Not Just a Witch (3 page)

‘Oh, poor Sumi!’

‘Now don’t worry,’ said the witch, who had changed into her school blazer and pleated skirt. ‘I shall pretend to be a social worker. That always goes down well. Just follow me.’

Inside the Boothroyds’ sitting-room, a fat policeman was writing things in a notebook and a thin policeman was talking to headquarters on his walkie-talkie. Mrs Boothroyd was yelling and hiccupping and gulping by turns, and Mr Boothroyd was blustering and threatening to do awful things to Sumi’s family. Sumi sat crouched on the sofa, her head in her hands. Between her shoes one could just see the dark, wet nose of the bewildered little dog.

‘Now, my dear good people, what is all this about?’ enquired Heckie briskly. ‘I found this poor boy wandering about in the street quite beside himself.’ She pointed to the letters WAW on her blazer. ‘I am from the Wellbridge Association for Welfare,’ she went on, ‘and we cannot be doing with that kind of thing.’

‘My baby’s been kidnapped! My little treasure! My bobbikins!’ screeched Mrs Boothroyd.

‘And it’s all these children’s fault!’ roared Mr Boothroyd.

‘Nonsense,’ said Heckie. ‘He’ll just have got mislaid somewhere. It often happens with babies.’

‘We’ve searched high and low, Miss,’ said the fat policeman.

But the little bulldog had heard Heckie’s voice. He crawled out from under the sofa and as she crouched down to him, he leapt on to her lap.

‘Who let that brute in again?’ raged Mr Boothroyd – and Sumi blushed and turned her head away.

‘Dogs give you fleas! They give you worms behind the eyeballs,’ screeched Mrs Boothroyd.

Heckie looked hard at the Boothroyds. She was angry, but she was also amazed. In spite of what Daniel had said, she hadn’t really believed that they would prefer Basil to the little dog. Then she gathered up the puppy and went to the door which Daniel was holding open for her, and out into the garden.

For an animal witch, turning nice animals into silly people is much harder than the other way round. Heckie’s eyes were sad as she shook off her left shoe so that her Toe of Transformation could suck power from the earth. Then she spoke softly to the bulldog, waiting till his tail stopped wagging and his eyes were closed. Only when he slept did she touch him with her Knuckle of Power and say her spells.

Ten minutes later, Heckie returned to the drawing-room. She had held the puppy close to her chest, but she carried Basil at arm’s length like a tray. His nightdress was covered in black streaks, he was bawling – but he was quite unharmed.

‘My lambkin, my prettikins, my darling!’ shrieked Mrs Boothroyd, covering him with squelchy kisses.

‘My son, my boy!’ slobbered Mr Boothroyd.

‘Where was he, Miss?’ asked the fat policeman.

‘At the back of the coalshed,’ said Heckie. ‘The obvious place to look for a baby, I’d have thought.’

‘But how did he get there?’

Heckie felt sorry for the fat policeman who so much wanted to have something to put in his notebook. ‘You want to look for a tall man with red hair, blue eyes, a black moustache, an orange anorak and purple socks. I saw him climbing over the garden wall. It’ll be him who put Basil among the coals.’

‘But what would be the motive?’ asked the policeman with the walkie-talkie.

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ said Heckie. ‘Revenge. Someone getting their own back. He’ll have bought one of Mr Boothroyd’s bath plugs and found it leaked. You know what it’s like when all the hot water drains away and you’re sitting in an empty tub all cold and blue with goosepimples . . .’

But when they had dropped Sumi off in the taxi Mr Boothroyd had been forced to pay for, Heckie turned to Daniel, looking thoughtful and serious.

‘You know, Daniel, I shall have to change my plans entirely. I had no idea people would make such a fuss and be so unreasonable. I thought they’d come to me and say: ‘‘Please, Heckie, would you turn my drunken husband into a dear chimpanzee?’’ Or: ‘‘We feel that Uncle Phillip, who is a handbag snatcher, would do better as a Two-toed Sloth.’’ That kind of thing. But now I see it isn’t so. I shall have to work in the
strictest
secrecy. Evil-doers will have to be
flushed out
!’ She peered at Daniel. ‘Might one ask why you are snivelling? Is it because there’s no one at home?’

Sumi’s parents had been there to welcome her, but Daniel’s house, as the taxi drew up, was silent and dark.

