A Guide for Young Wytches

By Jon Jacks

I meet a dream boy on holiday, accept his invite to his dream mountaintop castle; but when I get here, it’s a nightmare of invisible staff (apart from old, sour-faced Lisa) and gardens of either freezing white snow or sheer darkness. Oh, and magpies who appear out of nowhere.
Now I’ve found a book for ‘young wytches’; but will it help me survive the castle, or is it just another trap?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Jacks
• Release date: Jun 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310471407

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

To open your heart to love or align yourself to your spiritual development, create a talisman of Hawthorn (May Tree, or White Thorn).

A Guide for Young Wytches

The way Richard had described it, I was expecting a much more foreboding castle.

It must be a quite magical place to live in. It was far more like one of those fairytale-like castles rich German princes had built in the nineteenth century, rather than Richard’s ‘impregnable fortress’.

Certainly, it was positioned seemingly precariously on a hard-to-access peak in the mountains. Its walls, too, were sheer and massive. It would have blended seamlessly into the rock, were it not for a covering of sparkling white paint.

Snow was falling now, giving the whole scene the appearance of a beautifully constructed snow-globe.

Even my taxi driver whistled in appreciation at the castle’s majesty, despite his assurances earlier that he had often made this journey.

He did, however, seem to understand the complicated procedures for entering the castle. He waited patiently while a drawbridge slowly lowered into place, politely informing the man who answered the entryphone that, yes, this was an approved visit.

Smoothly swinging into the large courtyard lying beyond the drawbridge’s twin towers, the driver pulled up before the long, winding flight of steps running up towards the castle’s main doors.

I’d expected people to be there to greet me, yet the door was closed. Many of the nearby windows were even shuttered.

As I stepped from the taxi, I felt a little anxious.

Had I made a mistake? Had I come on the wrong day? Perhaps I’d even arrived at the wrong castle?

As I settled the bill with the driver, however, and he unloaded my suitcase from the back of his car, the huge, double doors at last opened.

‘Sorry, I need to rush back,’ the driver apologised in his harshly accented yet otherwise amazingly good English.

‘Before the snow gets worse and blocks me in,’ he hurriedly added as he quickly slipped back into his seat.

The taxi was already disappearing across the drawbridge into the swiftly stirring snow as an elegantly slim woman imperiously descended the steps.

As she drew ever closer, she glowered at me evermore intensely.

‘And you are…?’ she demanded sternly.

*

Chapter 2

The Sixth consonant of the Ogham alphabet, uathe (Hoo-ah), represents the energy of cleansing and preparation.

It grants patience and clarity, clearing the mind of negative thoughts and confusion.

A Guide for Young Wytches

Maybe I should have been angry with the driver for leaving me with my heavy suitcase to drag up the steps; but having seen the narrow passes we’d travelled through, I could well understand his urgency to get back down into the far-off valley. The increasingly vigorous snowstorm would soon make everything impassable.

Besides, like me the driver had probably expected such a huge castle to be serviced by a staff of ever-helpful servants. Staff who saw it as their only aim in life to please and ensure the total wellbeing of the castle’s guests.

Instead, the only person I’d seen here was this amazingly unfriendly woman. She did nothing more than sneer at me as I struggled with my case.

She had glared resentfully at the rapidly vanishing taxi, as if contemplating calling it back and ordering it to immediately whisk me back down towards the valley’s sole and lonely town. It was too far gone for the driver to hear her, however; so she’d taken to asking me unnerving questions instead.

‘What are you doing here? Don’t you realise you have to be invited to the castle?’

‘Richard invited me; Richard Leon. He said he lived here – that he owned the castle!’

Even as I made my reply, I abruptly realised how unlikely all this sounded.

That a boy so young owned such a magnificent castle.

That he would just invite me on a whim to stay here; a girl he had met on holiday and known only for one afternoon, one evening.

That any girl who knew so little about a boy would accept such an unlikely invitation. Especially when there was no written agreement, bar an address scrawled across a handy envelope.

Had I been taken in by a boy simply trying to impress me with false tales of a fortune and great, ancient estates?

Yet when I’d mentioned Richard’s name, the woman thankfully hadn’t stared at me as if she had no idea whom I could be referring to.

