No, not by Poe. No nasty bleeding diseases. No pit ' but quite a lot of pendulum. In fact, just what it says on the box: mystery and imagination. And Poe is relevant ' but not perhaps in a way that's immediately obvious.

In many respects, we live the best part of our life in our imagination. Query: is that 'best'� qualitative or quantitative? Pass. Judge for yourselves. Don't expect me to do all the work for you. What I will tell you is what I know about myself: that I cry more often over imagined griefs than real ones. Books and films and music move me more often, and more deeply, than real life. That may just be because I've been relatively lucky, or because I'm pretty heartless (these two possibilities may reinforce rather than contradict one another). Art is to life as wine is to grapes.

I don't think that's an irrational point of view. René Descartes, inventor of co-ordinates, endorsed the power of imagination when he declared that our ability to conceive of God guaranteed that He (God) existed (and that René existed, too, of course ' I think, therefore I am, remember?) Real events leave traces. Imagined events leave traces, too, though crime scene investigators wouldn't necessarily be able to find them. For the moment, that's all I'm saying.

Jump-cut to what was a non-event in one framework, but an event (of some kind ' again I'll leave you to work out what) in at least one other framework. A person with whom I was capable of imagining some kind of relationship asked me to accompany her to look at a house. It wasn't a house for us to inhabit together, let's be clear about that, though Couldbe's a big country. I can't remember, now, whether she was intending to rent or buy. I thought she might be wanting my advice. She was probably just wanting the security of a male who'd be unlikely to attack her. I don't usually think of myself in that way ' but then how often do any of us think of ourselves as others see us?

The estate agent was my side of the property to be inspected, so she asked me to call in and pick up the key on the way. No need for directions, she said, the estate agent will give you a map, and we'll meet at the house. So efficient at dispensing with the unnecessary. Yes. Pay attention to the way I phrase things. It always tells the truth, whether I want it to or not.

I must confess I was surprised at where she'd chosen. Not my taste at all, and I shouldn't have thought it would have been hers. You can't build new houses in the New Forest. That's clear. But there are places round the edge, scrubby fields used by car-breakers, the yards of coach-firms that have been taken over, garages surplus to requirement, where you can do a bit of infill, too small to be ribbon development, more like floss between what's there already. And the layout resembles one of those geometrical puzzles with matchsticks, the developer squeezing as many units as possible into the tiny space, so that they almost, but not quite, overlook each other, separated by wooden panel fences that give the illusion of rusticity. 'Forest edge'� is what the estate agents say. One leg out of the window and clinging on to the sill, you can probably see a tree.

The entrance to the development was imposing. Two bijou lodge cottages, single storey, single chimney, probably only double-roomed, late nineteenth century to judge by the proportions of the windows, stuccoed to look like Adam brothers classical, but given away by the damp-stains and mould. Nice places for those without a cat to swing. Porsche outside the right-hand one, babywalker outside the left. Perhaps it was a very modern marriage?

Just past them was a bollarded traffic-island that forced me left into a road so narrow it had to be one-way. On my right, in the centre of the estate, was an unbroken terraced square facing outwards, with inbuilt garages, and the house I wanted was, I realised within the first few seconds, at the very far end, all the way round the block, right where I had come in. So, I drove slowly round the one-way system, reading the names of the little back-to-back closes on the left: Christie, Blake, Knox (Named after murderers? Spies?) ' then there was a bit of a view over a scruffy paddock where an enamel bath offered scummy drinking water to three nondescript horses who stood aloof in the shade of an attractive oak-tree on the far side. The terraced houses had no front gardens, just hard standing for a single modest car. Anyone with a limo blocked the pavement. Round the corner, past Allingham and Marsh and Sayers (Footballers? Popstars? Probably just faceless councillors ' not as interesting as the Renaissance Dramatists estate I lived on once, with Heywood and Massinger and Beaumont and Fletcher ' though I wouldn't have wanted to live in Webster Close!), and back to the start, where I crunched awkwardly and selfishly on to the gravel outside my destination. My companion, when she arrived, would have to find her own salvation.

