Wednesday, December the 8th, 2004

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hear this 

Stairway to Heaven

Researchers claim to have found a picture of one of Dobson's out-of-print pamphlets. One of the researchers is tall and Hungarian. The other is lantern-jawed and recently suffered from gastroenteritis. They have only been working together for a short time, and have never met face-to-face, communicating via a virtually redundant communications system involving pneumatics, magnets and steam.

I have to say that this picture looks more like a book than a pamphlet, in which case it may be the unimaginably rare Stairway To Heaven, one of Dobson's most puzzling works. The picture is too small to decipher the text, so we can only suppose.

Stairway To Heaven was written in the first flush of Dobson's youth, the manuscript scribbled in a clutch of exercise books the pamphleteer-to-be stole from an enormous locomotive stuck in a railway siding. The guards had apparently gone off to paddle in a pond and hunt wild boar while they waited for spare parts.

The book is subtitled Some Conjectures On The Possible Location Of An Actual Staircase That Leads To The Celestial Sphere, and is a remarkably assured text for one so young. It begins thus:

As I wander through the wilderness of this world, I often fall to wondering how I will get to heaven. I know it is there somewhere, for that is what my mama and papa have told me ever since I was a tot. I know, too, that every single thing they have ever told me is true, because they vowed it was so. They made these vows to me on my sixth birthday, as papa cut my cake and shortly after mama clambered in through the window after chasing away a robber with her high velocity sniper's rifle. She came through the window of the kitchen because at that time the door to the cottage was sealed shut against fiends and demons, known to prey upon good folk in the countryside where I grew. Papa used quick-drying cement for the job, completing the work in just an hour on the one day that winter when there was no rain or snow, for we lived in a valley. If there is ever a second edition of this book I will check a meteorological reference work to check the accuracy of that statement.

There never was a second edition, of course, a fact that sometimes finds me lying awake all night, sobbing into my blankets, big blankets from Finland, where it is important to keep warm and snug through the long, long winter night.