Not Just a Witch (7 page)

He pushed Daniel forward and the boy stumbled out and ran over the bridge of wooden planks, across the fields . . . ran, panting, for the safety of the station.

And Ralph Ticker looked after him with narrowed eyes.

‘It’s no good, sir,’ said the assistant when Daniel was out of sight. ‘Even if the kid keeps quiet, they’re beginning to talk in the village.’

Ticker said nothing. Twice before, the inspectors of the RSPCA, those snooping Do-Gooders, had closed down his chicken farms. Once in Cornwall, once in Yorkshire – and the second time he’d been fined two hundred pounds. But what was two hundred pounds – chicken feed, thought Ticker, grinning at his own joke. Each time he’d made a whopping profit before they got wise to him.

‘Time to move on, Bert,’ he said. ‘Scotland this time, I think. You know what to do.’

‘But, Mr Ticker, there’s four thousand chickens here. I can’t chop the heads off—’

‘Oh, I think you can, Bert. Yes, really I think you can.’

‘You’ve got to do something,’ said Daniel, trying not to cry into the ‘nice cup of tea’ which Heckie had brewed him. ‘You’ve got to turn him into a chicken himself and force him into one of those cages and—’ ‘Now, Daniel,’ said Heckie severely, ‘how many times have I told you that the second someone becomes a chicken he is not a wicked chicken, he is a chicken who needs only the best? And anyway, the zoo doesn’t want a chicken, what the zoo wants is an okapi. Now drink up and leave everything to me.’

The next day, without saying anything to the children, Heckie called the wizards and witches to a meeting. She had made a map of the Tritlington Poultry Unit from Daniel’s description and was feeling important, like Napoleon.

‘Now you all understand exactly what you have to do?’ she asked.

‘I’m to flush him out of the building,’ said the cheese wizard gloomily. He was not looking forward at all to changing Mr Ticker into an okapi. He had never seen an okapi and didn’t know if he would like it if he did, and he couldn’t remember a single spell for flushing anybody out of anything at all.

‘And I’m to lure him into the field with my beauty,’ said Madame Rosalia, fluttering her false eyelashes which were made of spider’s legs.

Heckie frowned. ‘I didn’t say anything about luring. What I said was, I want him in the field in front of the shed because I shall need space to work in. Boris will take you all down in the van and park it across the drive so that Ticker can’t escape in his car. And you, Frieda, must stop him crossing the bridge. If he makes a dash for the station, we’re done for.’

‘How?’ said the garden witch. ‘How do I stop him?’

‘How? Good heavens, woman, you’re a witch. Root him to the ground. Wrap his legs in ivy. Just stop him!’

Frieda scratched her head and Heckie reached irritably for the garden shears. Really, having to deal with witches of such poor quality was hard.

‘But what about you?’ asked Madame Rosalia. ‘How are you going to get there?’

Heckie simpered. ‘I shall descend from On High!’

‘Eh?’

‘I shall float down in one of Boris’s hot air balloons,’ said Heckie, waving a hand at the mechanical wizard and feeling more like Napoleon than ever. ‘And remember, not a word to the children till it’s all over. We wizards and witches may be bullet-proof, but not the children.’

Nobody liked the sound of this at all. It was so long since any of them had done any proper magic that they had no idea whether they were bullet-proof or not.

But the cheese wizard had other worries too. ‘Do they bite?’ he asked, as he shuffled with the others to the door.

‘Do what bite?’

‘Those okapi things. I just wondered.’

Ralph Ticker was standing by the great hole he’d bulldozed the day before on the waste ground behind the sheds. He was waiting for Bert to come and chop off the heads of the birds and bury them. Once the hole was covered, there’d be nothing to show those snoopy RSPCA people that there’d ever been hens in the place, and he’d be safely away over the border.

Only where was Bert? He was late. Ticker’s Porsche was parked in the drive, his case was packed – but he certainly wasn’t going to kill four thousand chickens by himself.

What Ralph Ticker didn’t know was that Bert had already done a bunk. He was sick of cutting the heads off chickens for peanuts and he was sick of Ticker. While his employer waited by the death pit, Bert was on the pier at Brighton, playing the fruitmachines.

