Not Just a Witch

And now Heckie had her. Her own free arm came round Mrs Winneypeg’s fat throat. She kicked off her slipper and her toe curled and throbbed with the power that came from it. Mrs Winneypeg was scared now, she wanted to get away, but she was caught in a ring of old people. If she pushed through, someone would probably keel over and die and that meant doctors and people asking questions. And Heckie’s grip was tightening. Her knuckle glowed like a ring of flame!

‘Sploosh!’ spluttered Mrs Winneypeg. ‘Shluroop . . . Oink!’

And then it was over! At the last minute, Heckie had known exactly what would turn out best. And as they saw what had happened, there appeared on the faces of the old people a look of wonder, and one by one, their wrinkled faces broke into smiles.

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.

Chapter Eight

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.