Wardstone 7 - The Spook's Nightmare (29 page)

‘She’s running straight for the headland. We’ve cut her off from the port. She’s nowhere to go now but the salty sea!’ shouted the Spook.

He was right. Lizzie was running directly towards the cliffs. Very soon we would face the last of her power. How strong was she still? Would the five of us be able to overcome her? It was far from certain, but we had to try.

It was then that disaster struck. Alice slipped on the wet grass and went down hard. I stopped and helped her up, but when she tried to put weight on her left foot, it buckled under her and she fell to her knees. As the Spook raced past us, he turned to shout at me: ‘Leave the girl, lad! We’ll come back for her later. I
need you with me! Now!’ He ran on towards the cliffs, his footsteps fading into the distance.

‘Yes, leave me, Tom! My ankle’s sprained. He’s right – he’ll need all the help he can get to beat Lizzie. She’s still strong.’

‘No, Alice, we stick together,’ I told her, putting my arm under her left shoulder and lifting her back onto her feet. ‘You know why we can’t risk being separated …’

Alice could only limp forward slowly, grunting with pain.

The witch had nowhere left to run. She turned her back on the sea to face the Spook, Adriana and Simon. They’d slowed to a walking pace but continued to advance along a narrow spur of grass that jutted out above the sea. The waves crashed onto the rocks below before drawing back to surge forward once more.

At first nothing happened; then, very suddenly, like a blow to my solar plexus, I felt Lizzie’s power again. It took my breath away, almost stopped my heart. But it wasn’t
dread
or any other spell designed to
immobilize us while she took our lives with her blade. It was a spell of compulsion. I was consumed by a strong urge to run forward and throw myself off the cliff. I wanted to fall onto the rocks and break into little pieces; to become nothing – as if I’d never been born.

I fought back but she was too strong. I saw the waves far below. I had never wanted anything so much.

Far ahead, the Spook had fallen into a crouching position, his staff still in his left hand. With his right he was clutching a tussock of grass as if that would somehow anchor him to the cliff-top. But then, to my dismay, Simon suddenly sprinted directly towards the cliff edge. I realized that he was going to throw himself over!

I heard Adriana scream, a long wail of anguish and loss. Simon had jumped out into nothingness, and was gone. Under the compulsion of Lizzie’s dark magic he’d hurled himself over the edge to his death.

Ahead, Adriana was stretching her arms above her head and pointing towards the sky, arching her back just as Lizzie had earlier. Then she began to chant,
hurling her words up into the firmament. She was speaking in the Old Tongue, gabbling far too quickly for me to understand.

In answer came a peal of thunder and a flash of sheet lightning, and suddenly, far above us, the heavens were filled with birds. There were crows, ravens, black-birds, finches and swallows – and a single magpie …one for sorrow.

Alice and I had almost reached the cliff, and I heard Adriana utter four more words very slowly and clearly. Even with my poor command of the Old Tongue, these were easy to translate. It was a command: ‘Peck out her eyes!’

From the smallest to the largest the birds obeyed, swooping down in unison to attack the witch. For a moment Lizzie was hidden from our sight, buffeted to and fro by the frenzied, screeching birds.

But she was not to be defeated so easily. There was an intense flash of light and a blast of hot air that made me close my eyes. When I opened them again, the birds were screaming, falling out of the sky, wings aflame.
Some dropped, blackened, burned and twitching, onto the cliff-top; others fell down towards the sea, trailing smoke. Lizzie had blasted them out of the sky.

Adriana let out a great sob and rushed towards her, but the bone witch seized her by the throat and lifted her off her feet.

I knew what was going to happen: I let go of Alice and stumbled forward to try and help her, but the world was still spinning about me and I was forced to my knees, hard pressed just to stay on the cliff-top, still consumed by the desire to throw myself onto the rocks.

As I watched, horrified, Lizzie hurled Adriana over the cliff. As she fell towards the rocks, she gave a shrill cry like a bird. Then she was gone.

A
gloating smile settled over Lizzie’s face.

