"What do you see?" the face asked. Charlotte described the map to him.
"I suggest you visit the first hare," the face said. "He will help send you on your way."
"What are you talking about?" Charlotte said. "It's just a wooden hare!"
"Is it, indeed?" With that, the face stopped moving, its features seeming to set back into solid stone in an instant.
"What's going on?" Ben asked Charlotte, who offered him no explanation. He ran up to the stone face and shouted at it. "What's going on? Why is this happening?"
The stone face said nothing.
"Come on," Charlotte said, waving the map in the direction of the first wooden hare. "Let's follow the map."
Chapter 8
The wooden hare identified as number one on the map looked exactly the same as it always had, standing at the end of the path that led from the entrance gate at the car park down to the main park, silently greeting visitors and wishing them a pleasant day. There was a sign next to the hare, which read "There are 12 more hares in the garden. Can you spot them all?" The sign had always been there, but Charlotte and Ben had never really taken notice of it before. For some reason they couldn't put their finger on, the message now had greater significance.
"So what do we do now?" Ben asked.
"I have no idea," Charlotte said. "We've already had a chat with a man made of stone today, so I guess anything could happen."
They stood in silence staring at the wooden hare, but nothing happened. The hare didn't move; it was standing to attention over their father's ashes and a patch of daisies.
"You always patted them on the head," Ben said.
"What?" said Charlotte.
"When we used to come here with Mummy and Daddy. I can remember – you used to do it. You did it this morning too—you patted the hares on the head when we went up to each one."
"Okay," Charlotte shrugged, as if to say, this is no crazier than anything else that's happened to us today. She walked up to the hare, reached a trembling hand out, and lightly patted it on the head, then held her breath and quickly stepped back.
Nothing happened. A moment of silent frustration passed between them. They knew they had to do something, but they didn't know what that was or what would happen when they had done it.
"What did the guardian tell us to do?" Ben asked.
"He told us to visit the first hare," Charlotte said. "He said, 'He will help send you on your way.'"
"Send us on our way where?"
"I don't know,” Charlotte said, and pointed at the sign telling them to find the rest of the hares. “I think maybe we need to visit all the wooden hares."
"To get back to Mummy?"
"I guess so," Charlotte said, shrugging again. She could feel her little brother getting frustrated and scared. He stepped onto the grass, grabbed the wooden hare by the neck and shook it, shouting, "What do you want from us? Why are we here?"
"Ben..." Charlotte said. He ignored her and shook the hare even harder.
"Ben!" she shouted. This time it got his attention.
"What?" he screamed, his face red with exasperation.
She pointed at his feet and said in a more measured tone of voice, "You're standing in Daddy's ashes."
He let go of the hare and jumped back in horror. He looked down and saw the pattern from the sole of his shoe had been imprinted in the ashes. In a frenzy, he rubbed his foot on the grass, desperately trying to get his father's ashes off the sole of his shoe. In doing so, he cut up the grass and daisies under his feet. He began to sob. Charlotte ran over and put an arm around his shoulder.
"I'm sorry, Daddy," he said to the pile of ashes. With arms around each other, they sank to the ground and sat on the grass.
"It's okay, Ben," Charlotte said. "Think about where we are, what we're doing. If Daddy was here, I bet he would love it. It's like a real adventure with real magic, isn't it?"
Ben didn't reply. Instead, he pointed at the grass he had cut up with his shoe and said, "Oh my God, Charlotte. Look at that!"
"What?" She followed his gaze and couldn't believe her eyes. Ben had wrecked that small patch of grass, chewing up the turf and uprooting the patch of daisies, but now, in front of their eyes, the garden was repairing itself. Lumps of soil rolled back into the holes in the ground by themselves, new blades of grass sprouted and rose to fill the gaps, and fresh daisies burst from the ground and opened in the moonlight. It was like they were watching a documentary about plant life, where a time lapse video shows a lawn growing over the course of a month, only it was happening in real time before their eyes.
"I just thought of something," Charlotte said as she reached for her backpack. She found the map of Hare Hill and looked again at the first hare. "Look," she said to Ben, pointing at it. The drawing of the wooden hare had something around its neck. They looked closer and the penny dropped.
"It's a daisy chain," Ben said. "Does that mean we have to make a daisy chain for the first hare?"
"Yes, I think so," said Charlotte. “Let's try it.”
"I've never done that before," said Ben. He was going to add, because that's what girls do, but decided not to.
"Come on, I'll show you how." Charlotte picked two daisies from the grass, but didn't do anything with them immediately. Instead, she watched the spots on the grass where they had been growing and, after a few seconds, shoots sprang up and opened into fresh new daisies. Her mind and body filled with hope and she turned her attention to the daisies in her hands. She took her time, showing her little brother what she was doing as she slit the middle of each stalk open with her thumbnail and fed the end of the second daisy into the hole in the stalk of the first.
"Got it?" she asked. Ben nodded.
"Okay, Ben. I'll pick them and make the holes; you put the chain together."
"Sounds like a plan, Stan," Ben said, and they both smiled. That was something they used to say with their father, but they had stopped saying it around their mother; it always made her cry.
