I was at another time, and in another place.
It was quite a large place. There was a big, rectangular table in the middle of it. And all the space there and then available was crowded to capacity, overcrowded, in fact.
We had all arranged ourselves in tiers around the four sides of this very big table, with some of us standing and others sitting down, pretty much the same as if we were all gathered round a boxing-ring waiting for a contest to begin, or else as if we were all spectators at a football-match.
The table I've mention was larger than a boxing-ring, but smaller than a football-pitch. There was a lot of noise and excitement. And we were all waiting for things to get started.
Several of us were humans, but the vast majority were assorted beings chosen to represent various other intelligent species, some of them from quite well known, but others from some rather strange and unfamiliar corners of the galaxy, while other beings were, some of them, so strange and peculiar that there simply is no telling where they came from!
The main cause of the excitement was that it had already been rumoured that 'God' was going to be present - incognito, of course - and although a few of the participating spectators were at first inclined to deny there was any truth in this rumour, more than one well-known theologian chipped in, and said that, incognitio or not, 'God' was absolutely bound to be present, because 'God' is always everywhere.
Suddenly, there was a big hush!
Total silence!
Not a "word" was heard, nobody moved, and you could have heard a pin drop - but it didn't.
Without any INSTRUCTIONS having been posted up anywhere for us to read, and without any "orders" or "directions" or even simple "announcements" having been broadcast over the public-address system, we all of us instantly felt in our bones or, in the case of those beings among us who didn't have bones, in whatever part of our make-up it was that most basically and fundamentally held us together, that the contest had commenced.
And we all knew in what that vital contest, that competition in which our very lives were at stake, consisted.
One of us was 'it'. And whoever was 'it' had to come up with the correct answer to the question that had not been asked.
There was also, and we all realised this, a strict time-limit, which we were all presumed to know, even though, as you may have already guessed, none of us had ever been actually told what it was.
'The answer' might turn out to be one or more "words", but then again, it might not. Sometimes a behavioural performance of an appropriate sort might be required instead.
Apparently there had already been some rather similar contests held previously, many if not all of which would seem to have ended disastrously - if one could rely on the telepathically broadcast "as-if-verbal accounts" I as-if-heard being given of them by some beings who in this subtle way insinuated that they had taken part in them themselves.
I know I may seem a bit green at times, but I am not taken in quite so easily as all that.
It may have been something about the tone of their broadcast. Perhaps the wave-length they were using was not quite right. To be honest, I'm still not sure how I tumbled to it. But I soon twigged on that these telepaths were simply trying to put one over the rest of us, attempting to make us feel nervous and without self-confidence, and doing their utmost to jockey themselves that little bit closer to the winning seats.
Telepathic communication of all sorts was, by the way, allowed at all stages of the contest, but any indulgence in it was always entirely at one's own risk.
I've already given you an example of telepathic liars. Well, there were telepathic eavesdroppers as well. Fortunately, I remembered that "silence is golden".
(Did I really remember that?) I thought secretly to myself, (Or was that not, perhaps, another telepathic suggestion being implanted in me, in order to stop my realising that it is now my turn to be 'it', and that there is something I am right now being expected to do or say?)
You will appreciate my quandary, I'm sure, and understand how it was that I soon began to feel quite a bit jittery. I felt myself shaking like a jelly, and you could have heard my knees knocking half-a-mile away, or so at least it seemed to me.
In actual fact, I can't have been making much noise, can't have been doing anything untoward, because nobody complained or pounced upon me.
My personal and private belief is that quite a few of the other contestants, because although I previously described us all as hbeing spectator-participants, which is also what we were, we undoubtedly were all, every man, woman, and other creature Jack, Jilly and Slantywinkle of us, contestants as well - my belief, I say, is that several other contestants were also feeling extremely nervous by this time.
Nevertheless, the general feeling was that there was very probably more to be lost by rushing in and doing something wrong, than by maintaining a low profile and staying even quieter than a church mouse and, in other words, doing nothing at all except breathe and think, even if time might be running out.
The upshot was that, after a bit, nothing happened for a long, long time.
And when I say "nothing", that's exactly what I mean. In other words, all the telepathic stuff stopped too.
There were no clocks, no sundials, no sand-glasses of any kind - neither hour-glasses nor egg-timers. So, I can't rightly tell you for how long it was that nothing happened.
It may have been minutes, or hours, or days, or weeks - but to me it seemed ages, and when I say "ages", which I didn't then, of course, since I was still keeping perfectly quiet, I do mean 'ages', 'centuries', that is, rather than just 'years'.
What first made it clear to me that it really and truly must have been ages, and that that wasn't just my going on imagining things, was when I noticed some of the other contestants making huts, and houses, and castles, or else towers, and turrets, and such like to shelter themselves from the cold, and to take a kip in until they felt it was their turn to be 'it'.
I ought, I think, to explain at this point that quite a large number of them there participants I'm telling you about now were what, for want of a better "word" with which to describe them, are best described in human "language" as being "magicians".
Hence, it was no bother at all for beings such as them to produce habitations and residences for themselves out of thing air, without needing any builders to help them and, what's much more to the point, without making any noise either.
All that I managed to manifest for myself was a cardboard box. So, I had to be content with that.
It didn't strike me as immediately being strange or funny at the time…
But as I think back on it now, I suppose I must admit there was something rather odd and peculiar about all those edifices I've mentioned appearing out of nowhere and going up just one at a time - so perhaps producing them was an example of the sort of BEHAVIOURAL PERFORMANCE I referred to earlier. Perhaps each of us had put up some sort of a dwelling-place on the basis of some sort of secret inner sense of being 'it', and of being, therefore, required to demonstrate some sort of architectural ability.
As I've said, there were lots and lots of different beings there, so all this building of houses and such like took a great deal of time, thousands of years by Earth standards of time-reckoning at least, but eventually everyone there, including me with my cardboard box, had at least some sort of a roo to shelter under.
But feeling that a cardboard box was no sort of protection at all against any form of eventual hostile attack, I also suddenly made up my mind to protect my head by covering it with an Air-Raid-Prevention warden's tin-hat, which I also somehow managed to magic right out of thin air, just like that!
Don't ask me to explain how exactly I did it. I'd like to, truly I would but, I really amy very sorry, I can't!
The best thing I can do for you is to say that it was something like turning a tennis-ball inside out, while it is still in one piece.
(Quite a neat trick that!) I was thinking to myself, ruminating over the implications of the fact that, in all probability, I had been 'it' at the moment it had happened, when I noticed that my supposedly modest gesture had somehow started a new trend all round.
