Being an account of the early years of one Jesse Truant, dream-ravaged vizard and houngan to the new gods of the city.

Jesse Truant was born with a caul wrapped around his eyes to a decaying mansion in Louisiana. That isn't his real name. His mother, at the time of his birth, was in a locked ward for dementia. No one ever spoke of his father to him. The house was gigantic, room after room of rotting, waterlogged books and wallpaper lazily forming arabesques on the wall.

Skeletal great aunts lorded over dinners each evening, and an array of silent, ancient servants trailed after the boy. He later suspected the servants might have already been dead. He did, however, have a puppy.
A pale and anemic boy heir to a decaying fortune, and to a family history with more than just skeletons, he was frequently absent from school. Brain fever, the notes to the principal said. The town left him alone. They heard about his birth, and their mothers told them quietly to stay out of the boy's way. The county, however, took a dimmer view of things. Jesse was constantly in fights, when he wasn't rocking autistically in his seat, or refusing to touch a book that hadn't already been read. 

When he was twelve, the county Sheriff drove him home from school and stood on the wet planks of the veranda, chewing Jesse's great aunt Hyacinth off for negligence. Six minutes after the Sheriff’s speech was over, he was peeling out in his car, leaving in terror never to return. Jesse was officially home schooled from that day on.

Jesse had always heard voices. He figured it was just the house. And his dreams, well... everyone dreams of the same place, night after night, don't they? Jesse dreamt of the castle, on the hill, with the oceans
around it. And the door with the puzzle that locked it. So, at age twelve and a half, Jesse solved the puzzle. Inside the door was a polished marble atrium with an ivory fountain and a winged cat. The cat's name was Ezekiel.

As Jesse explored the castle in his dreams, Ezekiel taught him how to shape them. There were visitors - spirits and gods, forgotten and unborn, who came to socialize, to politick, or to snoop. Nobody told him whose castle it was. Early training for a lifetime of gate crashing. At dinner, Aunt Hyacinth would nonchalantly ask, "What's the Marquis wearing this season?" or, "Do tell Mr. Carrefour I say hello, won't you, dear?" Jesse thought this was normal. He hadn't left the estate in two years. The days he roamed the woods with his dog, or sat indoors and tried to pry waterlogged pages apart. He often failed. He was eighteen before he found out that Doc Eon escaped from the Hollow Earth and the clutches of its hexapod denizens.

At sixteen, his Aunt informed him that he was going to inherit the family ring. Matter of factly. Between soup and crab legs. "Be a dear and wear a suit saturday." Ezekiel told him to be careful. Ezekiel had never liked his Aunt, but Jesse just assumed it had nothing to do with him. Nothing else ever seemed to. So, Friday night, Jesse learned how to tie a tie. Difficult to learn from someone without opposable thumbs, I might add. And Saturday morning, he put a suit on. That night they killed him.

Hyacinth etched his secret name on a bullet, Muriel stood him in front of the coffin - he hadn't figured out what was coming next - and Laetitia shot him between the eyes. He woke up in a coffin. Ezekiel was sitting on his chest. He could feel the bullet under his skin, lodged against his skull. "They're going to feed you to the gods," the cat says. "It's why they never die." Jesse had other plans.

He opened the coffin and sat up in the antechamber of the dream castle. Someone handed him a drink. He stepped out of the coffin and picked his way through the weird polygonal twister game going on, and followed Ezekiel out the front door. It took a month to find Legba, get an audience, and work a bargain. Jesse traded his name for the name of the locks binding his wrists in the other world. Bum deal, but sixteen year olds don't haggle well under pressure. Ezekiel said he could have gotten the same thing for the name of his dog, but Ezekiel always finds something to bitch about.

He woke up in a coffin, again. He whispered the name of the lock, and felt the tumblers twist and click. He sat up. He was in the basement. They'd killed his dog. Memories are a bit fuzzy, from here on out. Jesse has made lots of deals and sold a lot of his memories. He doesn't know where most of his tattoos are from. He doesn't think he always had this face on. He remembers watching the fire eat his house, remembers his Aunts screaming, and remembers the flashing sirens, and how long it took them to navigate the flooding driveway.

They locked him up. Lockdown, psychward, restraints - the whole nine yards. Nobody mentioned that the bodies were decomposed before the fire started. Maybe nobody noticed. Jesse was shipped to a Knoxville
facility, pumped full of drugs and rolled over twice a day to prevent bedsores. The Halidol made everything cloudy and made it easy for the boy to sleep sixteen to twenty two hours a day. He spent a lot of time with Ezekiel that year. As Jesse tells it, the way he escaped was:

"I was dating a sylph named Hazel. She lived inside a shade of blue. She came to a party to celebrate Viscomte Jandelbraas being promoted from a euclidian to a non-euclidian manifestation. He'd been a torus. Now he was something weirder - anyway, as ranks were measured, it was a step up and I'd helped him with some gossip and intrigue, and she was at his party.

Then she started cheating on me with some Reichsbaron from the outer realms. I was moody and pissy and too depressed to deal with sleep so I woke up, despite the drugs. Jandelbraas still owed me one, so he helped get me outside my room, or maybe just convinced or explained to me that I already was outside, and I stole the custodian's clothes from his locker and walked off the grounds and hitchhiked to Philly. Took me three hours to realize that I’d left my name inside. Never did see fit to go back after it."