One by one, Charlotte picked the daisies and made holes in them, Ben added them to the chain, and they both watched in ceaseless amazement as each daisy they picked grew back only seconds later. In no time, they had made a long chain and Ben linked the two ends together. He held their delicate construction in his hands and looked at the wooden hare.
"Go on, put it on," Charlotte said.
Very carefully, Ben approached the hare and slipped the daisy chain over its ears, letting it drop down around its neck. They looked at each other as if to say, what now? and they got their answer. The ashes at the hare's feet began to glow; not the red and orange of embers, but a shining golden warmth that grew stronger and stronger until they had to shield their eyes from its dazzling brilliance. Then the ashes rose from the ground and started to spin around the hare. Round and round the glowing ashes danced, faster and faster, until they reached a crescendo and there was a blinding flash from the wooden hare itself.
They opened their eyes and blinked away the spots before them. The golden glow had gone and the ashes had disappeared. The hare was still there, but it wasn't made of wood any longer. It wasn't made of anything; it had turned into a real hare. Its silky brown fur shone in the moonlight and they noticed it was still wearing the daisy chain around its neck. The hare rubbed its eyes with its paws, then looked up at Charlotte and Ben, twitched its nose, and leapt from the place it had stood for so long and ran into the darkness.
"Oh my God!" Charlotte exclaimed. "Can you believe what just happened?"
"It's a real hare," Ben said, still staring at the spot where the hare had disappeared in the distance. "How did that happen?" Then he thought for a moment and said, "What does the map look like now? Are the others on there?"
Charlotte opened up the map, but it looked exactly the same as it did before; the paths were marked and the first hare was there, but the others were all missing.
"If we had to find all the hares, wouldn't the map show us which hare to go to next?" Ben said.<
br />
"Come on," said Charlotte, grabbing Ben's hand. "Let's ask the Guardian."
They returned to the sculpture but the Guardian of Hare Hill's face was still frozen in stone. No matter how much they said his name, asked nicely to talk to him, or shouted at him, his face didn't move.
"I think we need to work this out ourselves," Charlotte said. "Now, can you remember what we did with Daddy when we came here? He always made a map for us like this one..."
"I remember something!" Ben said. "He always said the wooden hares were real hares that had been turned into wood by an evil witch a long, long time ago."
"That's right! And if we completed the challenges they would turn back into real hares for one night after we left the park. Then they would turn back into wooden hares at sunrise."
"And they would be waiting for us to come back the next time, and we could turn them back into real hares for another night!"
"So that's what we're here to do, isn't it? We have to find all the wooden hares and break them out of their spell."
Ben looked worried. "Does that mean the evil witch is here?"
"I don't know," Charlotte said. "Maybe, so we have to stick together. Let’s find the next hare."
They looked at the map, but it still just showed the first hare. Charlotte pointed down the path leading into the park. "Don't worry about the map. I remember where hare number two is; it's just down there."
They walked down the path under a canopy of blossoms until they reached a left turn, where the second wooden hare sat. Or rather, where the second wooden hare usually sat, because now there was just a circle of ashes where the hare should have been.
"Hey, where has it gone?" Ben said.
Charlotte stood in silence for a moment, frustrated that the solution to the puzzle around them was not coming to her.
"Where has it gone?" Ben asked again, this time pulling on his sister's arm.
"Let go!" she said. "Be quiet for a second, I'm thinking."
She paced backward and forward, talking to herself. "What are we doing wrong? We saw the first hare and set it free. Maybe the second one has been freed too? Maybe all of them? But the map still only shows the first one, so we must have to go round the park to find all of them..."
Then it hit her. "That's it!" she exclaimed. "We need to roll the dice to work out where to go next!"
She unzipped her backpack and reached in to search for the two plastic cups with the dice they had used to find their way round the park with their mother. Her hand found the cups and a brilliant white glow burst from her backpack. As she took out the cups, she saw that they were shining brightly, as if light bulbs had been illuminated inside the empty cups.
"What's that?" Ben asked.
"I think we've got magic dice!" Charlotte said, squinting as she handed a glowing cup to her little brother. They held their cups at arm’s length with both hands, averting their gaze from the dazzling light that bathed their corner of the park.
"So what do we do?" Ben asked.
"Let's roll them," Charlotte said.
“But there's nothing in my cup,” Ben said.
“Just pretend there's a real dice die in there, okay? On the count of three. One, two, three!"
They tipped their cups and thrust them forward. The brilliant white light burst forth and two enormous dice made of white light bounced along the path. They left a trail of dancing white flecks of light in their wake and came to a stop. The spots on the top of the dice glowed to tell them the numbers they had rolled.
"I rolled a two," Ben said.
"And I rolled a one," Charlotte said. "That means we're going to hare number three next."
She unfolded the map, and hare number three had appeared, drawn by an invisible hand on the other side of the walled garden. The light from the dice faded and they were left with the plastic cups in their hands, which they put back into Charlotte's backpack.
"Let's go and find the third hare!" Ben said, and grabbed his sister's hand.
