Eve 1/8

Eve was still worrying about the possible magical abilities of her next door neighbour’s child. It didn’t seem to matter how she or her husband tried to prove that she was able to do real magic; the result was always inconclusive. She was thinking hard as she did the washing up after breakfast. Every time she or Adam had become involved with the girl, things had gone wrong just as they thought they were getting somewhere.

If only there was some other way of checking out what the girl did when she went on her walks in the woods. Just lately she hadn’t even been going there, come to that none of the family seemed to go there any more. Yet whenever Eve thought she might pop round to the house for a cup of tea and a chat with Mary, she often found that they’d all gone out without her ever noticing.

She smiled to herself as her thoughts moved on to another track, remembering her visit to what she had been assured was another world. Her guide, who called himself George, had made a proper idiot of her. Everything he’d shown her as being a marvel of witchcraft or magic had gone wrong.

She suddenly stopped absent-mindedly rinsing a plate, supposing it had all been real and nobody wanted outsiders to know. Surely the best thing to do would be arrange a lot of silly things to happen during their visit and make them suppose that everything they saw was a fake. If that was the case then at least she could try and find the George person again and wouldn’t have to bother about following Jennifer Jane or her parents at inconvenient times. She finished the washing up in a hurry, there was no time like the present. She put on some sensible walking shoes, left a note for Adam and set off on her adventure.

She caught a bus to the town where she usually did her big monthly shop. It didn’t take too long to find the path that George had taken her along on her supposed visit to the alternate world, as he called it. Although it had been dark at the time, she was sure she had found the right place and strode out confidently. It didn’t seem to be taking as long to cover the ground as it had in the dark, but long before she expected to reach the seawall that she’d seen on her last visit, she suddenly found herself in an open space surrounded by trees and thick undergrowth.

There was no way out except by the path that she had just followed and that wasn’t right. Looking around she could see a bare spot in the middle of the clearing, which looked as though the ground had been badly burnt at some time. To one side a heap of poles, some of which were still upright, looked as if they might have once been used for some sort of temporary building or storage space.

There certainly hadn’t been anything like this on her night-time walk! Then she remembered passing the time of day with an old lady picking blackberries a little way back along the path and decided to go back and ask her if she knew of any other similar paths in the area.

The old lady looked up from her picking as Eve walked back to her.

“Are you lost my dear?” she asked.

“In a way yes. I came along a path very similar to this some time ago, but it went on much further and didn’t end in that clearing.”

“Well that clearing has been there for years, the old charcoal burners used it when I was a girl and it’s never really grown over properly since. There aren’t any other paths round here unless you go back for half a mile or so.”

“I’m sure I was brought up here a little while ago by a man called George who was leading a party of tourists and I’m trying to get back to the same place so that I can try to meet him again and have a word with him.”