A Blink of the Screen

a party of anxious people clustered near the rectangle, and the coachman saw with a falling heart that it too was rim’d with the glittering plates. This party was composed both of men and women, bearing lanterns, and, after some hesitation, one member approached the coachman.
    The man who had a house nearby gave a cry of recognition and embraced the stranger, claiming to know him as a neighbour, and then recoiled at the dreadful expression on his face. It was clear that here was another victim of a similar fate.
    After some refreshment from the Oxford scholar the newcomer explained that he had, with a party of friends, gone out carol singing. All had been well until, an hour before, there had been an eerie creaking and shifting of shadows, and now they were somehow in a world that was not of the world.
    ‘But – there is a street, and lighted windows,’ said the London man. ‘Is that not the Old Curiosity Shop, so ably run by Mrs Nugent?’
    ‘Then it is more than decently curious, because the doors do not open, and there is nothing beyond the windows but dull yellow light,’ said the carol singer. ‘What were houses, my friend, are now nothing but a flat lifelessness.’
    ‘But there are other streets – my home, not a hundred yards away …’
    The carol singer’s face was pale. ‘At the end of the street,’ he said, ‘is nothing but white cardboard.’
    Their companion gave a terrified scream, climbed into the frame, and was soon lost to view. After a few seconds they heard his shout, which the coachman screamed to me, also:
    ‘
May This Day Bring You, Every Year,/Joy And Warmth And All Good Cheer!
’
    Several of the ladies in the carol singers’ party were quite hysterical at this point and insisted on joining the company. Thus, after much heated debate, it was resolved to return to the mail coach and, with considerable difficulty, snow and luggage and the glitter were piled against the frame sufficient to allow it to be manhandled down on to the plain.
    At this point the coachman’s tale becomes quite incoherent. It would seem that they set out to seek yet another entrance to the real world, and found for the first time that the strange windows had an obverse side. If I can understand his ravings, they seemed to be vast white squares in the sky on which some agency had written lengthy slogans of incredible yet menacing banality, whose discovery had so unhinged the London gentleman.
    I can hear the coachman’s mad giggling even now: ‘
I have come a long, long way,/To bring you Joy this Christmas Day!
’ and he would bang his head on the wall again, in time to what I may, in the loosest sense, call the rhythm of the phrase.
    Then he would drum his heels on the floor.
    ‘
Merry Xmas to All at No. 27!
’ he would scream, ‘
From Tony, Pat, and the kids. Remember Majorca?
’
    And, ‘
Get lots of crackling this Christmas!
’ This last one seemed particularly to affect his brain, and I cannot but wonder what the poor man must have seen. ‘
Merry X-mas from Your Little Willy!!!
’ and it was at this point that I had to get the gardener to come in and help me restrain him, in the apprehension that he would otherwise manage to do himself an injury.
    How long were they on that fateful plain? For it appears that they were in a world outside Time as we know it, and sought for days an entrance into a world that was more than a flatness.
    And they were not alone.
    There were other people on the same dreadful journey. And Monsters also.
    I fear that his mind is quite gone. No sane man could have seen such things. There was a window, if such I may call it, into a world of desert sands under a night sky, wherein three men of African or Asian appearance had made their camp. One of them spoke passable Latin, which the Oxford scholar was still just able to understand, despite his state of near inebriation. They too had found their world running out into a cardboard waste, and after considerable study had put it down to some event, possibly astronomical, which had severely distorted Space and, who knows, perhaps even Time itself.
    They made common cause with the coachman’s party, much to the chagrin of the ladies present, but it would seem that they were well educated by heathen standards and indeed kept up the spirits of the company with their tales and outlandish songs. They were also men of considerable wealth, a fact of some importance when the swollen caravan of benighted travellers met a party