140. At the Sweet Dreamer

Since all had gone so smoothly and I had time to do this, I decided to humor the gluttonous Bunny and made a stop at the bakery that was the home of the deservedly famous Scrumptious Cake.

Michael’s birthday cake had given the students at the infernal school a taste of heaven, but although the largest of these cakes are made for forty people, not as substantial a taste as they would have liked to have. After all, they were eating in the company of Alpin and Cestodes.

So they could enjoy their cake without a quarrel, I bought not a couple of cakes, but fourteen cakes for forty people each. Mine I meant to share with Moll Avery, who, like me, had gone without the first time. I thought these cakes would do everyone good. In fact, I didn’t take more because fourteen for forty was all I could carry.

                                       

                       

The master baker who had created Scrumptious Cake was a sugar fairy called Mary Sweet. She spent twenty out of twentyfour hours sleeping in a meringue shell bed dreaming up delicious delicacies her team of bakers would later turn into reality. She was awake when I entered her bakery, and made me a gift of a box of chocolates with equisite stuffings for having been such a good client and for giving her establishment such good publicity.    

The bakery had a little terrace outside where one could order smoothies and slushies and ice cream to wash down the cakes and cookies and other sweets with. When I walked out, I noticed there were two men at a table there which was covered with rolls of parchment instead of sweets. One of the men I had seen before and when he saw me, he waved, beckoning me to the table.

I accepted and sat with them, not wishing to be discourteous, and offered the men chocolates from the box I had been gifted with, which they were pleased to taste. The waitress arrived with their order and the men drew all the papers off the table and set them on empty chairs. As they did this, I noticed most were maps of the firmament.

                                 

“Did you come out the same way you went in?” asked Omar.

“Yes, but I’m not really out. I have to return for my friends,” I said. “They’re being held prisoners there.”

“Well, make sure you again come out the same way you entered.”

The other man also had something to say. It turned out he had studied at the devil’s school.

                                             

“Have you seen a shadow that moves by itself in there?” he asked.

I looked at the man who had spoken. He wore period clothing, mediaeval, close to Renaissance I thought, and his hair almost reached his shoulders.

                                

“Now that you mention it,” I said, “there was something dark and shadowlike following me around.”

“That was my shadow,” nodded the man. “You see, I was the student chosen to pay for all the seven in my class. And I am the only chosen one who has ever gotten out of there without paying. I rushed out the door with the others so fast that there was no stopping me. But my shadow was slower than I and is trapped in there.”

What he was saying had to be true. I noticed that he had no shadow.

“Do you want me to do something about this?” I asked.

“Oh, if you see the shadow again, just say Harry, its onetime owner, says hi,” he said.

I realized this was Henry, Marquis of Villena and notorious necromancer I had before me.