Three Word Title

  In one of many dozens of boxes discovered in the basement of 2495 Glendower Avenue following the death of the property’s owner was a yellow quarto notepad date-stamped 1956. Within that notepad, and surrounded by hand-written notes and amendments, was a double spaced, type-written story. The story was interesting for many reasons; not for its noticeably parochial English style and setting, which was a hall-mark of many pieces of the period, but for the manner in which it foreshadowed a number of notable fictions that followed. Reproduced below, with permission, is that story’s full text; the handwritten notes are not included, as to do so would diminish the narrative flow that the original author presumably intended.

***

  It was nearing closing time at ‘The White Hart’ when a frantic Harry Purvis burst in through the King’s end doors and knocked Eric Russell’s drink clean from his hand.

 ‘Mr. Purvis, it is most unlike you to dash,’ said a laughing Drew, as he languidly polished the hand-pumps behind the bar, ‘care to tell us the reason for this energetic display?’

 A good number of eyes were already on Harry Purvis, given his uncharacteristically energetic entrance, and they remained on him as he ordered six pints of lager and three packets of peanuts, which he paid for, also uncharacteristically, with his own money, and rather more of it than was necessary; in this case, a crisp new five pound note.

 ‘Five pounds, Mr. Purvis? I say,’ said Drew, cheerfully.

 ‘Are you buying a drink for everyone, or is the world about to end?’ asked Sam Youd, to laughter.

 Harry Purvis downed one of the pints and sat down on a nearby bar-stool, breathing heavily, apparently unable to focus his mind, whilst the clearly rapt audience watched as Harry filled his briar pipe with tobacco.

 ‘Gentlemen, I have seen a ghost,’ he said after almost forty seconds of silence, something of a record for an evening in the White Hart.

 ‘A ghost? Poppycock!’ said John Christopher, ‘You’ll be saying you saw walking plants next!’

 Harry Purvis started on his second pint and shakily lit his pipe.  

 ‘Well you may scoff,’ he said, ‘but I know what I saw, and it was quite the uncanny thing.’

 ‘Which was what, exactly?’ asked Eric Russell, helping himself to one of Harry’s remaining drinks as a replacement for the one that had been knocked from his hand.

 ‘I saw myself,’ said Harry.

 ‘Introspection, or in a mirror?’ asked John Christopher.

 ‘Neither,’ replied Harry Purvis. ‘What I saw, gentlemen, was something with a genuine presence outside my own mind, out by Cheapside, and I watched as he, or indeed I, pointed at me, or indeed him, prior to one or other of us vanishing into a police box.’

 ‘Nothing special about that; people often go into police boxes,’ said Drew, ‘it was probably just a man who looked like you?’

 ‘No, it was indisputably me,’ replied Harry, ‘I would never fail to recognize my own humble gaze.’

 There was a murmur of laughter from one of the pub’s darker corners, but even this was insufficient to abate the portentousness that filled the air.

 ‘That’s not all,’ continued Harry, ‘for the moment my other self vanished, so too did the police box.’   With that, he downed the remainder of his second pint and started on his third.

 ‘Were you drinking somewhere other than my hallowed establishment from some point this a.m., Mr. Purvis?’ asked Drew.

 ‘I wish,’ said Harry Purvis, ‘but my concern is that if what I saw was real, I fear it does rather herald the end of the world.’

 It was on this interjection that the door at the King’s end burst open again and another Harry Purvis walked in; or, at least, a facsimile of Harry Purvis so thorough that it may as well have been created by a machine.

 ‘I probably shouldn’t be here,’ said the second Harry Purvis, pointing towards the first, ‘but you have a traitor in your midst.’
 The first Harry Purvis looked up, startled.  ‘Surely you don’t mean me?’ he asked.

 ‘No, I mean me,’ replied the second jovially. Sidling up next to the first, and his drinks, the second continued, ‘mind if I have one of these? Looks like you have some spares.’

