There’s a bone-aching chill in the air as I stare at the landscape over the battlements of Castle Silverhill. It isn’t a pleasant sight, what with a blood moon coating the surrounding dunes in crimson and burnishing the still surface of the moat gently eroding the castle’s foundations.
I don’t like the look of the desert, and I haven’t been outside during the day since the castle materialised here. The heat makes the stones groan worse than usual.
The section of moat I can see when I lean over the wall looks like it might clot at any moment. Even the swirling wavelets caused by a tentacle breaking the surface roll away like they’re thicker than water.
Only a handful of stars glitter in the velvet sky. I turn away and brush my fingers over the mortar, loosening a fist-sized chunk which falls on my foot.
I hadn’t meant to do that. I know the ancient masonry is slowly crumbling, but that doesn’t make the pain in my injured toe any less acute.
I yelp, and with a low rumble, a chimney stack in the distant east wing topples onto a rooftop.
It wasn’t always like this.
When my great-great-great-great-grandfather built the place, the castle used to stay in one spot, as large, fortified buildings tend to do.
According to legend, a century after the castle was built, the lord of the castle at the time, Geoffrey, stole a book of spells from a wizard named Wenzel who had stayed overnight while on his way to Tintagel.
Geoffrey wasn’t known for his caution, and despite his less-than-firm grasp of thaumaturgic principles, couldn’t wait to try out one of the many spells between the book’s covers. While leafing through his ill-gotten prize to choose a spell he liked the look of, a word or two from each page caught his eye. Not being the most literate of readers, he mumbled them out loud.
Forty pages in, he’d said enough to inadvertently cast a spell.
One that had never been cast before because it hadn’t existed until Geoffrey accidentally created it.
And what a spell it turned out to be.
It cursed the entire castle to an endless existence of world hopping. Every fortnight, more or less, the castle – and everyone in it – moves to another world.
As you can imagine, the nomadic nature of Castle Silverhill has its drawbacks. For example, it makes catching a bus home rather awkward. Well, that’s if we’re in a world where there are buses.
And don’t get me started on postal services… To my boundless annoyance, the only letters that get pushed through my letterbox are tax demands, invoices, and bills. Some clearly have been in the postal system for hundreds of years, written as they are by hand on folded parchment sealed by large blobs of red wax imprinted with coats of arms.
But, I suppose, the biggest issue is that not all worlds are friendly. Some are downright hostile. You never know what the next world is going to be like, so it’s not like you can prepare.
Apart from being too hot, the desert world we’re in at the moment hasn’t come up with any nasty surprises.
Yet.
We’ve only been here two days, after all.
I sigh and trudge down the spiral stairs to my studio.
Grimmon’s there, waiting for me. His pointy ears quiver when I walk in and make my way to my desk, pretending I haven’t seen him. Goblins hate to be ignored, Grimmon more than most.
“I’ve finished changing the book covers,” he says. I suppress a smile at the testy note in his voice.
“What?” I say, raising my eyebrows as though seeing him for the first time.
His cheeks flush a dark shade of green. He slaps a leather folder on my desk and stalks out of the room, scuffing his boots on the rug as he goes. He knows that gets under my skin.
I wait until he’s left before I eagerly grab the folder and view his handiwork.
And here they are. New covers for the books so far in my Hollow series:
