Josh’s steps became slightly uncertain, and then he halted altogether.
‘She’s off again,’ he hissed.
‘. . . and Greenspell incense to ensure personal growth . . .’ Chelle’s eyes were wide but her voice continued low and expressionless, as if she was uttering an incantation.
‘. . . and that’s another order for a box of zodiac paperweights, which reminds me, let’s look up Cancer for this week. I’m back again. Ryan, it’s me, I’m back . . .’
Ryan stopped walking. A little ahead of him, Chelle stopped as well and stooped to stroke the cat. Ryan revolved on the spot and began a stately stride back towards Josh. Josh mirrored him until they halted face to face with the tips of Josh’s trainers just resting lightly on Ryan’s toes.
‘Well, let’s have a look at it.’ Josh started up the steps of the nearest building. Beside the door there was a panel with several intercom buttons, each with a different name next to it.
‘They’re all different businesses, aren’t they?’ Ryan said, glancing quickly at the names.
‘Yeah, looks like it. But Chelle was spouting hippy crystal-waving stuff. That rules out most of these – they’re nearly all surveyors and dentists . . . look, it’s got to be this one: Jeremiah Punzell, Holistic Soul Repair. Holistic means psychic.’
‘I think it sort of means to do with everything all being linked.’ Ryan racked his brain.
‘Yeah, well, that’s the same thing, isn’t it?’ Josh pushed the button next to Punzell’s name.
The intercom spat like fat in a pan before a female voice answered, ‘Holistic Soul Repair.’ There was something accusing in the tone, as if she suspected the visitors on the step of having no souls to repair. ‘Donna Leas receiving messages for Mr Punzell, can I help you?’
Josh wrinkled his expressive face and mouthed a silent swear word. Ryan could feel his own face drawn up in a wince. The name was familiar to both of them.
Is it definitely her? Ryan mouthed back. Josh nodded. They became aware of the intercom crackling impatiently between them.
‘Who’s there?’ The voice was sharp now, despite the fuzz of static. ‘Look, whatever you were going to say, take it from me, it wasn’t funny. The sole-repair-cobblers joke is getting old, and the load-of-cobblers joke is getting really old. And “going holistic” wasn’t even funny the first time. So let’s just accept that you’re sad and pathetic and then we don’t have to talk to each other.’ The intercom went dead.
‘You’re right,’ Ryan whispered. ‘It is her.’
‘Course it’s her.’ Josh stepped back and glared up at the windows. ‘She’s probably up there with her feet on the desk, like when she was in charge of the library, remember?’ He clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back. ‘OK. We’ve got to get past the . . . the poison-toad-woman of Guildley to get to our wisher.’
It was at this very moment that the door beside them opened, and a man stepped out.
His hair was black and curling and crept out into square-cut sideburns. His black cashmere coat was impressive in length, which was a shame since its wearer was not impressive in height. He wore a midnight-blue silk shirt, open at the neck. It made his eyes look particularly blue and interesting. One of his ears was pierced, and a small silver dragon wound round the buckle of his belt.
The man strode past them and off down the street in the direction of Chelle, who was still petting the cat.
‘D’you think that’s him?’ Josh asked through the corner of his mouth.
‘Looks pretty holistic to me,’ whispered Ryan.
The man was twenty yards from Chelle when she looked up and saw Ryan pointing desperately towards him, and Josh miming for her to stuff something in her mouth. She fumbled with her sponge and dropped it. As she crouched to the ground to pick it up, covering her mouth with her hand, the stranger strode past without giving her a glance.
Ryan and Josh ran to join her.
‘That’s him!’ exclaimed Josh. ‘But we’re going to have to find a way to talk to him while he’s not in his office. Maybe we should go after him now? Listen, Chelle, don’t freak, but he’s got that witch Donna Leas working there as some kind of secretary . . .’
‘I know . . .’ Chelle’s voice was small and she was twisting her fingers. ‘I know, and . . . and . . . Josh, it’s even worse. That man isn’t the wisher – he walked right past me and I didn’t get any of his thoughts. In fact . . . I think Donna is the wisher.’
