Lee had a concussion and six lacerations on his back—two three-inch shards of window glass had actually lodged in his left scapula and had to be removed—that required stitches. Being released from the hospital with scripts and bedrest orders the same afternoon, he asked after Crystal, but none of the ER staff knew her. Or they did but wouldn’t betray her to some clearly peculiar man with a mild to severe brain injury. 

He returned to his apartment, slept for thirty-two hours, then lay around for another eight watching the rainbows dance above his bed. At which point he committed himself to getting answers or dying in the attempt.

He dosed himself with cannisters four times a day. When not vacating his body, upon mentally resuscitating Lee experienced forty-five minute bouts of grogginess, the wounds in his back aching as the various regions of his brain slowly but steadily powered back online.

Waking hours were confined to the apartment. Naked as the day of his birth, he stared at the prism mobile above his head and did nothing but follow the shards of the color spectrum in their wobbly transits while silently parsing the words of the Founder that echoed in his memory.

Summed up: Lee’s intrusions filled Jupiter with annoyance and disdain.

Manifesting in the bleached ivory, Lee would exert every ounce of concentration to break through with a question, to advance towards the mahogany desk and grip the colossal old man’s lapels, to shake him as he demanded to know the meaning of all this, screaming primally for him to “reveal the source.”

None of this transpired, of course—if anything, in the light of eternity he grew even more rigid. What did occur: As the frequency of Lee’s intrusions increased, the amount of time—whatever duration meant in that space beyond—with Jupiter decreased.

The duration of each stay was not only shorter, but the rind-nosed Olympian’s words began to constrict to a trickle. The occluded, esoteric phrases the old man offered were sharp and succinct—“Seven planets as constituents,” “Unite clearness with depth,” “Arrive nowhere,” “Nature is Mind made visible; Mind the invisible Nature,” “Systole and diastole.”

And the “financial” or “material advice” turned both slippery and singular. “Invest yourself in fractional art.” These were the closing words of each of the bungled one-man, interdimensional SWAT raids Lee conducted every six hours—failing with every fiber of his being to eke out of himself a single sentence, never mind rushing and throttling old Zeus.

Immediately after each session, he was slammed back into his sweaty, unclothed body, simmering and roiling internally as he stared at the multi-hued 400-700 nanometer shatterings of light that were skinned and split from the sun’s rays by the swaying prisms. The entirety of his mind—including the flotsam and jetsam of thoughts he was increasingly convinced were not his own, but independent, disembodied beings that had as little interest in Lee as drivers do of the asphalt over which they drive—breaking and crashing like a hurricane-swept bay.

Those final words would hammer onto the shore of his consciousness, pulverizing the fried neurons as he attempted to clarify whether it was “fractional” or “fractal.”

After the second day of his rapid-fire sojourns, struggling to reconstitute himself through a dry-ice mental fog in twisted bedsheets, he seized on that phrase and the ambiguity of that word as the cryptographic key to deciphering the entire interdimensional mystery.

The intelligence taking the shape of old Jupiter (or truly being old Jupiter), the colors of the prisms, the warnings about movement, the serene stillness, the red-cube-incomplete, the emerald iris-ed faery, the hissing, bubbling tar of those initial long-gone dreams, the astronomical and astrological indicators—these were his seven planets as constituents. To these he would apply the key and—as the Founder suggested—maximally concentrate, and in so doing flood the ethereal absence of that bleached ivory with bursts of color, of will, of sound and action and energy. And in so doing, have It know IT.

The third day following that catatonic, and ultimately explosive, stroll through melting streets, Lee devoted himself to preparation.

A half hour before sunset, he took a substantially elevated dose of Adderall, prepared his bed as the point of launch, cut the main breaker to his apartment, and lit every candle ever given to him by ex-girlfriends, placing portions of the collection in each of the bedroom’s four corners. With the sheet pulled down, he lay back flat on the Egyptian cotton and stared at the mobile of prisms screwed into the ceiling. With tremendous focus, he visualized the swarm of rainbow fragments that would be surgically released from the prisms at sunrise.

Breathing slowly and reining in his heart rate, for what must have been two hours he exerted the whole of his concentration to bring that soothing, every-morning vision of the exploded visible spectrum to the edge of physical perception. When the rainbow shatters seemingly began to sparkle and crackle in the depths of his pupil, he grasped the black cannister he’d placed at the edge of the king size bed and inserted the nozzle into his nostril. With full force, he choked the trigger, locking his index finger in a crook as he inhaled to the maximum capacity of both lungs.

—He stood instantly in the motionless white. Jupiter sat silently tending to his ledger. Lee envisioned that collection of prismatic colors, forcing it from out of his consciousness and imposing it throughout the portion of that blank void that supported Jupiter’s chair and the taloned feet of the desk.

