Roxy & Jones

by Angela Woolfe

  “Fine!” Jones snapped, already striding to the curtains and pulling them back. “But this is NOT running away. This is a tactical retreat.”

  “Good,” said Skinny. “Now, you’ll need to take Seven Point Three Street all the way to the end, then head into the junkyard. Go through the gap in the fence at the end and you’ll be out on the open road again. Don’t go any other way. They’ll have put up roadblocks.”

  “They have!” gasped Frankie. “They said so!”

  “You’ll be fine once you’re out of the Sector. But be quick about it. I’ll stall them for a minute.” Skinny gave the girls a brief salute, eyes gleaming. “Oh, and that witch stuff you were talking about? You’ll be wanting to speak to Mortadella. If there’s a witch’s tower still standing in Illustria, she’ll know about it.”

  “Mortadella?” Roxy recognized the name. “You don’t mean … the evil fairy who cursed Sleeping Beauty?”

  “Evil fairies are witches,” said Skinny. “Or near enough. And don’t let the whole cursing thing put you off. Mortadella’s changed. A lot. Runs a kind of spiritual retreat these days, for stressed-out witches.”

  “Oooh, yes, I’ve heard it’s amazing,” said Frankie longingly. “More like a fabulous spa hotel, really. And Skinny’s right, now I think of it: Mortadella should be able to tell you anything you want to know.”

  There was an ear-splitting, wood-splintering crash at the front of the shop. It sounded a lot like the battering ram was being put to use.

  “All right, all right!” yelled Skinny. “Give a bloke a moment to find his keys, won’t you?”

  The striped curtains, now pulled back, had revealed the grimiest French windows Roxy had ever seen; the handle worked, though, and Jones slid the door open and stepped through.

  “Come on,” she said, reaching back for Roxy’s hand. Roxy crouched as low as she could, and the enormous pile of stiff hair made it through. “So now what?” Jones finished, glancing up the road as Frankie followed them out. “We run? How’s that going to work, then, with old Big Hair here?”

  “Frankie,” begged Roxy, clutching her hair. “Please can you un-magic it?”

  “No can do, dear, sorry.” Frankie was rooting in his handbag. “Don’t worry, most of my spells are pre-set to end at the stroke of midnight. And talking of magic…” He pulled out the shiny aubergine he’d shown them earlier. “Cross your fingers, girls!”

  “Frankie, no!” Roxy grabbed for the aubergine, but it was too late. Frankie had already tossed it into the air. A shower of now-rather-familiar lilac sparks flew from his fingers, and—

  “Step back, dearies!” Frankie shrieked, only a split second before a large and extremely shiny purple motorbike slammed down onto the cobblestones right in front of the girls.

  In the silence that followed, they could hear Skinny’s voice again, back inside the store.

  “Now, there’s no need for any stress, Wincey, old girl,” he was saying, “I know those keys are around somewhere. You’ve just got to give me a mo…”

  “Frankie.” Jones was gazing at the bike with an expression Roxy hadn’t seen on her before. It looked a lot like love. “Have you seriously just magicked up a vehicle from a vegetable?”

  “Do you know, dear, I rather think I have!”

  “Then you are officially the most awesome fairy godmother ever!” Jones let out a whoop and swung her leg over the motorbike. “Oh, wow,” she breathed, popping the lilac fedora back on her head. It looked rather like the hat had become hers.

  “Girls, really, you need to go now. As soon as you’re safely out of Sector Seven, you need to head to the Fabulous Forest, OK? You’ll find Mortadella’s retreat there.”

  “Fabulous Forest?” Roxy couldn’t hide her surprise. “I’ve been there once, on a school trip. It’s just full of artificial rapids for white-water rafting, and campsites and stuff.”

  “That’s only the outskirts. When you reach the Forest, keep driving northwards – keep on driving, no matter how thick the forest gets – and you’ll eventually reach the dead centre. That’s where Mortadella’s retreat is hidden. Now go!”

  Roxy, on shaking legs, clambered onto the back of the motorbike behind Jones. It felt firm and reassuringly metallic, and it gave off only the faintest vegetal whiff.

  “Frankie,” she croaked, “will you be OK?”

