Flitterwig

by Edrei Cullen

  Ella’s focus on the sugary smells subsided. She began to feel a prickling in her ears. The elixir was working.

  Back through another hole whooshed the pixie lollipop, and a dryer blew him so hard that his eyelashes stuck to his eyelids. Whoosh! Clamp! He was squeezed through another hole and onto a conveyor belt. Ella and Charlie watched him through the dark, both of them mesmerised by the luminous red light show.

  The giant lollipop balls travelled one by one along the conveyor belt, Dixon part of the procession. Rolling himself until he was standing upright, he ran along the metal belt in the wrong direction, knocking giant lollipops out of the way.

  ‘RURBLE, SLURP, BUMBLE!’ he yelled to Ella as he went. ‘FRINKLE, TRANGLE, SCHPLAT!’

  Trogglitis was setting in.

  And then Charlie started to laugh. Although he was still fragile (and he was sure that had something to do with those Troggles taking his blood), he just couldn’t help feeling amused. The predicament of the creature stuck in the lollipop was tickling him inside like a brilliantly funny joke. He felt stronger than he’d felt all day.

  Ella looked at the boy. She couldn’t remember ever hearing another child laugh. And there was something infectious about it. A deep sense of pleasure bubbled up sympathetically in her own tummy, and before she could do anything about it, she let out a chortle herself.

  Bulging out of his red lollipop mould like a swollen green marshmallow, Dixon glared at her. ‘RURBLE, SLURP, BUMBLE!’ he yelled. It only made Charlie and Ella laugh harder.

  Dixon threw himself over the side of the conveyor belt and rolled across the floor. ‘BLURGLE!’ he yelled. He stood up and tried to point, but his knees gave way. Charlie was bent double, and Ella snorted between guffaws.

  Dixon tried to sit up, enunciating words as though he had a balloon in his mouth. ‘ROOGLE!’ he cried.

  Ella made an effort to pull herself together. Charlie wiped his eyes.

  ‘OOOGLE!’ Dixon squeezed from his lips. ‘OGLE! GOGGLE!’

  ‘I know,’ Ella gasped, wishing she could contain herself. ‘You’ve been Trogglified, it’s awful,’ she said, taking deep breaths to try to settle her giggles.

  But that wasn’t what the pixie was trying to tell her at all.

  It was too late anyway. They were upon her.

  Fully fledged Troggles, swollen and slimy and rotten smelling, flung themselves at her, knocking her to the floor. Their eyes shone red under their dark cloaks. They swarmed across her, nipping at her with hands pointed like lobster claws.

  Ella couldn’t see or breathe, and, crushed as she was, her powers escaped her. As she began to lose consciousness, she saw Charlie, and something deep inside her woke up.

  For Charlie was no longer a laughing child. His eyes had turned black as night, his nose was flattened against his face, and a thick reptilian tail sliced through the back of his shorts. Ignoring Ella’s struggles, he pulled a trunk out of the shadows and opened it. The Troggles, a heaving dark cloud of muck, dragged Ella across the floor. The demonised boy leaned into her ear and hissed, ‘Stuck among all these machines, you are powerless, Ella.’

  Tears streamed down Dixon’s gentle face. ‘FLURGLE, MURGLE!’ he cried at the top of his voice. ‘FLURGLE, MURGLE!’

  Ella closed her eyes. In her mind she conjured up leaves and trees and petals, all the while trying to feel the elixir helping her natural instincts come to life.

  A waft of cinnamon and rain filled the room. Ella opened her eyes with a start. Her ears itched furiously, and heat flew through her shoulderblades. Thank goodness! Above the Troggle cacophony she heard a rustling, swishing sound.

  The smell and the sound touched something deep, deep within her, deeper than any part of her she’d ever known. The something burst up, searing painfully through her body, and flew like lightning from her eyes. A powerful noise, like the whistling of the wind, filled the room. Ella opened her eyes as wide as she could, and clung hard to her ears. Her shoulderblades swelled against her T-shirt as if something was trying to burst out, and her hair flared wildly, spinning about her, a whirlwind of gold.