Don't talk to me about Easter bonnets! Or about Ascot! The scene that met my eyes would have taken your breath away…
I don't just mean that every ebing there suddenly produced a magic hat out of thin air, but the size, the shape, the quality, and above all the number of these various assorted pieces of headgear simply had to be seen to be believed!
Some humbler folk were sporting contraptions that looked more like dustbin-lids than anything else.
A donkey-like creature near one corner of the table was wearing nothing better than a saucepan turned upside down.
One woman I noticed exactly opposite me, standing fairly close to the other side of the table, possibly a Duchess of some place or other, seemed to be wearing an entire flower-garden up top, while a Chinese Mandarin with a wispy black beard, who was stationed right next to her, struck me immediately as being in danger of being blown away by his brightly coloured flat oriental-style hat, which was at least ten times as wide as that of a Cardinal!
But, to tell you the truth, I still haven't even begun to give you any sort of proper idea yet of this headgear development.
I don't really want to slow down my narrative, nor to spend too much time on this particular episode but, believe me, it is important, as you will discover later.
Suffice it to say, then, that the vast majority of the beings present eventually ended up wearing at least six hats, all stacked one on top of the other, and that at least one bloke I noticed had no fewer than twenty hats piled up on top of his noddle, with each higher hat wider and stronger and so, of course, heavier than the one immediately underneath it.
An Air-Raid-Prevention warden's tin-hat is, as you probably know, pretty strong but, all the same, it is not really all that much protection against standing for thousands of years in the freezing cold, especially if the only house you have to retire into for shelter when you feel like it is a (f......) cardboard box.
Sorry about that, dear reader. I caught myself just in time. I almost said "a f...... cardboard box" - but actually, that comes later!
Anyhow, I decided I'd best button my jacket up.
(A very courageous gesture on my part) that was, I still think, even though I don't boast about it, or go around talking about "a very courageous gesture on my part", because when I did it, I didn't consciously realise it was my turn to be 'it', but I suppose it must have been, because nobody complained about what I had done, and as you can tell from the mere fact that I'm still talking to you now, even though admittedly I'm at this present moment dead and no longer what you would call "alive", I most definitely survived the experience.
At all events, that buttoning up of my jacket also set a trend.
I'll skip over this bit very quickly, and spare you the details, but soon every contestant as I could see was swaggering around in at least four, and some of them were, as far as I could make out, wearing no less than the equivalent of two dozen overcoats, each of them thicker than the one immediately underneath it, and some of them made out of chain-mail, or even heavy-duty stainless steel.
I say "equivalent" because, to be strictly truthful, only the humans among us wore jackets or overcoats. I don't rightly know the proper "names" or NAMES for the garments donned by the other beings, or for the materials they were made out of. So, "overcoats" and "words" like "stainless steel" and such like will have to do, just in order to give you some general idea of what sort of thing it was that I saw happening all round me.
And then I noticed that some of the beings had disappeared!
A shiver ran up all along my spine, I don't mind telling you. I came all over cold, and for quite a while I felt utterly stunned and nonplussed.
What baffled me more than anything else, once I had recovered my sang froid to a sufficient degree to think properly about anything, was why I hadn't noticed any of these disappearances earlier - because they hadn't happened all at once, but had taken place one at a time.
It took me quite a lot of pondering and cogitating to work it out, but the upshot of all my ruminations was the sudden realisation that whenever any particular being had disappeared, that being's habitation had vanished, more or less at the very same instant, and in such a way that no empty space was left, because all the previously immediately neighbouring places simply closed ranks, as it were, and coalesced into a new whole, so that there was never such a thing as a visible gap.
"Hello!" I said to myself. "What's going on here/"
This time I found the answer in a flash.
What all of us beings were engaged in was a competitive process of self-elimination. We were being thinned out, in preparation for some future and final harvest, rather like an over abundant crop of too closely planted young lettuces.
That being so, as you will readily appreciate, I was not faring so badly after all, despite my only having a cardboard box and a tin hat; I was still in existence. I had survived!
"But for how long?" I asked myself.
Then I noticed the Duchess and the Mandarin exchanging glances.
Hers wasn't so much a friendly smile though, more a sardonic leer, and it were accompanied by a conspiratorial wink of her left eye, while I fancied her right eye was appraising me with a sudden, sharp and shifty sort of look that gave my stomach more than a bit of a turn.
The Mandarin, meanwhile, kept curling and uncurling his wisp of a beard round the crook of his right index-finger, as his thick lips parted to reveal a somewhat yellow set of unevenly spaced and unusually large, pointed teeth.
I reckon he imagined he was smiling, but if I had been the Duchess, I'd have felt that the close proximity of that unsavoury grimace would have been enough to curdle the milk in my bosom!
I also noticed that the pair of them were each making a tight, clenched fist with their left hand.
That's what first made me suspect I was no longer surrounded merely by a crowd of individual rival competitors, but by a relatively small number of hostile cliques.
Looking around me carefully, I eventually concluded that some participants only belonged to one group, while others had started to play a double or treble game, and while seeming on the surface to belong to, say, the Duchess and the Mandarin's group, were secretly members of the donkey's group… and even more secretly members of one particular Slantywinkle's group, which seemed to have a deliberate, although covert policy of infiltrating and subverting as many other groups as possible!
"No doubt about it, my lad!" I groaned inwardly to myself. "You'll have to look sharp, and mind your step here, or else you're for a burton. It's wheels within wheels, now, that's what it is. Wheels within wheels!"
What made my predicament an increasingly urgen one was one of the rules of the competition that up to now I haven't mentioned to you at all.
Whether this here rule had been in force since the start, I can't say for certain, but it was certainly in full force at this stage of the proceedings, so I'd better tell you what it was.
Even though whoever was 'it' often fulfilled the requirements of that part silently, and without any external fuss, any competitor who suspected another participant of having delayed for too long before making a move, or of having done the wrong thing, or simply of having failed to do the right thing, always had the right to issue a public challenge "in the appropriate manner".
This feature of the competition introduced no end of extra complications into the overall situation, because it had never been made plain what 'the appropriate manner' was, but from various things that happened, I fairly soon deduced that 'the appropriate manner' kept changing from moment to moment.
I hadn't joined any groups, by the way, and no members of groups had made any overtures in my direction. The Duchess, as I said, had given me the once over, but only in order to reject me as unsuitable for her group's purposes, whatever they were.
"Why don't you challenge someone?"
That was the telepathic message I felt all the members of some group or other were combining their forces in order to instil it in my mind.
(Oh! It's psychological warfare is it now?) I thought, resolving to watch my p's and q's.
Being fewer of us left, we were all, of course, much closer together than previously, and the psychic atmosphere was electric.
