I was on a rant, I was on a rave. Flecks of yellow foam flew from my lips as I spoke and my audience cringed in mute, fascinated horror. And yet I never said a word. I never spoke a word because I had nothing to say! I had been stricken dumb. I had no voice. I was hiding, I was incommunicado. Don’t ask me where Communicado is, I don’t know! I’m very far from knowing where it is. I am very far from knowing anything – I had burrowed like an infected sand-weasel deep into the dunes and burrows of an alternative reality. I was the time traveller. Men came to hear my words but left in disgust when I said nothing, grim unforgiving expressions on their faces. Women didn’t bother. They walked by without even so much as a sideways glance. I was less than the dirt on their shoes. I was lower than the low I realised – even the unclean spirits were repulsed by me. They were sickened by how low I had allowed myself to sink. I burrowed deep into my own private universe looking for something that I could not find in the real world. I was looking for safety. What a safety look like when you find it, you ask me? Does it have a particular smell? Does it have a particular hue? Can it be likened to any everyday object? I don’t answer you however – I’m well on my way to my next adventure. What will I be next time round, I wonder? Will I be a hero next time round? I always hope I will be but the game never works out that way! It never works out the way I want it to. It turns bad for me in a flash. I pretended to be nothing, I pretended to be a stone. They were hunting me but they could not find me. They could not get the scent. I could crouch in a hollow for a thousand years without a single thought passing through my head. Even I didn’t know that I was there! I didn’t know anything. The trail had gone cold – the telepaths had given up the chase and gone home. The scanners had eventually stop scanning; the all-seeing mind rays swept through me no more. ‘It’s an everyday story of paranoid folk’, I pipe up cheerfully. It’s an engaging family comedy with a moral there for everybody. It’s an everyday story of everyday folk, but it’s played for laughs. It’s an everyday story of dead folk who become vampires and demons in the underworld. I am full of pride and swagger drunkenly into the town square: I take on the Great Story-telling Machine in a duel but it beats me and I become a character in one of its stories.