In front of me stood a tall figure wearing a black dress that came down almost to the ground. It was splattered with blood. The figure was female from the neck downward, but she had the huge head of a crow, with cruel beady eyes and an immense beak. Even as I watched, the crow’s head began to change. The beak shrank; the beady eyes softened and widened until the head was fully human. I suddenly realized that I knew that face! It was that of a witch who was now dead—the Celtic witch who the spook Bill Arkwright had once killed in the County. I’d been training with Arkwright and had seen him throw a dagger into her back; then he’d fed her heart to his dogs to make sure she couldn’t come back from the dead. Bill had been ruthless in his treatment of witches—much harder than my master, John Gregory.
And in that moment I knew that none of this was real. I was having a bad dream—and it was one of the very worst kind: a lucid nightmare where you’re trapped and cannot escape, cannot wake up. It was also the same one that I’d been having for months—and each time it happened, it was more terrifying.
The Morrigan was walking toward me now, her hands outstretched, talons ready to rend the flesh from my bones.
I fought to wake myself up. It was a real struggle to break free. I opened my eyes and felt my fear gradually fall away. But it was a long time before I calmed down. I was wide awake now and couldn’t get to sleep again. It didn’t leave me in the best state of mind to face a jibber—whatever that might be.
We met down in the kitchen, but we weren’t planning to eat anything substantial. We were about to face the dark, so the Spook insisted that we fast, managing with just a little cheese to sustain us. My master missed his favorite crumbly County cheese, and wherever we happened to be, he was always complaining that the local fare wasn’t a patch on it. But on this occasion he nibbled in silence before turning to me with a question.
“Well, lad, what are your thoughts on all this?”
I gazed into his face. It looked as if it had been chiseled from granite, but there were new, deeper lines on his brow, and his eyes were tired. His beard had been gray from the moment I first saw him, almost three years before, when he visited my dad’s farm to talk about my apprenticeship. However, there had been a mixture of other colors in there, too—mostly reds, browns, and blacks. Now it was entirely gray. He was looking older—the events of the past three years had taken their toll.
“It worries me,” I said. “It’s something we’ve never dealt with before, and that’s always dangerous.”
“Aye, it is that, lad. There are too many unknowns. What exactly is a jibber, and will it be vulnerable to salt and iron?”
“There may be no such thing as a jibber,” said Alice.
“And what do you mean by that, girl?” demanded my master, looking annoyed. He no doubt thought that she was putting her nose where it didn’t belong; meddling in spooks’ business.
“What if it’s the spirit of each dead person that’s somehow trapped and causing the problem?” she said. “Dark magic could do that.”
The frown left the Spook’s face, and he nodded thoughtfully. “Do the Pendle witches have such a spell?” he asked.
“Bone witches have a spell that can bind a spirit to its own graveside.”
“Some spirits are bound like that anyway, girl. We call them graveside lingerers.”
“But these don’t just linger, they scare people,” Alice pointed out. “The spell is often used to keep people away from a section of a churchyard so that witches are able to rob the graves and harvest the bones undisturbed.”
Bone witches collected human bones to use in their type of magic. Thumb bones were particularly prized. They boiled them up in a cauldron to obtain magical power.
“So, taken a step further, if these are trapped spirits, they’re somehow being forced to drive people to the edge of madness. That all makes sense, but how and why is it spreading?” my master asked.
“If it is a spell,” Alice said, “then it’s out of control—almost as if it’s developed an energy of its own, spreading its evil, working its way east. Bony Lizzie once cast a powerful spell that got out of control. It was the first time I’d ever seen her scared.”
The Spook scratched at his beard as if something wick were crawling there. “Aye, that makes sense,” he agreed. “Well, I reckon we should visit the place where the poor girl killed herself first. I’ll need the lad with me, so no doubt you’ll be joining us too, girl.”
That last sentence was spoken with an edge of sarcasm. Alice and I were in a very bad predicament, and he could do nothing about it. The previous year, in order to save the lives of many people, including the Spook and Alice, I’d sold my soul to the Fiend—the Devil himself, the dark made flesh. He had been summoned to earth by a gathering of the Pendle witch clans and was now growing ever more powerful; a new age of darkness had come to our world.
Only Alice’s dark magic now prevented the Devil from coming to collect my soul. She’d put three drops of her blood and three drops of mine together in what was called a blood jar. I carried it in my pocket, and now the Fiend couldn’t come near me—but Alice had to stay close by in order to share its protection.
There was always a risk that somehow I might get separated from the jar and be beyond its protective spell. Not only that: When I died—whether that was six or sixty years hence—the Fiend would be waiting to claim what belonged to him and would subject me to an eternity of torment. The only way out was to somehow destroy or bind him first. The prospect of the task weighed heavy on my shoulders.
Grimalkin, the witch assassin of the Malkin clan, was an enemy of the Fiend; she believed that he could be bound in a pit if he was pierced with silver-alloy spikes. Alice had made contact, and Grimalkin had agreed to join us in order to attempt this. But long weeks had passed, and there had been no further communication from Grimalkin: Alice feared that, invincible though she was, something had happened to her. The County was occupied by foreign troops—maybe they had moved against the Pendle witches, slaying or imprisoning them. Whatever the truth, that blood jar was as important as ever.
