The Spook's Apprentice (9 page)

The directions I was given turned out to be pretty good. Even allowing for going back to pick up Alice’s basket, it was less than an hour before Lizzie’s house came into view.

At that point, in bright sunlight, I lifted the cloth and examined the last of the three cakes. It smelled bad but looked even worse. It seemed to have been made from small pieces of meat and bread, plus other things that I couldn’t identify. It was wet and very sticky and almost black. None of the ingredients had been cooked but just sort of pressed together. Then I noticed something even more horrible. There were tiny white things crawling on the cake which looked like maggots.

I shuddered, covered it up with the cloth and went down the hill to the very neglected farm. Fences were broken, the barn was missing half its roof and there was no sign of any animals.

One thing did worry me though. Smoke was coming from the farmhouse chimney. It meant that someone was at home and I began to worry about the thing with too many teeth to fit into its mouth.

What had I expected? It was going to be difficult. How on earth could I manage to talk to Alice without being seen by the other members of her family?

As I halted on the slope, trying to work out what to do next, my problem was solved for me. A slim, dark figure came out of the back door of the farmhouse and began to climb the hill directly towards me. It was Alice - but how had she known I was there? There were trees between the farmhouse and me, and the windows were facing in the wrong direction.

Still, she wasn’t coming up the hill by chance. She walked straight up towards me and halted about five paces away.

‘What do you want?’ she hissed. ‘You’re stupid coming here. Lucky for you that those inside are asleep.’

‘I can’t do what you asked,’ I said, holding out the basket towards her.

She folded her arms and frowned. ‘Why not?’ she demanded. ‘You promised, didn’t you?’

‘You didn’t tell me what would happen,’ I said. ‘She’s eaten two cakes already and they’re making her stronger. She’s already bent the bars over the pit. One more cake and she’ll be free and I think you know it. Wasn’t that the idea all along?’ I accused, starting to feel angry. ‘You tricked me so the promise doesn’t count any more.’

She took a step towards me, but now her own anger had been replaced by something else. Suddenly she looked scared.

‘It wasn’t my idea. They made me do it,’ she said, gesturing down towards the farmhouse. ‘If you don’t do as you promised it’ll go hard with both of us. Go on, give her the third cake. What harm can it do? Mother Malkin’s paid the price. It’s time to let her go. Go on, give her the cake and she’ll be gone tonight and never trouble you again.’

‘I think Mr Gregory must’ve had a very good reason for putting her in that pit,’ I said slowly. ‘I’m just his new apprentice, so how can I know what’s best? When he gets back I’m going to tell him everything that’s happened.’

Alice gave a little smile - the sort of smile someone gives when they know something that you don’t. ‘He ain’t coming back,’ she said. ‘Lizzie thought of it all. Got good friends near Pendle, Lizzie has. Do anything for her, they would. They tricked Old Gregory. When he’s on the road he’ll get what’s coming to him. By now he’s probably already dead and six feet under. You just wait and see if I’m right. Soon you won’t be safe even up there in his house. One night they’ll come for you. Unless, of course, you help now. In that case, they might just leave you alone.’

As soon as she’d said that, I turned my back and climbed the hill, leaving her standing there. I think she called out to me several times, but I wasn’t listening. What she’d said about the Spook was spinning around inside my head.

It was only later that I realized I was still carrying the basket, so I threw it and the last of the cakes into a river; then, back at the Spook’s cottage, it didn’t take me very long to work out what had happened and decide what to do next.

The whole thing had been planned from the start. They’d lured the Spook away, knowing that, as a new apprentice, I’d still be wet behind the ears and easy to trick.

I didn’t believe that the Spook would be so easy to kill or he wouldn’t have survived for so many years, but I couldn’t rely on him arriving back in time to help me. Somehow I had to stop Mother Malkin getting out of the pit.

I needed help badly and I thought of going down to the village, but I knew there was a more special kind of help near at hand. So I went into the kitchen and sat at the table.

At any moment I expected to have my ears boxed, so I talked quickly. I explained everything that had happened, leaving nothing out. Then I said that it was my fault and could I please be given some help.

I don’t know what I expected. I didn’t feel foolish talking to the empty air because I was so upset and frightened, but as the silence lengthened, I gradually realized that I’d been wasting my time. Why should the boggart help me? For all I knew it was a prisoner, bound to the house and garden by the Spook. It might just be a slave, desperate to be free; it might even be happy because I was in trouble.

Just when I was about to give up and leave the kitchen, I remembered something my dad often said before we went off to the local market: ‘Everyone has his price. It’s just a case of making an offer that pleases him but doesn’t hurt you too much.’

So I made the boggart an offer ...

‘If you help me now, I won’t forget it,’ I said. ‘When I become the next Spook, I’ll give you every Sunday off. On that day I’ll make my own meals so that you can have a rest and please yourself what you do.’

Suddenly I felt something brush against my legs under the table. There was a noise too, a faint purring, and a big ginger cat strolled into view and moved slowly towards the door.

It must have been under the table all the time - that’s what common sense told me. I knew different though, so I followed the cat out into the hallway and then up the stairs, where it halted outside the locked door of the library. Then it rubbed its back against it, the way cats do against table legs. The door slowly swung open to reveal more books than anyone could ever have read in one lifetime, arranged neatly on rows of parallel racks of shelves. I stepped inside, wondering where to begin. And when I turned round again, the big ginger cat had vanished.

Each book had its title neatly displayed on the cover. A lot were written in Latin and quite a few in Greek. There was no dust or cobwebs. The library was just as clean and well cared for as the kitchen.

I walked along the first row until something caught my eye. Near the window there were three very long shelves full of leather-bound notebooks, just like the one the Spook had given me, but the top shelf had larger books with dates on the covers. Each one seemed to record a period of five years, so I picked up the one at the end of the shelf and opened it carefully.

