Tales From The Wyrd Museum 1: The Woven Path Read Free

attempt to tell me that they are here with you then I suggest you bring them in before they catch their deaths.’
    In silence, but with a curious smile traced upon her face, Miss Webster disappeared into the darkness which lay behind the entrance as the new caretaker scuttled over to his sons.
    ‘Neil!’ he called. ‘Give me a hand with these bags, will you?’
    It didn't take long for the Chapmans’ possessions to be unloaded from the van, forming an untidy pile beside the bollards, ready to be carried indoors.
    With a holdall full of clothes slung over one shoulder, a medium-sized suitcase in his left hand and a bulging carrier bag in the other, Neil trudged into the grubby alley and looked for the first time upon the grandiose entrance to the Wyrd Museum.
    ‘Looks like the doorway to a tomb,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘A great, big, hungry tomb just waiting to be fed and swallow us whole. This whole place is foul!’
    Frowning, he climbed the three steps and cautiously passed into the shadows beyond.
    The moment he crossed over the threshold, Neil coughed and dropped the suitcase as a horrid, musty smell assailed his nostrils—he spluttered in disgust. It was like opening a cupboard that had been sealed for years and inhaling all the damp and dry rot that had accumulated in that time in one great fetid breath.
    ‘Are you ailing, Child?’ snapped a brisk voice.
    Neil looked up—there was Miss Webster standing before him with her thin hands clasped primly in front of her.
    ‘It's just the smell. . .’ he explained, ‘I wasn't expecting. . .’
    ‘Smell?’ she archly interrupted. ‘I smell nothing. Is this a schoolboy joke? I have had little or no experience of your generation, child, so you would do well to keep out of my sight whilst you are here and refrain from any more of this idiotic humour. I have never tolerated nonsense and frivolity of any sort repels me. Have I made myself clear?’
    ‘Very,’ Neil answered, bristling indignantly at her severe and unjust tone. 'This slum probably hasn't been cleaned for years,’ he observed in a grim, inaudible whisper as he surveyed his dingy surroundings.
    No interior could hope to live up to the Victorian facade that framed the entrance to the museum, but the poky room he found himself in was a disappointment nevertheless.
    It was a cramped and claustrophobic hallway, crammed with ornaments; from a tall and rather spindly specimen of a weeping fig planted in a stout china pot, to an incomplete suit of fifteenth-century armour that leaned drunkenly against the dark oak panelling which pressed in on all sides. To the right of where Neil stood and just behind the entrance, a small arch had been cut into the panels and traced in letters of peeling gold were the words ‘TICKETS FOR ADMITTANCE’.
    A flight of stairs covered in a threadbare red carpet, and mostly hidden by a solid wooden bannister, rose steeply to the other floors. On the landing, one of the Georgian windows let in a pale ray of dirty brown light, weakened by having been filtered through the grime of centuries—and this tinted all it touched a melancholy sepia. Under its ghastly influence, the dim little watercolours which hung on the far wall seemed to have been daubed from mud and where it touched the weeping fig it was as if the leaves cringed and curled in revolt.
    Stepping into the province of the pallid beam, Miss Webster glanced uncertainly upwards and her white hair was sullied and transformed into a filthy gold.
    ‘As you are to live here, Child,’ she said, addressing Neil once more, ‘know now that you may wander where you will in this museum, if your courage allows.'
    A secretive, almost teasing tone crept into her voice as she gazed about the hallway and inhaled deeply as if savouring the rank atmosphere of the place.
    ‘You see, child,’ she told him, ‘there is an ancient and fundamental belief amongst some people which assigns to certain sites or buildings a