‘Do you know why the boy stayed behind with the girl instead of coming to help you?’ she asked the Spook. ‘Do you know why he disobeyed you? He needs her more than anything else in the world, and she’s just as soft on him. Your apprentice sold his soul to the Fiend, and now the only thing that’s keeping him and the girl safe is a blood jar. That’s why they have to stay together. He’s using dark magic to save the both of them. That’s just one step short of belonging to the dark!’

The Spook staggered to his feet and looked at me, and as our eyes met, I saw on his face a mixture of
sadness and disappointment. I’d let him down. I wasn’t the apprentice he thought I was.

Lizzie laughed long and loud, and the ugly sound was filled with triumph, with the knowledge that the dark had won.

But the battle wasn’t over yet. Adriana was dead, but her final cry hadn’t merely been one of pain and shock; it had been a command. Fresh raucous caws sounded overhead, and I saw a large flock of circling seagulls – the fierce aggressive birds that Alice had once called ‘rats with wings’.

Suddenly they swooped towards the witch, their harsh piercing screams filling the air. Bony Lizzie waved her arms to scare them off, whirling them about like a windmill in a gale. Perhaps she’d exhausted her power, or maybe there were just too many of them and she never had time to gather herself to with-stand the attack. The gulls dived straight for her, eager talons outstretched. Soon all I could see was birds, a chaotic turmoil of beating wings and stabbing beaks.

For a moment I glimpsed Lizzie’s head again. Her hands covered her face and blood ran down between her fingers. She staggered towards the cliff edge, leaning back at an impossible angle. Her eyes were black sockets in the moonlight, her mouth wide open in a scream, the sound lost amongst the shrieking of the birds. The seagulls obscured her again; when they soared upwards, she was gone.

I ran to the cliff and peered down. For a moment her broken body was visible below. Then a big wave engulfed her, its ebb dragging her into the sea’s salty embrace. The bone witch was no more.

‘Well, that’s the end of her, lad,’ the Spook said, walking up to stand beside me. ‘If she’s not dead already, that salty sea will kill her quickly. Then she’ll be food for the fishes. They’ll eat the heart and everything. She won’t be coming back.’

‘Poor Adriana and Simon have gone as well,’ I said sadly. I could see no trace of their bodies on the rocks below. The sea had taken them too.

My master nodded. ‘Aye, that was a bad business,
lad – but that girl helped to save our lives. She was a witch all right – no doubt about it!’

‘But what kind of witch was she?’ I asked. ‘She didn’t use blood or bone magic and didn’t have a familiar.’

‘She was something new to me, lad. I’ve certainly never met her like before. Maybe she simply had a special ability, one that can’t be learned and passed on to others.’

‘Adriana was a
benign
witch,’ I insisted.

My master didn’t reply. I knew he didn’t agree. Adriana had used some kind of magic to kill. To his way of thinking, the fact that she’d killed Lizzie, a malevolent witch, was irrelevant. She had still employed the dark.

I heard a noise behind us, and turned to see Alice limping along. The Spook looked at us in turn. ‘What Lizzie said about you selling your soul and employing a blood jar … please set my mind at ease and tell me she was lying,’ he said quietly.

‘I can’t,’ I said, bowing my head. ‘It’s true. I owe the
Fiend my soul. Alice made a blood jar, and that’s the only thing keeping him away. That’s why I couldn’t leave her behind. If I do, the Fiend will claim her in revenge for saving me.’

‘Why did you give him your soul?’ he asked, frowning at me. ‘What sort of a fool would sell his soul to the Fiend?’

‘I did it at Meteora, in Greece. It’s a long story, but without that we’d all be dead now, and the whole world – not just the County – would be at risk …’

The Spook sighed; it was a sound filled with sadness and a hint of despair. ‘We’ll find somewhere to rest,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m weary. We’ll talk in the morning.’

His head bowed, he turned and began to walk away, heading back towards the mill, where we needed to collect our bags. Once he had his back to us, Alice put her hand in the pocket of her skirt and drew out some objects, flinging them over the cliff and into the sea. They gleamed silver in the moonlight as they fell, the same colour as the tears that glistened in her eyes.

