Megan Button and the Brim-Tree Read online

  MEGAN BUTTON

  and the Brim-Tree

  Published by New Generation Publishing in 2012

  Copyright © M.T. Boulton 2012

  First Edition

  The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  eISBN 978-1-90939-521-3

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.newgeneration-publishing.com

  To my Mum. Thank you for such unwavering love, belief, support and understanding, and endless patience. As with all areas of child-rearing, thank you for also for being inclusive rather than exclusive where the arts are concerned; whether that be storytelling / literature, panel paintings, ballet, opera, theatre and any performing art medium. If you like a particular something, then you simply like it.

  in memoriam, my Dad

  Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited - a maxim principle truth, Albert Einstein

  Contents

  Chapter One Fete

  Chapter Two Princess Blossom

  Chapter Three A Surprise Visitor

  Chapter Four The Doorway

  Chapter Five Bumpy Wallops

  Chapter Six The Wall Of Fire

  Chapter Seven Tumble’s Horn

  Chapter Eight A Very Different Dragon

  Chapter Nine Stormy Skies

  Chapter Ten Darkly Neighbours

  Chapter Eleven Magical Returning

  Chapter Twelve The Unlocking Of A Keeper

  Chapter One

  Fete

  Megan Button patted an unruly ringlet, munched some more of the chocolate muffin then started to stroll around her school fete.

  The mugginess of early summer had surpassed itself as it shined down on her mum and dad, who were rooted on the slope near the cake stall, fixedly watching her sister and her gaggle of friends all hopping like hares over the funny-shaped bouncy castle; there was terrific bouts of boisterous laughter as they were trying to bounce over the clowns bowler hat!

  A chuffing train, less than a mile away, just clapped out a belch of steam, which was curdling in the sky like a flock of crows. The whistling choo-choo chugged on to its next station stop, and yawning back the mid-morning with a drawn stretch, Megan meandered into puddles of strobed lights spilling from the noisy carousel, then passing a wooden helter-skelter, she found herself face-to-face with a fluting banner.

  In her jeans, she had the last dregs of her pocket money and checking the coast was clear, sidled alongside the toy stall, where she spotted something peeping from under a raggedly battered teddy bear. It was a figure of a Fairy, perched on a branch, wearing a lemon-yellow dress, which flowed down to its ankles.

  It looked pleasantly lovely!

  Megan couldn’t peel her eyes off the figurine: she had a vast collection of Fairies and yet, in her estimation, none looked as real as this one, and her grandmother, knowing how much she highly prized these, would give her one on every birthday and Christmas.

  Her new teacher came over and saw her holding the model. ‘Hello, Megan, isn’t she beautiful?’ she remarked pleasingly, both admiring the light reflecting through the Fairy’s pale purple wings.

  ‘Yes, she is. How much is she, Mrs. Penny?’

  ‘She’s supposed to be two pounds.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She bit her lip, and fidgeted with the tog on her long-sleeved sequined cardigan.

  ‘Good gracious, girl, you oughtn’t look so ghastly,’ Mrs. Penny said somewhat concernedly.

  Megan smiled thinly.

  Mrs. Penny, seeing her disappointment, tapped a finger on the mottled cover of the leather-bound book she was cradling in the crook of her arm, and enquired. ‘How much do you have to spend?’

  ‘Erm, only one pound,’ she told her weakly.

  ‘Then that’s how much you can buy her for,’ Mrs. Penny winked with a knowing smile.

  This was certainly more than Megan had bargained for.

  She perked up, and with a beaming grin, that displayed the cute-as-pie dimples in her cheeks, she cried in delight, ‘Thank you, Mrs. Penny!’

  Excitedly, she sprinted and showed her parents, but had too wait to see her sister, because apparently she was having her face plastered in paint, in orange, black-and-white stripes.

  She eventually decided to grace them with her presence, and came skipping over to Megan. ‘Grrrr. Raaaa’ she growled. ‘Ooh, that’s a nice Fairy.’

  ‘I-I know,’ replied Megan hesitantly, now fully fearing what might come next.

