Wizard with staff and castle on a calf

Now, you all remember old Mr Penrith, who swept the corridors at Harcombe Grammar and never once took his hat off indoors. What none of you knew was that he'd been sweeping those same corridors since 1911, and that his staff leaned in the boiler cupboard every night, with a crystal on top the size of a hen's egg, lit from inside like a lamp left on in a window.

One wet Thursday in March, young Gary Hollis set fire to the bins behind the science block, and Penrith came out of the smoke with a pale glass orb in his palm and said, 'Let's see what you are, then.' Gary was never the same after that. He became a surveyor, which is much the same thing if you think about it. And up on the hill, where the old chapel stood, the stones began to climb, tower by tower, until the whole place had turned into a castle with its light spilling down the valley like a dropped bolt of silk.

They closed the school in 1987. Penrith was found on the playing field one frost morning with his staff across his knees and the orb gone from his hand, and the council man said it must have rolled down a drain. I've waited thirty-eight years to tell you where it really went. It's under the bike sheds. Go and look, if you don't believe me. Your knees will tell you when it's glowing.