Cover

Dedication

For my family

Epigraph

“The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world.”

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

“No man can swim unless he enters deep water. No bird can fly unless its wings are grown, and it has space before it, and courage to trust itself to the air.”

H. P. BLAVATSKY

“And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue degenerates, and so on, will be as right and as wrong as the child who stands underneath and says that the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.”

LEO TOLSTOY

1

THE ELDERLY HEADMASTER OF the Tusitala School for the Gifted, Troubled and Strange sighed and walked stiffly into the staff room. His own dark office, which he rarely left, smelled comfortingly of books, tapestries, good wine and cigars. The staff room, however, was a displeasing miasma of forgotten lunch boxes, cheap coffee, red ink, tragic perfume and all the unique aromas of the fugitive ex class pets.

There was, by now, quite a large selection of small mammals and birds that had momentarily forgotten themselves and bitten children (although never that badly) or eaten their own young (although rarely in public) and had, therefore, officially left the school.

“Hide the guinea pigs,” hissed someone. “And cover Petrov.”

Mrs. Beathag Hide (owner of the tragic perfume) tossed a pantomime vampire’s cape over the cage containing the parrot that was supposed to have been removed after swearing at the school inspector. Dr. Cloudburst and Mr. Peters started putting the guinea pigs’ cages into the lost property cupboard. Luckily the elderly headmaster moved slowly enough that there was plenty of time to do this.

The school cat, Neptune, uncurled from a hairy cushion and stalked off in the same direction, in the hope of finding himself shut in with the guinea pigs. He was quite deft at undoing their hutches. Mr. Peters shooed him out into the main corridor. At least Neptune no longer had to be hidden. His last misdemeanor had now been forgotten, and so he had recently begun to reappear in the school prospectus and annual newsletter. Parents liked cats.

Today, though, the headmaster was uninterested in the pets and their ignoble pasts.

“It is time,” he said slowly, once he eventually arrived in the center of the room, “to finalize our plan for the Winter Fair.”