by Stephen Popple

Created on: January 15, 2009

It was cold in the stairs going up the tower. But then it was always cold here. Even at the height of summer it never got much above freezing. The cold seeped through the stone walls and into bones. Gilbert pulled his ragged cloak tighter around him and moved further up the curling stairway. As he moved past one of the small leaded glass windows a muffled thumping sounded, causing him to pause. At the point where he was on the stairs it was difficult to determine if the sound came from above or below. If above, then something strange was certainly happening. The master was an old, old man, withered and frail and unlikely to be thumping anything.

The sound came from below. Gilbert grunted, turned around and began to slowly make his way down the stairs, resenting the fact that he would have to make this journey again later. Gilbert could feel his knees creaking as he shuffled down.

Gilbert himself was not a young man. Somewhere in his fifties, he possessed a bespectacled, bald head with a fringe of greasy, unkempt hair dripping over his ears and down the back of his neck. A sharp nose that seemed to continually run in the chilly environment where he spent his days and nights was the focus of an otherwise unremarkable face. Shoulders sloped sharply down from a scrawny neck, with withered arms ending in large hands that would have seemed brutish, if not for the long clever fingers that seemed to have a life of their own, being constantly twitching and wriggling in counterpoint to the constant muttering that emerged from Gilbert's small, tight mouth. The overall impression was that of a man with too much on his mind and neither the capacity or inclination to do anything about it.

Gilbert reached the foot of the stairs and crossed the small circular room that contained only a small iron stove, a battered and frayed armchair and a small table with a candle in a holder and a tattered book resting on its scarred and stained surface. The only other things visible in the room were the skeletal remains of several lizards, carefully reconstructed and tied with string to hang from the ceiling, and the door that led outside.

As he set foot into the room, unconsciously staying within the well worn path amongst the dust that covered the rest of the room, the thumping sounded again from the thick ironbound, oak door. Gilbert sighed, he hated going outside. Especially in the daytime, when the sun beat down and hurt his eyes and made his head spin.

He reached the door after a few shuffling

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