“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?!?”

Old Jupiter’s head jerked up from the ledger, those liquid gold eyes again peering through Lee. A look of mingled surprise and satisfaction beamed from the Founder’s face. “Scorpio Rising.” He pointed his fountain pen at Lee, then lowered it. “Refocus as you focused where you rest at present and concentrate upon vitality.”

The final trio of words in that statement produced a mute sonic boom, an invisible shockwave. Transparent, concentric ripples the size of tidal waves broadcast outward from Jupiter, rending Lee into an incalculable number of corpuscles in the space of a moment.

….Dozens of dawn rainbows whistling from without the prisms on the ceiling. He’d sweated through the sheets. The bedroom smelt of burnt almonds, lavender, and honey. Bolting upright, Lee swung his feet to the hardwood, strode into the kitchen and removed a trash bag from under the sink. Filling it with every Cosmos Cannister, he grabbed his keys, strode naked down the hallway to the trash chute by the elevator, pulled down the steel hatch door, and hurled the bag into the plummeting dark.

Once back in the apartment, he began packing his duffel.

*

With the steady hand of a surgeon, Lee flung beer cans half-filled with salt water up and over the gunwale of the Herreshoff with his left hand, then raised the 1911 Colt in his right. Eight beers drank then weighted with ocean water drawn up from a bucket hanging in water and tied to a deck cleat before being heaved up and out. Every time he held his shot until the can was on the descending arc.

As a boy at his family’s upstate home and “farm” along the coast, he’d excelled at skeet shooting but had been average at best at target shooting with pistols. It had been at least a decade since he’d fired a handgun. Yet, every shot connected. The ring of lead puncturing aluminum cut the slightly humid air as the impact of a round sent each can into a spin before its pieces flopped into the waves.

After the eighth direct hit, it occurred to Lee that the beer was faulty. He should have been drunk but was barely buzzed. He began launching full, unopened cans—the remainder of the two and a half cases he’d purchased at his final stop before lugging them and the same duffel jam-packed with a random collection of odds and ends from the apartment.

Somewhere into the last half dozen unopened beers, Lee’s actions became clear to him. He had chosen not to kill himself. Not slowly with canned vapor or canned liquid or quickly with munitions. There was one bullet left. Standing up, he removed the phone from his pocket and flung it high and far. He squeezed the trigger when the black rectangle was ten yards above the ocean and watched the screen blast to fragments as the casing tumbled into the undulating slate blue and sank.

He’d been on the water for fourteen hours. The offing was violet as the sun lowered. Turning over the pistol his great—or was it great-great?—grandfather had used in the trenches, he stared out over the water for a few moments before going below and placing it in the scroll-worked drawer beside the bed with an etching of Telemachus in the headboard. He situated it beside the boat’s flare gun, which lay zipped in a clear plastic bag.

Clawing through the guts of the pell-mell packed duffel, he drew out the mobile of prisms he’d pulled down from the bedroom ceiling and returned it to its place above the cabin’s bed. Not bothering to trim the sails or tend to the boat in any other way, Lee laid down and mesmerized himself to the sound of the tinkling crystals as they clipped and popped against one another while the yacht lolled. 

*

As the Herreshoff capsized, Lee slammed into the far side of the cabin. The storm had raged for five or six hours—billowing, torrential curtains of rain, the wet fibers of which lit mercury-silver with each serrated blast of electricity that momentarily rent the sky from east to west.

Until colliding with the far wall, Lee had been wholly oblivious—because for the first time in over a month he’d sunk into a dream. Quite literally sunk, for the dream was of him meandering along an eerily lit ocean floor until spying in the distance a tiny man. As he drew closer the size of the figure grew and the sight of him clarified; Lee recognized it as an aristocrat from the mid-eighteenth century.

…The man wore a powdered wig, silk stockings and a roquelaire coat and breeches. He was measuring something—or possibly nothing, but certainly measuring. First with compass and ruler, the stately gentleman gauged distances at eye level and arm’s length within the water. This carried on for a not inconsiderable amount of time before the gentleman placed those instruments within his left inner coat pocket, from which he then drew—like a magician pulling an impossibly lengthy collection of tied handkerchiefs from his sleeve—a full sized survey chain and poles. 

