Explorers on Witch Mountain

by Alex Bell

  ‘It were a fat-man-gobbler what done for Crunch,’ Munch said. ‘Ironic, really, considering he was the skinniest beanpole you ever saw. Could’ve used Crunch to fence with, if you had half a mind.’

  ‘You must have half a mind if you think we’re going to be taken in by this codswallop,’ Ethan said. He snatched the blanket from Stella’s fingers, dangled it at Munch and said, ‘Did you honestly think you could pass off this bit of old rag as a magic fort blanket?’

  Munch gave him a withering look and took the blanket from him. ‘The password,’ he said, ‘is Rattlesnake Ragtime.’

  The moment the words were out of his mouth, the blanket magically transformed itself into a magnificent fort that sprang up around them. It was big enough to encompass the five people and the entire trading post. There was even room for Margaret and the camel, which seemed most put out by the sudden appearance of the tent and spat at the wall in an offended manner.

  Stella could hardly contain her delight. The massive tent was full of overstuffed cushions, velvet pouffes, gilded ottomans and billowing silk curtains. There was even a fire pit in the middle of the tent, crackling away warmly. You could tell it was an explorers’ tent from the maps that lined the walls, the rifles slung over the backs of chairs, and the pith helmets and safari hats hanging from pegs in the corner.

  ‘Outsider alert,’ Munch said, and the whole thing collapsed back into an old blanket in his hand. He gave Ethan a self-satisfied look. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Not so full of smart comments now, are you?’

  ‘This would be incredibly useful,’ Shay said. ‘And so would that magic carpet. How much would you like for them?’

  ‘One hundred pieces of gold for the magic fort blanket,’ Munch said promptly. ‘And five hundred pieces for the magic carpet.’

  ‘We’ve got nowhere near that!’ Stella said.

  ‘Well, what have you got?’ Munch demanded.

  The four explorers did a quick check of their bags and pockets, then Stella turned back around and said, ‘We’ve got five pieces of gold.’

  ‘And a wonky squish-squish frog,’ Ethan said, pulling Gideon from his pocket and dangling him by his foot.

  ‘We’re not trading Gideon,’ Stella hissed. ‘Put him back.’

  ‘Five pieces of gold!’ Munch exclaimed, looking horrified. ‘Why, that’s not enough to even buy this rusty old compass, and that’s broken besides. I thought explorers were supposed to be loaded? You kids already owe me eighty gold pieces.’

  ‘But we haven’t bought anything from you!’ Shay protested.

  ‘You’ve had two magic carpet trips,’ Munch said, holding up two fingers. ‘That ain’t for free, you know. And somebody owes me for an entire crate of Captain Ishmael’s Premium-Grade, Expedition-Strength Salted Rum.’

  ‘We haven’t had any rum, you blaggard!’ Ethan said indignantly.

  ‘No, but they have.’ Munch pointed at the jungle fairies, who had passed out in a heap on Margaret’s back, snoring loudly and reeking of booze. ‘And they’re your fairies, ain’t they?’

  ‘Those fairies do not belong to us,’ Ethan said firmly.

  ‘Well, they’re part of your gang, and no one short changes Munch,’ he said. ‘No one. Mr Weenus would have my guts for garters.’

  Shay sighed. ‘We could give you the cow?’ he offered.

  ‘If you promise to take care of her,’ Stella hastened to add.

  Munch eyed Margaret dubiously. ‘Is she a milking cow?’ he asked.

  ‘The best,’ Ethan said. ‘There’s a whole creamery on that dirigible that she’s filled with all kinds of delicious cheeses and—’

  Munch snapped his fingers. ‘That’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the dirigible and we’ll call it quits. I’ll even throw in Nigel.’

  He gestured at the camel behind him. ‘We don’t want a camel—’ Shay began.

  ‘Neither do I,’ Munch said, unlooping the reins and passing them to Stella. ‘Camels and cows don’t get on – everyone knows that. So if I’m taking the cow, then you’ve got to take Nigel. He’s been nothing but trouble for me since the moment he arrived.’

  Nigel seemed to sense he was being talked about because he peered down his nostrils at Munch with an offended look. Still, at least it meant they’d have something to carry their bags.