To some extent my cardboard box functioned as an insulator, but on the other hand my tin hat operated more like a radio-mast or a lightning-conductor, and I very soon became most uncomfortably aware of criss-crossing rival beams of psychic electricity darting through my head, as if they were rapiers.
Sensing how important it was in the interests of my mere survival to keep my cool at all costs, I tried as best I could to relax, and although I was none too successful, I did manage to calm down to a sufficient degree to become aware of the presence of a second, and somewhat muted undercurrent of telepathic messages being transmitted at a much higher frequency, though also with rather less urgency and intensity, than the various attacking and defending beams.
I 'divined' - that's it, there's no other WORD for it, I DIVINED that this undercurrent of secret messages was made up of passwords and life-preserving magic spells, the efficacy of which depended on the psychic power built up by, and shared between the members of whichever group any particular password or spell originated from.
Thus, if, for example, we were at a stage in the proceedings when merely to half-mutter to oneself the "word", "panic" would, in the normal course of events, result in one's immediate disappearance, to secretly pronounce a magic spell one was entitled to use, because it had been invented and developed either by oneself or by some other member of a group to which one belonged, gave you, for instance, five seconds' grace, during which brief interval of time one might, with impunity, say or do anything at all without any risk - providing always, of course, that one's password or spell had not been rendered for the time being null and void by somebody else's dastardly use of a more potent counter-spell!
I needn't elaborate more, but you appreciate now what I meant by talking about "wheels within wheels"!
Resisting the various increasing pressures on me, I stayed put, held my uneasy peace, and observed the situation.
Some beings were so heavy and powerful that, whenever they moved about, the ground opened beneath their feet, or beneath whatever else it was that supported them, so that there were from time to time gaping trenches here and there, into which an unwary competitor might, and sometimes did, suddenly disappear, just before the trench closed itself over again, without leaving even a crack to indicate where it had been.
The various hats and overcoats, too, I had realised by this time, had not chiefly been designed to protect their wearers against any inclemency of the weather, but were magical garments, and were meant to prolong their wearers' useful lives by warding off evil psychic onslaughts. Some of them also functioned as uniforms, enabling members of the same group to recognise each other easily even at a distance.
With all this plotting and counter-plotting, this transmitting of hostile beams and magic spells, this repeated re-location of buildings, and this opening up of temporary trenches all lover the place, the entire "areana", or whatever else you like to call it, was getting more than a little dilapidated, with rusty down-spouts on some houses, broken chimneys on others, and bad smells and dirty water all over the shop.
I felt I was coming to the end of my tether, and since, even when I had been trying to take a bit of a kp in my cardboard box, the psychological din of the various telepathic messages with which I was being constantly bombarded had prevented my having any proper rest, I was completely drained and utterly worn out.
As a matter of fact, I was by this time so tired and exhausted that I could scarcely keep my eyes open, and I had to keep rubbing them with the back of what was by now a rather grimey hand.
So, in the circumstances, you won't be too surprised or astonished to learn that my concentration lapsed.
The upshot was that instead of just thinking reassuring thoughs secretly to myself, I actually pronounced a few words out loud.
"Mum's the word!" I ejaculated, quite audibly - and at that precise moment the whole caboodle vanished from my sight!
There and then I found myself in another place and at another time.
And when I say "another place" and "another time" I partly mean that, although thousands of years had been used up by our living through the various events that I summarised for you ever so briefly in the previous CHAPTER, the 'place' and 'time' in which the action of CHAPTER FIVE all happens is, in relationship to what you, dear reader, have become accustomed to calling "this world" and "the Eather", somewhere and somewhen before the beginning of things.
Besides that, I also mean that this different place and time into which I had been so abrupty and unceremoniously catapulted and precipitated was, although somehow connected with the previous location I had been occupying, undoubtedly an all together different set-up.
Call it, if you like, "a parallel universe".
I no longer had my cardboard box, by the way, but I was still wearing a buttoned-up jacket, and I still had my Air-Raid-Prevention warden's tin-hat clapped on the top of my head.
We were all sitting round this here table, all of us that were there, that is, but nobody seemed to be doing very much, nor, come to that, paying much heed to anything else that was going on round about the room.
I soon savvied that we were all waiting for summ'at, so I settled myself down, took it easy like, and bided my time.
Lots of beings were smiling and chatting to each other, and several of them were munching a sandwich or two. I'm partial to sandwiches myself, as it happens, so I also tucked in to a jam butty.
By the way, there was a large printed notice stuck up on one wall with the WORDS, SILENCE IS GOLDEN written on it in very big LETTERS. But somebody had scribbled a few other WORDS underneath with a wax-crayon; they read: AND CONVERSATION IS LIKE A BEAUTIFUL RAINBOW.
I quite liked that, and gave a bit of a chuckle to myself.
Then I pulled myself up short, and looked at the SCRIBBLED WORDS again, scrutinising the hand-writing.
I couldn't at that point remember having ever written that smart comment myself, but the hand-writing was undoubtedly my own. Any expert would confirm that, if you were to ask for a second opinion.
This realisation gave me quite a turn, and I came on all over funny, but luckily for me there was a sort of small tent, or mini-pavilion tucked away in one corner of the room, and when I made my way over to it I discovered that, sure enough, it harboured a latrine.
I found sitting on the throne more than a trifle too windy for my liking, since, instead of being plumbed in, the bottom of the toilet-bowl was simply a very deep shaft or tube, caked with rust and slime, that looked as if it might drop down for ever into nowhere - leastways that was my first impression of it, and I was too busy to take a second look.
I had 'things' to 'do', as we say, so I got on with 'doing' them!
I like to read a BOOK or a NEWSPAPER when I'm sitting on the 'loo, but not having any READING MATTER to hand on this particular occasion, I took a leisurely decko at my surroundings.
And that, I suppose, is how I came to 'notice' the NOTICE that was carefully affixed to the outside of the ancient and very much the worse for wear water-tank, which was still attached, although none too safely or securely, to the wall, a few feet above the bowl of the 'loo.
"WARNING!" I read. "ON NO ACCOUNT PULL THIS CHAIN - DANGER TO LIFE AND LIMB!"
Reading them there WORDS suddenly brought it all back to me. I had been in this place before. And not only me, we had all been in this place before.
I buttoned up my trousers, adjusted my braces, fastened my jacket and, after washing and drying my hands, left the pavilion, and returned to my seat at the table.
But, before I go on with the rest of my narrative, let me explain to you how it all was, the general setu-up, I mean.
The purpose of our being there was for us all to take part in a gigantic game, rather like the one you call "Monoply", only it wasn't called "Monopoly", it was called…
Just wait a minute, until it comes back to me…
Yes, that's it, it was called "Co-operation", that's what it was called! "Co-operation" was the "name" of this "game".
