Where should I find fellow cultists in Australia?

Seeking Dreamless Sleepers in Sydney

Dearest SDSiS,

It began, I tell you, when the snake dangled afore the brow of my rough companion, Rexford. We had taken refuge in the shadow of a cyclopean stone, afeared of the penetrating eye of the bright and full moon. As he slept fitfully beneath the ancient stone, I stood above him casting about with my unblinking and optically perfect eye.

And then, down the slick black stone slithered the serpent, glinting and foul, and if the creature had not tested the dry air of the terrible upspace with a glittering tongue, even the perfection of my eye would have missed it before it was too late.

But just then, Rexford he did moan and roll to the side, his hand falling into the silvery glare of the lunar light, and I was able to swing a steel-encased tentacle across the rock, splitting the wyrm in twain so that its burning ichor could hiss against the shining rock and fall to the ground by Rexford's ear.

At the sound of the acidic and boiling blood cutting through the dirt, Rexford did awaken and smile. "Aye, Archie, there be monsters enough for a lifetime in these distant and exotic locales."

He sat up, hugging the shadows, and from the band of his leather hat he did produce a handrolled cigarillo acquired in Manilla. He carefully smoked it and watched the stark shadows with me.

Across the desert plain, there were scattered outcroppings of black stone that, in the harsh light of the moon, cast ebon pits of shade across the sand.

Rexford carefully drew a circle in the sand, and within it another circle, and above it he carved Ares horns, and around the edge he inscribed a series of eldritch names too terrible to repeat. All of this he enclosed in a triangle that pointed out into the desert. From the apex of the form, a line pulled out of the shade where he sat into the full light of Diana's brow, and there at the end of the line he crushed the half-smoked cigarillo.

For a moment, there was nothing, and then the granules of the sand ignited from within, and the glyph he had inscribed was alighted pyrognomically, such that his face was awash in a sickening light.

Rexford gestured to me and we both stood out in the unprotected open.

The light, unimpeded at last, flowed over the black stone where we had taken our repose, and in so doing revealed occult inscriptions from a distant and forgotten epoch. As with the granules of dark sand, the inscriptions took on their own internal energy, and soon the shadow itself was gone, and above, in the air, we could see that guardian creature who had introduced the wyrm into the grim equation of our evening.

Suspended in the air, and seemingly only composed of the skeletal traceries of incandescent energy, the guardian was nothing more than mouth, opened, surrounding by the vague suggestion of scales, and accompanied at each of the four cardinal points by an unblinking and terrible eye.

Discovered, it disgorged a stream of serpents who writhed and hissed through the air as they emerged. Many were only partially birthed from the sauric cavity, and so dangled above the knot of them that was forming in the sand below, and so still more coiled down upon the dangling half-born creatures, until a pillar, writing and venomous, did stretch fully six cubits from maw to desert floor, the thousand eyes of the creatures locked on Rexford, I standing behind, still in my anti-bathysphere.

"Well, Archie," Rexford said without looking back to me, "You got any ideas?"

"IN TRUTH," I bega—

At this moment in the tale, I was interrupted by the arrival of my dear friend and typist, the young Jarwaun, who had recently completed his daily ministrations to the god of learning at the local academy, or "dropout factory," as I gather they are now termed by the hepcats and zoot suited swells of the street. He looked over what I had dictated to Mr. Leeks as my response to this most recent query.

He wrinkled his nose, quizzical, "Daaamn, Mr. Squid; you never said nothing 'bout you being no sidekick to crazy-ass Indiana Shakespeare or nothing? When did this go down?"

I retreated deep into the shadows of my own tank, and I did feel both the sheepish and the goatish.

"SOMETIMES," I hazarded, ". . . I . . . AM NOT CERTAIN WHAT TO SAY."

His amaze did shrink to head-shaking tskery. "You gotta learn to ask when you all don't know what to be tellin' folk. This man, you tell him to go to MySpace; my cousin D'Ante says he got friended by this Mexican female there, and she came over to his place two weeks later and suc—succeeded . . . in . . . bein' friendly. 'cause they friends. On MySpace." Jarwaun paused, gathered himself, and continued, "D. say that whatever freaky-foolishness you 'bout, they out there bein' 'bout it, too. That's what you should tell this lady Sydney. Probably twice as easy for a female to find someone wants to do what she wants to do."

Truer words, they have not yet been spoken, and so I pass them to you, dear SSDiS, sans the dilution of my interlocution

And Remain,
Your Giant Squid