 One of those spares was immediately claimed by George Whitely, who had dropped his own in astonishment, but it still left Harry’s double with a double to choose from. As he chose, the public bar was very quiet. The assembled throng, who were used to Harry Purvis’ elucidative silences, waited to see what would happen next, and what happened next was this: the second Harry Purvis whispered something into the ear of the first, who then rose and left the White Hart via the door through which he had entered.

 ‘So, as I was saying, I saw a man walk into a Police Box,’ said the Harry Purvis who remained.

 ‘That sounds like the opening to a very bad joke,’ said Drew, ‘and I believe it was the other you who spoke those words.’

 ‘Another me? Sounds to me like you’re the one starting a very bad joke,’ said Harry Purvis.

 Had this been an ordinary group of ordinary people being given the ordinary run-around, they may well have been vexed by the elliptical evasiveness of Harry Purvis’s replies, but regulars in the White Hart were used to this kind of thing, and knew it would simply be a case of waiting out the mystery until Harry chose to elucidate, and this he did once he had finished the remainder of the beer.

 ‘John, your question about the type of me I saw earlier was on the button,’ said Harry, eventually. ‘And the answer is “neither”. I know that usually when I tell you of fantastical things, they relate to incidents involving associates or acquaintances of mine, but in this instance, the incident happened to me and I couldn’t help but share it with you.’

 ‘But so far you’ve shared nothing, and you certainly haven’t explained your duplicate,’ said John Christopher.

 ‘Oh, but I have,’ replied Harry, ‘to myself, at least. Okay, let me start at the end. Just after I left here a moment ago, I was walking by St. Pauls and I was accosted by an odd-looking fellow in an astrakhan hat. He told me that the very future of the world was at stake, and that I was to go with him at once, so I did.’

 ‘He told you the future of the world was at stake and you believed him?’ asked George Whitely, incredulously.

 Harry Purvis shrugged.   

 ‘It isn’t so much that I believed him; it’s more that I’d just chanced upon a double of myself in the pub, which would doubtless faze you should it happen to you, and given I had nothing in my diary for a couple of hours, what did I have to lose? That’s why I went with him. All that transpired is that we ran around London’s sewers for a bit, threw a helix of semi-precious stones at some ill-lit men we happened upon down there, and these ill-let men then turned into gas before vanishing. So, the odd-looking fellow and I retired to the aforementioned police box--which, I ought to add, had greater dimension on the inside than out, and also, so the fellow told me, had some 387.44 million miles of corridors within it-- and before I knew what else, I was transported to some place called Algernon, where I was introduced to the walking, and indeed talking, plants that ran the place. 

 Then I was taken to a town called Arrowhead, which was full of Americans, so you can imagine what that was like. There was no particular logic to any of this, mind; not that I could tell, because straight after that the odd-looking fellow said to me, ‘Thank you very much,’ returned me to a sunlit Cheapside, intimated that it was now somewhat earlier in the day than when we had left and, as a result of which, I ought to avoid the White Hart for a significant while. Now, I believed I had done just that until I ran into myself, in here, a moment ago, and on meeting myself again I was obliged to tell myself to go outside and get some air, such that everything could fit back together as it should.’

 There was a brief silence.

 ‘That’s quite the most unbelievable thing you’ve ever told us,’ said John Christopher, ‘and despite your air of mystery, some of the chaps here have evidence that there is a twin brother Purvis, and it is therefore quite probable that the two of you are on some sort of wind-up.’

 ‘Ah, you know of my other?’ asked Harry Purvis, dejectedly.

 ‘Finding out such things is most certainly distinguishable from magic, Mr. Purvis, yes,’ replied Drew.

 ‘And your story was pretty unbelievable,’ said George Whitely. ‘The biggest clue, of course, being that you started it by spending your own money in here!’

 There was suddenly a twinkle in Harry Purves’ eye.  ‘Oh, I borrowed that fiver on Algernon,’ he said. ‘I suspect very strongly that it’s from the future.’

