Hugo and the Bird: Gnome Wars

By Jeff Mills

Kadavera, the witch, was dead. This should mean a celebration, but for nine-year-old Hugo, his schoolmate, Emma and their strange magical friend, Bird, it is the start of another dangerous adventure. Her death has precipitated the regeneration of not just one but both of her sister witches – and they are both far worse than she ever was.

Conscripting the Cornish goblins, the witches capture the gnomes from the Gnome Reserve to use as guinea pigs in their experiments to be able to exist in daylight. This would allow them to fulfil their dying vow; to kill and destroy all those and their descendants, who were responsible for their own and their mothers’ unjust execution 300 years before. They are determined not to let anyone stand in their way, especially two interfering children and a stupid bird.

A chance finding of a small amulet leads Hugo and his friends into realms of King Arthur and to the magic power of his sword, Excalibur. Emma receives some terrible news, which ultimately takes her on a journey from which there may be no return and pits her against her friends. Can Hugo and Bird, rescue the gnomes and prevent the witches from achieving their lethal goal and how can an inquisitive journalist make everything far worse? Set in North Devon, the heart-pounding adventure continues and is based on historical events. Hugo and the Bird: Gnome Wars is a tale of fantasy, revenge and friendship that readers from nine years to ninety will identify with and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789012187

Jeff Mills

Jeff Mills is a retired dentist who has lived in Devon for over forty-five years. He is married with two children. When they were very young, he told them stories as they journeyed to visit their respective grandparents who lived many miles away. Hugo was born during one of these journeys. This is the fourth book in the Hugo and the Bird series.

Book preview

Also by Jeff Mills

Hugo and the Bird (The Tooth Fairy)

Hugo and the Bird

Book Two

Gnome Wars

Copyright © 2018 Jeff Mills

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Matador

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ISBN 978 1789012 187

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To my mum, Joan Mills

For the love and support she has given me

throughout my life.

Contents

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I must give my grateful thanks to Ann Atkin, proprietor and owner of the real Gnome Reserve at West Putford, near Bradworthy, Devon; where a great deal of the action takes place. Without her co-operation and input, I would have had to rewrite much of the book which would have detracted from its authenticity.

In my original draft, I made the pixies the enemy but she pointed out that pixies are in fact a happy and friendly society. The real villains are the goblins, hence the change in the final copy.

Secondly I must thank Lorraine Matthews and my sister, Jacqueline Hyde, also a published author (Secret Whispers), for taking the time and effort in ploughing through the draft, highlighting the many mistakes that I had made, both in grammar and continuity.

I am very grateful to Brian Collins for his cover design.

Finally, I would like to thank the MV Magellan of Cruise and Maritime Voyages for giving me the ‘At Sea’ days on my wife’s (Anne) and my cruise to New Zealand in January 2017. With only the splash of the waves and almost imperceptible rolling of the ship to distract me, this second book would have never seen daylight.

About the Author

Jeff Mills is a retired dentist who has lived with his wife, Anne, for over forty years in North Devon in the South West of England, close to the village of Westward Ho! where much of the scene is set.

He has two children, now both grown up, and it was to entertain these when they were small that he started to tell them stories during the frequent long car journeys to visit their relations.

Where ‘Hugo’ popped up from, he does not know but Bird was loosely based on the ‘Big Bird’ character from Sesame Street, a television programme popular with children at that time.

As they were driving along, Jeff would try to introduce into the stories, items or places that they were passing, to give a greater sense of reality. He has tried to continue this theme with this book and the previous one, which was the first in the potential trilogy (Hugo and the Bird, The Tooth Fairy, published by AuthorHouse).

Periodically, as they grew up, his children would remind him of the stories he told but could not remember much of the detail, with the exception of the main characters: Hugo, Bird and the Witch.

Nothing was done until the spring of 2014. It was a time when it never seemed to stop raining. More out of boredom, he sat down and tried to write what he himself remembered of the stories he had told his children those many years before. He admits it was very strange writing because the story seemed to write itself. He had no plans as to plot or characters; they just evolved from thin air. Even he was curious to know what was going to happen. What he did know, was that he would like to bring the story alive by making its roots and its location real. For this, he based the series on the gross miscarriage of justice involving the hanging of the three Bideford witches in 1682; the last people to be legally hanged for witchcraft in England, and the places around his home in North Devon.

