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to dream of a fantasy land. First, the smells come to him: rich sandalwood and the exact freshness of a breeze that runnels across a stretch of clear, clean pond water. Then, the sounds: the rustling of leaves in a sensual wind, the staccato stamp-stamp of some animal moving through the underbrush, a hint of a bird-call, an owl perhaps, flying through the dusk. A taste of lime, a hint of mint. And when he opens his eyes in dream, he is there, with the somehow comforting hulk of a mountain range in the distance, and the splay of moonlight across his hands. He is sitting by a pool of water, in rich, deep mud, and when he staggers to the water’s edge and looks into its depths, he sees not just the reflection of the moon but also his face, transformed.
    Every night, it is a different face, of some creature from myth or nonsense rhymes. Each night, he delights in the power of the creature he has become, whether it be the powerful leg thrusts of the jackalope as it thunders across prairie beneath the mountains’ gaze or the thick muscular slide of a giant snake, belly ridges catching with itchy delight against an underbrush of dead, crinkly leaves. And with each incarnation, the concurrent amplification of his senses: eyesight that can pierce through the bark of trees to reveal the insects tunneling through its pulp; or hearing so acute that he can sense a droplet of water falling from the wing of a wasp in flight a hundred miles away; or taste that can bring him the brine of the far-off, long lost Old Sea, wrapped in the tang of seaweed and salt.
    From each dream, he wakes refreshed but with no memory of his adventures, while in the land he has left for the day, some creature dreams the details of his daily life with a similar amnesiac’s satisfaction.
    You could join a thousand circuses for a thousand years and never experience what Bowen experiences in his sleep, and which the cells, the blood, the flesh of his body still retain even if his conscious mind does not.
    Someday, Bowen will wake up during his dream, and his life will be more riotous with color and light than he could possibly imagine . . .

THE SECRET LIFE OF
    RICH DEMARS
    Rich Demars runs a gas-driven power plant that uses landfill methane. Once a nuclear operator on a submarine near Corpus Christie, he is a man with a full appreciation for the uses of energy, and the application of those uses. There are stories he could tell about his life on the submarine, but he chooses to keep them to himself. No one would believe him anyway. But his submarine secrets are not the only ones he keeps from his friends and family. The other set of secrets would not be believed either . . . “except when their utter and devastating truthfulness shall be revealed in the fullness of time” as he sometimes mutters during the slow times at the power plant. “Then they’ll understand. They’ll all understand.”
    For, in his off hours, Demars works for a worldwide secret society dedicated to returning the Earth to the rule of an obscure sect of Mesopotamian magicians and priests. These priests and magicians have kept their bloodlines pure down through the trials of thousands of years, and kept their plans intact as well. It may be the most secret of all secret organizations in the history of the world.
    Using the library in his home town—specifically, that marvelous invention the inter-library loan—Demars has been instrumental in helping the society realize its goals. For it was Demars who discovered the location of the legendary Euphrates Tablet, with all that connotates. It was Demars who figured out the best cell phone plan and got the entire sect to adopt it. And it was Demars who came up with the idea of a monthly newsletter, which he now edits. (The newsletter has no bylines and no masthead; it has no name and it has no mailing address; it also has no English letters, as it is written all in cuneiform—thus ensuring that infidels and other undesirables cannot read