Rules of the Campfire

It took Asitr forty years to discover the why. Soon after, he appears as a guest on a radio talk show to bait traps with the telling of stories. He tells tales about his life as one of the world’s most popular and quickly forgotten celebrities — of gardening for the Prophet Enoch, eavesdropping on Satan and Baal Zebub, and living between lives in a lost world. They sounded like the tall tales of a crazy man.

Twenty years later, a John Doe is found, naked and shivering, on the grounds of the Harbinger Psychiatric Institute, clutching a six-inch orb of blue glass and anxious to tell his own story. Is it a tale of organized insanity inspired by Asitr’s radio appearance?

Dr. Henry Milton has what looks like an easy assignment: he has twenty-four hours to evaluate the John Doe and refer him for processing. But John Doe has a timetable of his own. He has less than forty-eight hours to convince Dr. Milton to suspend his disbelief in a supernatural world where activities swirl around us unseen and mingle within our own natural realm.