The House of Bread

I'm Scott Bishop. I create fantasies for the radio. I write weird stories for magazines. I write books on strange subjects. Authors who do these things sometimes attract odd happenings.

I don't ask listeners to believe my stories. I do not expect you to believe what I'm going to tell you now. As I was sitting alone at my typewriter one evening, plotting in my mind an outline for a story. My room was quiet. It was a soft, spicy odor of incense, being wafted in from some other portion of the house. An organ was playing softly somewhere

in the distance. That was when I fell asleep, and in my dream I found myself alone high on a precipice, the highest in all creation, where I could observe with a naked eye all the far-flung wonders of the universe, where I could overlook that common clay that mankind calls the earth.

And as I watched tie on that vantage point, why do you sigh, my son, are any others ever alone? Those were not. But so desolate up here, so far from anything else. And I seem to be searching for something.

Could it be my son that the reason is you are searching for the truth? What is the truth? You ask that. Then asking, you surely must not know. Is it some vague inconsequential thing? Some mythical nothingness? Some non-existent wishfulness?

Truth, my son, is neither inconsequential, nor vague, nor mythical. If I could only believe that, you can believe it, if you will. Can one believe something he's never seen? Perhaps. Take me a cynic, don't you, sir. I haven't said I do, nor have you denied it.