Title tale of the book, DRIPPY TRIPPY DOOM.

We arrived at the church late into the night. Peering up, I appraised the wooden structure. Abandoned years ago when apocalyptic Lutherans were driven out of the basin by the Tongva, it had fallen into disrepair. A century of high desert winds had gifted the teetering steeple a sinister bent. Ancient boards dutifully blocked the windows. The expansive graveyard hinted at even darker secrets. Apparently, so many people had died over the years, the ground had become unstable from grave excavation. Sinkholes were a strong concern, so the town had been completely cleared out. I shuddered delectably.

Striding ahead, Lucifia knocked on the front door. After a loud creak, a hulking figure emerged. The hirsute beast surveyed us with bored eyes. Beneath their black beard, I spied orange lipstick and a heavy septum piercing crowned with an amethyst.

“I.D.’s?”

Lucy and I handed over our cards. The beast barely glanced at both before giving them back. I smiled at their shirt depicting Kali dancing over Shiva.

“Good to see you, Lucy,” he said.

“You too, Bolt,” she replied.

“Who’s the fawn?”

She acted scandalized, “You don’t recognize Daniella Zapato, the purr-eminent photojournalist?”

I finally spoke. “Call me Zee.”

The bouncer didn’t smile. “No photos.”

“Of course,” I resumed timidity, “Just honored to be here.”

Bolt pushed open the door to let us inside. We found several dozen Doompunks carousing before the stage. Tarps covered the instrumentation. A curiously large sheet sat draped over a tall bulky object at the very back of the performance space. Colorful spotlights adorned the church. A fog machine hissed lazily in the corner. Dank air filled my nostrils.

 Lucifia sniffed deeply, “It’s good to be back.”

No fewer than a hundred roguish freaks converged on the dark town of Gunterkuntz for the secret show, and I had the rare opportunity to join them. A mysterious punk band had just returned from a mystical sojourn to their ancestral homeland and promised to satisfy their loyal fanbase with an inaugural stateside appearance.

The venue was this ramshackle church, where teens and ne’er-do-wells frequently absconded for deeds most dark. The only reason I knew about it was Lucy; we’d shared an “intimate rendezvous” just once, years ago, when I first visited San Tobit. An upcoming project made for a good excuse to contact her again. We linked back up so she could show me around the local music scene. And other things, I hope, but it’s hard to suss out her cantankerous nature.

Lucifia was ugly—I don’t mean that pejoratively. She was one of those punks who took the genetic hand she’d been dealt and lit the cards on fire. Squat with a gruesomely pierced face, Lucy was akin to a deacon within the Doompunk hierarchy. Short tattooed arms jutted out from her black denim vest, bedecked in vulgar patches. Flashing iridescent hair spikes of mixed green and yellow oils, she resembled a poisonous beetle, primed for battle in the steaming jungle mosh pit. Her decorated ugliness shone out in shameless glory and, in that uncanny way, made her deeply attractive. I never missed a chance to attend a show with her.

“Have you ever seen a sorrier assortment of fuckfreaks?” She squawked with laughter.

I surveyed the crowd. Innumerable patches, pins, and tats celebrated “H.A.C.” in various fonts, many dripping with illustrated blood and pus. The fandom consisted of the grodiest species of Doompunk I’ve yet encountered. Outcasts and freaks of every conceivable stripe. Pierced faces leered out from between bodies of all shapes, sizes, and colors. I had donned my best leather jacket for the occasion, but I still stuck out.

I felt safe with Lucy. When the eyes of strangers roved past us, the reverence in their gaze shone through. I liked feeling like arm candy; I wondered if she saw me the same way. She studied the crowd, as if scrutinizing the clientele.

“Lots of old faces,” she said approvingly, “but plenty I don’t recognize.”

“Isn’t it good for the band’s impact to spread?”

She replied, “Rumor has it they’re debuting a brand new song. First time anyone will hear it. Feels wrong to enter on the top floor rather than the bottom. I’m gonna grab a few drinks, let me know if you want anything.”