  And sure enough, she stropped in a rather dramatic huff, ‘Have I got one?’ then promptly flicked a poor ladybird off her thumb.

  With a sinking heart because she knew she’d be cross, Megan muttered wearily, ‘No, sorry. I only saw this one.’

  Spitefully, she started to poke and prod at Megan. ‘That’s not fair. I want one,’ she bleated shrilly, ‘why should you have it? Just because you’re a year older than me!’

  After bickering for a few minutes their Mum, who was beginning to look terribly harassed, picked at an imaginary thread on her pashmina, and turning to the whirlwind of commotion, warningly, scolded quietly. ‘Lucy Dinah Button, you’re eight-years-old for goodness sake, and if you do not stop creating such a fuss, you will go straight home to bed and not have any ice-cream later, not go to ballet practice, nor get that new dress you want.’

  As the Button’s regimentally roamed round the parallel stalls laden with flagged bunting, (buying a fine tapestry Egyptian mat bundled by string, and a stained glass lampshade in decorative patterned peacocks as they did so) Lucy sulkily scuffed her new trainers over the sunlit lawns, and would only cheer up after shoveling a strawberry ice-cream cone into her mouth.

  *

  Sometime later, a squirrel, its bushy tail gluped with pipped pulp, skittered into an empty woodpecker hole. Such tree with dangling green fruity blotches, and now harbouring a squirrel family, was in the back garden of a smart-looking townhouse, where inside, lots of clatter and whooped shouts whirled from the kitchen: it seemed Megan and Lucy’s dad was baking a recipe from his latest cookbook, and their mum, who had somehow found time to pot pansies and daffodils, arrange a proud display of fragrant flowers in a vase, and now had a basketful of ironing balancing on her hip, told them they could go to their bedrooms for a bit before supper was to be dished out.

  And so with a snow blushed rose nuzzled in the rumples of hair behind her ear, Megan scampered to hers, where, on top of the bookcase that was opposite the bed, she clumsily plonked the figure in between her assortment of dolls and alphabetized books, so it would be the first thing she saw when she awoke. Over the bookcase was a shelf stacked higgledy-piggledy with figures of dolphins and Fairies in different colours; whilst drifting off to sleep she would stare at these models, and because she had no actual confidants of her own, she would pretend these were her bosom friends and have adventures with them.

  She always sat alone at school, with her nose stuck in whatever book she was reading that particular week, preferring to be whisked away into far-away lands, and the children in her class, who all thought her positively peculiar, took to nicknaming her with barbed cruelty, “Boring, Bookworm Button.” If Megan were brutally honest with herself, she would admit that this more than upset her, but usually she found ignoring them worked best, and so with a show of acting, would quite happily carry on w
ith her wistful daydreaming.

  This calm before the squall had, up until very recently, been proving well, and she’d taken to hiding, at break and lunch times, in the toilets. However, not one week past, the two ringleaders who tormented her, namely Millicent Mountbatten and Maximilian Ludsworth, had covertly followed her into a cubicle, barking that horrid nickname as they tore her favourite book from her pinned pleading hands, then stamped a couple of feet for good measure on her cheese and pickle sandwich and curtailed out, and in their hateful wake, left a teary-eyed Megan looking at Anne of Avonlea bobbing in the lavatory.

  The next day, thinking things had been brought to a head, she had ventured outside in afternoon break, only to be slapped on the back by Millicent. But what Megan did not know was that she’d Sellotaped a poster to her pinafore, scrawled with a slogan blaring the highly imaginative accusation:

  MEGAN

  BETINA

  BUTTON

  STINKS

  OF

  WEE!

  Megan shook her head, simply not wanting to remember the sniggers, and moseyed over to the heaps of paper teetering precariously atop the hulking-looking desk, then after ferreting through over-stuffed draws, and levering open ring-binder folders, she fetched out her drawing pad. Like her exercise books it was jam-packed with wonderful pictures of rainbows and miraculous creatures, and whiling away half an hour, she started to colour - being mindful of the lines - a big picture of a Dragon that she had sketched three days ago: these were her favourite things, but she also doodled whimsical castles in the sky when in lessons, rather than attending to the avalanche of viciously problematic schoolwork.