Carefully, he measured off a square on the ocean floor, at which point the chain and poles dissolved into a swarm of bubbles and he reached yet again into the coat’s inner left pocket, removing a shovel. Making his way to the center of the square, he stepped the blade-head into the ocean bed and dug thirty-odd times before dropping the shovel to float down beside the pile of rocks and silt the blade-head had cut through with the ease of a laser. Bending low, from the watery hole he drew forth a glass tube the size of a toddler and the shape of a kidney. Within it shown a brilliant white substance—a hyper-luminous gas…

A white flash lit the sky. The door to the deck had flung open. Water cascaded over the frame of the cabin hatch as pain shot through Lee’s battered left shoulder. He pressed up off the wall as his eyes adjusted to survey the waterlogged and tempest ransacked cabin. Staggering barefoot in a partially soaked shirt and khaki shorts, he stuck his head through the hatch into the hammering rain; the mast had snapped, the hull had taken damage.

Ducking back inside, he hopped his way over to the bed, snatched open the bedside drawer, brushed the 1911 Colt and its empty extra magazine out of the way, and grabbed the clear bag containing the flare gun. Lunging back toward the wall he’d been awakened against, he gripped the latch handle of the side bench containing supplies, flipped up the seat, pulled out one of several life vests, and drew it on over both arms. As he zipped and made to snap the third to last strap, he slipped the carry loop of the flare gun’s clear, waterproof bag around the tri-prong, then buckled and tightened all straps. Just before pivoting to head towards the deck, he stopped. In the cacophony, he heard faintly the tinkling of the mobile of prisms as they smote one another with every thrash of the waves.

Moving back, he yanked out the central crystal. As he zipped it into the right pocket of the life vest, a colossal burst of lightning flashed the cabin pale, standing to attention every wet hair on his skin as it unleashed a tremendous roar that rang Lee’s ears nearly to the point of ruin.

In two quick lunges he reached the blown-open hatch, pulled himself up onto the deck, and leapt into the monstrous swells. He swam furiously as the waves pummeled, working to put as much distance as possible between himself and every piece of lightning-rod-metal woven into the ruined yacht. After only a few minutes of full-force swimming, another bolt struck, crashing directly into the Herreschoff. He swam on, not turning back to watch the most cherished part of his meager inheritance sink. 

*

On and off he swam or treaded water for at least an hour—waves rolling over, crashing, forcing him under momentarily before bobbing him to the surface like a cork. In the absolute darkness, Lee had no notion of direction. For all he knew he was fighting his way towards the becalmed heart of the Saragossa Sea.

On the point of near exhaustion, the rain now coming down in a light mist, he unsealed the bag clipped to his vest by its carry loop. Drawing out the flare gun with cold hands, to the best of his ability he inspected it with his almost numb fingers. The gun had a cylinder, multiple shot. Raising it straight overhead, he fired.

Between the launching and bursting of the first flare, Lee intuited there would be no salvation. The flare shot was all for one final vision, one final burst of sight in this sloshing, inescapable darkness that would give him comfort before passing on to what knew would be more permanent but, he also suspected, less turbulent, black. By the time the first had detonated, he’d shot the remaining five right to left in a single line from where he’d fired the first flare.

Tossing the gun into the water, he pulled his feet up, laid back and watched the bursts scratching brilliant neon tears into the already saturated sky. Once they faded, Lee shut his eyes, tucked his thumbs into the straps of the life vest, and let the still energetic, but no longer furious waves roll over as he held that string of erupting magenta pearls in his mind’s eye.

*

He awoke face-down in darkness. At his initial attempt to move, he coughed, retched, and in the aftermath realized his face was compressed. Gripping a hand closed, he squeezed granular mush—sand. Leaving shins and feet sunken into the beach, Lee rose and heard the surf in his ears just before it surged over his  knees as cool air swept over him and misting rain drops coated his face. Pressing both palms back into the coastline, he retched a bit more.

With sand in his eyes, he righted himself again and surveyed the beach. Turning his head from left to right—dark, dark, dark, dark. Slowly, he spied a single glimmer which grew brighter as his eyes adjusted. Hundreds of yards, perhaps a thousand, in the distance, what appeared to be a single orb of pale yellow light.

To the back of Lee, a flash split the air, casting just enough light to see that he was on the edge of some well-manicured property and not washed up on a desolate untamed spit of woods jutting into the grinding Atlantic. In the instant before the dark reasserted itself, he caught what he thought was the outline of a residence wrapped around that solitary beacon of light.

As he hauled himself to bare feet, miles out to sea the thunder of that lightning strike swept ashore. Slashes of pebbles and stones barely registered against Lee’s benumbed soles as he trudged toward the gradually swelling point of light. Just as he’d gotten close enough to discern it was possibly a flame trapped behind a windowpane, Lee had the wind knocked from him.

First the portion of his life jacket covering his abdomen, and then a bare knee collided with stone. Reaching to brace against a fall, his palms smacked into the undulating but flat top of a roughhewn stone fence. After a moment’s rest, Lee pulled himself close and swung first one, then the other leg over, his feet coming down in short-cut grass over which he began half consciously treading.

