ADM - A True Story

a t r u e s t o r y . . .

I was given a windowless, high ceilinged, musty room not normally allocated to guests, but as I had been travelling all day I fell asleep soon after falling into the old large double bed. However I was quite quickly wide awake again, with that childhood certainty that someone else was in the room with me. I lay in the bed trying desperately to melt into the mattress and persuade the lurking malevolence that I wasn’t really there. I held my breath, closed my eyes and counted to a hundred; the sweat trickled noisily down my face and my heart sent the walls vibrating with its intense beating, yet unlike when I was young this time when I opened my eyes, the sinister shadows didn’t melt into an innocent dressing gown on a chair and I became aware of countless entities circling the bed, staring at me from the ground, from the ceiling, from the walls. I decided to pretend I wasn’t afraid. “Look, I know you’re here, I know you’re ghosts, but I also know that you can’t hurt me.” A moment’s stillness, then a red hot hand clamped itself on my arm. I screamed in pain and the hand withdrew as if shocked by my reaction. A moment’s stillness again, then wild excitement manifested by low murmuring voices, then the end of the bed was suddenly lifted in the air and dropped again, the head of the bed lifted up and dropped, it tipped from side to side, then I found myself clinging desperately to the bed as it was lifted completely in the air, sent spinning dizzyingly round and round, half dropped, tipped from end to end, from side to side, until as if on a prearranged signal the spirits all disappeared simultaneously and the bed seemed to drop for an eternity. Shrieking as I instinctively sensed the moment of impact impending everything flared magnesium flame white. I found myself sitting in a garden on a beautiful summers evening. Next door behind the perfectly manicured privet hedge I could hear an old rotary lawnmower being pushed and pulled in waltz time. Around me the setting sun occasionally caught a gossamer winged bee struggling, pollen laden, from flower to flower. As I soaked in the tranquil scene, a figure appeared from a slight gap in the privet hedge. He was about two feet tall and a cartoon caricature of a carpenter, complete with apron, cloth cap and pipe. His clockwork motion feet somehow propelled him across the garden (I say “somehow” because he was floating some four feet above the ground) and smoke occasionally puffed from his pipe. As he neared the wall of whatever building I am sitting beside, his two dimensional head turned to me and he lifted his hat in silent, but (I get the feeling) slightly sardonic salutation and then he disappeared behind the wall. I was then transported back into my bed and there was a quiet and somehow conspiratorial voice at my ear. “I must apologise for everyone’s behaviour earlier, it was quite inexcusable, especially as you are a guest. As compensation for your inconvenience I’ll take you to the edge of the universe”. Not waiting to hear whether I really wanted to go to the edge of the universe, an invisible hand took mine and I found myself whisked from the bed and somehow flying through the ceiling, the next floor’s ceiling, the roof and then into the night sky. We raced through the night, faster and faster, the stars blurring into eachother, but there seemed to be no planets, only one orange glowing globe that flashed below us. I remarked on this lack of planets to my invisible companion. “Ah, this is a short cut to the edge of the universe, and there are very few planets on this route” he explained. Our journey continued for what seemed an eternity, until almost impercptibly there were fewer and fewer stars and the sky became blacker and blacker, and we began to slow down. Ahead of us in the midst of the blackness there was a jagged hole, with a blackness beyond, blacker than any imaginable black could be. “I perhaps should have said to you earlier” my companion whispered nervously “but you’ll have to be very quiet as no mortal is supposed to be allowed here”. We inched cautiously towards the hole and putting my hand on the edge of the breach in the wall of our universe I peered through. A silver ball spun on an invisible axis in the midst of the blackest blackness within. “Someone’s coming” my panic stricken friend squealed.......

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