  Suddenly struck by inspiration, Megan put her pad to one side and pulled at the wrought-iron ring.

  Her hand swam inside the dark recess of the compartment draw of the desk (which had a pink helium balloon tied to it), and gingerly brushing past frilly pleats, worn by a Pierrot doll in a glazed porcelain finish, her fingers whacked against a tub of pastel-coloured biscuit macaroons, then Megan found what she was looking for: she extracted her best artist utensils; a tin of watercolour pencils.

  Sitting back, Megan put a black pencil in between her teeth, propped open the pad against her knees, and raked a hand through her mane of loose curls. Hearing tinkerling birdsong, and not mistaking it for a hopeful magpie out on the windowsill waiting for bread crusts, Megan glanced at the cuckoo clock, above her vanity dressing table (that served as a dumping ground and boasted an array of well-thumbed Pony & Me comics parceled with elastic bands, a clogged comb, a broken umbrella, gobstopper wrappers, a jewelry box chock-full of coloured pencils, a pink woolen scarf, an empty carton of birdseed, heavily-creased jackets, wads of tissues used to mop up the excess water from paintbrushes, a half-full tumbler of pink lemonade, an unopened cellophane packet containing six chunks of coconut-flavoured fudge, and all topped off by the slightly rotten remains of a banana skin languishing on a bashed-looking, dog-eared Dictionary), which had just chirped into the next sluggish hour, and the late afternoon clanked droningly on, then after a generous helping of mashed potato, sausages and baked beans, followed later by a scrumptious mound of apple crumble with lashings of custard, marbled bathing twilight fell, and nine o’clock, bedtime, came far to quickly for Megan’s liking.

  Her Mum came into the bedroom to tuck her in, and seeing Megan looking at her new pretty ornament, said with mock botheration, ‘I don’t know. What with your Father being a model plane enthusiast, and with all these,’ she waved a beringed hand, ‘we may have to convert the attic.’

  Megan returned her mum’s smile as she closed the door, then snuggled underneath the cocoon of her cream and pale pink quilt cover.

  Chapter Two

  Princess Blossom

  Lying on her stomach, with her nodding head facing the wall, Megan was not sleepy in the least bit: she was counting sheep, but kept on getting into quite a muddle after the thirtieth sheep had baa-baaed over the stile.

  Tossing and turning and trying to get comfortable, she looked up to her photo frames hanging on the pink-wallpapered wall and noticed beams of light reflecting off the glass.

  With mounting curiosity she slowly rolled over and saw a radiant yellow light encasing the Fairy figure. Turning as white as a sheet, Megan stiffened. Is this real, she thought, or am I dreaming?

  Hauling the quilt over her head, and diving under the bedclothes, she huddled into a ball, and then suddenly heard a muffled sound close by.

  ‘Do not be scared. I will not harm you. Please will you come out?’ coaxed a soft musical voice.

  Trembling and twitching, Megan took a deep breath and tweezed the quilt down inch-by-inch. As she timidly peered over the top, her pupils dilated saucer-like: a Fairy was close to her head!

  Megan gaped.

  She was about three times larger than the figurine, surrounded by a yellow and green light, and as she stared at Megan, her wings fluttered back and forth like a hummingbird.

  ‘W-who a-a-are you?’ Megan quivered, flabbergasted.

  ‘I’m a Fairy. My name is Princess Blossom of the Fairy folk.’

  ‘Goodness. A Fairy?’ breathed Megan, ‘a real Fairy?’

  ‘Yes, a Fairy, I am sorry if I scared you before. What is your name?’

  ‘I’m M-Megan. But why are you here, in my-y bedroom?’

  Blossom dropped her head and wings, while the light around her diminished.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ asked Megan, alarmed.

  ‘I was kidnapped and now I am trapped,’ Blossom replied in a very dispirited tone.

