by James Riley
May tossed a few other assorted instruments out of the closet, then turned around. “What?” she said. “That hammer’s no better than the knife.”
“Not the hammer,” Jack said. “The broom. That’s our way out.”
Outside, the clawing grew louder, and not just at the door. It sounded as if the creatures were trying to claw—or eat—their way right through the walls of the house. Apparently the poison didn’t affect them.
“Are you still drugged on candy?” May asked, narrowing her eyes. “You do realize that’s for sweeping, right?”
“Don’t you know anything?” Jack said. “How do you think witches get around?”
“Don’t touch that!” the witch cried out, struggling harder against the licorice bindings.
“One more word, and you’re going in the oven!” May said, then turned back to Jack. “You’re saying witches actually ride around on brooms?” she asked, one eyebrow up. “Wow, how old-school.”
Jack shrugged. “It’s tradition.”
“So how does it work?” May said, taking the broom from him. She straddled the handle and began hopping around the room with it under her. “Giddyup!” she shouted. “Let’s go! Bibbity-Bobbity—”
“Don’t just yell out magic words!” Jack shouted at her. Did she even know what she was saying?! Who knew what spell she might cast!
“I think we’re safe,” May said as she came to a stop. “And apparently I just ran around on a regular broom. Great idea, genius.”
Jack grabbed the broom and looked it over, thinking. Finally he shrugged, held it horizontally at shoulder level in both hands, then brought the broom down as hard as he could toward his knee, as if he was going to break it in half.
Just before it hit his knee, the broom leapt out of Jack’s hands and into the air with a squeal. It bucked wildly, then tore off around the cottage, madly flying in every direction like a trapped insect looking for a window.
May threw herself out of its way, but as the broom tore past Jack, he jumped up and grabbed it with both hands, holding on tight. The broom didn’t even slow down, continuing its frantic dash around the cottage, only now dragging Jack along behind it.
“Little help?” he asked as he flew by May. The princess grabbed Jack on the next go-around, and between the two, they managed to pull the broom back down to the floor.
“I think I figured out how to make it go,” Jack said, grunting as he held the still struggling broom with both arms.
“How’d you know it would do that?” May asked, tentatively approaching the broom, which seemed to be calming down a bit.
“It was just a guess,” he said. “I figured I’d try scaring it, see if that got any reaction out of it.”
“Just a small one,” May said, reaching out to pet the broom. As she touched it the broom jerked a bit, then quieted down, as if it were a frightened cat. “Where’d you learn this stuff, anyway?”
“School, mostly,” he said with a shrug. “The rest is just common sense.”
“Glad you caught the witch lesson,” May said, still petting the broom, which now seemed to be purring.
Suddenly, the lollipop chair holding the door closed bumped backward. Fortunately, the chair stuck briefly in the peanut brittle, falling back into place after the initial jolt. A second hit from outside, though, knocked the chair completely out of the way just as Jack leapt forward and smashed the chair back into place. The chair’s legs cracked a bit, but held firm in the sticky floor.
May turned from the front door back to the broom. “Right,” she said. “Time to go.”
As she straddled the broom again, Jack quickly grabbed the knife from the table and threw it into his bag. It wasn’t much, but it couldn’t hurt. “Ready to try this?” he asked May as he threw a leg over the broom behind her.
“Not even a little bit,” she said, turning around to look at Jack. “Let’s go.”
Before Jack could respond, another hit sent the chair skidding across the floor as the door banged open.
Seeing the creatures for the first time, Jack gasped. The witch had called them children, but these creatures looked nothing like any child he’d ever seen. Yes, they were small, no more than two feet tall, but not many kids in his village had sharpened fangs and claws. Also, most children he knew didn’t have empty sockets where their eyes should have been.
Even without eyes, though, every one of the witch’s children managed to look at them hungrily.
Chapter 11
“Grab them, my children!” the witch shouted.
“Get us out of here!” Jack screamed, kicking up from the floor. “Go, go, go!”
