The Narcofod

Excerpt:
A loud crack sounded in the distance, which might have been the breaking of a physical law; for the tip of the whip never sped past him, nor was it lingering behind when he checked there. Rather, the whip went straight up, snagged on something above.

He looked up at the cloud directly overhead. Great. Leave it to him to somehow snag a cloud. He tugged hard, but it wouldn’t give. He wrapped the whip around his wrist for a better grip, then jerked harder. Suddenly he was hanging in the sky.

“No!” he cried.

The bed drifted onward while he remained hanging in midair. He peered up at the cloud. If he wasn’t mistaken, it was getting closer. Was it descending? No, that didn’t seem to be the case. He was being reeled up!

He hung on for dear life, wishing he could reach into his back pocket to see what The Book of Blank Stares had to say about all this; for though he no longer trusted the book, it was still better than facing the grim unknown alone.

A damp white fog closed about him, obliterating all. Soon it began to thin, and he glimpsed ghostly funnels above, snaking about in wild orientations. He imagined it a graveyard for tornadoes. But as he was reeled up among them, he saw that they were massive funnel webs. There were other structures as well, tubular corridors that twisted away through starbursts of supportive web, branching here and there towards massive organs — as if he were in the visceral cavity of some large beast. Thick twists of glistening web rose from these towards the full moon high above.

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:55 — 37.5MB)

Excerpt:
“Beds fit for a king, for a queen, nay, for a God!”

“Chivalrous beds for the true of heart!”

“Lewd beds for the lustfully lascivious!”

“Buy a bed, get a concubine free!”

With a flurry of negations Kato ran a gauntlet of hawkers. He slipped past beds, cots, sheets, quilts, pillows, casters, canopies, headboards, footboards, even nightcaps and eyeshades. Spindly fingers clutched at him, beds were thrown in his path for free demonstrations, mesmerizing charms waved before his eyes. All about him, hawkers broke into pillow fights over territory and tactics. He lowered his gaze and plunged onward, spinning free of one bargain after another until one voice slowed him to a “just looking” trot:

“Come one, come all, see the bed fashioned at the world’s core, guaranteed to suppress all sensations of a falling nature!”

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:22 — 37.9MB)

Excerpt:
“Watch it your horse don’t step in my hole,” the man said, adjusting his slipshod hat.

Kato saw a tiny pole in front of the man. A line trailed from its tip to a bobber centered in a hole in the ice.

“There’s a woman down there!” Kato gasped. “She’ll drown — or freeze to death!”

“A fish is all it is,” the man said, glancing up at him.

Kato gawked at the face now visible under the brim of his slipshod hat. “Lord Kran? Is it you?”

“An easy mistake to make,” the man said. “Actually, I’m his twin brother.”

“Twin bro–?” Kato looked more closely. “The spitting image!”

“He didn’t mention me, did he. Never does. Anyway, I’m the one without the hat. That’s how to tell us apart.”

“But you’re wearing a hat,” Kato cautiously pointed out.

The man felt atop his head. “So I am.” He removed it. “There, sorry to confuse you more. The name’s Bill. And I’m not much with words, not like my brother. Fishing’s about all I do, and not very well. In fact, I’m about as close to a nobody as you’ll ever meet.”

“You shouldn’t berate yourself–” Kato began to say. But the figure beneath the ice again caught his attention. “That has to be a woman! It doesn’t look anything like a fish. She’ll drown!”

“Just a fish,” Bill assured him. “A Whadayawant, we call it. It mimics our deepest desires, for whatever reasons.”

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:16 — 30.5MB)

Excerpt:
When the sounds had faded away, Kato squeezed out of the log and looked about. A wild boar snored atop the log, an ornate vase precariously balanced between its tusks. The skeleton of a horse stood tethered to a stump. Blue and green marbles were scattered beside the log, spelling out “CAMOUFLAGE,” while red marbles lay on the log’s other side, spelling “MARBLE.” An owl hung upside down in midair, tangled in fishing line that dangled from the overcast, and robust orange grasshoppers marched single file in a large circle.

Kato continued his journey through the logfall. The fog to the north had advanced some, but not enough to be of concern. He stopped now and then, hearing faint cries, drummings, the clinking of wine glasses or chain mail — as if the strange properties of the logs had begun to resonate across the land. Was there any danger he might be swept up in endless imaginings? What potent brew had the daughter of God instilled in the logs? Or was it just an artifact of the manufacturing or distribution process? He had no way of knowing, or learning. Yet rather than be alarmed by his situation, he felt ever more at home here, as if this were a safe haven from the real world and its dangers. After all, the logs had always been good to him — in many ways his closest friends and allies.

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:59 — 34.8MB)

Excerpt:
“You are Lady Dusk, aren’t you?” he said, stepping further into the firelight.

She stared at him. “Have we met before?”

“In a dream.”

She remained puzzled. Then, seeing the steed, which had followed him, she exclaimed, “Why, you have my steed! But what is wrong with him? He looks pale — downright transparent, in fact!”