I recognized the Spook’s handwriting. Flicking through the pages, I realized that it was a sort of diary. It recorded each job he’d done, the time taken in travelling and the amount he’d been paid. Most importantly, it explained just how each boggart, ghost and witch had been dealt with.

I put the book back on the shelf and glanced along the other spines. The diaries extended almost up to the present day but went back hundreds of years. Either the Spook was a lot older than he looked or the earlier books had been written by other spooks who’d lived ages ago. I suddenly wondered whether, even if Alice was right and the Spook didn’t come back, there was a possibility that I might be able to learn all I needed to know just by studying those diaries. Better still, somewhere in those thousands upon thousands of pages there might be information that would help me now.

How could I find it? Well, it might take time, but the witch had been in the pit for almost thirteen years. There had to be an account of how the Spook had put her there. Then, suddenly, on a lower shelf, I saw something even better.

There were even bigger books, each dedicated to a particular topic. One was labelled, Dragons and Wormes. As they were displayed in alphabetical order, it didn’t take me long to find just what I was looking for.

Witches.

I opened it with trembling hands to find it was divided into four predictable sections ...

The Malevolent, The Benign, The Falsely Accused and The Unaware.

I quickly turned to the first section. Everything was in the Spook’s neat handwriting and, once again, carefully organized into alphabetical order. Within seconds I found a page titled:
Mother Malkin
.

It was worse than I’d expected. Mother Malkin was just about as evil as you could imagine. She’d lived in lots of places, and in each area she’d stayed something terrible had happened, the worst thing of all occurring on a moss to the west of the County.

She’d lived on a farm there, offering a place to stay to young women who were expecting babies but had no husbands to support them. That was where she’d got the title ‘Mother’. This had gone on for years, but some of the young women had never been seen again.

She’d had a son of her own living with her there, a young man of incredible strength called Tusk. He had big teeth and frightened people so much that nobody ever went near the place. But at last the locals had roused themselves and Mother Malkin had been forced to flee to Pendle. After she’d gone they’d found the first of the graves. There was a whole field of bones and rotting flesh, mainly the remains of the children she’d murdered to supply her need for blood. Some of the bodies were those of women; in each case the body had been crushed, the ribs broken or cracked.

The lads in the village had talked about a thing with too many teeth to fit in its mouth. Could that be Tusk, Mother Malkin’s son? A son who’d probably killed those women by crushing the life out of them?

That set my hands trembling so much that I could hardly hold the book steady enough to read it. It seemed that some witches used ‘bone magic’. They were necromancers who got their power by summoning the dead. But Mother Malkin was even worse. Mother Malkin used ‘blood magic’. She got her power by using human blood and was particularly fond of the blood of children.

I thought of the black, sticky cakes and shuddered. A child had gone missing from the Long Ridge. A child too young to walk. Had it been snatched by Bony Lizzie? Had its blood been used to make those cakes? And what about the second child, the one the villagers were searching for? What if Bony Lizzie had snatched that one too, ready for when Mother Malkin escaped from her pit so that she could use its blood to work her magic? The child might be in Lizzie’s house now!

I forced myself to go on reading.

Thirteen years ago, early in the winter, Mother Malkin had come to live in Chipenden, bringing her granddaughter, Bony Lizzie, with her. When he’d come back from his winter house in Anglezarke, the Spook had wasted no time in dealing with her. After driving Bony Lizzie off, he’d bound Mother Malkin with a silver chain and carried her back to the pit in his garden.

The Spook seemed to be arguing with himself in the account. He clearly didn’t like burying her alive but explained why it had to be done. He believed that it was too dangerous to kill her: once slain, she had the power to return and would be even stronger and more dangerous than before.

The point was, could she still escape? One cake and she’d been able to bend the bars. Although she wouldn’t get the third, two might just be enough. At midnight she might still climb out of the pit. What could I do?

If you could bind a witch with a silver chain, then it might have been worth trying to fasten one across the top of the bent bars to stop her climbing out of her pit. The trouble was, the Spook’s silver chain was in his bag, which always travelled with him.

I saw something else as I left that library. It was beside the door, so I hadn’t noticed it as I came in. It was a long list of names on yellow paper, exactly thirty and all written in the Spook’s own handwriting. My own name,
Thomas J. Ward
, was at the very bottom, and directly above it was the name
William Bradley
, which had been crossed out with a horizontal line; next to it were the letters
RIP
.

I felt cold all over then because I knew that they meant Rest in Peace and that Billy Bradley had died. More than two thirds of the names on the paper had been crossed off; of those, another nine were dead.

I supposed that a lot were crossed out simply because they’d failed to make the grade as apprentices, perhaps not even making it to the end of the first month. Those who had died were more worrying. I wondered what had happened to Billy Bradley and I remembered what Alice had said: ‘
You don’t want to end up like Old Gregory’s last apprentice
.’

How did Alice know what had happened to Billy? It was probably just that everybody in the locality knew about it, whereas I was an outsider. Or had her family had something to do with it? I hoped not, but it gave me something else to worry about.

Wasting no more time, I went down to the village. The butcher seemed to have some contact with the Spook. How else had he got the sack to put the meat into? So I decided to tell him about my suspicions and try to persuade him to search Lizzie’s house for the missing child.

It was late in the afternoon when I arrived at his shop and it was closed. I knocked on the doors of five cottages before anyone came to answer. They confirmed what I already suspected: the butcher had gone off with the other men to search the fells. They wouldn’t be back until noon the following day. It seemed that after searching the local fells, they were going to cross the valley to the village at the foot of the Long Ridge, where the first child had gone missing. There they’d carry out a wider search and stay overnight.