  The Troggles fell away just long enough for her to scramble to her feet, and then launched themselves upon her again. She fell backwards and almost lost her footing. Behind her loomed the dark emptiness of the trunk. Her hair whipped at Charlie’s Possessed body. The Duke cried out and hit back, his clawed, freckled hands trying to push her into the makeshift trap.

  The rustling and the whistling grew louder. Sensing their source, Ella turned to the sounds, straining to see in the gloom. The Troggles buried their heads deep in their hoods and fled out the back door.

  Beneath the other door, across the floor and up the wall stretched the tendrils and branches of a vine. The room became bathed in a natural green light. As Ella stared, the vine rose up, its branches spreading like tentacles around the demon in Charlie until he was buried in rich green leaves and thick brown stalks.

  And then he was gone. In his place was a small boy in a faint, lying in a puddle of thick black sludge, like oil residue.

  As the vine retracted under the door, a shower of tiny silver dewdroplets flew straight at Ella’s head. They stroked her cheeks and kissed her softly. A silver note folded itself into her palm.

  On the ground Dixon rolled about and called out to her, but his words were nothing but muddle.

  chapter 20

  debris & doubts

  It was Mr Snoppit who found Ella huddled in the dark room, a giant lollipop ball wrapped in her arms and a small piece of silver paper tucked in her hand. He shone a flashlight on her, his eyes blinking nervously in his moon-shaped face.

  ‘A-a-are you, are you…?’ he asked timidly, looking at the floor.

  ‘Ella Montgomery,’ Ella managed.

  Mr Snoppit nodded. ‘Wh-wh-why are you here?’ he asked.

  ‘I think I’ve been left behind,’ she said.

  ‘I-I-I don’t suppose you’ve seen Charlie?’ Mr Snoppit asked. ‘He’s about your age. Quite short. Lots of freckles.’

  Exhausted and afraid, Ella nodded vaguely. She looked about for the boy, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  Mr Snoppit tried to prise the lollipop from the girl’s hand, but she wouldn’t let it go. So he led her, his hand resting gently on her shoulder, through the corridors of the Lollipop Factory.

  They found Charlie curled up in a ball in the corner of a hallway. Mr Snoppit knelt down and rolled him over. His nose had grown back, and when his father shook him and he opened his eyes, they were as brown as hazelnuts again. But they were completely blank, and Mr Snoppit had to carry him to the car.

  ‘I-I-I found this lady locked in the bathroom. I-I-I’m pretty sure she works for you,’ Mr Snoppit stammered, pointing to Dribbles in the front seat of his car. The poor woman was utterly bewildered and didn’t say a word. He lifted his son into the back seat and held the door open as Ella climbed in beside him.

  Charlie sat in a daze, pallid as paper, as the old car chugged along. Ella examined him, wary still, the uncomfortable buzzing of the car engine ringing in her ears. Questions raced through her mind. The boy’s body had been Possessed back there, she was sure of it. By the Duke: she was sure of that, too. But did Charlie know he was being Possessed? And how come Charlie could see Dixon? Could he be a Flitterwig too? But that seemed crazy. How many of them could there be? Wrinkles had said there were loads of them. But how could you tell if somebody was one, or wasn’t? All Ella knew was that there was something about Charlie, something about having him close by, that made her feel safe. Of course that didn’t make any sense either, because whenever she’d met him (apart from the time when she’d landed in his pond), he’d been Possessed by the Duke.

  The colour was returning slowly to Charlie’s face, but he still seemed absent. Ella watched him surreptitiously, taking an occasional lick at the red lollipop clutched tightly in her arms. It was the only way she could think of to help free the pixie inside it, other than smashing him against
something hard.

  When Mr Snoppit drew up at Willow Farm, Dribbles barely gave Ella a glance. She limped off, shaken and dazed, towards her cottage.

  As Mr Snoppit’s car trundled down the drive, Truffles, the baby giraffe, peered out of the shadows of a mulberry tree and watched Ella beseechingly.

  By the time the Snoppits drew up at their own farmstead, Charlie’s state of confusion had worn off almost completely. In fact, it had worn off a little while ago, but Charlie hadn’t been ready to speak to anyone. He’d been too busy trying to work things out. There was definitely something very, very weird going on, he’d been thinking to himself, and he was going to get to the bottom of it. As soon as his father parked the car, he ran to the barn to find the Duke.