  ‘If you’re going to take the entire dirigible then you’ll have to give us the magic fort blanket too,’ Shay said, folding his arms. ‘It’s not a fair trade otherwise.’

  ‘Naturally, matey, naturally,’ Munch said. ‘Weenus’s Trading Post only deals in fair bargains. Besides which, if you’re heading up the mountain then all this stuff is guaranteed to come back to me pretty quick anyway.’ He thrust the blanket at the wolf whisperer and gave the explorers a toothy grin. ‘Nice doing business with you, kids.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Stella carefully scooped up the snoring jungle fairies and draped them over one of Nigel’s humps, before tying some of the bags to the camel and putting Buster back in her pocket. They examined the map, but it wasn’t really much help in working out where Jezzybella lived. In fact, it didn’t have much detail on it at all. As President Fogg had said, there was only one expedition that had ever gone to Witch Mountain and almost everyone on it had perished. There were just a few things on the map that the surviving jungle fairy had filled in, but the expedition had taken place more than twenty years ago and things could have moved around since then for all they knew.

  But there was only one path winding its way up the mountain, and so the explorers followed it, their boots crunching in the deep snow. When they’d put a decent amount of distance between themselves and Weenus’s Trading Post, they stopped to take stock of their provisions.

  They had Stella’s magic tiara, a small selection of food, a pixie lamp, a telescope, a camel, a magic fort blanket and four drunk jungle fairies. Beanie had brought a bag full of jellybeans that he’d managed to keep hidden from the fairies, and also a medical kit. Ethan said he had packed all manner of useful supplies in his bag, from weapons to binoculars, but, unfortunately, he had somehow picked up Gideon’s bag instead of his own, and this seemed to be filled with napkin rings, hairbrushes, a few pocket mirrors, and some silver tins of Captain Greystoke’s Expedition-Flavour Smoked Caviar.

  ‘Well, there’s no use worrying about that now,’ Shay said. ‘We’re just going to have to make do with what we’ve got.’

  ‘I suppose this witch is bound to live right at the top of the mountain,’ Ethan grumbled as they set off. ‘That would be just our luck.’

  ‘We’re going to have to be extremely careful,’ Shay said. His shadow wolf, Koa, was padding along at his side, her pointed ears flat against her head as she sniffed at the air. ‘This isn’t like before. This time we know exactly what lies ahead, and it’s not good.’

  Stella shuddered. Up until now, some small part of her hadn’t quite believed that she was really going to come face-to-face with the witch who had murdered her parents, and tried to kill her too. The thought was too big and horrible and wrong. She should be running away from the witch, not towards her. Jezzybella must be extremely powerful to have been able to kill both of Stella’s parents, in their own castle, surrounded by an army of stone trolls. But that was exactly why Stella couldn’t leave Felix to face her alone. And, while the witch roamed free, she knew she could never feel safe herself either.

  She gazed up at the jagged peaks of Witch Mountain, reaching straight into the stormy sky, and she couldn’t help thinking that they were just four junior explorers, a camel and a wonky squish-squish frog. What could they possibly do?

  ‘Don’t think about the entire task,’ Felix told her whenever something seemed too difficult or overwhelming to even make a start. ‘Just think about the first thing you have to do to begin, and go from there. That’s all there is to it. That’s the secret to achieving unachievable things. Just take it one tiny, little, manageable piece at a time.’

  Stella knew that the fir
st thing she had to do was take one step up Witch Mountain, then one more, and another one after that, until she found the witch’s lair. And if she was scared at the thought, well, it didn’t matter. She was going to do it anyway.

  ‘Smells like magic,’ Ethan said, tilting his pointed nose into the air. ‘That can’t be a good sign.’

  He was quite right. A smell of burnt sugar hung about the place, thick as treacle in the air around them.

  ‘It was only to be expected,’ Shay said calmly. ‘We all knew what we were going to find here.’

  Stella looked at her friends and felt a burst of gratitude and gladness that they had come with her – had rushed straight to her aid the moment she needed them, in fact. Difficult things were always easier to face when you had good friends at your side.

  They trudged on through the snow, pulling their cloaks closer to keep out the cold. Sometimes the path wound around the edge of the mountain – and they very quickly had to turn their eyes away from the sheer drop below – and at other times the path cut right into the black rock, which soared above them steeply.

