The Lost Witch (16 page)

And assuming she could get away, she still needed to find her way back to Runt and the
others, which meant triggering another transdimensional jump. Carole sighed. She'd wanted to
ask Glistlefern about it, but Wrinkletoes had interrupted.

Glistlefern had said she was now joined to faeries, and she'd seen the light cords
connecting her to them. So maybe the cords were still there, just invisible. She needed a way to
see them again.

Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine a bright thread stretching across the lake. At first
she was totally distracted by Spittle's slurping, but then she noticed a slight tingling on her
forehead. The tingle quickly became a thrum. Colors appeared and a fuzzy image began to take
shape. The image wavered, grew brighter and slowly resolved until she recognized the face of...
Runt?

But she needed to find Princess Glistlefern.

She tried again. Calming, focusing, and then the tingle, the thrum. An image, and...
Runt!

She looked away from the lake and the image faded. She turned towards the lake and the
image became clearer.

She tried a third time, but again that image of a smiling pig got in her way. She was
stumped.

"Thunk, throw your bowl into the cauldron. We'll let our guest carry it home for us.
Once we're back in the cave, I'll decide what's to be done," Spittle said. "Get on now girly, do as
you're told."

Under Spittle's watchful eye, Carole lifted the surprisingly light cauldron off its tripod.
Then backing away, she pretended to stumble, swung the pot around as if trying to regain her
balance, and without warning let it fly.

Spittle was quick, springing over the cauldron as it hit the ground, but she wasn't quick
enough to avoid the soup which followed. "Yeoowl!" She hopped about and rubbed at the
burning liquid on her skin.

Thunk stood staring, clearly transfixed by his leader's antics.

Seizing the opportunity, Carole bolted for the beach.

"Get her, you fool!" Spittle shrieked.

But Carole had already gained the sand and, pressing her advantage, she shot across the
water. Behind her there was a tremendous splash. She glanced over her shoulder to see Thunk
hopelessly mired in water lilies.

What now?

The faerie court was still her most logical choice. She closed her eyes.

Again Runt appeared, only this time he was surrounded by a gray mist. Where had she
seen that stuff before?

Of course. That pretty patch of fog out on the lake during the Linking. Her heart began
to race.

This time she welcomed Runt. As his image leapt into her mind, she found herself
traveling towards a swirling gray tunnel, one laced with brilliant bolts of colored lightning.

From somewhere within that churning vortex she heard an excited squeal.

"Reeet!"

"Omph!" Zack opened his eyes to find himself wedged half inside the tent, with Martin
pressed against the far wall. Lilly was sandwiched between them.

"Reeet!"

"I heard you the first time. Get off will ya?!"

Runt hopped off his stomach, allowing him to worm out of his bedroll.

Zack pinched his sister's foot. "Wake up!"

"Zaaack! We've been up half the night."

"Come on, Runt's found something. You too Martin. Move your butt." Zack crawled out
of the tent and blinked hard against the brilliant morning sunshine.

"Reet, reet, reet!" Runt was looking upstream.

"Okay, okay, I get ya. Let's go."

The pig shot off like a bullet.

"I didn't mean that fast."

"Hey, wait up you two! Oh, hurry up Martin, they've already gone."

A hundred yards from the camp, Runt stopped short, cocked his head to one side and
sniffed at the air.

"Over there?" Zack said, as he ran up. "Across the crick?"

Lilly and Martin jogged up, just as Runt let loose a tremendous squeal, jumped off the
bank into the shallow water. He waded halfway across the stream to a large flat rock and
scrambled on top. After seeming to study something invisible for a moment, he leapt into the air
and vanished.

"No way! Not without me, pig. Not this time."

Lilly watched Zack splash across to the rock, and saw him hesitate as if trying to see the
hole that Runt had disappeared into. "Don't you dare, Zack. You've no idea what you're
doing."

Zack hurtled from the rock. And disappeared.

"Get back here, Zack. Zack! Zaaaack!"

"Oh man, oh man. You guys really were telling the truth." Martin's face had lost all
color.

"Come on." Lilly grabbed his shirt and pulled him into the stream.

