Chapter One: Wonk

Chapter One

Not everyone knows that you can do almost anything until someone tells you that it is impossible.
For instance, there is a little girl, lying half way up a hill, far away, right now. She is talking to a tortoise through her toes. You might not believe me, but its absolutely true. She can do it, because she hasn't been told that it is impossible.

And there's a little girl sitting in a tree who eats bumblebees. She eats them. Stacks of them. She knows that they make honey.They are infact, very tasty. Now sooner or later, someone is going to come and tell her that bumblebees are very bad for her, and they will make her sick.
But nobody has yet.
And then, there's William. Nobody has told William anything. Nothing at all. And that means that for William, the number of things that are possible is multiplied by about 1,300,457.
The reason that no one has told anything is that William's mother went off one day to get milk and a newspaper, and never came back.
William can fly about on a mop.

Or stand upside down.

Or talk to the cat.

That is the first strange thing about William. The second strange about William is that she girl. William, of course, is a stupid name for a girl. But her mother was rather absent minded.

At the age of one, her mother ad dangled her in a teapot, mistaking her for a spoon. After that she became wonky.

Now she has a wonky house, a wonky witch's hat, a wonky bicycle, and a wonky cat. Everything that she touches, wonks.

William lives on the outside of town. No one bothers her, apart from Mr Silverkrunk.

Mr Silverkrunk is an obsessive. He is obsessed is measuring things. The only thing Mr Silverkrunk loves more than measuring things, is stuffing things.
He stuffs rabbits, frogs, roses, elephants. And other things as well.

He likes to capture the look of horror on their faces.

Mr Silverkurnk hates wobbly lines. And he also hates children.

Whenever he walks past William's house, he kicks at her door. When he does this, nearly everything in her kitchen falls down, and she has to put it back up again.