  “Don’t you worry about me, dearie! And don’t you worry about me either,” he added, rather pointedly, at Jones, who was completely taken with her new toy and already revving the engine impatiently. “Skinny and I will think of something to get the SMOGs off our backs. Will you two just promise me – whatever the reason you want to find this witch’s tower – you’re not doing anything too dangerous?”

  Roxy opened her mouth to reply.

  But perhaps it was a good thing that, at that moment, Jones pressed hard on the handlebars and, with a shout of thanks in Frankie’s direction, sped the aubergine motorbike along Seven Point Three Street, towards the Fabulous Forest.

  14

  Thanks to a killer combo of the sat-nav on Roxy’s phone plus the remarkable speed of what Jones was already calling the Veg-E-Bike, they were already deep into the Fabulous Forest only a couple of hours after speeding away from Sector Seven.

  “My sat-nav’s getting a bit confused,” Roxy yelled over the noise of the engine. “Must be all the trees. But remember what Frankie said: we just keep heading north, no matter how thick the forest gets.”

  “No prob!” Jones yelled back. “Anyway, I’m glad it’s getting a bit wilder, after all those creepily perfect campsites and that piddly little so-called lake! Rubbish school trip you must have had, staying there! Not like this proper adventure!”

  Roxy wanted to agree – to be fair, nothing could have been worse than the four days she’d spent at Camp Good-Times with sixty-two of her old classmates – but she couldn’t shake off the anxious ache in the pit of her stomach. Actually, she couldn’t shake off anything, not with this appalling heap of hair weighing her down.

  “Just to be clear, there’s nothing I can do about the hair,” Roxy yelled, “until the magic wears off at midnight?”

  “Nope! I mean, I guess you could try and let it down. But then we’ll just have about ten miles of tresses trailing behind us!” Jones yelled back. “If you’re worrying about what your sister will say, don’t – it’ll all be back to normal by the next time she sees you!”

  This had been precisely what Roxy had been worrying about but hadn’t wanted to say.

  “Um, on that front, Jones,” she began, tightening her hold round Jones’s waist with the arm that wasn’t being used to steady her hair. “We won’t stay too long at this witch spa-retreat place, right? I mean, we have to be back in Rexopolis by bedtime, obviously.”

  Jones snorted. “Yeah, right. Because that’s what people do when they’re trying to save their entire country from an evil witch: pop back home at the end of the day for their jim-jams and slippers.”

  “But I have to go back home tonight.” Unease was spreading through Roxy’s gut; had she bitten off more than she could chew? “You don’t understand. My sister, she gets … anxious.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t join me at all, then. I mean, if your sister’s going to get anxious. Maybe you should leave before we even meet Mortadella, and head home, and spend the rest of the day doing … sorry, what exactly were you doing when I met you this morning? Sitting on your own listening to music, with breakfast cereal stuck to your face?”

  “OK, OK.” Roxy could feel her cheeks heating up. “I get it.”

  “Do you, Roxy? Because you can’t be here if you’re not properly up for it. This is BIG STUFF. We’re saving the world!”

  “I thought you just said we were saving our country,” Roxy muttered mutinously.

  “Yeah, but you heard Frankie and Skinny. The Perpetual Wickedness – sorry, sorry, I mean Pep-Wick! – could return and infest Illustria again. And if Dark Magic can infest Illustria, it’s only a m
atter of time before it infests the entire planet! And the only thing standing between old Bellissima and an all-powerful Witching Stone is us. You and me, kid!”

  Roxy couldn’t pretend that a shiver of excitement hadn’t just whizzed its way up her spine. Especially not when – how? – Jones seemed to have noticed it too.

  “I felt that!” Jones cackled as she steered the Veg-E-Bike impressively between two densely wooded evergreens. The track was getting narrower and the daylight more sparse with every quarter of a mile. “You’ve got a bit of hero lurking in you somewhere after all! OK, a pretty well-hidden bit of hero, but still…”

  “Hey. Just because I don’t go around deliberately seeking out danger!” Roxy protested. Then she fell silent for a moment. She was busy thinking. Or rather, for the first time in her life perhaps, not thinking. “Look, I don’t want evil Queen Bellissima to find this Seventh Witching Stone any more than you do …”

  “Fighting talk!” Jones punched the air, then quickly returned her hand to the handlebars before they swerved off course.