10
The Library Witch
One summer, four sixth-form girls from another school had signed up to spend two weeks as ‘Helping Hands’, assisting the teachers of Waite’s Park Primary. One of these, Donna Leas, had entered school folklore.
She had slouched in through the school gates when Ryan had been there less than a year, when everything still blinded and dizzied him with its newness. Thinking about her now was like looking into a painful light. She brought with her too many memories of self-consciousness, mortification and fear. In any case, Donna had been papered over with countless stories since then, and Ryan could not help thinking of her as the ‘poison-toad-woman’ Josh had described.
Ryan could remember her sitting by the window on library duty, one hand holding a paperback bent back on its spine. When she read she forgot about her tongue, and it peeped out at the corner of her mouth. This corner was rubbed red, and Ryan always found it hard not to stare at it.
Sometimes she searched your bag when you left the library to make sure you weren’t smuggling out books (some said she confiscated your sweets and crisps and ate them herself), and if your book was late she gave out detentions (some said she also pulled out individual hairs from your head and kept them).
Ryan had been lucky and had not come into much contact with her over the two weeks. However, he still remembered the one time circumstances had forced him to approach her. He’d found a battered library book down behind the radiator, with its front cover buckled from the heat, and taken it to the library to hand it in. Donna had pushed her curtains of blonde hair back from her slab of a face and glared at him as he tried to explain.
‘This book’s five months late.’
‘I didn’t borrow it,’ Ryan had said. ‘I found it.’
‘What are you doing with a book that hasn’t been signed out to you?’
‘I just found it . . .’
‘It’s the book your class was reading last term, isn’t it?’ She obviously did not believe him.
‘No, I mean yes, but Mrs Parthogill is letting me read next year’s books. I’m . . . they’re going to move me ahead a year . . .’
For what seemed like ten minutes Donna had skewered him with her unblinking, spectacled gaze.
‘Put your name down here, and if your story doesn’t check out your parents will be getting a serious bill for this book fine. A serious bill.’ She glared at him as he wrote his name. ‘So . . .’ The bitter words almost seemed to push their way out of her. ‘So you’re supposed to be clever then, are you?’
Ryan stared at her with a crashing sense of embarrassment, but not for himself. It was the stupid spite of her tone which shocked him, coming as it did from an adult.
Nearly everybody at the primary school had a worse story, of course. Indeed, at the end of the two weeks Josh had taken on the role of archivist and collected many of the best ones. As he walked with Ryan and Chelle away along Temple Street he recounted some of them with vicious verve.
‘So what makes you so sure that it’s Donna you were picking up on Radio Chelle?’ he asked at last.
‘Well, after you left me, Ryan, I thought I’d sneak back into range and see if I could be helpful and hear anything. And at first I was just getting stuff about her looking through this magazine for her star sign, and then looking up another star sign, but then when you two were pushing the intercom button her thoughts were all about it ringing and her answering, and her being angry about all the kids who pushed the button and said things like is there anybody th
eeeeeere, and then . . . well, she thought her name when she said it out loud . . .’
Josh swore under his breath. ‘She is the wisher then.’
‘Oh, great,’ muttered Ryan with feeling.
‘Like she deserves to have her wish granted.’ Josh wrinkled his nose. ‘I mean, what’s she going to ask for anyway, a new face?’
‘I don’t want to find out more by listening in. I don’t want her thoughts in my mouth, eeugh . . .’ Chelle tangled her fingers up in a knot of squeamishness. ‘I mean, it’s Donna Leas, and he’s put the stamp on upside down again, I expect his mind is half-astral today, it always is when he’s been working too hard . . .’
It took a moment for Ryan and Josh to realize what was happening. It took another moment for them to realize what it meant. Josh clapped a hand over Chelle’s mouth, and Ryan peered anxiously down the street, looking for the dreaded Donna Leas.