But was it really "a game", I still ask myself that question sometimes, even today.
I needn't explain most of the rules, since a lot of them were very similar to those for the ordinary game of "Monopoly" which you are already, I take it, fairly familiar with, and the majority of the rest of the rules regarded telepathic communication and magic.
Nowadays I personally am quite a dab hand at telepathy and magic, but at that time I was a comparative novice.
Nevertheless, it didn't take me long to appreciate that the actual systems of telepathy and magic we were using in this "Co-operation" game were exactly and precisely the same as the ones we had been using in that other place I told you about in CHAPTER FOUR.
But whereas in that other place we had all been rivals, fighting for our lives, and engaged in deadly competition with each other, those of us who had at last reached this "Co-operation" space were all supposed to have learned the folly of our previous ways.
That's why we were still waiting. We weren't playing as individuals anymore, leastways most of us weren't; we were taking part in this game as 'teams'.
All the members of the same team, even when, as was more often than not the case, they were representatives of entirely different species of beings, wore clothing of the same colour, and that's how each team could be recognised and identified.
There were six teams as I could see, seated around me in the room, a red team, an orange team, a yellow team, a green team, a blue team, and a violet team.
It didn't take me long to work out why we were still waiting. There was no indigo team.
Naturally, of course, I did check to see if I myself was wearing 'indigo', but I wasn't; I was garbed in severe and sombre 'black'!
Anyhow, to cut short what otherwise might be in danger of becoming too long a story, another couple of dozen beings of assorted sorts, but all of them dressed in indigo, fairly soon afterwards, one after another popped into the room, sat themselves down quite nonchalantly besides us, and all the chatter came to an abrupt end.
Various parties, I soon noticed, were looking at me, and to explain why, I think it is high time I confessed to you, dear reader, what it is that I had remembered when I read that there NOTICE affixed to the water-tank, back there in the 'loo.
As you already, in all probability, realise just as well as I do, the main purpose, aim, and objective of any game like "Monopoly" is to win, and winning involves competing against other players.
This, according to the WRITTEN RULES of the game, was also the idea of the "Co-operation" game, but because we were playing as teams, whenever any member of one team made a good move, all the members of that team reaped the benefit, and whenever any player slipped up, and made a wrong or inappropriate move, all the members of that player's team came to grief.
Since, however, muggins here was not a member of any of the seven regular teams, nobody's having invited me to join them when we were all still at that other time, and in that other place, where and when the various alliances had been entered into, the different code-systems and passwords established, and the teams themselves formed, everybody had agreed, or else someone had made it a rule, in the interests of "Fair Play" and "Co-operation" all round, that whenever I, notwithstanding my being under the very severe handicap of playing alone, made a good move, then everybody benefitted, but whenever I was so unlucky as to make a wrong move, everyone had to suffer the penalty!
You will be beginning to appreciate by now why it was, therefore, that all the other players were taking such a keen interest in me and my welfare.
As I say, I'd been in this here place before. We all had…
But the last time as I had been there, when it came round to be my turn to shake the dice, I had landed up on the square marked, to use the corresponding WORDS you'll find written on an ordinary Monopoly board, COMMUNITY CHEST.
As we played the "Co-operation" game, the 'Community Chest' was the Duchess's generous and ample bosom, so I reached in my hand, and felt around for a card.
The one I eventually extracted was engraved with the WORDS: GO TO JAIL! GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL. DO NOT PASS GO! TO NOT COLLECT £200!
And that, dear reader, is how the whole lot of us had come to be sentenced to sever thousands of years in that tense and fraught situation that I portrayed for you in CHAPTER FOUR, and where, incidentally, that rusty down-spout I mentioned to you earlier was actually the bottom end of the tube running down from the latrine in this place.
As you may recall, I've already said that the two places, although entirely different, were somehow connected. Now you know what I was getting at.
Rest assured, dear reader, that I don't enjoy revealing such unsavoury details any more than you enjoy reading about them, but they are, as you will learn later, an intrinsic and almost indispensable part of my main story, and so I must ask you to be patient.
So far, in fact, I've been speaking as if we had only played at "Co-operation" once before, and as if we had only once been in jail. But the facts are entirely otherwise.
I don't, even now, remember the exact number, but we had all of us been in both places umpteen times, with the earliest experiences having been the least happy and the most painful to remember, while our more recent trials seemed mild by comparison.
Coming back to the present round of play, various beings were, as I've said, looking at me rather intently.
It didn't take me too long to fathom out why. Since "Co-operation" was the name of "the game", and since we were all supposed to be ready to let by-gones be by-gones, despite it's having been me who had landed the whole lot of us in jail the time before, I was now being accorded the doubtful privilege of shaking the dice first, and making the opening move.
Telepathy and natural magic are, of course, much more important than manual dexterity and other acquired skills in this game, and so I was in no hurry to shake the dice.
I gave the Duchess a broad smile. I winked at the Mandarin. I inclined my head as graciously as I could muster, since I was still wearing my tin-hat, in the general direction of the being I have called "the donkey". I even waved to the chief Slantywinkle.
Only after that did I place my hand, gently but firmly, on the little red wooden pot, if that isn't a contradiction in terms, which contained the dice.
As my fingers touched the wood, I felt a sudden sparkling and crackling shoot right through me.
"That's a very powerful carrier-wave!" I said to myself. "But what precisely are the contents of the messages it is carrying?"
I rubbed one finger, slowly and gingerly, up and down along the side of the dice-shaker, and then, plucking up courage, began to swirl the three dice it contained, slowly at first, and then increasingly quickly, round and round the inside of the bottom of the pot.
By this time all the other players were craning their necks towards me, if they had necks, and those who hadn't were, all of them, nevertheless very clearly manifesting an intense interest in whatever it was that I was going to do next.
I felt an inrush of strange power into my right arm, and I flung the three dice forcefully out of the pot, so that they rolled over and over in front of me, coming to rest well towards the centre of the table.
There was a 2, another 2, and a 3…
It doesn't take too much working out. I'd thrown 7. A LUCKY NUMBER.
What this meant, of course, since I'd just been making the opening throw in a new game, was that I'd landed myself on CHANCE which, as you may remember, comes immediately after THE ANGEL ISLINGTON and just before EUSTON ROAD.
I'm rather ashamed to say how the CHANCE card read. The WORDS printed on it were these - DRUNK IN CHARGE. FINE £20.
I don't mind telling you that I felt more than a twinge of dismay.
But this time I needn't have worried. We'd all of us played this game several times before already, as I've already told you.
In other words, we were none of us green-horns, and we had learned from bitter experience that, as well as "Co-operation" being "the name" of this game, real 'co-operation' was in the best interests of us all.