  They were in one of these rocky chasms when Ethan suddenly stopped and said, ‘Does anyone else have the feeling that we’re being followed?’

  The others paused, gazing back at the empty path behind them.

  ‘You’re imagining it,’ Shay finally said. ‘It’s the mountain playing tricks on you.’

  Ethan frowned. ‘I thought I heard footsteps behind us a moment ago. And felt eyes on the back of my neck. Magicians are extremely sensitive to eyes on the back of the neck, you know. We can sense when we’re being watched.’

  ‘It might be bats, rats or cats,’ Beanie said. ‘Witch Mountain is bound to be crawling with those.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Ethan said doubtfully.

  They continued on their way and, almost at once, Stella knew what Ethan meant. She could sense it too – a prickly feeling right on the back of her neck. Several times she glanced sharply behind her, but the path was always completely empty.

  ‘Would you two stop doing that?’ Shay said. ‘This is going to be a very long journey if we’re all jumping at shadows every moment.’

  They turned around a corner in the path just then and found themselves face-to-face with a cave entrance – two cave entrances, in fact, side by side.

  Beanie groaned. ‘Caves are never good,’ he said. ‘There are so many ways you can perish in a cave.’ And, to everyone’s dismay, he started counting them off on his fingers. ‘Ravaged by bats, drowned in rock pools, crushed by a rockslide, suffocated by moths, eaten by hairy-leg spiders, sliced in half by—’

  ‘Beanie, stop it,’ Stella said. ‘No one wants to hear these things.’

  ‘There’s no other path,’ Shay said. ‘And no way round.’ He glanced at the others and said, ‘If we want to carry on, then we’re going to have to go through one of these caves.’

  Ethan sighed. ‘A pitch-black cave in Witch Mountain,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it will be fine. Absolutely fine.’

  Stella dug out the map from her bag and they all gathered around it. The map did indeed show two caves. One of them was marked as the Cave of Hypnotising White Cats. The other was marked as Unknown.

  ‘Hypnotising white cats don’t sound good,’ Shay said, chewing his lower lip. ‘I mean, I like cats normally but these will be witches’ cats, won’t they?’

  ‘Witches’ cats can be extremely dangerous,’ Beanie agreed. ‘You’ve got hypnotising cats, levitating cats, eye-clawing cats, fury-spitting cats.’ He frowned and added, ‘There were reports that Captain Unwin Marjory Banks decided to buy a hypnotising white cat when he retired to the Karzak Jungle. One day he didn’t get up to feed the cat its breakfast, so it hypnotised him into walking straight into the piranha-infested river outside.’

  ‘Why would anyone want a hypnotising cat as a pet in the first place?’ Ethan demanded. ‘Seems like a terrible idea.’

  ‘Too much tiger punch, perhaps?’ Beanie suggested. ‘He was a Jungle Cat explorer, after all.’

  ‘Well, let’s go with this other cave,’ Shay said, pointing at the unnamed one. ‘For all we know, there might not be anything dangerous in that one at all, whereas we know the other one is going to be tricky for a fact.’

  ‘Koa seems to prefer it, though,’ Stella said.

  They all looked to see that Shay’s shadow wolf was, indeed, standing right outside the Cave of Hypnotising White Cats, gazing back at them hopefully and wagging her tail.

  ‘Oh, Koa loves cats,’ Shay said. ‘She can probably smell them in there and doesn’t realise that they’re hypnotising ones. I say we go through the other cave. It hasn’t been explored yet anyway, so we ought to go that way to help complete the map.’

  There was no arguing with that. They were explorers, after all, so when faced with a choice of this kind, they should always choose the unknown. Stella took the pixie lamp from her bag and gently prodded the fire pixie awake. The pixie uncurled from the floor of her lantern, shook out her fiery long hair and immediately began flitting to and fro, emitting a bright golden light. Stella whispered her thanks, lifting the lantern up high, and the four explorers and the camel stepped into the mouth of the cave, Koa padding after them reluctantly.

