The Power of Poppy Pendle by Natasha Lowe

Author:Natasha Lowe [Lowe, Natasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books
Published: 2012-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

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Poppy Pendle Disappears

AS Poppy TRUDGED INTO POTTS BOTTOM, SHE scowled at a row of little blackbirds chirping away on a telephone wire. It was a happy noise and Poppy couldn’t stand it. She reached for her wand and turned them all into stone, followed in quick succession by two more cats, a squirrel, and a colony of ants marching across the pavement. The postman was just walking past on the other side of the street, whistling away, and Poppy was about to turn him into stone when a goose waddled out from the path that led down to the canal. Pausing a moment, Poppy suddenly had an idea. She would live in that old abandoned cottage, the one beside the canal with the falling-in roof and broken windows. After all, it didn’t belong to anyone and she’d be quite alone there, nobody to bother her. With a determined flick of her wrist, Poppy zapped the poor goose to stone and kicked him under a patch of ferns. Then she marched on by.

As she climbed over the crumbling wall in front of the cottage, Poppy remembered how she and Charlie had sat there talking. They had laughed and eaten cookies, and she had told Charlie about her dreams of one day owning a little bakery just like Patisserie Marie Claire. Not wanting the sadness to overwhelm her, Poppy used the full force of her anger to turn a beautiful swan, floating down the canal, into stone. Then she shoved open the front door and went inside. It was musty and dark. The floorboards had caved in and nettles were growing up between them. There was no furniture in the room except for two old packing crates and a stained, lumpy mattress. Empty cans littered the floor, but someone had swept up all the broken glass into a corner. Obviously Poppy was not the first person to claim the cottage as her home, although from the dust, it seemed whoever had been living here was long gone. The only other occupants now were a family of mice who had chewed a nest for themselves in the middle of the mattress, and Poppy promptly fossilized them.

It was impossible to go upstairs, because most of the boards had rotted away, so Poppy moved one of the packing crates over to a window and sat down. She opened a can of Super Savers meat stew from her backpack and ate it cold. Even though it tasted like dog food, Poppy didn’t care. Then, holding her wand at the ready, she turned every bird that landed in the overgrown garden to stone. When it got too dark to see by, she lay down on the damp, lumpy mattress and fell asleep.

A dawn chorus of chirping robins woke Poppy, and within seconds they had joined the rest of the little stone birds outside. Sitting back down on her packing crate, she ate two Twirlies and stared out at the canal. Poppy stayed there all day. By

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