"Cops?" Hilda frowned. "Suck an elf, what are cops?"
"Hello, lady inside the building. This is the police. We know you are in there. You are in danger, the building is not stable. Please come out as soon as you can, or we will be forced to come in and get you." The sound boomed through the room, and probably all the other rooms in the building. Several unseen parts of the building rattled ominously while in places dust descended from the cracks in many ceilings.
Hilda understood that she had just received an answer to her question. She rose from her chair and walked to the window that had no glass in it any more. Outside the fence around her new home there were four of the horseless, metal carts. Blue lights were flashing on top of them, and there were at least ten men in black clothes. She recognised those, as the man in the park who had told her not to be on the grass had worn something similar. The wicked witch magically enhanced her speech, and at the same volume as the police megaphone had been, she boomed back: "I am not in danger. Go away and leave me be." The men in black covered their ears and dove for cover at the sound of her voice.
"Pathetic," she muttered. As she was about to turn and pay attention to the papers again, the police voice came back.
"You in the building. We are not joking. We will come in and take you out by force if you do not cooperate."
Force? Now there was a word that Hilda understood. "You want a show of force? Yours against mine? Very well. Where do you want to duel?" She peered outside and counted the men. "Only you eleven?"
The police voice remained silent for a considerable amount on time, while the keepers of the law discussed how to go about this crazy person in the condemned building. "We do not want to duel. We just want you out of the building. It is not safe in there for you."
"I don't need a handful of people in carts to tell me what is safe for me," Hilda responded. "I am safer in here than you are out there." She tapped her wand in her palm, waiting for them to make a move, so she could make a counter move. And let them hurry please, she had better things to do than to muck about with insolents.
"This is our last warning. Come out now and there will be no repercussions, lady. We'll let you walk and there won't be charges for breaking and entering an unsafe building."
Hilda did not understand most of that. She had not broken the building. It was safe enough for her also. Yes, she had entered, but that was for obvious reasons, her belongings, few as they were, were in here. But the words of the police cops that they would let her walk did sound like a good thing. It would be a shame to lose this home, but there would be another one somewhere. "You say you will let me walk. Will you also let me fly?"
"Whatever you want, lady, for all I care you come out on a unicycle. Just come out without making trouble."
"I shall come out. This is a witch's promise. You can leave now." Hilda sighed. Seriously, this was too bad. She dressed in the local's clothes and turned her own clothes into the shoulder bag again. She took the quill and the papers, and put them in the bag. Carefully she stored the crystal ball in the hidden pocket, put her necklace around her neck and then she turned the chair and the table back into rubble, the way she had found it in the room. After all that, broom in hand, she walked out of the building, towards the fence.
From behind it, she saw that the men and the carts with the flashing lights were still there. "Do you not trust me?", she asked. "I told you I would leave this building. I promised. I also said you could leave."
One of the officers stepped up to the fence, looking at the broom-carrying person in denim. "Are you by chance the same person with the broom who was in the park the other day? The one that sat on the grass?"
Hilda stood proud. "That, indeed, was I."
"Maybe you should come with us, to the station. We would like to run a few checks on you and find out what you did to our partner. The poor guy was babbling about a woman with a broom who flew off on it. If you were that woman, we'd really love to know what you slipped him."
The tone of the man was turning into something Hilda didn't like, and she was usually a very good judge of such things. Also, she understood, she was attracting a lot of attention. That was good in the real world, but in this one, becoming more odd and inexplicable every day, it was not. Hilda felt as if she had ended up in a horror story.
"Come on, lady, you have nothing to fear," the policeman tried to encourage Hilda.
"Indeed," the wicked witch agreed, "it is not I who has something to fear." Her wand appeared. "Subverto plostrum." Nothing happened. "Subvertos plostrum?"
There was silence. There was also wonder on the faces of the policemen, who until then considered themselves safe on their side of the fence.
"I hate Latin..." Hilda shook her head and mounted her broom. "Carts: overturn! Cops: stick to the floor!" Again it took a few seconds, but at least the result was satisfying.
As if they were grabbed by giant hands, the police cars were lifted up, turned over and then fell back to the ground. The policemen wanted to run to get themselves to safety, but they could by no means move their feet. They were pinned to the ground they were standing on.
Hilda kicked herself free from that same ground and flew off. Screams of the policemen followed her but only as long as she was within their yelling range.
-=-=-
Far outside the town, Hilda landed her broom in field of wheat. A spell and a simple snip of her fingers was enough to create a small open space for her to sit and study the papers again.
"The book store of the town you're in, Should definitely make you win. That's something I can work with," she said to herself, ignoring the noise that came from far away. "A book store. The book store, even," she noticed. "If there is only one, that should be quite easy to find."
Hilda looked up. The noise was becoming a nuisance. She got up and looked round. In the distance, but coming closer, was a large, loud monster. As so many things in this unruly world, it was made of metal. A large cylinder, consisting of many separate rods, was in front of it, rolling slowly like the wheel on a watermill, chopping the wheat down. A large yellow bulk was behind it, and in front of the bulk, over the rotating cylinder, was what looked like a very small hut with glass all around.
"No witch can concentrate with such noise," Hilda muttered. She took her wand and slapped out a spell. "Silencio."
The combine harvester obeyed promptly. Farmer O'Toole frowned. "What the heck..." He turned the ignition switch, but that didn't respond. The farmer looked over all the controls, switches and gauges; they all checked out, so the machine was in perfect condition. It just refused to start. The radio meanwhile announced that working crews were still trying to get a group of motorcyclists out of the road. where they had been found. It was still a mystery how the men and their machines had managed to sink into the asphalt.
With the noise taken care of, Hilda sat down and looked at the second page, the one that pretended to be a map. "Oh. Wait." She turned the page around. "Trying to be funny, are we?" she grumbled at the quill in her bag. What had first resembled only some scratches and wobbles, now looked like the view of a street. A street, Hilda noticed, that she knew. It was the street where she had first met the miscreants in the bar where she had left the bouncer. Then she remembered that she had indeed seen a book store in that very street! A loud clanging noise provided a new interruption, one that the witch could certainly do without. Once more she rose to see what was the matter.
Farmer O'Toole had descended from the harvester and opened his toolbox from where he had gotten a hammer. He had started pounding the engine, hoping it would somehow come back to life once it had been abused enough. "Shit, shit, shit, you stupid thing," he yelled at the stoic, lifeless hunk of metal.
"Shit?" Hilda giggled. "If that is what you want, that is what you get." She shot a spell towards the big machine. With a mushy 'splot' the hammer and also farmer O'Toole's arm disappeared in the engine space. Where once there had been an engine, now there was a full and fresh load of horse droppings. They were s
till warm.
10. The bookstore