old wrinkled tree. Reaching down, he gave himself one last look, before gently releasing them to follow his old man down the trail. He then floated up slowly through the branches and silently set sail to the south with Cosamado trailing not far behind.
Soon a silent fog drifted over them as they crossed over a silver sea while seagulls flew along side them, guiding them on to Liverpool. When they reached the mainland, they followed the ancient roadways, which crossed the countryside like varicose veins gone wild. Eventually the city of Oxford arose from the cobble and they soon found themselves hovering outside the second story window of Richard of Wallingford’s one room apartment.
“Before we go in, there is one thing I must prepare you for” Jean cautioned. “And that is, Richard has been graced with, ummm, a particularly large nose.”
Cosamado just looked at Jean, shrugged his shoulders and proceeded to melt his way through the windowpane.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Jean said to himself as he too let himself in.
Before them they saw the cluttered apartment of a collage student who had obviously long lost touch with a need to pick up after himself. Stacks of books lay scattered about the floor like some academic version of Stonehenge. Sketches of clocks, along with their gears and dials, were tacked across the room on every wall and across the ceiling. Beneath the window they had entered, a large wooden desk sat burdened with boxes of clock guts; springs, dials, gears and die cast numbers. Across from the desk, along the east wall, a huge iron framed bed arose like island amongst the surrounding sea of chaos. And from somewhere deep within the mountains of blankets thrown across the bed, an eruption of sound tore across the tiny apartment like a bad dream, giving quite a fright to Cosamado.
“That, would be Richard, “Jean explained while floating over to view his former college roommate.
“What on earth is wrong with him?” Cosamado asked, concerned that maybe he was experiencing some kind of epileptic fit
“Oh, he’s just sleeping. That’s just his gift to world. With his giant schnozzle, no one is safe at night from his snores which make the cries of tortured beasts sound like a chorus of angels.”
As they looked on, Richard slowly rolled over, revealing like a rising whale, the largest nose either man had ever seen.
“Oh dear lord, it’s, it’s…
“Big?
Big was just an understatement. Colossal, mountainous maybe but, big this was not.
“Okay, I’ve brought you here. Maybe you should get on with what you were sent here to do,” Jean said, anxious to leave the room of sounds that were now shooting like porcupine quills.
Cosamado did not need to be convinced. Having been shown the way, the last part of his journey was to implant a vision of the portal into Richards’s brain.
Reaching out, he bravely touched Richards’s snout, causing images of the portal, including the diagrams from the scrolls to flow like water from his memory into Richard’s subconscious mind.
“It is finished,” Cosamado exclaimed, releasing the schnoz.
Cosamado’s Journey