Into the Woods Read online

  ‘I can’t talk, Storm. I’m too exhausted. I could sleep for a hundred years.’

  Soon Storm could hear the even breathing of both her sisters. She lay awake, fingering the pipe around her neck and looking out through the windows at the stars that shone down coldly and without pity.

  *

  In the morning Bee Bumble woke them by murmuring sweet nothings in their ears. She gave each of them a steaming mug of hot milk, scented with honey and nutmeg. ‘Drink every last drop,’ she smiled. ‘It will help you grow big and strong. You all need feeding up.’

  The milk was scrumptious; Aurora and Any quickly drained their cups. Storm was only sorry that she clumsily knocked her own mug over when she had only taken a mouthful. Her freshly laundered clothes were by the bed, smelling faintly of candyfloss. Storm felt relieved that she had kept the pipe around her neck. She quickly checked the pockets of her dress: a box of matches, a twist of gunpowder, a half-eaten sweet and a small metal file were still all there.

  Then Bee Bumble took the sisters downstairs to the dining room for breakfast and the strangest sight met their eyes. Every surface glittered, as if the entire room had been drenched in precious gems. Brightly coloured boiled sweets, as bright as jewels, studded the gingerbread walls, while the cornices and door surrounds were made of royal icing inlaid with gum drops. The chandeliers were constructed from spun sugar and pear drops and the fireplace mantelpiece from marzipan. A crowd of children were eagerly pulling the sweets from the walls and eating them – it looked as if their mouths were stuffed with rubies, emeralds, amethysts, topaz and sapphires. Everything in the room was covered in a light dusting of sugar and the air was scented with ginger, toffee and cinnamon.

  In the centre of the room were four vast trestle tables piled high with more sweet treats. There were pecan pies, treacle tarts and raspberry cream sponges, chocolate

  fudge cakes the size of cartwheels, crateloads of blueberry muffins and hazelnut meringues, and slabs of candied nougat, honeycomb and peppermint fudge. Custard-and jam-filled donuts were piled high, as were sticky buns and chocolate brownies. Down the centre of each table were huge glass bowls of more boiled sweets that glistened in the light. On each side of the tables stood five-litre buckets of chocolate-chip, vanilla, and rum-and-raisin ice cream and jugs of steaming-hot chocolate fudge sauce. The centrepiece of the table was five huge swans fashioned from meringues, their necks garlanded with rainbow-coloured sweets and their backs full of trifle and jewel-like sorbets. Every dish had a little flag with a description, like the food at a children’s birthday party.

  Storm, Aurora and Any were open-mouthed in disbelief. Bee Bumble took the opportunity to pop an iced shortbread and a macaroon into each of the girls’ mouths. Storm choked. She was so dazzled by what she saw that it made her eyes hurt. She was also appalled, not by the cornucopia of sugar – after all, she was sometimes partial to a peppermint cream herself – but by the sight of the children, who were attacking these vast sugar mountains with the eagerness of animals who had been kept without food for a month. There were dozens of them, and in complete silence they were gobbling the cakes and hunting down the brightly coloured sweets. Their eyes were glassy.

  Bee Bumble pushed Storm and Aurora in the direction of the trestle tables. Any, who had the sweetest tooth, stretched out her arms longingly towards this Aladdin’s cave of sparkling sugar and immediately began sifting the bowls for red sweets, like a miner searching for a rubies in the dirt. Storm held back. Peering under a table, she saw a pair of plump twins. One was fast asleep, her face and arms streaked with chocolate and sticky with hundreds and thousands. The other held her sister’s head in her lap and was stroking her face gently. Storm opened her mouth to say hello just as Bee Bumble prodded her in the ribs with a surprisingly long, bony finger.

  ‘You’re much too thin, my little cupcake. You need fattening up. Eat!’ It sounded more like an order than a request and Storm decided that now was probably not a good moment to ask for a plate of broccoli. Instead, she nibbled politely at a peanutbutter cookie. It was delicious, and each mouthful made her feel pleasantly sleepy, as if every aspect of her life now had rounded edges, not sharp ones. Absentmindedly she helped herself to another. Satisfied, Bee Bumble headed towards the kitchen to whip up half a dozen devil’s food cakes and a death by chocolate gateau.

