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The Curse of Jumanji.

Bella looked between her aunt and Mildred, her eyes questioning and wide with fear. "Who's back?" she asked quietly, too terrified to speak louder. Ever since she had found herself trapped in Jumanji with her best friend and reunited with her aunt, Bella had quickly learnt how terrifying this place was, and everything new was probably evil8.

But the older witches weren't listening to her. Mildred instantly ran towards the broomsticks lined against the wall, Ethel following close behind her.

"Are you going to find out where he is?" she asked, and Bella could hear the real worry in her aunt's voice, and it made her more frightened than ever.

She had no idea what was outside, and it was clear whoever it was out there was someone to worry about.

"I might as well," Mildred grabbed a second broomstick, and strapped it to her back, talking as she did, "it will give us enough time to work out what to do next."

Ethel nodded, "I'll start packing up when you've gone. At least I've got a couple of helpers to shorten the length of time it will take."

Mildred looked at her seriously, "You'd better tell them about him when I'm gone."

Ethel's voice was grim. "I intend to."

"The sooner they know what's out there, the better," Mildred just had to go on, and Ethel rolled her eyes. "I know," she ground out, frustrated with Mildred for telling her stuff once, and then needing to go on. She would never understand the Hubble need to yak on and on.

"Who are you going to find out is out there?" Miranda interrupted their hurried and worried talk with her equally worried question, but her voice was more impatient and far more strident than Bella's, so it was enough to attract the attention of the two older witches. Miranda blushed when the older witches' attention was on her, she hadn't intended to be that demanding, but she shook that aside and focused on the matter at hand. "Look, I know we've not been here long, but we're here now, and we need to know what's going on."

Mildred glanced at Ethel and then turned back to Miranda. "Ethel will fill you in, but right now I've got to get out there. I'll be back as soon as I can," she said as she walked over to the entrance of the cave. She mounted on top of her homemade broomstick and flew clumsily out of the cave. Ethel sighed and rolled her eyes, and Bella wondered for a moment whether or not her aunt and Mildred had indeed become friends or not, but this wasn't the time to ask.

Ethel meanwhile turned to face the two younger witches, studying them both. They were worried, she could see that clearly; she was worried herself, but she agreed with Mildred that the sooner these two learnt what was out there, the better off they would be. She sighed and walked over to them, and sat down on the stone floor, waving for Bella and Miranda to do the same thing.

"I don't know how to say this, so I shall just say it; we're not the only people, humans that is, in Jumanji. There are others out there," she began, but before she could go any further, Miranda interrupted her.

"Then why are we hiding in a cave? Surely it would be safer with them?"

Despite the logical statement, Ethel had to bite down her tongue to stop herself from shouting at the pair of them, but she had to calm herself down. This was neither the time nor was it the place. "It's not," she decided to be short and simple with the girls, and she mentally cursed Mildred for going because the brunette would be better at this than she was. But Mildred was gone, so she was the one forced to carry the cauldron.

Ethel looked down at her hands for a moment, trying to work out the best way of making it clear to the girls, one of whom was her niece though she barely knew the girl, and she cursed the game for stealing thirty years of her life.

Still looking down at her hands, she started speaking, "Believe me, when Mildred and I found out about them, we immediately thought we would be safe, but we weren't. There are a few tribes out there, a couple of them are nomadic but whenever they meet each other they immediately launch into a full-scale war. Just like that," she clicked her fingers, making sure they sparked with magic though not enough to create a spell. "One of the tribes has tried to capture us more than once, though we're not sure if they want to marry us or eat us, though we've got plenty of evidence they would do it."

The younger witches looked at each other in worry, Bella shivered at the thought of being eaten by someone else. "But who is it Mildred's going to look for?"

Ethel sighed. "His name is Van Pelt. He's a hunter. He hunts and kills things," she said simply, "and he wants to kill me and Mildred."

She felt it was too cruel to tell the two girls if Van Pelt found them, he would more than likely do the same thing with them, but it looked like they were already considering the likelihood.

"Why?" Miranda asked.

"We don't know," Ethel said, "all we do know is he's been hunting us down ever since we found out about him, but he seemed to know we were in the game the whole time."

