Alice (9 page)

I FROZE TO
the spot. I didn’t like the sound of that one bit.

‘Come here, girl. I need your blood
now
!’ Lizzie commanded.

Did she mean to kill me? I wondered. Was I some sort of sacrifice? Is that why she’d brought me along?

‘My blood?’ I eyed the sharp blade nervously.

‘Can’t use my own, can I?’ Lizzie hissed. ‘I need to keep my strength up. Don’t you worry, girl. I’ll leave you just enough to keep your heart beating – although for a while it might flutter a bit.’

With those words she seized me by the left arm and pushed up my sleeve. There was a sharp sting, and then my blood was
dripping onto the grave. It wasn’t over. There was the second grave to sort, and she made a cut to my right arm too. Gritting my teeth against the pain, I watched the thick drops fall onto the damp soil. I was shaking, and my stomach was knotted with fear.

It was the first time Lizzie had ever taken my blood for her magic. There would be many more such occasions – I still have the scars on my body to prove it, though they’re mostly under my clothes so they don’t show.

As Lizzie pushed the knife back into her pocket, she shook her head. ‘Ain’t that bad, girl,’ she told me. ‘Stop snivelling. Need that blood, we do, because we got problems here. There’s a nasty trick that spooks use. Annie and Jessie have likely been buried head down so that, without realizing it, they’ve been digging themselves in even deeper. We might have to drag ’em out by their feet. But your blood will give ’em a bit of encouragement and point them in the right direction. They’ll sniff it and make a special effort to get free.’

Much sooner than I’d expected, I began to hear small disturbances from the soil, and then three fingers were thrust upwards from the grave to our left to writhe in the moonlight. Moments later, two whole hands were clear and the top of a head was just showing. Then fingers began to wriggle out of the second grave as well.

‘Caused some trouble, has Jacob Stone, but he’s been sloppy here! Must be losing his touch!’ Lizzie remarked. ‘Buried them the right way up, he has. They’ll both be out in a jiffy!’

It didn’t take the two witches more than five minutes to
drag themselves out of their graves. They certainly didn’t need any help from us – for which I was glad. I’d seen a dead witch before, but these two started my hands and knees trembling again. Jessie and Annie probably hadn’t been much to look at alive – but, dead, they were just about the ugliest, most repulsive creatures I’d ever seen.

They were coated in stinking mud and their lank hair was matted and stuck to their faces. Jessie, the larger witch, had only two teeth – big ones that curved downwards over her bottom lip like fangs. Both had long jaws and narrow-set eyes that gleamed white in the moonlight. And both started to advance towards me, sniffing and snuffling, hands outstretched, long nails at the ready, with just one thing on their minds.

For them, I was the only item on the menu.

My blood froze inside my veins and my whole body began to tremble. Dead witches are incredibly strong. Sometimes they just suck blood greedily until their victims are dead. Other times they go into a feeding frenzy and tear their prey to pieces. Terrified, I hid behind Lizzie. I don’t know what I was hoping for – she merely laughed at my predicament.

‘Had a taste of your blood, girl, and now they want some more,’ she gloated, before turning to the witches. ‘Listen well, Annie and Jessie,’ she shouted. ‘This girl’s blood ain’t for you! She’s done you a favour. Her blood it was that woke you up, and me it was who rolled back the two stones. Get you some rats, I will – enough to be going on with for a while. But it’s revenge on Jacob Stone you need. You need to kill him
that done you in, not this girl here. Drink his blood, and then you’ll be free to hunt whoever you please.’

With that, Lizzie muttered something under her breath, and many more rats began to run, squealing, towards us, not realizing that they were scampering to their deaths. It was a spell that Lizzie had already taught me; another one that I was very unlikely to use.

Lizzie caught each rodent quickly and thrust them into the hands of the dead witches, who soon began to bite into them and slurp their blood.

‘Right, girl, while these two get their strength up, let’s go and look inside the old spook’s house. Never know what we might find there . . .’

Lizzie led the way, and I followed at her heels, only too glad to get away from the dead witches.

The front door was made of solid oak, but the magical strength that Lizzie had summoned was far from spent. She gripped the handle and tore the door off its hinges, throwing it aside on the path with a loud crash. Next she pulled a stubby black candle out of the pocket of her long skirt, and ignited it with a word muttered under her breath. With that to illuminate our way, we entered the spook’s house.

I didn’t want to be a witch and murder people and drink their blood – but later, I had to admit, there was something about Lizzie that one tiny part of my mind found interesting. In Pendle I spent a lot of my time feeling afraid and just hoping to survive. But Lizzie was so confident and competent as a
witch . . . it would be good to be like that, in control of things and unafraid. It would be good to be strong enough to push away those who threatened me.

