. . . join the adventure . . .

and this is your destination now, and you run through the streets, half-blind with sudden 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, possessed as you are with furious and righteous anger.

…and yet, even as you move forward, angry as you are, you wonder: does a loss of her innocence really merit these mad 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.

The loss of these things is the tragedy. Without them … what even is a person? What even is a story?

You turn down a sidestreet and stop: before you is the first man’s lodging, apartment 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 snow, and a cigarette burns in 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. The old trick works: the sheet reveals a name: The Enchanted Hunters.

Quickly, now, to the manager’s office. A woman with a purple webbed mask over her face rests in a recliner, an electric fan wobbling to and fro. Hello? she says. Anything there? You tell her yes, there is something here, and it is you, and this you is searching for the man in A3, the terrible and calamitous man dehumanizing the world one innocent soul at a time, and to stop him you need to find a 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, I know that voice, she says. It’s you again. She tells you that the place you are searching for is very far, yet closer than you think, and that it will take some time to find. It is not in this town. It is out in the dangerous country, and no one sane ever goes there. You could walk but it would take weeks. Sometimes, though, a bus comes. The stop is just outside town.

She sighs, adjusts her mask, and 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 tell you what.

She tells you how grand his 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 where he came from, who he actually was. Once she came upon him in the kitchen, all alone, spooning bites from a grapefruit, and she realized that the most terrible thing about him wasn’t his anonymity so much as his deep unhappiness. Sometimes she imagined that if they all stayed home on a night of one of his parties, leaving him alone there on his wondrous estate, waiting for the people who would never come, he would probably walk alone out to his blue pool, and what a lovely pool it was, how it lit up night, a glowing sapphire in the dark yawn of countryside. Probably he would get a couple of the fancy volumes from his enormous library, walk across the lawn, and 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 purple mask from her face. You stifle a gasp. Save her gaping mouth, there is nothing there: no nasal cavity, no eye sockets, just skin grown over smooth bone. When she blows a pink bubble, a shiver courses through you. You don’t have to do this thing. No one is making you.

But what else do you have to do? You came to this town full of vim and vigor, but your ship has sailed, and this is your path now. Why not? Gotta do something.

She reaches out and with soft 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. Heed only the map.

You ask her what she means, what map she’s talking about.

She runs her fingers up your arm, 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 at the back of the room. Follow me.