Alec switched his attention back to the book; he reread the words and picked the hat up off the bed once more. Next he picked up the wand; instantly light sparkled off it in blues and purples. Alec blinked; it wasn’t reflecting the light from the room, his bedside lamp had no colour in it and wasn’t that bright. The coloured light was coming from the wand itself, dancing in front of his eyes. As he sat there captivated, Alec felt his mind twitch and spin for a moment; was that the wand connecting with him?

    He turned his head towards Charlie, but the cat showed no signs of being awake. “Oh well Alec,” he muttered to himself, “we’ll just have to go with it I suppose.”

    He reread the page once more. Then he raised his left arm high as he imagined a magician might do, and read out the odd sounding words:

    “Floreus advenio, magus virga appello, accersitus, vulsum corymbus.”

    As he spoke, he tried to imagine a bunch of flowers being pulled out of the hat. Alec had a good imagination, he easily saw the bright spring flowers that were now out in the gardens. He envisaged bunches of them, just like there were in the local supermarket, and pictured them springing out of the velvet interior of the old hat; daffodils and tulips in bright yellow and purple.

    Unfortunately, Alec’s imagination got the better of him as usual. He saw bunch after bunch of the flowers, in rows like the shelf at a florist. The hat began to shake violently, rousing Alec from the image, but it was too late! The inside of the hat misted and then began to glow yellow and purple. In no time at all, bunch after bunch of pretty yellow daffodils and beautiful purple tulips came shooting out of the hat onto the duvet.

    Alec gave a small cry of shock and dropped the hat onto his bed. It made no difference, flowers continued to spring out of it, covering the bed and spilling onto the floor.

    Charlie sprang up as a large bunch of daffodils landed on him; he stared in surprise at the scene in front of him, and then recovered his feline composure.

     “Hmm Alec, I don’t think that was really how the spell was supposed to work. One bunch of roses is usually the normal way of doing things you know.”

    Alec was starting to panic now, as more and more flowers poured out of the hat and cascaded across the room. “Umm, Charlie, when is it going to stop? I think I might have a job explaining this to my parents!”

    Charlie blinked slowly. “Just place the wand down for a moment Alec, it will stop the spell.”

    Alec dropped the wand onto the bed, immediately the hat stopped shaking and no more flowers appeared.

    Alec took a deep breath and slowly surveyed his bedroom. There were flowers everywhere, piled high on the bed and strewn across the carpet. One daffodil was even hanging from his light shade. He swallowed hard, what the hell was he going to do with them all? What if his mum came back up the stairs!

    Charlie jumped off the bed to avoid some tulips which fell off the top of the pile next to him. “Well my young friend, that was an interesting first spell you cast; you clearly have a vivid imagination. I wonder who they all belong to.”

    Alec gaped at the cat in surprise. “What do you mean ‘who they belong to’?”

     Charlie sighed. “Well they had to come from somewhere Alec. When you cast this type of spell, the magic simply searches for the nearest source. I remember in December a wonderful girl, and a natural witch I might add, cast a spell to pull a rabbit from a hat. The magic simply fetched her pet rabbit from the hutch in her garden; it was the nearest rabbit to her!”

    Alec started to surmise just where these particular blooms had come from. The only nearby ones he could think of were those in the garden five houses down, belonging to Mr Harris. All he ever did was grow rows of flowers and shout at the local children if they even looked at them. He also moaned his head off about all the cats in the neighbourhood, if they wandered onto his well cultivated ground to use the toilet, and even at the birds that landed around the plants searching for food. In fact, come to think of it, he wasn’t a particularly pleasant man at all!

    Alec really hoped that these particular plants weren’t from Mr Harris’s garden; goodness knows what trouble that would cause. However he had a horrible feeling that they probably were. He walked over to the window and scanned the back gardens, it was almost dark though, and Alec couldn’t really see much. He closed the curtains and crossed his fingers!