The Last Apprentice: Complete Collection

by Joseph Delaney

  Heading for the fells, the Spook set off at a very fast pace. I followed as best I could, carrying his heavy bag as usual.

  “Won’t some of his men just ride ahead and wait for us at Caster?” I said.

  “No doubt they will, lad, and if we were going to Caster, that could just be a problem. No, we’re going to pass the town to the east. Then we’re going southwest, as I just told you, to Heysham, to visit the stone graves. There’s the Bane still to be dealt with and time is running out. Talking to the ghost of Naze is our last chance to find out how to do it.”

  “And after that? Where will we go? Will we ever be able to come back here?”

  “I see no reason why we couldn’t in time. Eventually we’ll throw the Quisitor off our trail. There are ways to do that. Oh, he’ll search for a bit and make a nuisance of himself, no doubt. But before long he’ll go back to where he came from. To where he can keep himself warm during the coming winter.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t entirely happy. I could see all sorts of flaws in the Spook’s plan. For one thing, he might have set off strongly, but he still wasn’t fully fit, and crossing the fells would be hard work. And they might just catch us before we reached Heysham. Then again, they might search for the Spook’s house anyway and burn it out of spite, especially if they lost our trail. And there was next year to worry about. In the spring the Quisitor was bound to come north again. He seemed like a man who’d never give up. I couldn’t see any way that life would ever return to normal. And another thought struck me. . . .

  What if they caught me? The Quisitor tortured people to make them answer questions. What if they forced me to tell them where I used to live? They confiscated or burned the homes of witches and warlocks. I thought of Dad, Jack, and Ellie with nowhere to live. And what would they do when they saw Mam? She couldn’t go out in sunlight. And she often helped the local midwives with difficult deliveries and had a big collection of herbs and other plants. Mam would be in real danger!

  I didn’t say any of this to the Spook because I could see that he was already weary of my questions.

  We were high on the fells within the hour. The weather was calm, and it looked like we’d have a fine day ahead.

  If only I could have got out of my mind the reason we were up there, I’d have enjoyed myself because it was good walking weather. We’d only curlews and rabbits for company, and far to the northwest the distant sea was sparkling in the sunshine.

  At first the Spook strode out energetically, leading the way. But long before noon he began to flag, and when we stopped and sat ourselves down close to a cairn of stones, he looked utterly weary. As he unwrapped the cheese, I noticed that his hands were trembling.

  “Here, lad,” he said, handing me a small piece. “Don’t eat it all at once.”

  Doing as he advised, I nibbled on it slowly.

  “You do know the girl’s following us?” the Spook asked.

  I looked at him in astonishment and shook my head.

  “She’s about a mile or so back there,” he told me, gesturing south. “Now we’ve stopped, she’s stopped. What do you suppose she wants?”

  “I suppose she’s nowhere else to go, apart from east to Pendle, and she doesn’t really want to go there. And she’d no choice but to leave Chipenden. It wouldn’t be safe when the Quisitor and his men arrived.”

  “Aye, and maybe it’s because she’s taken a shine to you and just wants to go where you go. I wish I’d had time to deal with her before we left Chipenden. She’s a threat because wherever she is, the Bane won’t be too far away. It’ll be hiding underground for now, but once it’s dark she’ll draw it to her like a moth to a candle flame and it’ll be hovering about for sure. If she feeds it again, it’ll grow stronger and start seeing through her eyes. Before then it may chance upon other victims— people or animals, the effect will be the same. After bloating itself with blood, it’ll grow stronger and soon be able to clothe itself in flesh and bones again. Last night was just the start.”

  “If it hadn’t been for Alice, we’d never have left Chipenden,” I pointed out. “We’d be prisoners of the Quisitor.”

  But the Spook chose to ignore me. “Well,” he said, “we’d best get on. I’m not getting any younger while I’m sitting here.”