"No way I'm going anywhere near that... whatever that thing is."

"He's my brother!"

"You can't be serious. You want to disappear, too?"

"Of course not, but we've got to see where they went." Lilly climbed onto the rock. It
was wet and slick. "Take my hand. I don't want to slip."

"But--"

"Just do it!"

Martin grabbed hold as Lilly leaned forward, just as Zack had. "I can't see anything, let
me lean a little farther."

"There's nothing to see."

"Martin!" Lilly tugged against the boy's resistance but her feet slipped and her free arm
automatically shot out for balance. A powerful force gripped her body and yanked her and
Martin into the air.

"Runt, are you in there?" The whirling tunnel stretched off forever.

"Runt?" Carole strained to hear over the churning rumble. As she reached the threshold
of the tunnel, she tried to pause and look inside, but a powerful force grabbed her and sucked her
in.

The next thing she knew, she was hurtling down a gyrating tube. She screamed once
before she shot out the other end and stumbled, ankle deep, into cold running water.

She straightened up and squinted into a blanket of mist. "More fog?" she muttered.

She could still hear the vortex rumbling behind her, though on this side it was pushing
her away from the opening. Suddenly the air shuddered and a blinding light lit up the mist. She
started forward, but as she did so a dark blob detached itself from the water and flew toward
her.

"Reeeet!"

"Ummph... Runt!" Carole caught and held onto her squirming friend. "What a relief. For
a minute I thought you were some nasty. I should have known better, especially since you sent
me that signal."

"Rit?"

"You know. I heard you calling through the tunnel."

"Ret, reet," Runt said, shaking his head.

"But I could have sworn it was you!"

"Reet wret rreeet."

"Interesting. Just a minute ago, huh? Did you actually hear my voice or was it just a
feeling?"

"Reet."

"Hmm. Maybe this is one of the ways we work together. It makes sense. You know I
might actually be getting somewhere with all this transdimensional stuff."

Runt sniffed Carole's hair and shoulders. "Reet riit rit."

"In what way?"

"Reet!"

"Flowers? I smell like flowers?! Wow!" Carole sniffed her forearm. There wasn't even a
hint of pig barn. "I wonder if that's because of the lake, or the Linking?"

"Reet?"

"The faeries performed a Linking ceremony with me."

"Reeet?!"

"Yes Runt, real faeries! I met a princess and some of her court. Their realm was
beautiful, well mostly beautiful. It was still pretty dangerous because of The Conundrum, but
they gave me some pretty neat stuff too, like this dress and a magic wand!"

"Reeet, rit?"

"No, not yet. I need to take classes next time I'm there, but you know what else? I think
this tunnel must be some sort of natural bridge between here and there. It's not connected to The
Hub and doesn't look anything like the one Philamount was in." Carole glanced back at the
swirling entrance. "I wonder how long these things have been around? Maybe forever. Anyway
we can talk about it later. Right now I'm bushed. How do we get out of here?"

Runt shrugged his shoulders.

"What about the others? Where are they?" In answer, Carole heard splashing and then
Zack's voice. "Runt? Where'd you go, you pig?"

"Over here, Zack!"

"Carole, is that you? I can't see a thing."

"You're heading in the right direction, just follow the stream. Are Lil and Martin with
you?"

"Sort of, only they're not doing so well."

"What do you mean? What's wrong?" Carole got to her feet as Zack materialized out of
the mist. "You don't look so well, either."

"It's this fog. Soon as we landed in it, we started barfing our guts out; Lil and Martin
worse than me. They've stopped now, but I told them to take it easy while I went looking for
Runt."

"What do you mean landed? Landed from where?"

"We were following Runt and..."

Carole felt another shudder of air and turned to see the vortex explode in a pinwheel of
color. The surrounding mist dissolved and she found herself standing in the middle of the stream,
under a dazzling sun. A hundred feet away, Martin and Lilly were hanging over a large boulder
as if exhausted. A hundred yards beyond them was the campsite.

With the disappearance of the fog, Carole's friends quickly recovered. Even so, only
Runt seemed interested in breakfast. Lilly and Zack wanted to know all about the Faerie Realm.
Martin, on the other hand, remained silent.