With another squawk, she melted into the crowd. Lucy boasted her haughty protection of the fandom’s esoteric lore. In the nights leading up to the show, while I made transparently pathetic moves on her, she exegeted the band’s prismatic discography. Many hardcore fans regard H.A.C. as psychonautic cartographers, building a map from arcane scraps toward a dark enlightenment. They pulled from the mythologies of every beleaguered corner of the planet to craft a formula for final escape from the imperial archons. For this old cynic, it was hard to believe.

Presently, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to find hot scarlet pimples staring at me from a young masc’s face. His shaved head protruded awkwardly from a lumpy Spawn Of Cthulhu hoodie.

“You’re Daniella Zapato, ain’t ya?” he said with an affected twang.

“Zee,” I said, instantly regretting the handshake. His grip was wet with sweat.

“Name’s Hager. I’ve seen your photos. Really great stuff.”

“I appreciate that,” I said.

“Is it true that the Brotherhood of Saint Tobias rubbed shit in their eyes to go blind?” He grinned. 

“If you’d read the article, you’d know they didn’t.”

“Just in it for the pics!” He grew more ecstatic the longer our interaction lasted. “So what brings you to Gutterkunt?” I clocked his slangy mispronunciation of the town’s name.

My friendly smile faltered. “I’m actually here to do a write-up on H.A.C.”

His beady eyes lit up. “So you’re new to the cult.”

“Let’s just say I’m more of a Cindi Mayweather fan.”

I don’t think he caught the reference.

“Careful,” he tittered, “you might be the sacrifice tonight.”

“I understand things get pretty wild at these shows.”

“Wild is only one rung on the genetic ladder.” I noticed his eyes roving my body. What a charmer. “Y’know,” he leaned in, “You probably feel self-conscious about your lazy eye, but I’ve always found them extremely sexy.”

My expression turned to disgust, which delighted him even more.

He continued negging, “If you’re feelin’ fauny, I can show you things to open your third lazy eye—”

“Screw off, skinhead.” Lucifia returned with three drinks. Hager vanished into the bodies around us. Lucy handed me a drink and downed one of hers in a single gulp.

“Thanks,” I said, referring to the drink and the rescue. “I thought you said this was an all-queer show.”

“If he’s here, he very likely identifies as such. Most folks here are indeed seeking some strange, and he has his radar up. Parasites and bottom-feeders freely flounder in our brine pools. That tricky creep will keep striking out until he either devolves into something worthwhile, or he’ll mutate into a Nova Kid sniffing for a spot on Tisch’s gynoid waitlist.” Lucy gulped down her other drink. “That’s between him and whatever entropic principle he calls God.”

She spoke so fast, I had trouble keeping up, but I knew Lucy name-dropped a certain San Tobit gang. Tisch I’d also heard of. In a wasteland dominated by sleazoid psychos, the Doompunk collective remained the one haven for freaks just trying to get loaded and laid in privacy and peace.

The lights went down. Rather than cheer, as is the presumed concert etiquette, the crowd went dead silent. A static tension buzzed between our bodies.

The band came onstage. And there she was: Joan Dark, the she/they from another world. They had tied back their long black hair, revealing in full force the tatau adorning their face, neck, and chest. Their expression was intensely focused on their immediate task, as if the audience wasn’t there, staring at every move. She shrugged off a leather jacket, revealing a striped yellow and black tank top over their broad frame, breasts strapped down for better aerodynamics. They looked like a primeval warrior, large belly staunch against assault. Baggy cargo shorts belied thick, tree trunk thighs. Her muscular arms, also decorated with elaborate tatau, ended in powerful fingers that picked up a weatherbeaten guitar and started tuning.

If you search any sort of bio on Joan, you’ll get this: a Tongva-Samoan sorceress experimenting with psychosonic enchantments. They employ a pan global confluence of magical sources, including but not limited to: Kuksu medicine, Tagaloa rituals, Santería formulas, Yacqui brujería, Siberian shamanism, Kathmandian sex trances, Morrisonian metahexes, and biohacked Christian Science.