Now, as I've explained, when I won, everybody won, and when I lost, everyone was a loser. Hence, it was almost right away agreed - telepathically, of course - that, firstly, there was no real harm in my being 'drunk', since I was also the person who happened at that moment to be 'in charge' and, secondly, that '£20' was "fine", a fact which, as soon as you stopped to think about it, seemed undeniable and, indeed, so obvious as to be hardly worth the trouble of mentioning.
A trivial incident in itself, I grant you, but a typical illustration, nevertheless, of the general atmosphere of mutual goodwill and reciprocal helpfulness which now pervaded the whole assembly.
No need to bother you with an account of most of the subsequent moves in this game, which soon got going at a fair pace, and caused a great deal of excitement, with lively interest all round.
There were no windows open, for fear of the wind blowing the various cards and pieces of paper-money all over the show, and so the room became quite hot and stuffy after a while.
Perhaps, by the way, I ought to have told you already that in this place nobody was wearing more than one coat, or one hat, and that the garments being worn were, in each case, the lightest and thinnest which that particular person had been wearing in the other place, but freshly laundered and ironed.
The Duchess, for instance, was wearing a very light silk ...... I am not authorised to give you even THE FIRST LETTER of the NAME of the actual ...... she was wearing - but I can, at least, reveal that the Mandarin, who was still stationed beside her, was garbed in a brillian red satin kimono. He was also still wearing his extra wide flat hat.
Anyhow, as I was saying, the room was getting too hot for my comfort, and so I ventured to unbutton my jacket, and even to loosen my tie, and to unfasten the top button on my light green ærtex shirt.
This action of mine, I'm sorry to have to relate, distracted Slantywinkle, whose turn it then was to throw the dice next.
There were, by the way, as I think you've guessed, several different Slantywinkles taking part in this game, but when I say "Slantywinkle", just like that, I am, of course, referring to the chief Slantywinkle, the one I had waved to earlier on.
Hence, you will understand my particular regret and chagrin, as soon as I realised I had distracted his attention at a most inopportune moment.
Instead of his abiding by the rules of the game, and throwing the three dice down on the smooth surface of the table, so that we could all see for ourselves which numbers had been thrown, Slantywinkle shook the little wooden pot in such a way that only two of the dice fell out on the top of the table; the third one fell straight down onto the floor, which was made of very shiny, smooth and, what's more to the point, slippery, clear quartz crystal, where it rolled over several times, and then slid into a crevice of some sort which nobody had even noticed before.
What a to do!
Everyone was aghast!
For a while, all that happened was that a deep and solemn hush descended upon the room. Then the atmosphere noticeably lightened, and once again all eyes were turned on me!
They all realised, of course, that a Slantywinkle is far too large a creature to fit under a table, even an extra large table like the one we were using, and they had also all noticed, or if they hadn't themselves actually noticed had, pretty soon afterwards, been telepathically informed that it was me that had distracted the chief Slantywinkle from his throw by the way in which I had been fiddling about with my tie.
Nobody had ever ventured to crawl underneath this table before, and for some reason or other it was widely suspected that doing so might prove to be a somewhat perilous venture, but since i was still wearing my Air-Raid-Prevention warden's tin-hat on my noddle, it had, without any actual consultation of my own personal feelings in the matter, been unanimously agreed by the rest of the players that I ought to do the crawling, since with my tin-hat to protect me, I would most likely be perfectly safe and quite immune from deal danger in the unlikely even of any unexpected and sudden hostile attack!
(So much for "Co-operation") I thought. ("Co-operation" is a very fine motto, no doubt about it. But, when it comes to the crunch, most of us beings here are still more than a little bit too much attached to the business of looking after the welfare of 'Number One', and the result is that, despite all our good intentions, 'co-operation' goes by the board.)
However, as I've just indicated, I kept those thoughts to myself, I crawled over to where the crevice was located, and examined it.
I reckoned that it was just about large enough for me to get my little finger down into it, and to wiggle it around in order somehow to catch hold of the missing dice and, hopefully, retrieve it.
However, I did remember that in this "game" as we called it, nothing was ever just as simple or straightforward as it seemed, and that what might at the time appear to be merely an unimportant, incidental, and chance circumstance was often, in the actual event, an occurrence of the utmost and most vital importance.
Telepathic messages of encouragement and support were, by the way, now being beamed to me from all sides. Not a single one of these, however, conveyed even the slightest clue or indication as to how precisely I ought to set about wiggling my little finger, in order to get the desired result.
It was, therefore, lucky for me that at that point I remembered that, according to the theologians, 'God' is always and everywhere, and that 'God' knows all our 'thoughts'.
(God!) I prayed, thinking the beginning of a prayer…
And no sooner had I thought that one thought, than the game was over.
What a grand place we all found ourselves suddenly transported to! And what a fine time we found ourselves having!
"Paradise" is the only "name" I know that fitly describes our new situation.
It was, beyond any shadow of doubt, a huge and vast improvement on our previous lot.
Naturally enough, in the circumstances, all the other players were more than delighted with this result of my little excursion under the table, and various "titles" were added to "my name", which is, as I told you very early on, "Levi Hamer."
As soon as we got settled into our new surroundings, I had started to explain to my 'companions in co-operation', for that is how I had by this time come to regard them, that all I had actually done was start to 'think' a 'prayer'.
However, I had been compelled to cut my explanation off short, almost before I got properly started on it, because I could tell right away that many of these companions of mine had not the slightest notion of what a <thoguht> or even a (thought) is, and in those circumstances I reckoned it was a waste of time my trying to explain to them what I meant by 'thinking'.
Not that they seemed to mind this at all. If anything, I think they were rather pleased that I'd shut up so soon, and that I wasn't waffling on and on.
This 'Paradise' place didn't, as a matter of fact, strike me as having been particularly designed for serious talk, or for hard work of any other sort, come to that.
We still had our Co-operation-Game-Board in front of us, but now instead of being arranged on top of a solid table, it was floating gently on the surface of a beautiful blue lagoon, and there wasn't any sense of urgency about our starting a fresh game.
The water was lovely to swim in; it was not too shallow, and not too deep, and it was just the right temperature. There were no sharks, nor oil-slicks, and everything in sight was just hunky-dory: a benign Sun, pretty flowers, lots of tame animals and singing birds, fruit-trees galore and, in short, every creature comfort that you could possibly imagine - except clothes.
But nobody seemed to be the least bit put out by this almost total nudity since, despite our having all survived several thousands of years of trials and difficulties, here, in what seemed to be our new home, we all found ourselves restored to the very peak of our health and vigour. We were, in other words, each of us enjoying the prime of life.
