Flitterwig

by Edrei Cullen

  ‘Well done, Dixon, that was really impressive,’ Ella said to her friend.

  Dixon swelled with pride.

  ‘Don’t look ‘em in the eyes, whatever you do, poo!’ he yelled. Covering his own eyes with one hand, he whispered instructions to his conjured army. Their eyes glowed attentively. Nodding, they all hopped off the trampoline and headed down the hill. Dixon and Ella raced after them.

  A lull seemed to have fallen across the valley. The trees had ceased their rustling, and not a bird sang.

  As Ella and Dixon, only steps behind the Nogmashers, approached a hole in the hedge on the Snoppit Farm boundary, a gruesome smell floated towards them, filling their noses with the stench of rotting turnips, rat farts and toe cheese.

  It was Dixon who sounded the alarm.

  ‘Troggle attaaaaack, craaaaack, slaaaaack!’ he yelled as Ella began to crawl through the hedge. Too late. She was assailed by a gaggle of Troggles hidden in the bushes, wildly hurling themselves at her like cannonballs.

  The Nogmashers panicked and started to bounce all over the place, curled up in little purple balls to protect their eyes. Ella covered her head and crouched down. Slime oozed from the Troggles in fat black slurps as they set upon her. Dixon flung himself about, doing his best to karate chop them out of Ella’s way. A pincer sliced through the air, missing his throat by a millimetre.

  It was no good. There were too many of them.

  Ella thrashed about, trying to protect herself. The searing pain as a pincer stabbed her arm made her cry out loud. She was surrounded. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t breathe. The smell of rot overcame her.

  Coming to their senses at last, the Nogmashers closed in on the frenzied Troggles.

  A Troggle looked up from Ella’s arm and was immediately transfixed by the light shining from a Nogmasher’s eyes. ‘Ooooh,’ he sighed, falling on his back. Encouraged, the Nogmashers moved in faster. No sooner had they locked eyes with the Troggles than the ugly brutes found themselves hugging a neighbour or wiping mud off Ella’s face and apologising. But goodwill is easily forgotten, and the Troggles were dark again in seconds, gnashing their teeth and drooling hungrily.

  From the edge of the Dell, surveying the attack with dismay, Samuel looked at the Queen. He held her in his hand, wrapped up tightly in her maple leaf. ‘Her Protector is nowhere to be seen, Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘She needs more help.’

  The Queen nodded. ‘Of course,’ she whispered.

  ‘Okay, fall out!’ Samuel called into the bushes. A band of Magicals appeared – sprites, brownies, sylphs, gnomes, pixies. ‘Go to it! Give it your best shot.’ The Magicals saluted him and headed off along the boundary hedge.

  The Queen looked at Samuel, confusion on her sweet face.

  ‘We call them Tufnells,’ said Samuel sheepishly. ‘They’re Magicals we’ve saved along the way who’ve decided to stay with us on Earth. Exiles, I suppose. They take an Antidote made of tears, among other ingredients, so the pollution doesn’t get them.’

  Lacking the strength to respond, the Queen closed her eyes. ‘Rest now,’ said Samuel, tucking the gentle lady back against her leaf with his little finger. He wished there were more he could do to help the Clearheart, but, as all who were familiar with the Prophecy knew, her Protector would surely come to her aid soon.

  Charlie peered out of his bedroom window and nearly had a heart attack. What was going on in the hedge between Snoppit and Willow farms? He grabbed a pair of binoculars from his bedside table. Ella was being attacked by a multitude of Troggles, surrounded by heaps of bouncing purple balls apparently doing nothing at all. There was also an army of little people marching across the lawn on the Willow Farm side towards them.

  ‘Blimey!’ said Charlie. He swivelled the binoculars and saw Ella’s grandparents, the ugly woman who worked with them, and a younger man, all watching Ella from their front lawn. ‘She’s in BIG trouble’. He laid his binoculars down and was about to sit on his bed to try to figure out what he should do when there was a knock on the front door. Neither his mother nor his father answered it. There was another knock. Charlie set off downstairs to see who it was.

  As he opened the door, something stomped on his foot. ‘Ow!’ he yelled, looking down to see what it was.

  A purple parcel, all tied up in gold ribbon and perched on athletic little legs, stared fiercely up at him, hands clenched. It wound its fist back, this time aiming to punch Charlie square in the shin.

