Free The New Uncanny by Etgar Keret, Ramsey Campbell, Hanif Kureishi, Christopher Priest, Jane Rogers, A.S. Byatt, Matthew Holness, Adam Marek Page A

hung, just knowing it was there, was enough to cause delight. It was as though my life was a reflection in a pool, into which I could actually enter. It was as though narcissus could indeed embrace his own reflection.
    The experience of descending the cellar stairs into the inverted world below, to suddenly find oneself the only upright thing in a room turned upside-down, to be given the sense that gravity pushes upwards rather than downwards, to feel oneself floating, in fact, was an experience of delirious, dreamy delight.
    And one I had to share.
    So that is how I came to bamboozle acquaintances I met at The Earl of Chatham, the rather innocent, almost destitute young men who frequented that once family-friendly place, and who could easily be bought drinks. I would invite them home, after many reassurances that I was not an old queen, and they would accompany me back, usually because they had nowhere better to go, and not much prospect of a roof over their head for the night. I would sit them in the armchair, plying them with Jim Beams and playing Count Basie on the record player, until they passed out in a drunken swoon. Then I would carry them down to the cellar, lay them down on the floor (the ceiling), and leave them alone to wake up, but still with Count Basie playing on the now upside-down record player. I would return to the right-way-up-room, and wait. It could take a long time, but eventually there would come a cry from downstairs. ‘Jesus Christ’ they might say, ‘Holy Jesus, get me down, get me down,’ and I would go downstairs into the cellar, peep at them from round the corner and see them writhing on the floor (the ceiling), petrified at their weightlessness, terrified at their defiance of gravity. At first I would hang from the stairwell and peek at them upside-down, as if I too were part of the upside-down world, to increase their sense of being on the ceiling.
    ‘What’s the matter old chap,’ I would say, ‘feeling a bit light headed?’
    They would stare at me with about-to-be-shot eyes, hyperventilating, unable to find words, pressing themselves to the floor (the ceiling).
    ‘You should be pleased, old chap,’ I would say, ‘you’ve learnt how to fly. Aren’t you the clever one?’
    I would then reassure them that it was simply something they’d drunk. I would tell them to close their eyes and let me take care of them. Then I’d carry them back upstairs, plonk them down in the right-way-up living room, tell them to open their eyes again. From their perspective they had not left the room at all, merely descended from its ceiling to its floor. The look of tender alarm on their faces, as they felt about the arms of the chair, and the floor with their feet, to ascertain whether they really were back on the ground, and the way they looked up at the ceiling, apprehensive of the horrible notion that they might, at any moment, plummet towards it, was something to cherish.
    I have plans for extending my underhouse, so that the whole house, every room including the loft, should be duplicated. It would be a work of many, many years, and one I may not live long enough to complete. To open up so much empty space beneath my own house could be dangerous. I have this peculiar thought that, having completed my duplicate upside-down house, and having weakened the foundations of the right-way-up house, the latter will eventually collapse into the former. If the right-way-up house fell down into the upside-down-house, one must suppose that the two would cancel each other out, and that both houses would simply disappear. And if I happen to be asleep in my bed (right way up or upside down – how would I know?) what would become of me? I would have folded myself out of existence. A rather attractive thought. I’d better start digging.

The Dummy
Nicholas Royle
    THE FEATURELESS ROAD. The driving rain.
    White lines, empty fields.
    The endless rhythm of the stop-go shunt, a Newton’s cradle of cars on the