A spiral is an ancient symbol—a snake, an eye, a womb—and a hypnotic focus for mesmerizing the compliant into a hypnagogic state. A spiral is a flow into a singularity. A spiral is a whirlwind. The spiral before Zach’s eyes was generated by a light projector, he knew, and by a filter that was spinning before the projector. He focused and heard only a faint dripping. The fuzziness was falling away from him like he was shedding a cocoon, though, and he soon felt bindings of his arms behind him, metallic and cold, mirroring the cold of the room around him. The spiral was spinning gently, like a pinwheel in a breeze, and Zach found it comforting. It was a flow into a black hole, the negation of everything material, yet the lines of flow never altered or diminished, but extended into forever. A cold universe, empty of the luminous, yet beautiful in its existence, is still cold, he reasoned as he felt the chill rise out of the chair, into his damp back, and his arms. The spiral kept spinning with clockwork regularity.

He finally heard steel slide against steel and a light bloomed to his left, incandescently warm and yellow. A human shadow marched in and stood quietly before him. He didn’t speak at first, waiting to try to see who it was, though suspecting a female form from the subtle hints of hip and slender arm as the shadow moved around him. She slid into the light of the spiral and he recognized Aphrodite from the beach, her hair tamed slightly by a band compressing the afro into three cottontail puffs, above, left and right. She finally spoke, low and even, declaring him cleansed and purified.… Read the rest