  ‘Woah there,’ said Charlie, jumping out of the way. He shook his head to make sure he was seeing properly. He’d never met an angry parcel before.

  All of a sudden, the parcel split open to reveal a message. Charlie bent over cautiously to read the note.

  PROTECT HER, YOU NINCOMPOOP! the message read.

  Charlie stood up sharply. The parcel wrapped itself up again. Charlie could have sworn that it muttered ‘Bleeding Flitterwigs’ under its breath before turning its back on him and running off across the lawn.

  He ran his hands through his hair. What to do? He ran upstairs, picked up the binoculars again, and looked out the window. Ella was still fighting off the Troggles as best she could.

  Charlie’s legs itched and his ears itched and he felt a weird tingling in his feet coupled with a strong sense of protectiveness towards the girl. ‘Oh, sod it!’ he cried. He pulled the cap off the bottle Don Posiblemente had sent him and swigged the green elixir down.

  The effect was immediate. He could hear the blood pumping in his ears, and he felt better than he had in days. He ran out of his bedroom and back down the stairs. Out the front door he raced, and across the fields, with no idea what he was going to do.

  The animals, he thought, remembering Don Posiblemente’s letter. Don’t forget, animals are your allies.

  In moments Charlie was half way up the other side of the hill on Willow Farm, opening the doors to the animal enclosure and yelling instructions to the animals inside. He knew he was a fast runner, but the speed at which he’d crossed the valley astounded even him.

  ‘Get down over there and fight those Troggles!’ he yelled in fluent Animumble.

  The animals obeyed at once.

  Reaching the boundary of the two farms before the animals could catch up, Charlie deftly dodged Troggles to grab a weakened, bedraggled Ella by the hand and drag her up towards his house. The animals arrived just in time to stop the Troggles from chasing after them.

  Encouraged by the support of the animals, the Tufnells and the Nogmashers fought back the Troggles with renewed vigour. The battle raged.

  Granny, Grandpa, Dribbles and, of all people, Ella’s father, watched as Ella ran up the hill across Snoppit Farm, hand in hand with Charlie Snoppit, who had just set every one of Grandpa’s prize animals loose.

  Granny set off down the hill to rein the madness in.

  ‘I told you so,’ said Dribbles, hands on hips, as soon as Granny was out of earshot. ‘The girl is mad, quite mad, just like her mother.’

  Ella’s father glared at Dribbles. ‘That’s enough, Mrs Dribbleton-Faucet,’ he said. ‘Enough now. The girl has suffered enough.’

  chapter 25

  tussles & teamwork

  As soon as he was near his house, Charlie stopped to catch his breath. Ella pulled away from him, eyeing the boy for any clue of the Duke’s presence. He looked back at her, brown eyes shining, and grinned.

  Ella grinned back. It was good to see him. Especially now she was beginning to understand how important he was.

  Dixon zipped down off Ella’s shoulder and up on to Charlie’s, grabbing the five silver notes from Ella’s pocket on the way. He handed them to Charlie. ‘Quick, read these,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to find the Five Sacred Dewdrops, to save the Magical Kingdom of Magus. Or we’ll all die, pie, sky. They’re hidden somewhere, but we don’t know where. Can you help us? Us. Us. Rhymes with fuss.’

  Charlie looked at the notes, trying to make sense of the words.

  ‘We don’t have much time,’ Dixon ho
llered in his ear. ‘Time. Time. Rhymes with lime. Oh, how hard does this have to be, spree, flea? Hurry up, pup. Use your brain.’

  ‘I could if you’d shut up for half a second,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Well, I am soooooo sorry,’ said Dixon.

  Granny stormed up the hill towards them.

  ‘Let’s go, blow, throw,’ cried Dixon, pointing at Granny. Charlie and Ella turned, and their eyes opened wide.

  ‘I think I know where you can find whatever it is you’re trying to find,’ Charlie yelled, surprised at his own powers of deduction and grabbing Ella by the hand again. ‘Come on!’ He pulled her down the hill on the far side of Snoppit Farm, his feet moving so fast that Ella’s legs left the ground.

