A walk round the Witches' Home 1/4

Jennifer Jane had decided to visit her friends at the Witches’ Home in her canoe. Wilfred was wrapped up in his nice warm cloak fast asleep, when she reached the pool, while the pump was purring away quietly moving just enough salt water to keep the pool topped up to the correct level.

She packed her canoe trolley away in Drawrof as quietly as she could, in case she woke the giant and then paddled down stream to the wishing fog.

It was a lovely sunny day as she came out of the fog and as she approached the Witches’ Home she could see a small circle of witches on the lawn enjoying the fresh air. She lifted Drawrof out of the water, put it carefully on the grass and then walked over towards the group.

As she got closer, she could see that Abigail was taking a class of junior apprentices through some finger twiddling exercises. She knew that they wouldn’t want to be disturbed, so she walked past and went across to the workshops to see Robert instead.

He was hard at work on a cloud. There were two more in the workshop and he was obviously very busy. He looked up as Jennifer Jane came in and then put his head back inside the cloud to get on with the job.

She got rather a shock when a second head also looked out of the cloud. This one was only too familiar and for a moment she felt frightened.

Then she remembered that Malcolm was no longer a wizard and was just an ordinary person helping Robert with his job.

“Sorry,” said Robert, “we’ve far too much to do today to spare any time for chatting. They’re queuing up in here for attention.”

So she walked off towards the broom shed to see if there was anyone there to have a chat with but except for Abigail’s class, there didn’t seem to be anybody about.

It was at that point that she had an idea. She’d seen the Witches’ Home from the air on the castle side, on the day when magic had stopped working. She remembered it looked rather like a shiny half egg lying on the ground. ‘I wonder if it’s possible to walk round to the alternate world inside the egg?’

Before she could change her mind, she decided to have a try and walked past the broom shed into the woods. Almost at once she had to stop to avoid falling into the river.

That wasn’t right, the shed was at least fifty yards away from the water. She looked round and sure enough there was the broom shed fifty yards away and a little to her right. She tried again, rather more carefully this time, with the same result.

Very strange! To make sure that she was as close as possible to the ‘egg’, she turned sharp left past the shed until she could feel a strange sort of rubbery resistance to her progress. She stood still and carefully looked round.

The vegetation stopped two feet away from where she was standing. It was like being on a slightly curving path that went away to her left, until it disappeared round the bend. She took a couple of steps in a straight line and suddenly found herself back by the river again.

She stopped for a moment to think. It seemed that the undergrowth stopped two feet away from the edge of the ‘egg’. Any movement beyond that distance put her back to the river at once.

If she wanted to try and get to the alternate world by going round the edge, she would have to stay as far away as possible from the woods.

She went back to the shed and had another try. This time she faced the ‘wall’ and felt her way along with a sort of side ways movement. She could slide her hands along on a surface which yielded a little to her touch but which was quite strong enough to prevent her from pushing her way through.

As she went along, progress slowly became more and more difficult. A careful look round, showed that the path was still the same width as before but something seemed to be trying to hold her back.

She began to worry that she might be trying to do something dangerous, but she’d been going for so long that it seemed silly not to keep on trying, at least until she couldn’t force her feet to go on any more. Presumably if she couldn’t get any further, she only had to walk away from the path and she’d find herself back at the river near the broom shed.

She was just about to give up when she saw the end of the woods and some open space in front of her. She forced herself across the last few feet with renewed energy and suddenly walking became easy again. She stepped out onto the Witches’ Home lawn just beside the workshop.