FIVE YEARS LATER...
Melissa Hodgson, now a ninth grader, grabbed a couple of apples and two bottles of water from her family's refrigerator. She looked out into the back yard. Her mother sat next to her good friend Mrs. Sherman, talking about whatever it was mothers talked about. Melissa's two five year old twin sisters, Paula and Amy, sat in the grass nearby with their friend, Tammy Sherman (also five years old), playing some game of their own devising.
Melissa smiled, glad to have escaped babysitting duties for once - one of the hazards of being the eldest child - and took the snacks up into the attic, where her friend, Sheila O'Halloran, was waiting. Melissa and Sheila had known one another since kindergarten, and were good friends.. Sheila was a red-haired, bespectacled girl, somewhat more bookish than Melissa, though she was on the school soccer team, as Melissa was.
Sheila accepted an apple and a water from her friend, and picked up a large, old-looking book that was on the floor next to her.
"What's that, Sheil?" asked Melissa.
"I was about to ask you that, Mel. I saw it on a shelf while you were downstairs. It's weird-looking - the text is in some alphabet I've never seen before."
"Oh, yeah", said Mel. "That's my Uncle Edmund's old 'spellbook'. He claimed to be a 'retired wizard'. He used to tell me some really wild stories when I was little. I haven't thought about it in years."
The book was, in fact, the same one that her older brother Paul (now her younger sister Paula) had so misused five years before. Amy's final spell had backfired a bit - it had indeed transformed Paul and Tim into newborn baby girls, but it had done the same to Amy as well, making her Paul(a)'s twin sister!
Melissa continued, "A few years ago, I researched it on-line, but I could never find any alphabet that it matched up to. As far as I can tell, it's just an elaborate gag. It wouldn't put it past my uncle to cook something like that up. He was an odd bird, and would go a long way for a joke."
"Is he gone now?" asked Sheila.
"He just left one day, when I was five. We haven't seen or heard from him, since."
"Weird", said Sheila, looking at the book intently. "You know, I don't think this is another language, really. I think it's a kind of code. I'm seeing a pattern, here. I think I could decode this."
"Really?" asked Mel.
"Yeah."
"Then, go for it! Maybe it's his secret diary or something."
"OK, do you have a pencil and paper?"
"One sec."
Mel went downstairs to her room, and brought back a notepad and pencil. Sheila accepted them and went to work. Mel picked up the copy of 1984 that had been her father's and resumed reading it. After awhile, Sheila looked up.
"I think I've managed to translate a page of this, Mel."
"Really? What's it say?"
"It says it's a 'spell of transformation'."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Just what it says, I guess. A spell to transform someone or something into someone or something else. Wanna try it? There's a 'spell of reversal' on the same page, too."
"Hah, very funny. Typical Uncle Edmund."
Sheila smirked at her friend. "What's the matter, Mel? Don't you believe in magic?"
"Well, no."
"Well, if it did work, is there anything or anyone you'd like to be?"
Mel thought about this for a minute.
"You know what? If I could, I'd love to know what it's like to be a horse, just racing along. I bet that would be cool."
"Alright,then", said Sheila, "a horse it is!"
Sheila spoke the words of the spell, and...