The old man lit the last of seven candles and sighed, making the flames dance slightly.
“I believe in a certain amount of gloom,” he said, and with a wink he blew out the match. “What your eyes cannot see your imagination must discover. And your imagination is very important, young man.”
Sylas looked at him quizzically. “Important?”
“Yes, for a great many things… and you will put it to very good use in my shop,” said the shopkeeper. “Now, let us dispense with the formalities. They call me Mr Zhi.”
He stepped around the counter and held out his hand. It was covered in a beautifully embroidered velvet glove of the same dark green as his tie. Sylas only had a moment to look at it, but he saw that the stitching on the back of the hand glittered slightly in the candlelight.
As they shook hands, the old man straightened and looked at him expectantly.
“And how should I address my very first customer?”
“Oh... Sylas. Sylas Tate, sir – Mr Zhi, I mean.”
He felt flustered, but almost at once he felt Mr Zhi’s eyes soothing and reassuring him, as though telling him in some silent language that all was as it should be.
“You are very welcome, Sylas Tate,” he said, pronouncing the name with care. He raised himself up. “Now, where shall we start?” He looked into the darkness and seemed to ponder for a moment, then he tapped the side of his nose and his eyes twinkled. “Follow me,” he said.
He grabbed a candle from the counter and set off with surprising speed between some of the stacks. Sylas had to run to catch up. They turned left, then right, then left again, passing opened parcels of what looked like peculiar musical instruments.
“What are all these things?” asked Sylas.
“Ah well, that is a very good question to which there can be no good answer,” said the old man, without turning. “But you have found the right word. I collect and sell Things. Things, by definition, are objects we find hard to explain. Were I to explain them, I think I might have to close up shop!”
At that moment they arrived at a wall of crates. Some had been taken down and opened and the floor was strewn with straw and shredded paper. Mr Zhi turned to Sylas and smiled.
“As you can see, I have many thousands of Things in my shop,” he said, his eyes now peering into one of the crates, “but I consider it my particular talent to know which Things will interest which people. That is why I have never taken to having my wonderful Things displayed on shelves and in cabinets. That would take away all of the mystery, which is the greater part of any good Thing, and a good deal of the discovery, which is much of what is left!”
The shopkeeper bent low over the crate and very gently lowered his gloved hand into the straw.
“This you will like,” he said.
He rummaged for a moment and then, with great care, he raised his hand. He was holding a fragile wheel, made of some kind of metal, from which hung a number of silvery strings. Sylas half expected to see a puppet dangling below but, as Mr Zhi lifted the wheel still further, he saw that each string was tied to a tiny silvery bar, from which were suspended three more strings: one at the centre and one at each end. Each of these additional strings was connected to a further bar and thereby to three more strings, and so on, and so on, until Sylas could see a vast and wonderful structure of silvery twine emerging from the crate. Just as he began to wonder how such a complicated thing could have remained untangled in the straw, Mr Zhi drew himself to his full height and raised the wheel above his head.
Sylas gasped in amazement.
There, on the end of each of the hundreds of strings, were tiny, delicate, beautiful birds, each with its wings outstretched in some attitude of flight. Their feathers shimmered like rainbows in the candlelight and, as each bird turned on its string, they seemed to throw out more light than they received, so that the surrounding walls of crates moved with colour.
“It’s wonderful, just wonderful,” said Sylas, letting his rucksack fall to the floor.
“It is, is it not?” said Mr Zhi, with evident pleasure. “Of course, such wonders are created in part by your very own imagination,” he said, moving the great flock of birds slightly closer to Sylas. “To some, this is a beautiful object that must have taken several years for many careful hands to create. To others, to those with true imagination, it is a marvellous flock of magical birds carried by a wind we cannot feel, calling a cry we cannot hear, united by a purpose we cannot know. To them, each bird is as alive as you or I, because in their imagination they see them soaring, climbing, swooping, turning…”
Sylas found himself staring ever more intently at the delicately balanced parts of the mobile, watching closely as they moved around each other on the gentle currents of air in the room. He saw how each bird was finished with astonishing detail, showing the individual feathers, the tail fan, the precise angle of the wing as it manoeuvred in flight. He marvelled as they glided past each other without ever colliding, as if aware of one other.
And then, perhaps in a trick of light, he thought he saw one of them twitch.
A wing lifted slightly and a long neck turned. Then a crooked wing seemed to straighten as one of the birds turned in a wide arc around another. He blinked in disbelief as he saw another bird beat its wings, change its path in the air and then resume its endless circling. He let his eyes drift from place to place within the multitude, watching as every one of them seemed to take on a life of its own.
At first they beat their wings at random, but soon every bird was flapping in time with the others. And then, without warning, they broke from the circle below Mr Zhi’s hand and moved in one great flock, banking left then right, their wings catching the light in unison, forming a breathtaking display of colour. The gossamer strings seemed to have disappeared altogether. Moments later the birds turned their heads upwards and rose as if carried by an updraught of air. Sylas gazed in astonishment as he watched them soar over the top of Mr Zhi’s hand in a beautiful arc of light and colour, before swooping downwards to the floor. At the very last moment they turned upwards and sped through the air towards him, their wings beating rapidly now, their feathers ruffling and shimmering. As they circled round his head, Sylas laughed out loud, wanting to reach out and touch them. His heart thumped – not from fear, but from a wild, intoxicating excitement.
“So now you see it!” came Mr Zhi’s voice from the dark.
Sylas caught his breath. “I see it!”
Then, abruptly, the flock of birds wheeled sharply above his head and streamed towards Mr Zhi’s gloved hand. As they reached the glove, they turned again, so tightly this time that the leading birds met those at the rear of the flock, forming a circle. As the last joined formation, Sylas could again see the occasional glint of the silvery strings in the darkness, and then he saw that the tiny bars were supporting their weight once more, as though they had never been gone. The birds circled more and more slowly until they were drifting gently on the air currents. Their wings moved no more.
Mr Zhi began lowering them back down into the straw. Sylas wanted to ask him to let them fly some more, but had the feeling that they had done all that was intended.
He cleared his dry throat. “What was that?” he asked.
Mr Zhi simply patted Sylas cheerfully on the shoulder, picked up the candle and started back along the passageway of parcels. Sylas paused for a moment, glancing down at the pile of straw, but then picked up his rucksack and scrambled after him.
“There’s much to see!” he heard Mr Zhi say up ahead. “Please keep up!”
He moved so swiftly that, as Sylas turned one corner, the shopkeeper had already turned the next and the only way to keep pace was by following the dying traces of candlelight that flickered against the walls of parcels ahead.
“But what was it?” asked Sylas breathlessly.
“Ah well,