by Heide Goody
“I think you only find them in South America,” said Dee. The arboreal discussion ended abruptly as Lesley-Ann Faulkner swiped at them.
Dee swiftly joined Norma in a sprint down the path. “Your witchfire?” puffed Dee. “Can’t you burn her?”
“It’s a travel sized hairspray, Dee. Size of that thing, I’d want a tanker full of napalm at the very least.”
“Can’t you just dispel the enchantment?”
“My enchantment, yes,” wheezed Norma, her face crimson and her eyes bulging. “Not yours. I made Lesley-Ann Faulk—” She huffed with exertion. “—Lesley! You made the super-deluxe version.”
Crashing sounds coming from behind them indicated Lesley-Ann Faulkner was in close pursuit. Dee wondered which would give out first, her legs, her lungs or her heart. They were all proving to be strong contenders.
Dee had always loved nature. It seemed really unfair that it was now trying to kill her
“Can you hear something?” Kay said.
Caroline listened. “Not sure I can hear anything above this lot.” The boys were now all completely soaked, but continued to splash water at each other as they hollered. “What did you hear?”
“Like something being smashed by an angry elephant,” said Kay.
Caroline wondered if Kay had sneaked another can of cider while she wasn’t looking, then she heard it too. She scanned the water and the more distant trees to see if she could discern what was happening.
From the opposite weed-choked end of the pool, a small but unsettling wave rippled out.
“You don’t have crocodiles in this part of the world, do you?” she said.
The grey shambling troll-thing had a fair turn of speed. Jenny struggled to keep pace.
She battled her way through the forest of nettles, oblivious to the stings and came out at the high lip of a broad pool in which five teenagers, three boys and two girls in various states of partial undress, splashed around.
“The troll’s headin’ straight for the buffet!” said Jizzimus.
“Get out!” Jenny yelled to the kids. “Run!”
The words died in her throat when she realised one of the girls was Kay. The other girl, a beautiful dark-haired creature who looked oddly familiar, put her hand to her eyes to shade them from the sun.
“Jenny? Is that you?”
The invisible troll-beast burst into the pool. The teenagers couldn’t see it, but the wall of water pushed before it was obvious. They scrambled for the shore but one of the boys was too slow. The beast grabbed him by the shoulder and plucked him from the pool.
Caroline saw Brandon being hoisted into the air by an invisible force. He writhed, twelve feet above the foaming water, and screamed.
Kay was already on the bank and running back to the tractor. The two other lads, dopey Toby and cute Connor, hovered in the shallows and stared dumbfounded at their dangling friend.
“You need to run to a place of safety,” Caroline said.
“We need to run to a place of safety,” chorused the two boys and were gone: up the bank and into the trees.
Brandon swung back and forth in the air. Caroline was utterly nonplussed. It was as though he had been grasped by some invisible being. His T-shirt hung oddly and she was certain his shoulder shouldn’t look like that.
She wanted to fight back, wanted to help but her magics – her natural gifts – were of zero use against something she couldn’t see; something she couldn’t seduce with words. She had nothing.
There was the abrupt, throaty roar of the tractor firing up. Caroline looked round.
“What are you doing?” she yelled.
Perhaps Kay didn’t hear her over the thrashing water and chugging engine. The young woman had a grimly determined look on her face as she accelerated the Massey Ferguson into the pool and at the unseen menace. The water slowed the tractor but it churned its way forward, slamming into something at the centre of the pool.
Brandon jerked in the air and fell into the water. Caroline saw Kay dive after Brandon and then they were gone from sight. “Kay!”
Jenny’s stomach flipped with fear as Kay disappeared into the water. The troll-thing had been knocked back by the tractor but was now combing the water in search of the teenagers.
Jenny was about to dash down the bank to help when she heard what sounded like trees exploding. She saw Dee and Norma run from the line of trees above the pool and down towards the water. Their clothes were in disarray; they both looked terrified.
And bursting from another section of the woods, heading straight towards Jenny, came a creature she could only describe as ‘a really angry tree’.