At the end of writing the first book he realised that in order to complete the story he would have to write at least another two books, of which this is the second. Here again, the plot wrote itself.

So sit back, put your feet up, smell the sea air coming off the Atlantic Ocean and read about the further adventures of Hugo and his strange friend, Bird as they battle against the dark forces that inhabit the North Devon village of Westward Ho!

Chapter 1

The cave was silent, except for the continuous dripping of the water from the grime-covered stalactites that hung from the rough-hewn roof. The light, though never bright, was rapidly growing dimmer. One by one, the candles and soot-caked lanterns sputtered out, leaving only the glow of the open fire from under the dead witch, Kadavera’s, cauldron. A spark leapt from the hearth to illuminate a pair of bright orange eyes. Snatch, Kadavera’s cat, was like a large dark panther, with its head likened to that of a sabre-toothed tiger. It cowered in the corner of the cave restlessly beating its tail back and forth.

Another spark fought its way out of the ashes of the diminishing flames to momentarily light up a shadowy figure, moving silently towards and along the bench where Kadavera had worked and stored her array of jars, bottles and vials. Some were still steaming or emitting puffs of foul-smelling smoke.

The figure stopped moving beside a collection of small glass bottles that held liquids of various colours, though these were difficult to see in the dimming light. From under the tattered black cloak that the figure wore, emerged an emaciated hand. Draped between the bone-like fingers was the fine chain and pendant of the necklace that had, hours earlier, been hidden under the white quartz stones that Hugo had used to mark the entrance to Kadavera’s cave. The fingers moved, stroking and caressing the locket attached to the chain. Slowly and carefully, they threaded onto the chain the gold ring, embedded with the large green stone that had been buried with the necklace. It fell adjacent to the locket with a faint clink. A small weary moan and snuffle came from beneath the black hood, and the hand withdrew back into the depths under the cloak.

No sound or movement occurred for several minutes, until there was a loud crack and a flurry of sparks from the dying embers of the fire. This broke the spell of silence that had pervaded the cave. The figure jerked upright and moved to the far end of a shelf of bottles. Again the withered hand emerged from beneath the cloak and hovered over the array. After tracking up and down the line of jars, it seized one, and held it up to the firelight to examine the contents. An eerie blue glow shimmered from the flask, which illuminated the hand holding it. On the ring finger of the hand, which was bent and skeletal, was a similar large gold ring to the one that had been threaded onto the necklace moments earlier, but this one bore a large blue stone, itself giving off a faint blue iridescence. The hand rotated its dusty prize, turning and twisting it in the firelight glow, closely examining the contents, and then, both bottle and hand disappeared into the folds of the cloak. Silently, the figure melted back into the darkness. Silence returned, except for the constant dripping of water from the roof and the distant growling of the angry pet.

* * *

"One more week left," thought Hugo, as he propped himself up in his bed and looked out of the window of his bedroom to see what the weather was like outside. The sky was heavily overcast and dark clouds scudded across, with only the occasional hint of blue. The wind had risen during the night and was making weird howling sounds as it tried to squeeze through the fine gaps in the window frame. Trees and bushes bent and waved. Salt spray, whipped up from the nearby sea, left odd patterns on the glass as it evaporated.

The previous weeks of the long summer school holiday had been eventful to say the least. While out walking his dog, Jake, Hugo, an adventurous nine-year-old boy, had stumbled across an unusual zigzag shaped stone which turned out to be a sort of coffin for an extremely strange and colourful animal. It had the neck and body of an ostrich, but with strange purple and blue colouration, the ears similar to that of an elephant, though much smaller, and the legs and feet of an eagle.

As Hugo later found out, it had originally been a Cassowary, a large bird native to New Guinea and North Eastern Australia, which had been captured and kept in a zoo. At that time, it was a normal bird of that type, but had been taken and transformed by an evil witch called Kadavera. She had used him, and many other animals, in her experiments which, she hoped, would give her the ability to move about in daylight, as up to then, sunlight would prove as lethal to her as a bullet would be to a normal human. She had thought that she had killed it, as with her other ‘failures’, and had shrunken and encased its body in stone and thrown it into the sea adjacent to her cave, where it would blend in with the other pebbles along the North Devon coast by the village of Westward Ho!