  Sleepily, Storm looked about for Aurora and found her happily munching a chocolate éclair on the floor. She smiled up at Storm. ‘Oh Storm, I feel so happy. It’s safe and warm here and Mrs Bumble is so lovely. Let’s stay for ever.’ And before Storm could answer she had fallen into a doze and was snoring gently like a very pretty Chihuahua. Storm felt pleasantly snoozy herself. She looked around the room: all the children were either asleep or staring vacantly into space with smiles on their faces. Except for one. Storm could hear a stifled sob from beneath the table. It was one of the twins. Tears were falling down her pale face as she held her sleeping sister. Storm crouched down and crawled under the table to join them, ‘Hello,’ she said.‘My name’s Storm. Who are you?’

  The twin stopped sniffling and said,‘I am Arwen and my sister’s Aisling.’ She burst into tears again and sobbed, ‘Aisling isn’t well. She never wakes up properly. She just eats and sleeps and sleeps and eats. I want to leave here, but she won’t listen to me. We always agreed on everything. Now she’s changed.’

  ‘Maybe she’s just tired,’ said Storm sympathetically. ‘How long have you been here at the orphanage, Arwen?’

  ‘We’re not orphans,’ said Arwen indignantly. ‘We’ve got parents. But then the men with wolves came and we were brought here.’ She looked utterly miserable. ‘We came two days ago. I know because it was the day I had an upset tummy, so I didn’t eat anything. And I’ve been so worried about Aisling that I haven’t been able to eat since.’

  Storm looked thoughtful for a moment, remembering their own encounter with the wolves. It all seemed so long ago. Then she smiled at Arwen and said in a very grown-up voice,‘Well, there you are. You’re feeling low because you haven’t eaten anything. You must. Those peanutbutter cookies are delicious, you know, although a little too sweet. Here, try some.’

  Arwen took a cookie and nibbled at the edge. Within seconds she was gulping it down and reaching for more.

  ‘Goodness, you were hungry,’ laughed Storm, but she was talking to herself. Arwen had fallen asleep. Storm considered her for a moment with a puzzled look on her face. Then she crawled back out from under the table and wandered through the hall to the front door. She wanted to get a look at the outside of the building in daylight. She wondered how the spun sugar towers could so miraculously stay up. Why didn’t they melt in the rain?

  She had just begun to pull open the heavy front door when a sugary voice behind her said,‘Where do you think you’re going, my little chocolate drop?’ It was Bee Bumble. Storm spun round.

  ‘I just want to get a better look at the outside of the building,’ she said pleasantly.

  ‘Of course you do, my barley sugar, and why not? You’re very welcome to go outside any time you wish. But I think I heard your baby sister calling for you. The poor little muffin sounded quite distressed. I think you’d better go to her.’

  Storm ran off to look for Any, and was surprised to find her fast asleep and in no distress whatsoever. Puzzled, she trailed back to the front door, but although she could see no lock, it would no longer budge. She wondered briefly if there was another exit, but then she spotted a fresh tray of peanutbutter cookies cooling on a window ledge and decided exploring could wait until later.

  The rest of the day passed in a haze. Breakfast turned into lunch and lunch into supper – each meal as sugary as the last. Aurora and Any helped themselves with gusto but Storm began to feel an increasingly nagging anxiety. She had always preferred savoury foods to sweet ones, and the surfeit of sugar so early in the morning had made her feel queasy. She had barely managed to eat a thing since breakfast.

  In between eating,
the orphanage children dozed or sat around listlessly until, straight after supper, Bee Bumble shooed them to their rooms and into bed with an accompanying litany of sweet nothings and kisses that were like sharp little nips or bites.

  Storm felt far from tired. She lay awake listening to her sisters snuffling in their sleep, and worried. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she knew there was something terribly wrong at the Ginger House and that she and her sisters should leave the orphanage as soon as possible. The pipe glowed warm about her neck and, brushing it with her fingers, Storm felt her mind clear. She leaped out of bed and shook Aurora and Any awake. It took several attempts before her sisters opened their eyes. They blinked at her stupidly.

  ‘Come on! We must leave as quickly as we can,’ whispered Storm. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. Something’s not right!’