Some twenty yards from what he was now certain was an illuminated window that appeared to look in on a study, he tripped. His forehead smacked the flat of a wooden porch, the bottom step of which his foot, and then once more his knee, had collided with in the darkness. Motionless for a moment, he again pressed himself upward, crawling under the veranda roof.

For the first time since leaping from the yacht, he was out of the rain. On hands and knees, he moved further from the steps, as far from the faint, but nonetheless unceasing, precipitation as possible. Suddenly his palms connected with rough fabric. Lee rubbed his hands back and forth—a hexagonal doormat with six sides. Reaching out to the door that must surely stand beyond it, he found a heavy, solid slab of carved wood covered in what felt like peeling paint.

Standing, Lee leaned against the door, reached up, and rubbed a palm across wood until finding a knocker. It felt brass and was the shape of an eagle’s head. He banged its handle repeatedly.

After minutes of no answer, he reached for the knob. Turning to the left, it held fast. Turning to the right he felt the latch click back. The rusted hinges screamed as the heavy wooden door opened. Beyond the threshold, he saw a small foyer on the other side of which stretched a tunnel-like hallway. He smelt burning wood. At the extremity of his vision, what he took to be the vanishing point of the hallway, Lee faintly made out a low orange glow.

*

Naked, with clothes and life vest spread on the hearthstones of the giant fireplace, Lee warmed himself in the cavernous parlor. He’d fed the embers with wood stacked in a giant brass basket—seven rows high and seven logs long, crowned by a great arching handle—situated a yard away and to the right of the chimney’s base.

After feeding the fire, he’d groped about in the dark of the parlor and found a large, dust-covered blanket folded neatly on the arm of a massive Chesterfield. He unfurled it and beat the dust off against the equally dusty couch, then dried himself with blanket.

In the damp and dim of the parlor, he sat Indian style on the floor. Beside him lay an iron poker. In his hands he turned over a bellows that had been situated upright alongside the poker in a brass stand along with a flat scoop shovel. Inscribed in gold leaf on the cherry wood of one of the panels that formed the bellows were the words:

Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi

Once reasonably warm, Lee heaped an entire cord of wood onto the already roaring fire and worked the bellows for five minutes. The heat was sufficient, but he wanted light.

Upon entering, he’d had only the light from the low glow of the coals. He’d fumbled numb hands over a series of light switches by the front door, then up and down the walls of the hallway, finding three, then another two after entering the den as he shouted a series of reverberating greetings to a vacant house. The switches were dead; despite the embers in the fireplace, the greetings went unanswered.

Stoking the fire, Lee positioned the blanket as close as possible to the flames on the hearthstone, watching the steam rise off. He roamed to the edge of the light’s halo. Every item in the parlor was an antique. The youngest of the clocks and table-top statuary were no less than a century and a half old. Looking at the floor, he noticed only one pair of footprints in the dust—his.

A chill ran through him. Lee stalked back to the inner ring of the warmth and light, the crackling logs comforting him against the howl of the wind as the storm picked up his trail and rushed towards the coast. The clothes were still damp but the blanket was quite dry. Standing before the fire, Lee draped it over his shoulders like a cape or hoodless cowl, knotting it at the neck.

Stepping back from the searing heat, for the first time he looked above the mantle. An enormous oil painting—five feet tall and four feet across—in a gilt frame displayed a Rembrandt-like, full-length portrait of a man glaring down at him. 

The cut of the man’s coat and collar confirmed Lee’s late Renaissance placement of the figure. His hair was shoulder-length. Below a pair of brown eyes, a sharp jaw, pale skin, and a pencil-thin moustache.

The painted man’s glare was imperious—a mingling of scorn and bemusement. Fastened into the bottom bound of the gold-leaf frame, a silver placard shined in the firelight. Tiny in comparison to the painting, the placard was still large enough to be read in the whipping light of the flames: “Schweitzer.”

In the space between the stare of his eyes and the glare of those in the painting, the air densified. The fire light intertwined into the looped stare circulating between Lee and Schweitzer and carved an ovular groove through the thickening air that was imperceptible to sight or touch, but definite and real to some atavistic sense that Lee could feel dilating in the center of his brain.

Steadily etching itself deeper into Lee’s psyche with each circuit was a single image: the blaze of light through the window. The very sight that had led him within the summer home’s walls had vaporized from his consciousness in the instant he crossed beneath the eaves of the porch. But locked in some sort of exchange with the towering Dutchman’s stare, the memory reconstituted.

Somewhere in this house, someone was burning a lamp.

