Somewhere between waking and sleeping on our journey towards the unfathomable deep,
there comes a thin moment where we have one foot in the waking world and the other is in that other world where we relinquish conscious control.
Pausing here and straddled between two planets that drive one another like gears,
the attentive traveler will notice a narrow door only wide enough to sidle through.
This is the border of sleep, where imagination and reality are braided together,
a chasm in the crust of consciousness,
venting the hot pumice of imagery into the irresistible magma of narrative.
Welcome to episode 23 of Stories from the Borders of Sleep,
a weekly podcast of curious tales from bordersofsleep.com featuring original stories by your host Seymour Jacklin.
Visit bordersofsleep.com for more information or to leave some feedback.
Artwork is by Robin Traynor, production by Tim Wiles,
and the soundtrack for this week's episode is from Enchanted Wind by Susan Teng,
and that is available from magnitune.com so if you're ready to journey with me, then I shall begin.
The Ferryman by Seymour Jacklin There was a boy, a very strange, enchanted boy.
His parents had given him the name Turpin,
which immediately marked him out from his peers who wore commoner names like John and Stephen.
He added to that his father's surname, Whittington, and so signed himself Turpin Whittington.
He was in fact completely deaf in his left ear from birth, but he was marked in other ways too,
and not least by his proclivity for tumbling into fairyland with no prior warning or provocation.
As you know, the land of Faerie is never far from us,