The Starflash Opal

by Linda Talbot

Gemma’s eye and looks towards the jar of ointment, then at the open window through which Gemma is small enough to climb. She nods to assure him she understands.

  “I’ll come too!” says Wart which was what Swot had been hoping.

  They leave the kitchen. “Where’s Hagatha?” whispers Swot.

  “Listen!” says Wart. Loud snores come from a distant room.

  Swot leads them to the room where the babies are silent again, watching the swinging black cat. “How many babies do you think there are?” asks Swot.

  Wart, who thinks he can count, says “Ten.”

  “No. There are six,” Swot corrects him, still wondering how he is going to rescue them. Zophenas senses his problem and this time she turns the babies into black beetles. The toads look in bewilderment around the room and at the swinging black cat.

  “Where did the babies go?” they ask. Swot sees a large jar on the shelf and rounding up the scurrying beetles, pushes them in and twists on the top. The toads are looking under benches and tables and whirling around in disarray.

  “The ointment!” says Wart suddenly, “We left the ointment.” Blister looks alarmed. They hurry, bells jangling, from the room.

  Swot leaves with the jar by the front door and looks for Gemma. It is a gloomy late afternoon and he strains to see where she might be in the garden. Only the dark plants nod and wave in the sulky wind. Then he sees her, crouching as she passes below the windows, clutching the jar of ointment.

  Swot reaches her and explains about the beetle babies. “Quick, before the toads find the ointment has gone!” he says and they struggle through the wild garden and out into the fields. They run and run. But then they hear Hagatha screaming. She has been woken by the toads.

  Without her ointment she cannot fly and perhaps she cannot do much else, but her screams are suddenly very close. Swot and Gemma crouch behind a tree, drawing its huge green leaves around them.

  Hagatha stumbles past. She covers a lot of ground with each stride, her sloppy dress flapping round her bony legs, and lunges on towards the sea, flinging her arms and snatching in anger at her wild black hair.

  Swot and Gemma wait until her cries grow faint, then creep from their hiding place, still clutching the jars. They make their way towards the Miasmic Sea. They feel the air surge beneath their feet and are lifted up by Zophenas. They rise and dive on the bad tempered wind and have just begun flying over the water when they see the straggly black hair of Hagatha floating on the yellow crest of a wave. She bobs up, her ugly nose appearing first, but her eyes are shut and her arms flounder helplessly.

  “I think she drowned!” says Gemma.

  “Good. Now she can’t do any more harm,” replies Swot.

  The children are swept on across the boiling black sea to the misty land still swirling with curious shapes and shadows. Wearily they peer through the half light, hoping to see Zophenas. At last she appears on a mound of brown grass; her green eyes raised towards them.

  “Aha! Here you are. Did you succeed?”

  “Yes,” says Swot as he and Gemma come gently in to land. “We have the beetle babies too.”

  “Good. I couldn’t let them stay there,” says Zophenas. She takes both jars and, sitting under a blue tree with flopping green tassels, takes the lid off the ointment first. She sniffs and nods. Then she empties out the black beetles and before they can scurry away, says:

  “Beetles scary, beetles black

  Turn back, turn back

  Into babies.”

  Instantly the beetles burst and the babies, dragging their red shawls, crawl out. They start screaming but Zophenas puts a spell of silence on them and they stop, their mouths still open.

  “How will you find their parents?” asks Gemma.

  “That may take a while, but, rest assured, I will send search waves throughout the world above. I’ll find them. If you’ll excuse me I just want to see if this ointment works.” She vanishes and again the children are left in the damp and gloom. Oddly, since eating the red fruit, they are neither hungry nor thirsty. But they are tired. As they sink exhausted into the brown grass and are about to fall asleep, Zophenas reappears. She does not look pleased. “It doesn’t work. You will have to perform Task Number Three children.”

  “What doesn’t work?” asks Gemma.

  “I can’t get out of here and there are only three known ways. We have tried two of them. It must be the third that will take me back to the world above. I suppose you’ll want to go back too?”

  “Of course!” says Swot, “We don’t like it down here. Now if we were in Fairyland or somewhere really interesting.....”

  “That can be arranged if you wish,” sighs Zophenas.

  “Oh, no, I want to go home!” Gemma is near tears.