Hugo, intrigued by its pattern, had picked up the stone and taken it back to his house nearby, which was on the cliffs next to the sea. He did not know how, but the stone had cracked open and the strange bird-like animal had emerged and became friendly with him. The animal had introduced itself as Bird but it turned out that its name was really Philatitrocusfumaritor Minor. It was such a mouthful that very few people could remember or pronounce it, so he settled to be known as ‘Bird’.

A classmate of Hugo’s, Emma Jones, was staying at the Bennett’s house while her mother travelled to Bristol, about one hundred miles away, to visit Emma’s father, who was in hospital there. It was during this time that Hugo, Bird and Emma, discovered that a tooth fairy, called Puchy, had been captured by Kadavera and they set out to rescue the tiny creature.

By a series of misfortunes, they had been captured and held captive in the cave by the witch and her, sort of cat-like pet. A gnome, called Barguff, had rescued them but they were then recaptured.

Kadavera thought that she had finally found the potion that would allow her to exist in daylight, so that she might complete her vendetta; to kill all the descendants of those that were responsible for her execution and that of her friends. Unfortunately for her, its effect unexpectedly wore off and she died as the sunlight engulfed her while chasing the group of rescuers as they tried to escape yet again.

Hugo had also witnessed a horrible accident while he and his family were watching the filming of an episode of Time Team, an archaeological television programme. The production team were excavating the ruins of a mansion, inherited by an eminent and well-known person at that time, a Sir Richard Benson, though Hugo had never heard of him. He was a distant relation of a notorious judge from the North Devon town of Bideford who, in 1697, had allegedly killed a young man and then blamed the youth’s family for his death and that of the judge’s own children, who, in fact, had actually died of a fever.

To avoid being accused of the murder, the judge falsified evidence and bribed witnesses to throw guilt on the young man’s two sisters and their friend, resulting in their execution by hanging. As they stood on the gallows, the three women issued a curse, promising the death of all those involved with their own execution, plus the perpetrators’ descendants, however long it took.

These innocent victims also happened to be the children of the three witches of Bideford who themselves, through a previous gross miscarriage of justice, were hanged in 1682 and became the last people to be officially hanged for witchcraft in England.

During the filming of the excavation, Sir Richard Benson was killed by a bolt of lightning which struck a JCB digger he was driving, throwing him and it into the air, crushing him as it landed.

The weather outside did not inspire Hugo to even get out of bed, let alone do anything else. He was bored. For a second, the thought of going back to school seemed a good idea but it was quickly put aside when he remembered that it would mean the end of his morning lie-ins. Getting up early was not his finest attribute.

At that moment his mother called up the stairs, informing him and his teenage sister, Stephanie, that breakfast was sitting on the table and if they didn’t get down quickly, she was going to feed it to Jake, their pet retriever. This spurred Hugo to get up, because he knew that, given half a chance, the animal would love to demolish his plateful of bacon and eggs, and even the toast, if it had enough butter on it.

Hugo pealed himself out of bed and threw back the duvet to roughly where it should be. He just made it to the bathroom before his sister, because he knew that, once she was there in the mornings, the door would stay locked for what seemed hours. He splashed some water onto his face and cleaned his teeth, at least, sort of cleaned his teeth, as the batteries in his electric toothbrush were low as he had forgotten to plug it into the charger the night before. He deliberately dribbled some toothpaste on the front of his shirt so that his father, who was a dentist, would think that he had done a proper job. He plugged the toothbrush into the charger and rushed downstairs, almost knocking over his sister as she leant against the bathroom door.

Julia and Paul Bennett, Hugo’s parents, were both sitting at the kitchen table eating. Mr Bennett looked over his newspaper and said a cheery,

Good morning, as Hugo scraped his chair across the floor to the table.

You’ve missed a bit. he said, and pointed to the dribble of toothpaste on Hugo’s shirt.

Oh yeah, thanks. Hugo replied, smiling inwardly, knowing that the deception had worked. He was just finishing his juice when Stephanie slouched down without acknowledging anyone. Her mother wished her a cheerful, ‘good morning’, as she took her breakfast from out of the oven, where it had been placed to keep warm. The young girl just grunted and Mrs Bennett looked questioningly at her husband, who grimaced and hunched his shoulders.

Stephanie had been in a foul mood for the last few days, as she had been ditched by her boyfriend, Martin Edmunds or, ‘that dirty scumbag Marty’, as she now referred to him. Hugo thought that this would be a good time to ignore her.