"When did you meet him?" Miranda whispered, her mind instantly catching onto the implication of the last part.

"We met him sometime after we arrived in Jumanji," Ethel's eyes became haunted as she remembered the first time she had seen Van Pelt which had only sparked a massive and endless game of cat and mouse across Jumanji. "Mildred and I were still getting used to the place, but we'd already been attacked half a dozen or so times by the animals. We'd already been injured a couple of times; nothing too serious," she added quickly when she saw the looks on the girls' faces, "just a few bruises, cuts, that type of thing, and we had already come upon a number of purple plants that grow on vines that spread everywhere that shoot out poisonous barbs, and we'd found out it was a very bad idea to wander too close to the where the baboon troops move around. All that was bad enough, but then it got worse when we found out there was a hunter out there who wanted to shoot us both."

Ethel closed her eyes as she remembered the day she and Mildred had found that little patch of rugged land that didn't seem to have any hostile animals on it, and how they had both planned to find a way to live on it out there… only to be shot at by Van Pelt. She decided not to tell them that part of the story because it would take her forever to get through it.

In the end, she decided to keep it as simple as she possibly could. "One minute we didn't know he was there, the next… he was shooting us and he very nearly killed us both," she said simply, glad she had managed to condense the story so easily, but when she saw the terror on both girl's faces, she felt bad. That one of them was Esmerelda's daughter made her feel worse. "Ever since then, Van Pelt has been hunting us down, but luckily we've sometimes gone for months without seeing or hearing him, though we've learnt the hard way it is not a good idea to stay in one place too long. That's why this cave looks so sparse and simple; we thought we'd gotten rid of him once, you know, masked our trail. No such luck. We had found a nice little cave in a waterfall in a deep ravine, no way anything large could get in. Van Pelt used his dogs to try to smoke us out."

"His dogs?"

"Yeah. Van Pelt has a small pack of them. Think of some of the most vicious dogs imaginable in the real world, make them larger, more vicious, add in the typical resilience to our magic that everything here has, and you get an idea of what they're like," Ethel replied, "he uses them to flush out his prey. He's used them a number of times on both of us. Sometimes, he would take them out of his compound, and let them go free for a bit before they go back to his home. We've learnt the hard way it's a good idea to not camp on the ground. There is nothing worse than suddenly being attacked by a dog that is incredibly tough, resistant to magic, and so strong and fearless it won't be afraid to take on one of the bears like the one that attacked you two. We've been living in very big trees, deep in the jungle, or in other caves and caverns like this one. The good news is he spends most of his time up at that lodge of his, or he's busy hunting some of the local wildlife."

Bella and Miranda had both been terrified with visions of massive dogs suddenly appearing out of nowhere, but now Bella frowned, "His lodge?"

She didn't understand why she asked that since it would not make sense that a hunter would not have a place to live, and besides where would he house all of those dogs?

"Yeah, Van Pelt lives in a hunting lodge on top of a hill that's fenced off to protect him from the more vicious animals in Jumanji," Ethel replied, "ever since we realised getting through to him, and trying to make him help us, protect us, was a waste of time, we have gone out of our way to avoid finding a place that's near his lodge. We don't want to make it easy for him to kill us both."

Bella shared a look with Miranda, both of them understood the point of that statement. It made perfect sense to them, but there was one thing Miranda wanted to be cleared up. "You went to the lodge to try to persuade Van Pelt to help you?" she asked incredulously.

Ethel nodded. "We were desperate, me and Mildred. We were constantly on the move, running into dangerous animals. Our magic barely worked against them. We needed help, and fast. Every day was a struggle just to live an hour! You have to understand," she went on, dearly hoping they understood where she and Mildred had both been during that time, "we were desperate for help. We were in a place we couldn't escape from, we needed help. We both thought that perhaps Van Pelt had just shot at us by mistake."

Okay, Mildred was the one who had voiced that thought, though even she had been dubious about the veracity of her statement at the time. Still, she had quickly learnt differently, and now Mildred would need to take a great deal of persuasion to go near someone else.