  He found him resting on a hay bale, his tail curled up over his legs. Clumps of hair had fallen out of his head, leaving bald red patches. He tried to pull himself up, but his strength was all but exhausted from Possessing the boy in an attempt to overcome the Clearheart.

  ‘What happened at the Lollipop Factory?’ Charlie demanded.

  The Duke stood up as best he could and faced Charlie. The two holes in his face, where there had once been a nose, dilated and contracted like jellyfish in water. ‘I need your blood,’ he said, struggling for breath. ‘Now.’

  Charlie hardly had time to register the horror of what the Duke was saying before Troggles were upon him, nipping viciously at his skin with their pincers. They were all over him in seconds, oozing slime and stinking of rotten turnip, attacking him with the same savage hunger they had visited upon Ella. They pinched and poked and squeezed, but in spite of his weakness, Charlie’s need to survive made him stronger and faster than they were. Pulling the last of them off, he sped away through the gathering darkness, his feet moving so fast they barely touched the ground.

  ‘Come back!’ the Duke called weakly after him, his refined voice barely echoing that of the magnificent elf he had once been.

  Once inside and safely upstairs, Charlie threw himself on his bed. He couldn’t remember anything that had happened after he and Ella had started laughing at the little green man stuck in the lollipop, and that made him feel frightened.

  Charlie was sick of feeling frightened. He felt frightened at school every day. And now he felt so weak that he could hardly pull himself over to the window of his room. What was all that about the Duke needing his blood? Was that the reason why the Troggles had been taking it?

  Why had he trusted the Duke? He should know by now that no one was ever kind to him.

  He looked out across the valley to the lights of Willow Farm. Maybe he was mad after all? He threw himself on the bed and hollered obscenities into his pillow until he couldn’t holler anymore.

  In the silence that followed, Charlie could hear his parents talking through the wall that divided his room from theirs.

  ‘There’s s-s-something going on down at the rubbish dump on the boundary of our farm, m-m-my dear, that isn’t right,’ his father was saying to his mother. ‘The r-r-rotting d-d-debris is t-t-turning to liquid and beginning to b-b-bubble… I-I-I’ll alert the council tomorrow, though you know how I h-h-hate to go in to town, Mabel.’

  ‘I know, Fred,’ said Mrs Snoppit. ‘But you really must. I saw it this morning, and there is something terribly amiss.’

  The moon cast shadows across Charlie’s room. The boy lay on his bed and thought back over the crazy events of the past few days. Maybe he was mad, and maybe the Duke was the only person who could teach him how to use the specs to his advantage. But maybe there was something else happening. Something special. Something that mattered.

  And maybe it was the day he’d had, or the moonlight, but before Charlie slept, he pulled himself out of bed and stared across the valley once more, towards Willow Farm. He didn’t know why he did it, but it made him feel calm.

  chapter 21

  folks & frailty

  As Charlie fell asleep, his head resting against the windowpane, Ella walked up from the Dell. Her heart was heavy.

  Despite the lateness of the hour, she had skated down to the willow tree as soon as she got home from the factory. A light rain had begun to fall. With Dixon-the-Lollipop and the latest silver note held firmly in her grasp, she was going to explain to the Magicals that all this weirdness was beginning to scare her. She had never so much as spoken to another child before, let alone fought off a Possessed one twice in only a few days. She’d lost her spectacles. Dixon was stuck in a lollipop and suffering mild Trogglitis, and she was starving, not to mention exhausted. She needed a break from all this magic stuff.

  Truffles the giraffe had followed her, making strange, fretful, muffled sounds she couldn’t understand. She had tried to pat and soothe him as best she could, but he wasn’t to be placated, so she had given up and skated on ahead.

  Clearly there was very little she could get right today.

  When she reached the willow tree, Ella was met by the three gnomes, their faces crinkled with worry lines, their beards a shade greyer than the last time she had seen them.

