The Wicker Slippers

By Jon Jacks

Witch one will they choose?

What would you do if you found an ancient pair of witch’s slippers in the old cottage you were staying at?
Janet, who loves Lee (who loves Maxine), tries them on.
Maxine, who loves Greg (who prefers Janet), tries them on.
Then they find a book of potions.
Then they find that the house has decided it isn’t going to let them go.
Witch one will the slippers choose?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Jacks
• Release date: Jul 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301942664

Jon Jacks

While working in London as, first, an advertising Creative Director (the title in the U.S. is wildly different; the role involves both creating and overseeing all the creative work in an agency, meaning you’re second only to the Chairman/President) and then a screenwriter for Hollywood and TV, I moved out to an incredibly ancient house in the countryside.On the day we moved out, my then three-year-old daughter (my son was yet to be born) was entranced by the new house, but also upset that we had left behind all that was familiar to her.So, very quickly, my wife Julie and I laid out rugs and comfortable chairs around the huge fireplace so that it looked and felt more like our London home. We then left my daughter quietly reading a book while we went to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.Around fifteen minutes later, my daughter came into the kitchen, saying that she felt much better now ‘after talking to the boy’.‘Boy?’ we asked. ‘What boy?’‘The little boy; he’s been talking to me on the sofa while you were in here.’We rushed into the room, looking around.There wasn’t any boy there of course.‘There isn’t any little boy here,’ we said.‘Of course,’ my daughter replied. ‘He told me he wasn’t alive anymore. He lived here a long time ago.’A child’s wild imagination?Well, that’s what we thought at the time; but there were other strange things, other strange presences (but not really frightening ones) that happened over the years that made me think otherwise.And so I began to write the kind of stories that, well, are just a little unbelievable.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The cottage’s ‘For Sale’ sign was being taken down at last.

Janet was surprised; Apple Cottage had been up for sale for two years, ever since Lee and his mum had moved back into the city.

It was a bit of a mess, after being neglected for so long.

The garden was overgrown, the roses gone wild. The roses and wisteria climbing up the walls and around the porch had grown into the thatch.

Even so, this bright display of purples, reds, yellows and whites splayed across the roof only added to the small house’s strange, beguiling beauty.

Janet smiled.

Any other house this beautiful should have sold quickly.

But its unfortunate history always seemed to put off any potential buyer in the end.

It was rumoured to have been a house of witches throughout the centuries it had existed.

Even Lee’s gran, who had owned the house before he and his mum had moved in, had dabbled in Wicca. Perhaps she had been drawn to it by the house’s infamous past. Rumour was, the explosion that had killed her was of her own causing, an experiment that had gone wrong.

Janet couldn’t remember Lee’s gran.

But she could remember Lee.

If Lee had picked up anything from the house, it was a way to bewitch the girls he met.

*

Within less than a day, a team of workers had descend on the house, tidying up the garden, stripping away the blooms and overgrown branches infesting the thatch.

Janet wasn’t impressed.

Everything they did seemed too hurried. Everyone seemed to pitch into every task, rather than being specifically skilled at any job.

The repairs to the thatching was amateurish. She even caught them coating the new layers of straw they had laid down with a watery dye, just to make it blend in with the rest of the roof.

From what she could tell, the door and windows were only being given a swift brush of paint. Just enough to make them sparkle, but nowhere near enough to make up for all the months of neglect.

Most bizarre of all, though, was the placing of false, even plastic flowers around the windows, giving it back the colour they’d stripped away with their overenthusiastic cutting-back of the roses.

One day, even this lacklustre effort was scaled back.

The scaffolding that had been erected around the small cottage was dismantled and stacked off to one side of the garden. Although the workers continued to hang around, work came almost to a standstill.

It was little more than a clearing up of the mess and rubble they had created as they had gone about making Apple Cottage look more presentable.

Yes, thought the curious, observant Janet when she had come up with that insight; they hadn’t been restoring the cottage, so much as making it look more presentable.

The workers frequently glanced at their watches. With a despondent shake of the head, they would turn to make a grumbling complaint to anyone nearby who would listen.

They often stepped out beyond the garden’s high hedges, looking up the road as if expecting someone who was running late.

At least, Janet thought, they haven’t destroyed the overall look of Apple Cottage.

But she feared how extensive the change might have been to the inside of the house.

Had they already ripped out the huge, old fireplace she and Lee used to sit and play by when they were children?

How had Lee’s bedroom, with its exposed ceiling beams, its rickety floorboards, fared in the house’s ‘modernisation’?

And what of the kitchen, with the old Victorian range that looked like it had been directly ordered from a catalogue of essential Wicca equipment?

Lee’s mum had hated it, almost as much as she’d hated the house. She would moan at the heavy lids, the stiff doors, the time it took to heat up, like they were all insurmountable problems getting in the way of making dinner.

Even so, she would manage to conjure up the crispiest yet most succulent chips Janet had ever tasted. All served up in cones of newspaper so that she and Lee could eat them as they played throughout the evening in the long rear garden.

Another treat Janet often remembered with a lick of her lips was the mashed potato and turnip, piled up like miniature volcanoes, a hole made in the top where tomato (or in Lee’s case, brown) sauce could be poured, running down the sides like lava.

Of course, all that was in the days when she and Lee were younger. When they could happily play games with each other as friends, unaware of the changes to come in their bodies that would make them begin to look at each other in a completely different way.

Changes that would seek to draw them together in other ways; but in some ways would make them wary and even scared of each other. Uncontrollable, ever-changeable and bewildering emotions swept through them in a seemingly new and more puzzling form every day.

Of course, Janet wasn’t keeping a twenty-four watch on the changes being made to Apple Cottage.

It was just that every time she passed, as she made her way to or back from the school bus, or made trips to the local shop, or caught the bus into town, or made her way to her friends, she would draw near to the cottage’s gate to see how much the cottage had changed since she had last looked.

Chances are, then, that she would have missed the arrival of the gleaming BMW as it pulled up outside of the cottage. Fortunately, she was passing by, just out for a walk in the sun to celebrate the sense of freedom she felt now that school had broken for the summer holidays.

She stopped a distance away from the car, hoping no one would interpret her curiosity as nosiness.

The driver-side door opened. A woman slipped out of the driver’s seat.

A beautiful woman. A woman who knew she was beautiful.

She had that almost permanent smile of the knowingly beautiful woman. A smile that is slight, virtually invisible, because it has become so much a part of her perfect features.

Her eyes twinkled excitedly. Eyes that knew they could hold a man’s attention for as long as they wanted to.

As she turned to get her first full view of the cottage, her long, dark hair swirled around her shoulders, copper tints sparkling like electric currents.

Could Janet see all this from so far away?

No, of course not; but she knew what such a woman looked like up close. At school, she had come across girls avidly studying the skills they would need to attain such a high level of expertise.

The car’s passenger door opened.

A boy of around eighteen stepped out.

It was Lee.

*

Chapter 2

Janet turned around and walked back the way she had come.

She didn’t want to run any risk that Lee would see her.

Not like this; not while she was crying.

It was crazy, foolish, she knew that. How could she have ever clung to the foolish hope