Not Just a Witch Read Online Free PDF

‘Nothing! Please don’t do anything. He’s absolutely splendid as he is. I mean, any old witch could have a dragon for a familiar, but there can’t be a single witch in the whole wide world who has a dragworm !’
    Heckie smiled. ‘I’m glad you feel like that, dear boy. Because, to tell the truth, it would hurt me now to change him. We’ll soon get him trained up. He doesn’t talk yet, but he understands quite a lot already.’ She patted the dragworm’s head and he shot out his forked tongue and licked her hand. ‘We’re in business, Daniel. You’ll see. This time next year there won’t be a single wicked person left in the length and breadth of Wellbridge!’

Chapter Six
    The Wellbridge Wickedness Hunters met in Heckie’s sitting-room the following week.
    Heckie had asked all the wizards and witches in the town to join and she had hoped that they might turn out to be a bit like Robin Hood and his Merry Men, but they had not. Mr Gurgle, a wizard who kept a grocer’s shop in Market Square, was not at all like Robin Hood. He was a small, bald man who spent his time trying to make a cheese that could walk by itself. Not a cheese that could crawl – quite a lot of cheeses can do that – but a cheese that could walk right across a room without help. And Boris Chomsky, the mechanical wizard who serviced the hot air balloons the witches used, wasn’t like Robin Hood either. He was a Russian with a long, sad face and wore a woollen muffler which was stained with oil because he worked in a garage.
    Next to Boris sat Frieda Fennel, the garden witch who had grown Heckie’s carrot. Frieda had green fingers which meant that anything would grow for her, but it was difficult to stop it growing. When Frieda scratched her ear or rubbed her neck, little buds or leafy shoots burst out where she had touched herself, so anyone sitting near her had to keep her tidy with garden shears.
    And there was Madame Rosalia, who had been Miss Witch 1965 and didn’t let anyone forget it. Like most beauty queens, she was a show-off and was sitting with her chair floating halfway to the ceiling, just to be different. She kept a beauty parlour and always knew exactly what every witch should wear.
    ‘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