Not Just a Witch

‘Whiskers are in this year,’ she would say, ‘and moles are out,’ which annoyed Heckie. If you wanted whiskers you wanted whiskers and if you wanted moles you wanted moles. What was in or out had nothing to do with it.

But if the witches and wizards were not quite what Heckie had hoped for, she felt cheered as soon as she looked at the sofa where the three children were sitting very straight with their knees together and their eyes bright as they took in what was going on.

Heckie had known at once that Sumi and Joe could be trusted, and when Daniel, during break at school, had told them who Heckie was, neither of them had been surprised.

‘I knew,’ said Joe. ‘The way that gorilla tried to hold her hand.’

Sumi too had guessed. As she said, if someone has red hair they’re not going to have a black moustache – Heckie had to have made up the man in the Boothroyds’ garden. But though Joe was excited at once about becoming a Wickedness Hunter and tracking down evil people for Heckie to change, Sumi was not so sure.

‘I don’t know . . . People have souls, don’t they?’ she’d said, winding her long hair round her fingers. ‘What happens to them when they’re turned into animals?’

‘Animals have souls too,’ said Daniel. ‘That bulldog puppy was bursting with soul.’

But Sumi was still troubled. ‘I think it could go wrong. I think it could all go horribly wrong.’

But in the end, she’d agreed to join the club, if only to make herself useful. And already she had been useful. The mugs of tea that the witches and wizards were drinking all had tea-bags in them, and the biscuits they were eating came from her parents’ shop.

And between the wizards and the children, sat the dragworm in his basket.

Heckie now made a speech. She welcomed everybody and said how pleased she was to see them, and then she told them the kind of person she was looking for.

‘What I’m after,’ she said, ‘isn’t someone who’s just lost his temper and battered his bank manager to death with a hammer. Battering your bank manager to death with a hammer is not good, of course, but anyone can lose their temper and some bank managers are very annoying. What we’re looking for is people who do evil day after day, knowing that they are doing it, and still going on.’

‘Like flushers,’ interrupted the cheese wizard, getting excited. ‘Flushers want changing.’

‘What’s a flusher?’ asked Joe – and Heckie explained that it was a person who flushed unwanted pets down the lavatory. ‘Goldfish, newts – even terrapins. What’s more, flushers often turn into dumpers,’ she said, her eyes flashing. ‘People who dump dogs on the motorway when they stop being dear little puppies. And dumpers we definitely want!’

She then became practical. ‘You must remember that as soon as a wicked person becomes an animal, he has to be protected and cared for. If I turn an armed robber into a wombat he is not a wicked wombat, he is a wombat and has to be taken quickly to the zoo. And I shall need help for that.’

She looked at Chomsky, the mechanical wizard, who nodded and said he had a van which would do.

Madame Rosalia, whose underclothes were showing as she floated in her chair, now said that Heckie was wasting her time. ‘Whatever you do there’s always more and more wickedness in the world. Look at the newspapers! Every day there’s some grandfather starving a child to death in an attic, or a hit and run motorist leaving a boy in the road. There’s always been evil in the world and there always will be.’

For a moment, Heckie looked tired and sad. Witches only live for three hundred years and she knew better than anyone how much there was to do. Then she brightened. ‘I think you forget,’ she said, ‘that I don’t just have all you dear people to help me. I have my familiar!’ She pointed to the drag-worm, still sitting peacefully in his basket. ‘With a familiar like that, how can I fail?’

There was a pause. Then from up in the air, there came a titter.

‘Come, come, Heckie, you don’t think that funny-looking thing is going to be any use?’

‘It would certainly be most unwise to expect anything from . . . er . . . that,’ said the cheese wizard pompously.

‘Poor thing, he’d be better dug in for manure,’ said the garden witch.

It was exactly at this moment that there was a loud ring at the doorbell of the shop.

‘Drat!’ said Heckie. ‘I put up a notice saying SHOP CLOSED. Why don’t they go away?’

But whoever it was didn’t go away. There was another loud peal of the bell.

‘It’s someone with a white Rolls-Royce,’ said Joe, who had gone to the window. ‘An absolute whopper, and there’s a chauffeur driving it.’

Leaning out, the children could see the woman who was ringing the bell so impatiently. She was wearing a fur coat, white like her car, and her hair was piled up into a kind of tower and looked as though it had been sprayed with gold paint.

The bell rang for the third time.