A New Darkness (9 page)

Tonight, though, the narrow, cobbled streets were deserted, and soon we reached the bottom of the hill, turning in to a deserted lane with broken and boarded windows. It was a place I remembered well, but the last time I’d seen it, a sign hanging by a single rusty rivet proclaimed it to be Watery Lane. Now the sign was gone.

The terraced house on the corner, the nearest to an abandoned corn merchant’s warehouse, was our destination. Its number, 13, was nailed to the door.

“This is the place,” I told Jenny as I inserted the key into the lock.

Once inside, I lit a candle and handed it to the girl. Nothing within the small living room had changed. It was empty—there was only a pile of dirty straw on the flagged floor near the window. The curtains were yellow and tattered, the whole room full of cobwebs.

Jenny put my bag down on the floor and stared about her with wide eyes.

Suddenly a chill ran down my spine—the warning that a seventh son of a seventh son receives when something from the dark is close. Soon the ghasts would be active. Would Jenny be able to see and hear them? Would she be brave enough to face those terrible entities?

I pointed to the inner door, which was partly open. “That’s the kitchen, and to the right there are stone steps leading down to the cellar.”

I remembered descending those steps, struggling to be brave, readying myself for what might be waiting in the darkness of the cellar below.

“You can tell the time by the bell you’ll hear chiming from the church tower,” I continued. “What you have to do is simple. Go down to the cellar at midnight and face what’s lurking there. Do that, Jenny, and I’ll take you on as my apprentice for at least a month. This is a test of your courage when faced with the dark. Understand?”

She nodded, but she didn’t look happy. She was shivering, all her earlier cockiness gone. It was chilly in the room, but was she trembling with cold or with fear? I couldn’t tell, but I remembered all too well the terror I’d felt at being left alone in that house. It was only natural.

Then I recalled what else the Spook had told me. I gave Jenny the same advice now.

“Don’t open the front door to anyone,” I continued. “You may hear a loud knocking, but resist the temptation to answer it. That’s one thing you mustn’t do.”

I knew what lay out there—the ghast that walked the street was even more dangerous than the two in the house. The Spook had told me about it the day after our visit here. There had been an old woman, a “rouser” paid by mine workers to wake them for their shift by rapping on their doors. But she used to creep into the houses and steal things. One day one of the householders caught her at it. She stabbed him to death and was hanged for the crime. Now, after dark, the ghast haunted the street, still trying to trick its way into the houses.

It fed on fear, but of course it couldn’t actually kill you. Though if you gave in to your terror, it could drive you to the edge of insanity.

Jenny was strong-minded. I felt confident that she would survive such an encounter. I hoped she wouldn’t open the door anyway.

“Whatever you do, don’t let the candle go out,” I continued.

My candle
had
gone out, but luckily I’d had a tinderbox in my pocket, a parting gift from Dad when I left home to become the Spook’s new apprentice. Jenny wouldn’t be able to light her candle again. So, in a sudden impulse of generosity, I pulled my tinderbox from my bag and held it out to her.

“Here. You can borrow this,” I said. “Take care of it; it was a present from my dad and has sentimental value.” Then, without another word, I went out through the front door, leaving her alone in the haunted house.

I knew what to do next. Long after my test, my master had told me what he routinely did with each apprentice: went round to the back door, slipped into the kitchen, and crept down the steps to the cellar.

So that’s what I did. A couple of minutes later I was crouching down there in the dark with my back against a barrel. All I had to do was wait for Jenny. She had to come down to the cellar at midnight. Once she’d done that, I would stand up and tell her she’d passed the test. But first she would have to withstand a few very unpleasant experiences.

The house was haunted by ghasts, not ghosts, so the manifestations weren’t aware of their surroundings. They were dark fragments of suffering spirits left behind when their larger selves had escaped to the light. They played over and over again the part of their lives that had resulted in trauma—as the girl would soon find out.

I waited. I hoped again that Jenny would have the sense to obey me and wouldn’t open the front door to the more dangerous ghast. It had tried to trick me into doing so by using Mam’s voice, plucking it from my mind and imitating it perfectly. I’d managed to resist the impulse to respond to it, but I wondered what voice the ghast would use to lure Jenny. No doubt someone from her past whom she liked and trusted. I suspected that if the girl
did
open the door, she’d be faced by something horrible—an old lady wielding a blade, with murder in her eyes.

Soon the ghasts of the main house began to make themselves known.

It started in the far corner of the cellar. I heard a rhythmical digging: the sound of heavy, damp earth being turned with a spade. There was a soft squelching as the spade lifted the soil from the cellar floor. The chill that came from being close to something from the dark intensified, and though I knew it would be far worse for the girl, I reflected that I’d be heartily glad when this was all over. I wasn’t scared, but it was unpleasant.

The ghast was digging a grave, and it had a terrible story. It belonged to a miner who’d grown jealous, thinking that his wife was secretly seeing another man. One night, in a fit of rage, he killed her, striking her on the head with a big cob of coal, and had dug her grave down here in this cellar. But, even worse, she wasn’t actually dead when he’d put her in the grave. He’d buried her alive. And then he’d killed himself.

So that’s what I could hear now—the ghast of the miner digging his wife’s early grave. If Jenny truly had the abilities she claimed, she would be able to hear it too. It was truly terrifying.

John Gregory had come up with this effective means of testing his apprentices. After all, what was the point of training someone for weeks, only to have them flee from the first really scary thing they encountered? There was no doubt: it was a hard job. You had to be tough to do it.

