Chatterbox: Pudding's Place

My dear humans,

You, no doubt, are reading this on one of your newfangled electronic devices, on the website called the Chatterbox. You're probably also a once or current recipient of Cricket magazine, which is, so far as I can gather, a periodical for children who like to read books and draw pictures. Cricket is, at its heart, a few stories stapled together with a nice picture on the front. Like all stories, it's a bit of other people's dreams caught in paper and ink; an idea incarnate.

It's a remarkable thing. You read stories, no? And those stories are, at their hearts, just a few little black marks that tell you something, and somehow that something can make you smile or shudder or laugh or cry -- it's something you can't touch, something invisible and intangible but definitely, definitely true. You do have souls, you impossible, magical humans, and so do your stories. To quote one of your own unknown geniuses, you look at symbols etched in dead wood and hallucinate. It's a singular talent.

Perhaps you're a teller of stories yourself, stringing words together to mean something pretty or funny or true or brave. You scribble away in the margins of your science notes, struck by an idea for a character or scrap of dialogue. You wake up in the middle of the night, inspired by your dreams, and reach for your No. 2 pencil to write them down.

Or your keyboard, I suppose, but it's so much more romantic to write in spiral-bound notebooks or leather journals or the backs of one's failed English assignments than it is to click away in the soulless glow of a computer. But I'm old-fashioned. Or just old.

You're probably wondering where I'm going with this rambling on about dreams and storytellers and suchlike. --Well, as it happens, this is a story. A story written by a human child, much like yourself, at night, when they really ought to have been asleep. Perhaps they wrote it somewhere far away, or perhaps very close -- in the house across the way, or the coffeehouse you pass on the way to school. It's a mysteriously murderous sort of story, about you and me and some other storytellers, and a big house by a lake somewhere that doesn't exist. I hear you call it a ski lodge.

But let's not spoil the magic, shall we?

My name is Calloway, and I'm the Master of the Castle by the Lake. I take many forms and faces, and I'm not entirely trustworthy. I'd like to invite you to a party at my grand, ancient, occasionally cantankerous, very large house. There will be popcorn. There will be magic. There will be murder.

If you've no objections to any of the above, fill out (*cough cough* fill in, I meant of course -- I may be a shapeshifter of questionable origin, but I'm still a Brit--) the brief form below:

Name and/or nicknames:

CBer or AE:

Pronouns:

Appearance:

Personality in exactly seven words:

What would you wear to a party? (Anything goes. Wear an Elizabethan gown. Wear a tux. Wear overall shorts and flip-flops and your hair in rainbow pigtails. Just be prepared to eat popcorn, dance, and die in it):

Other:

My sister, Pix, will be along to pick you up on December eighteenth. Watch for the flying Ford.

Be brave, stay strong, and sharpen your pencils and uncap your pens and put your magic fingers on your unromantic keyboards, and perhaps you'll survive this peculiar story of mine. I wish you the best of luck, my sweet summer children.

Most sincerely,

Calloway, Master of the Castle by the Lake