“Fly!” May yelled, pulling up on the broom. “Fly, broom!”
At the princess’s command, the broom leapt into the air just above the first few children that lunged at them, then shot forward like an arrow, straight at the monsters blocking the doorway. Jack ducked his head and May screamed in terror as they plowed right into the creatures.
Claws and teeth ripped at Jack’s clothes and skin as the witch’s children grabbed and bit, but the broom never stopped. A second later, they were through the mob of creatures and out into the night sky. A few of the witch’s children held on to May, Jack, and the broom, but Jack managed to kick and poke the little monsters off as May angled the broom up into the sky.
As the monsters tumbled off the broom, Jack watched them fall. Despite the fact that it was now dark again (how long had he been knocked out?!), the lights inside the cottage lit up the area around it, giving Jack just enough light to see by. And what he saw made him sick.
The entire forest floor, as far as Jack could see, was covered in the witch’s children. There must have been hundreds of the tiny, swarming monsters, including the ones climbing all over the cottage … the same cottage that just minutes ago Jack had tasted.
He swallowed hard, pushing down the bile. That’d teach him to eat candy from strange houses.
“If we hadn’t found the broom …” May said, then stopped in midsentence, thankfully. Jack glanced down again, but as they rose, the children quickly blended into the forest floor. Soon, even that was blocked by the trees, the tops of which they quickly rose past.
“We’re a bit high, aren’t we?” Jack asked, feeling his toes go cold with nothing beneath them.
“This?” May said, looking down, which tipped the broom. Jack tapped her on the shoulder more and more urgently until she leaned back. “I’ve been on roller coasters higher than this.”
“Good to hear,” Jack said, fixing his eyes on the horizon, not really caring about her rolling coasts or whatever.
The moon lit up the cloudless night despite its only being half-full, and the whole land unfolded before them. If the moon didn’t eat soon, it’d risk fading away completely, but from what Jack had seen, it never learned, disappearing from view at least once a month.
Now that he could see where they were, Jack glanced around for any landmarks he might recognize. The forest extended in all directions, and there was no sign of a road or path. Giving up on landmarks, Jack started looking for the nearest farm or town, anything with people who could give them directions. He couldn’t find one of those, but he did see the turrets of a castle peeking out above the trees up ahead. A castle meant royalty, but at least the royals wouldn’t try to eat them.
A low standard, yes, but an important one.
“See?” May said, pointing down as she twisted back to look at him. “Now we’re getting high.”
Jack looked to where she pointed and almost toppled off the broom. They hadn’t stopped rising, and now they were so high Jack could barely make out individual trees below them. “Broom!” Jack yelled, his voice cracking. “Stop going up! Go forward!”
The broom ignored him.
“Broom!” May shouted. “Stop rising, and fly straight ahead!”
Instantly, the broom stopped rising and began to inch forward.
May turned around and smiled. “It likes me better,” she said,
and the broom purred beneath them.
Jack sighed, happy not to be flying any higher. “It’s probably used to listening to the witch. Maybe you remind it of her.”
She glared at him. “You want me to tell it to drop you?”
“I take it all back,” he said quickly, not willing to test if May was joking or not. “You’re wonderful and beautiful and amazing.”
“That’s what I thought,” May said and turned back around.
“Point it toward that castle over there,” Jack said, and she pulled on the handle until they were pointed at the large stone fortress.
And just like that, they were off … if by off, one meant moving along at about a slug’s pace. And not the pace of one of those magic slugs that were larger than a horse, with super-slick oil that they skated on top of, either. Granted, their oil was valuable, since it kept metal hinges from sticking, but still.
“I’m going to give it some gas!” May yelled, interrupting Jack’s slug-oil musings. Before he could wonder what she meant by gas, the princess leaned back to brace herself, an act that almost made Jack lose his balance again.
“Stay still!” he hissed at her, his heart in his throat. “I almost fell off!”
