Extracts from “An Encyclopaedia of the Impossible World”
from CAPE VERDE…
There is evidence that, even prior to the Portuguese colonisation of these previously uninhabited islands, they had long been host to something the first settlers came to refer to as the council of lights. Every ten years, roughly, a storm which stirs the air but does not touch the sea settles over Ilhéu Raso for a period of several days, with only indistinct shapes of light moving about within the cone of blackened sky and intermittent strikes of lightning which forbid entry. Of the many who have braved this singular storm in an attempt to see the council of lights up-close few have returned, with only two offering any kind of testimony as to what they claim to have witnessed. The first was still aboard his boat when he was rebuffed, though he claimed the storm had parted, and that the figures were people, human forms carved out of light. He tried to get closer, but the storm pushed the boat away and he gave up. The second witness, a young girl who saw the council of lights on her third birthday and resolved to be at the next, swam from a boat she had stolen from her father and left nearby, ducking beneath the waves to avoid the storm. Within she saw that each of the lights, numbering hundreds, was a distinct figure; some humanoid though others more insect, or avian, or wholly alien. As their lustre faded a bolt of lightning from the storm would invigorate them, making them too bright to look upon as they moved lazily around the island. They seemed, apparently, to be communing with one another and with the Raso Lark, the island’s only native inhabitant, in voices which sounded like the rushing of air across grass.
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from EZO, REPUBLIC OF (now Hokkaidō, JAPAN)…
Though short-lived in its independence, the Republic of Ezo saw a great number of impossible occurrences during the five turbulent months of their succession. The most significant of these was the phenomenon of the children who could not lie, a group of the population who not only lost the ability to speak in falsehoods but were compelled to answer all questions with absolute veracity, even when the truths they spoke should have been unknown to them. The recorded ages of the afflicted shows them to have been between five and eight years old and that, despite the gradual onset of the condition, all of the children affected lost their seemingly boundless omniscience on the same day: May 26th 1869.
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from INDONESIA…
From June 2007 to April 2008 Indonesia saw an unprecedented rise in the amount of resurrections occurring throughout the country (the average over the decade prior is three per annum), though the outbreak was centred around Jakarta. Reported incidents of deceased animals in slaughterhouses and private homes alike suddenly gasping and shrieking their way back to life became commonplace and, though the animals were no more or less aggressive than they had been previously, their appearance and scent was that of rank putrefaction. This swathe of resurrections, which some linked to a fire in the city’s Wayang Museum in which an exhibition of puppets representing the anthropomorphic ‘Deaths’ of several cultures were destroyed, ended as abruptly as it had begun. On April 23rd 2008 those animals remaining after the state’s attempts to introduce a mandatory cremation policy simply dropped down dead, with far less fanfare than had accompanied their return to life. Though a few newspapers listed deceased humans amongst the resurrected, no firm evidence has been found to corroborate this.
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from NEUTRAL MORESNET (now part of Kelmis, BELGIUM)…
For much of the period in which Neutral Moresnet was a Belgian-Prussian condominium (1830-1915) its main export was smithsonite (zinc carbonate, also known as zinc spar) from the mine around which the territory was created. In 1836, after a minor cave-in in which no-one was hurt, workers discovered a cavern at the eastern extremes of the mine, its walls set with what appeared to be rubies, emeralds and diamonds, all cut to a fine shine. Excited, the workers took fistfuls of these treasures back to the surface to prove their find, these gemstones and jewels which, when removed from the mines, crumbled into dust within the hour. Geologists from the University of Liège have conducted a number of experiments to investigate the unusual properties of the bounty from this unique mine, but have yet to come to consensus on a plausible theory which explains them. Since the smithsonite deposits were exhausted in 1885 the mine has been largely abandoned, a glittering horde of wealth which can never be claimed.
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from OLMEC (located in Veracruz and Tabasco, MEXICO)…
The Olmec peoples and land, one of the first civilisations in South America, were notable for their invention of the number zero. Whilst theirs may have been predated by the use of the idea in Gwalior (see INDIA for more details), the Olmec devised and used it ritually. They had been plagued by the presence of vicious sap-wraiths, humans and animals who had fed on the sweet sap of a native form of a Ceiba tree and become skeletally drawn but unbelievably vicious, with a strength born of psychotic disregard for their own pain and suffering, to the point where the sickness threatened the Olmec civilisation. So, by the use of zero, an absence, and the rites of their ancestors, they created an absence across their land which persists even now, where the impossible became truly that. There are no impossible things where the Olmec once made their home.
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from SCOTLAND…
Of all of Europe, where the phenomenon has almost always occurred since the first recorded incident in 1972, Scotland sees the most frequent appearance of Impossible Doors. These portals appear overnight, a nondescript white door in a similarly nondescript frame, as though they are all that remains of a house which stood previously where there is only a field, the middle of a street or even a river or mountaintop. Immovable and inviolable, the Impossible Doors cannot be forced open, cannot be displaced or destroyed, and though they can be an inconvenience they have not proven to represent a danger beyond that demanded by their singular specific appetite. Each Impossible Door takes one person, usually someone within fifty or sixty miles, though there are some who have been known to travel half the world, if the Door is theirs. The chosen person, there seems to be no pattern or reason by which they are chosen, is drawn to the Door, though they may not recognise the source of the compulsion, and when they reach it, they step calmly through the Impossible Door, which will open only for them. They are never seen again.
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