Episode 1: Visions of the Nameless Tranquil

January is the coolest month. You sit at a desk in your room, your eyes growing bleary and tired. All of a sudden, a wind from outside penetrates your room and a resonating hum fills the air with a mad crackling! An eidolon appears, fuming little puffs of purple and blue vapor, tickling itself, laughing and speaking in a BC quasi-biblical dialect. You rummage around your desk...you know it's  here somewhere...maybe under the miscellaneous phone chargers, lint roller, sharpie penz, opened packs of unused batteries (wait, didnt you use them...?),  signed documents that languish, nonetheless retained, and ah! there it is: your old Enochian magick square! You place the colorfully decorated square on the carpet in front of the old. smokey ghost and he looks at you with sweet, dead eyes-- burnt red ochre spheres--and a silverly wisp of resurrected water leaks from the corner of his woebegone right socket. He uses the baffling hermetic symbols of the magick square to tell you all about the afterlife. You weren't really interested, but you caught him saying something about all your old pets padding and frolicking around the festooning clouds of the royal parks. Jeepers! That's a nice thought: old Skippy hopping around willy-nilly, nibbling on all sorts of ve-ge-tables and some nice angel passes by and feeds him succotash every Friday morning on her way to kneel at Yahweh's feet. Oh, enough. Tell me something else, Meister Gheist. What? There's a whole slew of buried treasure with your decayed and harangued body? Why the shit did you not mention this before? 

You brave the cold: you strap your John Dee fan art, your Enochian Ouija board to top of your head and wrap yourself in thermal blankets. You look like a ghost and a mummy traversing the wicked cold expanse, aiming for a nearby graveyard. It's a Masonic cemetery: they  carve geometric sigils onto exquisitely built, phallic obelisks that penetrate the night sky's dark expanse. You trudge along, singing tunez about how unbelievably rich you are going to be by the time the Sun wakes from his eventide bed. Will o' the Wisp phantom fires wink off in the distance periphery of the cemetery but you get the feeling like you're being watched. Regardless, the ghost guides you to the spot where he was cruelly buried with an old Mason man. He was a prodigal man-servant and spent all his days faithfully attending to his master's every want, lavishing him with fine conversations and aligning his belt buckle with his fly and shirt buttons in a neat vertical line--an obelisk constellation that gave the old man a sense of pride about his purloined Egyptian heritage. There was an argument one day between servant and master about the domestication of royal cats and their subsequent proliferation; ohhhhhh, it was a heated debate that lasted well into the night, my friendz. Now some tell there was a scuffle and some say there was nothing heard but the soft needle shimmying through the air. It could have been a fight, it could have been asp poison, Cleopatra style, that purged his body of life, finally. And who the fuck knows? The Masons took the body away, prepared it with fragrant oils and sealed it in a tomb, here, right here, with this poor servant inside. It was a Pharaoh double-whammy. So you're scouting around this big, albite mausoleum, looking for an opening so you might courageously free the entrapped soul while simultaneously becoming filthy rich. You let your fingers walk around the surface and its little white stone juts decorating the tomb’s surface. There’s gotta be like a secret entrance or something, right? No luck down here. The ghost gives you a foothold with his silvery, celestial hands and boosts you onto the top of the tomb. You scour the surface from corner to corner, for an hour when you finally spot a hieroglyph etched  via intelligent design into the plagioclase feldspar. It’s a chemical equation. It’s written in skeletal branch lines depicting some organic reaction. You harken back to your undergraduate years delightfully spilling sulfuric acid in a lab while an African grad student with an indecipherable accent  actually manages to teach you the wonders of these colliding molecules. Ah, yes, so that’s what it means:

You write the answer in royal purple that shines in the moonlight atop the tomb. A hatch opens before you and you plummet post-haste into the sepulcher.  Right away you spy the solid gold casket of the dead Freemason, etched with jackal-headed Anubis leading a procession of the dead into the Great Beyond. And then, in the corner, in a tangled mess, you find the servant’s bones. He’s wailing outside now. It’s such a sad moment. You hug the bones to your chest and think of his love for cats. This goes on for 5 minutes at least. You wipe your sniffling nose with the back of your hand and proceed to investigate the rest of tomb by now encroaching daylight.  There’s a bunch of urns in a corner. You open one and find a bunch of jewelry. You cover yourself in necklaces and occult talismans. You fill your pockets with Arabic diamonds and a dizzying number of sapphires. Finally, you pull from an urn a bone handled pirate’s sword with the words “Walk the plank, wench, and then ride it” acid-etched into the blade. You cut the air once or twice to test its worth and then act like you’re dueling scally-wags and decapitating your arch nemesis, Captain Doh, amid the furious battery of ships’ cannons and men struggling on the High Seas. You are triumphant and raise the flag to honor the Dread Queen of the Sea…

Then you hear the Masons outside. They’ve figured out you’re in there! They had spies watching—mostly owls and translucent ghoulas they keep alive with Asmodeus-derived formulas and all sorts of quasi-biblical voodoo. You grab two urns and use them to climb out of the tomb. You jump while the Masons are detonating TNT at the entrance. The guy working the plunger spots you as you run toward the mountains. They’re hot on your trail but you think you’ve lost them up in the canopy of stone and snow. You walk forever. You finally see the ocean. You trade an Arabic diamond for an AquaSub—a one man submarine, baby! This pirate sword is running the show now. It’s possessed you. You submerge under the ocean and make your way out into the abysmal ocean’s depths. 

It’s been two weeks. Your pirate sword keeps you company, talking to you and regaling you with stories from its travels. You’ve decided to let it be your world tour guide. Oceanids bring you food and refreshments to keep you alive while the sword pilots you further into the dark, liquid expanse. One Oceanid, named Doris, wants you to marry her and take her with you. You loved her for a time…a few days, but she always got into fights with the pirate’s sword, Dewezel, as he likes to be called now. You asked Dewezel where you’re going to—the final destination. He replies “Why to Egypt, of course.” And then you smacked your head and fell asleep thinkin':

Skippy, my bunny, why did you
Poop so much as you ran around the house?
I still remember collecting it in my six year old hands;
Don't you know, Skippy? Don't you see?

I’m the baby Moses of the sea.