Chapter Thirteen
‘Shit,’ Frida cried. ‘Shit, shit.’ She shook the fairy desperately, but they didn’t stir.
Unconscious, or asleep. Or dying, she didn’t know.
With a groan of despair, she lurched to her feet.
‘Hamish, Antony!’ She started running back towards them, leaving the fairy slumped against the tree stump.
What else could she do? ‘It’s time to go! ’
Antony and Hamish were splayed out on the grass pointing out cloud shapes in the sky, their bright polished nails glinting in the sun, senseless it seemed to the rumbling below their feet.
The air felt tight, overstuffed, as if something was about to explode.
The grass now whispered above her ankles, getting taller by the second.
‘Cliff, this is Frida!’ She tried the radio again and again. ‘Cliff, there’s a Code Red. I repeat, a Code Red at the bloody Hawthorn! Can you hear me?’
She let out a whoop. ‘Cliff! Oh my god, Cliff. You can hear me?’
‘. . . Yes . . . Not . . . Can you repeat?’
‘THERE’S A CODE. RED. AT. THE. TREE!’ she wailed.
Antony and Hamish were still cloud-spotting.
‘That one’s definitely more of a ten-trunked elephant, Ant .
. .’ Hamish murmured, to Ant’s giggle, as if they couldn’t hear the approaching earth-deep thunder.
‘No, it’s a giant drinking coffee, can’t you see?
’ Tears of frustration fell down her cheeks as she tried to drag them up, straining against their dead weight. It was as if she wasn’t even there.
The radio went in and out of static.
‘Swan2, can you . . . the situation . . . precisely where you are . . .’
She tried not to howl. ‘Cliff, there’s a fairy at the Hawthorn.
The wards are gone. I repeat. There are no wards, and the Coffin is in pieces.
The fairy has done something – I don’t know what.
It feels. . .’ She drew in a gasp, her voice dipping with fear.
The idea of saying the word magic out loud.
. . she had to stay professional, but all she could do was gaze at the glittery power moving faster and faster, unspooling like watery ribbons.
She had to blink because it was the most beautiful and terrifying thing she’d ever seen. Her hand shook on the radio.
‘Cliff, Antony and Hamish have been bewitched. I can’t move them. I don’t know what to do. Please, help me.’
‘Swan2 . . . don’t panic. . . bringing wards . . . on the way . . . retreat to a safe position. . .’
‘Cliff,’ she let out a gasp.
The radio went dead.
‘It’s magic,” Antony whispered.
She whipped her head around, but the word was out there.
Antony had said it. Antony, a scientist who couldn’t even decide on an ice-cream flavour without making a spreadsheet.
He was gazing in awe, double dimpled smile on full display, as he watched the glitter coiling ever higher.
New shoots bursting out of the earth. Everywhere was the smell of heated metal.
The bees were going bananas. Birds did loop-the-loops.
Butterflies flocked in their thousands. Hamish’s eyes dilated as they pointed towards where she’d left the fairy, although there was no sign of them now amongst the tall grasses.
‘Your fairy did this,’ Hamish sighed dreamily, leaning their head against Antony’s shoulder and lightly touching the dark curls of his beard.
‘I love your soft beard, Ant. It’s so tidy.
How do you do that?’ They looked up at him, as if he was the only person in the world, and there wasn’t glitter exploding out of every orifice of this clearing. ‘Do you comb it?’
Antony giggled. ‘Of course I do.’ He’d been making angel shapes out of the grass, but now he snuggled up against Hamish and his white teeth gleamed as he beamed. ‘Oh Mish, you make me giddy. Do you know that? Sometimes I just want to swoon.’
Frida gaped at them both. Only when they were blackout drunk did they speak to each other like this. Awkwardly, she reached for their arms again.
‘Ah, Fri,’ Antony turned his hazy gaze on her, seizing her hand in an adoring grip. ‘Beautiful Fri. We love you so much, do you know that?’
‘Yes,’ Frida exclaimed. ‘I know! But if you really love me, you’ll move.’ She gave another desperate tug, but Antony just flopped back down, dropping her hand. She could have sworn the rumbling was getting louder, as if the roots of the very hill were waking up.
Hamish reached up to touch her cheek. ‘You’re so kind Fri, I don’t tell you that enough. You always look after everyone else, and you never give up. Not on a grunkle, not on me, not even on little spiders in the shower.’
Antony nodded sagely, his eyes meeting hers again, this time much too discerning for someone high on fairy glitter. ‘That’s why we won’t let you give up on yourself.’
She went utterly still, a high-pitched whirring in her ears.
And then Antony gave another giggle and wrapped his arms around Hamish, his eyes going blurry again. The lush grasses settled around them like a blanket. ‘Shall we take a nap, honey?’
‘Oh yes, I’m awfully tired,’ Hamish murmured. They gave Antony a sleepy smile, before closing their eyes and muttering into his shoulder, ‘We can help Fri de-worm the hedgehogs later.’
The glitter was tumbling like embers from a mounting wildfire. Her hands shook so much as she reached for the radio again, but there was only the crackle and hiss of static. Cliff had promised he was coming. She fought to steady her breath.
It’s going to start soon, the fairy had said – Dozy, Hamish had called them.
Helplessly, she watched as the grasses and flowers kept growing.
Where had Dozy come from? Higgleton Common, all those years ago?
Frida had been four years old, but she did vaguely remember the day it had been cut down.
Her mum had been watching it on TV. She’d really wanted to join the protests, but in the end with too many shifts at the restaurant, and looking after young Frida, she hadn’t been able to.
When the bulldozers had gone in, they’d been at home making an ice-cream cake.
Are you ok? she’d asked Dozy. Not really, Frida, they’d rasped. No, I don’t think I am.