Soon after dark, carrying a candle, the Spook led us up to the attic—the small, cramped room right at the top of the inn where the poor servant girl had lived and died.
The bed had been stripped of its mattress, sheets, and pillows. At the side of the bed nearest the window, I saw dark bloodstains on the floorboards. The Spook set his candle down on the little bedside table, and the three of us made ourselves as comfortable as possible on the floor just in front of the closed door. Then we waited. It was reasonable to expect that if the jibber was in need of victims tonight, it would come for us. After all, there was nobody else staying at the inn.
I’d filled my pockets with salt and iron—substances that usually worked against boggarts and, to a lesser extent, witches. But if Alice’s theory was correct and we were dealing with a trapped, dangerous spirit, salt and iron would be ineffective.
We didn’t have long to wait before the jibber arrived. Something invisible began to rap on the floorboards. There were two quick knocks, then three slow ones. It happened over and over again, and my nerves were on edge. Next the candle flickered and there was a sudden chill in the air; I had an even colder feeling inside—the warning that a seventh son of a seventh son often receives when something from the dark approaches.
Directly above the bloodstains, a column of purple light appeared; the sound that emanated from it confirmed that the jibber had been well named. The voice was high and girlish and sibilant. It jabbered nonsense, jarring my ears, making me feel uncomfortable and slightly dizzy. It was as if the world had tilted and I was unable to keep my balance.
I sensed the malevolence of the jibber: It wanted to hurt me very badly. It wanted my death. No doubt the Spook and Alice could hear the same disturbing sounds, but I glanced right and left, and neither was moving; they were just staring, wide-eyed, at the column of light as if transfixed.
But despite my dizziness I could mov
e, and I decided to act before the jabbering got right inside my head and made me do exactly what it wanted. I rose to my feet and strode forward, plunging my hands into my breeches pockets: My right hand seized salt; my left, iron filings. I flung both handfuls at the column of light.
The substances came together perfectly, right on target. It was a good shot. The bad news was that nothing happened. The column continued to shimmer, and particles of salt and iron fell harmlessly and ended up scattered across the floorboards beside the bed.
Now the jibbering started to hurt. It felt as if sharp pins were being driven into my eyes and a band of steel was tightening across my forehead, slowly crushing my skull. I felt panic rising within me. At some point I would no longer be able to tolerate the pain. Would I be driven to madness? I wondered. Pushed to do something suicidal to end my torment?
With a shock, I realized something else then. The jabbering wasn’t just meaningless prattling. The speed and sibilance had fooled me at first. This was the Old Tongue; a pattern of words. It was a spell!
The candle suddenly guttered out, plunging us in darkness—though the purple light was still visible. All at once I found that I was unable to move. I wanted to leave this claustrophobic attic where that poor girl had killed herself, but I couldn’t—I was rooted to the spot. I felt dizzy, too, and lost my balance. I tottered and fell hard onto my left side. I was aware of a sharp pain, as if I’d fallen on a stone.
As I struggled to rise, I heard another voice—a female voice, also chanting in the Old Tongue. This second voice grew louder while the first quickly died down until it had faded away altogether. To my relief, the jibbering had stopped.
Then I heard a sudden anguished cry. I realized that the second voice was Alice’s—she’d used a spell of her own to end the jibber. The spirit of the girl was now free, but in torment. It knew that it was dead and trapped in limbo.
Now there was a third voice, deeper, male—one that I knew well. It was the Spook.
“Listen, girl,” he said. “You don’t have to stay here….”
Befuddled as I was, for a moment I thought he was talking to Alice; then I understood that he was addressing the spirit of the dead girl.
“Go to the light,” he commanded. “Go to the light now!”
There was a wail of anguish. “I can’t!” cried the spirit. “I’m lost in the mist. I can’t find my way.”
“The way is in front of you. Look carefully and you’ll see the path to the light.”
“I chose to end my life. That was wrong, and now I’m being punished!”
It was always much harder for suicides and those who had died sudden, violent deaths to find their way to the light. They sometimes wandered within the mists of limbo for years. But it could be done. A spook could help.
“You are punishing yourself unnecessarily,” my master told the girl’s spirit. “There’s no need. You were unhappy. You didn’t know what you were doing. I want you to think very carefully now. Have you a happy memory of your earlier life?”
“Yes. Yes. I have lots of happy memories….”
“Then what’s the happiest one—the happiest one of all?” he demanded.
“I was very young, no more than five or six years old. I was walking across a meadow, picking daisies with my mother on a warm, sunny morning, listening to the droning of the bees and the singing of the birds. Everything was fresh and bright and filled with hope. She made a chain out of the daisies and put it on my head. She said I was a princess and would one day meet a prince. But that’s just foolishness. Real life is very different. It can be cruel beyond measure. I met a man who I thought was like a prince, but he betrayed me.”
“Go back to that moment. Go back to the time when the future still lay ahead, full of warm promise and hope. Concentrate,” the Spook instructed. “You are there again now. Can you see it? Can you hear the birds? Your mother is beside you, holding your hand. Can you feel her hand?”
