Hi everyone! This is my very first fanfiction, so I'm still experimenting a bit. I have changed the names of the three main characters in Enid Blyton's The Faraway Tree books from Jo, Bessie and Fannie to Joe, Beth and Franny. The characters Jack, Peg and Timothy are all of my own creating. I really hope you enjoy this story, and please review!

The train chugged on and on through the country meadows, like a thought which kept you distracted but never seemed to go anywhere. The three children stared out the windows. At the window, facing forwards, sat the oldest sibling, Jack. In his arms was clasped a large book with a red cover. Opposite him sat his younger sister Peg. Peg had blotchy freckles and a fat, sad sort of face. Next to her sat the youngest, Timothy, a little wisp of a thing, a handkerchief clutched in his bony little hands. Every now and then he would give a small snuffle and wipe his dripping nose. Apart from this, the children in the carriage did not move at all. All had the distinct impression of town children going to the country and trying to blend in. Their clothes were old, and they clearly had the impression that farm kids wore clothes several centuries out of date.

The train drew up a station, and some people got out, while others got in. 'Jack?' It was Peg. Jack looked up.

'What do you think the cottage will be like?'

'What?'

'The cottage. The one we're to stay in.'

'I don't know,' said Jack. 'The book doesn't say much about it.' He opened the book on his knee. The pages were old and blotched, as if having been painted with tea, and were covered with cramped handwriting, progressing from the messy scrawl of a child at the beginning to the narrow script of an adult.

'I'm confused,' said Timothy, after a particularly loud sniff. 'How is Mrs Josie related to us?' Jack flicked to the back of the book, and placed it on Timothy's knees. The page showed a family tree.

'Look, there are our great grand parents,' he explained. 'They are the ones who took granddad and our great aunties out to the country. See, here's Grandfather Joe, and Great Auntie Beth, and Great Aunty Franny. And here, you can see Granny Connie. This line means that Granny and Grandpa got married. This line here shows their children, just one, which is Dad. Dad married Mum here, and look, here we are. Jack, Peg, and Timothy.'

'Yes, but how is Mrs Josie related to us?'

'She's our aunt you silly, Great Auntie Frannie's daughter.'

'Why doesn't she like being called Aunt? Why must she be Mrs?'

'Mum says that she's a bit odd.'

'Jack.' This was Peg. 'Why must we come out here?'

'Don't be silly. You know perfectly well why. Mum and Dad's divorce is just taking awhile, and when Mrs Josie wrote to ask if we could stay with her it was perfect timing.'

'But why can't we just stay with either Mum or Dad?'

'Shut up. Stop asking questions.'

The train ran on in silence.

When they arrived at the station, they gathered their bags and sat, waiting. The train moved on. Eventually, the bustle of people cleared enough for them to see a woman at the other end of the platform. She had brown hair in two childlike braids, not unlike Peg's, and was wearing a blue checked smock, the sort a child would wear. On seeing them, she bounded over in delight. The children backed away a little nervously. She was like an overgrown child with the face of a fifty year old woman.

'Hello, my friends!' she cried in a sugary voice. 'I'm Josie, and I'm sure we'll be great friends. How was your journey?' No one spoke. After a brief hesitation, Mrs Josie covered up the awkward pause with a high laugh. 'Now who are you all?' she asked. 'You must be... um... Jake, no Jack. And you'll be Peggy, and you'll be Tim. Do come along with me. The cottage is this way. Come, let's hold hands.' She grasped the children's hands, making it very hard for them to carry their bags, and drew them off along a narrow and winding country lane, bordered with hedgerows. As they walked, she pestered them with questions.

'Are you looking forwards to staying in the country?'

'Not really.'

'Oh. Well I'm sure you'll soon love it just as much as I do. What's that book you're holding, Jack?'

'It belonged to Granddad.'

'Oh, Uncle Joe. Is he still alive?'

'Yes, he's in a rest home. He's ninety four.'

'Oh yes, he is, isn't he? He must be absolutely bonkers by now, like my mother. Do you know Frannie?'

'Yes, we met her a few years ago.'

'Did you like her?'

'No.'

'Oh.' Mrs Josie was silent for a bit. 'You really are terribly disagreeable.'

'Oh.'

'Mind your step here.' They all stepped over a sty, fixed to a low stone wall, and passed through a little wicker gate. Before them was a rundown cottage. The mood was very grim. The cottage looked terribly old. Jack recognized it from a sketch in the journal. He knew that it was the one which Granddad Joe and Great Aunty Beth and Frannie had lived in. It did not appear to have been renovated since then, and even in his journal Granddad Joe had described the place as old. The roof was missing tiles, the window sills were rotted, the windows cracked and the weatherboards on the walls crumbling and broken. The garden around it was overgrown, muddy and sodden from the recent rains. The fields surrounding the cottage were wet too, and the sky was low and grey. Everything felt utterly dismal.

Mrs Josie led the way inside. The door's hinges were rusted through, so she had to pick up the door and unplug it from the doorway, and let everyone troop inside, before going in herself and squeezing the swollen door back into the doorframe. Inside was damp, and the surfaces near the windows were covered in moss. A great pile of dirty dishes lay in one corner, apparently on the floor. There was a small stove and a table, and nothing else. Through a door to the side Jack could see a small room, probably Mrs Josie's, while through another door he could see an even smaller room, which Mrs Josie shepherded them into. 'Your bedroom,' she informed them.

The bedroom was tiny, with three beds squished tightly together, all unmade. Jack turned to look up at Mrs Josie. 'Aren't there any other rooms in the house?' he asked.