Suddenly the sound of digging stopped and the cellar grew quiet, filled with a stillness that seemed to fill the whole house. Then there was a sequence of thumps. Heavy invisible boots were climbing up the cellar steps toward the kitchen. The ghast was moving away from me.

It was approaching Jenny.

A ghast feeds on fear and draws strength from it. The more scared Jenny was, the scarier the encounter would be for her.

After a while the invisible boots descended the steps again and crossed the earth floor of the cellar, passing very close to where I was sitting.

Next, the expected knocking on the front door began. It went on for a long time, but Jenny had listened to me, and I didn’t hear her respond.

When the distant chimes of the clock chimed half eleven, the ghast’s digging started up once more. But to my surprise, it didn’t climb the stairs this time. Jenny must have shown a brave face, which meant that the ghast had nothing to feed on and wouldn’t bother her again.

There was no doubt about it: courage made spook’s business much easier, and Jenny clearly possessed it in abundance. Of course, that was if she really was sensitive enough to experience the full horror of the ghasts. The next half hour passed slowly. Then at last I heard the clock chime twelve to mark midnight.

I waited expectantly for the sound of Jenny coming down the cellar steps.

But the whole house was silent.

Perhaps she had fallen asleep and hadn’t heard the chimes? I thought. Her terrible experience at the hands of the Kobalos had taken a lot out of her, after all. So I was patient. I waited for the next chime to mark the half hour. Then I climbed the steps.

The front room was empty. The door was wide open.

Jenny had fled into the night.

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11

A Rare and Special Type

I
started searching around for her. Perhaps she hadn’t gone far. . . . I walked up the hill, keeping to the main lane but checking each cobbled street to my right and left as I passed by.

Had she been lured into opening the door to the street ghast?

I didn’t think so. I’d warned Jenny about that. She was sensible and would have resisted, just as I had during my test.

It seemed likely that she had simply given in to her fear and run, meaning that she had failed the test.

After about an hour, I stood on the steep grassy slope that led up to the slag heaps and mine workings and looked down at the village. Nothing was moving below. But for the wind sighing across the hill, all was silent. Everybody who wasn’t down the mine working the night shift was safely tucked up in bed.

I gave up and walked through the night back toward Chipenden. And as I did so, my doubts came rushing back. The truth is, I wasn’t ready to take on a trainee. Although a practicing spook, with a good number of successes under my belt, I was hardly more than an apprentice myself. I reckoned I needed at least five more years before I had the knowledge and experience to train someone properly.

Not only that. She was a girl, and as far as I knew there were no precedents for a female apprentice spook. It might cause all sorts of problems. And who knew what powers a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter possessed? I had been hasty in taking her on—perhaps I’d done so to make up for almost getting her killed by the Kobalos. I knew that she could hide and make herself difficult to detect, but did she have any immunity to witchcraft? Could she really hear the dead and talk to them, as she’d claimed?

To tell the truth, my feelings were mixed. Although I had no evidence that she really
was
a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, I had expected her to pass the test. In my mind I had gotten used to the idea of her being my apprentice. I was lonely—that came with the job, of course, but since my master died I’d been completely alone. Alice had left us and gone to the dark for good. I would have liked to have someone else living in the house again; someone to work with. I remembered something Alice had once said to me, back in the first year of my apprenticeship: “One day this house will belong to us, Tom. Don’t you feel it?”

A lump came into my throat as I heard her utter those words again. Loneliness was a terrible thing, I reflected.

When Jenny first told me her name, I had been stunned, taken back to the vision of the future I’d been given by the mage . . . of the new name added to the list on my bedroom wall in the Chipenden house.

Jenny.

I shrugged in annoyance. Scrying did not always foretell the future accurately. The future could be changed with each decision we made, with every step we took or failed to take.

Jenny’s steps had been in the wrong direction—away from the cellar. She had failed the test, and now her name would never be written on that wall.

Whatever the future might bring, I remembered with a curse that Jenny still had the tinderbox that Dad had given me. I wanted it back. If she didn’t return it, at some point I would have to return to Grimsargh to collect it.

The next two days were quiet. Nobody rang the bell at the withy trees crossroads. So while waiting for Grimalkin to return, I spent my time on routine business. I put in some hours of practice with my chain and staff, determined to get my skills back up to their former level, and taking out my annoyance with Jenny on the tree stump.

I also started to read the Spook’s notebooks again, in case I’d missed any mention of the Kobalos. There was only the short section in the Bestiary, but it comforted me to read my master’s words and to hear his voice in my head.

John Gregory had written and illustrated the Bestiary himself, and now I read his final words about the loss by fire of his beloved library and the books it contained; books that were a bequest from past spooks to those yet to ply their trade.

Before he had died in battle, my master had made good that promise. He had rebuilt the house and library. Unfortunately, as yet, there were precious few books restored to those new wooden shelves. That would be my task. During my lifetime as a spook, in addition to fighting the dark, I would endeavor to restock the Chipenden library.

It was early in the morning of the third day after Jenny had fled that Grimalkin arrived. I heard her call through the trees and went to the edge of the garden to escort her through to the house and tell the boggart that she was here with my permission.

She’d arrived on horseback, and after taking a large envelope from her saddlebag, she left the animal grazing in the western garden. She greeted me curtly, and we walked toward the house in silence.