The Spellbound Tree

Hedy van Beer looked up from her book. The garage doors had exploded open and what looked like a huge cloud billowed out in a puff. There was no way her brother, Spencer, had planned whatever had just happened. Fearing the worst, Hedy tucked her book into her waistband. A knotted rope hung from the sycamore tree where she had been reading, letting her scrunch and stretch her way to the ground like a cross between a monkey and a caterpillar. ‘Spencer?’ she yelled, sprinting for the garage. Spencer and their cousins, Jelly and Max, stumbled out through the ballooning cloud into the garden. They were all a little damp, as though they’d walked through mist. ‘What happened?’ Hedy asked. Spencer was trying out a device that he’d been given by their friend, Mrs Pal. It was an artefact from Iceland called a skyskepnur, roughly translated as ‘sky creature’. It was supposed to create massive cloud shapes.