  “… and after hearing what happened to poor Skinny’s sister… If anything like that ever happened to my sister…” Roxy was feeling a bit sick again, and the bumpity-bump of the Veg-E-Bike on the forest track wasn’t helping. “But maybe you’d be better off on your own. I just don’t know if I’m cut out for all this stuff.”

  “Well, nobody ever knows if they’re cut out for this stuff. Not until they at least try. And Fate has chosen us, kid. No – Destiny! Destiny has thrown you and me together, you with your crazy super-memory and me with all my incredibly awesome skills that would take way too long to list – and by the way, one of my most awesome skills is my modesty.” Jones paused because the Veg-E-Bike had just let out the most colossal farting noise. “I mean, has it ever occurred to you,” she went on, “that maybe you were given that gift of yours for a reason?”

  This had, obviously, never occurred to Roxy for even a single minute.

  “Because the way I see it, everything happens for a reason,” Jones was musing. “Like, all that time I was treated like dirt by my stepfamily. Yeah, it was horrible, being made to sleep in the attic with no heating and not even a proper bed, for Pete’s sake …”

  “Jones, look, if you ever need to talk about all that—”

  “… but all that stuff taught me something,” Jones interrupted. “It taught me how important it is to be free. And I’ll tell you one thing: now that I know what my own hard-won freedom feels like, there’s no way on earth I’m letting some Dark Magic tyrant come and stamp all over it. Or letting it happen to anyone else, for that matter. And freedom, by the way, doesn’t just turn up. It doesn’t pop round for a nice cup of tea when you least expect it. Freedom is something you have to get out there and fight for. It’s something you have to win. You can’t rely on anyone else to do that for you. And if I – if we – can be the ones who make sure our country is never again enslaved by Dark Magic … well, that’ll make us heroes, kid. Proper, epic heroes.”

  At which point in this incredibly stirring speech, the Veg-E-Bike farted again and then stopped altogether.

  And then, just as suddenly, it turned back into an aubergine, tumbling the two of them onto the forest floor.

  “Nice time for that to happen!” howled Jones, kicking the aubergine in frustration, then hitting it with Frankie’s fedora for good measure. “So much for Frankie’s spells lasting until the stroke of midnight! It’s not even the stroke of half past blooming three!”

  “And now how are we going to get back home by nightfall?” Roxy staggered to her feet, still clutching her atrocious hair. “Let alone find this witches’ retreat place!”

  “Well, we’ll just have to keep going.” Jones picked up her fallen kitbag, popped the fedora back on and began to stride on up the track. “D’you know,” she added, craning her neck to peer up at the overhanging tree branches, heavy above them, “I can’t help wondering if this so-called Fabulous Forest might have been another forest in the days of the Cursed Kingdom. Like, maybe, the forest that sprang up around Sleeping Beauty’s castle while she slept for a hundred years.”

  “You think so, do you?” sighed Roxy, trudging after her. (She might have been more able to throw herself square behind some of Jones’s crazy plans to Save the World, she decided, if she didn’t feel quite so tired, hungry and footsore.)

  “Well, have you ever seen a forest quite this thick?” Jones was using her hands to shove aside a particularly thorny hedge that the Veg-E-Bike would never have got through anyway. “I’ll bet Minister Splendid’s guys gave up cutting it back when it all got too wild. They probably thought nobody would ever come as deep as this, anywaaaaaaaaayyyy…”

  The last word faded into an awed sigh as, on the other side of the thorny briar, a truly magnificent sight greeted their eyes.

  Through the briar was a clearing, and in the middle of the clearing stood a palace. It was built from palest yellow stone, and its half-dozen dreamy turrets were circled with rambling pink roses. The palace was surrounded by lush green lawns and a sweeping gravelled drive with marble fountains, an ornamental pond and sculpted hedges. One looked a lot like a cauldron, another like a broomstick…

  “It’s the witches’ retreat!” gasped Roxy, pointing at the sign positioned between two hedges:

  WELCOME TO MORTADELLA’S WOEBEGONE-WITCH WELLNESS CENTRE AND MAGICAL RETREAT

  In swirling gold letters beneath this was written what looked like a motto: COME UNTO US AND REST YOUR WEARY CAULDRONS.

  “This is so awesome!” breathed Jones.