  ‘G-gosh.’

  Blossom just about managed a wintry smile.

  Megan sat up straight, and said kindly, ‘Please do tell me about your world, Princess Blossom,’ as the Fairy then settled on the bedspread in front of her.

  Pushing aside her velvety-wavy brown hair that cascaded down her shoulders, the Fairy’s glow came back. Her sparkly wings, the same size as her body, went up again. ‘Of course, Megan: the world I come from is called The Enchanted Kingdom.

  ‘In Fairy Land, where I live, there are many gigantic toadstools; some are brown and others red and white. I used too live at the top of a red and white toadstool, but after my wedding to the Prince I would have lived in a magnificent castle at the heart of Fairy Land. It has high towers and many big courtyards. A large river runs round the castle walls and the roofs on the castle are pale pinks, blues and greens, and against the blue sky there are lots of wonderful rainbows and white clouds. My world has three suns, and in the rays, the gold and Fairy dust that is sprinkled over the castle, glitters and shines all day long - ’

  ‘ - D-did you just say… three suns?’ Megan interjected totally disbelievingly.

  ‘Hmm, yes, one is yellow, one is red and the other is orange,’ she replied and then resumed, ‘and within The Kingdom there are many, many different Lands with various creatures. I have seen some of these, but my Father, who is a wise old Elf and journeyed far in his youth, used to tell me stories about others when I was little. If I remember rightly, the Dragons live to the north of The Kingdom, and are mostly the size of your house.’

  ‘D-dragons?’ exclaimed Megan.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They e-exist?’

  ‘Yes-s, Megan, of-f course-e t-t-h-h-e-e-y-y d-do,’ replied Blossom, clearly amused, for she was giggling, ‘a-and all but one are my friends. All of us have lived in harmony for many years until a Dragon named Abraxus wanted power. In the Dragon Land, all the Dragons chose a new Prince and Princess to rule and guard over them. When Abraxus realised he had not been chosen to be the Prince he became very jealous and bitterly angry, and he vowed to himself that he would show the other Dragons how powerful he was.

  ‘Just after my wedding to Prince Elfin, I was enjoying the outdoor celebrations, as were all of The Kingdom, when a blue and white Dragon with enormous wings, a long trailing tail, and horns and spikes on his head, descended into Fairy Land and kidnapped me. My brother, Nugget, sa
w what happened and followed Abraxus to the Land of the Unicorns, where he hoped to raise the alarm, but Abraxus saw him and captured him too.

  ‘Using the old Magic, to rip a gateway between our world’s, he threw both of us into it, but only commanded that I turn into a statue of myself,’ explained Princess Blossom. ‘I have been here a long, long time in the form of a figurine waiting for a very special child to appear who believes in Magic and Fairy folk, so that one day I may be able to get back to my Prince and Kingdom. When I saw you at the fete only I could see the light all around you, and I knew then that you were the child I had been waiting for, as you have a kind heart and truly believe in us. You are The Fairy Key. That is the secret to unlocking the evil power of Abraxus.’

  This piece of information did not serve to embolden Megan.

  ‘M-me?’ she croaked.

  The Princess nodded.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, Megan.’

  ‘This can’t be right. Me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean… me?’

  Again, the Princess nodded.

  ‘B-but why not a grown-up who holds the… k-key?’ Megan asked, her bamboozled senses now blatantly reeling.

  ‘That’ll take a long story to explain, but suffice to say that every child born has Magic within themselves, but here in your world, as that child becomes older, they lose their Magic and stop believing in all that live within The Enchanted Kingdom,’ replied Blossom, with her tawny-brown eyes glinting brightly.

  ‘Oh, I see… um…’ Megan garbled uncomprehendingly, feeling headachy (indeed, she felt in dire need of an aspirin), then slumped further down her double-folded pillows, ‘err… is Nugget OK?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘I have not seen him since being thrown into your world,’ Blossom admitted miserably. ‘I simply do not know.’

  Megan gulped.

  ‘D-do you think anyone has tried too come and rescue you?’ she pondered.