"It didn't work?" Bella placed her hand on her aunt's arm as comfortingly as possible, though she knew she was stating the obvious she couldn't think of anything better to ask.

Ethel shot her a look. "Nope," she replied darkly. "We tried to persuade him to give us some shelter, but he shot at us. We were forced to race back into the jungle, and we ended up hiding up a tree when he set those damn dogs on us. Mildred almost had her leg torn to shreds, but we managed to escape." (Ethel wondered whether it was a good time to tell them that the same tree was located near the chimpanzees who had very nearly killed them as well, but she decided not to; she wanted to tell them as much as she could about Van Pelt).

"Is he as resistant to magic as the animals are?" Miranda asked.

Ethel nodded, "We can use simple spells on him, but they don't last long. In fact, they seem to last on him less than the animals do; he just shrugs them off, so we have decided to try to think on our feet where Van Pelt is concerned."

Miranda and Bella shared another look with each other, but Ethel could very well see the fear on their faces. She didn't blame them; she, Mildred, Bella, and Miranda were all witches. They needed magic in order to survive, they used it all the time. The idea they were in a place where their magic wouldn't help them and would barely protect them was probably bad enough, but to find out there was a hunter out there gunning for them…

Ethel closed her eyes and hoped Mildred was alright.

On the one hand flying through the Jumanji sky at night instead of during the day was a good thing because Van Pelt couldn't see her if she flew too high in the sky, or into the light of the moon, but it was a bad thing also because there were other dangerous animals who could fly; birds like hawks or eagles who were just as indiscriminate as the animals on the ground, or giant bats.

Mildred didn't plan on going too far out away from the cave where she, Ethel, and now Bella and Miranda were staying in for the moment, because she knew only too well if she went out too far, she might not be able to get back, particularly if she missed the landmark the cliff where the cave was.

The good news was the moon was casting a great deal of light down onto the jungle, giving Mildred a good view around her. The moment she had left, she had seen the cliff face the cave was in, and she had used it as a starting point when she had gone out to look for Van Pelt.

The thought of the hunter made her stomach clench in fear. It had been ages since Van Pelt had turned up; that was one of the biggest problems with Jumanji, it was virtually impossible to keep track of time, so Mildred could only estimate she and Ethel had only seen the hunter a couple of months ago.

Mildred just hoped Ethel had told the two girls enough about the deranged hunter to make it clear to them it was not a good idea to wander off if they did then it was likely the pair of them would get killed. She just hoped her friend didn't get the idea into her mind to regale the girls with some of the more nastier stories about Van Pelt and what he'd done over the years, but she felt it was a good idea if the two girls were frightened enough not to go out of the sight of either herself or Ethel.

She wasn't surprised the game of Jumanji was still in Cackles Academy; the people the Great Wizard and the rest of the Magic Council had sent to the school to try to find both her and Ethel would have been looking for signs of forced entry, evil spells being used, that type of thing. The game would have been tucked away quietly in the school and would have gone unnoticed.

And it had, for thirty years. Thirty Years!

While she was flying, Mildred couldn't help but be amazed that suddenly she and Ethel had company now instead of being forced to toil away in this hellhole for the rest of their lives. She was just sorry two first-year girls from Cackles were dragged into this mess.

"Still maybe with these two girls we might finally be able to reach the Barrier and break through it, and maybe we might be able to get out of here," she thought privately to herself, knowing that presumably the same thought had occurred to Ethel as well (Mildred instantly shoved those thoughts out of her mind, deciding to worry about that little matter later even if it would mean their freedom - she had a job to do).

She wondered if Van Pelt had come back because of Miranda and Bella. It would make sense to both her and Ethel if that was the reason why the hunter was out tonight. Van Pelt had not been surprised in the least when they had first met him, so why would he be surprised now? Besides, both she and Ethel had the feeling the game and the hunter were so inexplicably connected he was able to track them so effortlessly; he had known they were there when they'd tried persuading him to give them some shelter long before they had managed to reach the lodge, that was the perfect proof in their minds.

