by Edrei Cullen
Under her breath she whispered to her own Protector. ‘But how do we even know if it’s safe to talk to Max, Charlie? Maybe it’s all just a strange coincidence,’ she added, decisively, ‘and we’re blowing it out of proportion. And anyway, are you really sure Max is the best person to be talking to? I mean, he lost his memory in the garden somewhere today. If he can’t even hold onto his own memory, how in Magic is he going to Unweave someone else’s dream? And as for seeing Dixon, well…’
‘Something strange is going on!’ said Charlie. He threw his grubby hands up and tipped his head at Ella like an exasperated parent who had repeated the same thing to his child a gazillion times. ‘I can’t just do nothing about that, can I? And nor can you! And, you know, if there’s anything in it that could help find Thomas and Bolgus…’
Charlie’s pet frog, Harold, ribbited in agreement from a perch on his shoulder.
Ella sighed. Charlie and the frog were right.
When they got home, Ella promised to talk to Max on Monday, then she sent Charlie off. His remarkably fast feet zoomed down the Willow Farm hill and up the next to his own house. Charlie’s mother had a penchant for growing potatoes (even though she had no green finger to speak of) and Charlie could hardly wait to get to the potato patch and try out a new spell he’d learned in Horticulture for encouraging growth. Having such weak abilities with plants meant that Charlie preferred to practise such Magic in the privacy of his own home, when nobody, especially not his human parents, would be paying him any attention.
Ella was met by Granny in her driveway, who was accompanied, as always, by her two labradors, Noughts and Crosses. The happy dogs went wild, sniffing at Ella’s skateboard bag, sensing the pixie hidden inside it. Granny ordered them away with two quick clicks of her manicured fingers, entirely unaware (being simply human) of the Magical in their midst.
Mr P took his leave, a look of deep worry furrowed on his brow.
‘Your father is here for the weekend, dear,’ said Granny tentatively, as she steered her beloved granddaughter into the kitchen for tea.
Ella’s eyes instantly lit up. Her father lived alone in London, caught in a deep depression since his wife and sons were taken on that dreadful day of the automobile accident, but lately he’d been visiting Willow Farm more and more. She always hoped his visits might have something to do with wanting to know her a little better.
‘We’ll hardly see him,’ Granny promptly added, ‘so don’t get your hopes up. You know what he’s like, darling.’
Ella’s long hair flared as she thought of the accident. Her, human grandmother, as usual, chose to entirely ignore the strangeness of it. It never ceased to perplex Ella that her grandparents could ignore this oddity with such determination. But as humans they were terribly good at only seeing what they wanted to. And anyway, how on Earth were humans expected to imagine that Ella had elf blood running through her veins?
Grandpa arrived to dinner late. Since retiring from his lollipop empire he had become a brilliant animal trainer. He was teaching his giraffe, Truffles, now full grown and terribly accomplished, how to foxtrot and he was awfully excited, as he sliced off a chunk of vegetable pie, to tell Ella all about it.
Ella’s father appeared at the table later still. He slipped into his chair like a sullen teen, nodding shyly by way of acknowledgement. Ella nodded shyly back.
‘Say hello to your daughter,’ said Granny gently.
Father pulled at the sleeves of his worn green cardigan before looking up at Ella. Ella caught his eye… and then a strange thing happened. Ella felt her memory in Instinctamology resurface inexplicably. Remembering the sound of her father’s sobs made her swallow back tears herself.
She clutched her glass of water and took a sip. Dixon, who was sitting beside her plate, nibbling on a piece of carrot she’d put on its edge for him, looked up suddenly, sensing her change of mood. Not that anyone other than Ella could see him there, although it did seem strange to Grandpa that there was a bit of carrot disappearing for no apparent reason off the side of his granddaughter’s plate.
‘He did say hello,’ said Ella simply, putting down her glass. ‘In his own way.’
Her father smiled at her gratefully and Ella’s heart swelled.
Dixon, who was standing up now, looked at Father and back at Ella. Then he looked at Father again and back at Ella. Then he got all confused and started looking back and forth so much and so fast, he had to grab his head to stop it! He certainly hadn’t heard her father say hello. But more surprising, it was a novelty to hear Ella defend him!
