Mirror Dreams

This square had short neat grass and pretty rose gardens. Someone obviously went to a lot of pain to keep it neat. In the middle stood two white towers, the shape of a rook (castle) in a game of chess. Jodie remembered the white king and hoped he didn’t live here. The two towers were linked to each other via a drawbridge from the middle of the tower.

“There’s a party on the hill would you like to come? Well that’s silly, the tower can’t answer back. I’ll try a different one; enee meanee mynee mo catch a tiger by the toe, if it wriggles let it go enee meanee mynee mo.”

Jodie's finger flickered between the two towers while she dipped. It landed on the one on the right. Jodie walked over to it slowly. The tower grew larger as she got closer; the gardens grew more extravagant; roses of colours Jodie had never seen before lined the cobbled path that she followed to the door.

She knocked at the door but no one answered so she gingerly pushed it open. A winding staircase greeted her. Jodie followed it up; she met no one and eventually came to a landing. From the landing another staircase rose up, but a corridor also led off from it. Jodie decided to follow the stairs; she could see where the corridor went when she came back down. A sound of chinking and muttering grew louder as Jodie climbed higher up. She came to a small wooden door at the top of the stairs that was slightly ajar; a strange golden light was creeping through the gap and onto the stairs. Her heart fell as she opened the door and saw the white king, just who she didn’t want to meet. He was surrounded by piles and piles of gold coins. Jodie picked one up; on both sides there was a picture of the white king. The coin chinked happily as it was placed back on top of a pile; the noise made the king look up.

“Hast thou come to rob me blind?” he asked.

“No, I was just passing and wondered who lived here,” she replied.

“Well thou canst see that I dwell here can you not? Help me with these beastly sums.”

A sheen of sweat was on the king’s forehead from trying to count his gold. Jodie took a look at his tables; they did not make sense at all. Numbers were all over the place.

“Count the fives for me wilst thou,” the king said, pointing vaguely in the direction of lots more gold.

“How can I tell what are the fives, each coin is identical,” she complained.

“Weigh them!” shouted the white king, “The scales are over here.”

“You mean each coin weighs its weight, instead of just having the number on. That’s stupid; a fifty coin would weigh so much you’d need a cart to carry it round.”

“That is why I have so many ones and fives. The placing of numbers would remove me fromst the coin,” he sulked.

“You could still be on one side; just the other side would have the number on. Then they wouldn’t have to be so heavy. They could be thinner too; you could fit more in your room.”

Jodie hoped the king would take up this suggestion, it would give him something to do while she snuck away; all the gold was giving her a headache. She wanted to see where that corridor below had gone. The king was muttering happily about two and half coins when Jodie crept out of the room; she hoped he wouldn’t make the coins too complicated, he still had his adding up to do. She hurried down the stairs and along the corridor; a slight breeze was coming from gaps in a closed wooden door up ahead. She turned the handle and pushed; nothing happened. She tried pulling but still it would not open.

“Blasted door,” she muttered, “I wonder if open sesame would work.”

She tried it, but to no avail. The door stayed shut. Perhaps it is a fake door, put here to confuse people like me, she thought. Jodie worked her way along the wall feeling for anything that might open the real doorway but there was nothing. She decided to look over the wooden door again. She felt along the top and then the bottom. On the bottom she found a little silver bolt; feeling incredibly foolish, Jodie lifted it and the door swung open. The doorway had blocked the entrance to the drawbridge Jodie had seen, she walked out onto it.

The drawbridge was actually two bridges, one for each tower. Luckily they were both down and resting next to each other. There was a small gap between each bridge but Jodie managed to cross it by avoiding looking down. She walked straight through an open door and into the second tower.