The Sisterhood Of The Travelling Broomsticks: Part Three

They were clustered around in a circle, Kindle holding paper and a faerie pen, and Marie leapt up.

     “I’ve got it!” she shouted. “Let’s try all of the spells on the eyeballs! Maybe one of them is for fire!”

     They were all blank. “You know, I never actually thought of that,” Allison said, blinking. “I’m stupid, aren’t I?”

     “I don’t know about that, but if you are, you’re our stupid,” Tiggy said, smiling at her.

     Allison rolled her eyes. “Anyway, let’s try! This magic thing’s exciting, even if eating eyes isn’t.”

     They each took an eye for the second time. Kindle glanced at the paper. “The next one’s atertou. Are you going to instruct, Marie?”

     Marie nodded once, looking at the paper. “Okay, so it says to be ‘firm and loud’. Don’t shout, just be loud, and firm, like you’re scolding a naughty Puppyblew or something.” They nodded and took a deep breath, pointing their wands at the eyes. “Atertou,” they said firmly.

     The eyes closed in on themselves, crumbling into powder and fell on the floor. “Cool,” Tiggy whispered. “I wish I knew how to do that when I was at school; man, would that have gotten rid of some annoying people!”

     Kindle gave her a look and she was silent. Marie ignored them, and continued: “Take another eyeball. The next one is naevr; it says to start slow and then raise your voice at the end, so it might sound like naEVR. Ready?” They nodded and pointed their wands at the eyes. “NaEVR!”

     The eyes dropped from their fingers, liquefying. They left a sticky, slimy substance on the witchlets’ fingers, and they went to the tap to wash them off.

     “Golly we’re going to have some cleaning up to do afterwards,” Kindle muttered, looking at the powder and the goop.

     They got yet another eyeball. “The next one javvestip and you have to this one really quickly, and make it louder at the end, like javveSTIP! Okay? Good.”

     There was a loud sounding of javveSTIP and four bolts of lightning were shot out of four wands. The product was four flaming eyeballs in their hands, but they quickly went out from the liquid in them. Allison laughed.

     “Take that, eyeball!” she yelled, giggling.

     “Now, we come to the hard one,” Marie said after everyone had taken a fresh eyeball. “This is the ‘passionate one.’ It says, ‘Scream, yell, do a dance – be PASSIONATE!’”

     “Do we have to do all of those things?” Kindle asked tentatively.

     Marie laughed. “It doesn’t mean that you have to scream, yell and do a dance, it just means have emotion and feeling. The word is bassfuory.”

     When the voicing of bassfuory came, there was such a bang. It was so tremendous and everyone reeled back in surprise. It sounded like a bomb. It had been an explosion, and it seemed to ripple through the air with an after-shock, like after an earthquake.

     “I have but one thing to say: wow,” Tiggy said, her eyes wide.

     “Did that just happen?” Allison asked, blinking quickly.

     “Yep,” Kindle said, a little breathless. “I guess I know what it must have been like if the witches ever decided to have a war... They could easily levitate, crumble, liquefy, singe and blow people up with a single world – and those are only the easy spells!”

     “No wonder witches are feared,” Marie said, a chill creeping up her spine at what she could be – what she would be.

     She was frightened. She didn’t want to be some strange, magical thing that could disintegrate someone with barely any thought at all. She didn’t want to be a Morguss, Edna or Sophie – after all, Kauvara really was too commercial to add to the list of greats – but rather she wanted to be a Marie, a simple, normal Marie. She had always thought how painfully normal she was, in the eyes of most people, because they never saw the weird things that happened to her; now she was definitely not normal and she was complaining! How fickle I am! she thought, shaking her head.

     They cooked the stew and it went marvellously. After they were washed up, the girls went back to their usual pastimes: putting on makeup, reading magazines and writing about scientific findings. Only Marie was left to do nothing.

     Walking over to the box of eyeballs, she wondered what they would do with the remainder. She started to count them for something to do. At the very bottom of the box, she stumbled upon something.

     “What’s this?” she murmured under her breath. She held the thing gingerly, afraid it might break at any moment. “It’s... a golden eye.”

     * * * * *

     Examining it closely, she could see that the iris, the pupil and the flecks of light in it were jewels, studded into it with careful precision.

     “What the heck is that?” Tiggy asked, punctuating every second word.

     “I don’t know,” Marie said, holding it up to the light. The gems cast little spyderwebs of glimmering light on the wall and she thought how pretty it was. “It’s some sort of bejewelled eye.”

     “The Eye of Perspective,” Kindle whispered with horror and elation, her mouth hanging open. “It is very dangerous, Marie! It says that it can change the perspective of someone!”

     “What do you mean?” Allison asked.

     “Let’s say that you hated Sloth,” Kindle said.

     “Fair enough.”

     “If Marie wanted she could make you want to grovel at Sloth’s feet and think that he was the master of everything – that’s how powerful it is.”

     Everyone’s eyes widened and Marie looked back at the little golden orb in her hands. It was beautiful... but so dangerous.

     “I – I do not want it!” she exclaimed, placing it on the ground and backing away hurriedly.

     “Don’t just leave it lying around like that!” Kindle shrieked, lunging for the Eye. “Some evil thing could swoop in through the door and snatch it up! How would you like it then?”