Antony and Hamish lay before her in the carpet of flowers, snoring blissfully.
She’d just sunk down onto her heels, considering whether she could bodily drag them out of the clearing when the most colossal rumble yet tore through the earth, so violent that it tossed her sideways.
She threw out her arms instinctively, throwing herself over the sleeping bodies of Antony and Hamish, craning her neck to look behind her.
She wished she hadn’t.
Magic.
It burst out of the Hawthorn, a tidal wave of silver and pink, so gargantuan that it made anything that had come before seem trivial.
With a scream, she ducked as the wave of spine-tingling glitter passed over them.
The explosive rush of freed galaxies: summer’s fire and winter’s frost, autumn’s decay and spring’s new buds.
She was choking on the sulphuric smell of volcanoes, the heady rush of petrichor.
And something else, too. Something sweet and spicy, like almonds.
She didn’t know how long it lasted. But when the rumbling finally subsided, a strange silence seemed to surround her, pounding in her ears.
There was the pulse of a heartbeat. Ba-dum, ba-dum.
Hers, yes, deafening in her head. But something else too, someone else’s.
Huge, and all around. Ba-dum, ba-dum. The earth pounded.
Ba-dum, ba-dum. The wood. Ba-dum, ba-dum.
She had one hand clutching her cap, the other clutching Antony’s shirt, Hamish’s collar.
The ba-dum, ba-dum grew louder. In stunned horror, she watched as the Hawthorn’s enchanted wood began to awaken.
Before her eyes, the trunks stirred. The earth below them cracked.
Whilst her friends slept in the shadows of the trees, the wood woke up.
It began to inflate like a thorny balloon.
‘Oh . . . shit!’
Nobody heard her though. Antony and Hamish were dreaming, unaware that with that blast of oceanic magic, Dozy had unleashed something.
Slowly, with trembling legs, she lifted herself onto her knees.
She could hear the branches battling for space, the roots digging deeper, roaring like a tiger released.
‘We really should have gone to get waffles,’ she said as she clung onto her cap and scrambled to her feet.
Even as she tried to reassure herself that Cliff would be here soon, she watched the wood lift towards the sky, as if it had been given some magical Miracle-Gro.
Nothing about this would look good on Management’s annual report.
Habitats didn’t just decide to grow on their own!
Her heart in her throat, she raced back to Dozy, searching for the fairy’s broken form amongst the wild grasses.
When she found them, right where she’d left them, curled up at the base of the Hawthorn’s burnt heart, she fell to her knees.
Suddenly, the lines of the fairytale, Sleeping Beauty, came back to her, the ones her mum had read to her, so long ago.
‘It shall not be death, but a sleep of a hundred years, into which the princess shall fall.’
She gazed down at Dozy’s wilted crown, the spider-silk suit hanging in fraying shreds, the pale gleam of the thorn that pierced their lip.
She could hear their shallow breathing, see the soft fluttering of their eyelids.
In the version of Sleeping Beauty her mum had told her, the princess is woken by the prince’s kiss.
She chewed on her thumbnail until it bled as she remembered the exhausted way Dozy had formed her name, not just Frida but Frida Rose, the way it pierced her, as intimately as the thorn in their lip.
When she touched the ragged webs of their spider-silk, it came apart in her hands.
Their skin was ice cold, sending a shock through her own body in sympathy.
Tiny tendrils of new growth had started to loop around their ankles, threading through the matted snarls of their hair and curling around their fingers; their hawthorn leaf crown slipped over one eye.
‘Please!’ she pleaded. ‘We didn’t know you were in here, I swear. If you’re angry, we were just trying to care for your tree as best as we could. Whatever you’ve done, if you just wake up, I’m sure we can fix this.’
But when Dozy didn’t stir, she felt a rush of fury, hot and blinding.
They’d told her to trust them. Look what they’d done though!
She wanted to scream in their green fairy face, to force them to fix this, but however much she shook them, they didn’t wake up.
And by now, the wood had grown so tall, it looked as if dusk had fallen, even though it wasn’t even mid-afternoon and she should, by rights, have finished her shift and already be at home eating a family-sized bucket of pasta in front of the TV.
Cliff should have been here by now. She felt the layers of the wood smothering her, closing overhead like a living ceiling.
She wondered if it was creeping off the hill too, swallowing the vampire bats, the neighbouring manticore enclosure.
Would it consume all of Forest? Overrun Melody-Upon-Sea?
She forced herself to breathe, telling herself that the wards would stop it.
But then she remembered – they had failed.
Last night. Lucky had managed to blast through the wards on the Coffin.
But the Coffin’s wards had been Level 1.
Lucky was a Level 8. It would have been easy for him.
What Level was Dozy, she wondered.
She needed to find Cliff. NOW.
With a final blistering curse at the fairy, she hurried back to her friends.
They were buried in a thicket of forget-me-nots, tiny flowers caught in their hair and in Antony’s beard.
Some foolish part of her thought that if she could just tidy them up, everything would be ok.
She straightened Antony’s collar, placed Hamish’s fallen cap back on their head, brushed off a bit of mud from Hamish’s shirt.
But as her hand lingered on their chests, feeling the slow rise and fall, she knew they weren’t going to wake up.
Like the fairy, they were asleep.
The canopy had shut out the sun completely.
She let herself drink in the sight of her friends one last time.
Antony’s dark lashes, the faint furrow between his perfect brows, the single dimple that suggested he was smiling, even as he slept.
Mish’s cheekbones were flushed, the bronze line of eyeshadow set off against a blue stain of mushroom feed on their neck.
They were curled together with a tenderness they’d never usually allow unless off their faces on whiskey or, it seemed, fairy magic.
She raised her face to the Hawthorn’s broken canopy, which looked luminous around its charred edges, a terrifying beacon in the dark.
Then she started to run.