Sentence The Fivehundredandthirtyseventh 

Laszlo Licinic stared at them and they stared back – he looked down at his body and saw that he was no longer wearing his cardboard costume; though he still had on the underclothes he had been wearing beneath it for the performance; "where am I?" he asked, "who are you?" and stopped; something was wrong here, he had never met any of these people before, nor did he recognize the dingy room – a cross between a bedroom and a sitting room, with mismatched furniture and no ornaments, it didn't look like a hospital, unless – he knew several people who had ended up in madhouses, but this didn't feel like that, there seemed to be no nurses or guards and two of the women's heads were bandaged; he put a hand up tentatively to his own and found that it too had bandages wound around it; one of the women, speaking slowly, said: "you appeared yesterday, you had a wound to your head, each room has a small first-aid kit and I washed and dressed it as well as I could, but I am no nurse – oh, my name is Roxy Davidova, I'm from Edinburgh in Scotland," and

when she paused, his own bourgeois upbringing made him bow his head and introduce himself: "Laszlo Licinic, originally Romania, now Switzerland, Zurich; how did I get here? by ambulance?" but Roxy shook her head and said: "the same way we all did – something happened to each of us, knocked us out, and we woke up here," and the others each briefly introduced him or herself, including one he identified as a rather odious demagogue, who seemed to fancy himself as the natural leader and looked set to ratchet himself up to make a stemwinder of a speech, before he was interrupted by the little gnome-like man, wizened and bent, with red hair and beard and a pointed felt hat, who said: "an oise Uncle Tom Cobley, young'un, an oi jist woked up ere lass noit, atter fallen aff a orse in 1794, a-cummin beck arter Widdercoombe Fayre, seems oi jist upped sticks un muster bin caut by a tornader or summat un whirled aboot fer a hunner yers en merr, farst asleep, un plopped darn ere, witch maks oise th'owdest ere, so tellus troo, waas a dite, or waas it wen you laas moins it?" and Laszlo thought for a moment: "it is December 1916, I can't remember the day," and the

moon-faced man, shorter than the other two, asked: "were you at the Cabaret Voltaire on the night of the explosion?" and Laszlo replied: "I don't know anything about an explosion, I was performing when everything went black, have I been unconscious for long?" and the man who called himself Lorre looked sadly at him: "I was only 12 at the time, living with my family in Vienna, but it was quite a sensation, and your name rings a bell with me – as for your question, we have no definite knowledge but we have estimated that this must be around 1938, although the last that some of us remember was in the future – Roxy and the other Peter came from the year 2016, as did Martin there, for me it was '37, and these two ladies, '31 and '39, so we have some of us come backwards, others, most significantly Uncle Tom and including yourself, forward in time; oh, and I believe we are in Berlin, because this is a reproduction of a movie set that I worked on here – and there are a number of books, and the latest date of publication in one of them is May 1938, and it feels, looks and smells freshly printed and new, which is why I do believe that we are in 1938: however improbable and unlikely that may seem," and the old Uncle piped up: "iffen oi kin bleev'im, un oise nobbut an ould eejit, wi jist a couple hauf-brains in moi napper, then yese got na excuse-me fer dootin," and after a

pause, Laszlo asked: "is this Hell, or Heaven?" although his spirit knew perfectly well that it was neither, simply because there were no such places in the Creator's Universe!