A New Darkness Read online

  So I planted a seed of happiness in his mind.

  Within days, he was planting his own seeds. By late summer his garden was in bloom, and in the autumn he was selling his own produce at market. He was smiling at everybody.

  What I’d achieved with the stallholder had given me an idea. Instead of continuing to meet anger with anger, I would strive to help my false father. I would try to make him feel better inside. Then his attitude toward me might change . . . at least he might leave me alone.

  Some weeks later, at dusk, I found him leaning on the wall at the foot of the garden. “It’s a nice evening, Dad,” I said pleasantly.

  “What’s nice about it?” he muttered angrily.

  I worked away inside his head, trying to improve his mood. As I did so, I put my idea to him.

  “This is quite a big garden,” I pointed out. “You could grow vegetables, and Mam could sell them at the market.”

  He shook his head dismissively. “There’s not enough land to make it worth the while.”

  “Then why don’t you take one of those allotments the village council is offering?” I persisted. “The rents are low. After a few years, you might even have grown and sold enough stuff to buy a small field of your own.”

  Recently a farmer had died and bequeathed to the council a large gift of land. They’d decided to parcel it up and make it available to the villagers for a nominal rent.

  “That’s pie in the sky.” He snorted. “Do you think I’ve strength left in my body to do that after working my fingers to the bone for others all day long?”

  “Mam could help you. I could help you a bit too. There are times when things are slack and there’s no farmwork. That would give you the chance to till your own bit of land, wouldn’t it?”

  He snorted again and went inside without a word. But I could sense the change in him. My idea had gotten him thinking. Within the week, he’d taken on an allotment.

  As I’d promised, I did help out from time to time. Having the allotment made him a lot happier. He was still a grumpy old devil, but he now had something to work for. He had a dream. He had hope.

  That’s all most people need.

  He never beat me again.

  As my powers developed, I began to wonder what other uses I could put them to. Would it be possible for them to provide me with a living in some way?

  Above all, I longed for independence; I wanted to make my own way in the world—not just be married off to some man my adoptive parents deemed suitable.

  But I feared that if I used my skills to help people, I might be seen as a witch. They hanged witches at Caster. Even worse, witch finders sometimes visited the County and tortured the witches they found. They swam them in ponds: if the women sank, they were declared innocent; those who floated were considered guilty and were burned at a stake. They died either way. It was too dangerous to sell my skills, I realized.

  Then one afternoon, about eighteen months after I met my true mother, I witnessed something that pointed to the answer to my problem.

  I had a wanderlust that by now took me all over the County, much farther afield than my first journeys. Sometimes I stayed away from home for over a week at a time. Far to the south of Priestown, I was exploring a small town called Salford when I saw a big man dragging a small skinny woman through the market by her hair. She was shrieking and screaming and it was terrible to watch, but not one person from the busy market interfered.

  I asked one of the stallholders why the man was doing that.

  “She’s a witch,” the trader replied with a scowl, polishing an apple on his dirty apron. “That’s Spook Johnson. He has at least fifteen witches in pits. He’s got a big garden, but he’s going to run out of space soon. He does a good job keeping us all safe from the evil eye.”

  I’d heard of spooks before, but Johnson was the first I’d ever seen. I knew that these men fought the dark and dealt with witches, boggarts, and ghosts, keeping farms and villages safe. My know-it-all foster dad thought they were frauds; he didn’t believe in creatures from the dark. I did. By now I’d seen at least three ghosts and often sensed unseen things in dark, quiet places.

  It was horrible to watch Johnson at work, but it also fascinated me, and the seed of an idea started to germinate within my head. I hung around Salford for a few days and managed to find out where he lived. I learned that he had a big house on the edge of town, and I studied it from a distance. It was built of ugly brown stone with rusty iron railings around the garden and a thick hawthorn hedge so that you couldn’t see inside. But I could hear noises—faint groans and the occasional scream.

  Then I made a mistake. A big one.

  Spook Johnson caught me spying on him.

  He ran at me through the trees, roaring like a bull, and grabbed me by the shoulder, spinning me around to face him.

  “What you want, girl?” he demanded in a big booming voice. “Been spying on me, have you? Don’t try to deny it. I’ve seen you watching me!”

  I was really scared. He looked hard and cruel, and I don’t think he knew how to smile. To make it worse, he had really big ears with tufts of brown hair sprouting from within them. Some people shudder at spiders. For me, it’s hairy ears. They’re revolting.

  “I was just curious,” I told him, trembling with fear.

  “Curious? Curious! Don’t you know what curiosity did? It killed the cat. Well, little kitten, I’ll give you two minutes to explain yourself. And if you can’t, you’re going into a pit. My guess is that you’re either a witch or the relative of one of those I’ve got bound in my garden. Thinking of a way to help her escape, were you? So which is it, eh? Come on, speak up!”

  I was already slipping into his mind, trying to change his mood. Not everybody was susceptible to my gifts, and he was harder to affect than most folk, but suddenly I felt his anger soften, and he began to relent.

  “I want to be a spook!” I blurted out, putting into words what had been spinning around in my head for days. “I want you to train me!”

