sleep in a bed or something.”

She was quiet and I could hear the wind flapping the tent.

“You’re nice,” she said.

We sat in silence. I heard her get up. A flapping sound and then trudging noises.

“I’m going back,” she announced.

“That’s good.”

I listened to the crunch of her many irregular footfalls. A door opened and space shrank. I could discern her footfalls, echoing as though in a large space.

“How big is the house?” I asked.

“Many rooms.”

“And your food situation?”

“There are stores, but eating same things all the time…Makes me sick.”

“I’m sorry.”

I could hear her mounting a staircase. Various creaks of wood came through and I somehow got a sense of the age of the place.

“You said this friend of ours is a travel agent,” I mused. “Does he perhaps have an office?”

“I have address.”

“Send it to me, I’ll go down there and ask him to get in contact with you.”

“My friends say he’s no more there. They stick up posters saying ‘Have you seen this man’.”

“Doesn’t matter, maybe there’s still something there which would lead me to him.”

“You are nice to help me.”

“I also want to find him.”

She lapsed back into quietness. I realized she was still climbing the staircase. Heavy, pendulous steps filtered through the tiny receiver.

“High stairs,” I mentioned. “How many floors?”

“Many,” she answered.

“Where are you going?”

“Just walking. Walk all night sometimes. Can’t sleep.”

She eventually detached from the staircase and I could hear her shambling through a succession of empty sounding chambers. Some seemed constricted, others enormous.

“I should go,” I eventually said, growing weary of listening to her wander aimlessly about.

“Stay.”

“I have to sleep,” I complained politely.

A long pause.

“Ok.”

I stood up and ambled into the sunken kitchen. I switched on the kettle. She was still walking around, opening doors and clumping down passages, showing no sign of leaving voluntarily.

“How long till dawn?” I eventually asked in an attempt to break the silence.

“It’s winter now,” she stated flatly.

“Winter?” I frowned, pouring hot water into a cup.

“This is polar night,” she muttered. “There will be no sun for some weeks.”

A that point the dreariness of her situation began to depress me intensely.

“I really have to go,” I said. “I’ll take a look at his address and call you after, ok?”

I waited for a response.

“So cold,” she whispered.

“Bye,” I murmured and quickly hung up.

A few minutes later she sent me the address. I noticed that it had begun to snow again, but somehow I could not bring myself to venture out. The atmosphere had lost all it’s previous sense of wonder.