  ‘Get out? Why would we want to do that? It’s nice here. I don’t want to go back out into the cold, frightening woods and be chased by wolves again,’ said Aurora dozily.

  ‘Neither do I,’ piped Any. ‘I like it here. I’m going to stay. It’s like living in a sweet shop,’ and she put her thumb in her mouth and closed her eyes.

  ‘Aurora,Any, what on earth is wrong with you?’ Storm said angrily.‘We’ve got to leave. This place is no better than a prison!’

  Aurora smiled sleepily. ‘Don’t be silly, Storm, we can walk out any time we want. There are no locks on the door. Mrs Bumble and I sat together on the front steps earlier when she was giving me her recipe for orange almond cake. You wouldn’t believe it, Storm. It hasn’t got any flour in it at all. She is a quite astonishing cook. I could learn such a lot from her.’ And with that she turned over, curled up in a ball and fell back to sleep.

  Storm slumped back onto her own bed. She suddenly felt very tired and weak. The pipe burned around her neck. What had happened to her sisters? They were not themselves. For a moment she wondered whether she should just walk down the stairs and out of the Ginger House, but she knew that she could never bring herself to leave them behind. The three of them together. For ever and for always. If she could not persuade them to leave, then she had no choice but to stay too.

  It was then that Storm heard a slight scuffling noise. It was coming from the opening to a large liquorice pipe up near the ceiling. Storm had seen similar holes high up in every room of the orphanage and realized they were designed to waft a constant sweet aroma of baking into the air. She had even considered climbing into one to see if it might lead outside, but Bee Bumble always seemed to appear just as she was considering how to scale the wall. Apparently someone else had managed it though, because a single green eye was now shining luminously out of the darkness.

  Storm sat bolt upright, scared and curious. She didn’t know if the eye belonged to a human or an animal. But then a soft, sad voice said wistfully, ‘Your sister. She’s the gentlest, most beautiful girl in the world.’

  Storm threw back the covers and went eagerly to the wall beneath the pipe. The voice sounded vaguely familiar. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ asked Storm. She thought she heard distant movement from somewhere in the house. She stood on tiptoe and called: ‘Can you help us? Can you help us get out … ?’ Outside the room there was the sound of footsteps, and the eye vanished back into darkness.

  ‘Please …’ whispered Storm urgently.

  Heavy footfalls sounded from behind the door, the eye glittered briefly back into view and the disembodied voice said hurriedly, ‘Whatever you do, don’t eat the food!’

  Storm leaped back into bed and pulled the cover over her head just as the door swung open. Bee Bumble stood on the threshold. She eyed the children intently for a few moments and then, convinced they were fast asleep, she left.

  The Extremely big Oven

  In the morning, Storm tried again to persuade her sisters to leave the Ginger House. When they refused she told them about the warning voice in the night – although she left out the bit about Aurora being the most beautiful girl in the world because she didn’t want her to become vain.

  ‘So,’ she concluded, ‘I think it’s for the best if we all stop eating the food that Bee Bumble serves up.’

  At that moment Bee walked into the dining room with trays of chocolate-chip cookies and orange and vanilla cupcakes, and, much to Storm’s disgust, Aurora stood up eagerly to take them from her.

  ‘Such a sweet girl,’ said Bee Bumble. ‘Quite delicious.’ She looked at her appraisingly. ‘Although you still need fattening up. Then you’ll be truly scrumptious.’ She licked her lips as if savouring the thought.

  Aurora blushed. ‘So tell me, Mrs Bumble, how do you get your sponge cakes to rise like pillows? Do you favour the creaming or the whisking method? And might I hazard a guess that your devil’s food cake is an entirely fatless creation?’

  ‘Oh, my little cupcake! What a delight it is to find someone who shares my passion for the great culinary arts, who is willing to sacrifice herself upon the hot and steamy altar of gastronomy. How I will coddle you. Step this way into my kitchen.’ And she steered Aurora away, leaving her sister to clench her fists in frustration. Storm turned to protest to Any, but the baby had already crawled away to feast on more treats.