Lucifia claims to have written it herself; I find it a little offensive in regards to exoticising sacred traditions, but I’m too nervous to tell her. And who knows: maybe Joan really does do all those things. I’m still an observer among these assorted strange folk. A good humor about their own spookiness seems baked in. Additionally, I’ve noticed a beleaguered demeanor among the Doompunks: a morbid shrug at the world’s grim circumstances and a grin gritted against the gloomy future.

Lucy claims that Joan endeavors to metabolize the malignant energy at play in San Tobit. Anyone with eyes knows there’s something going on in this pre-apocalyptic desert. Between the guttersome gangs, the drug-trafficking bikers, the fascist government, the rapacious technocrats, and the rotcore mystery cult, it’s easy to feel good and properly fucked. Joan and their merry band have half a mind to survive it. To escape it, even. Or so Lucifia tells me.

The crowd remained silent, as if afraid to interrupt brain surgery. Joan’s bandmates joined her and took up their instruments. Apprentices to the regal bitch-warlock, the other musicians contribute their own unique grab bag of technomagickal experience. The frontmensch allegedly plucked each one from obscurity to employ their skills in an alchemical quest. They appeared cut from the same ragged cloth: sweaty hair tied back, smeared warpaint, efficient minimal clothing. Fully gathered, they gave me a vision of Visigoths sent to sack Rome.

The band pulled the tarps off the instruments. Joan on guitar, keyboard, and lead vocals; a backup keyboardist with lank black hair, a bald bassist, and two burly drummers seated at a pair of elaborate kits. They left the largest tarp covering the bulky object behind them. A surprise for later, I guess.

Joan leaned into the standing microphone. They opened their mouth wide, almost fellating the tip, “We are Holesome American Cunt.” Her dusky voice hit the crowd like napalm; everyone erupted into frantic cries of exaltation.

“Dig in, bitches!”

Joan’s fingers slashed the guitar, uttering a banshee shriek. Their bandmates eviscerated the sound with a flowering matrix of melodies. I recognized the song from a record Lucifia had spun days before, but hearing it live was nothing short of electric sex. Cosmic pulp splattered my brain, juiced from the face of the deep. It was unlike anything I’d heard in my life. And yet, it was these punks’ bread and butter. 

Lucifia materialized with two more drinks and handed me one. I kept an unconscious tally of her chivalrous acts, from retrieving drinks to scaring off creeps. Hope for more than just affection budded in my chest. I sensed waves of carnal relaxation emanating from Lucy’s body next to mine. This was her mecca. Pilgrimage complete, she was finally free to kick back with her own entropic definition of God.

A mosh pit took shape at the front of the crowd; young acolytes unhinged their souls and turned loose. I spotted Hager savagely po-going among the hardfaced adherents. Benevolent violence bonded bodies in ecstatic displays of Dionysian physicality. I mosh every now and then, but in that moment the music held me tight. I could feel the ongoing oscillations caress the organs in my chest.

And just like that, it ended. The threads of vibration scattered back to their source in the waiting microtonal background. My flesh yearned for more, leaning into the imagined whip. I could tell it was just an appetizer warming us up to H.A.C.’s energy. A two minute song blasting us to bits so the rest of the set could reshape us.

“That was called Face Stabber II,” said Joan, a grin splitting their wide features. “Thanks for having us back, San Tobit. We know you hate it here. So do we!”

The crowd jeered.

“We got some surprises for you tonight, so slurp up this Scumpunk Soup!”

The crowd cheered, recognizing the title of a song. I felt overwhelming love rise, like an extra layer of humidity, and swallow the already sweaty room. Each person in the crowd carried an unbearable darkness. Here they were able to enjoy squealing metal implements which sonically squeezed out the pus from their heavy hearts.