     “I think that we should let the Witches know,” Marie said uneasily. “They will know what to do with it.”

     “Yeah, keep it for themselves!” Tiggy said. “We can’t give it to them.”

     “Well, what else can we do with it?” Marie asked, frustrated. “It’s not like we need to mess with anyone’s brain right this second.”

     “I would like to mess with whosoever brain it was that gave us that bath and supplied the food,” Allison grumbled.

     “I know what the Witches would do with it,” Kindle said darkly, looking straight ahead. “They would use it on the faeries.”

     * * * * *

     There was a stunned silence for a moment. “What do you mean?” Marie asked. “Why would they do that?”

     “You heard Tiggy before: witches hate faeries; they would change their perspectives, make them like witches, and then... It just wouldn’t be good.”

     “I think it would be good,” Tiggy said, and only got three glares in reply. “What?”

     “We can’t give it to them. We’ll just keep it; hide it, you know,” Marie said. “I think that that would be the safest option.”

     “Yeah, I agree,” Allison said.

     When they all agreed, they had to decide where to hide it. They whispered, as well, because they thought that the Witches might be listening in.

     “I think we should hide it in that little nook behind the toilet,” Allison whispered.

     “I think we should hide it in the closet, under all of the clothes,” Tiggy suggested.

     “I think we should hide it behind the bookcase,” Kindle said softly.

     Marie racked her brains, and then it came to her. “I think we should hide it inside an eye.”

     “Huh?” Tiggy asked, frowning.

     “Okay, we hollow out a regular eye,” Marie said in a whisper, “and then we slip the Eye inside its ‘jacket’ and we glue it together and put it in the freezer with all of the normal eyes; no one would suspect a thing!”

     “That is the most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard!” Allison said. “Well... not exactly, but you know what I mean.”

     “I think it would work splendidly. If anyone came to look, then they would think it was a normal eye, because the ‘real’ Eye is very flashy and gold, as we’ve seen.”

     “We should make a decoy eye, as well,” Tiggy suggested, “and we could hide it somewhere they would easily find it.”

     “Great idea, Tiggs,” Allison said, smiling.

     They spent the rest of the day hollowing out an eye – it was a lot fiddlier than it sounded, and they wrecked a fair few eyes – and then placing it in. There was no handy bottle of superglue around, so they had to find a gluing spell in the massive, insanely dusty book of spells that lay on the ground.

     “Ugh, it’s so heavy,” Allison complained. There was an intricate pattern on what appeared to be the twisted vine of a rose, complete with thorns. It sort of looked like the bubble for dark faeries in Faerie Bubbles.

     “Awesome! I bet the Twisted Roses made it,” Tiggy said unhelpfully upon seeing the cover, and Marie sighed.

     “We should look under G,” Kindle said, “for ‘glue.’”

     “No, duh, Kindle; that’s a bit obvious,” Allison said, rolling her eyes. She flipped to G.

     “Now you should find the G-Ls,” Marie put in, because Allison seemed to be going from G-A.

     “Oh. That would help,” she said.

     “Hey, why do you say that she is helpful when I was equally helpful?” Kindle said, her bottom lip sticking out.

     “Because I actually didn’t think of that,” Allison said teasingly, and Kindle stuck her tongue out.

     “Brat,” she muttered playfully.

     Allison pretended to ignore her and said: “I found it!”

     “Really?” Kindle asked, surprised, looking over. “I didn’t actually think that you would.”

     They all clustered around, looking at the spell. “Uffergiddius?” Marie asked uncertainly. Then she shrugged. “Okay, whatever works.”

     “Y’know, the Witches don’t really prepare us for things – I mean, in the real witch world you don’t get supplied with helpful hints on pronunciation!” Tiggy complained.

     “Shut up, Tiggy,” Allison said absently, looking at the spell. “I think that we can do it; it doesn’t seem too hard.”

     “Good. Let’s go!” Kindle said excitedly.

     They slipped the Eye into its case and pointed their wands at it. Then came a loud voicing of “Uffergiddius!”

     The Eye’s case was covered in sticky glue, but it was definitely sealed shut.

     “Now, on to making the DE,” Tiggy said. “Mwahahahahaha...”

     “Shut up, Tiggy,” Allison said for the second time. “By the way, what’s the ‘DE’?”

     “‘Decoy Eye’, duh!” Tiggy said. “Too bad we don’t still have the Eye to make an imprint...”

     * * * * *

     Marie was awake early; much earlier than everyone else and she wandered about the little house absently, thinking. She went to the fridge, and she rummaged through the many eyes, looking for the one with the tiny, almost invisible seam that ran along its length.

     “That’s odd,” she muttered, but she kept looking. “No, not that one...” She took out a magnifying glass, and looked over each one. “No, not that one either...”

     She ran through the whole house, almost tearing her hair out with frustration – and partly fear, too. She didn’t know what was going to happen now...

     “What’s wrong, Marie?” Kindle asked, blearily rubbing her eyes.

     “It’s gone,” Marie whispered, falling to her knees. “Gone!”

     “What’s gone?” Allison asked, walking out anxiously.

     “The Eye,” Marie whispered. “It’s been stolen.”

To be continued...