  And so it continued over the following days. Aurora refused point-blank to listen to any criticisms of Bee, and Storm had absolutely no luck persuading Any to forgo the groaning tables. In fact, when she refused to carry Any to her favourite puddings and sweets, the child soon discovered that her legs worked perfectly well after all. She hunted out the gem-like sweets and toddled between the cherry pies and profiteroles on chubby little legs that were getting chubbier by the day. The more she ate, the more she wanted. And when Storm remonstrated with her, she fixed her sister with a melancholic look and said, ‘In my short, unhappy life I have already been deprived of my mother, my father and my home, and now you want to deprive me of the only food available. You are being quite unreasonable, Storm. Every child knows that sweets are an important, indeed essential, part of a balanced diet.’ Then she clambered onto Storm’s lap and kissed her face, so it was like being licked by a small dog with very sugary breath, and all but melted Storm’s exasperation away.

  By the sixth day, though, Storm thought she would go mad, not just from frustration with her sisters, but with boredom. The occasional howl of a distant wolf had made her think twice about trying to explore the grounds again and, with the other children interested in nothing but eating, she found herself spending hours lying on her bed, staring up at the opening to the liquorice pipe, and fretting over the strange warning she’d been given. Part of her wondered if she’d dreamed the whole thing. Could there really be anything wrong with the food? Her sisters were looking a little plumper, but otherwise they seemed happy. And Storm couldn’t deny that they were safer here than in the woods, or back at Eden End in the clutches of Dr DeWilde. Even so, she’d tried to eat as little as she could, which was a real struggle when all the treats were so terribly tempting.

  Now she stared glumly out of an upstairs window, trying to ignore the rumbling in her tummy and wondering if she’d ever see home again and if the pipe was really worth all this bother. If she had just handed it over to Dr DeWilde, maybe she and her sisters would still be safe at Eden End. It was all her fault, she thought miserably.

  The day had turned unruly: the wind gleefully toppled chimney pots and swirled tatters of leaves past the sugar-spun panes. Sudden rain hit the window like gunfire, startling her. The sky above the orphanage had turned inky, and somewhere far off Storm heard the first rumbles of thunder. She decided to check on Any, who had been nervous of loud bangs ever since their misadventure with the fireworks.

  Storm needn’t have worried. She found her sister huddled under one of the tables in the dining room, fast asleep, her arms wrapped around Ted Bear and her starry blanket, and her face smeared with chocolate. She looked so peaceful that Storm felt like chiding herself for worrying that the orphanage was unsafe. She crept quietly aw
ay so as not to disturb her. But at the door Storm suddenly spun round. The sticky, snoozing Any had reminded her of the twins, Arwen and Aisling. Storm realized that she hadn’t seen them for several days. She felt a dreadful coldness inside and, crawling back under the table, shook her sister gently awake.

  ‘Any, Any, wake up. I need to talk to you,’ she whispered urgently. Any opened her eyes, looking dazed. ‘Any, you know the twins, the dark-haired ones with plaits? Where are they?’

  ‘Gone,’ replied Any, and promptly shut her eyes again.

  Storm shook her sister, more roughly this time. ‘Gone? Gone where, Any?’

  ‘Just gone. I don’t know. With the others, I expect,’ said Any, and she fell straight back to sleep.

  Storm shook Any much harder. ‘Wake up! This is important, Any.’

  Any sat up grumpily and yawned.

  ‘What others, Any?’

  ‘The other children. All gone. That big handsome blond boy with freckles. Little Henna, and that horrible Rudi, who would never share the pistachio ice cream with the rest of us. I am glad he’s gone. We all are. The pistachio ice cream is particularly scrumptious.’

  ‘But where have they gone, Any?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I know when they went. The day before yesterday. They were here at lunch but not at supper. I know because I got the pistachio ice cream all to myself.’

  ‘Didn’t you wonder where they went?’

  Any shrugged. ‘I heard two girls talking. One of them said children leave and new ones come all the time. Now, Storm, I really am quite exhausted. I must get another nap in before lunch.’

  Storm sighed; she could tell she wasn’t going to get any more sense from her baby sister. She was about to go looking for Aurora when Any opened one eye and said in a small voice,‘I love you, Storm. I’m already missing you, even before you’ve gone.’

  Storm smiled and took her little sister in her arms. Any curled up her arms and legs like a tiny newborn baby, put her thumb in her mouth and snuggled up sleepily. ‘You make me feel safe, Storm,’ she snuffled happily.