The next thing I knew, I was lying on a cold concrete floor. I lay there for a few minutes, just relieved to be alive. I could feel something half in my pocket and half out. I moved slightly, so I could touch it and see what it was. It was the wand! I couldn’t believe my luck.
‘He’s awake,’ said a thin, dry voice behind me.
I sat up slowly and turned round. I saw now that I was in a metal shed with a concrete floor. Sitting on a plastic chair was the ghoul, and hovering in mid air as always was the spectre.
‘I thought you were going to kill me,’ I said, confused.
A voice came from the middle of the shadow that was the spectre. ‘The witch came to us creatures of the dark, and offered us power over the pixies, the fairies, the flowers, the creatures of the light. But she tricked us.’
‘How?’
‘We helped her establish her reign over this world. We helped her chase out the creatures of the light. But then she needed more power, power that she could only get by feeding magical creatures to her machine. She used fairies when she could get them, which wasn’t often because they have powerful magic of their own. When she couldn’t get fairies, she used pixies. When she couldn’t get pixies, she used our kind.’
‘We are the only ones left,’ said the ghoul with unexpected sadness. ‘She has kept us as her slaves, but we know what she will do when we are no longer useful.’
‘We must make a plan, then,’ I said. I suddenly remembered what the fairies had said about the last magic carpet leaving at noon. I looked at my watch. It was eleven o’clock. I must have been out for longer than I had realised. ‘We’ve only got an hour, though, or we will all be trapped here!’
‘You have only got an hour,’ said the spectre. ‘We have all the time in the world. The fairies would never take us, not after we chased them all out in the first place. But if we can trap the witch here with us, we will have made amends, in a way.’
I was going to argue, but there just wasn’t time. Every second we wasted made it more likely that I would get trapped too, more likely that Suki would die, and more likely that Arabella would get the power she needed to destroy other worlds.
We talked for a few more minutes, then I grasped the wand and wished for invisibility. I looked down and I could no longer see my body. I knew that if Arabella searched specifically for invisible people, she would see me—but I hoped she wouldn’t be doing that, as she thought I was dead.
Standing next to the ghoul, I rang Arabella’s doorbell again. A few seconds later, Arabella opened the door and I slipped inside. ‘Why didn’t you let yourself in?’ asked Arabella angrily.
‘Door didn’t open,’ whispered the ghoul.
I couldn’t stop to listen, but I smiled to myself as the argument at the front door became more heated. Arabella was getting angry, and the ghoul was replying in a nasty whisper. It could sound very nasty when it wanted to, and right now it did want to, because it was getting Arabella too angry to think clearly.
I had found a room which was full of electronic apparatus. In the middle of the room was an archway that looked like an airport security scanner, and I wondered if you walked through that to get to another world. There was also a desk with a laptop on it, which I assumed controlled everything. Also on the table was the cage with Suki in it! I quickly released her, though of course she couldn’t see me.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked, staring around her.
‘It’s me,’ I whispered. I guided her to my shoulder, and she perched there, apparently sitting on nothing. She gripped my ear rather tightly, which was uncomfortable, but there was no time to arrange things better.
Before we did anything else, we had to stop Arabella’s equipment working. I gripped the wand and wished: ‘Disable this equipment, so it can’t be fixed with the technology available on this world.’
A virus warning message appeared on the laptop’s screen.
I grinned to myself in spite of everything. There was something clever and minimalist about that. It made sense, though. The other equipment might well be useless without the laptop, and it might well be impossible to fix the laptop if all the install disks were at home.
I slipped out of the front door and looked at my watch. Of course I couldn’t see it. I cancelled the invisibility and tried again. I had less than ten minutes to meet the fairies! For many years, I’ve kept fit by running, and I’ve never been as glad as I was at that moment. I set off for the trees at a run. I could feel Suki flapping her wings. Of course she was scared and wanting to help, but she was too small to make much difference.
Behind me, Arabella had come out of the house, and because I was now visible she had seen me. She pulled the remote control out of her pocket and pressed buttons madly, but it seemed not to be working. That was something, I thought. Presumably the laptop had crashed and she had lost her powers. Of course she then realised that she was in danger of being trapped, and she set off at a run after us. I don’t know if she’d done any training, but if not, her fear was allowing her to keep up a good pace.
I held the wand and wished to be able to run faster. It didn’t work. Instead, in my mind, I saw the fairies packing up their belongings. I never found out for sure why it worked that way, but as the fairies packed up, I think perhaps it broke this world’s link with magic. As I ran, I sensed the fairies untying the doormats and the extra carpets, packing them in bags and stowing them on the front carpet for the journey. They then shrank the trees, put them in plant pots, and put them on the carpet too. Finally, when I was nearly there, I saw the fairies climb on the carpet and I watched it begin to move. I was close but it looked as though it was still too late.
Then everything got confusing. The ghoul jumped out, grabbed a plant pot from the carpet, and ran off. The fairies swung the carpet round and set off in pursuit. This gave me a chance to jump on. Arabella tried to do the same, but the carpet did a tight turn, and she found herself grabbing at empty air. The ghoul had put the plant pot down and disappeared again, so I lent off the side of the carpet and grabbed it as we sailed past. Now we were ready to leave, but we had another problem. Arabella was running along behind us, and the carpet seemed to be running out of steam; it wasn’t fast enough to shake her off.
‘We can’t leave this world until no one is watching,’ said the oldest fairy. ‘But this world’s magic is disintegrating fast. If we can’t leave soon, we will be stuck.’
We looked at each other. If someone got off the carpet, they could probably delay her, but then they would be stuck too.
The carpet had circled back on itself, and we were now quite close to Arabella’s house. As we went past, I saw a familiar metal shed, and the next moment, Arabella found herself surrounded by shadow. I saw her fall down, struggling with the spectre.
‘Hold tight,’ said the fairy. ‘This won’t be as comfortable as the journey here.’ At that moment, the carpet reached the top of a small hill—and there was nothing on the other side. We found ourselves falling into a black void. I had hold of something that turned out to be a fairy’s foot, but I didn’t dare let go.