I certainly didn't intend to wait for her in the car. The horses had had the right idea. It was that appallingly hot spell last summer, and I rushed into the house, out of the sun.

The house was stuffy and bare. I didn't dare open a window ' there might have been an alarm system (I'd seen a box), and even if there wasn't, I'd probably never have been able to get it closed again. The back door, though, had a key in it, and it turned, and let me out into the house's own shadow, which, though small, it being barely three o'clock, nonetheless covered half the garden.

The heat was like a hammer. I wanted to lie down. I wasn't going to do it on the patio, with its pair of terracotta plant mausoleums, its UVcompromised plastic furniture, and dubious stains that I took for cat-wee. The shred of lawn was in full sun, but an enormous tangle of brambles beyond that promised ' what? I don't know ' relief ' escape ' from the sharp light and the sharp shadows of the sharp buildings. It was, if nothing else, mysterious. Impenetrable. Which was why I went back to my car for the secateurs. Yes, of course I carry them with me at all times! I like going for spontaneous country walks: secateurs (and wire-cutters) are indispensable (blow the map!) My first girl-friend was always urged by her mother to keep a pair of secateurs in her handbag for self-protection ' though clearly they would be the weapon of absolutely ultimate resort, for practical reasons, there's no denying that they would have proved an effective deterrent, or, failing that, preventative in extremis.

There was no sign of anyone trying desperately to park, no sarcastic note on the windscreen, so I concluded that my fellow house-viewer had been unavoidably detained. She couldn't call me on my mobile, because I don't have a mobile. There's so little real communication between human beings that I refuse to subscribe to that particular form of the illusion.

The Sunday papers were in the car. I had bought them for my insignificant other, I hasten to add. I picked up the cultural bit, thinking it might give me something to do while waiting.

The brambles were old and woody, which made the job easier. Over many years, they had made a kind of huge dome, inside which there was an old-fashioned wooden shed. Though hasp and padlock were intact, the wood had rotted round the screws that held the hasp in place, and it lifted clear without trouble.

Sheds, I think, are magical places. Like my head, they're stuffed full of all kinds of things for which there is no immediate use, and no place anywhere else, and there's no telling what you may find. This one was quite tidy, and not especially crowded, (so a little different from my head), but it contained enthralling objects: a line-marker for tennis courts, the white paint solid and cracked, a harmonium suffering from respiratory failure (mice had eaten big holes in the bellows), a writing desk with a glass inkstand and penholder (the ink long dried and gone), and a fine revolving captain's chair ' without upholstery, so spared by the mice.

I have a thing about chairs like that, which probably comes from never having owned one. In no time, I was in it and spinning Not all the way round ' that would have been foolish and dangerous. I would have barked my knees on the cubbyhole desk. Oscillatory movement in the horizontal plane I find more restful than in the vertical. Rocking chairs, as far as I'm concerned, just play hell with my knees. My eyes closed. The cultural bit of the Sunday papers, which I had brought with me and placed on the desk, was forgotten (as it probably deserved to be). In a moment, I was away. Where? In my imagination. That's what dreams are, isn't it?

It wasn't, let me tell you, a place where I wanted to be. There was blood. I saw a knife slip into a wound that opened in front of it, like an automatic door. And like a shower when you first turn it on, the blood oozed out, and then gushed. Sometimes I was doing the stabbing, sometimes I was doing the bleeding.

Then there was the blunt object. A candlestick. A paperweight. A bronze bust ' it may have been of Wagner, but that could just be my personal animosity. Sometimes I was the perpetrator, with the jarred arm and wrist, sometimes the victim, feeling the fragments of skull lacerating my cortex, and the subsequent haemorrhage obliterating my synapses and all their ability to communicate with myself.

Finally, there were the poisons. Some sudden, some slow. Arsenic slowly invading, building up in the hair, after it had done its deadly work in the body. Prussic acid, with its telltale whiff of bitter almonds reaching the nostrils too late, after it had already passed the lips and stopped the breath. I looked down at the body, I looked up, with sightless eyes, at my murderer ' or murderess.