Even so, she had stared at me as if she thought such a scenario was highly unlikely.

‘Well you can’t stay!’ she snapped. ‘I’ve no idea what he was thinking, inviting you here! We’ll have to phone the hire firm, recall your taxi.’

‘But can’t I at least see Richard to–’

She cut me short with a glower.

Behind the doors there lay a surprisingly vast entrance hall, with yet another set of steps gracefully rising up to the next level.

The whole scene, however, was dominated by a towering Christmas tree. It was so huge I felt sure that it must have been taken from amongst the forests of darkly-packed firs we’d passed on our way up here.

At least, the unfriendly woman had realised that I would undoubtedly freeze to death if I’d been left outside.

So, instead, she left me here in this looming hall, were I would merely freeze off my toes.

I had wondered why such an otherwise expensively attired and elegantly poised woman was wearing boots rather than preposterously high heels, until I felt the freezing draughts swirling everywhere throughout the hall.

All the sounds around me echoed hollowly. The woman’s footsteps dully clopped on the stone as she left the hall and strode off into one of the many rooms leading off from it.

She left the door to the room open, no doubt so I could hear as she picked up a phone and angrily demanded that the taxi turn around to pick me up and take me away.

I should have known all this was too good to be true: a ridiculously handsome boy inviting me to come and stay at one of Germany’s most ludicrously beautiful castles.

Despite my sour mood – my fury with Richard for his useless invite, my sense of irredeemable stupidity for innocently acting on it – I was entranced by the sparkling glory of the Christmas tree.

It had been painstakingly and lovingly decorated in a staggeringly beautiful style, with all manner of glistening decoration hanging from it.

I refuse to use the term ‘bauble’ when it comes to a Christmas tree’s decorations. Where I come from, we still use the ancient term wassail cups, or wassail balls, recalling when actual cups of welcoming and celebration would be hung throughout the tree.

I find it a far more fitting description of the deliciously intricate and thoughtfully designed ornaments of glass, wood or ceramics that a Christmas tree is so carefully strewn with.

The tree was clothed in classical style, with garlands, crackers, toys and gifts scattered throughout branches already dripping with balls of brightly coloured glass, and tipped with pure white candles.

Even so, I had a strange sense that there was something missing, despite my uncertainty as to what it could possibly be that made me regard this stunningly beautiful tree in this oddly unnerving way.

It took me quite a while of study for me to finally realise why this apparently perfect tree gave me this feeling of incompleteness; it lacked a star, a fairy, or perhaps one of those almost Oriental-style ornaments that are normally used to grace a tree’s top as a final, finishing flourish.

In this case, however, I was certain that it actually lacked none of these – for what it truly lacked was an angel, one that had been used for generations: and its absence was a cause of great worry to the castle.

*

How could I be so sure that the tree lacked an angel, rather than a fairy or a star?

How, even more amazingly – perhaps ridiculously – could I be sure that the angel’s disappearance was a source of anguish?

Well, of course, I couldn’t be sure at all.

And yet…I had a deep sense of unease, a feeling that all this was indeed the case. To the extent that I resolved to ask the sour-faced woman, on her return, if the tree was usually topped by an angel. No matter how rude or stupid she took me to be.

There was the clack of footsteps on stone once more, the sound – I presumed – of the woman returning from making her phone call. (I had already discovered that cellphones refused to work out here when I had tried to use mine to notify the castle of my imminent arrival.) Yet there was also the squeak of a door on the floor just above me, the more laboured footsteps of a second person heading – it seemed to me – towards the top of the stairs.

‘Your taxi refuses to return!’ the woman snapped irately as she stormed into the room. ‘Some nonsense about the snow being too bad for– Richard! What are you doing out of your room?’

Her furious glare was now directed towards the very top of the winding stairs rather than at me. Following her gaze, I gasped as a sadly dishevelled figure, hunched over metallic crutches, exhaustedly staggered towards the stairs’ uppermost

Reviews for A Guide for Young Wytches

[Liberty Schmierer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alright, that was awesome. I utterly enjoyed the unpredictable plot. That was delightfully far from your "standard" story of magic and witches.