The wizards and witches, meanwhile, were driving down to Tritlington. It was an uncomfortable journey. They had to sit crowded together on the bench seat in the front because the van had been got ready for the okapi, with padding on the walls and lots of straw. Boris, who had an unhappy nature like most Russians, was worried about Heckie’s hot air balloon. She had asked for a blue one to match the sky and he’d let her have it before he remembered that that was the one he’d been doing experiments on. Boris had always been sure one could invent a hot air balloon that flew on the hot air talked by politicians, but so far he hadn’t managed it – and now he couldn’t remember whether he’d put enough fuel back in the machine.

By the time they reached the poultry unit, everyone was feeling ill-tempered and car-sick. As for Mr Gurgle, he wasn’t just feeling sick, he was feeling extremely frightened. But he had said he would flush Mr Ticker out of the poultry shed, and flush he would. Trying desperately to remember some useful spells, Mr Gurgle crept towards the door.

‘Coo-ee!’ he called. ‘I see you!’

But he didn’t, at first, see anything. He was very short-sighted and the shed was almost dark. Groping his way forward, he felt for his spectacles and put them on – but this was a mistake. Now he
could
see.

Mr Gurgle was not fond of chickens and had thought he didn’t mind what happened to them, but he was wrong. As he reeled from cage to cage, his stomach heaved and sweat broke out on his forehead. Stumbling on, his foot hit a zinc bucket with a crack like a pistol shot – and a large black rat, carrying a chewed chicken leg, scurried across his path.

It was too much. Mr Gurgle gave a cry of terror and fainted clean away.

After this, things happened quickly, but not exactly the way Heckie had planned.

Ralph Ticker heard the pistol shot, rushed into the shed – and saw a dead man! A gang fighting it out in his buildings! White with fear, he ran to the entrance, meaning to make a dash for his car. But a van was slewed across the road and in it, a man with a long, cruel face. Ticker doubled back – and straight into the arms of a ghastly gangster’s moll!

‘Come into the field, you dear man,’ leered Madame Rosalia. She fluttered her eyelashes so hard that they came off, and the chicken farmer, seeing what he thought was a Black Widow Spider on his trousers, shrieked and bolted for the bridge.

‘You can’t come by! Not here you can’t!’

Ticker stopped dead. A talking bush. A bush with a leafy top, but two fat pink legs – legs which ended in large green Wellington boots. But if Ticker was terrified of a bush in wellies, he was even more frightened of the gangsters behind him. He pushed the bush violently to one side and set off across the bridge.

The station was ahead now, and safety.

Only what was that thing above him? A hot air balloon – and coming down very fast. Dangerously fast. It was going to land on top of him!

Ticker crouched down on the planks, trying to cover his head with his hands. And then, just as it seemed certain that he would be squashed flat, the balloon veered to one side – and landed with a gigantic splash in the water!

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ laughed Ticker, forgetting to run. He was the sort of man who loved to see people in trouble.

But even as he leant over and jeered, something was coming up behind him. A bush in boots, which now lifted one leg and kicked him very hard on the backside.

‘Whoosh! Phlup! Guggle!’ spluttered the chicken farmer as he landed in the deep and icy water.

And then a voice, close by, in the river. A kind voice like a nice nannie’s. ‘Don’t worry,’ it said. ‘I’ll help you. I’ll hold you. Just keep calm because I’m swimming right up to you and I’m going to hold you
very tight
!’

The journey back was not a happy one. Mr Gurgle still felt faint and was lying down in the straw they had put down for the okapi. Boris was full of gloom and guilt because of what had happened to the air balloon, and Frieda’s left foot was cold.

‘All right, that’s
enough
,’ snapped Heckie. She was soaking wet, but what she was worrying about was what was in Frieda’s Wellington boot which she was holding carefully on her lap. She had filled it to the brim with water, but even the best wellies leak a little, and if the poor dear fish that swam inside it should dry out and die before they reached Wellbridge, she would never forgive herself. ‘So Frieda’s foot is cold, so Rosalia’s lost her eyelashes, so you wanted an okapi. I’ve told you, I can’t go struggling about in the water with a kind of giraffe. They’re poor swimmers, giraffes – everyone says so.’

‘We understand that,’ said Madame Rosalia. ‘No one’s making a fuss because you turned Mr Ticker into a fish. What we don’t understand is why you didn’t leave him where he was.’