“It’s not exactly your steed,” Kato Whip tried to explain, “but a version of it dreamed by the tarantula. It became mired in reality when it tripped and snagged itself on a web. I have to admit it was the fault of a good friend of mine, a baby earthquake, but I assure you it wasn’t intentional.”

“This is all very confusing,” she said, studying him intently. “What particularly perplexes me is how you remain awake so near to me — though I’ve noticed this in others of late as well.”

“Your reign of pure goodness is at an end!” he proclaimed with a fanfare wave of his hands. But this seemed only to confuse her more. “Uh, you see, I woke the spot of bad that had fallen asleep inside of you, and now you need not fear being such a bore.”

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:59 — 32.0MB)

Excerpt:
“Enough!” Kato said. “I don’t want to hear any more bickering for a while.” He gathered the girls about him. “Just stay close, okay? Don’t go out of sight again.” He counted them with a finger that trembled with emotion.

“What happened to your horse?” Vickie asked.

“It’s gone,” he said, counting them again, and still again.

“But we want to ride in it some more,” an in-between said.

“Stand still! I’m trying to count!” he scolded, because the count kept coming out wrong, very wrong, and when he had convinced himself there could be no mistake, he asked, “Why are there eight of you?”

“Eight?” they said. They took turns counting, coming up with eight as well.

“Which of you doesn’t belong?” he asked.

They looked among themselves, then said with a singsong whine, “It’s just us!”

He looked them all over, and for the life of him he could not pin down which was new. “Let’s go,” he said, just wanting to get them to their aunt’s before something else happened. “Hold hands, understand? Don’t let go no matter what.”

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:58 — 24.7MB)

Excerpt:
The eel slithered to and fro, clearly out of his element. “Well, I can juggle.” Five stones shot up out of the sand, and the eel set them to dancing in the air.

“Wow!” Kato watched in amazement. “That’s great!” He noted how the eel’s body sparked and pulsed, and how from time to time the stones clanked together, probably hematites and certainly made of metal. “Electromagnetic induction, am I right? You’re using your electric current to induce a magnetic field, and that is what you use to manipulate the stones.”

“That’s how I do it?” the eel said. “Yes! That’s how I do it!” He froze with the complexity of the notion, and the stones fell to the sand. “Oops.” The eel tried to get them going again, but could not.

“I guess I shouldn’t have said anything,” Kato apologized as the eel’s head sank lower.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:10 — 27.6MB)

Excerpt:
Kato remained amazed that he had made a kite that could fly, and while it didn’t zip about like the others, he could appreciate its little movements, dips and surges and feints of a more subtle nature, a delicate dance that began to speak to him.

For as it moved about up there, he became aware of its diaphanous nature, and how it didn’t resemble a kite so much as it did a woman. The Diaphanous Woman. It was she up there, doing that subtle dance, which wasn’t a dance at all but a struggle. Her hands were at her neck, clawing at something there. A collar? No, a choker chain! He could see the panic in her face, the mouth beginning to pucker, the tongue protrude, and the chain drew tighter still, made that way by a line descending towards him, to his straining hands–

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:28 — 37.1MB)

Excerpt:
Tucking the paper wad in a pocket, he continued down the corridor, which had an unmistakable downward slant. He walked for several hours. He walked for a day, a week, a month. And still he had not reached the end. To help pass the time he pulled out a rubber band and worried it between his fingers until it broke, then another, and another, to the point where he dared not waste any more. After several months, wearied from so much walking and getting nowhere, he leaned against the cold corridor wall and listened to the scribbling of pens on paper, the tapping of fingers on keys, the blup-blup, clank, gulp, and splash of coffee being brewed, stirred, drank, spilled–

“Excuse me,” he called out. “Excuse me. Have I reached the hacks yet?”

Screams of outrage issued from the offices. All form of object sailed out into the corridor, slamming the wall about him. He dodged a coffee-maker, ducked a monitor stringing a keyboard, leaped over a shattering mug, and hurried onward.

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:59 — 34.8MB)

Excerpt:
He negotiated a contortionist’s nightmare of rubber bands, setting off several, and stepped into what proved to be the kitchen. The woman stood over a hot stove, ladle in hand, preparing a spaghetti and meatball dish more puzzling than the house. “Uh, hi,” he whispered. “I’m looking for the lady of the house.”

She glanced around at him, a woman as nondescript as they come: middle-aged, plain-featured, raggedy-dressed. Yet there was something tantalizingly beautiful in her domestic pose, the frizzy penumbra of rebelliousness in her drawn-back hair, the way her calf muscles bunched one after the other as she shifted foot to foot. Her face was flushed with the heat of the stove, her brow and neck glistened, and her nose ran as she sniffled and sneezed. All the while her temples throbbed with concentration, for the spaghetti-and-meatball dish was growing ever more complex with each application of the ladle, such that Kato began to sense about it not so much a culinary masterpiece as some arcane mathematical construct, perhaps a topological exploration of the human digestive tract as written in the algebra of hunger.

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:49 — 29.1MB)