"Cthulu, I presume?" Celia asked as she, oddly enough, greeted the thing politely. She had just given birth to her boyfriend and was feeling rather confident after such an atypical accomplishment. Besides, she thought, she had to set an example here.

"An octopi!" Trent said, apparently no longer concerned with whether Cthulu was a single entity or many.

"No, she had it right. Bob Cthulu. And who might you fellows be?" The thing asked amiably from beneath the squirming mass of tentacles.

"You’re one of those things from that H. P. Deskjet book…" Trent murmured as he examined the trail left by the speeding article of furniture that Matt had ridden. He paused for a moment and then looked back up at Bob Cthulu. "How are you at tracking?"

Celia, meanwhile, was not being so friendly. "Lovecraft… He was made up by Lovecraft… You’re imaginary!" She accused, poking at the creature bravely.

"No I’m not" It said as it produced a cocktail umbrella to shield it’s be-tentacled head from the light of the non-iridescent sun.

"You surely are! Trent! We can make him go away before he kills us! You just have to disbelieve!" She declared wisely, still trying to hold on to some manner of control.

"Hey man, you can’t disbelieve in Cthulu…" Bob Cthulu said chidingly, wagging a tentacle at her.

"Stop hassling him babe… I need a tracking hound." Trent muttered.

"If you’re going to be impolite I can go. Your boyfriend didn’t even say please." The elder god with the hurt feelings said in a soft tone of voice that still seemed to squirm with menace. Celia did her best defensive stance and stretched her head like a snake out of the way. It was interesting to see as Bob Cthulu passed by her, shedding only one tear.

"You’ve cursed us!" Trent declared. "We’ll have to ride the snake to get there now!"

Celia was now completely befuddled. In her desire to understand and control their situation she’d become like an unbending tree in a storm, while her companions, less knowledgeable in such matters, had simply admitted their ignorance and were now ready to go with the flow, quite literally. The tear of Bob Cthulu had become a river , and the river had become a snake. A snake that was seven miles long, and it was beginning to carry Trent away.

"You can’t! We have to… Oh fuck it!" Celia said in frustration. She only barely grabbed the creatures swaying tail.

The snake turned into a river once or twice and they moved through deserts and tundra, sometimes right next to each other and separated by a thin hedge of rainforest.

Finally, as if by some magic of the tears of Cthulu, they came alongside the speeding half buried thing, which was apparently an end table now. Had Trent been considering the matter logically he might have conceived that it had not originally been an end table, but it was now, and so it had always been, an end table.

Trent and Celia hopped aboard the quite large subterranean end table and tapped Matt on the back, eliciting a red scream of terror, a scream that was colored red as it moved through the air in a very jagged way.

Matt saw wolverines, and lots of them. He began to try to get to the guns in what he had decided might be a gun cabinet, but ended up with old copies of TV Guide. Celia wondered why she was suddenly being beaten with TV watcher’s excuse for literature. It took her and Trent quite some time to restrain and calm their friend as the end table swayed and bucked erratically.

Finally, with Matt settled down and the three riding into the setting of the strange pulsing sun, it was oddly enough the wolverine slayer who remembered their deadline. Matt, staring dead into the sun for what seemed like hours, suddenly stood up as though for a sermon.

"We have a train to catch!" He declared grandly.

"How do we do that?" Celia said while watching the lines pass by on the road that the partly underground desk/end table was now traveling.

"We… Must…." Matt started out slow and stuttering, searching for the answer, or for his mouth to catch up to his brain. "Rewind the mind! Get back to where we were in the station!" He said very quickly. Trent could only look at him curiously before beginning to write a death poem. He didn’t intend to kill himself, let alone commit seppuku, but at the moment he fancied a death poem.

"I think… Oh…" Celia was finally coming back, and now had figured out that she must try to use her understanding of the imagination to work with the will of the Greater Imagining than to try to impose her own. She couldn’t make things different, but she could try to imagine them as such, and, well, if it worked – super!

"Just think how you did when we began here… Trent you were in me I think, and Matt was… Something… I cant even remember now…"

"I hadn’t been on this writing desk!" Matt declared triumphantly.

"It’s not a writing desk" Trent protested as though it mattered.

"It’s not here anymore!" Celia said as they were floating in a clear sort of jelly.

"Well it was a writing desk…" Matt said stubbornly.

Trent was about to reply when Celia pulled him into her as though she was pouring a glass of water in outer space.

And then, as if by magic, the portal appeared again.

"We have to go in!" Celia declared.

"This is the eight thirty… We want the nine o’clock train Yorkshire to Terry Grove North, connecting with Terry Grove to Yorkshire South back to Sudan…" Matt said as he examined a map of train schedules that was not there, even in his own mind. It was just at the right moment then that Trent leaped out of Celia, pushing him through the dimensional opening. As the two boys exited the twisted psychedelic world Celia was all too happy to follow.