H.A.C. launched into another song. A convulsive beat and ugly melody. Ruthless lyrics detailed depravities. Joan wielded the guitar like a battle axe, sometimes clutching it close to their torso, as if it were a rifle firing wildly into the crowd. We lapped it up like sharks swallowing chum. People leapt above each other’s heads, mouths open wide to gulp fresh air from the colorful dark above. The song pushed and pulled their limbs. Like ragdolls, they tottered against each other, slathering skin and clothes in shared fluids, until the room truly became a soup of punk scum.

“This fucking rules,” I said to Lucifia. She gave me a kiss on the cheek, her septum piercing tapping my soft skin. Another delectable shudder rippled through my circulatory system. I wanted to drink in that moment for eternity.

The short song ended. No banter this time; they immediately broke into something else, something longer. Dark’s bright eyes stared at nothing. A transcendence approached. The song kept building, the broth frothing, the meaty chunks chomping each other. We felt our souls grow larger than the cosmos could contain. There was nothing else but this moment, dangling from the fragile mercy of Joan Dark’s sadistic grip.

The song’s conclusion exploded, sending certain listeners into screaming bursts of relief. A powerful duende flattened the echo. Joan moved to the large tarp behind the band. 

“Ready for some bootleg anthropotechnics?”

They pulled off the sheet, revealing an enormous machine. It resembled a quantum computer I’d seen in magazines. Narrow rings encircled tall copper columns. The thickest, centermost column stood taller than the others, capped by a golden orb. This apparatus jutted from a boxy base embellished with dials, gauges, switches, and wires, like a miniature prop used to represent an alien metropolis in an old sci-fi flick. The whole getup was a retro-futurist pipe organ fit for a cyberpunk cathedral. How the hell they got this atom smasher inside the church escaped me. Joan picked up a cable with an antique plug and attached it to their keyboard’s modified port. Their bandmates attached similar cords to their own instruments. They all synced up to the strange contraption.

Joan pulled the microphone close. 

“This song’s called Rezonator.” 

Dark smashed the keyboard. Energy started from the machine’s base, rose up its columns, and radiated into its rings. The golden orb discharged synth-waves which gathered the sympathetic vibrations into a sonic tsunami. I discerned visible music within the tumult: shimmering polyhedrons ceaselessly changing shape. The towering sonic boom rippled the purple and green spotlights, gathering every color into its singular momentum, then the whole mess came crashing down on the crowd in cascading shards of synesthesia. No one stood a chance; the superwave washed over us completely. I watched sinuous musical notes splash human bodies, leaving rainbow tracers sticking to their movements. The resultant morass swirled together and began drowning the audience in kaleidoscopic seafoam.

They fucking loved it.

I felt a tickle in my loins. It rose up my spine, igniting my chakras along the way. Secret glands secreted exotic hormones into my bloodstream. My euphoric pores yawned open, puking pink perspiration. Fireworks exploded in my vision. Primeval sunlight dawned at the base of my neck and shined out of my eyes, nose, and mouth. I no longer absorbed sensory data; I was belching it. Polychromatic soma ejaculated from my face like a jetstream. The same happened for the crowd. Colors from beyond the perceptible spectrum spewed out of orifices like ancient geysers. The phosphorescence intermingled and formed gravid clouds. Droplets of sonorous quintessence rained on the cultists in flurrious phantasmagoria.

Our qualia combined. I tasted the sweat on their skin, the smoke in their lungs, the blood in their veins. We were actually pooling together: mind, body, and soul. Something was happening, and I couldn’t pull away. It was too late. There must’ve been something in my drink. It was terrifying but also enthralling. I could feel this thing dancing beneath my slippery skin. Did I want it to stop?

“Nam-myoho-renge-kyo!”

Joan changed keys. Our collected consciousness thickened into clay between her fingers; she smeared us like wet shit across the silicon teeth of her instrument. Still spitting out periodic pulsations, the resonator warbled in devotion to the musician’s mystical whims. The machine’s energetic discharge strengthened into a winding probe, snaking between all the bits of Being. Dark began improvising, culling cosmic jazz from subquantum playtime. The instrumentation of asymmetrical orbits carried our living minds beneath any reckoning of sound and place. Planets and particles clashed in disharmonious Creation. Time and space copulated under a coniferous canopy in an infant galaxy. Then the leaves shed, exposing us as naked nerve cells. The foliage of surface-reality rescinded until I saw it in all its vastness. There we roiled, caught in the riptide of this unnameable something—this deciduous lysergic doom. Delicious.

