Tetanus Acres
By Brendan Detzner
Introduction
Part I
1
There is a single fact about Hallucination that must be understood. If it is not understood, then nothing else about Hallucination can be understood. This fact deals with motion.
Hallucination is a prison. It is not an ordinary prison, but it serves a prison's function, and a prison's function is to stop a certain kind of motion. The purpose of a prison is to stop motion from inside to outside.
Inside of Hallucination, motion is a broken toy. If you are standing by a tree, and take a step towards a river, you may find yourself one step closer to the river. Or you may find yourself three steps closer. Or two steps to the left. If you are a child, and wait to become an adult, you may find yourself becoming an adult, or you may stay a child. When the sun tries to find it's way back down at sunset, it may find it's way down eventually, but only with great difficulty, and it may find itself back where it started at any time.
For a long time, trees and rivers and sunsets were not a part of Hallucination. How could a river flow, if the parts of the river were unable to move in the same direction? Even if the river could figure it out, why would it want to? Hallucination is a prison. It was a place for prisoners.
Hallucination was a place for people who didn't deserve motion. Some of them were too lazy to move, some of them thought they were too good for movement, others refused to believe there was any place worth moving closer to. These kinds of people could not make head or tails of Hallucination. They wandered in circles. They were good prisoners.
The King of Hallucination was not a good prisoner. He arrived in Hallucination, and changed things. There had been bad prisoners before, prisoners who thought and focused and organized, but none of them were like the King. When he arrived in Hallucination, trees began to grow, rivers trickled and roared, and the sun rose over Hallucination for the first time.
The sun shone it's light over the prisoners, and they could see. They looked at the landscape and for the first time, they wondered where they should go.
This is a story about the King of Hallucination.