by Eva Ibbotson
Joe’s mother had died when he was born and his father had reared Joe like he reared one of his orphaned apes, carrying him round in a blanket, feeding him on bottles of milk and bananas. Joe’s hair was ginger like the orang-utans’ and fell over his face; there was no tree he couldn’t climb, and when anyone annoyed him, he stuck out his lower lip and glowered exactly like a gorilla.
Daniel introduced him to Heckie who was very interested to hear that his father was a keeper.
‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘are there any empty cages in this zoo? Spare cages? In case someone was to send in some animals in a hurry? Unexpectedly?’
Joe gave her a sharp look from under his hair and said, yes, there were. ‘They’re over by the West Gate, behind the tea place.’
He went on staring at Heckie as she talked to the monkeys and the apes. Joe understood animals almost as well as his father and he knew that the way they came up to Heckie and laid their faces against the bars and tried to take her hand was quite out of the ordinary.
‘Is she an animal trainer or something?’ he asked Daniel, and Daniel said that perhaps in a way she was.
‘We’ll just have our picnic now and have a think,’ said Heckie when they had been right round the zoo. ‘Perhaps your nice friend will lend us a saw to cut up this interesting carrot. Or shall we just go across the road to The Copper Kettle?’
Daniel thought this was a good idea and soon they were sitting at a corner table, eating cucumber sandwiches and looking at Heckie’s list.
‘Of course, the baboons are unbeatable. Those red and blue behinds!’ Her eyes glinted. ‘But I like the orang-utans too: the way their hair hangs down from their armpits . . .’ She bit into her sandwich. ‘You notice I’m being brave about the camel?’
Daniel nodded and suggested the Bearded Basilisk. ‘It might fit better into the flat?’
‘Yes, but reptiles are dreadfully snooty. Coldblooded, you know. Oh dear, this is so difficult.’
Heckie was very quiet as they wheeled the carrot back across the river and the tip of her nose had gone quite white from the strain of deciding. But in the street behind Daniel’s house, she stopped and stared at a shop window. It was a Do It Yourself shop full of tools and screws and bits of shelving.
Suddenly she hit her forehead with her hand. ‘What an idiot I am, Daniel. What a complete fool! Why choose a familiar? Why not make one?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Daniel, his eyes shining. ‘A Do It Yourself familiar! The first one in the world!’
And, terribly excited, they hurried back to Heckie’s shop. Once she had made up her mind, Heckie wasted no time.
‘Do you know what I’m going to make?’
Daniel shook his head.
‘A dragon. Yes, honestly. Why not go for the best? A pocket dragon. Well, a bit bigger than that. Sort of between a rolling pin and a turkey in size. About the weight of a Stilton cheese. Oh, I can see him. Slightly fiery round the nostrils, you know, with green scales and golden claws! Let’s get the pattern book and have a look.’
She went to the bookcase and got out a book called Ferocious Dragons and Loathly Worms and began to turn over the pages. There were pictures of silvery dragons like the ones that ate princesses and were killed by St George, and gloomy, evil-looking dragons with poisonous claws and fiery tongues. But the nicest dragons were the Chinese ones. They had shaggy heads like Tibetan terriers with their hair in topknots and big, bulging eyes and wide mouths chock-full of teeth which gave them a smiling look. Daniel had seen dragons like that painted on kites and liked them very much.
‘Can you make a dragon from nothing?’ he asked when they had decided that a Chinese dragon was what they wanted.
Heckie looked shocked. ‘No, no, dear boy. I’m only a witch, you know. I can change anything into anything else, but I can’t make things from nothing. What we’ll have to do is find an animal that isn’t happy any more. An animal that’s tired of life – and then I can change it. To mess about with an animal that was enjoying life would be quite wrong.’
They went downstairs to the shop to see if there was an animal there that was bored with living, but there wasn’t. So they went to the park because Heckie thought she remembered seeing a duck that was no longer glad to be alive and, sure enough, there it was, sitting in a clump of rushes by the pond. It was a white Aylesbury drake; its eyes were filmed, its feathers were limp. The other ducks were swimming and diving and gobbling up bread that the children threw, but not this duck. This duck had turned its face to the wall.
Heckie put out an arm. The duck did not have time even for one ‘quack’ before it found itself zipped into the tartan shopping basket on wheels and bundled off to the pet shop.
‘Can I watch you?’ begged Daniel when they had unpacked the animal and set it down on the kitchen floor. ‘Can I watch you make a dragon, please?’
‘No, dear boy, I’m afraid not. And you wouldn’t like it, you know. It’s not just my knuckle – a lot of power comes from my feet. Things happen down there that are not suitable for anybody young.’ She looked down at her toes and sighed. ‘If you come tomorrow after school, the dragon should be ready,’ said Heckie, and Daniel had to be content with that.