“Jizz, I really don’t know what’s going on here.”
“Yer don’t say.”
As the tree thing bore down on her, Jenny dropped into a crouch and pumped a blast of witchfire into its mid-section. It roared and skidded to a halt, batting at its burning leaves.
Down in the pool, four figures flailed, unaware of the invisible thing that towered over them.
“Jizz, I need you to distract that troll,” said Jenny.
“What? Me?”
“Now!”
“Yes, boss.” He leapt down into the water.
Jenny ran to the right, putting the tree between her and the pool, and summoned a massive surge of witchfire, scorching its trunk and singeing a significant number of branches. Its roar turned into a howl of pain. As she had desperately hoped, it turned and fled from her. Down to the pool.
Jenny followed, giving it an enthusiastic blast every few seconds. She heard the sound of the tractor engine starting up and the screech of tortured metal. She kept blasting the tree thing with witchfire and it plunged without hesitation into the flame-quenching waters.
Straight into the troll-thing that was currently ripping the front wheels off the tractor.
Dee hauled a young man out onto the banks of the pool as Lesley-Ann Faulkner, all aflame, hit the water with a massive, steamy hiss. Dee, who rarely coped well with multi-tasking, struggled to comprehend what was going on.
Here she was with a gangly youth in her arms. The gangly youth clearly had a dislocated shoulder; he mumbled, on the edge of conscious. Over there, Norma, Kay and a teenager who bore a suspicious resemblance to Caroline, clambered up another bank.
And there, in the centre of the pool, Lesley-Ann Faulkner appeared to be engaged in a life-or-death wrestling match, or some form of supernatural ballroom dancing, with a giant but invisible assailant while – and this was the odd part – a driverless tractor with much of its front end missing, attempted to cut in between the two of them.
“What the hell is that?” Caroline, drenched and filthy, pointed at the fiery tree monster.
“That, Miss Black, is Lesley-Ann Faulkner,” said Norma, attempt to wring pond water out of her tweed skirts.
“Who the buggering fuck is Lesley-Ann Faulkner?”
“It’s just a name,” said Norma. “Dee said we had to give it a name.”
Out in the pond, the violent and invisible force lifted the tractor and, with a titanic swipe, used it to slice Lesley-Ann Faulkner in two. The tree groaned, its upper half fell away into the pool, and was still.
Kay looked at Caroline. “Did this kind of stuff happen when you were a teenager?”
Jenny’s heart leapt to see Kay and the others unharmed. She was further cheered to see the troll thing, bleeding from various cuts, one eye permanently closed and bloodied, and a large splinter of branch impaling its hand, turn and flee back up the dyke it had come from.
Jizzimus, wet and stinking but otherwise unharmed, bounded up to Jenny.
“You should ’a’ seen me boss, driving the tractor. I’m a natural! Call me Farmer Geddon.”
“You’re a natural all right. We can’t let that thing get away.”
“I think we should absolutely let it get away,” said Jizzimus.
Jenny began running back along the bank. “Then we need to know where its lair is. We need to know what
it is.”
Dee reset the boy’s shoulder, cast a generic healing ward on him and, because she thought he, she and the world in general could do with a break from his pained moaning, put him to sleep with a magical hand-jive and incantation that might or might not have been borrowed from a Disney movie. That done, she schlepped through the mud, stepping over the steaming remains of Lesley-Ann Faulkner, to reach the other witches.
“I,” said Caroline-the-teenager, “am very, very confused.”
“Have you been drinking?” asked Dee.
“Wait just a second,” interrupted Norma. “Miss Black: has Miss Wun been drinking as well?”
“Maybe,” said Kay happily.
“What on earth were you thinking?”
Caroline huffed. “Kay is old enough to drink. If you tell her she’s not supposed to she’ll just want to do it more. We had a chat and there were some things she wanted to try out. Things she missed when she was a teenager.”
“Is that what the glamour’s for?” said Dee.