Someone that had started this fire, and that had surely heard every bang, clang, shout, sigh, curse and groaning floorboard, every scrape and knock of the poker, the repeated thrashings he’d given the blanket now wrapped around his naked body. And yet, this person had not—to Lee’s ears—stirred in whatever corner of the cavernous, neglected mansion they crouched, huddled, reclined, waited. Certainly, they’d not shouted a “Who goes there?” of yore or the modern name of a grandchild—“Skylar?”—or an old-money “Preston?”

The heat of the fire swelled in his marrow even as another chill raked his skin. Reaching to the hearth stones, he armed himself with the fleur-de-lis iron poker. Parting his lips to call out through the manse, he checked himself and then steadily sealed them back shut.

Call out what? Call out that he’d intruded, was nude, that he would be staying on until the storm had passed and morning dawned? Ask where he was? No. Exploring the recesses of his mind for what would do to say or kindly state to whomever he encountered, not quite half aware he began walking. Straight out a side door and into another hall, his feet propelled him independent of thought.

As his left hand drew the blanket about him for warmth, his right gradually tightened around the poker as the light of the hearth and the sound of crackling embers faded in the dark arteries of the mansion.

*

A tap against the hardwood, then to the left, then to the right baseboard of the hallway, he made his way forward using the poker like a white cane. Here and there in the seemingly endless twisting series of hallways were windows—their presence and location only revealed when lightning bolts stabbed the ocean as the storm continued its steady, landward approach.

Precisely how long he shuffled through that skein of unlit passageways, twisting doorknobs that opened to unlit rooms, was beyond him. Perhaps he’d roamed for hours, perhaps minutes. But Lee was certain the distance he’d traversed was too much floor space for what he could recall of the mansion’s exterior.

As the storm drew closer to shore, the frequency of lightning increased and the space between bolts and thunder shortened. As light flashed momentarily through the rain-streaked windows, he glimpsed familiar placements for picture frames and tables he’d noticed in the glare of previous strikes.

Halting in the dark, Lee curled his toes into the carpet. Had the carpet been there the entire time or was it only in this particular stretch of hallway? He pulled the blanket tight and halted. He felt winded in a way that exceeded physical exhaustion. Standing stock still, he closed his eyes and listened to the groans and creaks of the mansion.

Eyelids held shut, he conjured the beacon that had led him to the house from the dark beach. In the glow of the lamp it shielded, he pictured the window—rivulets of water cracking across it like miniature, untamed rivers in a pre-European America.

In his mind’s eye, he rotated that flame-illuminated window to locate the corner of the house it was situated within, attempting to map it against the disorienting array of angular left and right turns he’d taken. Thunder swelling in his ears, he switched the poker to his left hand, reached out the right and felt wallpaper against his fingertips. As the bare soles of his feet began automatically rising and falling on carpet, Lee maintained tactile contact with the mansion’s outer wall.

In approximately thirty-two or thirty-three steps, his fingers discovered a groove in the wallpaper. He slid the nail of his index finger up the faint, vertical indentation. It ran upwards as far has he could reach, and presumably farther. Sliding the nail back down, he pressed hard and broke through the wallpaper to a thin, machine-tooled channel. Drawing the finger all the way down to waist level, Lee hit a latch. Pressing it, he then pushed a shoulder against the outer hallway wall. A thick door steadily swung open to a blaze of light.

* 

As his foot crossed the threshold onto the curiously warm floor, the virtually blinding light was permeated with the words: “Be seated.” The three syllables tolled like church bells as the glaring light rose to the intensity of the sun, blotting out his vision and every other sense.

When his faculties reconstituted, he was without a poker, seated in a padded leather visitor’s armchair placed before a mahogany desk, on the other side which the alligator-skin nose of old Jupiter was bent to his ledger.

Behind The Founder were shelves filled with dozens of leatherbound notebooks with roman numerals engraved into the spines, along with busts, a globe, and forest-green draperies framing the enormous rain-lashed window that loomed at the back of him like a hyper-anamorphic tapestry covering the usual white void he inhabited.

In the glass pane towering at the back of Jupiter was the light Lee had seen from the shore. It was the reflected, visible echo of the oil lamp burning at the front left-hand corner of the desk, just beyond which sat the Founder’s standard pile of unopened correspondence.

After a half dozen scratches of its nib across the pages, the pen lifted and one of those giant hands slid beneath the ledger and hauled the accounts together with a sharp clap. Jupiter rested the fountain pen atop a large symbol embossed in gold leaf across the ledger’s now closed cover. 

The symbol appeared to be a stick man with a giant cyclopean head sporting horns, its handless arms outstretched to the sides of its rail thin torso and its equally thin, feet-less legs bent to round-knees in a way that conveyed a crouched posture.