In the staffroom at Wellbridge Junior School, the deputy head was in a temper. ‘I’ve had another letter from those professors complaining about Daniel’s work. They say they’ll take him away and send him to a private school if he doesn’t do better.’
Miss Jones, who was Daniel’s class teacher, put down her cup with a clatter. ‘I wish they’d leave him alone. There’s nothing wrong with Daniel; he’s a thoroughly nice boy and his work’s perfectly all right. If they spent a bit more time at home with him instead of nagging about his marks, there’d be some point.’
The deputy head nodded. ‘I’ve gone past that house again and again and there’s no one in. He’s got a lost look in his eyes sometimes, that child. It’s a pretty turn of affairs when the most deprived child in the class is the son of two rich professors.’
But when Miss Jones went to take her class for English, she thought that Daniel looked more cheerful than he had done of late – and indeed Daniel wasn’t worrying about how he was going to do in the spelling test or whether he had passed his music exam. He was thinking that in a few hours he would see a dragon made out of an Aylesbury duck, and nobody who thinks that can look unhappy.
Of course, it would happen that on the one day on which Daniel was longing to get away, his parents were both in for tea.
‘Well, how did you get on with your spelling test?’ asked the Professor Trent who was Daniel’s father. He was tall, with greying hair and a big nose.
‘I hope you got ten out of ten,’ said the Professor Trent who was Daniel’s mother. She too was tall, with thick spectacles and a strong chin. When they were both standing looking down at him, Daniel felt a bit like a puppy who has made a puddle on the carpet.
‘I got eight out of ten,’ said Daniel, hoping that this would be all right, but it wasn’t.
‘Really?’ said Daniel’s father. ‘And what words did you get wrong?’
Daniel sighed. ‘Separate,’ he said. ‘And mystify.’
Daniel’s parents thought this was odd. Daniel’s father had been able to spell mystify when he was four years old, and Daniel’s mother said that surely when one understood that separate came from the Latin word separare there could be no difficulty. ‘How many did Sumi get right?’ she wanted to know.
‘She got them all right. She always does.’
Both professors shook their heads. ‘It seems extraordinary, Daniel, that a girl who does not even speak English at home should do so much better than you.’
Daniel said nothing. One day he meant to do something that would surprise his parents and make them proud of him – only what? If the house burnt down he could drag them from the flames (though they were rather large) and if there was a flood he could commandeer a boat and row them to safety. But so far there had been no fire, nor had th
e streets of Wellbridge turned into rivers, and sometimes Daniel thought that he would never be the kind of boy they wanted.
But when tea was over at last and he slipped out of the house, his face soon lost its pinched, dejected look. He took a deep breath of air and then he began to run.
Heckie seemed pleased to see him, but there was something a little odd in her manner.
‘Is he finished? Have you done it?’ asked Daniel eagerly.
‘Of course,’ said Heckie stiffly. ‘What I do, I do. It’s just . . .’
She led him upstairs and pointed to a dog basket she had brought up from the shop. The new familiar was sitting in it: a Chinese dragon about the size of a dachshund, with a black topknot of hair, big red eyes, fiery-looking nostrils and a pair of wings set close behind his ears.
‘Oh!’ said Daniel. ‘He’s beautiful! He’s the most beautiful dragon in the world!’
‘Yes, he is, isn’t he,’ said Heckie. ‘Most of him, anyway . . .’
Daniel moved closer. The dragon’s neck and shoulders were covered in green and golden scales, his pearl-tipped talons gripped the rim of the basket and his teeth were pointed and razor-sharp.
So far so good. It was the back of the dragon that was . . . unexpected.
Heckie cleared her throat. ‘You see, I was just in the middle of changing him when the bell rang and it was the postman. You know how exciting it is when the postman rings. It might mean anything.’ And Heckie blushed, for she had thought it might mean a letter from her friend Dora to say that she was sorry. ‘I left the window open and the pages blew over in the book and . . . well, you see.’
‘Yes,’ said Daniel.
The front end of Heckie’s new familiar was a dragon, but the back end was a worm. It was not an earthworm, it was a Loathly Worm like in the book – but it was a worm. There were twelve segments, each bulgy and carrying a pair of blobby legs, and though the dragon part was green and gold and scaly, the worm part was smooth and pale with faint pink spots.
‘What shall I do?’ asked Heckie, and Daniel was very touched that she, a witch of such power, should turn to him.
Daniel was usually a shy, uncertain boy, but he knew exactly what she should do. ‘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 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, Heckie tucked him up behind one of the food-bins so that no one could see him. Then she opened the door and the woman in the white fur coat swept in. She was carrying a birdcage with a cover which she took off. Inside was a large green and orange parrot.
