conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled The Journeying Boy about London, News with the genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers & Suspense.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I could see no faults in it. There is no one to compare with him.--Illustrated London News
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Journeying Boy
  It was the healthful custom of Mr Thewless to sleep with his window open to its fullest extent. When he had undressed, therefore, he extinguished the lamp which had been burning in his room, drew back his curtains, and threw open the casement. The waning moon was hidden in cloud and the night was almost completely dark; he had the sense, rather than the perception, of standing at a considerable elevation, and he remembered that what was commanded from this aspect of the house must be a view of the sea. A single light was visible at a distance not easy to determine, presently he distinguished that this was faintly reflected in water; and it occurred to him that it might well represent a riding-light on the motor cruiser noticed by Humphrey before dinner. There was still a chilly breeze, and Mr Thewless climbed without more ado into bed. He had been not without fears, reasonably bred by the marked unreliability of the furniture around him, that the night might bring discomforts of its own. He found, however, that the bed was in excellent order and soothingly sheeted in the finest linen. As he tumbled in, he became aware of a dim radiance gliding smoothly across the ceiling of his room. It must be the faint reflection of the beam from the lighthouse that he had previously remarked as touching the upper part of the house. The effect was too slight to be disturbing. Within a minute Mr Thewless was asleep.
  It would have been no more than fair had his late vicissitudes earned him a full night's oblivion. But his undisturbed sleep was of short duration, and was succeeded by uneasy and perplexing dreams. In these he was himself at first the only living participant and he moved amid a décor which his waking consciousness – as we have seen, nicely informed in such matters – would have assured him reflected the alarms and dismays which had attended a singularly frightening episode of his career undertaken jointly with his mother some fifty years before. Painful progressions through narrow tunnels, terrifying drops through space, sudden assaults upon eye and ear by unanalysable lights and sounds, the dread presage of unknown modes of being: all these things, in a confusion somewhat suggestive of the best modern music, formed as it were the overture to his nocturnal drama. And then it was as if the curtain rose and slowly, with a careful regard for the sluggish understanding of the audience, the actors appeared one by one. The first of these was Mr Thewless himself, aware – and surprised, but only mildly so, at his awareness – that he was no longer very substantially Mr Thewless, since he had assumed the vastly more distinguished role or identity of Sir Bernard Paxton. Mr Thewless having become Sir Bernard, and having gained thereby an insight into Sir Bernard, remarked that Sir Bernard (who was himself) was by no means so impressive a spectacle when viewed from within as he (Mr Thewless, that was to say) had found him when viewed from without. In particular he was prone to behave in an indecisive and timorous fashion when confronted by heights. And this was the position now. In a vast, void darkness Thewless-Paxton trod falteringly the brink of some unimaginable precipice. Far below shone a single light dimly reflected in dreadful waters; to a sickening plunge towards this he felt himself irresistibly impelled; his head swam, his knees gave way beneath him and he fell. But from the darkness a strong arm stretched out and held him and, turning in air, he recognized that his preserver was Humphrey Paxton, who was his son. Again he trod the precipice, the boy holding his hand and guiding him as he went, and presently their path through darkness began to rock and pulse beneath them. It was a path no longer, but the corridor of an express train, its outer side cut away to expose them to the hurtling night, its inner giving upon a series of compartments through the glass of which there gibbered and mowed monsters and prodigies in endless sinister diversity. But in every compartment too sat Ivor Bolderwood – always in the same corner an Ivor Bolderwood, his glance composed and direct through his large round glasses, in his lap a bowl of boxty from which he ceaselessly fed the horrors around him with a long-handled wooden spoon. But whether Ivor was master of the rout or whether he was in their thrall Mr Thewless could by no means determine as the boy hurried him onwards down the interminable train, his lips parted and his eyes, bright with challenge, fixed upon some distant and shrouded goal.
  The dream seemed interminable: always the monsters, always an Ivor, always the swaying corridor beneath the feet. Once Mr Thewless turned his head and behind him saw the bearded man with pebble glasses, in his hand a bludgeon raised and prepared to strike. But even as Mr Thewless shrank in anticipation of the blow the bearded man was transformed into Mr Wambus, swathed and powerless in his bandages, like a corpse in some old picture. Once – and once only – the dread monotony of the teeming compartments was varied, and Mr Thewless glimpsed the solitary figure of Miss Liberty, a volume by Sapper in her lap. But her face was blank and sightless; or rather – he realized with a chill of sudden horror – it was no face at all, but simply the dial of a clock from which the hands had been wrenched so as to render it useless.
