Experiments in style: a mystery

An excerpt from the book Insoluble Mysteries: Glimpses behind the curtain, by Poul T. Geist

Greetings!

One of the things I’ve been trying out is reworking a piece of text into a completely different style. A full exposition and explanation are given here:

Experimenting with styles

For today’s experiment I wrote the story as a “beyond our understanding” mystery.

First, though, here is the original text on which these experiments or transformations are based:

The original (template) text

In the middle of the night, I woke up (if you can call being semi-conscious being awake), walked purposefully towards the door to go to the bathroom — and almost knocked myself out.

The reason was that in the twin states of entire darkness and semi-somnambulance I was facing in a different direction from the one I thought I was facing. As a result, instead of walking through the door, I tried to walk through the wall.

The next few days brought nausea and headaches. After much prevarication I went to Accident and Emergency, where I waited petrified among people for whom “social distancing” means not quite touching you, and who wore their masks as a chin-warmer.

An hour and a half later I emerged into the twilight, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing more serious than mild concussion. I failed to do much writing, but I was pleased to have read a further 17% of my book.

A mystery

The following is an excerpt from Insoluble Mysteries: Glimpses behind the curtain, by Poul T. Geist. Geist has been researching inexplicable phenomena for decades. In this extract he looks at the ‘bang on the head’ story with fresh eyes.

Little did Terry Freedman know, when he retired for the night on Tuesday 19th October 2021, that during the night he would experience an incident that will remain engraved in his memory for the rest of his life. Terry agreed to an interview. We arrange to meet at a café in London.

When I arrive, Terry is already there. He stands up to greet me. He is wearing a powder blue shirt with double cuffs, clasped together with gold cufflinks. His jacket is an off-white Italian weave, which contrasts nicely with his navy blue chinos and black loafers. His slightly greying hair endows him with an air of authority.

“Permit me to recommend the Chai Tea”, he says to me as we shake hands. “It has a slight spiciness which goes some way to ameliorating the acidity of the underlying leaf.”

A waiter serves the tea, and it is indeed delicious: a confluence of flavours that are, or should be, mutually antagonistic. The effect is exhilarating. I ask him to explain what exactly happened.

“It’s all so bizarre.”, he says. “One minute I was lying in bed. The next, I had an overwhelming compulsion to visit the bathroom. It was as if I was suddenly possessed by a force outside myself.”

That last sentence is telling. Could it be that Terry was the vicitim of an attempted alien abduction? He goes on.

“The next thing I knew, I had walked straight into the wall. That was strange because the wall is in precisely the opposite direction to the bathroom. It was as though the room had been rotated 180 degrees.”

Could it be that Terry had inadvertently and momentarily crossed into a parallel world that is an exact mirror image of our own?

“I was unable to write for a few days because of a mild headache and dizziness. To be honest, I felt like I’d been drugged.”

Was it possible that Terry had been abducted by aliens, put under anaesthetic, operated upon, and then returned to his own place and time?

“I went to the hospital to get checked out, in case I’d done myself some real damage. The waiting room was a vision of hell. Scores of people were sitting or shuffling around staring at their phones, while paying no heed to either the social distancing rules or the need for wearing masks — or wearing them properly. Their eyes seemed dead, as if they were automatons. I tried to ignore them as best I could by reading nearly a fifth of my book.”

Had Terry somehow entered the realm of the living dead? Or perhaps found himself surrounded by those in bardo?

“A nurse examined me, and said there was no indication that anything had happened, apart from a mild concussion. She couldn’t explain it, and told me to take it easy. But I’m still haunted by the thought of what could have happened. Did I have a lucky escape? I guess I’ll never know.”

A lucky escape? Or had Terry been abducted by aliens, sent back by mistake to a parallel mirror world, then deposited into a kind of twilight zone? And was the nurse who reassured him that nothing was wrong really a human being, or an alien carrying out research for who knows what nefarious purpose?

We may never know.

I hope you enjoyed this version. If you’d like to dig deeper, I often write an ‘Experiments in style extra’ post to explain how a version came about, or how I did it. That’s for paid subscribers. Indeed, next week I’ll be publishing some notes about today’s version.

If you’re new to the series, you can see the index of my experiments here: Index.

As always, I’d love to hear your comments.