Not Just a Witch (6 page)

But of course no one believed them afterwards. When Mrs Winneypeg had been gone a few days and the police came, and the inspectors from the council, no one believed a bunch of old people when they explained what had happened. Old people have fancies, everyone knows that. But the inspectors were so shocked by what they found in the Sundown Homes that they closed them then and there and moved the residents to council homes where they were properly cared for and had plenty to do. Miss Merrick was given a little bit of garden and Major Holden was put in charge of all the shoe cleaning, not just his own, so that everybody looked smart. And Sam’s parrot stopped saying: ‘Where’s Sam?’ and said some other things instead – things it is better not to mention because he’d been at sea with Sam for many years and had picked up some very fruity oaths.

But still no one believed the old ladies and the old gentlemen. Not even when a brand new warthog turned up in the Wellbridge Zoo – a warthog with a greedy snout and blue eyes and a way of banging its back parts furiously against the sides of the cage. Not even then.

A new statue had appeared in Kidchester Town Park. It was made of marble and very lifelike. You could almost feel the hair on its moustache and the waxy blobs inside its ears.

The council thought that the statue had been put up by the Lord Mayor and the Lord Mayor thought it had been put up by some ladies who called themselves the Friends of Kidchester and wanted to make their town a beautiful place.

But the statue hadn’t been put up by any of these people. It had been dragged there in the middle of the night by the stone witch, Dora Mayberry, who had been Heckie’s friend.

Dora had found a nice garden gnome business in Kidchester which was about thirty miles from Wellbridge. She made dwarves and fairies and mermaids for people to put round their garden ponds, and in her spare time she tried to Do Good because that was what she and Heckie said that they would do. When she turned Henry Hartington to marble and put him in the park, she was certainly making the world a better place. She had heard Henry’s wife scream night after night while he beat her, and seen his children run out of their house with awful bruises, and when she met him rolling home from the pub, she had simply looked at him in a certain way and that was that.

But she was lonely. She missed Heckie all the time. Dora was shy – she was apt to grunt rather than speak and this made it difficult to make new friends. Far from having a bontebok for a familiar, Dora didn’t have a familiar at all. What she did have was a ghost: a miserable, wispy thing which had come with the old wardrobe Dora had bought to hang her clothes in. The ghost was a tree spirit who had stayed in her tree when the woodmen came with their axes, and floated about between the coathangers, begging Dora not to chop down the wardrobe.

‘I wonder if I should write to Heckie,’ said Dora to herself as she lowered a soya sausage into boiling water for her supper. ‘But why doesn’t
she
write to me?’

Then she went out to the shed to feed her hat. She too had gathered up the snakes that hissed and slithered on the lawn after the quarrel and brought them with her to her new home. But the hat was really the only pet that Dora had so she was feeding it too much and it was getting fat. The Black Mamba was like a barrel – soon it would be impossible to tie it into a bow.

Oh dear, thought Dora, nothing seems to be going right.

There was plenty to do in Kidchester. She had plans for Dr Franklin who kept twelve dogs in the basement of his laboratory and was doing the most horrible experiments with them. Not experiments to test new medicines, just experiments to test face creams for silly women who were afraid of getting old. Dr Franklin would look nice in granite and she knew exactly where she was going to put him: by the fountain in the shopping centre so that the children could climb on him and the pigeons would have somewhere to sit.

But nothing is much fun if you are lonely, not even Doing Good – and when poor Dora got back to the kitchen, the saucepan had boiled dry and the sausage had exploded in a most unpleasant way.

Should I move to Wellbridge in secret? thought Dora, scraping the sausage into the dustbin. Perhaps if we met by accident, Heckie and I would fall into each other’s arms? But if she cut me dead, I couldn’t bear it.

And poor Dora stood rubbing her nose, not knowing what to do.

Warthogs are not beautiful, with their hairy grey bodies and messy snouts, but the new warthog which had arrived in Wellbridge Zoo was very popular. Lots of people came and watched it snort and snuffle and wallow in its trough, and the way it ignored the other warthog in the cage, barging into him as though he wasn’t there, made everybody laugh. Perhaps it was the mysterious way the animal had arrived, sent by an unknown person as a gift to the zoo, that made people so interested. It had turned up in the middle of the night with a label round its neck which said MY NAME IS WINNIE. But whatever the reason, it certainly pulled in the crowds.

