The dusty second hand book shop was hidden in the back streets of the old town. Its front doors all cracked glass and peeling paint. Most customers found it by accident, lost or looking for a short cut. Strangely, nearly all returned. To the unwitting and unwary the shop exerted a kind of magical pull. Its own unique form of human gravity.

Alberto the owner often said with a wink that the shop found his customers not the other way around. And he may have had a point. Although he didn’t know it, the shop was located directly over the confluence of the most powerful ley lines in Britain. It is also stood over a spring venerated by druids for millennia, now efficiently drained by the Victorian sewage system. A subterranean temple to Dionysus, a scene of ancient sacrifice and wild sexual abandon, lay silent and undiscovered beneath the basement. A dowser once employed to find the source of a leak vowed never to return after his rods had taken on a life of their own and then viciously attacked their owner. In paranormal terms, the place positively fizzed.

Alberto could usually be found behind a battered leather desk near the entrance reading an ancient tome or quoting random verse from the great poets. A bottle of grappa always close at hand for his favourite customers. A large blue and yellow parrot perched on a hatstand on the other side of the entrance, greeted confused and disorientated entrants stumbling into the darkness with a deafening ‘Hello my name is Claude. Welcome to my shop’.

When Alberto first took over the shop he set many hearts in the old town racing. His calm demeanour and habit of kissing the hand of every lady he met with the words ‘Caio Bella’ brought a blush to many an English rose. Now in later years he was a greying, but still handsome ‘Florentine’ with an amused sparkle in the corner of his eye.

Alberto’s sudden appearance as the owner of the shop is as buried in mystery as the appearance of Claude some years later. ‘Where did Claude come from?’ Flo one of his more exotic customers once asked. ‘I don’t know. He just turned up one day and I haven’t been able to get rid of him since. He is very well read though. I think he may have been classically trained’. At which point Claude interrupted ‘All the world’s a stage and we are merely players. ‘I see what you mean’ observed Flo.

When events at the shop started to go from weird to even weirder is easy to pinpoint. It was undoubtedly the moment that Claude realised that if a book was placed on the exact point of ley line intersection, he could ride the super amplified electromagnetic resonant frequency to fly directly into the narrative of any novel of his choosing.

Of all places the location of the hotspot for tele-literal transference (as it is known in mystic circles) was in romantic fiction. One evening just as Claude was performing an elaborate aerial manoeuvre, he was suddenly flung beak first into the romantic crescendo of a Barbara Cartland.

‘I can’t believe we are finally together. Tell me that you love me, Cecil?...Cecil? Why are you distracted so?

Cecil’s sea blue eyes were troubled. A frown clouding his perfect features ‘I say charlotte a damned parrot is helping himself to our picnic hamper! Be off with you. You wretched bird!’

‘Don’t mind me’ squawked Claude taking off clutching a cucumber sandwich and a devilled kidney.

‘It’s all a mystery’ Alberto admitted some weeks later. ‘I keep finding general fiction in the romantic section. It can only be Claude, but why? Last week I found ‘Fifty shades of Grey’ amongst the Mills and Boon. That was a disaster waiting to happen!’

In time, Claude gradually mastered his craft and turned his attention to the classics. He was now like a songbird released. Every night roving the literary world exorcizing his insatiable curiosity for the written word. How could these dull flat pages, full of meaningless black squiggles contain such vivid colour, such adventure? He joined the crew of ‘The Hispaniola’ with Long John Silver and Captain Flint. He flew through the back of the wardrobe to Narnia and singed his tail feathers over The Crack of Doom. He visited the count of Monte Cristo in the Chateau d’If, was chased by dementors whilst visiting Sirius Black in Azkaban. He popped in on Oscar Wilde in the Ballad of Reading Jail and entertained Robinson Crusoe with a selection of sea shanties.

It was around this time that Alberto noticed a pattern. Shortly after he found ‘Treasure Island’ Claude’s most common tic became ‘pieces of eight’. It happened again with ‘The Importance of being Ernest’. Claude found it highly amusing to shriek ‘a Handbag?!’ at every inopportune moment. Surely, he wasn’t actually reading these books was he? He consulted Flo who was rumoured to dabble in the darker arts. ‘I think it is even stranger than that,’ said Flo. ‘I have not mentioned this before and I don’t want to alarm you, but your shop is the largest conduit of paranormal energy that I have ever encountered. That’s partly why I come in here and hang around the Romance section. To re-charge my Psychic batteries. I suspect that your parrot is a tele-literal voyager. That’s how he comes out with all this stuff. Furthermore, I surmise’ Flo was now on a roll. ‘That Claude is an actual character from a novel, and I think I know which one. Have you ever stocked ‘Still Life’? ‘Yes. It sold out on the first day, but that was some time ago’. ‘About the time Claude turned up?’ ‘Now you come to mention it….’. ‘There is a parrot in that book the spit of Claude and guess what? He’s also called Claude’. I think they are one in the same. I think he flew straight out of the pages of that book and now he can’t get back’.

Alberto was open minded but couldn’t bring himself to believe what he had just heard. But on Flo’s insistence he put a copy of ‘Still Life’ on order. What is the worst that could happen?

It was also around this time that a plan began to take shape in Claude’s small but surprisingly sophisticated avian mind. As you may know parrots are very intelligent creatures and Claude was cleverer than the average parrot. He was also possessed with something rarer in the parrot world, a healthy dose of avian compassion. It broke his little heart to see his friends The Count, Robinson, Oscar and the others imprisoned in a world of misery. He was going to organise their great escape!

He had hatched his plan and from little eggs eagles soar. Tonight was the night!

He spent the day secretly collecting Dumas, Defoe, Rowling and the others and stacked them neatly over the paranormal hotspot. But just as he waited for Alberto to lock up there was a loud rap at the door. ‘Urgent book delivery’.  Alberto signed for the book, but as he returned to his desk the phone rang. ‘Hello. That’s a coincidence. ‘Still Life’. Yes, we do have a copy. Early tomorrow morning. 7AM. Ok. See you then’.

Claude couldn’t believe it. His friends, Florence, Home! Why did it have to happen tonight? But he couldn’t leave his new friends. Not now. He had a mission to accomplish!

His plan was simple. First to Azkaban where he performed the Expecto Partonum charm to expel the dementors and spring Sirius. Then to Reading Jail where he bribed the guards to release Oscar with some of Long John’s booty. Robinson Crusoe was a tougher nut to crack. A quickly lashed together raft of coconut shells towed by reluctant Moby Dick was the best he could come up with at short notice. Finally, the Count of Monte Christo. He gently filched the keys from the pocket of a snoring guard, released the grateful Count and watched him slide down the gardarobe to freedom and the sea below.

An exhausted Claude eventually found his way back to the shop just as the sun was rising and the sound of Alberto’s key in the shop door. One final effort was all he needed. He gathered his diminishing strength and flew to the desk, picked up the book and made straight for Romantic fiction, Alberto hot on his tail feathers. He dropped the book. Bullseye! Straight on the hotspot. He Stuka dived after it and was flung headlong into the grateful arms of Ulysses in the Pensione Bertolini. ‘Where have you been Claude?’ We were so worried. You were gone all night’. They all gathered around. Ulysses, Cressy, Evelyn and the kid. ‘There is no place like home’ sighed Claude. ‘And who’s your charming friend?’ asked Evelyn. Alberto stooped to kiss her hand. ‘Caio Bella’.

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