To his great surprise, he could not see her. Across the road a young man in denim was tucking flyers under car windscreen wipers. And not far away a young woman with a russet bob slowly sorted the envelopes tucked into the crook of her elbow and pushed them into a postbox.
She wore a soft green jacket, a long skirt and a white blouse with a Victorian-style lacy collar. She seemed trim and smart, and as if she might be pretty when she raised her head. Then, as Ryan watched, she held one envelope up to the light and peered at it intently. Her tongue poked out with the effort of concentration, and she pushed her swings of hair back in an all-too-familiar gesture. It was Donna Leas.
Ryan felt a plunging sense of unreality. He was still boggling at the transformation when Chelle snatched Josh’s hand from her mouth and took to her heels. Ryan took half a step after her, but Josh caught his arm.
Donna was walking towards them in a way that was like and unlike the monster Ryan remembered. She had lost her slouch, but she planted her feet squarely apart as if she was used to having wider legs and was still making room for them.
Josh started walking slowly towards her, his head lowered and his eyes fixed with fierce concentration on the holes in his kite, as if he had only just noticed them. Ryan fell into step with him and joined him in glaring at the poor kite.
As Donna drew closer he could see that her face was the smooth, dead, peach colour that meant layer upon layer of make-up. Dark green eyeliner rimmed her eyes, extending into long painted bars at the outer corners so that she looked a bit like something from an ancient Egyptian painting. As she stalked past, Ryan kept his gaze downwards.
And then she was past and clipping away from them. Grimacing with suppressed laughter, Josh half capered behind the postbox and crouched, peering round it at her retreating back.
‘She didn’t recognize us!’ Josh’s voice was half choked with hilarity and excitement. ‘C’mon, let’s tail.’
‘Um, Josh? We kind of stick out. I mean, we’ve got this great big kite . . .’
Josh stared blankly at the kite, then pushed its beak through the slot of the postbox. When he let go it dangled sadly, as if the bird had crashed cartoonishly into the postbox and got its head stuck.
‘And now we haven’t,’ Josh said, with a note of lunatic calm. ‘Come on!’ They crept along behind the row of parked cars.
At the end of Temple Street, the strange new Donna took a left down Marvel Hill and clipped up the steps to the Eastgate Library.
Even though Ryan knew this library well, he felt a moment of hesitation. In his imagination Donna was the hulking monster haunting all things library. Shadowing her into one seemed a bit like following the dragon into its private cave.
They waited a couple of minutes, then followed her in. Unlike the grand Guildley Central Library, with its broad, brightly lit aisles and computer desks, the Eastgate Library smelt like somebody’s attic. The furniture was a jumble-sale mix. The shelf stacks rose to various heights like a set of tower blocks. Ryan loved the way you had to weave your way through this mad book-city maze, trying not to catch your clothes on jutting nails or rough-cut splinters.
Into this maze Donna Leas had vanished, and now they listened in vain for the sound of a step.
‘Is there a psychic-holistic-dippy-hippy section?’ Josh asked in a whisper.
‘I think folk dancing and yoga are over there somewhere,’ Ryan whispered back, and led the way.
Halfway between World Dance and Buddhism, Ryan halted, hearing a faint, stealthy floorboard creak. On a shelf a little above his head was a row of books marked ‘Self-Help and Happiness’, each bound in a different soothing shade of blue. Peering over these in a far less soothing fashion were two large, green-lined eyes, terrifyingly intense without the glasses they had once worn. The next moment they were gone.
Josh turned to find Ryan mouthing silently at him.
Donna was right there! She saw us!
They peered around different corners, but she had disappeared again. Then they heard quiet, firm steps approaching.
Mrs Corbett, one of the librarians, put her grey head around the nearest corner and looked at each of them with a stony deliberateness. She knew Ryan well, but for once she did not smile. She withdrew her head and the footsteps receded.
With a seething sense of embarrassment, Ryan pulled a book of folklore from the shelf at random and walked towards the desk. Something had been done, something had been said and suddenly he was not welcome in his library. He did not meet Mrs Corbett’s eye as she stamped his book, and he only looked around to see if Josh was still with him when he was out in the street.