The dragworm, meanwhile, settled down happily in Heckie’s shop. Everyone made a fuss of him, even the wizards and witches who had sneered, but he was not at all conceited. What he liked best was a quiet life, sleeping in his basket, going for careful walks with enough time to think about which of his legs was which – and having baths. Because of having been a duck, the dragworm loved to be in the water, and he was never happier than when he was sitting in Heckie’s bathtub with Sumi washing his hair and Daniel scrubbing his back.

Heckie was still hoping that he would learn to talk. Familiars often do and it is a great comfort to witches having someone to speak to when they are alone. But though he understood so much of what was said to him, the dragworm didn’t open his mouth except to smile or yawn . . . or eat.

The dragworm was very fond of eating and what he ate (because he was, after all, a dragon) were princesses. Not real ones, of course; they would have been too big and anyway there weren’t any in Wellbridge, but princesses made out of gingerbread which the children baked for him in Heckie’s oven.

And it was a batch of these princesses which led Heckie to a man called Ralph Ticker who must have been about the nastiest person in the world.

Heckie wasn’t after Ralph Ticker, she didn’t even know he existed; she was after a mugger who had broken the skull of an old lady in a back lane and snatched her handbag. Heckie had decided to turn him into an okapi which is a beautiful animal halfway between a zebra and a giraffe. Wellbridge Zoo didn’t have one, and she thought it would be nice if they did, so she spent the evenings tottering through the back alleyways of Wellbridge with a handbag full of money, waiting for the mugger to come, but so far he hadn’t.

It was half-term. This was usually a bad time for Daniel. Sumi’s aunts and uncles came to visit and she went on outings with her cousins, and Joe spent his time with his father in the zoo. Up to now, Daniel had dreaded the holidays which meant being alone in the tall, gloomy house while his parents went on going to the university.

But now it was Daniel who was the lucky one because he could spend all his time in Heckie’s shop. And it was Daniel who went to the market to buy half a dozen eggs, and Daniel who baked the princesses for the dragworm’s supper.

He was whistling as he took the baking tray out of the oven and put in the currants for the princesses’s eyes and the slithers of glacé cherries for their mouths. They had come out beautifully, with their crowns scarcely wonky at all, and as soon as they were cool enough, he scooped one out and put it on the dragworm’s plate.

The dragworm bounded out of his basket; he put his snout down on the plate. Then he lifted his head and gave Daniel a look. And what the look said was: ‘What exactly
is
this rubbish?’

Daniel was annoyed. ‘They’re absolutely fresh. I baked them myself. Now please eat up and don’t make a fuss.’

He held the princess up to the dragworm’s nose. The dragworm closed his eyes and shuddered. Then he turned his back on Daniel and climbed back into his basket.

It was at this moment that Heckie came back. She was not in a good temper because as she had been hovering in a dark lane, hoping for the mugger, a kind policeman had come and insisted on seeing her home.

‘The dragworm’s off his food. He won’t eat his princess.’ Daniel was upset. When your parents have told you for years and years that you’re no good, you don’t have much confidence, and Daniel was beginning to wonder if he’d done something wrong.

Heckie frowned. ‘It doesn’t look to me as if he’s sickening for anything. I hope he’s not going to turn faddy.’

She broke off a leg and held it under the drag-worm’s nose. Once again, the dragworm turned away and if he’d been able to speak, there’s no doubt that what he would have said was: ‘Yuk!’

Daniel now took Heckie into the kitchen and showed her exactly what he had used to bake the gingerbread: the flour, the sugar, the spices, the honey . . .

‘And one of these,’ he said, holding up the carton which had the words FRESH FARM EGGS stamped on the box. ‘But it wasn’t rotten. I smelled it carefully.’

There were five eggs left in the carton. Heckie picked up one and carried it to the window. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Oh dear, oh
dear
!’ And then: ‘No wonder the poor dear creature wouldn’t eat. For a wickedness detector an egg like this would be quite impossible to swallow.’

Daniel was puzzled. ‘But surely . . . an egg can’t be wicked, can it?’