  My words sent him into fits of laughter. “You’re just a slip of a girl and still wet behind the ears!” he roared. “You have to be a seventh son of a seventh son to be taken on as a spook’s apprentice. Be off with you! Get back to your mother. Learn how to be a seamstress or, even better, a good obedient wife—that’s what a girl like you should aspire to. Be off with you, I say, before I change my mind about that pit!”

  I ran away while I could and went back to Grimsargh, raging at the way Spook Johnson had treated me. Some men were pigs! But the idea of becoming a spook’s apprentice was growing inside my head. I was becoming more set on it.

  It would be the ideal job for me. I could see the dead, and no doubt with training I could talk to them as well. I felt sure that my gifts fitted me to become a spook, especially when I learned that the basic qualification to become a spook’s apprentice was to be a seventh son of a seventh son.

  My dream suddenly seemed possible. I was the seventh of a seventh too. No doubt spooks had similar gifts to mine. I already knew that they could talk to the dead. So boy or girl, what difference did it make? I knew now that, being a girl, I’d find it hard to get a spook to take me on. But I’d never been one to give up easily; I hated the way men seemed to make up all the rules and decide how the world was run. Things could change, couldn’t they? I would make them change! Then I would have a job that gave me real independence; I could make my own way in the world without having to rely on marriage.

  Soon after encountering Spook Johnson, on the night of the full moon, I became aware of a new ability—my fourth gift. I could make myself almost invisible. My success at this depended on conditions. It was much easier in low light, when I cast no sharp shadows. I also had to keep very still; some folk had sharper eyes than others.

  Yes, a spook’s apprentice was the trade for me. Johnson hadn’t been right for me, but that didn’t mean all spooks were the same. To my delight, I found out that the best spook in the whole County was based
in Chipenden, not more than eight miles or so from where I lived.

  His name was John Gregory.

  So I went to Chipenden and asked around. His master before him had been called Henry Horrocks, and since his death, John Gregory had been doing the job for more than sixty years. He had lots of experience. He would be a good master, an ideal person to train me.

  Then I received a big disappointment, another setback.

  He already had an apprentice—a boy called Tom Ward.

  For a while my dream faded. I traveled farther in search of the right master and found out that spooks were in short supply. I heard there was one working north of Caster, so I tried him. His name was Judd Brinscall, and I talked to him a couple of times, but he wasn’t much better than Spook Johnson; he got so sick of my pestering that he set his fierce dogs on me.

  I’d almost given up when, a few months later, I learned that John Gregory had been killed fighting some witches. It was the talk of the villages. Witches had arrived in the County in large numbers, scaring folk, threatening them and thieving. Eventually there’d been some sort of big battle east of Caster that had put an end to the invasion, but John Gregory had been killed. They said that, although only just turned seventeen, his apprentice, Tom Ward, was now the Chipenden Spook.

  I heard people talking about him. Some thought he was still wet behind the ears—far too young for the job. Others had kinder words. They said he was polite, hardworking, and brave. In Chipenden it was said that, as a new apprentice, still well short of his thirteenth birthday, he’d saved a young child from the clutches of a dangerous witch.

  Whatever his gifts, it didn’t sound very promising. Surely he wasn’t much more than an apprentice himself, too young to train someone else. . . . But I went to Chipenden anyway to have a look at him.

  I liked him at first sight.

  He was young but really good-looking, apart from a faint scar that ran down his cheek. He seemed nice, but my gift of empathy told me that he was in torment. He was full of sadness at the death of his master; there was anger there too. He had been very fond of a girl who had eventually betrayed him.

  Before I approached him, I found out as much information as I could. I was delighted to learn that we shared a birthday—the third of August. It was a sign, and he was exactly two years older than I was. This time I was much more careful than when I’d spied on Spook Johnson; I used my gift of invisibility.

  Finally he agreed to train me.

  What I have dreamed of has finally happened.

  At last I am a spook’s apprentice!

  16

  The Bones of Little Children

  TWO days ago, the bell rang at the crossroads. I perked up at that. At last there might be some local spook’s business to deal with, the traditional County sort that many generations of apprentices had cut their teeth on. Tom had begun my training, and it was interesting, but this was the real thing!

  So, carrying my staff and Tom Ward’s bag, and wearing my new cloak, I followed him toward the withy trees, excited at the prospect of some sort of adventure. Little did I know how it would turn out and how differently I would feel afterward.

  I could feel the sadness emanating from the woman’s mind even before we moved into the gloom beneath the willows and saw her properly. She was in torment. She’d stopped ringing the bell and was standing with her back against a tree trunk, with tears streaming down her face. She was young, no more than twenty-five, but her face was haggard with grief.

  “My little girl’s missing!” she cried out as we approached. “A witch has her!”

  “Where are you from?” Tom asked calmly, with a sympathetic smile.

  “Ribchester,” she sobbed.

  It was a village southeast of the Long Ridge, less than half a day’s walk away. I’d visited it more than once on my travels.

  “And when did your child go missing?” Tom asked. “It might just be that she wandered off. . . . Why are you so sure that a witch is involved?”

