by Maeve Friel
Jessica pushed Berkeley down into her pocket, seized the first book to hand and scuttled over to a desk. Only then did she see the title.
“The Story of the Besom Wars. By Vox Libris.”
She had found what she was looking for before she even knew what she was looking for!
Chapter Four
Jessica turned to the title page of her library book. She was astonished when a slow drawling voice began to speak.
“Good evening, Jessica, and Berkeley too,” it said. “Welcome to my story. I’m Vox Libris. You can stop and ask me questions at any time. You can move backwards or forwards. You can zoom into my illustrations and you can even join my chat rooms. Just be careful not to sneeze unless you’re ready to travel.”
What has sneezing got to do with it? Jessica wondered. She flicked through the pages to figure out where the voice was coming from. A jumble of words tumbled out.
“. . .cross and wanted to be boss . . . in the witchy year. . . Pluribella . . . all-out war. . .”
She flipped backwards and forwards.
“. . .air turned blue . . . horns locked. . .”
She closed it. When she opened it again a different voice spoke.
“Help!” said a high-pitched, tearful voice. “I’m a witch-in-training. Get me out of here!”
“Oh!” exclaimed Jessica – and shut the book quickly. When she reopened it, another stream of words bubbled up out of the pages.
“. . .stony-faced gryphons . . . disenchantified. . .”
Jessica turned back to the title page. Vox Libris’s calm drawl spoke again.
“Why don’t you let me start at the beginning?”
Jessica nodded, wide-eyed.
Vox Libris began: “After Dame Walpurga invented the New Broom, nothing was ever the same again. For the first time in their history, witches could enjoy flying. Most of them ignored the grumpy Powers-That-Be and took to free flight like eagle chicks. Flying without having to be mad was so easy! On the old brooms, it had been hard to fly long distances, for, as you know, it’s nearly impossible to stay in a bad temper for hours. But on the new brooms, witches could fly on and on and on, even sometimes as far as the Milky Way! Witch life was transformed.”
As soon as Vox Libris had started to speak, Jessica was under a spell. She and Berkeley and the book were all alone in a little pool of yellow light. Music swelled up from behind the stacks of books and moving pictures scrolled around the library walls showing grinning witches spinning among the stars.
“It wasn’t long before witches invented new extreme sports like Ducking and Diving. They swooped like giant crows between snorting dragons and soared fearlessly over ash-spewing volcanoes. Muncheon clubs started up. Host covens and their guests met to exchange Muncheon recipes and swap Brewing tips. Next, Walpurga invented the Trambroom.”
To Jessica’s astonishment, a long multi-seated broom with a dozen cheering passenger hags suddenly zoomed over her head.
“Whoops!” she shouted and ducked, even though she knew it was just a picture that the book had conjured up.
Vox Libris chuckled. “That was especially for witches who were too old to learn to fly the new brooms themselves – Walpurga used to take parties of retired witches on night excursions.”
“Excuse me, Miss Libris,” Jessica interrupted, flipping over a few pages, “didn’t the Powers-That-Be put a stop to all that?”
“I was just coming to that bit,” said Vox Libris. The music became very slow and dark and brown. Berkeley snuggled down deeply into her pocket fluff.
“Up in her fortress in Hagopolis, the Powers-That-Be still wanted to be boss. She did not like witches enjoying themselves. She liked old-fashioned witches who threw tantrums and made repulsive Brews with mashed slug and eye of mummified crocodile. When the Right-Way-Uppers formed their own private flying club, the Broom Riders, and introduced their own driving licence—”
“Oh, I have one of those,” said Jessica, swelling a little with pride.
“Well, that was the last straw for the Powers-That-Be. She called her gang together. There was a stormy meeting. Then they flew in one black hissing swarm to Walpurga’s Garden. They nailed a notice to the well.
ALL WALPURGA BROOMS ARE FORBIDDEN. ALL NEW-STYLE FLYING IS BANNED. BY ORDER: THE POWERS THAT BE
“Banned?” gasped Jessica. “Could she do that?”
Behind her, a computer printer clattered into action. Someone turned the lights on and Vox Libris’s pictures faded away.