Evem the Slantywinkles looked handsome, and as for the Duchess, she was a "Wow!"
Although she was no longer wearing her ......, by the way, she still had that flower-garden of hers on the top of her head, and I was still wearing my tin-hat.
That is why I described our nakedness as being not quite complete; all of us were still wearing hats.
My tin-hat was, by the way, as it had always been, adorned with the three painted LETTERS: A. R. P., which are normally used as an abbreviation for the WORDS: AIR-RAID PREVENTION.
However, as part of the process of showering various new TITLES upon me, it had been agreed that, henceforth, the LETTERS: A. R. P. were to be interpreted by all and sundry as meaning ADORNED WITH ROYAL PREROGATIVES.
I don't mean that I had become EMPEROR OF INDIA, or QUEEN OF ENGLAND, or DUKE OF CORNWALL, or even LAIRD OF CAMSTER. Nothing like that!
Everybody had been very careful to make sure that all the TITLES bestowed upon me were ones which nobody else was entitled to.
To give you another example, this time a religious one, or as I suppose it is probably more correct to say, since not all clergymen have actually lived what I would judge to be a truly 'religious life', an ecclesiastical one - I was not made POPE.
There were several quite good Popes knocking around, by the way, while I lived on Earth, from 1896 to 1962, viz..: Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI, Pius XII and John XXIII, but the only one I am authorised to tell you is here in heaven with me now is Pius X.
Mind you, I'm not saying, nor am I in any other way insinuating that the other Popes are not in heaven; I am simply telling you that I have not been authorised to reveal their present whereabouts to you. That's just one of the rules I have to abide by.
I've at least told you they were, each of them, living on Earth at the same time as I was. Let that piece of information satisfy you for the time being.
I didn't mind not being made Pope while I was in Paradise so, naturally, I wasn't the least bit put out at not having been made Pope while I was on Earth.
I did, true enough, at one stage want my son, Colin, to be Pope, because I reckoned he would grow into the right sort of man for the job. But in saying that, I must also make it quite clear to you right away that I have nothing at all against your present Pope, John-Paul II, who has much more polish than my son.
Colin, in fact, has turned out a bit of a rough diamond… but I mustn't digress.
As I've told you already, I never, speaking for myself personally, wanted to be Pope. Come to that, I never wanted to be an ordained Priest either.
Of course, especially with me being in heaven, there is a sense in which, as a believing and faithful Christian, I am 'a priest', since every man, woman and child that has ever been baptized, either with water, by martyrdom, or simply, as the theologians put it, "by desire", is 'a priest'.
But the expression "ordained priest" refers to something else, and what precisely this something else is I, to tell you the honest truth, still don't know, since it is something way and beyond and outside the whole range of my own personal experience.
So, if you happen to want any reliable information on that score, it's no use asking me. You could, however, ask Colin, since he is an ordained Priest, even if he doesn't always give everybody else the impression that he lives like one.
Mind you, just to clear up this point and get it out of the way once and for all, I never wanted Colin to become an ordained Priest, even when I did want him to become Pope, because ordained Priests are not allowed to marry in the Roman Catholic Church, and having enjoyed my own married life with Edna, I certainly didn't want to see either of my children deprived of the joys and delights of married bliss!
This is not just a story I'm telling you, but the pure and simple unvarnished truth, and I can even supply you with evidence to back up my statement.
My own CHRISTIAN NAME is LEVI. My father's NAME was LEVI, and his father's NAME was LEVI, and the NAME, LEVI, which is a Hebrew WORD meaning ADHESION, is frequently used in THE BIBLE to identify a person as being 'a priest'.
Hence, if I had wanted Colin to become a priest, I would have called him "Levi", like his father, his grand-father, and his great-grand-father before him. But I didn't; I called him "Colin", and COLIN is his NAME.
End of story - not of the main story, of course, but of that little digression.
If, in Paradise, I didn't myself become "Pope", or "Emperor of India", or "Queen of England", or "Duke of Cornwall", or "Laird of Camster", what did I become?
Too many TITLES were showered upon me, dear reader, for me to mention them all here, but I will give you a short list of the most important ones, taken from among those I still remember:
I particularly liked that last title I just mentioned, but even, or should I say "especially", in Paradise, 'pride' often comes just before 'a fall', and for my companions and me, our troubles were not yet over.
As I've already stated, the sun over our heads in Paradise was benign. I didn't, however, describe the rest of the sky to you.
The sky was absolutely cloudless, and it was all a bright, deep, even blue in colour.
Blue is one of my favourite colours, so I spent a long time sprawled out in a deck-chair, and looking up into the sky. That, I suppose, is why I was the first to notice it.
(It?) you are already wondering.
Yes! 'It' - by which I mean 'the fact that the sun was, relatively to our point of view at any rate, not moving in the sky at all, but always remained stationary in the same place.'
Now, as I feel sure you will agree, that gave us all a bit of food for thought!
Perhaps because of our thousands of years of frequently unfortunate and painful past experiences, no sooner had one of us caught the slightest whiff of something unusual or untoward than we all tended to get more than a bit worried.
Seeing as I had been, by this time, already proclaimed, among other things, KING OF THE SOLAR-SYSTEM, I could hardly complain or object, when all the others put it to me that it was my duty to look into things, and to make sure everything was all right.
I suggested we should forget about the sun, at least for a few hours, and settle down to another game of "Co-operation" while our luck held, but nobody else seemed to reckon much of this suggestion. So, I didn't insist.
Instead, still, of course, wearing my tin-hat firmly clapped on the top of my had, having spotted what seemed to be another pavilion-like structure next to a few banana-trees, I withdrew from the assembled company and, saying that I needed "to meditate", I retired to the latrine, where, without any futher a do, I seated myself on the throne.
As well as enjoying a good read when I'm on the 'loo, I also like to indulge myself in a nice pipeful of tobacco. BRUNO FLAKE is the NAME printed on every packet containing my favourite brand. So, if you ever happen to have any going spare, bear me in mind.
Without any hurry I extracted a thumb-and-fingerful of 'baccy from a small leather pouch I had with me in one of my jacket-pockets, and then I pressed this little wad firmly into the bowl of my pipe which, by this time, I had taken out of one of my other jacket-pockets, and had already stuck into my mouth.
After removing this pipe from my mouth for a brief instant, just to check and make sure that all the 'baccy was pressed down evenly and firmly enough, but not too tightly to let the air through when I started to puff, I replaced it between my lips, took out a box of safety-matches from the same pocket as I keep my pouch of tobacco in, and struck a light while, at the same time, beginning to breathe a prayer, because I was afeared that the wind coming up from the deep and rusty tube below the toilet-bowl, the tube that connected Paradise to the Games Hall and the Games Hall to the Jail, might blow out my match.