  But after another hour we rested again. This time the Spook stayed down longer before finally forcing himself to his feet. It went on like that throughout the day, with the periods of rest getting longer and the time we were on our feet getting shorter. Toward sunset the weather began to change. The smell of rain was strong in the air, and soon it began to drizzle.

  As darkness fell we began to descend toward a patchwork of drystone wall enclosures. The fell side was steep and the grass was slippery and we both kept losing our footing. What’s more, the rain was getting heavier and the wind starting to build from the west.

  “We’ll rest while I get my breath back,” the Spook said.

  He led the way to the nearest section of wall, and we clambered over and hunkered down on its eastern edge to shelter from the worst of the rain.

  “The damp gets deep into your bones when you’re my age,” said the Spook. “That’s what a lifetime of County weather does to you. It gets us all eventually. Either your bones or your lungs suffer.”

  We crouched against the wall miserably. I was tired and weary, and even though we were outside on such a night, it was a struggle to keep awake. Before long I fell into a deep sleep and began to dream. It was one of those long dreams that seem to go on all night. And toward the end it became a nightmare. . . .

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Nightmare on the Hill

  IT was quite definitely the worst nightmare I’d ever had. And in a job like mine I’d had a lot. I was lost and trying to find my way home. I should have been able to manage it easily enough because everything was bathed in the light of the full moon, but every time I turned a corner and thought I recognized some landmark, I was soon proved wrong. At last I came over the top of Hangman’s Hill and saw our farm below.

  As I walked down the hill, I began to feel very uneasy. Even though it was nighttime, everything was too still and too quiet and nothing was moving below. The fences were in a poor state of repair, something that Dad and Jack would never have allowed to happen, and the barn doors were hanging half off their hinges.

  The house looked deserted: Some of the windows were broken and there were slates missing from the roof. I struggled to open the back door, and when it yielded with the usual jerk, I stepped into a kitchen that looked as though it hadn’t been lived in for years. There was dust everywhere and cobwebs hung from the ceiling. Mam’s rocking chair was right at the center of the room and on it was a piece of folded paper, which I picked up and carried outside to read by the light of the moon.

  Your dad’s, Jack’s, Ellie’s, and Mary’s graves are up on Hangman’s Hill. You’ll find your mother in the barn.

  My heart aching to bursting point, I ran out into the yard. Then I halted outside the barn, listening carefully. Everything was silent. There wasn’t even a breath of wind. I stepped nervously into the gloom, hardly knowing what to expect. Would there be a grave there? Mam’s grave?

  There was a hole in the roof almost directly above, and within a shaft of moonlight I could see Mam’s head. She was looking straight at me. Her body was in darkness, but from the position of her face she seemed to be kneeling on the ground.

  Why would she do that? And why did she look so unhappy? Wasn’t she pleased to see me?

  Suddenly Mam let out a scream of anguish. “Don’t look at me, Tom! Don’t look at me! Turn away now!” she cried as if in torment.

  The moment I looked away, Mam rose up from the floor, and out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed something that turned my bones to jelly. From the neck down, Mam was different. I saw wings and scales and a glint of sharp claws as she flew straight up into the air and smashed her way out through the barn roof, taking half of it with her. I looked up, shielding my f
ace from the pieces of wood and debris that were falling toward me, and saw Mam, a black silhouette against the disk of the full moon as she flew upward from the wreckage of the barn roof.

  “No! No!” I shouted. “This isn’t true, this isn’t happening!”

  In reply, a voice spoke inside my head. It was the low hiss of the Bane.

  “The moon shows the truth of things, boy. You know that already. All you have seen is true or will come to pass. All it takes is time.”

  Someone began to shake my shoulder, and I woke up in a cold sweat. The Spook was bending over me.

  “Wake up, lad! Wake up!” he called. “It’s just a nightmare. It’s the Bane trying to get into your mind, trying to weaken us.”

  I nodded but didn’t tell the Spook what had happened in the dream. It was too painful to talk about. I glanced up at the sky. Rain was still falling, but the cloud was patchy and a few stars were visible. It was still dark, but dawn was not far off.

