That sideboard...

I do believe when we last communed, I left you wonderin' at a sideboard bein' what you might call alarming...

See, right in the middle of the very middle shelf of that sideboard, was where I kept The Door - though I didn't know that's what is was back then, you understand.

Funnily enough - and it doesn't half seem funny now, knowing what I know - I'd never even wondered what the thing my grandpa showed me was for, and nor do I reckon had he. We just both knew it was special: he'd wanted to keep it safe, and I wanted to have it. Well, bein honest, I'm pretty sure it wanted him to keep it safe and it wanted to have me - but I'm gettin ahead of myself.

So gettin' back to that icy, icy night: there I stood, one 'and on the back of my armchair, starin' at my sideboard in the grizzly light from the window - and blow me down with a wicker man if there wasn't a whole cloud of fog surroundin' that horrible old piece of furniture- like someone plucked a cloud from the wintry sky and popped in my livin room. For a second there I thought to shout "fire!" - but through the doze and the gin-fug and the brass monkey's cold, I realised what I could smell wasn't fire - it was churches - that rich sickly sweet smell of the censer.

Now I ave to say, ladies and gents, that I ain't a brave man, but I am a curious man and it was curiosity that beat the fear and the cold and led me forwards towards the cloud shroud round my sideboard. Or at least that's what I tell myself to this day - but I'm also a suspicious man, and I do wonder if The Door weren't callin' me, trickin' me to find out what it was for.