Granny, who also looked a little surprised to hear Ella coming to her father’s defense, didn’t have a chance to say anything, for Grandpa had already launched into an impassioned monologue about the intricacies of dancing and African animalia. Fascinated, Dixon was up and away in an instant, off to sit beside Grandpa’s plate. He stared up at him, mouth open, a little carrot swinging off his bottom lip, hanging on every word.
The distraction gave Ella a chance to contemplate this sudden protectiveness she felt. She was used to feeling guilty whenever her father was around, for she really felt somehow that it was her fault that her mother and brothers were lost that day when the grey cloud descended and sent their car careening through the stone walls and off that bridge. She felt that maybe he blamed her, or that maybe he resented her for surviving, along with Manna.
As the sound of his sobs from her memory echoed in her heart, it occurred to her that the loss of her mother and brothers had been even greater for him than for her. After all, she had only been three at the time. Ella battled down the tingle in her shoulders and the itch in her ears. She pulled her wandering hair back into a tight ponytail and twisted it into a knot.
Granny had turned the conversation at the table to tomorrow’s visit to see Mrs Dribbleton-Faucet, Ella’s old governess. Dribbles, who had retired to a village nearby, was a rhinoceros of a woman who utterly despised Ella. She was, in Granny’s words, ‘ever so excited’ about seeing Ella. Really! Granny only ever saw what she wanted to!
Ella smiled as brightly as she could, but she couldn’t stop herself peering at her father whenever Granny turned away to berate Grandpa for his ‘tiresome obsession’.
It disturbed Ella that there was no light in her father’s eyes. It reminded her a little of Gloria Ulnus’s eyes these days. Gloria’s eyes had once shined with malice but these days, they were dull and empty—as if she’d lost what she’d believed in.
Grandpa suddenly gathered Granny in his arms over by the sink to show her the foxtrot according to giraffes. Dixon swayed off the top of Grandpa’s head, delighted to be a part of the dancing trio. If Ella hadn’t been so caught up in her new feelings of empathy for her dad, she would have been amused to watch her little friend. There was something particularly funny about a pixie swinging off a human being, especially when the human being had no idea the pixie was there!
Grandpa annoyed Granny, there was no doubt about it, but Ella noticed that she clearly loved him, too. It seemed important, somehow, to realise that humans don’t always say what they mean and don’t always express themselves very clearly. While Dixon—well he couldn’t help spelling out every feeling he had, as if it were the beginning and the end of the world!
Ella tipped her head as she watched her grandparents. Grandpa was pulling Granny this way and that as he tried to show her the movements of a giraffe’s four feet. Granny swatted at Grandpa with her dishcloth but her silver hair bounced in a playful way and her face was struggling not to smile.
Back at the table, Father also watched Grandma and Grandpa. His eyes and his mouth drooped over his grey face in a way that pulled on Ella’s heartstrings. Ella shook her head as today’s Poofed memory grew bolder inside her. It danced about in her head and her heart and seemed to deliver an urgent, if indecipherable message.
Her father turned to her. She looked him square in the eyes. Her heart pounded. She gulped. She knew her eyes were shining that weird bright green
they did when she was particularly magic. She blinked to try to stop it. But she couldn’t. Just before he looked away, Ella’s mouth opened and she blurted out a few words that she never would have, never could have, dreamed of blurting in her life before. Oh gosh!
‘What was in those notebooks you sat me next to the day after Mother died?’
The blacks of her father’s eyes dilated. He breathed in so hard it made Granny and Grandpa stop foxtrotting mid-step, as though suddenly dancing on eggshells. Father sat, straight as a pole, transfixed on his daughter. Ella sat, straight as a pole, transfixed on her father.
‘Em, excuse me,’ interjected Granny protectively, thrusting Grandpa aside. Ella and her father never really spoke. There’d been nothing but the simple niceties of life between them for ten years. ‘What’s all this?’ Granny continued. ‘Dessert I think. Yes. Dessert. Stop it now,’ she said to Grandpa, or Father or Ella or someone, swatting Grandpa with her tea towel, knocking poor Dixon, unwittingly, clear off Grandpa’s head.
Father slumped in his seat and returned his gaze to his plate. Ella’s heart thumped like a drum. How could he just ignore her?