They were the thumb-bones of the shaman.

* * *

Luckily we quickly stumbled upon the ruin of a cottage. There were just three walls standing, and no roof, but it provided some shelter, and fortunately it didn’t rain again, so we settled down there for the rest of the night.

We awoke at dawn, cold and stiff, and the Spook set about building a fire while I went off to catch rabbits for our breakfast. I only managed to get one, which I skinned and gutted before Alice cooked it. There wasn’t really enough to go round but it took the edge off my hunger.

As we ate, it began to drizzle, and dark clouds gathered from the west. There was worse weather to come.

At last there came the full reckoning.

‘Right, it’s time to talk!’ commanded the Spook. ‘Don’t leave anything out. I want to know everything. I don’t care how bad it is, I want to know it all. Let’s start with you, girl. Tell me about the blood jar. Did you fashion it?’

Alice nodded.

‘Am I right in thinking you’ve put your own blood in it – the blood of a daughter of the Fiend – and the blood of my apprentice, Tom?’

Alice nodded again and bowed her head.

‘Well, lad, I’m finding this hard to believe. You actually gave your own blood for the purposes of a dark magic spell?’

‘No!’ Alice cried defiantly. ‘Ain’t true, that. Tom was unconscious when I took it. Back in Greece, there was a rock-fall in a cave. Knocked out, he was, so I took three drops of his blood and added them to mine in the jar. Tom didn’t even know about it. It was only later, when the Fiend came for him, that I pushed it into his hand. After that Tom had to keep it on him to stop the Fiend coming back and dragging him off to the dark. I have to stay close to Tom as well, else he’ll take his revenge on me!’

‘So tell me what you got for your soul,’ the Spook asked.

I explained how the Fiend had given me three
things: the location of our terrible enemy, the Ordeen; a delay of one hour before she awoke; and, finally, the lives of him and Alice, who were facing imminent death.

‘Not only that, he showed me the future,’ I said. ‘Thousands would have been massacred that day – men, women and children. Had the Ordeen won, the County would have been the next place to be destroyed. In the past I’ve resisted the temptations of the dark – even when the lives of my own family were at risk. This time it was the County in danger. And you’ve always taught me that we protect it, and that our first duty is to the County and its people. So in the end that’s why I did it. Not for Alice, not for you – for the County. It seemed worth my soul at the time.’

‘Show me,’ the Spook said quietly.

I reached into my breeches pocket and pulled out the small jar. I held it in my open palm so that he could see it properly.

‘Give it to me,’ my master ordered.

‘It’s dangerous even to let it out of my possession—’

‘Hand it over, lad!’ he commanded angrily, raising his voice.

Nervously I did as he asked. He peered at it closely, and for a moment his fingers gripped the stopper. One twist and it would be open, and he could pour away the drops of blood. My heart was in my mouth.

‘What if I were to smash this now, or drain it of its contents?’ he asked me. ‘Could the girl make another?’

‘Ain’t possible to make another to save Tom,’ said Alice. ‘You can only use a spell like that once.’

‘And it would be the end of me and Alice,’ I added. ‘The Fiend would come for us. We’d be dead and our souls dragged off to the dark. You too probably – he wouldn’t spare the life of a spook.’

‘Don’t try to scare me, lad. I’ll do what’s right, whatever the cost.’

‘I wasn’t trying to scare you. Just telling you how things are. I’ve thought about it a lot,’ I retorted.

‘Would he come right away?’ asked the Spook, looking thoughtful. ‘Tell me that, girl. You made it, so
you should know. I’ve never encountered this type of jar before.’

‘Could be here in the blink of an eye,’ Alice told him.

‘What a miserable existence you’ve got ahead of you,’ said the Spook, shaking his head. ‘Living in fear with just this little jar standing between you and a terrible fate. Then, when you die, which is inevitable, the Fiend will be waiting for you. He’ll collect your soul the minute you draw your last breath.’