  And now the unending train was devouring not only space but time as well; it was hurtling at such speed through aeons of time that Mr Thewless recognized in a rhythmic sweep of light and darkness about him an actual procession of nights and days. And suddenly he knew the destination of the train. It was hurtling towards the sun. This was the goal upon which the eyes of the boy who still guided and supported him were set; ahead was nothing but empty space, with that vast conflagration at the end. And then it was before him – burning, incandescent light. Mr Thewless felt the leap and lick of its vast tongues of flame upon his brow. He woke up.
  Mr Thewless woke up and on his retina there glowed and swam a single orb of orange fire. He stared at it and instantly, from its voyaging place a thousand million miles away, his mind made a wonderful leap at objective fact. Somebody had shone an electric torch in his face. Hence the sun as terminus to that unending journey; hence now this fading spot of colour on his brain. And this realization was followed by another almost as immediate. The swift procession of nights and days through which his dream had moved as over a chequer-board of darkness and light had also been physically determined. It was dark now; presently there would pass over his ceiling the faint illumination from the lighthouse. In this illumination it would be possible to see.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: There was a lurking appeal for reassurance in this. Ivor laughed. 'We certainly can't have you scouring the country by yourself just at present. That ambulance would roll up again, and away you'd go. They wouldn't bag the tutor instead of the pupil a second time.'
  For a second Ivor was irresolute, his eye on the firm, shining surface, printless save for the criss-cross tracks of gulls; he might have been a man recognizing in a situation some factor of which account ought to have been taken long ago. 'Stop!' he called. 'Come back at once!' And he himself advanced a few paces, as if meditating pursuit.
  The word, as Humphrey echoed it, hung upon the air rather longer than Ivor liked, making him wish that he had phrased his warning differently. 'But it's rather fun going by these pools. There are crabs, and sea-anemones, and some astonishing seaweeds.'
  Perceptibly, Humphrey hung back. Perhaps it was merely that the proffer of these interesting marine exhibits struck too juvenile a note – as if the graduate in Biggles, the student of Captain Hugh Drummond, the explorer of the pastoral loves of Daphnis and Chloe had been questioned on a forgotten command of the creations of Miss Enid Blyton. Or perhaps it was something else... 'We'll be there in five minutes now,' Ivor said. 'You can see the opening. It's that dark patch just before the next headland.'
  The gulls wheeled around them, crying out as if in some futile warning. The mouth of the cave, foreshortened to a jagged slit in the face of the cliff, lay in front – obscurely sinister, like an unsutured wound.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'When half of the guests at a charity masquerade fête at Drool Court turn up dressed as sheiks, it must be more than pure coincidence'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: When half of the guests at a charity masquerade fête at Drool Court turn up dressed as sheiks, it must be more than pure coincidence. One of them is the real thing, however, and Sir John Appleby, master detective, discovers that he is in grave danger. When one of the pseudo-sheiks if murdered, Appleby finds himself in the midst of an international political crisis. 
  Respected Fine Art experts are deceived in one of the most intriguing murder cases Inspector Appleby has ever faced, beginning with Gribble, a collector of forgeries whose latest acquisition is found to be a forged forgery! In the words of Appleby himself: 'Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. Just a little mad, for a start. Inclined, say, to unreasonable jokes in the course of business. But later – well, very mad indeed.' 
  Stunning Belrive Priory, consisting of a mansion, park and medieval ruins, is surrounded by the noise and neon signs of its gaudy neighbours – a cotton-mill, a brewey and a main road. Nevertheless, Arthur Ferryman is pleased to return for a family Christmas, but is shocked to discover that his cousins have taken up a new pastime – pistol-shooting. Inspector Appleby arrives on the scene when one of Ferryman's cousins is found shot dead in the study, in a mystery built on family antagonisms. 
  Meteorites fall from the sky but seldom onto the heads of science dons in redbrick universities; yet this is what happens to Professor Pluckrose of Nestfield University. Inspector Appleby soon discovers that the meteorite was not fresh and that the professor's deckchair had been placed underneath a large, accessible tower – he already knew something of academic jealousies but he was to find out a great deal more. 
  The Simney family, of Hazlewood Hall, have a dubious history. Sir George Simney, who was travelling in Australia before the baronetcy fell to him, sleeps with a shotgun by his side. When he is found dead in the library, the Reverend Adrian Deamer will not rest until he has discovered who is responsible. This is an absorbing tale narrated by Simney's widow, Nicolette, and by young Harold, who has just joined the C.I.D.