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Page 24
A recent discovery by Nick Webb in the University of Texas Defoe
Archives implies the existence of an unsuspected space-time
warp in the region of Abney Park.
It was passing strange. Ensconced in The Knackered Horse Inn, scarce two hours ride by
spavined nag from London, I was enjoying some Argument with MacWilliam, a fellow
pamphleteer, on the vexatious Scottish question, when I found myself with a mere half pint
of porter inside me falling into a gentle and then, by degrees, a profound swoon.
Recovering swiftly for since my days in Newgate, now long past following the success of
my many writings, I have a gift for tolerating beer and spirits that none may equal I
found myself in a state that, even recollected in the safety of my home, my wits can
barely apprehend without dread. In truth, I appeared to be on some sort of huge carriage
drawn along a road of astonishing smoothness without any sign of horses. Prodigal in its
use of glass, this nightmare vessel offered me the sight of the very Inn in which I had
been speaking with such a masterful marshalling of Logic a moment earlier. It passed
before me at a speed that doubtless would have made it hard to breathe had I been outside.
Even now I recall it with terror.
 Now I have always been a seeker after forbidden knowledge, but imagine my
bewilderment when I beheld all around me people of many colours who at first I took to be
demons so strange was their attire and so grim and woeful the expressions on their ravaged
faces. So affrighted was I by this vision that I turned instead to the window; but where I
expected green fields and market gardens there burst upon my sight endless rows of
terraced housing, and everywhere vessels without horses roaring along at a velocity that I
could scarcely credit. And behind the windows of those fell contrivances were people
people, like those in my own carriage, whose faces bore the marks of weariness and defeat
as if they had been ingested alive by the devices that transported them at such unnatural
speed.
Sensible to the horror of my situation but nonetheless determined that my duty as a Man of
Letters was to observe all around me, the thought that pierced me to the quick was this: I
must be in hell. Had the Almighty taken revenge upon me for a lifetime of Dissent? Yet
somehow still the bones of the Earth seemed familiar. Was not that the rise where so many
victims of the great distemper had been interred and who was Mr Costcutter that he
should so recklessly construct a hostelry atop a plague pit? But bit by bit as my horror
receded and I looked upon the shape of the land, I came to understand that I was still in
Stoke Newington, but by some astonishing intervention of providence I had been carried
from 1728 unto the far future.
To what a melancholy pass had society fallen! I recollected when as a boy
I was introduced to the great thinker, Mr Hobbes, who impressed upon me most cogently the
notion that without the fiercest imposition of Order perhaps at the hands of an
absolute monarch mankind, left to its own devices, would degenerate to the estate of
the animals. From the signs of those around me, clearly such a catastrophe had come to
pass. What else could explain the variety of human life stock such as I had never
witnessed before, or the maddening Babel of languages of which only the insinuating tongue
spoken by the perfidious French was familiar to my ear? Had our island been invaded since
the days of George the Second? In truth I have always distrusted the intentions of the
Dutch and, if this essay should be found among my papers in centuries to come, I have no
doubt that my suspicions will be revealed to have been well founded.
My musings on this point were interrupted, however. 'Where did you get that cool wig?' My
wig had been purchased from the finest perruquier in Bond Street, but it was like all
its kind damnably hot. 'Pardon me, Madam, are you addressing me?' The young woman on
the bench in front of me had swivelled around. She was an extraordinary sight, with no wig
and the short hair of a boy. In her left nostril she had inserted a jewel, possibly a
small diamond. This I recognised from my investigations into the life of Andrew Selkirk,
whose misfortunes became the inspiration for my most famous book, as the mark of the
concubine of a chief of the Anthropopagi from the islands of the Great Southern Ocean.
Despite this blemish, she was a comely wench with a saucy look of challenge in her eyes
and a most immodestly tight bodice of some unknown material clinging to her body like a
voluptuary friend.
'Oh,' said she, 'you're in character. Fancy dress party, is it? Who are you doing?' At
this point the other woman on the bench also turned around and revealed herself to be, if
anything, even more handsome. |
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