She stood up to clear the table, trying to control a rising sense of anger and panic, as if alarm bells were ringing inside her. But as she reached for her father’s plate, he reached out his hand to stop her. His touch made Ella’s skin tingle!
‘The notebooks were your mother’s diaries,’ he whispered. ‘I thought it would be nice for you to be near something precious to her because I couldn’t be… I’m sorry.’
Outside the kitchen window, perched in an oak tree, wings aflutter, Manna, Ella’s mum’s mum, watched the mostly-human family say their goodnights. Her Goblin Protector, Mr P, watched her anxiously from the shadows of the tree trunk. At her age, she didn’t fly much at all anymore, but when Mr P told her what Charlie had said in the car that afternoon, he couldn’t stop her grabbing two letters out of a locked box in her study and flying right out the window at once.
As soon as she was sure all the lights in the Willow Farm house were out, she flew up to Ella’s father’s window and, with a simple enchantment, bade the windows open. Silently, she placed the two letters in her possession on Mr Montgomery’s bedside table.
‘It’s time,’ she whispered to her sleeping son-in-law, before taking her leave.
chapter 6
power stations & prophecies
Samuel Happenstance, sole chairman of the Flitterwig Rooniun, floated past a newsstand outside Green Park tube station in London and smiled gently to himself.
SECOND POWER STATION DISAPPEARS DESPITE 24 HOUR SECURITY
Beside The Evening Standard a misty sheet hung in the air, bearing the title The Daily Flitterwig.
FLITTERWIG ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION WORK REACHES NEW HEIGHTS. FURTHER POWER STATION POLLUTANTS OF THE PLANET REMOVED.
Samuel’s long, emerald-coloured jacket floated about his tall, slim frame as if it had a life of its own. He tucked a loose strand of his wavy, greying hair over a delicate, if extremely pointy, ear and averted his smoky eyes. He hated those power stations with a passion. Belching, spluttering, polluting monsters they were, vomiting filth into the clear blue skies, tarnishing the loveliness of nature.
He looked over at a red double-decker bus driving by and sighed proudly. That was one of their conversions, for sure. He could tell by the smell of popcorn coming from the exhaust. Any educated Flitterwig knew that a diesel engine running on vegetable oil gives off the delicious smell of popcorn.
Now that the Flitterwigs, Magicals and Giants were working together again to protect the natural balance of things, as part of the Special Flitterwig/Magical Operations Group, headed by Samuel himself, they had come leaps and bounds in finding ways to supply vegetable oil for these great big guzzlers. Flitterwigs had been collecting waste oil from industrial deep fryers, potato-processing plants, snack food factories and fast food restaurants for years now. With the help of the Elf Queen of Magus and her five supremely powerful Dewdrops, twice in the last twelve months the supply had even been Stretchified, and was now stored in an underground cavern by the Giants of Gommoronahl.
Samuel slipped into the Slug & Lettuce, a barely noticeable Flitterwig drinking hole off Piccadilly, and gently sat down at a table across from a well-set man with large ears, a bushy beard and an honourably strong nose. He was none other than the great scholar Don Filosofico Posiblemente, the Keeper of the Flitterwig Files, records of the historical Magusian Tomes and of Flitterwiggery itself. The man’s eyes were wiser than time and a deeper brown than the finest mahogany. He was reading a misty page of The Daily Flitterwig, concentrating deeply.
Samuel cleared his throat. Don Posiblemente waved the watery page away, his face set serious as a pillar, yet gentle as a tired ox. The page sucked itself up like a waterfall in reverse, and disappeared into an invisible vortex.
‘Tell me everything, Samuel,’ said Posiblemente, his accent British with a twang of the Continent about it. ‘Firstly, how in Magic did you bury the second power station?’ The bearded man motioned for a new round to the bartender, who was an impy-looking fellow wearing a colourful cloth around his head to tie up a mass of dreadlocks.
‘It wasn’t that hard actually,’ Samuel said to the grand Gnome Flitterwig before him, thanking the bartender for his pint of ale with a graceful tip of the head. He paused before speaking again until the dreadlocked Flitterwig was gone. The disappearance of power stations was a matter of national Flitterwig security.
