A Bad Night In Bridgetown

Lester And James Find Most Of A Dragon

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Lester was pretty certain that they had managed to fall through a skylight. Thankfully, the skylight had no actual glass in it. If it had then that could have been troublesome. Not that their landing had been particularly comfortable. They appeared to be covered in books and bits of paper.

Lester had never heard a mouse scream before. He had not expected it to sound like it did, it was far less squeaky than he had imagined it would be.

"I hate bats!" the mouse said. Lester looked over to where the tiny creature was sitting in the ruins of its pumpkin gourd. It crouched up on its hind legs to look at a picture resting against the floor. The picture was, at one and the same time, simplistic and quite horrible. It depicted a bat, wings folded, perching on top of a tree, in the background a shooting star streaked across a pitch dark sky.

There was some kind of symbolism or other arty nonsense going on, because the bat was enormous, or the tree was very small. Lester wondered if it was, in fact, a normal bat on top of a bonsai. His train of thought hit another startling realisation and was instantly derailed.

"You can talk!" he said.

The mouse swivelled its head to look at him.

"Your moustache has come loose," it said.

Lester reached up to his face to prod at the waxy false moustache he had been sporting. He had believed it appropriate during his brief and undistinguished career as a goblin trader. It had, indeed come away on the left hand side and was now hanging limply beside the right hand corner of his mouth. He grasped the offending article between his fingers and pulled it off his face. He couldn't see anywhere to put it tidy so he dropped it onto the floor.

"So, you're just going to dump it there?" the mouse asked him.

Adding to the stack of new experiences today had already thrown at him, Lester now knew what it felt like to have a rodent make him feel guilt. He picked the moustache up again and thrust it into his pocket.

"Sorry," he said. "I was... a bit confused."

"Too confused to be tidy?" the mouse asked.

"No, well, just... this is so... I mean... isn't this odd, don't you think?" Lester asked. He took a moment and got on to his feet so he could have a proper look around, and up.

They had, in fact, fallen in through a hollow skylight. They had landed to one side of a pile of books mounted on a desk. Their passage had up ended the desk and scattered the books all over the floor of the small room. Mixed up with the books were a number of loose leaf sheets of manuscript paper. Scrawly, illegible handwriting filled them all from corner to corner.

The painting of the bat was not the only work of art adorning the walls of the room. There were many strange pictures hung from the walls, there were more stacked up, some up to five deep, on the floors.

The room was not a regular shape, Lester had to count, there were nine walls. In the domed ceiling the skylight was the only window. About two and a half feet away, spitting the odd shower of blue and orange sparks, was the broomstick. The other trader had offered him the item as 'security' back in the market. Either that had been a trader's joke or Lester had the short end of that bargain.

"In the last twenty four hours," the mouse said, "my life has been turned on its head. My home, the pieces of which you may now see lying about my feet in small orange chunks, rolled down a hill. I was nearly eaten by," the mouse spared a glance at the picture, "a giant bat. I took a ride on a shooting star. I heard a silly story about a knight who was a wolf. I went inside a tent that had more stacks than apparent square footage. I met a mermaid, briefly. I felt a disturbing flutter of deja vu. To top it all I disappear from the side of my only companion in a whirl of blue and orange fire to end up here with you. I left 'odd' behind some time around the gnome deciding it had better things to do with its time."