Chapter 9
They ran hand-in-hand down the path that led past the east entrance to the walled garden, then turned right at the greenhouse where National Trust staff grew plants and vegetables. Up ahead, they spotted the third wooden hare, lying in the grass next to the path.
"How do we turn this one back into a real hare?" Ben asked. They both looked at the map again and Ben saw something that hadn't been on there before.
"Look, it's a tree!"
Drawn on the map just down the path from where they were, at the east entrance to the walled garden, was a large tree covered with leaves. They ran back up the path and stopped when they saw what was sitting next to the path ahead of them. There was a bucket filled with soil, containing a sapling, and a selection of garden tools: two spades, a trowel, a watering can, and two pairs of gardening gloves.
"They weren't there a minute ago when we came down this way," Ben said.
"This place is magic," Charlotte said.
They thought about this for a moment. Something magical was happening around them, something far beyond their own comprehension, but they felt no fear. If anything, they felt secure and safe in the adventure they found themselves embarking upon. Someone had decided to take them away from their mother and set them on a quest to find her. If the story their father had told them really was true, and a wicked witch had turned these hares into wooden statues, then surely it couldn't be the same witch that was orchestrating these events?
"Well," Charlotte continued, throwing Ben a pair of gardening gloves and slipping her hands into the other pair, "I think we know what we have to do here."
They grabbed a spade each and started to dig. In years gone by, they had seen their mother and father working in their garden at home and, on occasion, they had offered to help. They had always been given straightforward tasks like pulling up weeds, collecting grass, or dropping bulbs into freshly-dug holes. What their parents had never asked them to do—which was only becoming clear to them now—was any of the hard work. Digging a hole in the ground may seem like a simple way of passing the time, but for the eight-year-old Charlotte and five-year-old Ben, it required serious physical effort. The bucket containing the sapling was tall, so they planned to dig a hole deep enough to fit it all in, but then they pressed on with their task without talking to each other.
Ben stopped for a moment to wipe the sweat from his forehead. "This is hard work," he said as he surveyed the scene before him. The hole they were digging was taking on a strange shape; it was too wide, not deep enough and some of the soil they had piled up next to the hole was falling back in. Charlotte was still digging as fast as she could, her face growing redder and redder, and her deep exhalations gave away the frustration she was feeling.
"Wait a minute," Ben said to her, but she didn't listen. She carried on digging.
"Charlotte, wait!" he said again. She looked at him, then carried on digging.
"Charlotte! Wait!" he shouted.
"What?" she shouted back, throwing her spade to the ground.
"We're not digging the right way. Look." Ben said, and pointed at the misshapen hole in the ground they had created. She looked at the hole, then at the pot the tree was sitting in, then back at the hole. With a slump of her shoulders, Ben could tell she knew he was right.
"Okay," she said, "what should we do?"
"We're digging a hole that's too big for the tree," Ben said. "It only needs one of us to be digging at a time, so we should take it in turns. That way we won't get tired out and whoever isn't digging can check we're doing it right."
Charlotte raised her eyebrows. "Good idea," she said, wondering why she hadn't thought of it herself. She stepped out of the shallow hole and beckoned her little brother forward.
"It was your idea," she said, "so you go first."
Ben got back into the hole. The first thing he did was to push the pile of soil back from the edge of the hole, to stop any falling back in. He then began to dig, slowly but purposefully, until he'd cr
eated a hole that was deeper than it was wide. He then high-fived his sister and they swapped places. Charlotte did the same until the hole looked like it was the right shape to house their sapling.
She got out and, together, they carried the pot to the edge of the hole. They used the trowel to loosen the soil around the pot, then lifted the sapling out very carefully, Ben holding the fragile trunk and Charlotte holding the roots. Then they placed the young tree into the hole and both got to work, filling in the gaps with the soil they had piled up next to the hole. Ben used the watering can to give the tree its first drink in its new home and they stepped back to admire their handiwork.
They shared a moment of quiet appreciation, basking in the pride of a job well done. This tree, no matter how vulnerable it looked now, would one day grow tall and strong. They had done something meaningful, and they had achieved it together.
All of a sudden, the spindly branches of the tiny tree began to twitch. Charlotte and Ben looked at each other and felt a rumbling in the ground beneath their feet. The rumbling got stronger and stronger, until the gravel on the path began to shake. They stepped back even further and watched in awe as the tiny sapling they had planted in the ground burst upwards, groaning and creaking with the deafening sound of severe physical strain as it grew taller and wider. Its branches seemed to multiply, sprouting leaves that created a grand canopy over their heads. As suddenly as it had begun, the tree stopped growing and stood still, towering over them. An owl fluttered over from a tree behind them and hooted as it landed on one of the freshly-sprouted branches.
"That was amazing!" Ben said.
Charlotte was dumbstruck, then a thought snapped her out of her daze. "The hare!" she exclaimed. As quick as they could, they ran down the path and around the corner, just in time to see the wooden hare as it became engulfed in a magical golden glow as the ring of their father's ashes spun round and round. Just as the first hare had awoken from its spell, the third hare rubbed its eyes and bounded away into the shadows.
The Children of Hare Hill Page 3