‘I told you why,’ said Heckie irritably. ‘Because the river’s polluted. No fish could last in it for more than a couple of days.’

‘Well, I can’t see that it matters. After what he did to those chickens . . .’

Heckie opened her mouth and shut it again. She was absolutely sick of explaining to people that the second someone was a fish, he was not a wicked fish or a fish who had tortured chickens, he was simply a fish.

Everything had gone well, really. She had phoned the RSPCA and they’d promised to send some men at once to see to the hens, and Ralph Ticker would never harm a living thing again. But it wasn’t much fun sharing adventures with these moaners and grumblers. If she’d had her old friend with her, how different it would all have been!

‘Oh, where are you, Dora?’ sighed Heckie, clutching her watery boot.

Dora was sitting on an upturned chamberpot in the back of a swaying furniture lorry. Round her were all the things she had brought from Kidchester: her bed, her kitchen table and chairs, her work bench and her tools.

She had decided to move to the outskirts of Wellbridge, where a nice garden statue business had come up for sale, and she was doing it in secret. She hadn’t said a word to Heckie or to anyone she knew. After all, it might be that Heckie was going to be cross with her for ever. On the other hand, if they lived in the same city, even at opposite ends of it, they just could meet by accident and then . . .

The lorry lurched round the corner and Dora clutched the metal jam pan which contained her hat. The hat wasn’t well at all – the overfeeding had caused the snakes to start shedding their skins. If she wore it now, people would think she had the most awful dandruff.

‘Should I put it on a diet?’ wondered poor Dora as the lorry ground up the hill past Wellbridge prison. But what sort of a diet was best for hats? It was Heckie who knew about animals. ‘Come to that, I ought to go on a diet myself.’

It was true that Dora, who had never been thin, was now definitely overweight. People who are lonely often eat too much and Dora had really been stuffing herself. Muscles, of course, are important for stonework, but fat is another thing.

Nothing had gone well for the stone witch in Kidchester. She’d managed to do some good all right: Dr Franklin, the one who’d done the awful experiments on dogs, really did look very nice by the fountain in the middle of the shopping centre, and she’d found a comfortable spot for a swindler who’d gone off with the life savings of a lot of poor people. He stood between two pillars in front of the Pensions Office, where the starlings were enjoying him. But Kidchester wasn’t pretty like Wellbridge . . .

No, I’m lying, thought Dora. It’s because I miss Heckie that I’m moving. It’s because I miss my friend.

They bumped over some old tram lines and from the wardrobe, pushed against one wall, there came a worried bleat.

‘Don’t chop down the wardrobe,’ begged the ghost. ‘Don’t chop—’

‘I’m not
going
to chop it down!’ said Dora, for the hundredth time. ‘It’s trees they chop down and
you’re not in a tree
!’

They had passed the prison and the football ground. Not much further to go . . .

Well, I’ve done it now, thought Dora. And even if I don’t meet Heckie, I can still do some good here. There must be lots of wicked people left in Wellbridge even after Heckie’s finished with the place. But oh, if only I met her. If only we became friends again!

The lorry stopped at the lights. Just a few metres away, facing in the other direction, was a blue van with sealed windows. Inside it sat Heckie, holding the Wellington boot with the fish in it.

Oh, if only Dora was here, she was thinking just at that moment. If only I had her to help me instead of these useless moaners.

Then the lights changed. The vans moved forward – and neither of the witches knew how close to each other they had been.

Daniel never quarrelled with Sumi. She was so gentle and so sensible that he wouldn’t have known how to begin. But after Ralph Ticker was changed, they came as close to quarrelling as they had ever done.

‘Well, I still don’t think it’s right,’ she said. ‘I think it’s dangerous changing people into animals and I don’t think Heckie should do it.’

They were in her parents’ grocery shop, parcelling up black-eyed beans, and Daniel was so cross he let the beans spill from his shovel way past the correct weight.

‘I suppose you think it’s right to torture four thousand chickens and then plan to murder them in cold blood.’

‘No, I don’t. You know I don’t. But he could have been sent to prison and—’

‘He couldn’t,’ said Daniel angrily. ‘The RSPCA kept trying and all he got was a measly fine. And anyway, I don’t see that it’s so terrible being an unusual fish. Being an ordinary fish might be, but he isn’t. People have been coming from all over the country to find out what he is, and I should think it’s very exciting.’