Tea With Mr. Winterford

“Mister Carlos, I presume?” the author cheerfully greeted the journalist. 

Raoul Frederick Carlos held his notepad in front of him, a little starstruck, or perhaps just surprised that he had been greeted at the door by Alistair Winterford himself, rather than a butler or a housekeeper. 

“Yes sir! It’s an honour to meet you, and I must express my deep gratitude to you for agreeing to this interview.“

“Yes, yes,” Winterford said dismissively. “Pleasantries aside, you know as well as I do that this will do us both good. I couldn’t decline a request from a publication as illustrious as yours. Besides, I’ve got my great-grandchildren’s college education to think about!” His eyes gleamed with good-humoured mischief.

“You have great-grandchildren?” Carlos couldn’t believe it. He was old, but not that old.

“Ha! I jest! But I have plenty of grandchildren and I have faith that most of them will breed. Come in! Come in!”

He followed him down a tastefully decorated baroque hallway which opened out into a large lounge. While clearly belonging to a man of means, Carlos found the room to be a little spare compared to the kind of furnishings he imagined would be available to someone who spent weeks at a time on bestseller lists around the world. He was ushered into a comfortable armchair.

“Ah, Jannike has prepared tea for us already. Excellent!” Winterford said as he lowered himself into his own chair. “I hope you’re happy with Earl Grey and lemon. I can get her to bring something else if you’d prefer.” It wasn’t what he normally drank, but Carlos didn’t want to impose. Winterford poured the tea then leaned forward, engaging his guest with an expectant smile. “Well. Down to business!” 

To Carlos this felt like the kickoff of a major football game. He didn’t want to mess up. He had to open strongly.

“Mr. Winterford, at the risk of sounding obsequious, which is not my intention, it seems you have a particular knack for leading readers into the world of your imagination in such a vivid and immersive way that they often find putting your books down becomes a task of some considerable mental effort. Is this attributable to a muse, and if so, what do you do when the muse is absent?”

“Oh, failing to get into the zone you mean? I think the whole muse idea is a bit old-fashioned, but I do think it is easier to write when one is in the zone, so to speak. And not getting into the zone can pretty simply be described as writer’s block. Is that what you’re referring to? How do I deal with writer’s block?”

“Yes. I suppose.”

“Well I shrink my frame of reference. That usually works.” The naughty gleam in his eye that Carlos had noticed at the door twinkled back. 

“What do you mean by that?” Carlos asked.

“I mean try to get as small as possible. Like this. Try it with me.”  

Carlos noted with alarm that everything in the room was moving away from him at speed. The ceilings soaring to the heavens, the walls receding to form a vast, cavernous space between them. The fabric of the soft armchair was now a mat of rough bundles of twine, the arms themselves cliffs stretching above him. He was terrified.

“What is happening!?” he called over to Winterford.

“Calm yourself, man!” came the reply. “Climb off the chair and I’ll meet you on the floor.”

Carlos could hear Winterford but he couldn’t see him. He thought that he must be in a similar predicament, but then realised that this was something he did voluntarily. He picked his way across the weave of the fabric. Getting across it was treacherous. He felt that at any moment one foot would slip and get stuck in a gap and what then? He imagined himself ballooning back to normal size, his foot stuck fast in the fabric of the chair. 

“Don’t worry about suddenly changing back. It won’t happen unless we both imagine it!” Winterford called over to him. He’d anticipated that fear. Guessing the next one too, he called over again: “Don’t worry about slipping and falling off the chair when you’re climbing down. You’re unlikely to hurt yourself.”

It was a genuine accident, but at that moment, as if to prove Winterford’s point, Calos lost his footing and slipped off the edge. It was a fall that certainly would have killed him if he were life-sized, and the gravity of the “No” he uttered as he slipped was worthy of being his final word.

But he bounced lightly, if a little uncomfortably, on the carpet. He checked his limbs and everything seemed fine.

  

“We’ve kept our relative mass, but the air is the same density, so we fall much more slowly” Winterford called over, grunting with the effort of the last part of the climb off his chair. “Same reason an ant will continue its business as if nothing has happened after falling from a great height.”

Carlos shuddered at the thought of running across an ant at this scale. It would be at least the size of a large dog. He finally caught sight of Winterford, picking his way across the carpet to get to him. His eyes were alive with delight. “I didn’t have to look for them this time. Come and see!” he gestured back the way he had come. Carlos followed him as he bounded across the carpet, now a flat landscape composed of evenly spaced fibrous bundles, like tussocks of grass. Carlos was almost out of breath by the time he made it over to Winterford. He recoiled in horror at what was being pointed out to him. Horrid, spider-like creatures about the size of guinea pigs crawled around amidst the tussocks. They looked like scrotums with crab legs. “What are those?!” 