Hugo started to tuck into the bowl of cornflakes that his mother had put in front of him. He put his arm out to get some sugar to put on them, but then noticed his father looking over the top of his newspaper at him and rapidly pretended to stretch instead.

Why does my dad have to be a dentist? All my friends are allowed sugar on their cornflakes, he inwardly moaned. When the bowl was empty, he grabbed a piece of toast and watched his father out of the corner of his eye as he reached for the marmalade. His father was engrossed in the newspaper, so the young boy seized the opportunity to smother his toast with an extra thick layer.

Leaving the table, he started to go upstairs, but a loud grunt from his father, who was looking at the empty bowl, made him turn back and reluctantly pick it up to put it in the dishwasher. Seeing the faint smile appear on his father’s face, Hugo grimaced and ran up to his room.

He switched on his computer and started to play with some of his games but his heart was not in it. Then he remembered that, in his escape from Kadavera’s cave, he had forgotten to retrieve his rucksack. Inside were some of his dad’s tools plus a torch, all of which he knew might be missed. Also, he really wanted to see again the ring and necklace with the locket attached, which were all that remained when Kadavera had transformed, as the sunlight hit her, from a haggard old witch, into a beautiful young woman, with a deep red mark around her neck, finally evaporating into the air as she died. Hugo had been warned by Bird that these jewels might be cursed, so he had hidden them under a small cairn of white quartz stones which he had used to act as a marker for the entrance to her cave.

The weather outside was still very blowy, but at least it was not raining. Hugo dragged his raincoat out of his wardrobe and put it on. He realised that the tunnel and cave would be very dark, so digging around in his toy cupboard, he found a model of a T. Rex, which had a torch incorporated into it to make the monster’s eyes light up. Stuffing it into his pocket, he ran downstairs and explained to his mother that he had decided to take Jake for a walk. This surprised her, as it was totally out of character for him to actually ‘volunteer’ to walk the dog that early in the day. The dog sat up on hearing the word ‘walk’ and wagged his tail furiously, almost knocking the newspaper from Mr Bennett’s hands.

After fastening Jake’s lead, Hugo and the dog stepped out and briskly walked towards the track of the disused railway line, now a coastal path, next to his house, towards Kadavera’s cave.

They were still a hundred yards away but Hugo could see that the white stones he had placed there had been moved. When he reached the spot, his fears were realised. The chain, locket and ring were gone. He was bitterly disappointed and felt annoyed with himself that he had been so stupid as to leave them, where anyone could find them, for he was convinced he had left them really well covered.

‘I bet someone was watching me hide them,’ he thought, but at least now he could not be told off by Bird for keeping them. The bad luck, if they were cursed, would now go to the thief.

‘Serves `em right,’ he said sneeringly to himself. He looked over to where the entrance of the cave was but could hardly see it. It was almost hidden by earth and grass. Hugo thought that, since there had been a great deal of wind and rain the previous night, it must have caused some form of mini landslide which had covered the mouth. It took several minutes of pushing and pulling large sods of earth and grass before a space, which was big enough to allow him entry, was made. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the toy dinosaur and flicked the switch to turn it on. Jake was obviously keen to explore the boy-sized rabbit hole and raced inside. Hugo tried to grab the lead that was still attached to his collar but his pet was too quick and ran ahead, barking with excitement as he went.

Although the light from the dinosaur was dim, Hugo’s eyes rapidly adjusted to the dark conditions. He eventually caught up with Jake at the makeshift door to the main cavern but the dog was no longer showing its former exuberance. It was motionless, with its tail between its legs, and making a small whimpering sound. As Hugo approached, Jake backed up, putting Hugo between the door and itself.

The door was half open and the cave was almost completely black. The only illumination was coming from the dying embers of the fire, over which still hung a large cauldron, with wisps of steam emanating from the oily liquid it contained. Hugo pushed the door just enough to allow him to enter. He was not sure exactly where he had left his rucksack but he knew it must be the other side of the cave where he and the others had been imprisoned in wooden crates. Inch by inch, he eased his way around the perimeter of the cave, keeping his back touching the wall, feeling his way with his hands. His head flicked left and right, aware that there still might be some unknown surprises lurking in the dark recesses. His foot hit something. Looking down. he recognised the large crate that had been the temporary prison of Bird when they had been prisoners of Kadavera.

The light from Hugo’s dinosaur was growing dimmer as the batteries gave up, so he dropped