  “Have we slept all night?”

  “We have that,” replied the Spook, “but I didn’t plan it that way.”

  He rose stiffly. “Better move on while we still can,” he said anxiously. “Can’t you hear ’em?”

  I listened and finally, above the noise of the wind and rain, I heard the distant baying of hounds.

  “Aye, they’re not too far behind,” the Spook said. “Our only hope is to throw them off our scent. We need water to do that, but it needs to be shallow enough for us to walk in. Of course, we’ll have to get back on dry land sometime, but the dogs will have to be taken up and down the bank to pick up the scent again. And if there’s another stream close by, it makes the job a lot easier.”

  We scrambled over another wall and walked down a steep slope, moving as fast as we dared across the damp, slippery grass. There was a shepherd’s cottage below us, a faint silhouette against the sky, and next to it an ancient blackthorn tree, bent over toward it by the prevailing winds, its bare branches like claws clutching at the eaves. We kept walking toward the cottage for a few moments, but then came to a sudden halt.

  There was a wooden pen ahead and to our left. And there was just enough light to see that it contained a small flock of sheep, about twenty or so. And all of them were dead.

  “I don’t like the look of this one little bit, lad.”

  I didn’t like the look of it either. But then I realized that he didn’t mean the dead sheep. He was looking at the cottage beyond.

  “We’re probably too late,” he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “But it’s our duty to go in and see . . .”

  With that he set off toward the cottage, gripping his staff. I followed carrying his bag. As I passed the pen, I glanced sideways at the nearest of the dead sheep. The white wool of its coat was streaked with blood. If that was the work of the Bane, it had fed well. How much stronger would it be now?

  The front door was wide open, so without ceremony we went in, the Spook leading the way. He’d just taken one step over the threshold when he halted and sucked in his breath. He was staring to the left. There was a candle somewhere deeper in the room and by its flickering light I could see what, at first glance, I took to be a shadow of the shepherd. But it was too solid to be just a shadow. He had his back to the wall and the crook of his staff was raised above his head as if to threaten us. It took a while for me to understand what I was looking at, but something set my knees a-trembling and my heart fluttering up into my mouth.

  On his face was a mixture of anger and terror. His teeth were showing, but some of them were broken and blood was smeared across his mouth. He was upright, but he wasn’t standing. He’d been flattened. Pressed back against the wall. Smeared into the stones. It was the work of the Bane.

  The Spook took another step into the room. And another. I followed close behind until I could see the whole of the nightmare within. There’d been a baby’s crib in the corner, but it had been smashed against the wall and among the debris were blankets and a small sheet streaked with blood. Of the child there was no sign. My master approached the blankets and raised them cautiously. What he saw clearly distressed him, and he motioned at me not to look before replacing the blankets with a sigh.

  By now I had spotted the infant’s mother. A woman’s body was on the floor, partly hidden by a rocking chair. I was grateful that I couldn’t see her face. In her right hand she gripped a knitting needle, and a ball of wool had rolled into the hearth close to the embers, which were fading to gray.

  The door to the kitchen was open, and I had a sudden sense of dread. I felt certain something was lurking there. No sooner had that thought entered my head than the temperature in the room dropped. The Bane was still here. I could feel it in my bones. In terror I almost fled from that cottage, but the Spook stood his ground, and while he remained how could I leave him?

  At that moment the candle was suddenly extinguished, as if snuffed out by unseen fingers, plunging us into gloom, and a deep voice spoke out of the utter blackness of the kitchen doorway. A voice that resounded through the air and vibrated along the flagged floor of the cottage so that I could feel it in my feet.

  “Hello, Old Bones. At last we meet again. Been looking for you. Knew you were somewhere nearby.”

  “Aye, and now you’ve found me,” said the Spook wearily, resting his staff on the flags and leaning his weight against it.

  “Always were a meddler, weren’t you, Old Bones? But you’ve meddled once too often now. I’ll kill the boy first, while you stand and watch. Then it’ll be your turn.”

