The Wrath of the Woolington Wyrm: Miss Mary-Kate Martin’s Guide to Monsters 1 by Karen Foxlee illustrated by Freda Chiu & Freda Chiu

Author:Karen Foxlee, illustrated by Freda Chiu & Freda Chiu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A&U Children’s
Published: 2022-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

She breathed a sigh of relief that it was sorted.

She could look at Arabella’s words now. What did she mean – she’d seen it? Had she really seen it? Or actually been near it?

‘Is everything all right, Mary-Kate?’ asked Yolanda. She’d arrived with tea and biscuits. ‘I thought you might be hungry.’

Mary-Kate turned the page quickly and smiled. She was about to tell her about the children in 1866; how the wyrm couldn’t be blamed for it. Something stopped her though. Yolanda desperately wanted the wyrm to be real and maybe she wouldn’t like to have this fact disproven. Like the way Arabella had gripped her arm. Mary-Kate sensed that the wyrm meant something different to everyone and that they felt passionately about it, whether they believed or not.

‘I’m going to try to do some cross-checking of the dates you gave me earlier,’ said Mary-Kate. ‘The newspaper only goes back as far as the 1850s, doesn’t it?’

‘I think this book might be useful,’ said Yolanda, running her fingers along a row of books on the nearest shelf. ‘The Complete History of the Parish of Woolington Well. For the earlier dates, at least. Would you like me to help? We have an hour until closing time.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mary-Kate.

She crunched on her biscuit, her pen poised, as Yolanda took a seat before the computer. Mary-Kate had left two whole pages for the interview with Arabella and she’d transcribed the dates of the wyrm appearances from earlier pages with spaces in-between for any information they found. The title for this new set of dot points was rather long although also strangely satisfying. THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN THE SAME YEAR THE WYRM CAUSED TROUBLE. She used her deep-blue glitter pen.

‘Okay. Working forwards or backwards?’ asked Yolanda.

‘Forwards, please,’ said Mary-Kate, because backwards reminded her of the idea of facing backwards on a train.

The first date she’d written was 1317. This was the year that James Woolington had placed the strange creature in the well. She knew there had been a war in France and that many of the village men had not returned. A monument was being built to honour them in the market square. She wrote ‘War’ and ‘Monument being built in market square’ beside this date.

The next date was 1596.

Yolanda opened the book she had taken from the shelf. It was an old book, leather bound, much like the ones Mary-Kate had seen in the hotel room.

‘Something that happened around 1596 in Woolington, you say?’ said the librarian. ‘Here it is. Remember, I told you, a new church was being built right beside the market square? The old church had burned down. This new church was quite grand and took almost ten years to build.’

That is interesting, thought Mary-Kate. She wrote down the dates ‘1596 to 1606’. She remembered Yolanda saying that the wyrm had caused problems for many years around these dates.

‘What about around 1672?’ asked Mary-Kate as Yolanda turned the pages.

‘In 1670, construction began on the new village hall,’ she read.

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