There amongst the stones he lay again. And again he had no thought. And again he found it good. But now there was no fear. There was no apprehension.

For he had reckoned the symmetries.

The propitiations had been made. The ginseng laid. The feng shui done.

He rose and strode without fear through the dark.

It was not sight that guided him.

Not sight but knowledge. Knowledge laid down from the foundation of the world. And not this paltry sphere with its pregnant groans of promise. But the world as the breath of God. The first inhilation of divine will animated his profane skeleton and reanimated that wick so long dormant with the idle cares of flesh.

A bear approached, reared on its legs, and Jim looked upon it. With a whimper it fled.

Everywhere he tred the world grew still. And the faeries followed.

The sunken lake in the heart of the mountain swallowd him whole. His drowning was the sweetest whiskey. He was drunk with the music of the spheres.

Sinking to the magenta bottom he drug the fiends along on invisibile threads of covenant.

For a sacrifice of the elder blood was a rite beyond bargaining.

There within the twinkling madness in the chasing of Ariadness thread Jim was free to dance and to bind in rhythm those maggots that would have their feast too soon.

Their will dissipated and the ghastly forms returned to stardust to lonesome fade till the appointed hour.

There he hung in a whirling vortex that would surely have shattered the earthen vessel that he had so recently abdicated.

‘Fuck.’ Jim screamed through the ether. ‘How the fuck am I going to make it back?!’ At the Jim shaped grain of dust clinging mouth agape to the cold silt.