“Six more gates!” fumed Durosimi. “Six more! When am I going to wake up from this nightmare?”

The sorcerer had found himself lost in the pages of a long-dead alchemist’s handbook, an infamous volume entitled ‘The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.’

If Rosenkreutz himself had been there to jump through these particular hoops, Durosimi would have been a happy man. The problem was that the only guest who seemed to be the centre of attention at this wedding — the alchemical marriage of the sun and the moon — happened to be Durosimi O’Stoat.

“Much more of this,” he thought to himself, “and whatever tattered shreds of my sanity are left will be gone completely.”

Even his most ardent enemies (and there are many) would not dispute the truth of this. Over the past couple of days Durosimi had been exposed to enough absurdities and paradoxes to satisfy even an absinthe-addicted surrealist with Zen sympathies. Just when the end seemed to be in sight, he was informed by the hooded, faceless creature, who offered him a steaming mug of hot chocolate, that there were six more tests for him to endure. It was all too much.

But what was there to do, other than drink his hot chocolate and wait to see what happened next?

So he drank his hot chocolate, and what happened next was that Durosimi lost consciousness.

He awoke to find himself no longer in the topmost chamber of the tower, a room that had been apparently shaped by architecture and a certain amount of reason. Now the world seemed to have suddenly flattened. The colours were somehow too clean, and the shadows all hatched at curious angles. Trees stood still as etchings; a brook sparkled in fixed droplets, unmoving.

Durosimi gulped. If he did not know better, he could swear that he had woken up inside an illustration.

The grass beneath his feet was ink. The sky appeared to be some etiolated watercolour wash, too perfect to be real. There was an aspect to it that suggested that it may have been painted by a hand that had grown bored halfway through. In an attempt to make sense of his surroundings, Durosimi gingerly turned and saw, drawn with exquisite precision, a castle perched upon a hill. Above it was a caption in Gothic script: The Castle of the Soul.

Durosimi squinted at a curlicue in the foreground, where something had obviously gone wrong. The ink had pooled. Curious, he leaned closer. That was when the ground gave way beneath him, and he tumbled sideways into the margin.

Margins can be the strangest of places. It is here that readers and writers alike allow their brushes, pens and pencils to wander, doodling and annotating as they will and, when the need arises, erasing. The only problem with this is that nothing is ever entirely erased. Everything that has been set loose in the world will always leave a memory of itself behind, and the figures who inhabit the margins are no exception.

That is why Durosimi’s stumble was not into a clean, white space. The margins were alive, with forgotten notations, botched angels, and errant scribbles that writhed like worms in a scholar’s nightmare. Half-erased faces leered from unfinished medallions. A doodle of a jester whispered lewd limericks at him in Latin. Worst of all were the small spidery squiggles that patrolled the edges ceaselessly.

Attempting to escape into the relative sanity of the illustration, Durosimi’s cloak snagged on a thorn that had been sketched hastily in charcoal. Blood (real blood) welled from the tear in his arm, despite the fact that the thorn was two-dimensional.

“Oh! So not content with humiliating me,” he muttered, “the book is now trying to kill me. How charmingly baroque.”

And that was when Philomena saw him in the lower right-hand corner of the page, jammed in among curious symbols. He was a tiny figure tangled in marginalia, waving furiously, and mouthing something that looked remarkably like, “Help! Help! Get me out of here.”

Durosimi also mentioned something about avoiding the margins, but by then she had slammed the book shut.

Philomena and Drury drifted through the silent, sleeping Squid and Teapot and into the snuggery, where the ancient grimoire, guarded by Reggie Upton, awaited them. Being in a state of lucid dreaming, Philomena was able to direct the way in which the dream unfolded, and being the faithful hound that he was, Drury followed her. Leaving the inn behind, they entered the book, landing upon a flat, yellowed expanse that stretched out in every direction; it was an endless sea of parchment. Above them, the sky was an oppressive grey, filled with strange, swirling calligraphy that rearranged itself if stared at for too long.

In the distance, they spotted Durosimi, trapped inside a cramped, woodcut-style scene. They could see a castle on a hill, which overlooked an ancient gatehouse. A forbidding path twisted down, and through the knot of twisted trees that kept Durosimi trapped in the margin of the page. He appeared as a stiff, almost caricatured figure, the ink lines twitching slightly around him as if alive.

Philomena quickly realised that the margins were hazardous. They shifted and squirmed like a living tide, filled with small, spidery creatures made of ink. They skittered and snapped, trying to tug Durosimi deeper into the border where he would be lost forever in decorative oblivion. It seemed obvious to Philomena that the only way to extradite Durosimi would be with magic; she hoped that her Rough Magic would be enough. Battling with enchanted books was not something she had any great wish to do, but her witch-senses told her that, if she were to succeed, this would have to be written magic — something the book itself would recognise and respect. Remembering her grandmother’s teachings, she bent low, pressed her hand to the parchment, and began writing with her fingertip, creating a spell in rough, crooked cursive, shaped from her will alone.

Drury, meanwhile, snapped and barked at the inky beasts, scattering them with glee. He had rarely had so much fun while sleeping.

Slowly, Philomena’s words formed a path, a thread of golden letters stretching across the parchment toward Durosimi’s prison. She beckoned to him. Confused at first, he eventually staggered out of the illustration, stepping carefully along the luminous trail. As he moved, the woodcut image behind him folded in upon itself with an audible snick, like a trap closing.

Just as the last of the margin-creatures lunged towards him, Durosimi stumbled onto the thankfully safe area of parchment beside Philomena and Drury. With a final swirl of determination, Philomena slapped the book shut, and in a nauseating whirl, reminiscent of the worst fairground ride in the world, snapped Philomena and Drury back into their sleeping bodies.

A few minutes later, Philomena, now fully awake, walked into the snuggery to find Reggie, who had given up guarding the now closed grimoire, snoring contentedly. Drury wagged his skeletal tail. What a dream that had been.

She gazed down at Durosimi, sprawled out in a state of collapse, and gasping on the floorboards. He was still ink-streaked and bewildered.

“You needn’t thank me,” she said, with a grin. “But that’s the last time I’m giving you a book to look after.”