  “All right, all right. But it will depend on whether you can get me a two-tailed cat from the land of pagodas and kimonos that is in your world, but where you cannot stay until you have returned with the cat. You will first have to find a lovely lady who lives with a lord. When startled she should run away, shrink and turn into a cat with two tails. How you get her back here I’m not sure, but as usual I will help if I can.”

  The children sigh, wanting to sleep, but wait for Zophenas to send them on their final journey.

  They begin to spin in fast circles, the mist flying from them in long grey threads. Yet again, they whirl over the Miasmic Sea, the green hills, red deserts and billowing oceans of Earth. They dive close to a high, snow-covered peak. Mount Fuji, rising from the ancient island of Japan.

  They see sweeping roofs with bright red tiles and rocky gardens with white stones and silver streams crossed by wooden bridges. They descend on a light spring breeze and land outside a large pagoda surrounded by exotic plants in pots.

  The sound of a stringed instrument and the voice of a woman softly singing, drifts from within. Carefully they approach the open door. The woman in a silk kimono painted with chrysanthemums, sits on the floor and plucks the instrument as she sings.

  A fat gentleman sits with her, nodding his head and shaking a floppy double chin as he listens. A table stands between them, spread with delicacies, which the fat man eats without pause.

  “No wonder he’s so fat!” whispers Gemma.

  “Do you think this is the lord’s lady who might turn into a two-tailed cat?” asks Swot.

  “Who knows? We’ll have to scare her and see if she runs away,” says Gemma.

  “Let’s wait until the man goes away, if he ever stops eating!” says Swot.

  They crouch by a large pot of white peonies until the woman stops playing. Then she helps herself to some delicacies and smiles at the fat man. Slowly, with difficulty, he rises and wobbles from the room. The woman spreads her beautiful kimono around her and smiles again. Her face is very white, her lips very red and her shiny black hair is piled high and held with long pins.

  “BOO!” shouts Swot suddenly. Even Gemma jumps.

  The woman drops her food and leaps to her feet, nearly falling over her kimono. She has never seen two children covered in the grime of the Underearth. She thinks they are demons.

  She stumbles out of the room and the children run after her. She flees, screeching, up a narrow passage, and as the fat man reappears, vanishes into the garden. Swot and Gemma hide behind a huge vase as the fat man lumbers past, calling after her. When he has crashed twice round the garden and found no sign of her, he staggers, gasping for breath, back into the house and disappears through another sliding door.

  Gemma and Swot run into the garden and look behind pots, rocks and up trees. Has the woman turned into a cat? They hear a high-pitched voice from behind a hedge.

  “Is it me you want? If you do, you’ll have to catch me. Ten paces from where you stand, multiply by four and divide by two,” the creature cackles.

  “That’s twenty paces!” says Swot. They move that distance towards the hedge which quivers and separates to reveal a large cat whose fur shines with red, black and green squiggles. She has si
lver eyes and - yes - two spiky tails.

  “Come on then - catch me!” the cat teases and bounds off towards a tree with a thick grey trunk. She shoots up it and wedges herself at the end of two narrow branches.

  Swot is a little thinner than Gemma because, at home, he did his homework while she ate big suppers and he remembers her getting wedged in the rocks when they went to find the warlock’s soul.

  “I’ll see if I can get up there!” he says and shins swiftly up the tree. The cat edges to the very end of the branch and grins at him. Her silver eyes expand like saucers.

  But Swot wiggles between the branches, tearing his trousers and grazing his legs, until he can reach out and almost touch one of the cat’s pointed black ears. She laughs, draws back and topples from the tree into the long grass. Gemma is waiting and reaching out, grabs one of her long tails.

  The Two-Tailed Cat

  Back to the Start!

  “YOWL!” bawls the cat. Swot arrives and grabs the other tail.

  “You must come with us!” he commands. The cat tries to bite them but her tails hurt so much, she collapses in the grass.

  “Come with us to a wonderful land where cats live on cream and have diamond-studded collars!” says Swot in desperation, as the cat regains her legs and prepares to flee.

  Gemma giggles, knowing this is not true, but sees the cat’s silver eyes light up.

  “I love cream and I’ve always wanted a diamond-studded collar,” she says, “I’ll come if it’s not too far. I have this feeling I was