were travelling home by train, some friends and I, when—without knowing it—I started work on this book: I asked each of them to tell me the strangest thing they’d ever experienced.
We had not got far when the stranger in the seat opposite interrupted.
“You’re talking about the paranormal,” he said, “and it’s doing my head in.”
He was swigging a can of beer but seemed good-humoured. And he had a point: for a public place our conversation was rather odd.
“I’m not fascinated by that stuff,” the man said, raising his voice over my friend’s story about the night her mother sighted a ghostly figure in the garden. “In fact, I think you’re talking garbage.”
“Well, I respect your opinion,” I said.
Some of the other passengers were pricking up their ears.
“Anyway,” the man said, settling into a more conversational tone, “paranormal stuff happens to people who look into things more deeply than others. Let’s say my pen started to roll over the carpet: I would think nothing of it. But because you are into paranormal things, anything that happens to you out of the ordinary, you’d think: ‘Oh My God!’ Whereas I just think: ‘Well, that pen rolled over.’ To you it means something. To me it doesn’t.”
“So doesn’t it boil down to whatever is in your head is real?” I said.
It was naughty of me, but without telling him I’d pressed the button on my digital recorder. (Hence the striking realism of this dialogue, as you’ve probably already remarked.) Something unusual was taking place: a conversation with a stranger, plus a crowd of other passengers listening in while pretending not to do so. (A couple of them later overcame their politeness and started to chip in their comments.)
“I pray that the stuff you’re talking about is true,” the man with the beer can said. “But I won’t believe it until it happens. I really pray for myself and my two kids that it is true, but I don’t believe there’s anything after death. It’s a horrible belief and I don’t want to be like that. At least you’ve got something to hope for.”
“Your point of view is a strong reason to make the most of life,” I said, glossing over the fact that by not believing in something he was not actually ruling out its existence.
“I don’t see why you’re put on this earth for 60 years to work away and graft,” continued the man, “and then die for nothing. I graft bloody hard and don’t particularly enjoy it. If there was something afterwards, that would be great. But if there is someone above looking after you, then I don’t understand why you have to work. My experience of life is I have to work for 60 hours a week to pay my mortgage. If there’s something afterwards, why should I do that?”
What if he ran into a ghost later that night, I wondered; or if he got off the train and was abducted by aliens. (Or, at least—if he had some kind of experience that he understood in that way.) Taking him at his word, this would be all he needed to quit his job and stop paying the mortgage. I imagined him joining his local Spiritualist church and channelling the wisdom of the Ascended Masters, or putting on a sky-blue shell suit and joining the alien contactee lecture circuit.
Isn’t this precisely the fascination of the paranormal for all of us: proof that everything we know is wrong, and the liberating realization that there’s no point in playing any longer the tiring game of normality?
“I’ve heard that it never happens to people who don’t believe,” the man said. “I had a granddad who died 20 years ago. He was one of the greatest. I used to go around his house all the time from when I was eight. If you were to tell me he would come and stand by my bed tonight, well—at first I would shit myself. But I would long to see that.”
He paused at this point and looked surprised.
“Freaky, actually, because I’ve just realized that today is his birthday.”
“You think that’s coincidence?” I smiled at him. “How do you know this conversation isn’t his way of letting you know that he’s in touch?”
For a moment there was a look on his face that made me wonder if I’d gone too far. But luckily for me he seemed to decide to take it in the way I’d intended.
“Oh, don’t give me that! Don’t tell me he’s talking to me through you! Anyway, what experiences have you had?”
“Well, years ago,” I said, happy to shift the focus, “I used a Ouija board to call up a spirit and …”
“Whoa! Wait a minute. You don’t just go and do something strange like that. I would never use the Ouija board. If something happened, I would shit my pants. You just don’t do that.”
“You do when you’re 13.”
“What do you mean, you ‘called up a spirit’? You can’t just say: ‘Hello, spirit, here we are!’ There you go already, you see; I don’t believe you. You cannot just say: ‘Spirit, here we are, please move the glass!’”
Yes you can, I thought. Really, you can. But if you do, don’t count on paying the mortgage again.
What I hadn’t confessed to him were my credentials: I’m a magician. Not the sort that does card tricks and saws women in half—they are “illusionists”, by the way. No, I mean the “occult” kind. You’ve heard of Aleister Crowley, probably? Well, that sort of thing. (Please don’t mention Harry Potter.)
Much of the news these days is generated by secular rationalists on one hand squaring up against religious fundamentalists on the other. Or vice versa. You do not hear much about the third path, far less travelled, which treads a course between. Some regard it as the sanest alternative, although the majority—certainly those on the two extremes—view it as even more despicable than their opposite. This third path is mag-ick, the occult. You won’t hear it discussed in the mainstream media, which is a shame because, unlike how they would have you believe, magick is not all about worshipping Satan, dancing naked in the woods and curdling your neighbour’s semi-skimmed. Magicians might do these things, but they do much else besides.
The life experiences that forced me off the straight-and-narrow track of secular rationality into the path of the oncoming juggernaut that was magick are the reason why this book is different from your standard “strange-but-true” pot-boiler. It was some close shaves with the paranormal that proved to me forever how reality has nothing in common with what we like to call “everyday life”.
We say goodbye to our beer-drinking friend on the train at this point. We are done with him. We will leave him to his decision to believe only in what happens, while he makes well and truly sure that certain things never ever will.
I’m going to wax autobiographical.
By the time I’d reached my thirties (I’m older than I sound) I’d settled into a steady job, working with computers, making money and feeling like a grown-up at last. Yet the more “successful” in conventional terms I became—in other words, the more stuff I owned and the more people who looked up to me—the less happy I felt.
I couldn’t have said why I was unhappy. I had money and a lovely girlfriend. We went shopping every weekend and flew off on holidays. I was healthy and liked the gym. But I was also often stressed