Shar Pintake appeared out of nowhere at Jessica’s shoulder. “The library is closing,” she said with a noisy suck of her teeth, “but you may borrow that book for one night. Just let me give you a piece of advice. Before you escape into a book, make sure you know how to get out again.”
Jessica nodded gravely and curtsied at Shar Pintake who had vanished once again, leaving only her teeth behind.
“I wish she wouldn’t keep doing that,” said Jessica, with a shudder.
“Doing what?” said Shar Pintake’s teeth.
Jessica tucked the book under her elbow and fled down the stairs.
Chapter Five
Once outside, Jessica flew up above the rooftops of Coven Garden and turned her broomstick to Automatic.
“Hurrah for Dame Walpurga and her blessed warts,” she told Berkeley as she reopened her book. “If it weren’t for her, no one could read and fly at the same time. On our way back to Miss Strega’s, we can find out what happened when the Powers-That-Be banned Walpurga’s brooms.”
Vox Libris’s pages rustled.
“Dame Walpurga and the early Right-Way-Uppers were truly the cat’s pyjamas. They were not going to allow the Powers-That-Be to take away their new freedom. If they couldn’t fly their broomsticks, well, they decided they would fly something else. . .”
Suddenly Jessica and Berkeley were surrounded by dozens of witches. But not one of them was flying a broomstick! Instead, they sailed past on hot-air balloons and magic carpets. Some even flapped by on clumsy stony-faced gryphons. Others had fixed themselves up with brightly painted kites or winged bicycles. There were witches bouncing along on space hoppers. One witch who obviously couldn’t lay her hands on a magic carpet had bewitched her yellow-duck bath mat and had taken to the air on that.
“Great honking goose feathers!” exclaimed Jessica.
Vox Libris lowered her voice. “It has to be said the skies were chaotic. There were traffic jams, gridlock, collisions, pile-ups. And all the other sky-users, the dragons and flying horses, the tooth fairies and goblins, moaned nonstop about the newfangled traffic cluttering up the night skies.”
“I don’t suppose the Powers-That-Be was very happy either.”
“No indeed. The Powers-That-Be never had any sense of humour. Cross and bossy, that’s all she ever was. She threw a massive wobbly. She put on a spectacular show of bad temper. The air turned blue. She slammed doors all over the earth. She smashed plates. She ripped up papers. She stamped her feet and yelled her head off. Houses trembled. Trees fell over. A tidal wave of tantrums swept over the world. Then, she issued another decree. There’s a copy of it on my next page, if you care to have a look. You might want to cover your ears. It’s very loud.”
Jessica Paused her broom and peered into the book. The page screamed at her.
ALL travelling is OUTLAWED. FLYING, on ANY class of broom, animal or machine, is BANNED. Any witch found outside her own witchy neighbourhood will be DISENCHANTIFIEO.
By order: The Powers-That-Be
“Disenchantified?” Jessica asked.
“Stripped of her powers to Spell, Charm and Brew. Expelled from Witches World Wide.”
Jessica gasped. But after a moment’s thought, she tweaked her Forward twig and moved off again. “So how come I’m flying?” she asked.
“Ah-ha!” exclaimed Vox Libris. “Because the Powers-That-Be was not half as clever as she thought she was. After that second decree, everyone was grounded, both the Right-Way-Uppers and the Wron
g-Way-Uppers, so everyone was unhappy. You have no idea the trouble it caused. Every witch who was abroad when the decree was made had to sneak home under Cover of Darkness. Some of them were stranded on the other side of the moon and never made it back. Others spent months flitting through forests, tunnelling underground, cycling over mountains, hitching rides on long-distance lorries. Then the dirty tricks started.
“The Right-Way-Uppers tried to ambush Wrong-Way-Uppers. Wrong-Way-Uppers put Spells on Right-Way-Uppers so that they went round and round in circles. And don’t forget, there were spies everywhere. Bad fairies, sneaky goblins, owls that couldn’t help hooting to the Powers-That-Be. Thousands of witches were disenchantified. Dark days. . .” Vox Libris’s voice wobbled just like Miss Strega’s the night they had Spelled Backwards.
“Go on,” Jessica prodded.