Later that night I blew out of my body. I saw myself sleeping, huddled and dim below. I could feel the snow drifting outside, floating down through space in curtains of obliterating white. For some reason, I don’t know why, I let myself be drawn out into these. I passed through the watery meniscus of the window, out into a measureless whiteness. The sleepy trees of the park were gone. Instead I saw a flat expanse, stretching out endlessly. A velvet black sky yawned above this all, icy and immense. I expected to feel fear, but somehow didn’t. I began to spool out into the tundra, slowly at first and then gradually gathering momentum. Soon I was skimming along at a fine speed. For a long time, there was precious little to focus on save the great erasure of whiteness. But after a time I discerned a monolithic structure, approaching from the soft horizon. I slowed and was greeted by the rambling silhouette of a shadow saturated house. The ancient gables were rotted and decayed. Vast, angular supports hunched beneath the sprawling bulk of the place. In fact, the entire structure seemed to sag like a pile of dust laden cobwebs. Even the time bleached wood had something of the greyness of ancient webs. I glimpsed shattered roofing cascading down in many improbable angles. A multitude of dark windows winked throughout my aerial passage. I felt my flight describe a long loop, viewing the shapeless leviathan from a revolving perspective as I drew down. The walls and eaves rose up to meet me like the prow of some majestic shipwreck, and I was sucked neatly into an open window. Musty darkness enveloped me at a great velocity. My eyes seemed to adjust and I witnessed myself being whisked down dim, wide passages. Faded wallpaper flashed by, blurring like the down of doves. Some light penetrated the structure through tall windows, but this was not sufficient to fully illuminate the interior. Shadows brooded in gauzy masses, spilling this way and that, looming and receding, taking up entire chambers. I was sucked through a succession of rooms, curiously devoid of furnishings and adornment. High, vaulted ceilings arced and diminished as I traced a flight across the silty dust of untrodden floorboards. Carpeting disintegrated, abandoned chairs lay scattered like the husks of long-dead insects, drapery hung heavy as carved wood. I passed through empty ballrooms and beneath chandeliers which dangled like dried flower pods. I could then sense myself beginning to slow. I was in a passage, coasting along at a weak ebb. I sensed a presence and immediately discerned a thin shape hunched at the end of the corridor. The figure was seated on the floor, its back turned to me. It appeared to be speaking on an antiquated telephone, yet no sound penetrated my sphere of being. All I could hear was the numb beat of my sleeping heart and the throb of a distant, vast wind. I drew closer, like a mote of dust, and the figure seemed to freeze as though sensing my presence. It rose on thin legs and the image of the house shimmered. I was following this figure down passages and into the snow outside. I saw a vision of strange structures cascading in a lopsided fashion behind the house. These towering, shambling constructions appeared to fashioned of thick sheets and pennants of some fibrous material. They billowed and breathed like lungs in the polar winds, creating strange sagging forms against the landscape of ice. As I drew closer I saw that the material was a dense and sticky weave of silken threads which glistened vaguely in the crystal light. The form of the structure was impossible to follow and chaotic openings led into its interior much like the aorta of some unfathomable organ. I fluttered through one of these membranous portals and found myself in the atriums of a strangely biological interior. The walls heaved like sails, creating a flexible cathedral of pulsing spaces and long winding tracts. I spotted the figure far below me, squatted like an insect in a nest-like configuration of the organic weave. I drew closer and again the figure seemed to somehow hear me approaching. The tiny pale face glanced around and withdrew into the glutinous mesh. The figure was soon obscured from view. We remained like that for awhile before I sensed it returning to the house. A sort of wind at once gathered me and sucked me back into the cavernous chambers and passages of the gloomy house. I could not tell how long I was blown down depressing corridors and featureless cul-de-sacs. I eventually crested the verge of an enormous wooden staircase which tumbled down like a world of broken pianos. This case lilied open into a long hall lined with more towering windows. Panes had collapsed throughout many of these monumental frames and the snow had invaded, covering all the withered tapestries and long tables in a glutinous film of paleness. At the far end, beneath a nave-like structure, beside an enormous dead fireplace was a squatted shape. I coasted slowly over the tables, making out the thin limbs of the figure I had followed earlier. I could now make out the facial characteristics and general features of the phantom. Her scratched knees were drawn up beneath angular shoulders and I saw that she was watching intently as I approached. The eyes of this figure had an Oriental, almost mongoloid slant to them. It was difficult to imagine eyes like these having lids, so flush were they with the surface of the skin. The hair which curtained her stare was was fine and black, sighing like damaged silk against bluish-white cheeks. Large petal-like lips lay curled, slightly ajar, as though steadily drawing in breath. A suction was being created. A gravitational inflow which was reeling me in toward her like steam toward a tiny vent. I came to within an arms length of her and stopped dead as the suction ceased. I wafted insubstantially, gazing into her unblinking, insectile eyes. I observed, somewhat mesmerised, as she drew a long fingered hand to her cracked lips. Her mouth opened to meet it and I noticed that she had been sucking at something. I had been aware of this but not acknowledged it until now. At first I took it to be a strand of hair, but now I saw that it was in fact a slender cord, worn loosely about her neck. The cord emerged slowly, in black coils from between her long teeth. A tiny talisman had been attached to it, and this was gradually revealed. She regurgitated it and held it out to me on an upturned palm. I peered in close to see a tiny glass spider sitting upon her hand. There was a tiny black shape within the spider, like the smoky smears you sometimes see in crystals. I was on the verge of recognizing it’s form when she touched my cheek lightly. Her hands had been drawing toward me all this time without my noticing. The glass spider had been left suspended like a mote of dust in the freezing air, completely captivating my attention. The fingertips on my face were surprisingly warm and seemed to melt right through me. The contact of flesh jolted me intensely, though not unpleasantly. It was a lot like stepping into a bath of warm, revitalizing water. An ocean of mental static charged and retracted, fuzzing my vision at the edges. I could sense her lips scraping mine before I woke. The breath which seeped from between them was scalding. An intense aroma fountained in it’s flow, waking me instantly.

It was uncommon to snap out of an astral fugue. Usually one would drift back to their body, re-amalgamate into the well of sleep and then awaken naturally. Now I clattered up in my bed like a string drawn puppet, lit by the white light of dawn, dazed and panicky. I did not feel properly hinged to myself and when I glanced out of the window it seemed to me as though I were still dreaming. I washed my face in cold water before brewing some tea. The snowfall had increased, blurring the world outside to an absurd degree. Shapes had been nullified and softened to an atmosphere of absurd vacancy. My thoughts returned to the strange out-of-body encounter I had just experienced. I felt an unexpected emotional twinge at the memory of the girl. I could not describe this sensation. It was almost nostalgic in its intensity, somewhat melancholic. A wave of sadness and longing which repulsed me. I could not concentrate properly. I took a shower, dressed and set out to investigate the address which had been given me.