"God", I whispered, but I got no further, because at that very moment there was, to put it at the very least, an almost almighty explosion - all my companions were, so far as I have been able to find out, annihilated, Paradise vanished, the other places we had previously been in were also abolished for ever, and all that was left, apart from me, 'the man in black', was a vast cosmic soup of protons and electrons.
What we had taken to be the sun had really only been some sort of artificial source of warmth and illumination, and what we had mistakenly believed to be a perfectly blue sky had simply been the inside surface of the skin of an immensely large balloon, inside of which we were all floating somehwere in space.
The air we had all been breathing was, to cut a long story short, also a highly inflammable gas due, unless I am very much mistaken, to the fact that it had, down through the ages, become more and more heavily impregnated with methane and other noxious vapours emanating, most of these, from the pavilion and its neighbourhood.
Thus, dear reader, my innocent act of lighting up my pipe of 'baccy was 'the beginning' of the world as you know it, indeed, of the whole f…… universe.
Don't talk to me about LET THERE BE LIGHT!
I don't bother to read many BOOKS nowadays, nor NEWSPAPERS if it comes to that, and I have also entirely given up 'smoking', but I'll tell you this - THE BIBLE is only telling THE TRUTH, when it says that "God" created the Heavens and the Earth.
Whether 'God' had anything directly to do with it is, on the other hand, entirely another and quite different matter.
After all, so far as I can rightly tell, I was the only one that was busy 'doing things' when it all started.
But then again, if 'God' is everywhere, and if 'God' does know all our (thoughts), it is possible, I suppose, that for some motive that still remains entirely unknown to me, 'God' meant me to strike that match the way I did…
Up to now I have not told you very much about life in 'Heaven', the place where I usually reside nowadays, and although I have told you quite a fair amount about some of my main experiences in three different, but inter-related parallel universes, as I have called them, in which I used to live, long, long before I ever took up my recent abode on your present Earth, apart from explaining how my lighting a match as I was whispering the "word", "God" initiated that terrific explosion which, according to the vast majority of 'scientists' brought into being your present universe, I have not so far said very much about the connections between 'Heaven', your 'Earth', and those earlier 'universes'. In this final CHAPTER I shall attempt my very best to remedy that deficiency, so far as I am allowed.
As I revealed to you earlier, I was born in Bolton, which is an industrial town in working-class Lancashire, in 1895. The present population of the town is perhaps not far short of 200,000 and, although in my times the place was a fair bit smaller, it was still quite a busy and populous place to live in.
The sun sometimes shone, and there were some nice parks to visit whenever you had a bit of spare time, which wasn't often, but there was also no shortage of wind and rain, and sometimes there was losts of thunder and lightning, too.
One of the main streets in the centre of Bolton was called then, as it still is, Great Moor Street, and on this street there was a large general-store known as Gregory & Porritt's, in which you could buy a wide variety of useful commodities, such as dust-pans, and sweeping-brushes, and pots and pans of various shapes and sizes, and balls of wool for knitting with, and, among other things, electric light-bulbs.
These here electric light-bulbs were available in different strengths, including 100--watt, 60-watt and 30-watt bulbs. You could also buy bulbs in quite an assortment of colours: clear white, pearl, yellow, pink, or blue. I occasionally purchased a 60-watt pink bulb to impart a cheerful glow to Colin and his sister's bed-room, but by and large I restricted my purchases to the clear white bulbs, and I invested mainly in the 100-watt sort.
Anyhow, all these bulbs were spread out in rows on four quite long and wide counters that had been fitted together to from a sort of hollow oblong place, for a shop assistant to stand in the middle of, somewhere just inside the main doors leading from Great Moor Street into the front of the store.
Believe it or not, but please remember that I have promised to tell you no lies, and also that I am not the sort of chap who is given to exaggeration of any sort, one day, as a result of the local thunder and lightning, the whole atmosphere wsas so full of electricity that all these bulbs lit up, without being plugged in.
I wasn't, I frankly admit, myself an actual eye-witness of this unusual event, but one of my sisters-in-law was married to a chap called Jim Knowles who is [was until fairly recently], incidentally, still living on Earth, and it was him as first gave me the details, having been, as he told me, there himself at the time.
Now, no need to be more clever than is good for you, and to start asking me precisely where was 'there' where he was when it happened, because I reckon as it ought to be clear enough to thee from the general tenour and entire context of my remarks that he was standing inside Gregory & Porritt's. In other words, Jim Knowles were an eye-witness, and that's enough for me.
By the way, my son, Colin, has also described this particular incident in much more detail in a book of his own, where he also explains how the most likely cause of what happened seems to him to have been his own action, when he was only six years old, of letting one of the porcelein saucers belonging to a set of toy crockery in a doll's house owned by St. Ethelbert's Roman Catholic Primary School, in Melbourne Road, which he was then attending, drop to the ground and break into fragments.
Whether or not there is any actual substance in my son's account of the matter is not something I am prepared to discuss in public, but what I will say here is that I myself almost certainly made a significant contribution to the whole still rather mysterious process that precipitated the electric storm, that lit up all them there light bulbs, and which in its turn - not to keep you in suspense any longer, dear reader - which in its turn, I maintain, had been triggered off by the passage through the air of a stream of much more subtle and deadly vibrations.
These 'vibrations', not to beat about the bush, had emanated in their turn from one most secret and particular way with which I had once 'looked' at an 'item' in my immediate neighbourhood. When I say "item", Colin as is writing this down knows full well what I mean, but I'm relying on him not to give you too much information, since WALLS HAVE EARS, and some bad habits are contagious!
Important NOTE:I describe and discuss both the episode with the light bulbs and the accidental breaking of that miniature flying-saucer, as I call it, in Chapter Thirty-Four of The Rainbow Cymbal where you can also read, although in a slightly different order, these WORDS: WHO TEMPTED THE DEVIL?… THE FUTURE CAUSES THE PAST. THE END IS THE BEGINNING… I CANNOT BLAME THE DEVIL FOR MY OWN SINS AND WEAKNESS SINCE… IT WAS I MYSELF WHO TEMPTED SATAN TO TEMPT EVE BECAUSE, AS A GOOD PSYCHOLOGIST, HE FORESAW THE IMPACT ON MY PSYCHE OF MY COVER-UP FOR SENDING THAT SAUCER FLYING… IN EVERY HUMAN BEING, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF MARY OF NAZARETH, JOHN THE BAPTIST, AND POSSIBLY A FEW OTHERS, SUCH AS, PERHAPS, THE BUDDHA AND THE PHARAOH HATSHEPSUT, THERE IS, I VERY STRONGLY SUSPECT, ALWAYS A SOMEWHAT SIMILAR, SEEMINGLY TRIVIAL, AND INVARIABLY NON-SINFUL, INITIAL, GUILT-ENGENDERING FLAW OF CHARACTER, DIFFERENT IN EACH PERSON. NONE OF THESE FLAWS OF CHARACTER ARE PART OF GOD'S PLAN; BUT NEITHER ARE THEY AGAINST IT. THEY ARE THE RESULT OF INFELICITOUS SYNCHRONICITIES.