  Wrinkles appeared out of the tree itself. ‘The Queen is ailing badly,’ he said, taking the silver note from her hand. He paid no heed to Dixon whatsoever, but a handful of imps appeared out of nowhere and buzzed about the lollipop with longing expressions. One of the gnomes growled at them. He tweaked his ear and the lollipop exploded in a puff of smoke, sending imps flying everywhere. Dixon was free.

  Wrinkles held the silver note up to the light of a firefly hovering helpfully nearby and read it out loud.

  You summoned Nature

  To your aid

  To curb the tricks

  That sugar’s played.

  Remembered well

  Don P’s advice

  And drew the power

  In a trice.

  You also met

  Your other half.

  A lone Protector

  Made you laugh.

  So find us deep

  Beneath a well,

  Far from where

  Sweet breezes dwell.

  Find us hidden

  All alone.

  Release your wings now,

  Take us home.

  The gnome who had freed Dixon from his lollipop prison took the note from Wrinkles and tramped over to the bowl of water cut into the log. All the gnomes huddled together and began to study the riddle.

  Ella was so tired. She’d had enough of adventure. She was sorry for the Queen and all that, but what she really wanted right now was Granny and Grandpa and some proper dinner and a good night’s sleep, all of which would be available to her if she wasn’t a Flitterwig.

  She turned her back on the Magicals with their leafy fires and silken webs and sat down, fighting back a rising desire to cry. It was no use. A fat, sparkling tear fell on the bracken, squeezing its way from her tear duct like crystal toothpaste from a tiny, wee tube.

  A sprite physician appeared out of nowhere and started to gather the tear on a leaf saucer. Ella pushed him away. Unperturbed, he tried again.

  Dixon, somewhat unstable from having been exploded out of a lollipop, wobbled towards her as best he could. ‘GLEUGH!’ he yelled at the sprite, the effects of Trogglitis still addling his brain.

  ‘But what about the Queen?’ the sprite whispered, refusing to back off. ‘This could ease her pain, if only for a short while! Remember what the last one did?’

  Dixon let out a pixie roar of fury. Moving giddily this way and that, he did his best to knock the sprite out of the way. ‘Leave her ‘lone, oogledy groan!’ he yelled.

  His protective behaviour was more than Ella could bear. She wanted it to stop! All of it!

  ‘Take the stupid tear!’ she yelled. ‘Just take it and go away!’

  ‘Oh, my poor, poor dear,’ said Wrinkles, appearing before her. ‘This is all so very much for a young child to bear.’ And the kind goblin began to cry in sympathy.

  Truffles poked his head out of the bushes and looked at her longingly. Wri
nkles blew his nose on his sleeve and continued to sob.

  Ella looked at the strange collection of creatures who had set up camp by the willow tree. They looked back at her, hope and concern in their faces.

  She could take no more of it. Ignoring them all, she stood up and walked away.

  ‘But what about the latest riddle?’ one of the gnomes called after her. ‘It says a lone Protector made you laugh. Who has made you laugh recently, Ella? For whoever it is must be your Protector.’

  Dixon leaned against the willow tree, trying to steady himself. ‘Hey, guess what,’ he called out as loudly as he could, sounding almost fully recovered. ‘You aren’t even wearing your spectacles, plectables, rectables. So don’t be mad!’ Losing his balance, he fell over into the bracken.

  It was true. She wasn’t, and she could see and hear everyone. But she really didn’t want to right now, so she kept stomping up the hill, away from the Magicals and their worries and their tears and their unreasonable expectations.

  As she left the Dell she saw light shining from a window in Snoppit Farm, and an idea began to wind its way under her skin like a second layer.

  ‘It couldn’t be him,’ she thought, through a blur of exhaustion, remembering how she and Charlie had laughed together in the Lollipop Factory. ‘Could it?’

  As she made her way into the house through the back door, the silence was deafening. No one was waiting up for her. There was no Grandpa snoring upstairs, not even a drifting dog whimper or owl’s hoot to fill the space. Her father must be here, but it didn’t feel like there was anyone in the house at all. Plus, there was an added emptiness: Dixon wasn’t there. She’d left him in the Dell when she’d walked away, and he hadn’t followed her. Even Noughts and Crosses didn’t come to greet her, thrust as they were into the deepest of depressions by the absence of their beloved master and mistress.