Disclaimer: D'you know what? I still don't own LOTR! (breaks down and starts to sob)

The Blatant Rip-Off of the Rings

The Fellowship of the Round Yellow Shiny Thing

Chapter 5: Smog on the Barrow-Downs

Unfortunately, when Fenny woke up she was in an empty clearing and there was no sign of Tommy or Mary-Sue. Had it all been a dream? Fenny could hardly believe the author would resort to such cheap plot tactics so early in the story.

"Sam?" She poked her friend, who was asleep with her head on a rock. Sam rolled over and muttered, "Five more minutes..."

"Sam! Wake up!"

The urgency in her voice must have filtered through, for Sam's eyes snapped open and she rolled awkwardly into a sitting position. "What's the matter? Hey, where'd the house go?"

"No idea," muttered Fenny.

Sam looked around at the clearing. It was filled with the grey light of early morning, echoing with birdsong, and completely devoid of gingerbread.

Poppy was wandering around the rim of the trees, near where the clearing opened onto a wide expanse lumpy with hills. "I can smell something sweet."

"Again?" asked Megan, sitting up and stretching from a bed of moss. "Your nose is fine-tuned for sugar, Pop."

Poppy bent down and scooped up something flat and pale. "They left us a letter!" She ran back to the other three, waving the slice of paper, and spread it out on Sam's rock.

"Rice paper," observed Sam, scrutinizing it. "Written in food dye."

It read:

Cheddar is only a few miles away, over the Barrow-Downs. Go while it is still light. And stay away from the Wheelbarrow!

Mary-Sue & Tommy xxx

The four half-pints were hungry, so they divided the letter between them to save the little food they had left for the walk.

"What do you think it means by barrows?" asked Poppy.

Megan looked out over the downs. "I suppose it means burial mounds," she pondered. "And the Wheelbarrow must be some kind of a grave on wheels."

The four of them shuddered.

"Well," said Fenny at last, "I for one don't want to wait till sundown to go through there. We'd better take their advice and go while it's light."

And the four of them reluctantly set off, pursued by a chilly wind that sent the grass and leaves in the forest waving, and would have done the same on the downs had there been anything but naked earth and rock.

After a while, Sam piped up: "D'you know if the phone lines reach to Cheddar? Only dad'll worry if I'm not back by this afternoon."

"Never fear," said Megan. "I put a note through Annie's door while Fenny was calling the taxi. She'll pass it on to everyone."

--

Annie Freda got up late, padded across the hall to the lounge and noticed a piece of paper lying on the carpet. She picked it up and read it. "They might have invited me."

Afterwards she phoned Megan and Poppy's parents on the other end of Shiredon, who sighed at their daughters' wilfulness but were used to this kind of thing.

She was halfway through calling Sam's dad when there was a knock on the door. She answered it to several tall, foreboding figures in pinstriped suits.

Something quite nasty happened which would probably raise the rating, and then they and the letter were gone, the only thing moving being the abandoned phone swinging from its cord.

--

The boundaries of Shiredon are a disputed thing, but common knowledge agrees that they peter out somewhere along the river in the Quite Elderly Forest. As the four half-pints made their nervous way around the first hill, stepping gingerly on ground that was scorched and rent as if great claws had ploughed it, they left their homes and the comfort of the familiar far behind.

The sun rose in an orange blaze, as if determined to give a last grand display before summer died into autumn, sending thick dark shadows against the torn earth. Squinting up into the sky, Fenny saw birds wheeling about the edge of the forest and above the river in the distance, but none ventured over the downs. Not even insects crawled in the parched earth. The heavy air smelled of dust and a strange, sickly scent.

Only once they found something living: a small, wilting patch of wheat, brown and barely clinging to life. Beside it was the very small, delicate skeleton of a crow, a few dark feathers still sticking to the corroded bones. The sickly smell was stronger here, so they moved on, Poppy looking very ill.

As they paused in the most shaded place they could find – the leeward side of a hill – to take a very subdued drink of water, a rattling noise disturbed them. Fenny crept up to look over the crest of the hill.

She bit down a scream.

A gigantic wheelbarrow of bleached wood was rattling and bumping toward them over the dead furrows of the ground, dragging behind it a great long pole which stretched across the ground. Lashed to the pole was a long line of chambers, spraying a thick purple-grey smog into the surrounding downs.

Fenny crouched, frozen, for a second. Then on instinct she sprang back down to her friends, yelling, "RUN!"

The four sprinted away, panting in shallow breaths, trying to breathe more oxygen and less smog. The Wheelbarrow roared after them, bumping over the rents in the ground, choking out its load of the foul pesticide.

Then it was past them, jolting away along the furrows of the Downs.

The four staggered, panting, across the swift, shallow river that marked the end of the Downs, and, coughing, pounded on the tall, strong wooden gates of Cheddar.