irk’s powers were well manifest in Dublin. Most eerie was the resemblance between what Cuchulainn went through during his warp spasms, and how Dirk describes the most frightful of his psychic journeys into the unknown territory of telepathic supernatural investigations. And I don’t just mean mushrooms. Dirk puts it like this: When the first vision hits me, it’s an out-of-body jolt, wham! right away. It seizes me and I see myself, and I am different. It makes me into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. My shanks and joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shakes like a tree or a reed in the stream. My body makes a furious twist inside my skin, so that my feet and shins and knees switch from the rear and my heels and calves switch to the front. On my head, the temple-sinews stretch to the nape of my neck, a mighty, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child. My face and features become a red bowl: I suck in one eye so deep into my head that a wild crane couldn’t peck it onto my cheek out of the depths of my skull; the other eye falls along my cheek. My mouth is weirdly distorted: my cheeks peel back from my jaws until my gullet shows, my lung and liver flapping in my mouth and throat, my lower jaw strikes the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram’s ass reach my mouth from my throat. My heart booms loud in my breast like the baying of a dog at its feed or the sound of a lion among lambs. Malignant mists and arcs of fire flicker red in the vaporous clouds that rise boiling above my head. The hair of my head twists like the tangle of a thornbush stuck in a gap, then rises up from the dead center of my skull a straight spout of black blood darkly and magically smoking like the smoke from the Vatican when a new Pope is anointed. Sure you guys are jealous of my psychic powers, my luck with women, the oversized size of my fan population. But you would not want to be in my shoes. Trust me.

?