I woke up one day and found myself in a dark place, halfway up an enormous tree. I don’t know how I got there; there was no way down. The tree was centuries old, grand and gnarled and near the end of its life, and though it was dark, I could see that the bark was brown and black, and it was covered in lichen and moss, and full of tiny little dips and bumps; handholds for squirrels and other creatures.

Miss Margaret McTuckleberry is incredibly tall, incredibly thin, and incredibly strong. Strong enough that, if she wanted, she could pick up a troublesome visitor to her pub by the scruff of his neck and throw him out of the front door from several paces, sending him sailing straight over the porch and onto the gravel just outside “The Dancing Bear”

When I was a boy, there was a theatre in a nearby town that had once been a malt house. It’s not easy, these days, to recall much of what it looked like, but there are a few images of this malt house that remain in my mind. There is an image of the main performance room, filled with hundreds of chairs in curved rows going up as they go further back, looking down over the main stage. There is an image…