Dave The Penguin by Nick Sambrook Page A

but as he hadn’t taken
any recreational drugs or hit his head, he needed to know what it
was all about.
    Without thinking first,
he went into the entrance of the hole and fell in, and then down,
down, down, just as expected.
    Down, down and more down
the tunnel he went, Which is
quite logical, thought Dave, as he
fell.
    Even though he knew it was
imaginary he still kept his wings and feet tucked in; it was always
hard to get out of habits, and the hypnotic effect of
illusions.
    Still,
there’s no harm in that , always better to err on the safe
side, you know, just in case it turns out to be real, even if it is
a different sort of ‘real’ , he
thought
    Then logic went out the
window as he emerged with a thump on the floor of a very
large, white, well lit square room.
    There were stairs going down to
a basement, and lots of strange things all around him, including a
brightly coloured chandelier swinging from the ceiling.
    This is all
in your mind Dave told himself. Which was
quite a big thing for him to realise.
    Dave had also worked out the
truth in his mind; it wasn’t a great penguin in the sky after all,
it was just an elephant.
    It was now looking at him from the other side of the room. It was
really there - he could see it out of the corner of his eye - in
the corner of this large room; there, large, awkward, and
big.
    It had an embarrassed, guilty
look, suddenly realising for itself what it was, and expecting him
to sort the problem out.
    To resolve the awful chaos in
this ‘Haven’ place in which it stood. Dave knew it was called that,
as there was a sign above the entrance where he fell in.
    The sign had the word ‘Haven’
on it with a symbol of a penguin next to it in crayon. Symbols
seemed to be important here, it made things simple, like links or
connections, just as you had on your desktop.
    Dave wondered if there
were rooms like this with other symbols on them for other things,
like fish, snakes, or stars, to indicate what was in the room, and
what you would learn there.
    This room clearly did not have
any form of en-suite facilities though, and Dave had no intention
of even taking a quick look into the basement, as he had a fairly
clear idea of what was down there - and it wasn’t good.
    “Alright Dave?” asked the
elephant enthusiastically, and nodded to him in a friendly
manner.
    Dave ignored it, in the hope
that it would just go away.
    The elephant in Dave’s
mind wasn’t really an elephant though; again it was just a
manifestation of the difficult problem, the unresolved paradigm of
what this all was.
    It was that awkward issue of
something that couldn’t be explained away by anything that you knew
or understood; that awkward thing that plagued all philosophy,
psychology, quantum physics, art, religion and everything else.
    It was that ‘hang on a minute
that doesn’t make any logical rational sense’ elephant, that you
couldn’t translate into physical logic, and get your mind
around.
    Dave knew what the answer was
really, you had to have been ‘in it’ to understand ‘it’, but he
didn’t have any way of describing ‘it’ in any physical or real
terminology either, as it wasn’t ‘like’ anything.
    Yet everything he knew
and perceived had come from it, not the other way around. So the
problem remained an elephant for now, and the only way of getting
close to defining it or describing it was still through various
analogies and descriptive stories.
    Dave just carried on
ignoring the elephant, and pretended that it wasn’t there; just in
the same way as everyone else did.
    Besides it would be very
embarrassing getting caught talking to an imaginary virtual
elephant, especially as he didn’t even know its name.
    Dave did know however that he
wasn’t going mad.
    This was all just here to show
something to him, to explain something to himself.
    They had said that his late
aunt Mildred was mad; madder than a box of squirrels, apparently.
She heard ‘voices’ all the time, and she