Josh was still beside him, biting his lips together tightly.
‘That was a trap,’ he said after a while in a thin, angry voice. ‘Just her sort of trap. It must have been Chelle running off like that, made her guess it was us ringing the intercom. Bet she led us in there so she could take a look at us and to see if she could get us in trouble with someone. Bet you.’
‘She’s a library witch,’ Ryan said. ‘We should never have followed her in.’
Chelle was nowhere to be found. Josh and Ryan retrieved the kite and parted at the park.
As soon as he skated into the lounge Ryan knew that something was wrong. His dad was sitting in his chair with the paper in his hand as usual, but he looked up as soon as Ryan entered, instead of taking minutes to register his presence.
‘Did you have a good time at the park?’ The tone was carefully casual, but Ryan recognized that, for whatever reason, he was being given an opening to choose his story carefully.
‘We kind of gave up on the park,’ Ryan answered quietly. ‘Josh’s kite’s a bit broken.’
Ryan’s father looked at him for a few moments and then folded his newspaper.
‘About half an hour ago I had a phone call from a woman who claimed that you spent the afternoon ringing her doorbell and running away, following her through the streets calling out names and chasing her around a library.’
Ryan collapsed under a wave of mixed outrage and shame.
‘We didn’t! I mean . . . we did ring the doorbell once, and we kind of walked along after her a bit because it was someone we knew, but we didn’t shout anything or chase her . . . it wasn’t like we were trying to scare her or anything . . .’
‘So what was Josh trying to do?’ His dad stared into his face for a few more moments, then sighed and lowered his eyes. ‘I’m sure whatever his reasons were they were ingenious and compelling. Josh is a very clever boy.’ Ryan’s father laid stress on the word ‘clever’ as if there was a danger that it might be confused with a similar-sounding word of very different meaning. ‘However, cleverness is all very well, but trusting everything to one’s wits is as dangerous as trusting everything to one’s luck. If I were Josh’s friend, that would worry me.’
Ryan wanted to understand what his dad meant. This seemed to be one of the rare occasions when his father was really serious.
‘I just hope,’ his dad said, scratching at his own ear lobe with a pen cap, ‘that Josh is clever enough to appreciate how lu
cky he is to have you as a friend.’
Sadly Ryan watched his faith collapse like snow in the rain. He wanted to believe in his father’s all-penetrating wisdom, but that one sentence showed that his dad understood nothing of the way things worked. Josh, who could win friends in a minute, had decided to take notice of a timid outsider. There was no doubt of who had been generous, and who was lucky.
Mrs Corbett must have given Donna my name and number, he thought as he climbed the stairs to his bedroom. Well, at least Mrs Corbett won’t have recognized Josh. If Donna had phoned his parents as well he’d go crazy for revenge . . .
11
The Paranormal Punzell
As it turned out, although Mrs Corbett had not recognized Josh, Donna had. Perhaps it was his trademark sunglasses that had given him away, but Ryan rather thought not. In the short fortnight of the ‘Helping Hands’ Donna and Josh had clashed repeatedly.
The bitterest episode had been the incident with the helmet. Donna always chained up her bike, but left her cycling helmet slung loosely over one of the handlebars, and this proved too tempting to Josh’s sense of mischief. Later, everybody agreed that Donna had probably seen him slipping off with it, and that her insistence on the police being called was pure malice. The headmaster had convened the whole school in the hall so that the visiting officer could impress upon them the seriousness of the offence. Gradually, those nearest the door became aware of a faint, choking smell of burning plastic. Needing to hide the helmet somewhere, Josh had pushed it behind the heater in the school airing cupboard. When it was found the back part of the helmet’s dome had melted and flattened. Josh had been spotted leaving the airing cupboard, and his parents were called in to talk to the police. He had been exiled to Merrybells for a month.
Even after three years, Ryan could well believe that Donna would remember Josh as clearly and bitterly as Josh remembered her.
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