  Granny stopped and watched the two children running away (goodness, that boy was fast on his feet). She was quite oblivious to the Nogmashers bouncing past her and the handful of Troggles being chased by an army of frogs, one of them yelling, ‘Revenge is mine! Charlie, prepare to die!’

  The poor woman felt a stab of guilt at having kept her granddaughter away from other children for all these years. Ella was clearly desperate for company. But Granny wasn’t ready to absorb the fear, nagging at the back of her mind, that all this might be something deeper, more mysterious, somehow connected to Ella’s mother. No, that was more than she could manage.

  His Protector’s instincts wide awake inside him, Charlie pulled Ella behind a pile of tyres on the far boundary of Snoppit Farm. He needed to get his bearings.

  A huge rubbish dump spread out before them. It was hardly recognisable as a dump anymore, for the old cans and plastic bags and abandoned television sets were melting before their very eyes. A beeline of Nogmashers hurtled past them towards the mass of bubbling, stinking waste.

  The Nogmashers were brought to an abrupt halt by the smell. It was disgusting. Foul. Putrid. Worse than the smell of a hundred rotting Troggles. They began to bounce about again in a panic.

  Dixon, attached to Ella’s dungarees, grabbed the silver notes back from Charlie and flicked through them.

  ‘I see. Ah yes, guess, mess. Where rusty cans abound. A rubbish dump, mump, lump.’ He licked his finger and ticked the air. ‘But where’s the well, bell, smell?’ he said, reading through the notes with less enthusiasm, looking over at the soup of filth bubbling angrily in front of him. ‘And the water lizards, blizzards?’

  ‘Do you have to do that all the time?’ Charlie asked Dixon, examining the dump site for any sign of the old well where he often played. It had definitely been here last week. He could hardly believe how much the dump had changed since then. It was almost as if the whole place were dissolving.

  ‘What? Not,’ said Dixon.

  ‘Make everything rhyme!’ yelled Charlie.

  ‘Apparently so,’ said Dixon, his eyes bulging as the multicoloured rubbish tip began to swell before them.

  ‘There’s the well, just over there,’ said Charlie with relief, pointing over to his right. He dragged Ella towards it, wading through the muck. Dixon bounded after them, making gagging noises. The Nogmashers, pulling themselves together, followed too.

  Ella looked at Charlie and, sensing something, hesitated. Dixon was up on her shoulder in a trice. ‘He’s okay, Ella, really, wheelie,’ he urged. ‘A bit annoying, but otherwise fine, pine, whine.’

  Ella didn’t have time to hesitate further because Charlie was yelling at her.

  ‘We have to go down there,’ he shouted. Before she could argue, he had pulled her over to the edge of the well and was pushing her over the side. They fell through darkness, and hit the water with a splash.

  Charlie dived into the depths head first. The Nogmashers, realising the boy was on to something, zipped past him, lighting his way. Pulling Ella and Dixon behind him, Charlie swam with the speed and elegance of a dolphin. Before Ella could even consider she might need air, they had reached the bottom. As they did so, the water lifted above them with a sucking rush, leaving them in an air pocket.

  ‘I have no idea why I just did any of that,’ spluttered Charlie, staring wide-eyed at the water hanging like a ceiling above them.

  Ella took a deep breath and looked about her. In the Nogmashers’ light, she noticed a dripping trapdoor to her left. She opened it. It led to a tunnel.

  When she turned back to Charlie, she saw to her horror that in that instant he had changed. There was a familiar blackness in his eyes. His nose had begun to melt.

  ‘It’s over, Ella,’ came the Duke’s refined, menacing voice.

  Ella backed away. Her heart rose up into her mouth, and her eyes went blurry. The unthinkable was happening: Charlie had been Possessed – again. Except this time she was trapped at the bottom of a well with no way out. She couldn’t jump up and back into the water: she wasn’t sure it was even physically possible. And there was no way she could swim as fast as Charlie, Possessed or not. There was only one other way she could go, but she was so dizzy with fear that she wasn’t sure if she could make her feet move.

  Dixon, suddenly realising that Charlie wasn’t Charlie anymore, let out a muffled scream. ‘It’s the Duke, spook, Luke, puke!’ he yelled to Ella. His voice brought her back to her senses.

