Not Just a Witch Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    ‘Oh, blast the woman! I’d better go and see.’ Heckie opened the door and the dragworm decided to follow her. This was not so simple. His front end bounded out of the basket quickly enough, helped by the whirring of his little wings. But then he stopped and a frown appeared between his shaggy eyebrows. The worm part of him had twenty-four legs, a pair on each of his bulges, and it was not easy for him to decide which one to start walking with.
    The wizards and witches tittered, and the children glared at them.
    Then all at once, the legs on the third bulge from the end started to move, which set off all the others, and, suddenly looking very happy, the dragworm bounded and slithered down the stairs.
    In the shop,