Raymond sighed. He’s been here quite a long time, you know, so he’s earned a little sigh every now and then. He’s looking at the stick and wondering what you expect him to do with it? His magic-making days are long since over; it’s only him keeping the structure together – can’t you see that? If he bent down to pick up the offering, what do you think would happen next? A bang-squash-crack, that’s what. And then what would you people do then? No amount of iron fencing will make up for that mess. It didn’t use to be just Raymond, you know. There used to be a lot more of them and, in those days, it wasn’t just Raymond doing all the hard work at Kit’s Coty House. In those days, uprightness was shared amongst a lot of the stones. Old Maisie to the left, well she’s long since checked
He’s lost his feather, but I am sure you can tell that this is Prince Doily I. Just in case you were wondering, he’s originally from Rajasthan, but I found him on a stretch of the North Downs Way near Borstal in Kent. He’s only recently escaped from a locked drawer where he’s been kept prisoner for a century. Prince Doily I said we can call him Pridi for short, because it sounds a bit like ‘pretty’, which he most surely is. Pridi smiles when you say stuff like that to him, because he’s well into manners and enjoys a good fluff of his ego every now and then. Floral language is one of his specialities: he learnt the intricacies of it during a secondment to an illustrious Iranian court six hundred years ago. Pridi said he was glad to have met me and particularly commended me for my maxim: ‘manners
I know it doesn’t look like it, but this is a dinosaur; I found it in Knole Park. It has deliberately camouflaged itself to look like a dead log, but if you stare at the wide, circular opening, you’ll come to see that it’s actually a giant mouth, beckoning you to enter. Dinosaurs are always hungry, even dead ones. This is a standard natural history fact, and it’s why there are armed security guards around the National History Museum at night. Just saying. Anyway, point is, this dinosaur, whom we shall call Deadloggosaurus, wants you to enter, but you’d be wise to hold off on that. For starters, at night, hoards of demonic creatures come scuttling out. Some of them carry a bag of rosehip powder which they spend the night pouring down human noses. Ever wake up with inexplicable allergies? Now you know why. Other things which come out of
Rachel was a portal hunter. She’d been doing this professionally since 1988, but this was the first one she’d found. She’d known it was the real deal because of the way the light avoided the ground. This tricksy portal was hiding in plain sight, but not from her! Her decades of honed professionalism taught her to look directly at that which others pass over. She felt vindicated at last, and shook off the niggling doubts which others had imparted to her. To be honest, it wasn’t what she expected: it was a bit dirty really. She had presumed portals to the underworld would be kept pristine by their magical charms. It may well be that others are, she thought, perhaps that’s why even her trained gaze slid over their glossy charm. That this one was covered in grime was the fact which allowed her gaze to stick upon it, and thereby
They’re called the Wiblets of Oldpark Wood, but as I am sure is obvious to a knowledgeable reader like you, they are really from AlphaZenturianSix. Their claim to be from Oldpark Wood is simply a ruse to lull us into a false sense of security. For if they belong to an earth locality, then we may be less inclined to monitor their behaviour. But monitor we should, fellow earthling, monitor we should, as there is more to the Wiblets than meets the eye. The Wiblets first came to earth forty-five years ago, when the M25 had burnt a hole in the soul of parts of southern England. The Wiblets spied it from space and saw their chance to begin their slow colonisation of a new planet. As the M25 had damaged, deaded, or dispersed a great many of the indigenous natural powers of certain parts of Surrey and Kent, the land