It was massive! Huge! Gigantic! Colossal! It was bigger than anything Ed had ever seen. The clock! He was sure it was the clock. It was very dark but Ed was sure that he could make out the carvings on its surface. He knew them well but this time they were miles above him and much bigger. What do I do now? Ed asked himself, beginning to feel very sorry that he had left his bed in the first place. Instead of giving up and crying, like some boys would, Ed decided to walk around the clock and see if he could find a way to climb up. He thought that maybe if he climbed high enough he could see the door back to his room; he had forgotten what direction it was in after he fell.

  ?Ten minutes later Ed had managed to get around the back of the clock. It was so dark that he couldn't even see his hand in front of his face. He was running his hand against the clock so that he wouldn't lose his way. All of a sudden his hand fell into an empty space followed rather quickly by Ed himself.

  ?Ed picked himself up, dusted his pyjamas off and tried to figure out what had happened. He quickly found out that he was in some sort of cave. A wooden cave, about Ed's height (which was not his normal height at all) and perfectly round. The floor, however, was wavy; there were ridges all around the cave that spiralled in; it seemed to Ed like a sci-fi picture that he had once seen of a portal to another world. Everything was very rough and jagged.

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  ?Ed continued to explore, he walked into the cave, seeing how far it went back. He clambered over the ridges trying not to get any splinters. The cave was getting narrower and Ed was being forced to crouch and squeeze so that he could get further up the tunnel.

  ?Ed was about to give up and go back when his hand reached the back of the cave. Unlike everything else it was completely smooth. The surface was round and, strangest of all, had a door knob on it. Before Ed could tell his brain to stop he twisted the door knob and opened the door, as a door it certainly was.

  ?Warm yellow light washed over Ed. It dazzled him, making him blink. His eyes weren't used to light, because he'd been in the dark for so long, eventually his vision came back and he looked around.

  ?The tunnel that he was in was, as he'd imagined it, a wooden tunnel with ridges spiralling towards the narrow exit. As I've said, this boy was extraordinary and when he saw that tunnel, in the light, he was able to guess exactly what it was. It was the hole caused by a screw hole, someone had once screwed a screw into the back of his Grandfather's clock and then removed it, leaving this cave which Ed had fallen into. 'I must be very small indeed' Ed said to himself.

  ?He turned around and looked past the door. Before him was a huge room, a very tall, rather narrow, round room with walls made out of wood. The room was entirely empty apart from two things.