Looking up with a pair of eyes that were as near to human as they’d ever presented themselves—ice-blue irises encircled by two thin bands of gold that insulated a pair of pupils black as polished obsidian—he gave Lee his undivided attention. 

“You careen like a dead stone through the halls of your ancestors.” Howling wind rattled the pane at Jupiter’s back. “Across sheer mystery your ancestors sailed Encountering a strange land that confounded their vision, they altered that vision to construct a new reality. That reality was personal and communal, but it expanded —from outpost to polis, polis to metropolis, metropolis to cosmopolis, cosmopolis to civilization.”

Jupiter pressed both elbows to the desktop, knitted the thick fingers of his shovel blade hands and peered over his gray moustache. “Poverty of imagination—absence of a grand vision—has vulgarized your blood.” He straightened himself in his chair, elongating his seated height to what appeared seven feet. Before Lee, the desk rose to accommodate the Founder’s swelling frame, lifting his elbows along with it as the giant intensified his now downward slanted, piercing gaze.

Jupiter leaned forward as he continued to grow upward, towering now eight feet above Lee, who sat before a solid wall of mahogany staring upward at those ice-cold eyes. Beyond the windowpane a blast of lightning split the black sky, flaring the room cerulean and opal—a peal of thunder that shook the room lagging three seconds in its wake. Two more bolts fired inland, rattling the house three seconds after crashing along fence rows skirting the primeval forest that stood beyond the property. The wind screamed.

“Material and immaterial, your forebearers sought only substance. Rotten to the crevices with cold stardust, you inquire after trifles, panhandle after metaphysical inanities.” Jupiter’s globe-sized left fist crashed down on the arcane symbol embossed on the ledger’s cover.

The monstrous horror of the scene was lost on Lee. As old Jupiter roared and the earth nearly rattled to pieces in the maelstrom, fury swelled in his solar plexus—blind, murderous Achillean rage. Glaring up at the founder above blasts of thunder, cacophonous wind, and bellowed declamations, Lee distinctly heard the rhythmic hiss and rasp of a crosscutting saw.

“Your worth and fate are recorded and beyond alteration—marked down ‘dead stone.’”

Lee’s ears filled with the sound of cracking—not that of skyborne electricity, but of the rip and snap of felled lumber. Like a cougar, he leapt for the ledger, exploding nine feet into the air to lunge over the desktop with both arms extended. As his hands clasped the ledger, so too did Jupiter’s.

Pulling against the giant’s grip with both feet braced just below the edge of the towering desktop, the first of several subsequent strikes of lightning collided with the mansion’s roof. Braced with his heels, Lee drove with all his might and leaned backwards, hands vice-clamped to the ledger. As Jupiter began to draw him up and forward over the desktop, with an almost superhuman might he wrenched the ledger from those titanic fists.

As Lee hurtled into the floor, another bolt of lightning struck some far corner of the mansion. Rolling to his side, the knot in his blanket loosened and—pinned beneath one leg—remained on the antique rug as he sprang to his feet. Whipping open the cover, he held the ledger with one hand as he sank the other into the paper like talons. But as curled fingers clenched around a collection of pages to tear them loose, wad them, cram them between teeth, bite through, swallow them—his eyes fell upon the innards of the ledger.

From the left margin across the spine and over to the right margin, a single, illuminated image shone forth. It was rendered in a style reminiscent of gold and silver-streaked Byzantine paintings or illuminated medieval Irish manuscripts. Its sublimity transfixed and horrified. All portions of creation external to the image faded as Lee’s consciousness was drawn into and absorbed within it.

*

In the foreground—his body visible from the solar plexus upwards and divided in half by the gutter of the “ledger”—stood the figure from the painting above the mansion’s fireplace. Though draped in an ultramarine cloak fastened at the throat with a golden broach the shape of a small rose, the Dutchman was coiffed and attired precisely the same.

Before his stomach and chest, he held a sixteenth-century glass bottle filled with a ruby elixir. Also split down the middle by the gutter, the container measured from just below the man’s golden rose broach to the palm of the left hand which cradled its spherical base.

Brushing against the left hand’s thumb and index finger were the scales of an emerald serpent. The gemstone snake coiled from the base upward along the neck, which came to a stop just below the golden rose broach. The snake wound around the minium liquid in an upward spiral. The serpent’s head faced Lee, a pair of red beryl gemstones for eyes staring through him, as it rested atop the bottle’s opening like a cap or cork.

To either side of the bisected Renaissance man, bottle, and serpent expanded an aerial view of an island—the contrast of which made it appear as if Lee was floating 7,000 feet in the sky face to face with the seventeenth-century Dutchman as the land and water unfurled beneath them.