When his locked room was found empty, and his locked restraints untouched, Jesse's file was quietly lost. In Philadelphia Jesse met Skinny Pete, a semi-notorious grifter, and was put to work. Apprenticed to Pete, Jesse would 'rope' targets in, finding new victims for Pete's con games and guiding them back to Pete for fleecing. Jesse took a ten percent cut, but he learned the art of the con.

He knew he was crazy. The voices were too loud. He kept seeing the future out of the corner of his eye. Ezekiel was in his dreams. Dead movie stars spoke to him at two in the morning, sometimes from movies they weren't even in. Everything around him turns into a portent when he looks.

So he drinks a lot. He doesn't dream when he passes out. But, being a short-con specialist, being drunk doesn't help. He ends up in jail at nineteen in Reno for running the gold brick against an undercover
narcotics officer.

Voodoo Eddie was a Brazilian gambler in for a three to five on a grand theft auto. He was also a hermetic of House Thig. Chance, fate, or something Jesse never figured out put them in the same cell. Eddie saw
Jesse convulse as his cigarette ash fell and spelled out the numbers of a mob enforcer who Jesse didn't know was set up to be shivved that night.

Eddie started talking. He laid out the game, told Jesse to quit drinking and listen to Ezekiel. He even visited Ezekiel's dreams and called them his desmesne. After two years of this, Ezekiel took Jesse into the castle and showed him new rooms. Jesse learned the names of new spirits, ones that could do things. Eddie called it a seeking. The next day, Jesse walked.

A greyhound bus to California later (and sixty three short-conned dollars richer), Jesse met Ezekiel's mentor. He found the Hermetics. He started studying to earn a sigil. Being the new kid, sullen and angry, he wasn't very popular. But he committed himself to his reading. For rent, he parlayed a bartending job into a deejaying gig under the name Kid Sinister. There, he met a Japanese kid who looked like a pig and smelled worse. Hiro.

The two got to talking. The next thing Jesse remembers, "Shit started getting weird. I knew a drumbeat that could summon the loas to the dancefloor. I don't remember who it was that thought of putting a rave in an Orgone box. If it was me, I must have had a different planet that week. So we made a big Orgone collector, consecrated it to resonate at the frequency of Venus, and built it inside a warehouse. Once the beat kicked in, and I added some ultrabass NLP, pidgin enochian dialects that took the pain of dancing away, people started getting down, and before you knew it, the gods were on the dancefloor."

San Francisco started to feel crowded. The executive-track Thiggians became less cold and more openly hostile. Jesse and Hiro became roomates. They called the roach-infested hovel they rented the invisible college.

House Thig wished it were invisible.

The decision to move came suddenly, and might not even have been spoken of. One night, they passed out individually as usual, amidst whatever they were doing. The next morning, they woke up and it was unanimous.
They started packing.

Paradigm
The spirits are everywhere and everything. They don't have faces, that's just how we interact with them. The world is a five dimensional crystal vibrating in an eight dimensional fluid. When thoughts intersect our three dimensional lattice, from outside the confines of spacetime, this is how they appear. We used to call them Angels. Then loas. They include all sorts of things - a spirit is the life of an idea, a word given form.

Now, they take the faces of celebrities and comic book characters. Fictional heros and dead rock stars. Elementals, ghosts, and gods. They speak in the static of television, wave from the reflection of neon light.

Watch a newspaper fold itself in the wind and it will spell out your horoscope. If you use tarot cards right, the scenes they show animate themselves and become mirrors, set at odd angles, that reflect around the
corners of time.

There is an economy of barter. After initial contact, Jesse performs favors for the spirits, stockpiling goodwill. Then he can call on them and they are obligated to return the favor. He engages in weird ritualistic behavior (Like voodoo - drink rum and curse and smoke cheap cigars and eat candy, and you get Papa Ghede's favors) to garner favor from them, and then he spends these favors as needed. Speed Racer can teach you, for a night, to drive like a maniac. Borges' librarian will read to you from all the books never written. Batman will teach you to hide in the shadows and dissapear.

Everyone knows about these spirits, everyone feels them - Jesse just knows how to talk to them. If you speak their language, everyone will hear you. Neurolinguistic Programming is what you call speaking in the imperative tense of enochian. In the linguistic field that is your mind, you can construct golems - automata - dreamthings - that are every bit as autonomous as a computer's subroutines. These are cyclical prayers, zen koans, or artificial intelligences.

Foci
-- Sphere --------------------- Need? ----- Focus ----------------------------

   Correspondence 		Fluids, Distorting influences
   Entropy 			Tarot Cards, TV, Mags, Cut ups
   Forces 			Spiritual rituals, tattoos or charms
   Life				Coral, DNA splicing, drugs, retrovirii, apparati
   Matter			Naming, alchemy, playdoh, sigils
   Mind			Languages
   Prime			The Color Gold, money, water, big red soda water
   Spirit 			TV, radio, cutups, drumbeats
   Time			Tarot cards, TV, mags, cut ups