  My initial excitement faded a little. Tom was right. The child might just have wandered off and gotten lost. Things like that happened all the time. There’d been an old woman in our village who some people thought was a witch. But it was just a lot of nonsense. She was lonely and talked to her cat, that was all. This might not be spook’s business after all.

  “I look after my daughter well!” the woman snapped angrily. “I wouldn’t allow her to wander off and get into danger. Yesterday, just after dusk, I went into the garden through the back door to peg out some washing. I’d left her sitting on her little stool by the kitchen hearth, eating a biscuit. I wasn’t away more than a couple of minutes. When I got back, she was gone. The witch had come in through the front door and taken her. The door was blowing in the wind, slamming back against the bricks. That door had been locked.”

  Tom stared at her silently. I could sense his concern growing.

  “What’s your daughter’s name?” I asked.

  “Katie, her name’s Katie, and she’s only three.”

  I began to wonder if this might be the work of another Kobalos beast, but the woman’s reply to Tom Ward’s next question confirmed that it was indeed a witch.

  “You’ve searched the whole area thoroughly, no doubt?” he asked.

  The woman nodded, tears streaming down her face. “We know where she is, but nobody dares go there. Even the men are scared. Five of them, led by my husband, set off with dogs to track Katie. They found the witch’s cottage, all right, but could do nothing. Ahead of them, they heard the dogs howling in the darkness, as if they were being skinned alive. Then they fell quiet, and before the men knew what was happening, something truly monstrous attacked them. When they returned to the village, my husband had to be carried. He’s maimed for life—his kneecap’s shattered and his leg’s broken in three places. They spoke of a huge invisible creature that came through the trees and smashed his leg. It’s made a cripple of him. He won’t be able to do farmwork anymore. How will we live?”

  I’d been looking forward to going out on a job with Tom, but this was beginning to sound really scary.

  “Who is this witch?” Tom asked, frowning. “What does she call herself?”

  “She calls herself Bibby Longtooth and she’s an incomer. She’s only been in the area for about a month. She talks funny. Somebody said she was from down south, somewhere in Essex.”

  Without delay, we set off for Ribchester with the woman, whose name we learned was Margaret. We didn’t talk much, but Margaret continued to sob all the way. She was so upset that I found it difficult to be near her. Her anguish seeped into my mind. I experienced her sorrow and torment as if it was my own; I couldn’t keep it at bay.

  When we reached the village, we talked to Margaret’s husband. He kept breaking down and crying too. I don’t like watching men cry. They try to be strong most of the time, so when they go to pieces like this, you know it’s really bad. Mostly, I knew, he was crying for his missing child, who he didn’t expect to see again, but he also cried for himself and for his hopeless future.

  This was the first time I’d seen Tom in action since he’d rescued me from the beast. He seemed very businesslike. A little cold, maybe, but you probably need to remain slightly aloof to function as a spook. You had to keep your anger and fear locked inside in order to do what had to be done.

  The sun was going down as we left the village and the weeping parents behind. I was feeling really nervous about confronting this witch. And what was the creature that had crippled the father? I asked Tom about it.

  “It’s called a thumper,” he explained as we walked. “It probably killed the dogs, too. It’s part spirit—an elemental born in a dark place—and part spell. The witch will have used dark magic to bind it to her will and strengthen its malevolent power. No doubt it patrols the area around her cottage to drive people away. It should be easy enough to deal with, using salt and iron . . . providing I don’t miss!” He gave a grim smile. “But it’s dangerous, make no
mistake about it. A thumper can kill. If anything happens to me, turn and run away as fast as you can.”

  “What about the witch?” I asked.

  “My silver chain should do the trick!” he said. “It never fails!”

  “Providing you don’t miss!” My joke fell flat, even to my own ears, though Tom managed the ghost of a smile. “Will she try to use dark magic against us?” I went on.

  “That’s more than likely. But a seventh son of a seventh son has some immunity to witchcraft. Let’s hope that’s also the case for a seventh daughter. We’re about to find out, I suppose. Don’t worry too much. You’re just here as an observer, to watch me and learn. It’ll be over before you can blink.”

  By the time we reached the cottage, it was quite dark. A cold wind sighed through the trees, and the sky was patchy with fast-moving clouds. The moon was up there somewhere, but at the moment it was hidden from view.

  Tom pointed up through the trees. They were mainly sycamore and ash and covered a small hill, with the cottage at its summit. I could see a faint flickering light in the distance.

  “That’s a candle in one of the cottage windows,” he said, “so I’m pretty sure she’s at home. It would be better to wait until daybreak, but there’s a slim chance that the child’s still alive. It’s dangerous, but we have to take the risk. It’s our duty, and we always put that before our own lives. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said, beginning to tremble with fear. I sensed that Tom was nervous as well, but you wouldn’t have guessed it by looking at him. And there were other things emanating from him, too: determination, fear for the child, and a sense of duty.

  “Whatever you do, Jenny, stay close behind me,” he instructed. “First I’ll deal with the thumper, and then the witch.”

  He entered the trees, and I followed, carrying his bag and both our staffs. Tom needed his hands free. He had salt and iron in his pockets, and the silver chain was tied loosely around his waist.