H Block is filled with the materialists, rationalists, literalists, and the atheists along with all those who don’t believe anything until a committee of experts and scientists has confirmed it’s true. All other apparent evidence to the contrary is discounted as hokum. However, the hokum really enjoys poking fun at H Block by surrounding it and filling it with peculiar phenomena. H Block is where the fairies have their fun, where the angels get some time off from being good, where the wickedest ghosts haunt, and alien entities taunt, where the astonishing coincidences that happen to most people once in a blue moon happen during every cycle of the moon.
However, the H-blockers have a remarkable ability to ignore anything that doesn’t cohere with their pre-existing model of how things are.
H Block is like a very sophisticated haunted-house attraction at an amusement park, but populated by graying rationalists who wander around insisting they know how everything is done. Their childhoods are long forgotten. There’s no room for magic. And no room for any possibility other than how they think it is.
In one day, a ghost dressed as a guard walked through a prison wall. The prisoner convinced herself she’d imagined it. A fairy went for a swim in Harrison Fairweather’s soup, looked him in the eye, and then spurted soup in his face. Fairweather went back to the serving hatch and insisted there was a fly in his soup. For one hour, the spirit of telepathy granted the highest-level telepathic powers to the prisoners, so that everyone knew what every one else was thinking, or knew what they were about to say before they said it. A lot of prisoners spent the hour saying, ‘I knew you were going to say that.’ But they didn’t once suspect they’d been the recipients of a gift of phenomenal paranormal perception.
Later in the day, when one prisoner fell and cut his leg, one of the guards clicked his fingers and the wound instantly healed. The prisoner assumed that the frequent portions of boiled spinach explained the remarkable effect on his blood cells’ clotting ability. Jimmy Wagfinger, who had been in a wheelchair since a motorcycle accident in his 20s, got up and danced a Highland jig1 for a bet. But once the money was paid, he lost his incentive to dance, so sat down, never to get up again for the rest of his life. Those who saw it wondered whether he’d got hold of some potent drugs, then thought no more of it.
Close to dinnertime, it looked like a storm was on its way. Sure enough the heaviest, darkest storm engulfed H Block. It was ferocious but short. And when the sun came out, if anyone had cared to look out through the barred windows, they’d have seen the prison was now surrounded by an emerald sea, lapping at a beach of golden sand, which before was just the gravel yard. But no one cared to look out.
During the night, the ghosts of those lost on the Titanic made an official tour of the block as part of their world benevolence tour; griffins made a huge fire in the gym out of back issues of Elves Weekly and danced round it until dawn; God popped in for a flying visit and did a huge crap in the warden’s private bathroom; and the prison’s pet mouse spontaneously combusted. Luckily, all the sparks from the combustion became tiny baby mice, but with a superior DNA to their mother, which allowed them to squeeze through the eye of an ant sitting on top of a needle balanced on an aniseed ball.
And that was just one day (and night).
If you prefer, you can go straight to Breaking Through the Wall of the Story.
1 A traditional dance in Scotland usually performed by burly men wearing kilts.