Carole was much too tired to talk about her latest adventure in great detail. She told the
twins to hold onto their questions while she caught up on some much needed sleep. Despite her
fatigue, she couldn't manage more than a catnap.

Upon waking, she stumbled over to where they sat around a small campfire and ate a
little of the food they'd saved for her. She related her adventures, and then asked how they'd
found her.

"But how come I couldn't see the tunnel?" Zack grumbled. He picked up a smoking stick
from the fire, and hurled it into the stream. "It's not fair."

"Who's the multitasker?" Lilly reminded him.

"Runt probably is, too," Carole said, scratching her pig. "He's definitely a homing
beacon for me, and obviously he has a knack for finding the tunnels."

"He couldn't find you last night," Martin muttered.

"Probably because Carole didn't use a tunnel last night," Lilly said, as if the notion had
just occurred to her. "This morning's trip sounds totally different from your other ones."

"Yeah, it was."

"It seems like you've been traveling by two entirely different methods," Lilly said. "At
least two, maybe even three."

"What three?" Zack said.

Lilly scratched her nose. "Let's see, there's the fog tunnel. There's falling from one
dimension into another. And there's also the time you escaped from the werewolf. You did that
one completely on your own."

"Not completely. I got a kick start from Philamount that time."

"More like a kicked-out start," Martin grumped. He crossed his arms and slumped into
himself.

Zack threw him an irritated look. "What's important isn't how many ways Carole can
multitask, but whether we can go with her the next time and pick up some cool stuff, too."

"What's this 'we' stuff?" Lilly said, "We're not multitaskers. We don't go anywhere."

"And we don't want to!" Martin said.

"Think about it, Lil. When we followed Runt, we landed in a different dimension. We
multitasked!"

"Did not. We were in the middle of the stream the whole time."

"We vanished from sight." Zack jumped up and began to walk around. "At least Runt
and I did. But I bet if anybody else had been watching, they'd have seen you and Martin
disappear, too. And it was foggy, and the world was whipping way out of control. We puked our
guts out. If that wasn't being in another dimension then what was it?"

"Well, I... Well, it... How come we couldn't see the lake and the lily pads? How come
we couldn't see the stars or the giant red moon?"

Zack screwed his face up in thought. "The fog! There wasn't any fog in the Faerie
Realm, was there Carole?"

"No."

"And there wasn't any fog on our side, either," Zack grinned. "Just in between.
Remember how it happened to Carole on her the first time? She landed between her farm and
The Ghostly Spirit Realm, and got sick too. Not as bad as us. She didn't throw up, probably
because she's already a multitasker. But you felt pretty bad didn't you, Carole? Like you were
going to puke?"

"Only for a second."

"And yet you never actually left the farm. Some ghosts and tombstones just turned up.
Well, didn't we just do the same thing?"

"No we didn't!"

Everyone looked at Martin.

"We didn't go anywhere. We only got a... a taste of the Faerie Realm."

"A taste?" Lilly said.

"If I buy into this whole cockamamie story, and I'm not saying I have, but if I did, then
when that vortex formed, part of the Faerie Realm must have come over--air and stuff. When
Carole left the faeries it was still night, while here it was morning, but near the mouth of the
tunnel it was in-between."

"Duskish," Zack beamed, as if happy to forgive Martin now that the boy was seeing
things his way.

"That's probably because we got a mix of both worlds, which also explains why we got
so dizzy. But it wasn't overlapping dimensions. It was only a temporary link through one tiny fog
tunnel."

"But, I bet if we jumped completely into a different dimension, we'd be fine once we got
there. We just need to find the right tunnel." Zack was bubbling with enthusiasm.

"You can't be serious?" Lilly looked horrified.

"Why not? It's not like we'd be going to The Hub."

"You don't know that! You don't know anything about these vortex tunnel things. We
could end up anywhere."

Carole held up her hands. "First of all Zack, I'm not sure I could find other vortexes even
if they do exist. Second, you're out of your mind if you think I'd just hop into one. And third, if I
do see one, I'm definitely not telling you about it. The connector's around here and this is where
we need to look. If you'd rather not help, just say so."