  Grabbing her little friend by the waist, Ella crawled frantically into the tunnel. But she had scarcely gone a few metres before it narrowed dramatically and dipped downwards into a steep drop, leading who knew where. She looked behind her. Charlie was crawling after her, shaking his head, struggling against the wicked Magical overtaking his body, the dark ambition fighting for his very being.

  Ella shut her eyes and tried to breathe slowly. She could feel an asthma attack coming on. Worse still, she was beginning to cry.

  The sound of an alarm clock ringing gave her such a fright that she hit her head on the ceiling of the tunnel.

  There it was again.

  Hovering above her was a teeny-weeny silver-winged alarm clock, no bigger than a thumbnail. It thrust itself into a nosedive, heading straight for Ella, and wrapped its hands around her nose, ringing its bell over and over.

  ‘Okayokayokayokayokayokayokayokay!’ Ella yelled.

  went the alarm clock.

  ‘Okay!’ Ella yelled again. Reaching out with some difficulty, she twiddled her ear. The alarm clock disappeared.

  ‘That was your internal alarm reminding you we don’t have much time, Ella,’ Dixon said, reminding her of the first time they’d met. ‘You must be getting really magic to have one of those!’

  ‘I must be,’ said Ella.

  She licked at a tear that had rolled onto her top lip. It tasted warm and salty, and the effect of it spread across her body like hot water in a bath. Her ears itched and her shoulderblades pulsed. She tried to keep calm. ‘It’s okay,’ she told herself. ‘It’s okay.’ And then a wonderful smell reached her. A truly magnificent aroma of cinnamon and rain, oranges and cloves drifted up out of the black hole. The Dewdrops were near. Ella could sense it with every fibre in her body. It made her feel much, much braver.

  Responding to her instincts, reassured by the smell, she closed her eyes tightly. ‘Nogmashers!’ she called back over her shoulder.

  A couple of Nogmashers squeezed obediently past her, the light from their eyes momentarily stopping the Possessed boy in his tracks and illuminating the fall below. Ella peeked into the void, being careful not to make direct eye contact with the Nogmashers. The hole was way too narrow for her to get down.

  Behind her, Charlie was losing the battle. The Duke was consuming him.

  Ella focused on the buzz in her ears, the pressure in her shoulderblades, the powerful smell of magic filling her senses. Dixon touched the tip of her ear, whispering, ‘Here’s the last of my elf dust. Rust. Must.’

  Ella took it, but she had no idea what to do with it. She tweaked her ear desperately, longing for something, anything, that would show her what to do next. Could Nature help her here? Often, when she had been in trouble lately, Nature had lent a hand.

  As if hearing her tho
ughts, a spray of water (albeit filthy and stinking) shot up out of the hole and stopped, suspended in thin air, between her and Charlie. It fused together, filling the tunnel with an undulating barrier, like a sheet of liquid glass.

  The Duke in Charlie let out a piercing cry of frustration.

  Ella felt the magic thump through her veins, and she knew what she must do. She had to fight the Duke. She had to make him leave Charlie.

  Through Charlie’s finger, the Duke sent a blast of elf dust to pierce the water-wall. The wall split, but Ella stood firm. Nature’s appearance, its reassurance, had given her the belief in herself she needed. She stared back at the Duke, her green eyes lighting up the dark tunnel. ‘Go away!’ she commanded, radiating an energy that was almost electric. ‘Go away!’

  Charlie fought the Duke too, with every ounce of strength left in his depleted body. The Duke fought back, hissing through the boy’s mouth. But Ella’s magical force-field was too powerful for him, and he was so weakened by his time on Earth that his mightiness began to waver.

  Ella grew stronger by the moment, her lungs empowered by the perfume of the Dewdrops floating up from below. At last the energy radiating from the girl’s eyes, the boy’s spirit, and their combined willpower overwhelmed the Duke. With the anguished cry of an injured crow, he was gone.

  ‘I’m going to try to Shrinkify us before it’s too late,’ Ella said to Charlie, wasting no time. ‘It’s the only way to get down that hole. The Dewdrops are down there – I know it.’ She was bursting with magic. She could feel the urgency now. She was going to save them all! Charlie, still in a daze, tried to shake himself back to his senses.

  Ella wiped her eyes, twiddled her ear and tried to find the place deep inside her where the real magic lay. She was going to Shrinkify herself and Charlie. She didn’t know how, but she knew she could do it. She was the Clearheart.