Aurelius and I (7 page)

“I know,” Barry replied ruefully. “I don’t mean them any harm though. I love animals. I just wish they could understand that, but all they can see is the big, lumbering oaf who’s destroying the plants and trees they like to shelter under.”

I didn’t know what to say. Every time I tried to pay Barry a compliment I somehow managed to upset him further. I couldn’t help but be surprised at how different he was from my existing impression of what an ogre should be. Not only was his appearance really quite normal, if a little over-sized, but he was also incredibly self-conscious, and not at all like the untamed, savage beasts that the fairytales I had been read had portrayed ogres to be. I was immensely grateful when Aurelius interrupted the awkward silence that hung between us.

“Anyway, Barry, we really must be getting on, so if there’s nothing else you were needing me for...”

“Actually, there was something,” Barry interrupted.

“Go on,” said Aurelius, rolling his eyes.

“I was just wondering if you’d spoken to Rain yet? It’s just that she was asking after you earlier on. She said she needed to speak with you, it seemed kind of urgent.”

“Well, thank you for the information, Barry. I haven’t seen her yet, but I shall keep my eyes peeled and my ears open and I’m sure that we shall come across one another sooner or later. Now, if you’ll kindly excuse us, we really must be off to fetch some supper.”

A few minutes later we reached a small clearing in the Forest surrounded by hundreds of large bushes, each one filled with an abundance of berries, the likes of which I had never seen before. Some were bright pink, others were an almost luminous yellow and others still were silver with white polka dots. Aurelius stopped.

“Here we are, the perfect spot. You take these,” he said, handing me two, small, woven pouches from inside his enormous jacket. “Put the pink berries in the yellow bag, and the yellow berries in the pink bag.”

“Why the yellow in the pink bag?” I asked.

“You’ve got to have a system, Charlie,” Aurelius replied, “otherwise they’d all get mixed up, and that simply wouldn’t do.”

I wasn’t sure whether Aurelius had deliberately missed the point of my question, but I decided to ask another rather than pursue the issue.

“What should I do with the silver, spotty ones?”

“Never pick the silver ones – they’re strictly fairy food only and they might put a curse on you if they catch you taking any.”

“Fairies? So all the stories I was told as a child are true then? Magic really is real?”

First ogres, now fairies, it had been a very strange day and I couldn’t help but ask the question, even though I knew what Aurelius’s answer would be. I felt like I needed to hear it spoken though, just to confirm that I wasn’t going crazy, or that this wasn’t all some elaborate prank.

“Well of course magic’s real, Charlie, my dear boy. I mean, how on earth would the world work without magic?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Most things in the world work with no help from magic at all. In fact, I’ve never even seen anything magical happen outside of this forest.”

“Oh dear, dear, Charlie. I am sorry, I have assumed that you know more than you do. Silly old Aurelius, always jumping ahead,” he chided himself. “I suppose it is about time that you learned how the world really works. You see, Charlie,
everything
works because of magic.”

“Everything?”

“
Everything
. Well almost everything. Some old clocks work because of clockwork, and windmills work because of the wind, but, aside from these and one or two other notable exceptions, yes, everything in this world works because of magic.”

“But how?” I asked.

“Well that’s different for different things,” replied Aurelius. “I mean, take your video recorder for instance. That only works because of tiny, elf-like creatures called gullivals who run really fast in the wheels on the inside to make the tape go round.”

“But I thought it worked because of electricity.”

At that remark, my velvet-clad guide laughed harder than I had seen anybody laugh for a very long time. He laughed a proper belly-laugh, inappropriately loud and bent over double, tears running down his cheeks.

“Electricity indeed,” he gasped when he was finally able to speak again. “Next you’ll be telling me that your smoke alarm works because of the battery you put in it.”

“You mean it doesn’t?”

“Well of course it doesn’t! How on earth would a battery ever be able to tell if there was a fire? I mean, they don’t even have any nostrils! No, my boy, you see inside every smoke alarm is a tiny leprechaun, and whenever he or she smells smoke, they pick up their little hammer and bang as loudly as they can on a big bell. I thought everybody knew that.”

“But, how come they don’t die from the smoke?” I asked, suspicious of Aurelius’s tale.

“They wear a protective mask of course. My dear boy, for somebody who was born to protect magic, you really don’t know a whole lot about it,” Aurelius exclaimed as if I was the one who was acting strangely.

“Okay,”
I whispered, talking more to myself than to Aurelius. “
Magic is real, I have magical powers, and I’m picking berries in the middle of an enchanted forest with some nutter I barely know. Fine. That’s fine. Slightly unusual perhaps, but no need to panic.”

“What was that?” Aurelius asked from the other side of the clearing.

“Oh, nothing,” I replied, anxious that the nutter had heard me calling him a nutter and was going to turn me into a pine cone or some other plant related forest fodder. “I was just mumbling to myself.”

“Did I hear you say that you thought this was an enchanted forest?”

“Well, yes,” I admitted, merely glad at the element of my sentence on which he had chosen to focus. And then something entirely unexpected happened, Aurelius burst into a second fit of laughter.

“Ha ha ha. Hee hee. Ho. Ho. Oooh. Oh dear! Control yourself. Enchanted forest indeed. That’s a good one! Wherever did you get such a ridiculous idea?”

“But, well,... er, is it not enchanted then?” I asked, utterly bemused as to what my companion was finding so amusing.

“Well of course it’s not enchanted!” Aurelius replied as if this was something that should have been obvious to me.

“My dear boy, let me assure you that there is not now, nor has there ever been, anything enchanted about Hanselwood Forest. Indeed, one would find it difficult to imagine a more unremarkably average forest than Hanselwood. Its trees, its grasses, its wildlife, all are decidedly common and can be found in abundance in a million other forests across the land. Its inhabitants are, of course, a different matter. Many of them are both enchanted and enchanting, but I am afraid that their home is decidedly ordinary.”