Small wonder that I woke breathing fast and sweating ' mentally, not physically induced symptoms, be it said. Imagination has, I hope, some limitations. And then I heard the calming sound of summer.

The old-fashioned push-mower is the closest thing we still have to the scythe, without the latter's disturbing symbolic associations. Its regular muted clatter, with those pauses as the pusher turns and takes another run at the thing, are like the rocking of a cradle for the somnolent adult, like the weary labour of a medium fast bowler set, on a sultry afternoon, against a pair of stonewalling batsmen who are playing out time.

Hang on a bit, I thought. There are no gardens round here big enough to get up that kind of run. I know. I've driven round them all. These are strimmer people, with the shrill noise when the plastic line runs out and the low growl when it gets caught round something.

I opened my eyes. Before closing them, I had registered the fact that whoever built the shed had plonked it slap against the rear fence, and, moreover, the wrong way round. There was a window over the desk at which I sat, and it had a fine view of planks two inches away. That hadn't worried me. As a child on shopping expeditions, I'd wandered round kitchen displays in big stores, with a view of the garden from the sink that was painted on a piece of hardboard. I'd been in plays where the same was true of the view down the fjord, or the cherry orchard. But now, where the planks of the fence had been, there was a view, over grass, through tennis court netting, and across a winding driveway, towards a red-brick mid-nineteenth century house. And in the foreground, behind a mower, a red-faced, grey-moustachioed man, with a knotted handkerchief on his balding and slightly sunburnt head, stared, open-mouthed and apoplectic, straight at me.

I attempted communication, as you do, even when you suspect it may be futile (I also work as a supply teacher, remember). I moved to the glass-windowed door beside the desk and rattled its handle. But the door was apparently locked, for nothing happened. I tried to shout, but I don't know what words came, and I doubt if he heard me.

It mattered little in any case, because at that moment the planks reappeared and I found myself shouting furiously at a fence, and rattling the handle of a door that could barely have opened more than an inch.

I needed a drink. It was probably to my benefit that the house offered nothing but water, and no vessel to hold it beyond my own cupped hands. That way, I was generally cooled, and in the continued absence of the woman in the case I thought I had better go and retrieve the cultural bit of the Sunday papers, and calm myself down.

I stepped through the brambles with some trepidation, but the shed was still firmly planted against the back fence, as I could see before I entered, since I had left the rear door open in my flight. The newspaper section, however, was not on the desk. On the other hand, there was reading matter on the floor, beside the desk, that had not been there before. It looked as though it had been pushed under the glass-windowed door ' though, clearly, that was impossible. Nonetheless, I picked it up. It was The London Mercury for July 1934. I took it with me back to the house, carefully replacing the hasp of the lock and re-inserting the screws into their rotten holes.

Interest annihilates surroundings. Unaware of the heat, or the discomfort of sitting on a bare floor, leaning against a wall (as in bookshops I have risked thrombosis, kneeling in the cramped space between the shelves, to read just one more page and then just another after another after that, and fallen over when I tried to stand up and my legs refused to work) I looked through the table of contents for a clue as to why this sudden apparition should be relevant to my present circumstances. And I found it. Believe me, not all hunts for clues are so immediately successful.

The name of one of the authors of articles in the periodical was the same as the name of the one-way street that ran all around the new development, and in which the house I sat in was situated. Coincidence? Synchronicity? I did not think so. And I was right.

Mr - 'Freeman'� shall we call him? Why not? - Freeman, then, was, it seemed a famous author of detective fiction. He had written a series of books called The Colour Mysteries. A long and successful series, each one with an appropriate dust-jacket. It had apparently reached heliotrope by way of aquamarine. terracotta, viridian and burgundy ' way beyond the canonical seven, certainly. A boxed advertisement beside Mr Freeman's article indicated that Herbert Jenkins, publisher, would be happy to furnish copies of all these to discerning readers. However, all this laudable literary activity had come to an abrupt stop as the result of an event which the article described in some detail.

