Chapter 2: Reefer Madness

It was like no other spliff he'd ever had.

He was riding a roller coaster but it was inside him. The world was still there but inside him streaks of light spread out from the back of his eyes and wound their way around the inside of his skull. Although he was still staring out at the room, beyond it, but within him, the chains of dimension unfroze their links to fracture a spectrum of light in colours that had no name. Each link exploded in a pyrotechnic blaze of expanding nodules of space and time giving synaesthesian existence to the numbers of the universe.

He was out of his head but still inside it and it wasn't at all clear if it was pleasant or not.

In terms of conventional time, he sat for hours on the floor of his room, his back against his bed his gaze fixed straight ahead. In terms of unconventional time, the space was bending so that the closer he got to now, the sooner it was to where he needed to be the later he found his place.

Then came sensation. The certainty of breathing followed by the curious sensation of the tiny snakes surging through his veins and arteries, swimming their way against the pumping flow of his blood or riding the surging red tide, seeking out each corner of himself and carrying with them the re-colouring of his inner being to a psychedelic, swirling, fractal, spinning pattern of yellows greens and browns where what had once been red and purple.

And then he was still. Alone in his room. Except for Doctor Strange and Mandrake The Magician. And Samantha. She was suspended above them, hanging in a cradle of rope, in her cheerleaders uniform, and football player's armour with helmet and shoulder pads. She span slowly in her rope cocoon as Strange and Mandrake conjured pulses of light from the air, spinning in orbits around the struggling girl, while the snakes coursed through Gregg's body. "Welcome, Swami," Strange said. "Be careful how you use your skills."