“So, why do so many magical creatures choose to live here then?”

“Hmmm,” pondered Aurelius, as though such a question had never before occurred to him. “I’m not sure really. Proximity to Tesco perhaps?”

“What?”

“Pardon, young man. I believe you meant to say pardon.”

“Proximity to Tesco?” I continued, ignoring his Aurelius’s advice on the correct use of English, which I did not consider to be of great import at this particular moment. “You can’t be serious. Why would that matter to a magical creature?”

“Well, we can’t all live on berries all the time can we, they do become rather dull. Sometimes one acquires an urge for barbecue sauce flavoured chicken wings.”

“But wouldn’t the staff notice if an ogre walked in?”

“Well, in the daytime, perhaps. But the beauty of Tesco is that it is open every hour of every day. If you go in the middle of the night on a Tuesday, most of the people who work there are asleep on their feet and don’t really notice much about anybody. Indeed, compared to some of the humans you find trawling the aisles at 3am in search of a scotch egg, being a little bigger, or even having scales and an extra eye doesn’t seem too unusual.”

“You don’t seriously expect me to believe that every magical creature for miles around has converged on this one forest just to make it a bit easier to get chicken wings, do you? I mean, their must be some other reason surely?”

“Well,” said Aurelius, “first of all, not
all
magical creatures live in forests. The vast majority prefer to live out normal lives and work in normal jobs. Like your friend Mr Creamy, for example.”

“Mr Creamy is a magical creature?” I asked incredulously, unable to believe there could be anything remarkable about such an ordinary (if forgetful) old man.

“Well of course he is, Charlie! Of course he is! He’s a wizard. How else would he possibly be able to make such delicious ice cream?”

I simply stared at Aurelius in response, once again dumbfounded as to how to argue with such logic, not because I thought it correct, but because it was so
obviously
incorrect that I didn’t know where to begin my questioning of it.

“As I was saying,” Aurelius continued, “most magical beings choose to live in normal neighbourhoods in the normal world. Indeed, I am quite sure that most of those Alundri who do not live in the human world would choose to do so if they could. Not all magical creatures are blessed with such inconspicuous appearance however. For the ogres, and the fairies, and the goblins, and the trolls, places like Hanselwood Forest provide an essential refuge from the everyday persecution they would face in the world outside. Here they at least have safety in numbers. And, in truth, aside from the odd lost dog walker or hiker, nobody really bothers us much. The humans are too scared to come into a forest they think is haunted, but at the same time, no human is willing to admit aloud that they would take such thoughts seriously, nobody believes the stories enough to come searching the woods for their truth, just enough to stay away. Which suits us fine. Indeed, the whole situation is close to perfect. Well, until The Professor came along that is.”

I had a million more questions that I wanted to ask Aurelius, like how it was that he knew that The Professor was behind the plan to demolish the forest. And why its magical inhabitants could not simply move elsewhere. However, before I had the opportunity to utter another word, we were once again interrupted.

A voice came from within the trees, the unconcealed fear it contained commanding our immediate attention.

“Mr Jones! Mr Jones! Thank goodness I have found you!”

I turned to see a girl running towards us from the forest. She looked to be about thirteen or fourteen years of age and wore a mud-stained tunic which was covered in dead leaves and bracken and was held in place by a belt that looked as though it had been woven from vines, off of which hung a small, rustically crafted slingshot and a pouch of what I presumed was ammunition. The only other things she wore were big white daisies that floated so naturally on the waves of her long, blonde hair that they looked as if they may have grown from it. Her legs and feet were bare. I had never seen such a beautiful creature in all my life. It was only when she got closer that I realised that the uncommon nature of her looks emanated largely from her strange, slightly up-turned nose and pointy ears.

“Rain?” asked Aurelius, momentarily perplexing me until I realised that he had referred to the girl by her name, which was as unique as her beauty. “My dear girl, whatever is the matter?”

“Raymondo...badger...black...” she panted, making no sense to me whatsoever. Clearly my companion was just as perplexed as I was.

“My dear girl, do calm down. Here, drink some of this,” he said, pulling from inside his coat a small bottle which my eyes could not help but be drawn to. It was similar in design to those bottles people sometimes refer to as ‘flasks’ for no reason I have ever been able to fathom – to me a flask is a vessel for tea, not whisky. This particular bottle though, clearly contained neither of those substances, judging by the deep, regal purple of the liquid contained within its opaque blue moulding. The bottle had been formed from a beautiful, tranquil, unassuming coloured glass that juxtaposed somewhat unpleasantly with the bejewelled red heart that was the vessel’s only adornment. The girl I now knew to be called Rain took it and swigged eagerly.

“Not too much,” warned Aurelius, and for a moment I feared it was a warning which had come too late, for within moments the girl’s face had reddened, and her eyes were bulging, but, just as I feared she was going to vomit all over me, she appeared to regain control of herself. He face returned to its normal colour and when she began speaking again she was a great deal more comprehendible.

“Blackheart! Blackheart is here! Here in the forest!”

“Blackheart? Here? Impossible.” For the first time since I had met him Aurelius looked frightened. The shock of such a spectacle, in turn, passed this fear onto me. “How do you know this? Have you seen him with your own eyes?”

“Well, no... not exactly,” Rain admitted.

“Okay, so how
exactly
did you come across this information?” the lanky Fernator asked in a tone more threatening than I was used to hearing from him; a tone which clearly did not go unnoticed by the strangely-dressed girl, a notable element of fear having crept back into her voice when next she spoke.