Heckie was still holding the egg to the light and shaking her head to and fro. ‘Not wicked, perhaps. But unhappy . . . full of bad vibes.’

‘An
egg
!’

‘Why not? An egg is made up of the same things as a person. Everything in nature can suffer – plants . . . seaweed . . . Seaweed can be absolutely
wretched
, you must have seen that.’

So they gave the dragworm some dog biscuits, which he ate, and it was decided that Daniel would go to the market first thing in the morning and ask the stallholder where she got her eggs.

‘Because an unhappy egg means an unhappy chicken,’ said Heckie, ‘and an unhappy chicken we cannot and will not allow.’

The lady who had sold Daniel the fresh farm eggs was helpful. They came, she said, from the Tritlington Poultry Unit, about ten miles north of Wellbridge.

‘They weren’t bad, I hope?’ she said anxiously. ‘I’ve been promised they’re not more than two days old.’

Daniel said, no, they weren’t bad, not like that.

Two hours later, he got off the local train at Tritlington. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and the little station was almost empty. He asked the way to the poultry unit and was directed down a footpath which ran across two fields, and over the river, to some low, corrugated iron buildings.

‘But he won’t thank you for going there,’ the station-master told Daniel.

‘Who won’t?’ asked Daniel.

‘Mr Ticker. The owner. Keeps himself to himself, does Mr Ticker.’

As Daniel made his way down the path, he wondered if he had been wise to come alone. But both Sumi and Joe were helping out at home, and anyway what was the use of being a Wickedness Hunter if you didn’t
do
anything?

Mr Ticker’s poultry unit was surprisingly large. There were two buildings, each of which looked more like an aircraft hangar or a railway shed than a farm. A high fence surrounded the area and there were notices saying: KEEP OUT and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Daniel’s heart was beating rather fast, but he told himself not to be silly. Mr Ticker was only a chicken farmer; what could he do to him?

Daniel reached the door of the first shed. There was nobody to be seen: the high door was bolted and barred and above it was another notice saying NO ENTRY.

He walked over to the second building. Here the door was open a crack. He slipped inside.

The light was poor and at first, mercifully, Daniel could scarcely see. Only the smell hit him instantly: a truly awful smell of sickness and rottenness and decay.

Then came the sounds: half-strangled cries, desperate squawks . . .

But now his eyes were becoming used to the gloom. He could make out rows and rows of wire cages piled from floor to ceiling on either side of narrow concrete corridors that seemed to stretch away for miles.

And he could see what was inside the cages. Not one chicken, but two, packed so close together that they could hardly turn their heads or move. Unspeakable things were happening in those cages. In one, a bird had caught its throat in the wire and choked; in another, a chicken driven mad by overcrowding was trying to peck out its neighbour’s eyes. There were cages in which one bird lay dead while the other was pressed against its corpse. And yet somehow, unbelievably, the wretched creatures went on laying eggs – large brown eggs which rolled on to the shelf below, ready to be driven to Wellbridge Market and make Ralph Ticker rich.

Daniel was turning back, knowing he’d be sick if he stayed any longer, when he heard voices at the far end of the shed.

‘There’s another seventeen birds died in the night, Mr Ticker.’

‘Well, mince ’em up, feed them to the rest and burn the feathers out at the back.’

‘I don’t like to, sir. People have been complaining about the smell. If they call the RSPCA . . .’

‘They won’t.’ And then: ‘Who’s that up there? Why, it’s a bloomin’ kid!’

Daniel tried to run for the entrance, but it was too late. Mr Ticker pulled down a switch and the building was flooded with light. There was wild clucking from the hens and then the chicken farmer, followed by his assistant, came running up the aisle. Then a hand banged down on Daniel’s shoulder and Mr Ticker’s red face, with its bulbous nose, was thrust into the boy’s.

‘What the
devil
are you doing in here?’

‘I was . . . just . . . looking.’ Mr Ticker was shaking him so hard that Daniel could scarcely get out the words.

‘Did you see the notice? Did you see where it says KEEP OUT?’ With each question he shook Daniel again. ‘You were snooping, weren’t you? You were spying. Well, let me tell you, if you say one word about this place to anyone, I’ll get you. I’ll get your mother too. I’ve got people everywhere. People who throw acid, people with guns . . . Got it?’