Don Posiblemente laughed a belly laugh, rich and booming. ‘It wasn’t that hard? You can’t fool me,’ he said. ‘Come on, I want every detail!’
‘Well,’ said Samuel, leaning across the table, ‘Thomas and his Giants have been loosening the foundations under the station for three months now. It was simply a matter of geological engineering. With the right force, the ground finally gave way and the plant simply collapsed into the quarry below. Gone!’
Posiblemente nodded his head, impressed.
‘The Giants filled the cavity with rocks and earth, then my Flitterwigs covered it with carpets of wasteland. The tricky part,’ Samuel continued, ‘was getting the edges of our work right.’
Posiblemente nodded again, all ears. Literally.
‘That’s where the Magicals came in,’ said Samuel excitedly. ‘A team of pixies arrived and tweaked and pulled and twisted and shifted the tiniest grains of soil and scraps of grass all night long, blurring the lines between the original terrain and the freshly-laid cover. By morning it was impossible to tell that a building had ever been there at all. You should have seen the faces of the authorities when they turned up! Completely doubting themselves, they were! Consulting their maps, exploring the terrain in helicopters—wondering for the life of themselves whether a power plant had ever existed there in the first place! If it weren’t for the roads that stopped leading to anywhere being proof that something had once been there, I’m sure most of them would have lost their marbles entirely!’
Posiblemente clutched his great belly and chuckled, squeezing his warm eyes shut with pleasure.
‘And what about the security guards, Samuel?’ he said, suddenly serious. ‘No-one was hurt, were they?’
‘Certainly not!’ said Samuel. ‘A team of my best Elf Flitterwigs had them enchanted in less than an hour. They were led off the property and Freezified for the duration of the operation, then Bamboozled just before dawn so that they wouldn’t remember anything. Such fun! Can you imagine? Watching a group of innocent humans walking around in circles wondering what on Earth happened to their power station!’
‘Priceless!’ Posiblemente breathed, putting his hands up to his rich beard. ‘Simply priceless!’ He raised his half-empty glass and clinked it against Samuel’s. ‘Congratulations!’
Posiblemente sighed heavily with satisfaction and looked down into the remains of his dark ale. For a moment sadness flickered across his face. He looked up again.
‘If only Saul had not turn
ed,’ he said. ‘What a day this might have been for him in his environmental protection work.’
Samuel nodded gravely. ‘His ambitions to infiltrate Magus were just too strong to keep him on our side.’
At the mention of the word Magus, The Daily Flitterwig reappeared in a whirl and a spit. Samuel wiped a speck of water from it off his cheek and a stray letter scrabbled in the air to rejoin the newssheet.
The two wisest and most powerful Flitterwigs on this Earthly Earth looked at the words and pictures on the floating page before them. A sketch of Magus shimmered before them from the Opinions section. Magus was the home of pure Magicals; those tiny creatures thought to be myths: pixies, elves, gnomes, goblins, sylphs and so on and so forth. In truth, this land has never actually been seen by a Flitterwig, but there are oh so many descriptions. A Flitterwig artist of some repute had painted a depiction of the Magical Kingdom. The picture floated and sparkled, showing spiralling towers of mercurial water spinning up out of the most luscious green grasses with magical folk popping in and out, some shaking leaves out of windows, others waving goodbye to their families at front doors of homes made of almost-crystalline toadstools with bursting red rooves, tiny doors and windows. There were miles upon miles of flowering blooms and burgeoning trees, and not a telegraph pole in sight. Not a car, not a wisp of smoke, and a sky so clear blue that the most sparkling of aquamarines could not dream of having such freshness.
Beneath the picture, the story of the day read:
Could it be that Saul Bottomly, former co-chairman of the Flitterwig Rooniun might be behind the recent disappearance of the Giants, Thomas and Bolgus Brackenrack? Saul Bottomly defected from the Rooniun three years ago in order to secure himself entry to Magus, relinquishing his illustrious position at the head of our Flitterwig Government to support the Magusian Elf Duke who has long been planning an attack on Magus with Shrinkified human weaponry and machinery. The Elf Duke has not been heard of for a year now and is suspected to be dead on account of poisoning by Earthly Pollution. Could Bottomly be planning an attack with the aid of the Giants? It is the opinion of this writer that…