An All Too Magical Christmas #16

In which a magician (second class) reluctantly rescues some teenagers from a fate they almost certainly deserve

When a magician (second class) chooses to do Christmas duty in the City of London, it's because he's hoping for a nice, quiet, seasonal time, not for ancient magic to break loose and the enchanted city to be filled with ghosts, monsters, wonder and danger. Not on his watch. Not when he's going to have to deal with it all on his own. That would be an all too magical Christmas.

An All Too Magical Christmas is a seasonal adventure story of magic, mayhem and mystery told in 24 instalments. It is written by Tobias Sturt and read aloud by Jon Millington.

Incident report YUL-XX/12

Section Sixteen

I am, as you might imagine from my profession as an actual Government wizard, generally against the burning of witches. It is cruel, prejudiced and, if they’re an actual witch, rarely works. And if it does work, they weren’t a witch and congratulations, you’ve just committed an extraordinarily unpleasant murder.

Which was precisely what I was not intending to do. I was actually expecting the witch to escape the flames as easily as I had, especially when the little black cat came jumping through the hole I had made in the walls, but the storybook house was burning down and no one else came out.

The cat began to prowl back and forth round the edge of the conflagration, watching. The pages that were the walls curled up and away from the beams of spines, the sentences blackening, catching, the books that were the roof took flight in the rising hot air, their covers spreading like wings, then catching fire, flaming birds spiralling up into the sky. In the roaring fire you could hear the snap and hiss of the consonants, the pop of the vowels as the words burnt up, the flames chattering all the stories at once.

And still no one came out.

The cat came back round a corner of the house and stared at me.

I wish it recorded in this report that I was immensely sorry about that, sorry for as long as it took me to find the actual pen of children round the back.

Actually, it was less of a pen and more of a hedge. A hedge of holly, thick, bristling and at least twice my height. There was a gap in the hedge, a sort of arch, and I poked my head through. Inside a path branched left and right. Alright then, a more of a maze. A maze of holly, thick, bristling and - ow - impossible to climb or push through.

“Help,” came the cry again from somewhere inside.

“Hello?” I called back, “Are you all ok? Did she eat any of you?”

“Are you going to eat any of us?” said someone and

“It’s Hairy Potter!” said someone else.

Of course. The children from outside Drosselmeyer’s shop. The children who had started this whole thing by shouting insults up at my window. And now they needed saving again.

It is, I think, a credit to my professionalism that I decided that it was going to be me that was going to do it.

From the other side of the burning house behind me, the cat was watching, the flames reflected, dancing, in its green eyes. Large green eyes. Larger than they were before. The whole cat was larger than it was before. Was it growing?

“Walk towards the sound of my voice,” I called.

“You walk,” came a reply, “It’s like a maze in here.”

“It is a maze, stupid,” said someone else.

“It’s a stupid, stupid,” said another voice.

“I’m at the entrance,” I said, “You just need to find your way to me.”

I looked back over my shoulder. The cat was gone. But in the flickering orange light that lit the trees beyond something big moved. Big and black and stealthy.

“I’ll keep talking, you just come towards me,” I said, and then, “No, wait…”

The gap in the hedge wasn’t there. I could have sworn there was a gap. I had put my head through it, hadn’t I? I started down the holly hedge, searching for it.

“Hang on,” I said.

“You’re moving,” said a voice, “You don’t move, Hairy Poopoo.”

“Stupid wizard,” said someone else.

I came to the end of a wall of holly and discovered it was a corner. From the shadows in the forest beyond, something glimmered. A light. An eye! A cat’s eye, the size of a dinner plate. Two of them, green and glowing with wavering fire.

“I’m just trying to find the way in,” I said, “Wait there, I’m coming to you.”

There! An opening in the hedge! Narrow and prickly, but less narrow and prickly than the mouth of a giant cat, I’d bet. I went through.

“I’ve found the way out,” I shouted, “Come towards me, again.”

“Stay there, this time,” came the reply.

“Don’t worry, I’m not…” the gap in the hedge wasn’t there any more. It had been narrow, perhaps I was just missing it. No. No, nothing but tangled, impenetrable holly.

“This doesn’t go anywhere,” came one of the kids’ voices, “Go back.”

“Go back where?” said someone else, “This doesn’t go anywhere.”

“Course it does,” said the first, “We came that way, stupid.”

“Stop talking,” I shouted, “The hedges are listening.”

“What are you talking about, Harry Pot-head? Hedges can’t listen.”

“It’s a magical maze,” I said, “Walls have ears. It’s listening to what we’re saying and changing to confuse us. We have to stop discussing things out loud. You use sign language, I’m going to sing.”

“Oh my god,” said someone, “This is the stupidest…”

“Shhh,” said someone else.

“You shush,” came the reply, but the voices were at least moving, even if they couldn’t actually stop talking.

“The holly and the ivy,” I began, “When they are both full grown…”

I mean, what else was I going to sing? It was the first thing that came into my mind. At least it was seasonal.

“Why’s he singing that stupid song?” said someone.

“So we can… we just…” someone despaired of trying to explain without words, “Just go!”

“Of all the trees that are in the wood,” at least perhaps this might mollify the hedges a bit, “The holly wears the crown.”

“That doesn’t rhyme,” said a voice, much closer now, “Grown and crown don’t rhyme.”

That’s the funny thing about carols and songs like that. You grow up singing them and after a while you stop noticing the words at all. They just become sounds you make along a tune. I’m not sure I’d ever really thought about the words to The Holly and the Ivy before.

“O, the rising of the sun,” I sang, “And the running of the deer…”

Where was the ivy, I thought? The song was called The Holly and the Ivy, but where was the ivy?

“The playing of the merry organ,” I sang, “Sweet singing in the choir”

There were deer, there were choristers, there was an awful lot of holly, but there was no ivy. It didn’t seem fair. It was in the name of the song. There really ought to be ivy.

“The holly bears a blossom, as white as lily flow'r,” I sang. Lilies, even, but no ivy. There really ought to be ivy.

And as I thought this, something was happening to the hedges around me. Something was rustling and creeping, the holly was shaking and heaving back and forth. For a moment I thought it was the giant cat outside, trying to force its way in, but then, amongst the dark, glossy holly leaves, came the bright, heart shaped leaves of ivy.

It was like one of those time lapse sequences from a nature documentary, as the stems of the ivy wound up and around the holly branches and great swathes of flat, green leaves unfurled across the prickly walls, covering them entirely.

You know that spark you get off your wand when you use magic? If you use magic. It occurs to me that some of you reading this might not have. Well, there is, when you hold a government issued wand and cast a government approved spell, a sensation you get in your hand, somewhere between a shock of static electricity and pins and needles. A spark in the fingertips.

Well, I was getting that now, but not just in my fingertips: all over. From my toes to my nose. I had a spark in my ears. I had magical knees. Was I doing magic? Was I doing magic without a government approved wand and a government mandated spell. Was I using old magic, wild magic? Real magic?

“Oi, Worst Wizard,” came a voice, “What’s going on?”

No time for existential crises.

“Climb the ivy!” I shouted back, “Climb the ivy and get on top of the hedges!”

I myself grabbed a fistful of creepers and hauled myself up. I pulled myself up onto the top of a hedge as the first of the children was doing the same. They were only feet from me, but between us the maze switched back and forth in complicated whorls.

“Follow me,” I said, and we ran along the wavy paths of thick ivy, high across the tops of the holly walls, to the edge of the maze and scrambled down back into the forest beyond.