It began with an account of J.W. Dunne's theory of time that I can spare you, the nub being that past, present and future exist simultaneously, but we normally experience them separately and in the traditional order. Under certain circumstances, however...

The rest of the article explored a particular set of these circumstances.

'Ever since I was fortunate enough to acquire my present residence on the edge of that vast tract of woodland, moorland, rough pasture and bog which rejoices in the anachronistic and misleading appellation of the New Forest...'�

No. I can't take it. I've done so once, and I don't want to again. Let's take the style as read, and cut to the chase.

Mr Freeman had been in the habit of doing his polychromatic writing in a summerhouse in the grounds 'just beyond the tennis-courts, far enough from the house that no mere idle curiosity would think it worthwhile to venture to disturb me, yet not so far but that, on occasion...'� - yes, thank you very much! At a desk in that very summer-house those highly-charged and brightly coloured scenes had come into being which had won him countless readers the length and breadth of the Empire, and wherever else English may be spoken, however she is spoken, and regardless of whether we think of it as English, or Australian, or South African, or... It's a little pervasive, I'm afraid, not exactly addictive, but certainly hard to stop when you've started.

But that's hardly surprising in my case, is it? Because I'd had full-on contact with the place where his imagination had conceived all those terrifying scenes of vicarious cruelty. He hadn't been alone, mark you. Everybody did it in England in the 1920s and 1930s: poets and mediaevalists, translators of Dante and Catholic priests ' they all wrote whodunnits. Studiously ignoring the real violence and evil in the world, they invented their own. Let's be understanding. There are so many puzzles in life we can't solve, that we like to invent ones we can. Let's remember the Pont cartoon of the little old lady reading in bed, surrounded by wraith-like scenes of mayhem and murder ' but also by the figures of Holmes and the good old British bobby.

But something had stopped it. Something had stopped him from going down to the summerhouse, and somehow his imagination didn't work as well anywhere else. He had seen ' not something nasty in the woodshed, like Aunt Ada Doom a couple of years before, but something almost inexplicable in the summerhouse. And this bit I really have to quote:

'The chrononaut was evidently trapped somewhere on his endless voyage from past to future and back again. His face, twisted in a rictus of despair, bore eloquent witness to all his manifold sufferings, and a soundless cry of anguish tried to escape his dry, cracked lips. Time, through which he travelled, had not spared him, for a beard not unworthy of Robinson Crusoe sprang in uncombed tangles from his haggard features, while his bloodshot and sunken eyes...'�

No! I've had enough! I shampoo it and brush it every day! The bastard! He carries on by assuming that my shirt has rotted off my back. I was, needless to say, wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt of the type formerly known as Aertex ' not exactly Ralph Lauren, but good enough. I had no trouble, I'm afraid, recognising myself from his description ' not least because of a classic English detective story by G.K. Chesterton, 'The Man in the Passage' from The Wisdom of Father Brown, in which the reverend father, unlike other more distinguished persons, is able to recognise his own reflection in a mirror.

He knew, of course, that I was from the future because of the culture supp. that I'd left behind, though what he made of it, I dread to think. Actually, at the time I did dread to think, because I remembered the Ray Bradbury story where one crushed butterfly in the Palaeozoic changes the world. But I went into the garden and listened: from the left, one of the Grand Prix ' Imola, I think, or it might have been the German; from the right, Eastenders Omnibus; from over the fence, MTV. Nothing changed there, then.

Given the time, I concluded that I'd lost this particular game of Find the Lady and headed for home, where the answerphone told me that the idiot estate agent had confused her with someone else and given me the key to completely the wrong property. She'd gone to see the right one with the apologetic young man and...

Anyway, who cares? It was only on the way home, to my shame, that I understood the street names ' all crime-writers, suggested by the link with Freeman on whose grounds the estate had been built. Whoever thought that up really was on my wavelength, and I'd have been better off with him, or, hopefully, her...

And as for poor old Freeman... Well, I didn't have any way to tell him that I wasn't travelling through time any faster than he was, any faster than we all are, on our separate journeys to the same goal.

Except. Except, of course, in our imagination. 11.30-16.30 18.x.2006

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