Daniel shook his head. ‘I don’t mind being alone.’ He wiped away the tear in the corner of his eye. ‘It’s that lovely bulldog. I miss him so
much
!’

Heckie examined his face in the light of the lamp. ‘You know, you have the right ideas. Yes, I think I might be able to use you. For I have to tell you, Daniel, that I have just had a vision. I see a band of Wickedness Hunters! Children and witches together, uniting to rid Wellbridge of Wickedness! Yes, yes, I see it all. But first, dear boy, I must get myself a familiar. What a good thing that tomorrow is Sunday. Come after breakfast and we’ll go to the zoo!’

When Daniel called at the shop the following morning, he found Heckie feeding her hat.

After the quarrel with Dora Mayberry, Heckie had crept back and gathered up her Ribbon Snakes and King Snakes and the Black Mamba, and they now lived in a tank in a room behind the shop, eating boiled eggs and hissing and not being a trouble to anyone. It would have been easy for her to weave them together again and wear them on her head, but she hadn’t the heart, and because she knew that Daniel was a boy who could be trusted with people’s sorrows, she told him what had happened and how dreadfully she missed her friend.

‘We had such plans, Dora and I. She was going to have a little business making garden gnomes and nice things like that, and gradually fill the park with interesting statues. Only statues of wicked people, of course. Dora was Good, like me. Come and see her picture.’

She took Daniel up to the sitting-room and showed him the photo of Dora which she had turned with its face to the wall. The stone witch, with her square jaw and piggy eyes, was not beautiful, but Daniel said she looked interesting, like a prize fighter.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Heckie, and sighed. ‘And you should have seen her on the netball field! But it’s all over between us.’ And she turned the photo back to face the wall.

When they had fed the other animals in the shop, Heckie went to the larder to fetch a carrot. The carrot was about half a metre long and as thick as a thigh and scarcely fitted into the shopping basket, which was a tartan one on wheels, but Heckie said it would do for their lunch.

‘My friend grows them for me. She’s a garden witch – there’s nothing she can’t do with vegetables, but they do come out rather big.’

‘What I was wondering,’ said Daniel as they wheeled the carrot towards the zoo, ‘was why you
need
a familiar? I mean, they’re animals that help witches to do their magic, aren’t they – and you changed Basil all right without one?’

‘I don’t
need
one, but I
want
one. And nothing ordinary like black cats or toads. I bet Dora’s trailing round with a bontebok by now at the very least.’

Wellbridge Zoo was small, but pretty and well-kept, with flower-beds between the cages. Daniel went there often because his friend Joe, whose father was a keeper in the ape house, could get him in free.

‘Now to business,’ said Heckie when they had paid and gone through the turnstile. ‘You know what we’re looking for?’

‘An animal that’s fierce?’

‘Well, not so much fierce as powerful. Mean. Strange and perhaps a little throbbing; that kind of thing.’

But the sea lions, lying about like old sofas, did not look very mean or throbbing and nor did the giraffes with their knock knees and film-star eyes. They passed the aviary and though the cassowary looked interesting with its flabby black wattles and dirty feet, Heckie did not think she really wanted a bird.

‘All that flapping is not very good for magic, I have found.’

But when they got to the hyena, pacing up and down in its cage, Heckie’s face lit up. ‘Now that is something! The way its back end just trails away and those sinister spots, and the
smell
!’

She wrote something in her notebook and they crossed over to the big enclosure which housed the kangaroos and wallabies – great, rat-coloured beasts with huge feet and mad, twitchy ears which Heckie liked enormously. ‘Oh, I wish I was an Australian witch,’ she cried. ‘Everything over there is so queer and extinct-looking!’

The animal houses were closer together now and Heckie was running from cage to cage, as excited as a child in a toy shop. There were penguins jumping from rock to rock with their feet together like loopy waiters; there was a rusty numbat shovelling up ants – and there was a camel in front of which she stood for a long time. It was a bull camel, tall and sneery with lumpy knees and a lower lip full of froth. Bits of dirty straw stuck to its hump, and a low rumble like thunder came from its throat.

‘I want this camel,’ said Heckie. ‘I want it terribly. But I’m going to be sensible. I’m going to be practical. I’m going to be
brave
.’

Daniel could see how hard it was for her to tear herself away from the camel, but in the reptile house she cheered up again. It was a silent, sinister place and every one of the animals looked as though it would help one to do magic: the crocodile, smiling in its sleep, the Bearded Basilisk, the iguana like a shrunken dinosaur . . .