  An invisible hand picked me up and slammed me back against the wall so hard that all the breath was driven from my body. Then the pressure began, a steady force so strong that my ribs felt about to snap. Worst of all was the terrible weight against my forehead, and I remembered the face of the shepherd, flattened and smeared into the stones. I was terrified, unable to move or even breathe. A darkness came over my eyes, and the last thing I knew was a sense that the Spook had rushed toward the kitchen doorway raising his staff.

  Someone was shaking me gently.

  I opened my eyes and saw the Spook bending over me. I was lying on the floor of the cottage. “Are you all right, lad?” he asked anxiously.

  I nodded. My ribs felt sore. With every breath I took they hurt. But I was breathing. I was still alive.

  “Come on, let’s see if we can get you to your feet. . . .”

  With the Spook supporting me, I managed to stand.

  “Can you walk?”

  I nodded and took a step forward. I didn’t feel too steady on my feet, but I could walk.

  “Good lad.”

  “Thanks for saving me,” I said.

  The Spook shook his head. “I did nothing, lad. The Bane just disappeared suddenly, as if it had been called. I saw it moving up the hill. It looked just like a black cloud blotting out the last of the stars. A terrible thing’s been done here,” he said, glancing at the horror within the cottage. “But we’ve got to get away just as fast as we can. First we must save ourselves. We might be able to escape the Quisitor, but with that girl following us the Bane will always be near and growing more powerful all the time. We need to get to Heysham and find out how we can deal with that foul thing once and for all!”

  With the Spook leading the way, we left the cottage and continued down the hill. We crossed two more sections of wall, until I could hear the sound of rushing water. My master was moving a lot quicker now, almost as fast as when we’d set out from Chipenden, so I suppose the sleep had done him some good. Whereas I was sore all over and struggling to keep up, his bag heavy in my hand.

  We came out onto a steep, narrow path beside a beck, a wide torrent of water rushing headlong downward over rocks.

  “About a mile farther down, this empties out into a tarn,” said the Spook, striding down the path. “The land levels and two streams flow out of it. It’s just what we’re looking for.”

  I followed as best I could. It seemed to be raining harder than ever a
nd the ground was treacherous underfoot. One slip and you’d end up in the water. I wondered if Alice was nearby and if she could walk down a path like this, so close to fast-flowing water. Alice would be in danger, too. The dogs might pick up her scent.

  Even above the noise of the beck and the rain, I could hear the bloodhounds; they seemed to be getting closer and closer. Suddenly I heard something that made me catch my breath.

  It was a scream!

  Alice! I turned and looked back up the path, but the Spook grabbed my arm and pulled me forward. “There’s nothing we can do, lad!” he shouted. “Nothing at all! So just keep moving.”

  I did as I was told, trying to ignore the sounds that were coming from the fell side behind us. There were shouts and yells and more horrifying screams until gradually everything grew quiet and all I could hear was the water rushing by. The sky was much lighter now and below us, in the first dawn light, I could see the pale waters of the tarn spread out among the trees.

  My heart ached at the thought of what could have happened to Alice. She didn’t deserve this.

  “Keep moving, lad,” the Spook repeated.

  And then we heard something on the path behind us— but moving closer and closer. It sounded like an animal bounding down toward us. A big dog.

  It didn’t seem fair. We were so close to the tarn and its two streams. Just another ten minutes, and we’d have been able to throw the hounds off our scent. But to my surprise, the Spook wasn’t moving any faster. He even seemed to be slowing down. Finally he stopped altogether and pulled me to the side of the path; I wondered if he’d come to the end of his strength. If so, then it was all over for both of us.

  I looked to the Spook, hoping he’d produce something from his bag to save us. But he didn’t. The dog was now running toward us at full pelt. Yet as it got closer, I noticed something strange about it. For one thing, it was yelping rather than baying like a hound in full cry. And its eyes were fixed ahead rather than upon us. It passed so close that I could have reached out and touched it.