Spook's Destiny (4 page)

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
move, 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 towards 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.

DOWN IN THE
kitchen, we ate a light supper of soda bread and gammon. When we’d finished, the Spook pushed his plate aside and cleared his throat.

‘Well, girl, tell me what you did.’

‘The maid’s spirit was bound by a dark spell of compulsion,’ said Alice. ‘It was trapped within the inn and forced to utter a Befuddle spell 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 have all 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 and 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 – the only book that had survived the burning of his house and library in Chipenden – from his bag. 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 tom cat. 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 Spook 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 for ever.

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 now 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.

The encounter mirrored the first one at the inn almost exactly. After the rhythmic raps, a column of light appeared, and the spirit began its deadly work. However, it had hardly begun to jibber and jabber at us before Alice countered it with a spell. She did better than me, shutting it up quickly; for my part, I needed three attempts afterwards to send the spirit of the watchmaker to the light. It was no easy task: he’d had a difficult life, always counting his money and worrying about losing it. He didn’t have many happy memories that I could draw upon. But at last I managed it, and his spirit was free.

But then something happened that filled me with dismay. Beside the workbench I saw a shimmer, and a column of grey light appeared. It seemed that another spirit had joined us. And there, close to the top of the column, was a pair of eyes glaring at me with extreme malice. One was green and the other blue; they looked very like the ones that I had seen in the storm cloud, and I stepped back in alarm.

Then the column of light shimmered and a woman stood before us. She wasn’t present in the flesh – she was translucent, the candle on the workbench behind visible through her dark gown; it was her image projected from somewhere else. Suddenly I recognized her face. It was the witch that Bill Arkwright had killed.

I looked again, and with a stab of fright realized that this was the witch from my recurring dream.

‘I hope you enjoyed my storm!’ she cried, a gloating expression in her strange eyes. ‘I could have drowned you then, but I’m saving you for later. I have something else in mind! I’ve been waiting for you, boy! With jibbers to be dealt with, I knew you’d show up. How do you like them? It’s the best spell I’ve cast for many a long year.’