In the ape house, they saw what seemed to be a very small ape in blue jeans forking fresh straw on to the floor. This turned out to be Daniel’s school-friend Joe, helping his father clean out the cages.

Joe’s mother had died when he was born and his father had reared Joe like he reared one of his orphaned apes, carrying him round in a blanket, feeding him on bottles of milk and bananas. Joe’s hair was ginger like the orang-utans’ and fell over his face; there was no tree he couldn’t climb, and when anyone annoyed him, he stuck out his lower lip and glowered exactly like a gorilla.

Daniel introduced him to Heckie who was very interested to hear that his father was a keeper.

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘are there any empty cages in this zoo? Spare cages? In case someone was to send in some animals in a hurry? Unexpectedly?’

Joe gave her a sharp look from under his hair and said, yes, there were. ‘They’re over by the West Gate, behind the tea place.’

He went on staring at Heckie as she talked to the monkeys and the apes. Joe understood animals almost as well as his father and he knew that the way they came up to Heckie and laid their faces against the bars and tried to take her hand was quite out of the ordinary.

‘Is she an animal trainer or something?’ he asked Daniel, and Daniel said that perhaps in a way she was.

‘We’ll just have our picnic now and have a think,’ said Heckie when they had been right round the zoo. ‘Perhaps your nice friend will lend us a saw to cut up this interesting carrot. Or shall we just go across the road to The Copper Kettle?’

Daniel thought this was a good idea and soon they were sitting at a corner table, eating cucumber sandwiches and looking at Heckie’s list.

‘Of course, the baboons are unbeatable. Those red and blue behinds!’ Her eyes glinted. ‘But I like the orang-utans too: the way their hair hangs down from their armpits . . .’ She bit into her sandwich. ‘You notice I’m being brave about the camel?’

Daniel nodded and suggested the Bearded Basilisk. ‘It might fit better into the flat?’

‘Yes, but reptiles are dreadfully snooty. Coldblooded, you know. Oh dear, this is so
difficult
.’

Heckie was very quiet as they wheeled the carrot back across the river and the tip of her nose had gone quite white from the strain of deciding. But in the street behind Daniel’s house, she stopped and stared at a shop window. It was a Do It Yourself shop full of tools and screws and bits of shelving.

Suddenly she hit her forehead with her hand. ‘What an idiot I am, Daniel. What a complete fool! Why
choose
a familiar? Why not
make
one?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Daniel, his eyes shining. ‘A Do It Yourself familiar! The first one in the world!’

And, terribly excited, they hurried back to Heckie’s shop. Once she had made up her mind, Heckie wasted no time.

‘Do you know what I’m going to make?’

Daniel shook his head.

‘A dragon. Yes, honestly. Why not go for the best? A pocket dragon. Well, a bit bigger than that. Sort of between a rolling pin and a turkey in size. About the weight of a Stilton cheese. Oh, I can see him. Slightly fiery round the nostrils, you know, with green scales and golden claws! Let’s get the pattern book and have a look.’

She went to the bookcase and got out a book called
Ferocious Dragons and Loathly Worms
and began to turn over the pages. There were pictures of silvery dragons like the ones that ate princesses and were killed by St George, and gloomy, evil-looking dragons with poisonous claws and fiery tongues. But the nicest dragons were the Chinese ones. They had shaggy heads like Tibetan terriers with their hair in topknots and big, bulging eyes and wide mouths chock-full of teeth which gave them a smiling look. Daniel had seen dragons like that painted on kites and liked them very much.

‘Can you make a dragon from nothing?’ he asked when they had decided that a Chinese dragon was what they wanted.

Heckie looked shocked. ‘No, no, dear boy. I’m only a witch, you know. I can change anything into anything else, but I can’t make things from nothing. What we’ll have to do is find an animal that isn’t
happy
any more. An animal that’s tired of life – and then I can change it. To mess about with an animal that was enjoying life would be
quite
wrong.’

They went downstairs to the shop to see if there was an animal there that was bored with living, but there wasn’t. So they went to the park because Heckie thought she remembered seeing a duck that was no longer glad to be alive and, sure enough, there it was, sitting in a clump of rushes by the pond. It was a white Aylesbury drake; its eyes were filmed, its feathers were limp. The other ducks were swimming and diving and gobbling up bread that the children threw, but not this duck. This duck had turned its face to the wall.