Curiouser and curiouser.

The mist curled around the lamppost, stained with the light. Tiny motes of water sparkled on the cold metal, and a moth hammered its head against the glass in an eternal struggle that would last until morning.

One person walked along the quiet street, looking left and right, and up and down. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but if there was anything there he was determined to spot it. A chill breeze stirred the mists, and he shivered in the gloom. When he looked up again, he saw a doorway lit by a glowing red lamp which he was sure had not been there moments before. Taken by intrigue, and more by the chill of the night, he approached the door and knocked lightly.

There was no mark on the wood, which was painted a dark green. The handle was heavy lead, lacquered black. It made a very imposing portal, and the wood hardly registered his frozen knuckles tapping it’s crusted skin. Stamping his feet as Jack trod on his toes again, the man knocked harder. He was determined now, and the fact that no one should be awake, never mind tending their shop, didn’t enter into his head.

When the door opened he smirked, as though in someone small way he had scored a point against a world hell bent on stopping him. Almost without thinking, he stepped though into the inky darkness.

Such a barrage was the room on his senses that he sagged for minutes making sense of it. The pungent smell of herbs, he assumed, wreathed in tendrils of cloying smoke around ornate, bulbous candlesticks. Shimmering light from a dancing faery lantern on a large stone shelf danced across the bizarre paintings gracing the walls with glimpse at different worlds. A huge, deep sofa, sat indomitably in the middle of the room, all dressed in shawls, blankets and cushions. A squawking and flapping thing trapped in a cage jerked his over-stretched attention to the back of the room. Although he could see no door a man was standing there. Maybe he always stood there. Suddenly, all his available attention was targeted, and that was barely enough. A man, certainly, for what else was bipedal and possessed such bounteous facial hair. Nothing else was quantifiable. A dress, gown, toga, smock hung at obscure angles from his tiny frame. But not one, surly, for what single thing could warrant the reams of material from hemp to printed silk? But a man, and old, for the hands were merely nothing held together with the shrivelled memory of skin, hanging limp, pulled earthwards by the rings of all the colours of the rainbow. There must also have been a hat, although the feathers and draped lace, not to mention the dangled chains of charms, conspired to distract all but the most diligent observer from seeing below. Like Mary, he was decked in tiny bells, from sleeves, cuffs, and all over his hat. He stood in the corner of the room, so much a part of it as to be inseparable from the surroundings. And lo, he spoke.

‘Hello young man. What time is this to be wondering around?’

‘Um, er, hello,’ stammered the man, still recovering his over indulged wits.

‘Come now! What’s this? So inquisitive before, yet speechless now. Worse, thoughtless. Why did you knock on my door tonight?’

‘It, it was…cold.’

‘You tell lies and will find no truth. Cold, indeed!’

‘It was there,’ said the man, slightly sharply.

‘Better! Better say that than not, eh? It is there, was there, may indeed be there again one day. So it was there, but why knock? And then why wait?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes you do. You may not have known before you did it, nor even while you were standing there cold, waiting for the silent wood to give. But you know now.’

‘Because I wanted to go somewhere I hadn‘t been before.’

‘Is that so? Then, lad, come with me.’

A shuffling, tinkling while later, and under a rug hung from a wall, the pair were standing in another room. It was too dark to make out, but there were definitely shelves, and faint blue light, like sunlight through a clear sea. The old man stood still, letting his cloak sway to a halt.

‘Well, you wanted to see places you have never seen before, eh? Take down a box from the shelves yonder, and open it up.’

The man did so, in confused silence. The box felt empty, light even. He lifted the cardboard lid, and almost dropped it.

Inside he saw the tops of clouds swirling in arcane patterns over a lush green land, veins of rivers stretched here and there. And away to the east, he supposed, he saw in the rays of a setting sun, a bird with huge wings slowly flapping into the encroaching night. It must have been a bird, but he shook his head clear, and saw legs, four legs. And with a glance down which made his legs turn to jelly, he knew it was far too big to be a bird. If not that, then what?

‘You know,’ said the old man, carefully taking the box and replacing the lid, ‘but you just don’t want to know. Try another.’

Shaking now, and apprehensive, the man took down another box. He lifted the as though there were a snake inside, and peeped in. It was dark. So dark that he strained to make out anything. Then, as his eyes struggled to make sense of the place with no dimensions, he saw pinpricks of light. They were blinking out above and lighting up below, as though someone huge was moving across the face of the sky. The man flinched backwards as bright strobes of light lit up the scene like a storm at sea. A massive organic thing, flat in two dimensions, like a pair of plates joined by a magician, floated onward. And around it tiny specks of light and flashes of explosions as he assumed starfighters were harassing the thing. In the box, in his hands. He felt giddy and dropped to his knees.

The old man stood over him, and his bizarre garments smirked.

‘You have seen these things before, so why are you surprised? If you has not, you’d have no idea what the dragon, or the starfighters were. And you’d probably be less shocked.’

‘But they’re not real. I mean, they are fictions.’ The old man sighed, as though he was repeating something said a thousand times before. Something which should be known but is always ignored.

‘If they are not real, why did you drop to your knees?’

‘B…Because…because,’ he trailed off, frowning.

‘I am sorry to be abrupt, but if you will excuse me, I have places to be.’

Nodding, half to himself, the man stood up. He walked blindly out into the freezing air, and shook his head clear of the muzzy feeling. Dragons in a box! The crazy old illusionist would have to try harder next time. Above his head, completed ignored by the world, the moth banged into the lamp once more.