'These are the only usable ones,' she said. 'There are some more upstairs. Now, shall we all go outside and play?' There was silence. Mrs Josie's face dropped somewhat. 'You... all want to come and play outside, don't you?' Silence. 'Isn't that what children like?' Silence.

I'll explore the house, if you don't mind,' said Jack.

'Oh, all right then,' said Mrs Josie. 'I'll play in the garden.' She went outside, carefully dislodging the door, and then wedging it back in place after her. Jack opened the journal, and flipped to a floor plan of the house.

'Mrs Josie's room was our great grandparents' room,' he said, walking into the old fashioned wooden room. 'And according to the floor plan, the stairs are somewhere near this cupboard.' He stared up at a tall wooden paneled wardrobe. Peg and Timothy, hand in hand, trailed after him. 'Help me move this cupboard, will you?' said Jack, beginning to push at the heavy structure. Peg pushed half heartedly. Timothy hung back, looking scared, his nose dripping down the front of his jersey. The wardrobe shifted slightly. 'Heave!' panted Jack. It shifted again, and again, and Jack could see an opening in the wall behind it. With one last shove, the wardrobe had moved enough to show that behind it was a concealed entrance to an old stairwell, going steeply up. Some stairs were rotted, and the wallpaper was peeling like torn flesh. Peg gave a gulp and stumbled backwards. Timothy gasped. 'I'm not going up there!' he said in a whiney voice which annoyed Jack.

'Does anyone have a torch?' asked Jack. His two siblings looked up at him in silence. 'I'll have a hunt round the house,' he said, and pushing past them walked back into the main room. He hunted around in all the corners of the room, but found nothing save for a candlestick behind the dishes. He pulled it out, and found a box of matches taped to it. 'But I need a torch,' he said. 'Otherwise I'll set the house on fire.'

As he bent down to look under the table, he felt something tug at his shoulder. 'Jack,' said Peg, 'look out the window. Look at Mrs Josie.' Sighing exasperatedly, Jack straightened and strode over to the window. Outside in the garden sat Mrs Josie, perched in the middle of a muddy pool, her skirt trailing in the wet. Surrounding her were rows of mud pies; cakes of it moulded into balls and lain in rows, the outer ones turning pale and crusty as they dried. Mrs Josie's face was streaked with mud, and she had her tongue between her teeth, making mud pie after mud pie. Jack looked away, feeling as though he was looking at something he shouldn't be, or that he was seeing something private and not for his eyes, something sad which almost hurt.

He went back and took up the candle. 'We'll go up with this,' he said. 'I'll have to be careful not to set anything alight. Peg, hold the journal.' Peg did not reach out to take the journal. She took a step back, eyeing him uncertainly with those pale, sad eyes.

'I don't think I want to go up with you,' she said.

'Timothy?'

Timothy stepped back as well. 'I'm not going up there.'

'Well,' said Jack, 'either you come up with me, or you stay down here with Mrs Josie.' One glance out the window at the mad lady making her mud pies decided them. They crept up the stairs after Jack, Peg holding the book, Jack holding the candle high. They walked carefully up the staircase. At the top was a landing, with a room off to one side. The children crept in. It was a large room, with two beds.

'Beth and Frannie's room!' breathed Peg. The beds were still made, though full of mothballs. The room was hung with spiders webs, like garish decorations. There were some children's clothes dotted about the room, as though the inhabitance left very suddenly, or were still there. The faces smiled out of the photographs with youthful ease, as though unaware that one day they would be going batty in retirement homes. Peg shut the journal with a snap.

They moved along the hallway outside the girls' room. 'I'm scared!' whined Timothy.

'Shut up,' snapped Jack. Mounting excitement was filling him, making his heart beat faster and the hand holding the candle shake a little. The room at the end of the hallway was Joe's room, his grandfather's. What if he found something there... something exciting, something which wasn't in the journal. Some clue to this riddle the journal told.

They pushed open the door. The room was very small, with a low sloping ceiling and a bed pushed against one wall. But there was nothing exceptional about the room. Jack stepped cautiously inside, testing the floor in case it was rotted. He moved over to the bed, and felt around under the sheets. Nothing. Under the bed was dark and cobwebby, and Jack could see that, save for what looked like a rat's nest, there was nothing there either. 'Pass me the journal,' he snapped at Peg, and opened it to the very last page. In long slanting hand was printed, Go to my room, for there you will see how to get there. But what did it mean? They were in his room, weren't they? There must be something hidden here, something which would tell them they way. Jack began to search in a chest of drawers, going through the clothes, shaking them out one by one.

Then suddenly, Timothy gave a cry. 'The window, it's out the window!' Jack turned, and raced to the window. But all he could see were rain drenched fields, a wood, and some new building complexes.

'You idiot, Timothy. There's nothing there.'

'Yes there is! Look, the wood. Beside it's a ditch, there, you can see it. And the green of the trees are exactly what the book described. Wait... you can't see the wood properly. Wait for the mist to lift.' A fine mist was wafting through the air, as though someone in the sky was smoking a massive cigarette. The mist lifted for a second. One small second, then back it fell. But Jack had seen what Timothy had described. A wood, infringed by new building complexes and fresh roads, and some of the trees cut down. But the leaves were not those of a normal wood. Time and the evolving world had dimmed the vibrant colour from the days of Joe, Beth and Frannie, but even on a swift glance, one could tell that this was the wood described in the journals, this was the...

'Enchanted Wood,' breathed Peg, her flat nose squashed against the window pane. The three children stood, looking in awe at the wood, now an indistinct shape in the fog. And before it was the ditch, wide and dark, described in such detail in the journal. We can find it now, Jack thought to himself. We'll follow in their footsteps, and see if it's still alive. His finger traced the words embossed in gold on the red cover of the journal. The Chronicles of the Faraway Tree.