Mildred was shaken out of her thoughts when the broomstick jerked, and she cursed angrily under her breath while she tried to regain control. This broomstick wouldn't last much longer, and she yearned not for the first time for a proper broomstick instead of this thing. The materials she and Ethel used to rig these things up were just as resistant to magic as the animals and Van Pelt happened to be, but they were capable of flight providing enough magic was shoved into them, but it just made them fall apart faster.

She decided to just get this over and done with quicker before the broomstick fell apart, but she was relieved she had the second broomstick strapped to her back. Swallowing her worries and her hopes the broomstick did not fall to pieces with her on it while she was high up in the air, Mildred circled close to the cave mouth while trying to drift slowly around the tops of the trees while she tried to get an idea of where Van Pelt was now while she tried her level best to stay as close as she could to the densest patches of leaves so the hunter wouldn't be able to spot her in the sky.

But Mildred was tense.

One of Van Pelt's favourite tactics to find out where she and Ethel, and now Bella and Miranda, were living was to alert them he was nearby, and then he would go quiet for a bit, and then wait for either one or both of them to appear then he would pick them off.

But Mildred needed to find out where he was because he would attack out of nowhere, and with the two eleven-year-olds back in the cave, they were even more vulnerable. Mildred and Ethel had both learnt to stay on their guard, and besides, when they figured out where Van Pelt was whenever the hunter played this sick game, it would give the other time to get ready to escape-

BANG!

Startled out of her reverie by the gunshot which had taken her by surprise, Mildred was relieved she was high up in the sky, the bullet whizzed right past her. She could hear the whine it made as it whizzed right past her left ear. The shock of the attack made Mildred curse herself for letting her mind wander; the arrival of the girls and the possibilities of breaking through the Barrier, at last, had gotten to her, and she had become distracted.

The attack made her jerk the broomstick around, and it was too much for the crudely put together broomstick since it had already been pushed to the limits.

The broomstick snapped.

On the ground, his muscles tense as he still held the old-fashioned but still effective breach-loading hunting rifle to his shoulder while he remained alert to the rest of the jungle surrounding him, Van Pelt had a twisted smile on his face as he watched one of the girls he had been tracking down for the best part of three decades suddenly plummet through the air. The smile quickly disappeared when the girl twisted awkwardly in the air and pulled another of those flying contraptions from behind her back.

Cursing a few choice Indian and African curses, Van Pelt watched as the girl managed to get onto the second broomstick and fly away.

Panting heavily, her heart pounding and her head awash with adrenaline as she fell through the air, Mildred twisted on herself in the air as she reached for the second broomstick now the first one was gone, relieved that both she and her friend had years of practice doing this type of thing, especially high up in the air.

While she was dearly trying not to think about what awaited her on the ground, especially with the trees below her, Mildred didn't bother to sit astride on the broomstick this time, there was no time to be graceful and elegant. When she was sitting astride on the broomstick, Mildred closed her eyes and shoved quite a bit of her magic into the broomstick to make it fly, but she poured in quite a bit. The broomstick took off like a rocket.

On the ground standing in the shadows of some trees with incredibly thick trunks and canopies that were dark with leaves and branches, Van Pelt lowered his rifle, glaring into the night sky as he watched the witch fly off. He wasn't particularly angry she had managed to survive, but he wasn't pleased either. Worse, he had tipped his hand, alerted the girls he was nearby when he could have taken his time, surveyed this part of the jungle, kept watch from the ground or in the trees once he had climbed up, but if there was one thing he had learnt as a hunter, it was that prey moved, so he would need to kill it before it escaped. Tricky sport, hunting.

Sure, there would be some prey which did not move frequently, but he should have remembered these girls were always on the move through Jumanji, and with two extra girls they would be able to reach and penetrate the Barrier. Van Pelt only regretted that although he could hunt the girls, he may not be able to fully bag them.

Still, he knew his duty as the hunter of this land, and he would perform it. He just wished he wasn't a contradiction; able to hunt down and shoot the prey, but unable to properly kill them since many of them developed cunning in order to survive here in Jumanji. Besides, he knew now where the girls were likely to be since he had watched through the target sighting of his rifle the girl flying towards the cliff. It was likely there were caves there, the perfect place for them to hide.

Van Pelt hefted his gun and moved off in the direction of the cliffs.

Until the next time...