Now, although it's no part of my aim, purpose or objective in this concluding CHAPTER to discuss the pro's and con's of Colin's theory that all of us humans somehow carry a collective responsibility for the Devil's originally making a cock-up of things, as against my own more than lingering suspicion that I am the chief culprit, what I do want very strongly to emphasise and to insist upon is that in no way can such behavioural performances as 'breaking a saucer' or 'looking at a certain item' be accounted the true cause and root of the problem. No way!
All 'materials acts' of that or, come to think of it, of any other sort can, with due care and diligence, be mentioned or referred to by "words" or WORDS, and it is, of course, always also possible to 'think' about them, appropriately or otherwise, in (thoughts) which, as THE BIBLE reminds its readers, are most commonly utterly unlike the (thoughts) of 'God' whose <ideas> alone accurately correspond to 'things' as they are meant to be.
That brings me back to the topic of the phenomena I call "deadly vibrations".
This here BOOK that you're reading now, dear reader, was originally printed out by my son on what's called a dot-matrix printer, which he then had attached to another modern device, known as an electronic computer. Now, and this is my point, that computer can't read or write WORDS, and it can't hear or speak "words", but it helps my son no end in his writing, because it stores and manipulates [words] both in its own so called memory, and also on special silicon-discs which can be slotted into it.
To a certain extent, your own brain is rather similar. You don't go round carrying WORDS or "words" inside your head, but what you do carry around with you, leastways if the scientists are right, is [words] in abundance.
Moreover, since all that human beings seem to be ever interested in boils down in the end to some form of conscious and mutual communication, it can, I reckon, be fairly and properly said that every example of a human behavioural performance as is worth mentioning is, in a way, the equivalent of an arrangement of WORDS or, and perhaps more often than not, "words".
That being so, you could say that your entire memory, materially speaking and considered objectively, is simply a collection of [words].
Subjectively, however, the whole personal purpose and the entire joy and satisfaction of harbouring all these [words] in our noddles is to enable us, secondly, to translate them into "words", WORDS or 'appropriate behavioural performances' in order to communicate with other creatures, and firstly, to use them as carriers of entirely non-material <words> in order to communicate with ourselves!
All [words], as I call them, are vibrations of one sort or another as, indeed, are all material things, but ideally their nature as 'vibrations' should not be allowed to interfere with the contents and nature of the <words> we use them to receive, store, and transmit - whenever, and to the extent that [words] do interfere with, and detrat from the efficiency and purity of the communication process, I call them 'bad vibrations'.
In my opinion, though I'm no theologian, 'bad vibrations' is pretty much the same as what some people call 'original sin' - but I mustn't get side-tracked into talking about what's 'bad', since the only things I am really concerned with are those which are 'good' and 'right'.
'Heaven' is {God}, otherwise known as {Christ as God} or {The Word of God}.
Having your own {name} {written} in {The Book of Life} means 'starting to live in Heaven' - You don't, believe me, have to wait until you die in order to start living in Heaven; you can, if you really want to do so, begin to live in Heaven right here and now!
In other words, you don't have to get to 'Paradise' in order to find 'Heaven'. 'Paradise' is simply a place where all the [vibrations] are more than usually congenial, but even the best [vibrations] are never more than a [carrier-wave]… far from being the whole, or even part of the actual {Message}, they aren't even a (message).
It'll probably take you a bit of time, by the way, to get used to my son's new-fangled way of distinguishing between word, WORD, "word", 'word', [word], (word) and <word>/ {word}, because, as I don't mind admitting to you, it took me quite a considerable effort fully to appreciate how useful this set of distinctions is.
Nevertheless, I do recommend you to pay great attention to the sorts of differences we are getting at. You won't regret it, I know!
By the way, never pay too much attention to the so called REVELATIONS of mediums, psychics and spiritualists. I am not going to say that such persons are not good friends of God, nor that they are not upright and sincere folk in their own way. But most of their information is not a MESSAGE from 'Heaven'; it is merely their translation into WORDS or "words" of some (ideas) they have picked up for themselves, as a result of reading [The Akashic Records]. [The Akashic Records] are on the whole accurate, although incomplete, data-storage files, but they need expert decoding and interpreting, especially as some of these [Records] contain flaws, in other words, bad vibrations.
Fortunately, my Air-Raid-Prevention warden's tin-hat, which is not really made of tin at all, but mainly of iron, lined with cork and leather, has always shielded my own particular brain against the worst vibrations. That's how I survived the explosion…
Both I and that Authority whose spokesperson I am are sincerely grateful to the Syndicate Publishing Company, Ltd., some time of 18, Savoy Street, Strand, London, W.C.2, and to their successors in title, for permission to quote from the special Daily Dispatch edition of THE BRITISH EMPIRE UNIVERSITIES MODERN ENGLISH DICTIONARY, and in a particular way acknowledge our indebtedness to the Reverend Edward D. Price, and to those of his co-contributors whose WORDS have been quoted or otherwise referred to in this BOOK.
We also express sincere words of acknowledgment to Darton, Longman & Todd of London, and to their editorial tem, for permission to quote from THE JERUSALEM BIBLE, as well as to the proprietors of Waddington Games, Ltd., for allowing me to refer to some details of the game of MONOPOLY.
I am, as I mentioned earlier, fully aware of the continuing exitence of quite a number of sometimes important gaps in the foregoing narrative, but I have been assured that THE WORDS I have arranged to be made available for you to read in THIS BOOK are sufficient for their destined purpose, providing you are granted the grace to understand them aright.
In offering you that final counsel, dear reader, I am, as you most probably already appreciate, simply reiterating some of God's own WORDS from THE BIBLE, viz.., from CHAPTER EIGHT of THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES
Perhaps now you understand why THIS BOOK has only been made available by me posthumously, and why it is that I earlier recommended you to think of me as whispering to you myself from a position just a little higher than the top of your own head, and from a small distance behind your right shoulder.
I do hope you have found that that suggestion of mine has been, on the whole, a helpful one - but, if not, my son is not to blame.
Good-bye! Or rather, Au Revoir!
- Shalom & Welcome! - Back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
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