Daniel's box

Every boy and girl has, at some time or another, lost something they
valued dearly. Sometimes that something is not really a thing at all.
Sometimes that something is a person. Daniel had lost the greatest
person he had ever known. Daniel had lost his
grandfather?


Everyone thought that grandpa was totally mad. Some of the
kinder people said he was just a little eccentric. Most said he needed
locking up, or better still, shooting. Daniel, however, was a wise boy.
He knew that a man was only crazy if you didn't understand him, and he
understood more about grandpa than anyone else who had ever lived.
What's more, he knew that grandpa was a wizard.


Laugh if you must, I'm not asking you to believe me. I'm only
asking you to answer one simple question. Have you ever actually seen a
wizard? I don't mean a man in a silly blue dress covered with gold
stars. I mean a real, in your face, wizard. What's that? You say you
haven't? Then how do you know they don't exist? Have you ever seen the
tooth fairy or Santa Claus? Of course not, but you believe in them
every time you find money beneath your pillow or a stocking full of
presents, don't you? Well it's the same with wizards. You don't have to
see them to know they are there.


'Ah', I hear you ask, 'but aren't wizards just very clever
magicians with terribly long beards and bad breath?' Is that what your
parents told you? I thought as much. The fact is that most grown ups
never really get close enough to a wizard to know for sure what he
looks like. Throughout history wizards have been known to cause huge
problems for adults, so much so that most grown ups steer well clear of
them. As for the long beard and bad breath, well my auntie Audrey had
both of those and she wasn't a wizard. She was a gossip, which as we
all know, is a totally different thing altogether.


In truth there are many magicians spread all over this earth
and all would have you believe they were wizards, if you were fool
enough to listen. They may perform spellbinding tricks that make your
toes curl and the hairs on your neck stand up, but that is all they
are, just very clever tricks.


Wizards are entirely different. If they cast a spell, they do
it for real. They don't need a top hat to produce a rabbit. They don't
need a box to saw you in half. A true wizard could split you clean down
the middle as soon as he looked at you. A real wizard would have boiled
that rabbit in one drop of his own ear wax and eaten it right there and
then, fur and all. Indeed it was jolly fortunate for almost everybody
that Daniel's grandpa keeled over and died just when he did. Or was it?



Reports of wizardry were no longer commonplace in Bogsworth,
so the villagers generally excepted the existance of such creatures to
be highly unlikely. This was an assumption that, had it not been for
grandpa's final great deed, would almost certainly have cost them their
lives.


The end.


I know what you're thinking. 'How can any story end before it
has truly begun?' Do you mean to tell me you have never read a book
only to wish the end wasn't where you found it? Or wondered what
happened to the characters after they had finished living happily ever
after, and life returned to normal? Of course you have. Stories are
just like going to bed and getting up. It really doesn't matter where
you think the end should be, there will always be something else to
follow. For Daniel, that something else was the wildest, most greatest
adventure ever, and for once he didn't have to share it with his
sister.