“Yes! Yes!” cried the spirit. “She’s squeezing my hand. She’s taking me somewhere….”
“She’s taking you toward the light!” exclaimed the Spook. “Can’t you see its brightness ahead?”
“I can see it! I can see the light! The mist has gone!”
“Then go! Enter the light. You’re going home!”
The spirit gave a sigh full of longing, then suddenly laughed. It was a joyful laugh, followed by utter silence. My master had done it. He had sent her to the light.
“Well,” he said ominously, “we need to talk about what’s happened here.”
Despite our success, he wasn’t happy. Alice had used dark magic to free the girl’s spirit from the spell.
CHAPTER III
THE VISITOR
DOWN in the kitchen, we ate a light supper of soda bread and ham. When we’d finished, the Spook pushed his plate aside and cleared his throat.
“Well, girl, tell me what you did.”
“The girl’s spirit was bound by a dark spell of compulsion,” said Alice. “It was trapped within the inn and forced to utter a spell, “Addle,” that drives anyone who hears it to the edge of madness. Scares them so much, it does, they’ll do anything to get away.”
“So what exactly did you do?” demanded the Spook impatiently. “Leave nothing out!”
“I used what Bony Lizzie once taught me,” Alice replied. “She was good at controlling the dead. Once she’d got what she wanted from them—so long as they hadn’t tried too hard to resist, she let them go. She needed another spell to release them. It’s called avaunt—an old word for ‘be gone.’”
“So despite all my warnings against it, you used dark magic again!”
“What else was I supposed to do?” Alice said, raising her voice in anger. “Salt and iron ain’t going to work! How could it when you were dealing with a young girl’s tortured spirit rather than something from the dark? And soon we’d all have been in real trouble. So I did what I had to do.”
“Good came out of it, too,” I said in support of Alice. “The girl’s spirit has gone to the light and the inn is once again safe.”
The Spook was clearly deeply worried but had little more to say. After all, he had already compromised his principles by allowing us to keep the blood jar. Sensing that his silence was mostly directed at her, Alice got to her feet and stamped off up the stairs to her room.
I looked at my master; I felt sad when I saw the hurt and dismay in his eyes. Over the past two years, a rift had gradually come between the three of us because of this use of dark magic. I had to try to make amends, but it was hard to know what to say.
“At least we dealt with the jibber,” I said. “I think I’ll write it up in my notebook.”
“Good idea, lad,” the Spook said, his face brightening a little. “I’ll make a fresh entry in my Bestiary, too. Whatever happens, we need to record the past and learn from it.”
So while I jotted a brief account of what had happened in my own notebook, the Spook pulled the Bestiary from his bag, the only book that had survived the burning of his house and library in Chipenden. For a while we both wrote in silence, and by coincidence finished our records at almost the same moment.
“I’ll be glad when the war’s over and it’s safe to return to Chipenden,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to get back to our normal routine….”
“Aye, lad, it would. I certainly miss the County, and I’m looking forward to rebuilding that house of mine.”
“It won’t be the same without the boggart, will it?” I commented.
The boggart had been a mostly invisible resident, occasionally appearing as a large ginger tomcat. It had served the Spook well in many ways, and had guarded the house and garden. When the house was burned down and the roof collapsed, the pact between my master and the boggart had ended. It had been free to leave.
“It certainly won’t. We’ll have to do our own cooking and cleaning, and you’ll be making the breakfasts. My poor old stomach will find that hard to cope with,” said the Sp
ook with the faintest of smiles. He always used to joke about my poor cooking, and it was good to see him attempting it again.
He looked a little more cheerful, and soon after that we went to bed. I felt nostalgic for our old life and wondered whether it had now gone forever.
However, the night’s terrors weren’t over yet. Back in my room, I made a horrific discovery.
I put my left hand into the pocket of my breeches and immediately realized what had caused the pain when I’d fallen on my side. It had been the blood jar.
Was it damaged? My heart sank into my boots. With a trembling hand I carefully withdrew the small jar from my pocket, carried it over to the candle, and examined it. I shuddered with fear. There was a crack running along almost half its length. Was the jar in danger of breaking? I wondered.
Close to panic, I went next door to Alice’s room and knocked softly. When she opened it, I showed her the jar. At first she looked as alarmed as I was, but after examining it thoroughly she smiled reassuringly.
“It seems all right, Tom. Just a fine crack, it is. Our blood’s still inside, which means we’re safe from the Fiend. They’re tough jars, those, and don’t break easily. We’re still all right, so don’t you worry.”
I went back to my room, relieved to find that we’d had such a lucky escape.
The word soon spread around the city that there was a spook who could deal with a jibber. So while we enjoyed the payment for our success—a week’s stay at the inn—we were visited by others seeking our help.
The Spook refused to work with Alice again, but grudgingly allowed me to do so. So the night after our first visitation, Alice and I set out to deal with another jibber, this one plaguing the back workroom of a watchmaker’s premises. The man had fallen into debt and had killed himself late one night after drinking too much wine. His relatives needed to sell the shop but couldn’t do so with a jibber in residence.
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