
I cannot deny that what I had learned about the Mirocaw Festival did not inspire a trite sense of fate, especially given the involvement of such an important figure from my past as Thoss. It was my first time in my academic career that I knew myself to be better suited than anyone else to discern the true meaning of scattered data, even if I could only attribute this special authority to chance circumstances.
I had been fortunate enough to qualify for scientific training, an invaluable protective device which I planned to eventually turn to my own advantage. In the State’s eyes, I was its property. The State had even decided on the service I would perform to repay the cost of my education. According to the identity card I always carried, I was a researcher at one of the most important political and scientific institutions within the State Central Academy of Science.

In my drugged state this happening did not induce in me the same surfeit of bewilderment and incredulity that would normally, I believe, have been my reaction. Astonished I certainly was. It’s not every day that one’s chess set shows a life of its own, or that the pieces remain so true to their formal nature as laid down by the rules that they move from one position to another without bothering to traverse the spaces between. Not, let me add for the sake of the record, that the pieces showed any carelessness or laziness, or that they took shortcuts. In order to move, say, from Qk4 to Kr4, a castle was required to manifest himself in all the intervening squares to show that he came by a definite route and that the way was unimpeded — because, naturally, in a game of chess there is no ‘between adjacent squares.’
I felt a shiver run over my flesh. Last night, in the wild dark of the storm, this had been a place of gods and destiny, of power driving towards some distant end of which I had been given, from time to time, a glimpse. And I, Merlin, son of Ambrosius, whom men feared as profit and visionary, had been in that night no more than the god’s instrument.
As we drove away from the beauty parlour, I saw what looked like a teenage boy on the front hood of our car, leaning on his arms with his feet up in the air. He stayed there for about five minutes. Even when we turned he stayed on the hood of the car. As we pulled into the restaurant parking lot, he ascended into the air, up against the building, and stayed there until I got out of the car.
With a sigh, I turned the prow of my craft down stream, and with mighty strokes hastened with reckless speed through the dark and tortuous channel until once again I came to the chamber into which flowed the three branches of the river.

Here the terrain was generally steep, with scrubby trees and bushes, bramble patches and rocks of broken concrete. In places there were branches to swing on and small smelly waterfalls that glugged out of the ends of pipes and flowed down muddy gorges to the brook below. But there were also precipitous paths that led to dark leafy bowers where, in summer, one could sense stillness, feel oneself far from civilisation and even hope to see a rabbit. These sylvan glades, so near to home but so different, were awesome and full of magic.

Life has been pretty busy since they put me in charge of page seventeen of the internet. These are seven extracts from seven page seventeens found in seven books I own.
Grimscribe: His Lives and Works by Thomas Ligotti; Cockpit by Jerzy Kosinski; The Exploration of Space by Barrington Bayley, from New Worlds 4 edited by Michael Moorcock; The Hollow Hills by Mary Stewart; Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks; The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs; Seeing Things: An Autobiography by Oliver Postgate.