Not Just a Witch

Chapter Twenty-Three

‘Have some soup,’ begged Dora Mayberry, putting the tray down beside Heckie’s bed. ‘Please, dear. Just try a spoonful.’

‘I couldn’t,’ said Heckie in a failing voice. ‘It would choke me.’

For two weeks now she had been lying in bed in her flat above the pet shop, refusing to eat and getting paler and weaker with every day that passed.

‘My heart is broken,’ Heckie had explained at the beginning.

‘Well, my heart is broken too,’ Dora had said — but of course it had always been agreed between them that Heckie was the sensitive one and felt things more.

Dora had moved in with Heckie because her own business was sold, and she cooked for Heckie and looked after the shop and baked the dragworm’s princesses, but nothing could make Heckie take any interest in life. Sumi came with nice things from her parents’ shop, and Joe, and of course Daniel as soon as he was well enough. Daniel had left hospital after a few days and his parents had been so relieved that they actually took time off to make a fuss of him. But even Daniel couldn’t stop Heckie lying back on her pillows and talking about death, although it was his bravery that had prevented a terrible disaster.

For the leopards had not been gassed. There was something that Mr Knacksap had forgotten if he ever knew it — and that was that Dora Mayberry had been the netball champion of the Academy.

This plump and humble witch had leapt high over a crouching leopard, caught the canister, and run — as she used to run down the pitch — to throw it safely into the lake.

The rest of that strange, exhausting night had been spent driving the leopards back to the prison, changing them back to people, and undoing the stone magic on the guards. Everyone had helped. Nat and Billy had fled, along with Sid, so it was Boris and Mr Gurgle who drove the circus vans, and the other Wickedness Hunters stood guard outside the prison till the job was done. Since the prisoners couldn’t remember how they had got into the exercise yard, and the guards couldn’t remember anything at all, nobody could punish anybody else, and soon the prisoners were back in their cells and quite glad to catch up on their sleep.

So everyone should now have been happy, but instead they were completely miserable — and this was because of Heckie.

When she first realized that it was Mr Knacksap who had half-killed Daniel and tried to murder three hundred people in cold blood, Heckie had felt nothing except anger and rage. But as the days passed she couldn’t help remembering the chocolates with hard centres, and the red roses, and the careful way the furrier had brushed the crumbs off his trousers as they picnicked above the gas works — and she felt so sad that really there seemed no point in staying alive.

And while Heckie faded away, the power of her magic grew weaker too and very strange things happened in the zoo. The warthog had to be taken out of her cage and sent to the veterinary hospital because an odd fleshy bulge, just like a human leg, had appeared on her back end, and the unusual fish began to gasp and come up for air. The others tried to keep news of these things from Heckie, but they were all very worried indeed.

‘I really think I ought to call the doctor,’ said Dora now, taking away the tray with Heckie’s untasted soup.’

‘There’s nothing he can do,’ said Heckie dramatically. ‘I’m better off dead.’

So poor Dora shuffled off and Heckie lay back on the pillow and thought about her ruined life and what she wanted put on her tombstone. She had decided on: HERE LIES HECATE TENBURY-SMITH WHO MEANT WELL BUT GOT EVERYTHING WRONG, when she heard a voice somewhere in the room.

‘Quite honestly,’ it said, ‘I think this has gone on long enough.’

Heckie opened her eyes. All her visitors had gone. Dora was in the kitchen. Then she looked down, and there was the dragworm sitting in his basket and looking peeved.

‘But you can’t speak!’ she said, amazed.

‘I never said I couldn’t,’ said the dragworm. ‘I didn’t because there’s too much conversation in the world already. Babble, babble all day long. But to see you going on like this just turns me right off. And all for a man who, to say the least, is thoroughly vulgar. Furthermore, I have no wish to turn back into a duck. Being a duck was the most boring thing that ever happened to me.’

‘But surely—’

The dragworm rose from the basket and slithered over to the bed. ‘There,’ he said, lifting his tail. ‘On the fifth bulge from the end. Feathers.’

‘Oh, dear!’

‘And more to come, I shouldn’t wonder. Everything’s going to pieces. I wouldn’t be surprised if that mouse you made in the bank hasn’t got himself a machine-gun by now. So I suggest you pull yourself together and forget that creep. The smell of his toilet water…’

Heckie had propped herself on one elbow. ‘You didn’t like it?’

‘Like it? You must be joking!’

‘Perhaps it was a little strong,’ Heckie agreed. ‘But I don’t really know what to do with my life any more. I feel such a failure.’

‘Well, for a start you can eat something. As for me, I could do with a change. What’s with this Paradise Cottage there was all that fuss about?’