With a click of her fingers, Norma removed Caroline’s enchantment. “There. Back to your normal annoying self.”
“Listen, I wanted to help Kay. You know I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her.”
“So where did the tree monster come from exactly?” Kay asked.
“That was me and Norma,” admitted Dee.
“Mostly you I think, Dee,” said Norma haughtily.
“We were doing, er, combat practice and it got out of hand. Reckon your flame thrower set the woods on fire as well, Norma. Good job really.”
“Simply not possible!” snapped Norma, “I did not start a fire!”
They all turned to stare at the charred trees and still-smouldering Lesley-Ann Faulkner.
“The evidence would suggest otherwise,” said Caroline.
“I don’t care what the evidence suggests,” said Norma.
“Biscuit,” said Kay.
Dee reached forward and plucked a handful of charred acorns from the tree. They fizzed with raw magical potential, creaking with the urge to grow up, to become something much, much more.
She put them in her pocket.
As Jenny gave chase along the wide dyke, she drew near to where the ghostly maidens waited. How many youngsters had the creature killed? How many years had it been skulking and ambushing the unwary in these waters?
“They’re fadin’, guv,” said Jizzimus.
Indeed, the girls were becoming translucent: disappearing in the noon sunlight.
“They jus’ wan’ed you to give that bastard thing a pastin’,” said the imp. “Their business is done.”
Jenny smiled for only a split second. Jizzimus was wrong. “No,” she said. “It’s the potion. It’s wearing off!”
Up ahead, limping between grassy banks, the troll-brute was also fading away. Its grey flesh paled like dissipating cloud.
“No!” shouted Jenny.
She paused for a second to hurl witchfire, but it was too far away. The creature cried out – in pain or defiance, she couldn’t tell – and hurried on to where the dyke ran under a hedge-lined road. The creature, just on the cusp of visibility, pushed itself through the wide pipe which carried the dyke under the road, and it was gone.
Jenny had no intention of giving up the pursuit. She pressed on, barged through the hedge and came up onto the narrow road. She gasped and panted and surveyed the area. The dyke continued ahead but there was no sign of the beast, no tell-tale ripples. The fields of yellow-flowered rape beyond swayed in the breeze, not with the passage of a monster.
“We lost it,” she panted.
“Cockcheddar,” said Jizzimus supportively.
She slumped to a crouch in the road and shook her head. “Jizz.”
“Yes, boss.”
“It’s been a funny old day. What do you reckon Kay and Caroline were up to?”
“Chugging industrial-strength cider and tonguing local boys.”
Jenny nodded. “Probably. But I’m damned if I know what Dee and Norma were up to in the woods.”
“Indulging in a Sapphic orgy boss, that’ll be it. I might keep an eye on ’em for you.”
His tongue waggling leer actually made Jenny laugh out loud. She was about to tell him to stop when a car shot round the bend in the road. Jenny came to her feet; not fast enough. The car swerved, caught her upper leg. She was flipped over, her face smacked against something hard. That was all she knew.
Chapter 5 – Sand Witches
“It’s true,” said Caroline as they crossed the lawns to the teaching hut. The sun shone brightly on its ageing paintwork.
Dee gave Caroline her most confused look. Dee was a dab hand at looking confused. “Sold?”
“To a man in Porto.”
“Like a people trafficker?” said Dee.
Caroline shrugged. “It’s what she said.” She watched Dee closely. “What do you know about it?”
“What makes you think that I know anything, sweetness?”
“Your face is an open book. With lots of pretty pictures.”
“Curse you, face,” said Dee. “Fine. All I know is what happened the day we came here. A man was chasing them.”
“Kay and Jenny?”
Dee nodded. “Jenny had rescued her from some man. Jenny said he had kidnapped Kay. The only reason they’re here is because they’re trying to lay low.”
“So what’s Jenny got to do with this kidnapping plot?”
“Nothing. I think. Jenny just stepped in and helped her. And she’s been trying to help her ever since.”