Certain sections of the island were virginal forest with natural clearings, while in other areas stood tiny cottages in manmade clearings that rested beside one of the three rivers that formed the island’s boundaries. In yet another quadrant of the background stood a cluster of eighteenth-century wooden shops which were cheek-to-jowl with nineteenth-century government buildings of stone—which themselves gave way to twentieth-century steel skyscrapers that flowed into glass apartment buildings of the twenty-first century.

As the light which beamed from the pages shimmered across the embossed portions of the illustrations, each of these sections shifted and morphed one into the other like clear, sunlit water briskly flowing over a shallow streambed studded with precious metals that presented a constant flux of color.

With a tremendous effort, Lee tore his gaze from the eyes of the of man and serpent alike so that he might more closely observe each quadrant of the shifting and glimmering landscape below. Every millimeter of the island’s surface dazzled with a holographic effect produced with intricate brushwork, stippling, and burnishing.

Lingering on any given space and period of time in that partially obscured and continuously morphing background, his vision microscoped downward to reveal animated bits of life just as active and transient as the flora and architecture—pioneers, then cart drivers, then soldiers, then judges, now bankers, now fashion models, now addicts, then hangmen, then cops. A blend of human bodies across four centuries simultaneously weeping, preaching, toasting, toiling, smirking, screaming, leading, lazing, legislating, clearing, killing, constructing, transacting, sailing, saving, birthing, dying, rotting.

From point to point in each quadrant, an animated mass of life wheeling, cutting, and soaring like a murmuration of glittering starlings. Here and there they moved in an unpredictable but fluid pattern, until the multi-century roil and cacophony of every bit of the island not occluded by the hovering Dutchman in the foreground merged into a single, pulsating flock of what Lee struggled to vaguely classify as “thought substances” collected at the crown of the Renaissance Dutchman’s head.

Coalescing into a brilliant ball of burnished light, this condensation of the very life essence that infused the island below suddenly fired straight down the center of the image, cutting sharply down the gutter that separated both pages in a brilliant white beam.

The shaft of light pierced the serpent’s skull, balling straight through his forked tongue and lower palette before drilling into the open mouth of the bottle containing the elixir to infuse it with a terrible, radioactive brilliance which produced a burst of minium light to match the shade of the liquid. In the manner of an X-ray, this red glow shone through the Dutchman—illuminating the portion of the island which his body had previously obscured. Hued in the same dazzling shade of red as the elixir stood a jagged mass of skyscrapers.

Lee’s eyes immediately drew towards a collection at the grouping’s edge that appeared to be apartment buildings. One in particular magnetized his vision, yanking him toward it—sucking him further into the image with the inexorable pull of a black hole. Hurtling towards it with the velocity of a meteorite, the ruby-hued apartment building which motionlessly sloshed in the identically colored light soaking the landscape swelled to a size that blotted out every other portion of the image. The borders of the ledger dissolved as Lee rocketed towards the center of a book gutter that no longer existed.

On a collision course with the building, Lee fired through a red atmosphere that was both liquid and air. He was descending at supersonic speed towards a spot in the tower of glass three quarters of the way up to the building’s bland pinnacle of a lightning rod. Just before punching a hole through this tower of residential glass, a burst of color in the crimson light caught his eye—a flash of emerald, pearl, ultramarine, anthracite, rust, and chestnut. The burst of color came from straight ahead, directly in his trajectory.

A grinding instant before smashing through the window that separated Lee from the multi-hued burst of color with which he was destined to collide, Lee recognized it as the Renaissance Dutchman—standing in his own apartment—cupping his serpent encircled bottle of elixir which now matched the shade of red that enveloped everything. Despite bursting through the windowpane at ultrasonic speed, time slowed to a strolling pace.

In the instant before burning down from friction to such a fine, micro-meteoric point that he would stab directly through the empty space between the serpent’s emerald coils—exploding the container as he shot through it—he saw through the minium liquid sealed within the clear container a portion of the island which the Dutchmen’s body had previously obscured. Hued in the same dazzling shade of red as the elixir stood a jagged mass of skyscrapers.
As the glass of the elixir’s container burst in his wake, in the midst of what he  suddenly comprehended was an interminably repeating, matryoshka-esque descent, Lee’s eyes immediately drew towards a collection at the grouping’s edge that appeared to be apartment buildings. One in particular…

*

With a roar that he felt rip through every fiber of him to the core of his being—a side effect of what was the utmost expression of will that he would summon in the whole of this or any other life—Bailey Batts Vernheist slammed shut the ledger between his hands. The instant the pages struck one another his ears filled with a different racket.