I had not been into the city for months, perhaps years. Everything seemed unfamiliar. This feeling was compounded by the overwhelming rifts of snow which feathered down from an insubstantial sky. People staggered through these falls and flurries, bundled beyond all recognition. All the faces I saw were swaddled so heavily in scarves and mufflers that there was an impenetrable sense of anonymity about all the figures I saw. A silent cloud of plastic erasers was slowly rubbing out the pencilled outlines of the world, leaving messy, ruined paper in its wake. I blundered through all this, catching the occasional fridge-like bus. I finally found myself on a dismal downtown boulevard. The address corresponded to a mangy alleyway some distance down its cluttered length. Franchises were squashed into the thin channel like crates of rotting fruit. The alley branched off a main road and seemed to collect detritus like a drain. I saw a slender barber shop lit with white neon. Beside it, farther in, was an antiquated laundromat filled with steaming machines. A large man was getting his hair cut by the old barber and several neighborhood women sat about, smoking cigarettes, waiting for their washing to dry. I picked my way through the passage, skirting enormous garbage skips and a multitude of squashed boxes. I soon neared the terminus of the alleyway; a wall of defaced brickwork from a previous era. Opposite a tangled profusion of plumbing was a plate glass window with a sign that read ‘Blue Man Travel’. A ridiculous cartoon of a blue and grinning man was painted beneath this, touting a thumbs up and comic strip grin. The paint had flaked over the years, giving the character a faded appearance. Yet despite it’s absurdity, the name and picture still uncapped a fresh vein of fear in me. Had it all been a joke at my expense? Was the blue man of ‘my friend’s’ story merely an allusion to this pathetic cartoon? Some idle invention born out of boredom and the need to patronize an astrally-obsessed stranger? I felt like a fool. But still the fear did not diminish. I stepped closer to the glass. It was dim within. They were obviously closed. Tedious pamphlets advertised desert wastelands, ruins and other innocuous locales. Some bleak photos of arctic tundras which wafted ridiculously above balloon-font vacation blurbs and exclamation marks. I cupped my hand to the glass to see these pictures a little clearer. But despite my efforts I could not recognize any of the names or places mentioned. Even the ruins seemed unfamiliar, despite their obvious grandeur which prompted a vague sense of recognition. Blurry snapshots of vast pyramids and vine engorged temples sunk in steaming jungles lined the walls. I saw a vista which looked like the surface of the moon. I tried the door but it was locked. A heavy old chain held it in place. No-one had been in here for weeks, possibly months. No opening times were advertised. I uselessly contemplated throwing a brick through the glass before departing.

I decided to pass by the library. Perhaps I was delaying going home. For some reason I was resisting the urge to phone the stranded girl. Deep down, I wanted to call and tell her everything. But I could not understand why this urge was so inexplicably strong. The terrible neediness of her situation had somehow infected my reality, invoking a peculiar mixture of concern and revulsion. My mental state was utterly unbalanced. Perhaps I had not re-entered my body properly. It felt like parts of me were still hanging out, buffeting crazily in the wind. The utter self imposed isolation of my situation was not in any way helping. There was a deep emotional satisfaction to the form of contact I had experienced in the dream house. Something which ran contrary to the very nature of my native reality. I wafted through the library feeling like something of a phantom. It was in this unmoored state that I came across the book which had caught my attention the following day; the slim volume entitled ‘The Fallen House of the Spider God.’ The synchronicity of its title wearied me more than I could explain. I picked up the volume, dropping some coins into the void it had created between the other books. Then I drifted back out into the world of white.

I entered the nullifying scape of the winter park. Swans circled like plumes of smoke across the partially frozen ponds. Here and there, ice cracked like glass, forming and re-forming. The far-off honking of geese echoed mournfully over the frost blasted trees. I found a bench in a wedding cake grove, dusted off the icing and sat down to read. As soon as I opened the book an intense aroma drifted from the stained, yellow pages, momentarily transporting me into a peculiar reverie. It was a little like breathing in the vapour of pure emotion and almost left me in tears. All at once the scalding heat of her breath seemed to recall itself to my mouth and I was vaguely dizzy with the memory of the smell. A smell which was identical to this more faded version. It was an acrid, organic fragrance, something like the aroma you experience when you cut a bird open. This mixed with crushed flowers, burning lemon and the stench emitted by large quantities of rain soaked paper. I shook my head and turned to the first page, determined to resist the cloying feelings which now plagued me. Emotions which I was sure were not my own. The book was inexplicably populated by a vast majority of blank pages. However, within the central nexus of it, surrounded by the wasteland of unmarked paper was the fable entitled ‘The Fallen House of the Spider God.’ The ink in which it was scribed was hand-quilled, and it was from this tight, swirling script that the overpowering scent emerged. Perhaps it was not ink after all, but some bodily fluid saturated with essential oils. Whatever the case, I opted to think upon it no more. Without further ado, I began to read.