The moment was Now. At Joan’s command, we trickled into deep genetic memory and summoned forth archetypes from our respective mythopoetic alphabets. Fans burst into beasts of forgotten lore. Flowers sprouted from eye sockets. Bones dissolved into cartilaginous limbs of vestigial tales. Tails and wings and spines tore clothing as the orgiastic transmogrification reached fruition. One girl curled inward and popped into willowisps like bubbles. A short boy expanded into a blubbery kappa dripping with lechery. I became a duende, the imp my abuela told me would steal my toenail clippings while I slept. Lucifia, full-fouled in her fury, snatched destiny from the jaws of oblivion. Her temples birthed a trinity of horns, their curling ridges cracking her hardened flesh. Molten joy dripped in fat slaps from her slavering jaws, which stretched into a goatish snout. She had finally become Satan’s Hedonic Daughter.

The band’s bodies remained untouched by the transformation. Joan cackled in promethean delight at the successful spell. She smacked her thigh and flashed her eyes in a traditional sa’a dance. The magician grunted in glorious triumph. After years of seeking, they had finally done it: a psychotronic ceremony. The resonator was dividing our subatomic particles and weaving dormant emanations of ancestral consciousness using infinitesimal genetic strands. Joan and their coven had cracked some formula for siphoning spiritual truth from our noetic nuclei. Where Campbell and Jung had faltered, Dark had lobbed the golden bough like a grenade into our baby cribs. Imago Dei. Patamorphic anamnesis. Tame the cosmic serpent with punk-rock snake-charming. 

Joan returned to the keyboard. Her voice, preternaturally deep, emitted from within the bowels of countless ancestors all speaking at once.

“Dance, motherfuckers!”

H.A.C. lunged into a ferocious cacophony. The high octane beat pounded our souls like a war drum. There was no backing out: the world became a mosh pit. Dumbstruck, I watched Lucifia claw the faces around her. She had entered a murderous frenzy, determined to raise hell to a physical plane. Weaker spirits retreated from her sovereign power. Only one was strong enough to challenge her: Bolt the bouncer stepped forward. They had become a krodha-vighnantaka, a wrathful deva from Vajrayāna Buddhism, who destroyed obstacles to Enlightenment with as much violence as was needed to untie suffering’s knot. Fangs curling in white heat, a luminous durga clutched in each of their six paws, Bolt advanced.

She met them in battle. The violence was magnificent. The surrounding sprites fell into orbital decay, like protons failing to escape a black hole. The closest cluster morphed into a ring of light, creating an arena for the two deities to duke it out. Bolt’s goal in battle was to incarnate Nairatmya, the goddess of emptiness, in all phenomenological being. Lucifia, conversely, wanted nothing less than cosmic orgasm. She had finally acquired the celestial genitals capable of such completion.

Their struggle became a symbol for the soul’s passage through suffering; it was the epic epitome of struggle on the astral plane. We were caught in its awe. We experienced every strike, every wound. No one could turn away. There was no separate “one” anymore, only the all. The era of individual shape had given way to a new epoch where collective pathos took control. We were no longer rivulets in a generational stream; we had gathered into a universal ocean, a single story, and there was no separating from the whole. Within this hiveheart, I watched my archdevil hookup spar with an Indo-Tibetan bodhisattva.

The resonator bellowed the cry of an idiot god, its energy building to a scope too complex for Joan’s eighty-eight keys. The bandleader remained at their instrument, but the others realized they were out of their depth. They tried to flee from the stage but shared the fate of all mad scientists. The next vibrational wave shoved the bandmates into the frothing mundus imaginalis. Their abominable achievement atmospherically dissolved their corpses like weak asteroids.

