Kaleidoscope: Part Two

I'm not sure what I had been expecting, but as the haze lifted, I realized his house looked very much like a castle. It was vast and dark, with turrets rising on one side.

I could feel the blood coursing through my body like rivers through a landscape, my heart beating with trepidation as I got closer.

The portico had two giant wood doors beneath it.

There was an ornate metal gate guarding the entrance with an imposing black lock.

There was a strange musty smell in the passageway, and I could detect mud and rotting wood and something metallic in the air.

My fingers felt every bump and crevice in the stones of the wall.

I imagined rabid dogs coming after me, and swarms of bats flying through the darkness.

Something round and gritty was sticking out of the wall.

My fingers became a vise and I turned the knob as hard as I could.

A small wood door opened into a corner of the nave, and we walked straight into the giant space.

There seemed to be no ceiling above us. Instead, great arching canopies of stone soared overhead like the branches of a petrified forest.

There seemed to be no ceiling above us. Instead, great arching canopies of stone soared overhead like the branches of a petrified forest.

The vaults of marble above me began to ripple and breathe, as if a wind was blowing through the forest, and then the wind turned into a hurricane inside my mind and the next thing I knew I was on the floor, capsized.

Theseus had unraveled a spool of Ariadne’s thread as he moved through the maze so he could find his way out, but I had no thread.

I was intrigued by the painting of the garden, but I was having trouble concentrating.

Up ahead I spotted an unmarked entrance to a dark, little room. Something compelled me to step inside.

There was something so compelling about the way the boy spoke that for a moment I almost believed that he and I, as well as this entire museum and the universe itself, had been conjured into being by this ancient queen.

I opened my eyes and the boy was there, waiting for me in the shadow of a colossal Sphinx, an apple in his hand.

Mr. Gardner had died, and when his obituary was published in the local paper a few days later, the neighborhood discovered what he'd been doing in his attic all those years.

It was too big, too overwhelming.

They were charred and smelled of smoke, but we boxed them up and put them safely away.

We had only a tiny fraction of everything he wrote in our possession, but the fragments included references to Greek myths, the origins of the universe, children's fantasy novels, the quests of King Arthur’s knights, the creation of the periodic table, a man who found the entrance to a buried city behind a wall in his house, spaceships, ancient Egypt, mysterious castles, the invention of the kaleidoscope, and the knitted blankets of his childhood bed.

"You might be a changeling, by the looks of you, left by goblins in the night. This forest is full of strange things. So you never know."

"No, no. She’s not my pet. Wild animals can’t be owned. Her mother was killed when she was a kit一baby foxes are called kits. I took her home and raised her till she was old enough to fend for herself."

Sometimes in the middle of the day we'd close the shades in my bedroom, lie on our backs on the bed, and look at the glowing green phosphorescent stars my mother had painted on my ceiling last summer.

When I opened it, I saw he'd become a broken black umbrella. I carried that umbrella around for several months, but it turned out his metamorphosis was not yet complete.

They had a life-size ceramic bulldog on the hearth of the fireplace that sometimes seemed to move, and above the piano was a large oil painting of a fortune-teller with bright green eyes, wearing a black lace shawl.

In a kingdom very far away, there lived a tormented man obsessed with catastrophes. He dreamed of volcanoes, fires, earthquakes, and floods.

These apocalyptic visions filled his mind during the days as well, and his inner world was one of wreckage.

He was like a magpie, drawn to shiny objects, and soon he'd amassed a treasury of multicolored jewels.

When he came out of his fever, he discovered there was a hammer in his hand and his treasures had all been smashed into tiny bits. Horrified at what he'd done, he swept up the ruins of his shining hoard and wept.

He shaped flowing lava from splinters of rubies and carnelian, and he wove a tornado from silver threads and embedded it with diamond dust.

Every time he finished one of the dioramas, he hoped his nightmares would end, but they never stopped, so he kept working on the miniature scenes.

Over the next few decades, the rest of the little scenes were lost or destroyed, except for one. Wrapped in soft fabric and locked into a suitcase, the tiny delicate scene journeyed across land and sea.

The owner of an antique shop bought the unopenable suitcase along with two prosthetic arms, three ivory umbrellas, an elaborate wig, and other items you would never think people could leave behind in a train station.

The owner of an antique shop bought the unopenable suitcase along with two prosthetic arms, three ivory umbrellas, an elaborate wig, and other items you would never think people could leave behind in a train station.

Suddenly, I opened my eyes. It was like I'd come out of a trance. James and I were no longer touching the glass shipwreck.

Much of the original plaster had fallen away, revealing a kind of wooden latticework, like the scaffolding that goes up around construction sites. We found an opening big enough to squeeze through and we stepped inside the Sphinx.

Much of the original plaster had fallen away, revealing a kind of wooden latticework, like the scaffolding that goes up around construction sites. We found an opening big enough to squeeze through and we stepped inside the Sphinx.

We lay down inside the vast breezy expanse of the Sphinx's body.