Winterford beamed. “They’re dust mites! They eat the flakes of dead skin that naturally slough off our bodies. We don’t get to see them when we’re normal-sized because they’re so tiny. Aren’t they wonderful?” Carlos shuddered. “Come! I want to show you something else!”

They made their way over to the wall. The carpet was much harder to navigate at this size. The fibres were slippery, uneven and hard. Half walking, half clambering, they arrived at where the skirting met the floor. A vertical gap between two lengths of skirting made it possible for Winterford to clamber up. Carlos followed, wondering what awful things might lie at the top. When he pulled himself up onto the level section, he found Winterford, pleased as punch, pointing at a gap between the edge of the wallpaper and the top of the skirting. It wouldn’t have been noticeable at normal scale, but it was almost as high as Carlos’s leg. 

“Stachybotrys Chartarum” Winterford announced, pointing to what looked like a scraggly mat of old bunches of black grapes. “It’s black mould. I suppose I shouldn’t be too pleased about it but this colony is small and I doubt there is enough moisture down here for it to grow any bigger than it already is.” He picked one of the grape-like things and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, proffering it to Carlos, who waved it away. “I do say you look a little green around the gills Mr. Carlos. Don’t worry. This would only be poisonous if I take it with me, and I’m going to make a point of leaving it down here.” He tossed it back into the colony, then turned to face Carlos again. “Oh, it’s not just the mould, is it? Do you want to go back?”  

“Mister Winterford, with all due respect, I don’t know what’s going on. And I’m very frightened. Did you put drugs in my tea?”

“Drugs? In your tea!?” Winterford leaned back and let out a hearty laugh. He laughed for an incongruously long time. When he was finally finished, his cheeks were a peachy pink. He gave Carlos a glittering grin. “No, not drugs. This.” He tapped his temple. “You did ask about the zone, after all. No. To paraphrase another great surrealist: I don’t do drugs, I am drugs! To tell the truth, you’re still in your chair, experiencing a peculiar moment that you’ll remember as lasting not much more than a second. I’m across the tea table from you, but I’m working a lot harder than you are right now. You’re a bright and imaginative man, Mr. Carlos, which is why there’s enough latent existentiogenic power within you for you to be able to perceive, and experience as real, this little trip I’ve taken us on. “

“Existentio…”

“Existentiogenic. I have to admit I made that word up. The next best would be hallucinogenic, but as I said, no drugs. And this isn’t so much a hallucination as a recalibrated version of reality. You do look a little ill though, so we’d better go back.”

“Back to normal size?” Carlos felt that if his brain were a gearbox, the clutch had just failed. 

“Yes. Back to how we were, or are, if you like, in our respective armchairs.”

“Oh, thank God.”

“Come one then, it’s safe to jump off the skirting” he said, and promptly did. 

Carlos blinked. Apparently it wasn’t as simple as just reappearing in normal reality. Remembering the terrifying but ultimately harmless fall off the cliff-face of the armchair, he summoned the courage to jump off what seemed like a double-storey building. The landing was uneventful. Winterford was already making his way across the expanse of carpet toward the towering chairs.  Carlos did his best to catch up, dodging an ugly dust mite as it plodded across his path.

Why was this necessary? He wondered. Why couldn’t they just teleport back to how they were? But then it dawned on him. “Mr. Winterford! I think I understand! We need to get away from the wall so that when we re-inhabit man-sized space we won’t collide with it!”

“Oh no, that’s not it at all. We need to get to our chairs. Back to exactly where we came from.  Nearly there!”

Just then, an ant ran between them. It was almost as tall as he was and made a noise like wood being sawn by several people at once. Carlos dived behind a carpet tussock. Luckily it showed no interest in him so he got up and carried on toward Winterford. He finally caught up with him near the armchair he had fallen off. 

“Well, off you go, then.” Winterford told him. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. How do we get back? I thought you could take us back!” Carlos was almost in tears. 

“I will take us back. We’re already back, in a manner of speaking.”

Carlos looked around. He could see no giant shoes or towering trouser legs. There was no hint he was getting any bigger either. Winterford pointed upwards. “Climb! The fabric is not unlike those rope nets you see on obstacle courses, right? This is just a bloody gigantic armchair-shaped one. I must say, I regret not telling you this before. I suppose I am in remiss. We need to get back to the exact positions we started from so as not to upset the timescale. It’s a whole relativity thing. I’ll give you a head-start. I might be old but I imagine I’ve had a lot more experience than you with this kind of gallivanting. It shouldn’t be more than half an hour’s climb at this scale, and the great thing is, our tea will still be hot when we’re back to normal. Tally-ho!”