Flames roared about him and an explosion of thunder shook the books off the shelves of the burning study, mixing with a guttural howl which issued from his own throat. The combined effect was an apocalyptic din that matched the scene of destruction and ruin filling his eyes. In every direction whipped and tossed an inferno, the intense heat of which evaporated the sweat pouring out of him.

Wheeling around for the hidden door through which he’d entered, broad and high as a bank vault stood old Jupiter. Without a thought, Lee drew back a free hand to strike the aged giant with all his might, but before he could thrust forward his fist one of the Founder’s clinker brick sized hands struck his sternum. The hand sundered flesh and shattered bone as it punctured through Lee’s ribcage.

All five giant fingers squeezed together in a fist around Bailey’s heart. A tremendous burst of pain infused him as he felt the fingertips of the Founder press against the palm to which they were attached. An eruption of what he imagined magma to feel like poured from his imploded ventricles—a superabundance of scalding but soothing, viscous liquid that, as it rushed outward through every inch of his body and then into the burning mansion, Bailey realized was molten gold…

*

…An explosion of lightning blasted the top mast of the yacht. Lee snapped awake, face-down on the steps leading from the cabin to the deck, saltwater cascading into his open eyes. Wiping them with what felt like a broken hand, Bailey looked up just in time to see a burning chunk of wood the size of an office chair blown from the mast descend from above to smash a hole through the deck and momentarily pitch the stern upwards before it slammed back into the waves.

Pushing up from the stairs, Bailey gripped the rail, life jacket slipping down from his Adam’s apple as he stood. Getting to his feet, the clear bag with the flare gun threaded through the fastened center strap by its carry loop dangled against his vest—still there, unfired. Clambering onto the punctured deck, he unsealed it, drew the pistol and ripped all six shots upward at a forty-five-degree angle into the gale. Each hooked back in the wind and exploded forty or so feet up almost directly overhead.

As a wave hammered the boat he crashed into the deck. Staring up from his back, the bursts of magenta illuminated every howling raindrop into an innumerable spray of seraphimic sparks beaten from some divine anvil that would sink with him, the cans, the phone, the Colt and the boat to the depths of the abyss.

Contemplating his bones on the bed of that chained and surveyed ocean floor as he gazed into the flare light, Bailey realized his left hand was unzipping one of the vest’s pockets. Of their own volition, numb fingers prodded and grasped until they drew out the large prism he’d torn from the center of the mobile.

Still flat on his back, Bailey observed himself slowly raising the prism to the still present but fading flare light above. And then he who watched and that which was watched combined stereoscopically as Bailey held the prism to his right eye and peered through it at the blooming minium. Gasping at the sight shot through the facets, through the hammering rain a faint smell of burning filled his nostrils, his skin crackled, and existence flashed bleached ivory.

*

…The extraordinary force with which Bailey Betts Vernheist sat up within the ambulance snapped one of the straps fastening him down and bent the aviation-grade aluminum gurney at a ninety-degree angle. It knocked the paramedic defibrillating him into the nearest wall and sent the paddles crashing first into his thighs, then the ambulance floor.

Coming to a seated stop, as Bailey began to regain his senses, he was practically nose-to-nose with another shocked paramedic—a woman with platinum blonde hair and pale green eyes. Their faces frozen less than two inches from one another, the other medic lying unconscious on the floor of the ambulance from a combination of a blow to the head and the paddles striking him.

She looked familiar and with the slightest bit of concentration—in a bright, fluid, effortless moment of willed clarity that relaxed his nerves and cleared his mind in the red and white wail of the ambulance’s innards—Bailey recognized her.

Gazing into Crystal’s stunned eyes, in the core of her pupils Bailey saw what had transpired. The candles he’d lit in the corners of the room and by the bed had set off the smoke detectors, the batteries keeping them operational despite the breaker being flipped off. They’d triggered the fire alarm. The sprinklers activated. Apartment staff noted power was cut off in the room. Calls were made to emergency services, who were informed the source was the room of a man who’d been acting increasingly erratic in recent months. The building had been evacuated. Firefighters and paramedics rushed to his apartment. Breaking through the front door, they found a man in the bedroom dead or nearly dead from a cardiac event, black cans and pills strewn about soaked-through bedsheets and scattered over the hardwood.

A rainbow bloomed in Crystal’s irises.

His words were relaxed. “I’m a prince of America and I’ll show you something amazing once we’re both awake.” Before Crystal could respond, he leaned forward, the gurney creaking as it wrenched and bent the two remaining inches between their lips. He kissed her with both eyes open.

Bowered in every direction by a canopy of twenty-story buildings through which the first winds of fall whistled in the moonlight, Crystal put her hands around his face as the ambulance shot through a red-light intersection and the firmament sang a chorus that hushed all beasts past, present, and future.