Vox Libris turned over a new leaf. “By and by, all the witches turned against the Powers-That-Be. First, Dame Walpurga and the Right-Way-Uppers started the Reclaim the Skies Movement.”
Jessica was surrounded by moving pictures of Walpurga and her rebel forces, Spinning and Moon-Vaulting over the roofs of Hagopolis on daring undercover flights.
“But there was great bravery on the other side too.”
From far off came the sound of a low hum that gradually became a drone and then a loud angry shriek. Yellow beams of searchlights roamed the night sky. Then suddenly a party of Wrong-Way-Uppers came roaring out of the darkness. They zipped past Jessica’s broom so close she could smell the smoke coming out of their ears. Dressed in short capes with sheepskin collars, leather flying helmets and goggles, they were not like any witches that Jessica had ever seen before.
“That was the famous Besoms-R-Us gang,” said Vox Libris when they had passed over and the skies were silent once more. “For months they launched nightly cloak and dagger attacks on Pluribella.”
“Pluribella?” said Jessica. “Was she in the Reclaim the Skies Movement too?”
“Fiddlesticks!” said Vox Libris. “She was the Powers-That-Be.”
Jessica almost fell off her broom. “Never!” she protested. “Pluribella was Miss Strega’s grandmother.”
A little breeze rippled through Vox Libris’s pages. Her voice had become a little frosty. “Who is the history book?” she asked. “Are you suggesting I’m mistaken?”
“Oh no,” said Jessica, hurriedly. “But I can’t believe that Miss Strega had an evil granny.”
“Look,” said Vox Libris, “would you like to Spell Backwards? Be my guest. Come right in here and check the facts for yourself. All you have to do is choose the page you want to enter and sneeze the right number of times. Talk to Walpurga or Pluribella yourself.”
Jessica pondered. “Unfortunately, I don’t know the chant for Spelling Backwards,” she said, “and, by the way, why do people keep saying things about sneezing?”
The Vox Libris explained.
Jessica listened carefully. “That sounds easy enough,” she said.
“Hu-eet,” advised Berkeley. She shot out of her pocket and on to Jessica’s shoulder in a shower of birdseed. Jessica picked her up and soothed her neck feathers. Berkeley had a point. It might be risky. Both Miss Strega and Shar Pintake had warned her of the dangers of getting into books. And she herself had heard that voice shouting, “Help! I’m a witch-in-training. Get me out of here!”
At the same time, it would be a shame not to try Spelling Backwards for herself. Miss Strega would be gobsmacked if Jessica met Pluribella and Dame Walpurga in person.
“Look, Berkeley,” she said, “I have my lucky pebble. And I have the Safe Harbour pin that Pelagia gave me to get out of an emergency. I’ll stick it on to my broom handle so that we can always get home safely. It’s perfectly all right,” she insisted, “we won’t be in any danger. We’ll try it out as soon as we get back to Miss Strega’s shop.”
And she popped Berkeley back in her pocket, stuffed Vox Libris under her cape and Fast-Forwarded towards the High Street.
Chapter Six
Miss Strega was on the phone to the family witch doctor, Dr Krank, when Jessica arrived back. (Felicity had daydreamed a Spell from the book she was sitting on and had turned into a cat-shaped gingerbread biscuit.)
Jessica hopped on to the counter and began to leaf through The Story of the Besom Wars.
“Is that a new library book?” Miss Strega asked, distractedly eating a few stray Felicity-crumbs while Dr Krank consulted her casebook.
“Mmm,” Jessica answered, thinking that Miss Strega was going to have another shock when Jessica started sneezing.
For it turned out that sneezing was the key to Spelling Backwards. All she had to do, Vox Libris had explained, was choose the time and place she wanted to visit and sneeze the Sneezing Spell. As soon as she heard this, Jessica remembered that Miss Strega had sneezed a lot the night that they went Spelling Backwards to Walpurga’s Cottage. The strange chanting had just been Miss Strega being silly.
