Dangerous Games

Prologue

You might find what you are about to read rather difficult to believe. Hell, that's an understatement. Even I find it difficult to believe and a lot of it actually happened to me, but it is based on true events, recorded as faithfully as I can using the copious notes that I took at the time. I admit, I've had to fictionalise a lot of it, of course, as many of the people involved I just can't contact, for reasons which will become obvious if you read on. However, I've tried to keep the dramatisation to a minimum, and stick to the known - and verifiable - facts wherever possible.

One thing you could do if you simply think I'm making it all up, of course, is go on the Internet. Just type "The Elevator Game" into a search engine and you'll find more than one story of people who've tried it and lived to tell the tale, and some more tragic stories of those that tried it and didn't. If you'd searched for it directly after the incidents I'm about to describe, you'd have probably been a lot less cynical. Indeed, you could barely turn your head without hearing about it on the news or standing next to the water cooler.

We had something called Twitter in those days, a sort of messaging service that allowed people to post stuff they found interesting to all and sundry, and The Elevator Game was all over Twitter - people saying they'd tried it, others saying it was the Devil's work, most saying it was a load of rubbish. You know the sort of thing. The hash tag (that's something that marked out particular topics) #elevatorgame trended on Twitter for months, until they all found some other new topic to obsess over, at least.

Since then, the whole affair has rather receded into the background. Indeed, there has been a concerted effort the past few years to remove websites and blogs on the Internet that describe or even mention these events. Religious bodies, whom the powers that be cannot afford to offend, claim that they encourage dabbling in the Occult. Some more extreme groups assert that The Elevator Game is one way to bring about the end of the world. Even respected scientists - who really should know better! - talk cryptically about wormholes into other dimensions and arcane stuff like that. Most pressure groups however (and there have been a lot) simply call for such sites to be banned on vague public order grounds - and they've succeeded. But they haven't got them all, so go online and read about it for yourself.

It'll be interesting to see if they ban what you're reading now.

Okay, on with the story...