“It’s not so different,” he said. “Pekkur, I mean. It’s a city. One-million people; most of them locals, a few expatriates. Tourists too, but they’re a different group, a different population all together; there’s maybe seven million of them in any given summer.” He spoke quietly, giving shape to numbers with his hands. It was dark. Clouds promised rain, but the only sparks came from blocks away: irregular electrical strobes from mass-transit trains clattering along their elevated tracks. “But there’s a lot,” he said. “Like this.” And for just an instant, they paused at the mouth of an alley, bright with pole-mounted light, and dark with shadows that might have been alive. It was hard to imagine what Pekkur was like: old. That much was certain, but beyond that…? “Pekkur is a city of archways and bricks,” he said. “Everything’s crusty and black with mold, or green with that tarp stuff they put over scaffolding whenever they’re repairing a building but don’t want you to see what they’re doing. The city’s full of traps, too: weird little boxes like the traps they use here for rats, only they’re bigger and when you walk by them wearing headphones, you can hear a buzzing noise. Some kind of electromagnetic interference. They draw succubae,” he said, as if his words made absolute sense. “The females, at least…the males are only secondary predators. Ugly as hell, but nobody really pays that much attention to them. If they do, it’s usually kids, throwing rocks at them, or addicts looking for hunting females.” Pekkur: so far away; and yet his descriptions addled the mind and threw monster shapes into the alley-trapped shadows as if Pekkur (and the whole, odd country of Agara) loomed just over there. By the lake…somewhere between here and Indiana. It wasn’t hard to imagine that. Nearly everyone who’d been there (to Pekkur, to other cities in Agara) said that it was a strange place, a quiet place that seemed to exist wherever you happened to be. It was, by the sound of it, a disconnected country: a shifty, twitchy nightmare on the eastern fringes of Europe, the western fringes of Asia…or there…right over there…between here and Indiana. There were no succubae, however: no monster things, yowling in the night. “Come on,” he said…shuddering as if confronted by something in the alley. “Let’s go get coffee.” * * * I have no idea where the fragment above came from, but I suspect it has something to do with a random, truncated alley in the BoysTown area of Chicago. Ragstock (upstairs if you read the glare-obscured sign) is a second-story store, entered, not through a front door, but through a side alley. It is a neighborhood fixture: a second-hand shop specializing in retro-chic…the kind of retro-chic that neighborhood residents and regulars recognized, long before it became oh-so-suburban-fashionable. I suspect that this alley, bordered on one side by arches and a walkway, was captured because of the response it engendered in me as I passed it. I thought, not of Pekkur, but of Prague; the alley, as you see it here, is as wide (and perhaps wider) than a few of the streets I prowled in late night hours, or in the wee-dark-hours of the day. There were no succubae in Prague, but maybe there was a golem. As Prague and Pekkur are linked in my mind, it seems only fitting that a dark and brooding alley (in Chicago) should remind me of both. As always, thank you for viewing and reading and commenting, and I hope your week is off to an excellent start.