Free Aphelion by Andy Frankham-Allen

merely a shell, a vessel in which he moved, became a part of the substantial world. He was something else entirely. And it was that something else that was being grabbed, pulled, yanked out of the body with such force that he could not resist. Not that he would have known how to. Until a second ago he didn’t even realise he was this something else .
    There was his body, slumped against the grimy wall of the old man’s kitchen, now vacant of its owner. He was above it, floating in the ether, a spectral mass of conscience looking down on a limited form that had once constrained him.
    Wait; why was he thinking such things? He was Robert Hoard of East Acton; a nobody, sure, just a small man going about his own business. Aspirations nil; a shelf filler in a local supermarket, and slave to his mother. Still. After forty years.
    “Because, Robert, on the astral plane everyone is high and mighty.”
    Robert tried to look around, find the source of the voice, but he couldn’t. Look that is; he had no eyes with which to look. He knew the voice, though, even out here on the “astral plane.” It was the old man.
    Robert tried to speak, but shock of shocks he didn’t know how. He had only ever spoken with his physical voice. A—what? Astral voice? Yes. An astral voice was new to him and he had no idea how to use it.
    “You’ll work it out. You shall be here for a while. And you’ll discover that although you are literally high out here, you are far from mighty. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to borrow your body for a while.”
    Mind? Of course he minded. But what could he possibly do to stop the old man? There was nothing he could do because he was nothing. Just thought, intangible and hanging uselessly in the ether.
    His mind was all over the place. Perhaps he was having a mind panic? That’s what happened when you panicked after all; your mind goes all over the place, not able to focus on any one thing. Instead it was in little bits; here, there and everywhere. Analysing the wrong things, going down the wrong paths, and not paying attention to the immediate issue. If that was so, then yes, Robert was having a mind panic attack.
    He was everywhere in the house at once. In the skanky bedroom in which the old man used to sleep, back when he did sleep, which was probably before the days when he used the room as a dumping ground for more trash. At the same time he was in the lounge, which unsurprisingly contained a very ancient TV, a huge wooden box with the smallest screen, the kind Robert had seen in pictures from the late ’50s, and, of course, the now anticipated mess and general look of abandonment. All over the house it was the same; a place where someone used to live, probably with some contentment, but now that happiness had moved, replaced by apathy that was verging on clinical disassociation. The old man simply did not view this house as a home any more, but a prison unworthy of respect. Walls that kept him from the world beyond.
    Robert wondered where that had come from. Somehow, deep down, he knew he was right, that the man truly believed this was his prison.
    What was it Douglas Adams had once written? Don’t Panic! Possibly the best advice in the world. Panic was not something Robert tended to do a lot, after all, his mother pretty much controlled most of his life so he had little space in which to lose it.
    His mind was rambling. He had to focus.
    The old man had talked of borrowing Robert’s body, and considering the state of the old man’s body, Robert wasn’t sure he much liked the idea of that. God knew what state his own would be in when he got it back.
    It was the thought of that, more than anything else, that gave him his focus back. He was back in the kitchen, once again looking at the scene from above. His body started to stir. At first it was just the fingers, twitching as if he were dreaming. Only it was not he, this was for sure. He was still up near the ceiling, an abstract collection