Moving briskly, Joan unplugged the keyboard and attached the cable to their guitar. They jolted the strings with their fingers, and the machine’s energy zigzagged around their humanoid form. Once again, they invariously wielded the instrument like a battle axe and bolt action rifle. Joan intended to surf the synth. Hacking and slashing the music, the bitch-warlock mutated the predatory song into a jam worthy of their shamanic heritage. They were shouting, maybe even singing, like a ship captain cursing a maelstrom. I couldn’t make out the words.

Another crashing wave carried Joan off their feet, and they leapt into the mouth of the cosmic serpent. Striking at the heart of the beast, Dark’s body grew smaller as they defiantly assaulted the unter-kosmos. I didn’t see them vanish. The wave swallowed the stage, walls, and ceiling, leaving the crowd’s shared vision suspended in the vast expanse of amorphous mythscape. We vorped into an unrelenting hurricane of meaning-making. 

It was too much. I needed oxygen. I pulled away. I needed my body back. There had definitely been something in my drink. My mind was breaking under the weight of the psychedelia. I pushed past pixies, pygmies, leprechauns, goblins, djinn, nkishi, aswang, abúhukü, jué yuán, ipilja-ipilja, nymphs, sylphs, and selkies of every stripe.

The front door of the church, bordered with radiant light, still existed. If I left the resonator’s radius, I assumed I would return to the genetic makeup of my day and age. Or puke out whatever I’d been dosed with.

Hager stepped into my path. Having completed his own transfiguration, he resembled a demonic pterodactyl: his sable, rubbery skin stretched over long, emaciated limbs. His true name was Nitegaunt, skyborn harbinger of the Daemon-Sultan himself. He uttered a throaty croak. I didn’t need to understand the nameless language; he wanted me wedded to his entropic god. His set of fetid black wings threatened a rapturous ascent into torturous vortices of cenobitic hell. Hager inhabited an atheistic universe governed by a two-headed virus named Chaos & Power. I would always be prey in the depthless eyes of its monks.

I had no defenses. I didn’t know the words to this song.

Lucifia came to my rescue. She had bested her peer and was now reshaping the spiritual meshwork into her infernal legions. Fiery wings filled the sky as she rocketed down onto my hapless predator. Her cloven hooves clomped between myself and the Nitegaunt. Now that she was close, I could see Lucifia’s feral form: eight hairy breasts sagged from her elongated abdomen, which widened into massive scaly haunches. And in the center: animalistic genitalia intermixed with biological abandon. Twin phalluses capped with prickly claspers hung astride the vaginal mouth of a primordial shark. Her victory over Bolt assimilated their mystico-sexual properties into a hermaphroditic orgy of flesh. She was like Baphomet on meth.

In talons, sharp as volcanic glass, Lucifia brandished six blazing blades of fury. Having acquired Bolt’s mission, Satan’s Dragonic Spawn was now tithed to the removal of obstacles to Enlightenment, a telos she fully embodied in her hedonistic terminus. She was The Self as everything. All-consuming. All aware. Endless emptiness yearning to fill and be filled.

She was a fucking wonder to behold.

Nitegaunt’s faceless head lunged forth, but he stood no chance. Lucifia, her countenance an inflamed hobgoblin glare, ripped into his rubbery flesh. She tore out pieces and tossed them to the impish crowd. Rapidly rotting emerald ichor oozed from his wounds, and the sprites rushed to swallow it. In milliseconds, Nitegaunt’s essence was reduced to minute threads of sound gobbled into the shapeless earmouths of his former brethren. The sea devoured his soul, purifying its evil and exporting it as fresh Ka to nourish the next generation of dreams. I saw him reincarnated in the guts of rockbottom tubeworms suckling his sunken chunks.