“Oh, calm down,” she said, reaching an arm behind her to hold on to him. “Ready now? Broom! Fly forward as fast as you can. Ready? Go!”
Jack doubled his grip on May, locking his hands around her stomach and his knees around the bottom of the broom.
It wasn’t enough.
The broom bolted forward like lightning, faster than a galloping horse … faster than a winged horse, even. At that speed, they were going fast enough to pass the castle that’d been several days’ walk away in less than a second.
At that speed, they were also going fast enough to send Jack tumbling right off the back of the broom.
Chapter 12
“Jack!” May shouted as he flew off the broom. She threw herself backward, both arms desperately reaching for him, hanging from the broom with just her knees.
While her left hand missed completely, her right hand grazed his shirt, a fraction of an inch from grabbing it.
Jack’s flailing arms fortunately made up the difference. He grabbed on to May’s right arm with both hands, almost yanking her off the broom as well.
Jack locked his fingers around May’s arm with a death-grip as he hung suspended over miles of empty air. He tried to yell at her to stop the broom, but for some reason his lungs wouldn’t work, and he couldn’t get out more than a wheeze.
“Hold on!” May yelled to him. “And don’t look down!”
Trusting that she knew exactly what she was talking about, Jack fixed his eyes forward again, expecting to see the horizon. Instead, he saw something large, gray, and rocky.
They were headed straight for a mountain.
Jack frantically sucked in some air, intending to make his voice work whether it wanted to or not. “Pull up!” he screamed.
“What?” May yelled, the wind making it hard to hear much of anything. Unfortunately, hanging backward as she was, the princess couldn’t see the large amount of stone they were about to slam into.
“Mountain!” Jack screamed back.
Not knowing what else to do, he flexed his arms, pulling himself up a bit, then dropped suddenly, jerking May and the back of the broom down as hard as he could. The front of the broom shot up, rising just enough for them to miss the mountain.
At least, May and the broom would. Jack, unfortunately, lost his grip on May’s arms when the broom began to climb and down he fell.
“Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa …” Jack heard May yell until the wind in his ears and the growing distance from the princess wiped out the last of her scream. As he tumbled through the open air, his heart beat so hard it felt like it was going to break open his chest.
Jack quickly reached over his shoulder and pulled off his grandfather’s bag with all the old man’s most powerful magic items. As the trees rushed up at him with an alarming speed, Jack knew he had time for just one try. He thrust his hand into the bag, grabbed the first thing he found, and pulled out … a feather.
A feather! Jack’s eyes lit up and he smiled, the wind pulling at his cheeks. A feather might be perfect! If it was the feather from some kind of magical bird, maybe its magic would let him fly!
Desperately, he wiped the feather all over himself, hoping to make the magic work that way. When nothing happened, Jack frantically blew on the feather, then crushed it in his hands, closing his eyes, and willing himself with all his might to stop falling….
And as if by magic, he stopped! The sudden jolt sent his stomach into his shoes, and Jack glanced down to find himself maybe a dozen feet above the trees, swaying slightly in the wind. The feather had done it! He wasn’t dead! He was flying!
Jack’s laughter grew almost hysterical, he was so happy. “I’m flying!” he shouted to no one, flapping his arms like a bird. “I’m flying! Up, feather! Let’s go up!”
And just like that, he rose higher in the air.
He flapped his arms a bit more, but it didn’t seem to be necessary, so he stopped. Not that it mattered: He was going to be just fine. “Princess!” he shouted, looking up. “Princess! I’m flying! I’m fly—”
And then he noticed two log-size fingers pinching his shirt.
He wasn’t flying. He was being lifted into the air.
The excitement he’d felt a second ago up and took flight, unlike the rest of him. The huge fingers ended in an enormous hand, and that hand connected to a massive arm, which ended at … the mountain.
Except it wasn’t a mountain. It was a giant.
The mountain was a giant.
The mountain was a giant.
“Oh, great!” Jack screamed. The feather—the stupid, useless feather—fell from his hands and floated gently to the ground below, but that didn’t really matter. He’d probably managed to destroy whatever spell it had by crushing it anyway. Fantastic.