She turned to the pictures in the middle of the book. There was one in particular that looked interesting. It showed three witches sitting round a table in a dark room, lit only by the moonlight falling through a high window. Two witches wore old-fashioned pointy hats and they all wore fur-lined robes. She recognised Walpurga and the warty toad on her shoulder at once; the other had a ginger cat on her lap and, by the look of her chin and the glasses perched on the end of her long nose, she just had to be Miss Strega’s grandma, Pluribella. The third witch, the one in the middle, did not have a mascot but she seemed to be wearing a set of curly spaniel’s ears on her head.
Walpurga and Pluribella were dipping their long-feathered quill pens in a big metal ink pot.
Jessica read the caption beneath the painting:
The Signing of the Peace
Agreement,
5th January 380.
(Left to Right: Dame Walpurga, Judge Portia, Pluribella Strega)
What an important date in witch history! The Right-Way-Uppers and the Wrong-Way-Uppers must have stopped fighting each other. And both sides must have stopped attacking the Powers-That-Be.
“Let’s go and see it for ourselves. Come on, Berkeley, stop pecking at poor Felicity’s ears and get in my pocket.”
Then she began to sneeze, counting with her fingers.
Sneeze once for yesterday,
Twice for the century,
Three times for the decade,
And four for the year.
Miss Strega swung round. “Jessica!” she warned. “I hope you know how to come back.”
Even the gingerbread-biscuit face of Felicity looked worried.
Jessica went on sneezing.
Five more for the month,
And another for the day. . .
Achoo-achoo-achoo!
I’m Spelling away.
The next moment, Jessica was standing on a floor like a giant checker board. She could hear raised voices in the next room. She tiptoed across the floor and peered around the thick velvet curtain at the door.
The Sneeze Spell had worked! There were Pluribella and Dame Walpurga at the table signing their peace agreement. Though it didn’t sound very peaceful.
Dame Walpurga’s toad was croaking at the top of his voice; the ginger cat was standing on the table, hissing and spitting.
Walpurga herself was shouting: “I am not signing anything unless she agrees that my type of broom is the Right-Way-Upper.”
“That is not fair,” Pluribella shouted back. “You can call it the New-Way-Upper if you like, but as far as I’m concerned the old-fashioned besom was the Right-Way-Upper.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Right!”
“Wrong!”
“Right, right, right. . .”
“Crek, crek, crek. . .” went the toad.
“Tzzzzzz, tzzzzzz. . .” hissed the cat.
Judge Portia banged the table with the ink pot. “Ladies, please stop bickering!”
Jessica gave a little giggle. Berkeley went
“Hu-eet.” Jessica clamped her hand over her mouth and stepped back into the shadow of the curtain.
Five pairs of eyes swivelled in her direction.
Pluribella tapped her long nose and rose slowly to her feet. “A spy!” she mouthed.
Pluribella’s cat jumped off the table and took up a pounce-and-attack position.
Only then did Jessica realise that she had come without her broom and her Safe Harbour pin. And only then did she remember what Miss Strega had said about old-fashioned witches with iron teeth eating girls for breakfast.
She quickly turned on her cape to give herself guaranteed invisibility and began to slowly wind herself into the curtain, round and round, until she was completely coiled up in a dark cocoon of brown velvet.
“Moonrays and marrowbones!” said a voice that sounded terribly familiar. “We know you’re there! Reappear at once. I don’t want to have to say it again.”
“Miss Strega?” said Jessica.
She began to unwind her way out of the curtain until she was face to face, or rather nose to nose, with Pluribella, Dame Walpurga and Judge Portia. Of course, Miss Strega was not there at all.
The three witches stared at the empty space where Jessica was still hidden in her invisible cloak.
“What is it?” Walpurga snapped. “Is it a ghost?”
“It seems to know you, Pluribella,” said Judge Portia. “It called you Miss Strega.”
Pluribella stroked her long chin. “No, it isn’t a ghost but it could be someone under an Invisibility Spell.”
“Shall we toss it into our Muncheon cauldron? Or shall I just gobble it up right here and now?” said Walpurga, displaying her iron teeth.
Jessica reappeared at once.
Chapter Seven
Pluribella, Dame Walpurga and Judge Portia were astonished.
“Astonishing!” they chorused when Jessica had explained who she was and why she had suddenly appeared in Walpurga’s parlour.