Lucifia finished feeding her fiendish legion, then turned her attention to me. Her forked tongue flitted between her fangs. Her brow knitted into a lavish leer. Despite her fiendish visage, I recognized a hunger for affection behind her blazing eyes. I saw love in her poisonous heart. She too wanted that carnal episode that I had fantasized about. She desired to devour me so that we might sup eternity together. She wished to forge our spirits into a celestial unity that would survive the material armageddon awaiting our forefathers. I stood on the threshold, a virginal initiate before the panpsychic mysteries Joan Dark had cracked open for us to chow down. Lucifia unhinged her molten jaw.

All I had to do was step inside.

Terror got the better of me. I bolted toward the door. It opened without resistance, and I fell through, tumbling toward the dusty ground of the Gunterkuntz town square. I had breached the sacred circle and suffered the consequence. A concussive clamor chased me outside, propelling my human body further away from the church. I landed hard on the desert ground and turned around. 

The church was gone. A gigantic hole had replaced it. Holesome American Cunt and its fanatics had been erased from reality. Lucifia was gone, too.

I slept in her car, hoping this dream would evaporate in the morning. The hole was still there under the sober sun, so I drove across the desert to Lucy’s apartment. I assumed she’d open the door and joyously praise the show for being real psychedelic rock.

Except she wasn’t there. I crashed there like an orphaned creature in an empty burrow. I couldn’t touch the H.A.C. records for days. They exuded a cosmic darkness. Only when I saw the news report about the church did I realize it hadn’t all been a feverish hallucination. They say the intense vibrations of the show must have shifted the ground beneath the building and triggered a sinkhole. The graveyard’s unstable soil carried everything so deep that no machine could dig without causing more instability in the surrounding land. All of it—the wood, the stone, the metal, the flesh—had been swallowed by the soft earth. The report said “no survivors” which means nobody knew I had been there. I decided not to tell anyone; don’t need that kind of attention. I kept it to myself, except in writing these very words, meant only for you.

You’d think I’d be experiencing inexorable trauma after my crush got crushed, not to mention my possibly lethal exposure to strange æons, but… I feel fine. Enlivened even. These many weeks later, I still feel the buzzing vibration of that music in my innards. I’ve moved into Lucy’s place. Think I’ll stick around San Tobit—see what I can see. I’m beginning to like it here. I can finally listen to H.A.C. records again, discover new meaning between the grooves.

You can probably tell where I’m going with this: the resonator wrenched a wormhole in reality, and the crowd passed over. Lucy, Hager, Bolt, Joan, all of them: they’re one with the Song. The movements of the stars through the sky, the wind through the trees, the cytoplasm in your cells. Of course, this theory could be a somatopsychic reaction to my very real brain damage. I wasn’t exactly mentally stable before the event. Maybe my escape from the sinkhole backwashed an outrageous nightmare into my broken brain. Maybe I just miss Lucy. Maybe I want to imagine her “out there” if I can’t have her in here.

I don’t think so.

Something is speaking to me. Literally. It hangs, ungraspable, outside my auditory periphery. At the time, I couldn’t make out the words Joan Dark had been shouting as the resonator consumed them, but the lyricist’s spellbinding voice is finally finding its form, echoing over and over, in my head. My memory is piecing it together. I believe the Song is seeking a shape. With my collaboration, perhaps Joan Dark’s cabal can return in another’s mind. My mind. Your mind. They’ve needled their way into my waking dreams, and I wish to pass them into yours. Here are the shards I have gathered:

Crack shell, hatch hell.

Snatch kid from cribs, pull stiff from peat.

Suck you past sick lips.

Sorry,

gotta eat.

We came from the sea, originally. Shorn from timeless tempest, canoes and catamarans took shape across contemptuous stars to churn virgin soil. Worship void. Cleave the rock, build a door, rend a window on the shore.

Exochromatic lords of light and 

sonic, yonic empresses impress upon us

the toll of passage: the land has a womb.

Feed it.

Canopic jar’s stain in tomb. 

You need it.

Stuff gullets, pop pustules, grubby paws and hungry maws.

Vibrate to Her hum. Into carnal grottos toss slimy chum.

Slaughter the lamb and savor the bleat.

You’re simply too tasty.

Sorry, gotta eat.