As the giant lifted him higher, Jack could start to make out the creature’s proportions. What he’d thought were stones was actually a rumpled gray shirt, its buttons larger than Jack’s head. Hair jutted out from holes in the shirt, looking exactly like leafless trees. Surprisingly, the shirt had a pocket, and for a second, Jack considered what a giant would possibly need to keep there.
And then he remembered something fairly important. “Princesssssss!” Jack shouted into the night air. “Can you hear me?!” He imagined her ramming the broom right into the giant, or flying straight up into the sky until she hit a city in the clouds or something. When he got no response, he grimaced. Out of all the options, her landing safely on the ground didn’t seem too likely.
The giant apparently didn’t like Jack’s yelling, though, as it began to wiggle its fingers back and forth. That small act threw Jack around violently, knocking his grandfather’s bag right out of his hands. As soon as Jack’s eyeballs stopped shaking in their sockets, he lunged to grab it, but he was much too late … the bag was already far out of reach. As he watched it fall to the ground, Jack said good-bye to his best shot at saving himself.
Satisfied that his captive was done screaming, the giant began lifting Jack again. He passed the creature’s squat, creased neck and what seemed to be a chin or two before finally stopping at the giant’s face.
A few feet below him, the giant exhaled, sending a brief, tornado-like wind that almost blew Jack right out of his shirt. The smell of the giant’s breath was even worse than the strength of the wind, though: If a herd of animals had died in the giant’s mouth, it couldn’t have stunk more.
Jack gagged his way past the breath, only to find himself staring up into a virtual jungle of hair jutting out from twin cavernous nostrils beneath the giant’s enormous hooked nose. Trying to look away, Jack found himself eye to eye with a pupil the size of his fist in the middle of an eye as blue as a robin’s egg. The monster stared back almost curiously.
“So,” Jack said, twisting around at the e
nd of the giant’s fingers. “You’re a big boy, huh?”
The giant opened its mouth to respond, then paused, its enormous eyes spinning skyward, its attention suddenly elsewhere. Something was distracting the giant from above.
This was it. This was his chance to fight! Jack took a deep breath, prepared himself, then kicked at the giant’s eye as hard as he could.
Unfortunately, he didn’t come close to reaching, and only succeeded in spinning himself around in a circle. Beautiful.
A moment later, the giant’s eye spun back to Jack as its other hand descended from above. It took Jack a second to realize that the giant’s other hand held something as well, but then he sighed, both from relief and frustration.
The giant was holding a broomstick with a frightened-looking princess attached to it.
“Oh, hey,” Jack said to May as she reached his level. “Been a while. What’s new with you?”
“What is it with our luck?!” May asked, shaking her head in disbelief.
“At least we didn’t hit the mountain,” Jack said. “Anyway, it could have been worse.”
“Oh, yeah?” she said with a snort. “How’s that?”
“Food!” bellowed the giant, his great voice shaking both of them. And then the monster tossed Jack up into the air and down into his open mouth, slamming it closed with a loud squish.
Chapter 13
Jack hadn’t ever been eaten before, but the smell was just about what he would have imagined it would be like, if he ever had stopped to actually think about it.
The absolute pitch-black darkness, though, was a bit surprising.
As he passed the giant’s lips, Jack had just enough time to make out a dark tunnel of a throat before the giant’s mouth closed, taking all the light with it. As Jack fell straight down into the throat, he decided he was actually happy he couldn’t see. After all, wasn’t it better not to know exactly how disgusting his death was going to be?
And then, Jack smacked face-first into something warm, slippery, and soft. Without thinking, he threw his arms out and grabbed the … well, whatever it was. As he hugged the slimy, soft column, his momentum sent him and the slimy thing flying forward, slapping them both up against the back of the giant’s mouth. They hit with a wet smack, stuck for a moment, then fell backward again, jiggling to a stop over what Jack figured was the throat.