‘There are no consistent rules to this place,’ he reminded himself. ‘Everything turns about as it wills. Perhaps I may turn myself about, if I will?’
He tried this. First he took the twisted oak stool from before the piano, and dragged it over to the mantel. Then, finding it insufficiently tall, he stole three fat blue cushions from the seat before the window and piled them on top of the stool. A precarious business, climbing up this makeshift mountain, but he managed it, and stepped from there onto the mantel — which, being broad in width and solidly marble in construction, cheerfully bore his weight. He tried, through a (doubtlessly comical) series of ducking and crouching motions to make himself small enough to pass into the mirror, which failed.
‘Hm.’ He went back to the book, and tu
