. . . join the adventure . . .

and this is your destination now, and you run through the streets, half-blind with madness, careening off passersby, dapper suited men with laughing women on their arms, mothers wagging fingers at miscreant puppies, shoppers who flinch in fright at seeing you … you, now possessed with a furious and righteous anger all on behalf of that poor poor girl.

…and yet, even as you move forward, angry as you are, you wonder: does a loss of her innocence really merit these furious agonies? Whose innocence has been lost: hers? Yours? What is innocence, anyway, but a blindness to the truth of the world?

No. It’s not precisely ‘innocence’ that the girl has lost. You could see plainly that she was once lively and radiant, and now the tenderer human emotions are husks within her.

Curiosity. Wonder. Joy.

It is the loss of these things that is the tragedy. Without them … what even is a person?

You turn down a sidestreet and stop: before you is the first man’s lodging, A3. The door is open. You press in, and the room has been ransacked. Sheets flung from the bed. Dresser emptied of drawers. Water puddles in a corner. The television plays only snow. A lit cigarette burns in an ashtray.

On the bedstand lie a pencil and notepad with a sheet torn hastily from it, the edging still remaining. You take the pencil, lightly rubbing it across the remaining paper, and your heart leaps as the old trick works. The sheet reveals a name: The Enchanted Hunters.

Quickly, now, to the manager’s office. A woman with a mask over her eyes rests in a recliner, an electric fan wobbling to and fro. Hello? she says. Anything there? You tell her yes, that you are here, that you are searching the man in A3, the terrible and calamitous man dehumanizing the world one innocent soul at a time. You tell her you need to know how to find the place called The Enchanted Hunters.

She wheezes and shakes her head. She is older, her mouth lined with decades of pursed lips and passed judgment. Oh, she says. It’s you again. She tells you that the place you are searching for is very far, but closer than you think, that it will take some time to find. It is out in the dangerous country, and no one in this town will go there. You could walk but it would take weeks.

Sometimes, though, she says, a bus comes. The stop is outside town.

She adjusts the mask and sighs as she says she knows the man you are after. She is not surprised. Everyone hates him, he’s awful, they all just suffer him because he throws such nice parties. One of these days someone was going to do him his last dance.

She tells you how grand the parties used to be, how everyone from all over the country attended, drinking fancy champagnes, eating fine caviar balls. Did anyone really know him? No—they just wanted the luxury the man provided. He’d wander his own halls like a lonely stranger. Sometimes he stole glances at the women. Sometimes he stole glances at the men. No one was quite certain who he was. Once she came upon him in the kitchen, all alone, spooning bites from a grapefruit, and she realized that the terrible thing about him was his deep unhappiness. She says that sometimes she imagined that if they all stayed home on a night of one of his parties, leaving the man alone there on his wondrous estate, he would probably walk out to his lovely blue pool. What a pool it was—how it lit up night, a glowing sapphire in the dark yawn of the countryside. He would get a couple of the big fancy volumes from his enormous library, walk across the lawn, step down into the pool. He would stroll to the deep end, sit cross-cross-applesauce, and there, alone, flipping the pages underwater, he would slowly drown.

Her jaw tightens. Like my grandmother said: never feel sorry for people you’d trade places with, and never feel angry toward people you wouldn’t. She sits up and pulls the mask from her eyes, and you stifle a gasp. Save her gaping mouth, there is nothing there: no nasal cavity, no eye sockets, just skin grown over smooth bone. She blows a pink bubble, and a shiver courses through you. You don’t have to do this thing. No one is making you.

True. But what else do you have to do? You came to this town full of vim and vigor, bee in bonnet, ants in pants, blood a-fire. But your ship has sailed, this is your path now. Why not? Gotta do something.

The woman reaches out and, with soft and warm fingers, touches your arm.

You will encounter many strange things. They may change you, they may challenge you. Stay focused. Listen for clues. Do not fall prey: everyone in this tale is an actor. Nothing is real-real. Ignore the false siren songs. Heed only this map.

You ask her what she means, what map.

She runs her fingers up your arm, your shoulder, touches her thumb to your brow. The only one. The one in here. Now come, she says, rising from her chair and stepping into a doorway. Follow me.