 ‘Really?’ said Drew and he took the five pound note from the till to take a closer look. As he held the note in his hand, it crumbled to nothing. This, Harry suggested, was the Universe’s way of balancing out the entropy that had been displaced as a result of his recent temporal jaunt.

 ‘Oh, I see,’ said Drew, sceptically, ‘I suppose you’re suggesting that your dodgy fiver isn’t just a bit of sleight-of-hand? Well, no matter, Mr. Purvis; I’ll just put the drinks on your tab.’

 ‘Oh, add another couple,’ said Harry Purves, smiling.
 Drew pulled two more pints then looked up at the clock behind the bar.  ‘Goodness, it’s getting late?’ he said, then added with a flourish, ‘Time, gentlemen, please!’

***

 The existence of the notepad and its story prior to their discovery had long been the subject of rumour, the most famous of which was started by an inebriated John W. Campbell at the 1959 Hugo Awards, but the furore that greeted their discovery was even more well known, no doubt as a result of the fist fight between Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison outside Sotheby’s in August 2010, but unknown to the public until now are two very important facts.

 Firstly, despite it bearing many of the hallmarks of Arthur C. Clarke, the story was actually written by the real Harry Purvis, who was in fact responsible for all of the 'White Hart' stories, the conception and execution of which were as a web of autobiographical metaphors that related his dissociative psychosis before it finally overwhelmed him, causing him to leave England to join the Merry Pranksters in the early 1960s. Secondly, despite the notepad being date-stamped 1956, and despite its existence being widely rumoured since 1959, both it, and the character of Harry Purvis as presented here, are themselves fictions, created by the real Harry Purvis for reasons that remain obscure but were nevertheless recorded for posterity by the aforementioned Arthur C. Clarke. When these facts are considered alongside what may be generously described as the story’s prescience, most notably with regards to motifs usually accredited to Sydney Newman, it should not come as any surprise that Harry Purvis vanished from public view when he did, nor that the notepad stayed in private hands for so long.
 
 Nevertheless, even since the Sotheby’s incident, questions regarding the notepad’s provenance are regularly asked; indeed, there are rumours that the essay you are reading constituted the handwritten notes and amendments that surrounded the original story. Suffice to say, there is no foundation to these rumours, other than their truth.
The notepad is now back in private hands, and is likely to remain so indefinitely. This essay, however, is available for public consumption.
Addendum:

 Whilst searching the web for inspiration for a story, I came across a series of academic essays on an MSU server that detailed how the written word had risen from humble beginnings to being the major arbiter of the historic record, albeit with the significant caveat that without corroboration and substantiation, that record was open to abuse and falsification.

 The ideas I took from these essays were necessarily general, but my search was clearly logged somewhere because shortly afterwards I received an anonymous e-mail from somewhere in Argentina. The e-mail was encrypted with a hexadecimal key, but once decrypted, I was presented with an equally anonymous essay entitled, ‘Three Word Title.’ This essay had ostensibly been accepted for publication in July 2011’s ‘SF&F Review of Letters’ but was yet to be published, and the e-mail intimated that as the essay could somehow be considered to be in the public domain, I should do with it as I felt fit. What I felt fit was to appropriate its title, and to quote its text verbatim, both of which I've done above. 

 The e-mail then ended, as is usual with this kind of thing, with the disclaimer, ‘If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, then it was meant for someone else,’ and that was it. I attempted to reply to the e-mail, but my attempts kept bouncing back, so I had to assume that the essay was addressed to me all along. That said, I've found little on web to verify the essay’s claims, the Sotheby's incident notwithstanding, but even if everything in the essay were true, it hardly fulfills any notions of ‘fair usage’--I can see dozens of copyright infractions with only a cursory examination. Plus I can barely understand the excitement the notepad and its story caused, given that similar notepads, with similar stories, can be found for a dime a dozen in any library from Los Feliz to Buenos Aires. Those things aside, the essay did give me a concrete idea for a story; a story that, you’ll be pleased to know, is now finished.