Songs had power, I had to admit. I learned that Gord Downie had given a final push at a vital moment in Bobcaygeon when I collected the report from the rescuers.

Aware that they had just a day before the three assassins arrived to start tearing things apart, my rescuers had been fast. I was a bit annoyed by their inconsistent teamwork as I reviewed the account, but that was my fault for choosing three heroes who generally work alone.

Together in a high tech car combining the wizardry of Q and the Batmobile with sci-fi rockets for speed, they had penetrated the wilderness of disordered, unexplored mindspace to find the stronghold of the enemy. I had quickly learned that my inner army’s subjects could perceive the same ‘space’ in the mindscape very differently simultaneously, especially in the unstructured regions, but upon arriving at Nocome’s lair things became much more consistent as they were in my complex, and the three tulpas could agree about the fundamentals.

Nocome’s den in the deep recesses of my mind was deceptively small. It was an evil-looking black castle on top, lit with torches and patrolled by snarling jackal-things that seemed to be half dog and half woman. If Nocome had come with her own crew of previous victims, more than a few of them were skinwalkers like Deer Woman. But some of the guards were more human in shape, and Abe Bergman was proven correct when they described an abundance of young beauties up on the walls and inside the gates of this castle. They were only beautiful from a precise angle, however – every other angle made them pixelated or smeared.

Splitting up, my rescuers had each gone their own way within. Bruce glided from above out of sight from any torch, simply joining the flock of horrors that circled defensively above Nocome’s castle. Twisted thunderbird chicks and ravens, careless herons and owls – a man-sized bat fit right into the menagerie, and landed in the castle without challenge, slipping into the shadows. James had his more preferred method, allowing one of the female guardians to spot him strolling casually outside the perimeter and smoothly allowing the sexual-fantasy tulpa to do the rest, sneaking him in for a shag. It turned out that Nocome was forcing all of them to be celibate to build up a battery of sexual frustration that she could unleash in the dead of winter.

“And which one was she?” I asked.

James had not come out unscathed, but he was still able to grin.

“Englishwoman, a Ms. Pinder.”

“You lucky bastard.”

The Pinder-tulpa was left unconscious on a bed, maybe to be painted gold. The guards who were not lust-tulpas but previous victims of Nocome were more unpredictable and dangerous, but the tulpas outnumbered them by at least twenty to one, Chief reported. They were all far cruder than even my earliest tulpa, swarming around the place as Nocome kept spamming them into existence. The chaff in Nocome’s army would attack anything that couldn’t satisfy their lust but they weren’t smart enough to sound the alarm or act like rational defenders, so Chief had simply picked his point of entry where the non-tulpas were thin. After a tossed grenade and a few plasma shots he discovered that he could make the tulpas fight each other just by tossing a rock amongst them, like another Greek hero.

Since the lust-tulpas were vicious and swabbling all the time this fight didn’t alarm the dead human victim guards at all, who didn’t notice the blasted hole the wall until James was done with Pinder. Chief’s helmet could see through the primitive stone walls to give a complete 3D assessment of the castle, realizing that the real stronghold was underground beneath this fortification. Bruce had already worked this out, being such a great detective. They each went underground alone.

James, sneaking around the slave living quarters, got himself disguised as an Ojibwe hunter devoured by Nocome in the winter of 1817-1818 near Lake Abitibi. My rescuer tulpa knocked the guy out and tied him up after undressing him. Bruce descended with dark cape open majestically down a fall meant to break any intruder, landing silently while Chief crashed down unhurt to make a huge racket, walking through primitive traps meant to spear him without a scratch. Bruce trollishly considered this to be a smart move, distracting the defenders from himself and James.

They couldn’t agree so much about what Nocome was up to under her castle, diverging into their genres of comic-book supervillain lair, alien spaceship and nefarious scientific installation. Bruce fought through goons armed with crowbars, James with thugs in suits with brass knuckles and garrote wires, while Chief blasted apart hordes of cheap xenomorph-knockoffs. I wondered if Nocome could deliberately make an area harder to see, the disguise scrambling and personalizing the accounts.

They agreed that beside her prisoner cells Nocome had a dark library or computer area, and beyond that a great hangar space where something under a sheet was being assembled, some doomsday device that might be found in the genres of all three heroes. But Daphne was the priority, and the defenders above had finally noticed that something was going down. Nocome herself was not in house – it seemed that she spent most of her time lurking in the unstructured mindspace, scouting and hunting for new frustrated or hungry or lustful thoughts to assemble into tulpas for her army, but when her stronghold’s forces started screaming in unison she had coming roaring back fast enough and loud enough to temporarily deafen everyone.

Converging on the prisoner area, the three rescuers were mostly unhurt by the fodder, each in their element. When they stood together all three kinds of disposable goon were attacking, so I got shaky footage of what was basically Batman against xenomorphs and Chief just charging through piles of ineffective Bond villains. But now came the hard part. Daphne wasn’t in great shape once they cut the door open, a plasma torch and a diamond saw and a laser-pen burning around the frame. Bruce stabilized her against vague ‘wounds’, and Chief carried her with his suit’s enhanced strength. But they were getting low on batarangs and bullets and plasma charges by the time they were close to the surface, when the evil skinny lady herself came home to see what the hell was going on.

A formless howling wind couldn’t be shot at by any of their weapons. It iced the walls and froze everyone in place, Nocome’s minions and my own. Ice crystals like knitting needles were unknitting concrete and next the armor and suit of my heroes, exploring but then destroying. I saw this frostbite and general unknitting in the style of Elder Mother upon the bodies of my three tulpas, each disfigured and limping and cracked by just standing in Nocome’s presence. But at this moment the rescuers had been saved.

Daphne, as broken and drugged as she was, had opened her eyes in Chief’s arms and given a song. The song I had heard in Bobcaygeon.

In songs, starlight can melt ice. And in my mindscape poetry wasn’t all cringeworthy nonsense. Daphne somehow knew how to pick out the right songs and chants and poems, and knew when they needed to be given against the wailing darkness.