  The fire-pixie lamp blazed bright enough to illuminate a good portion of their surroundings, and they saw that it was a huge cave, reaching high up into the rocks and stretching away from them into the darkness. Frozen stalactites and icicles reached down from the ceiling, and blue rock pools gleamed below. The place smelled of cold water and frosty damp.

  ‘I don’t like the look of those,’ Ethan said, gesturing towards the icicles and stalactites above them. ‘They look like hanging swords that could pierce you right through if they were to fall off.’

  ‘Captain Leroy Livingstone Pritchard,’ Beanie said promptly. ‘Impaled by a falling stalactite in the bat caves of Eastern Vampira. It was so massive and sharp that it drove right through his pith helmet and straight into his brain.’

  ‘Thank you, Beanie,’ Ethan said with a sigh. ‘Very helpful.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Beanie said, looking pleased.

  The four explorers moved cautiously forwards. The sense of being watched was stronger than ever, and Stella felt like there were hundreds of unseen eyes peering at them out of the darkness, just beyond the light from the lantern. There was no snow inside the cave, and their boots crunched over frozen shingles. After a little while, Ethan tapped Stella on the shoulder and, when she glanced at him, he jerked his head back towards the path behind them. Stella could hear it too – the unmistakable crunch of footsteps. It was almost lost under the sound of their own and Stella supposed the faint sound could just be an echo. But it could also be someone, or something, following them.

  They carried on down the path, which soon reached a vast stony bridge. Savage-looking stalagmites reached up from the chasm below, interspersed with blue rock pools. Every now and then, a big, fat bubble would rise to the surface of a pool and pop in a suspicious manner, as if there were some large creature breathing beneath the surface.

  ‘I guess we’ll have to cross,’ Stella said. ‘The bridge looks solid enough, at least.’

  Still, there were no handrails, and the explorers stepped cautiously onto the damp stone. They made their way, step by careful step.

  At first, Stella thought it was the flickering, shifting light of the pixie lamp that made it seem as if there were dark shapes gliding above them, but, more and more, she felt like she could see something moving up there, out of the corner of her eye. She tried lifting the pixie lantern a little higher and squinting upwards, but the ceiling was too far away for her to see, and she could only make out shadows of movement.

  ‘I think there’s something up there,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Bats, probably,’ Beanie said. ‘There are ninety-three types of bat in the known world, ninety-one of which will attack humans if they’re provoked—’

  ‘Fortunately,
we’re not provoking anyone,’ Ethan said. He had Nigel’s reins in his hand and gave a bit of a tug to keep the reluctant camel moving. Stella expected him to spit in response but, strangely, the camel seemed to have taken rather a shine to Ethan, and leaned its head down to nibble at his hair in an affectionate manner.

  ‘Get off!’ Ethan batted him away. ‘Ew! Camel breath stinks! It’s a good thing I snatched some of those bath bubbles from Weenus’s Trading Post. I’m not going to walk around smelling like camel breath the entire time.’

  ‘You stole from him?’ Beanie exclaimed, looking upset. ‘Stealing’s wrong. And Munch was very nice to us.’

  Ethan waved his concern away. ‘He was cheating us for all we were worth.’

  The explorers were about halfway across when, suddenly, the rock pools below began to bubble, as if the water were boiling. The four children glanced down at the rock pools and instinct told them that this was not a good development. All the fur on Koa’s back was standing on end. And, as if any further proof was needed, the jungle fairies woke up and immediately started doing their chant of doom.

  Stella turned and saw Mustafah banging away at his drums on Nigel’s back, while Hermina, Harriet and Humphrey showed off their handstands and backflips. The camel’s ears twitched in irritation, and he shook himself in an attempt to dislodge the fairies, but they were staying firmly put.

  ‘Guys,’ Stella said, ‘I think we should—’

  Before she could finish, one of the rock pools below them seemed to explode in a great sea of sparkling white spray and freezing foam. A shark, six-foot-long, burst from the water – mouth open, monstrous teeth gleaming. But rather than flopping onto the rocks and beaching itself there, like a normal shark would have done, this one soared right up into the air, as if it were water. Its sleek grey body seemed to ripple with muscle as it swam through the air up towards the bridge, snapping its teeth at them on its way past their heads. The explorers all ducked in alarm and then looked up only to be met with a terrifying sight.