  Awesome wasn’t exactly how Roxy would have described it, especially now that a golf cart was trundling towards them. Her knees were knocking together in fear. The person climbing out of the golf cart, though, looked absolutely nothing like a witch. She was wearing black, it was true, but leggings and a cosy hoodie rather than a witchy robe, and her skin was glowing and lightly tanned. There was not a wart or a hooked nose in sight.

  “Welcome,” she said, in a mellifluous chime. She joined her hands together in a yoga pose and bowed briefly. “I am Katalina, Guest Services Team. Welcome to Mortadella’s Woebegone-Witch Wellness Centre and Magical Retreat. Come unto us and rest your weary cauldrons.”

  “Actually,” Roxy squeaked, “we’re not—”

  Jones kicked her, hard, on the ankle.

  “Yeah, we are pretty woebegone,” Jones said. “I mean, it’s tough being a young witch these days. So much to worry about: is my broomstick fast enough, is my bat, er, batty enough?”

  Katalina nodded kindly. “It’s the sort of thing we hear a lot here at Mortadella’s. Let me take you up to Reception,” she went on, climbing back into the golf cart and motioning for them to join her, “and we can get you witchlets all checked in.”

  “Awesome! Though I should just say, we haven’t necessarily decided to stay yet,” Jones said, pulling Roxy into the cart beside her (thanks to the hair, Roxy had to lean sideways at an extremely uncomfortable angle). “We’d like to ask a few important questions first.”

  “Certainly. Many of our witches have questions.” Katalina started the golf cart, which began to glide so smoothly across the gravel that Roxy couldn’t help wondering if it wasn’t in fact gliding on the gravel at all, but slightly above it. “Who am I? What is the meaning of life? Can I really express my magical self in a harsh world that no longer cares?”

  “Excellent questions, all.” Jones stuck up a thumb as the golf cart stopped beside the steps that led up to the palace’s magnificent glass front door. “And, y’know, is there a witch’s tower still standing anywhere in the country, and if so, where is it?”

  Katalina’s eyebrows rose up her smooth forehead. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one before. But here’s our wonderful director. I’m sure Mortadella will be able to help you with anything you need.”

  Roxy, who now had a really nasty crick in her neck, looked up awkwardly to see a figure descending the marble steps.


  So this was Mortadella.

  15

  If Katalina was serene, Mortadella was positively ethereal: even less like a witch, more of an angel. Her black hair was cropped close to her heart-shaped face, and her huge green eyes shone warmly at the new arrivals. She was wearing a white version of Katalina’s leggings-and-hoodie combo, with the words HEX, SLEEP, MEDITATE, REPEAT printed in gold lettering on the front.

  “Good afternoon, witchlets,” she began in a voice like a warm bed, “and welcome to—”

  She was interrupted by the loudest BANG-CRASH Roxy had ever heard.

  Roxy shrieked. Even Jones gave a small squeak.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that!” Mortadella beamed, beatifically. “That’s just our witch transport landing. Kat, my love, go and tell the driver to take it out of Invisibility Mode so these witchlets can see it.”

  Katalina strolled about ten metres and leaned forwards slightly, and her entire top half disappeared.

  “We have to give our witch transport an Invisibility Shield,” Mortadella explained as Roxy and Jones’s mouths fell open, “to deliver our guests safely from all over the country. Can you imagine the trouble from MOOOOOH if any witches were spotted in the skies on their broomsticks? Fines, shutdowns… You two didn’t come by broomstick, did you?”

  “No, no.” Jones, unlike Roxy, had recovered enough to speak. “We … uh … walked.”

  “Well, I hope you packed your broomsticks nevertheless. We have some fabulous broomstick-yoga classes here at the retreat! Ah, Invisibility Shield well and truly off!”

  Where there had, a moment ago, merely been a half-Katalina, there was suddenly an entire Katalina, leaning into a gleaming white minibus. MORTADELLA’S WOEBEGONE-WITCH WELLNESS CENTRE AND MAGICAL RETREAT was written on the outside in silvery lettering, and through the tinted windows the girls could just see a few weary figures getting up out of their seats. As they watched, Katalina began to help them off the minibus: defeated-looking women ranging from fairly young to rather old, carrying overnight cases, yoga mats and broomsticks.