THE ABYSS SUPERHIGHWAY: NEVER RELEASED ZAP COMIC FOUND!

More about THE ABYSS SUPERHIGHWAY: NEVER RELEASED ZAP COMIC FOUND!

A Cautionary Tale About Intergalactic Laundry

It all started when I was a kid, lying on the floor with enormous books, inventing words I couldn’t pronounce and pretending I understood them. I figured if you made the words big enough, eventually the universe would have to pay attention.

Years later, my alchemy guru encouraged me to babble until the nonsense organized itself into language. Wonderful! I was already halfway there.

Then came the grimoires, the sigils, the Al Azif, and the screaming insects of the desert night. I discovered you could turn insect noises into imaginary alphabets, arrange them into little choo-choo trains of power, and repeat the symbols until an entirely unexpected picture appeared.

I abandoned the Tarot cards and started making collages out of dictionaries. Pictures became words, words became poems, and poems became pictures again. Eventually the whole operation developed into my Baroque Star Swamp.

By then I’d figured out how to navigate the Abyss Superhighway.

Very convenient transportation.

One afternoon I put on my intergalactic backpack and travelled from Sirius to the Pleiades. Beautiful scenery! Enormous galaxies, impossible architecture, planets nobody had bothered naming, and absolutely no immigration officials.

I returned to Earth and discovered something resembling a little ball of lint in my pocket.

I threw it into the laundry.

Big mistake.

A week later the laundry had developed eyes. A few days after that, teeth. Eventually an enormous black creature emerged, covered in spines, with a mouth that appeared to lead directly into another dimension.

It looked like something that had escaped from the Akashic Records before the librarian finished cataloguing it.

Now, I’m reasonably tolerant of unusual houseguests, but this particular visitor was expanding into the furniture.

So I opened the Abyss behind it.

WHOOSH!

The creature, several shirts, miscellaneous underwear, and half my socks disappeared into a gigantic purple vortex.

I slammed the passage shut.

There I was, sitting on the floor, contemplating the philosophical consequences of losing perfectly good socks somewhere between Sirius and the Pleiades.

The cat, meanwhile, sat in the window watching the moon.

Cats understand these things.

They’ve been navigating the Abyss for thousands of years without passports, ceremonial initiations, or complicated magical alphabets.

And that’s the peculiar thing about all this occult literature. Everybody warns you about losing your sanity.

Nobody mentions the laundry.