That gave Caroline pause for thought. She had imagined Jenny was some mother hen type: over-protective and controlling; but, in the light of this new information…
“Do you think they’re in danger?” she asked.
“Jenny seems to think so. She said the kidnapper was a— Sh’up!”
Dee nudged Caroline. Kay sat on the doorstep of the teaching hut ahead, slumped like a discarded marionette.
“Morning, kiddo,” said Caroline.
“Ugh,” replied Kay with feeling.
“Oh dear. What’s the matter, poppet?” asked Dee.
“Too much Liquid Lightning yesterday?” suggested Caroline.
“It hurts,” said Kay.
Dee rummaged through her purse and pulled out a jar of leaves. “We’ll have you sorted in no time.”
Caroline put a gentle, restraining hand on her. “No. This is all part of the magical teenage experience.”
“My wee smells of apples,” said Kay. “Is that normal? Am I going to die?”
Caroline hoisted Kay to her feet and guided her indoors. “Not today, kiddo.”
Inside the hut, Effie stood at her teaching position, wearing a Fairport Convention T-shirt and an impatient expression. “If you’d care to take your seats, ladies.”
Norma and Shazam were already seated. Shazam’s large hair was looking especially bouffant today. Mr Beetlebane, equally bouffant, seemed unwilling to settle on her lap.
“How was the spa, Cobwebs?” asked Caroline as she guided Kay to a chair.
“It was wonderful,” said Shazam. “I’ve never felt so pampered. We had a something-something massage and hot stone therapy. And then we went in the sauna but Mr Beetlebane didn’t like that as it made him go all poofy. And then we had a ying-yang algae seaweed wrap.”
“For lunch?” said Kay, looking green.
“And then I had a rhassoul mud massage and a detox scrub. It was amazing.”
“You definitely have a healthy glow about you,” said Dee.
Like boiled shellfish, thought Caroline.
“And did Sabrina enjoy it?” asked Dee. Sabrina was absent from the hut. So was Jenny.
“Where’s Jenny?” said Caroline.
“She wasn’t in the room last night,” Kay mumbled.
“I have some unfortunate news,” said Effie. “If you could please be seated.”
Jenny woke slowly, fighting it all the way. She remembered th
e car accident, felt the physical memory of it in her legs, her head and her spine. She didn’t want to wake into a world of screaming agony or life-altering injuries. To her surprise, she came round with only the numbest of pain in her legs, and a dull throbbing ache in her head. She opened her eyes, prepared to see a hospital ward, life support machines and saline drips. Instead, she was lying in a large and luxurious bed in a room of equally large and luxurious proportions. The bedlinen had a subtle smell of lavender. Either the NHS wasn’t half as bad as people claimed, or someone had brought her to a five star hotel to recover.
Jizzimus sat on the damask top sheet, watching her. He looked genuinely worried. Jenny wanted to hug the horrible little homunculus.
“You all right, boss?” he said. “Blink once for yes, twice for no.”
“How long have I been out?” she croaked.
“All night long.”
A shadow shifted in the corner of the room. There was a woman who hadn’t been there before. “You’ve been asleep since yesterday afternoon.” She pushed heavy curtains wide and the room filled with morning light. “I thought a sleeping draught would help you heal. How’s the head?”
“Sore.”
The woman had sparkling amber eyes and a vaguely aristocratic bearing, and though she looked middle-aged, time had softened her features rather than worn them. Jen suspected that a punishing detox diet or the world’s subtlest plastic surgery played a part. Either that or a genetic heritage to die for.
The woman placed a hand on Jenny’s forehead. “May I?”
The woman muttered softly and the throbbing in Jenny’s head subsided. A witch then, thought Jenny. “Where am I?” she asked.
“My home,” said the woman. “The nearest hospital is in Boston and we don’t need to bother them over a pair of broken legs.”
“Broken legs!” Jenny sat up and threw the sheets back, flinging Jizzimus off the bed and onto the dressing table.
“All mended now,” said the woman.