But those thoughts were far from me back then. I was nervous. This spook hadn’t bothered to set traps in his garden, but what if there was something waiting for us inside? Lizzie didn’t seem the slightest bit worried. She led us into a small room lined with bookshelves – all dusty and covered in cobwebs. It didn’t look like old Jacob Stone had read any of his books in a long time.

‘Let’s see what we’ve got here,’ Lizzie said, lifting the candle high, her eyes starting to dart along the shelves of the spook’s library.

There must have been a couple of hundred books, with titles such as
The Binding of Boggarts
and
Daemons and Elementals
, almost all of them dealing with some aspect of the dark. But after a quick inspection, Lizzie seized just one and, blowing away the cobwebs, thrust it under my nose. It was bound in brown leather and the title was on the spine:

The Practices of Malevolent Witches
.

‘We’ll take that one with us.’ She gave it to me to carry. ‘It’ll be useful to know exactly what a spook believes about us. I’ll add it to my own library!’

I didn’t really care what spooks thought about us. I just wanted to get out of this house and garden as soon as possible.

But Lizzie insisted on making a thorough search of the house, finding little to interest her. It was only when we reached the very last room, the attic at the top of the house, that her eyes
lit up with what appeared to be excitement and I heard her breathing quicken.

‘Something special here!’ she said. ‘Some sort of treasure!’

The attic was large, covering the whole top storey of the house. Mostly it was being used for storage, it seemed. There were lots of open boxes, heaped with junk; nothing to do with spook’s work – just discarded household items, and even a landscape painting with trees and a house in the distance. It looked like a scene somewhere in the County, because it was raining and a mist was rolling in.

However, it wasn’t the stored items that Lizzie was interested in. She made no search of the boxes. After handing me the candle, she went down on her hands and knees, sniffing at the floorboards, her nose almost touching the rough wood. Serve her right if she got a splinter up her nose!

I sniffed three times very quickly myself, doing it quietly so that Lizzie wouldn’t hear. She was right. There was something under the floorboards – something very strange.

‘It’s here!’ she cried, coming to a halt at last. She thrust her hand down hard, and her nails tore into the wood; in one convulsive heave she ripped up a floorboard and tossed it aside. Another one followed in seconds. Then she peered down into the darkness and started searching the cavity with both hands. Moments later she lifted something up into the candlelight.

At first I thought it was some sort of egg; a large egg, bigger than my fist. But then I saw that it was artificial, stitched into an oval from several pieces of stiff black leather.

‘Bring the candle nearer, girl!’ Lizzie commanded, and I did as she asked, stepping forward and holding it close to the leather egg so that she could examine it more closely. I noticed then that it was covered in writing that spiralled round from one end to the other.

‘It’s in a language I never came across before, but it’s signed with a name at the bottom –
Nicholas Browne
. Wonder who he is? Might be written in a foreign language, but it sounds like a County name,’ Lizzie muttered. ‘Maybe it’s some sort of warning . . .’

She brought the strange object closer to her face and squinted at it, turning it first one way, then another, her mouth twitching. She sniffed it three times.

‘I’m thinking there might be real power here; danger too. That crafty old spook hid this away so that none like us could get their hands on it. We need to know where the fool got it and all that he knows about it. That means we need to keep him alive a little while.’

Lizzie set off down the stairs right away. But she was too late. Just as we reached the door, we heard a terrible scream.

It came from the direction of the garden gate.

By the time we reached it, the two dead witches had already fed.

The old spook had hardly made it through the gate before they’d leaped upon him, dragging him down into the long grass and sinking their teeth into his flesh. Now Jacob Stone was drained and lay on his back, cold and dead, his unseeing eyes staring up at the moon. I felt sorry for him. He was old
– far past the age when he should have retired from such a dangerous trade.

There was no sign of Annie and Jessie, but the iron gate was now open – they’d obviously gone off hunting, strengthened by the old spook’s blood. They’d want some more. Some poor local family would be grieving soon.

‘It ain’t the end of the world,’ Lizzie said, kicking the spook’s rowan-wood staff out of his dead hand. ‘If we can’t question the living, then we’ll question the dead!’

With that, she drew a knife with a sharp blade and knelt beside the body. I turned away in disgust, my stomach heaving. I’d never been present when Lizzie had done this before, but I knew that she would be cutting away the old man’s thumb-bones. Using them, she’d be able to summon his soul and get the answers she needed.

WE SET OFF
towards Pendle immediately. Lizzie was eager to get back to her cottage and find out what the leather egg was and what it could do.

We arrived after dark, but despite her impatience she couldn’t get started on it right away. First she had to contact the coven in order to report back formally on the success of her expedition to kill the spook. I had a feeling that she wouldn’t be telling them about the mysterious object she’d found hidden under the floorboards. That was something she’d be keeping to herself. And Lizzie was one of the most powerful witches in Pendle, well able to cloak her activities against the most competent of scryers.

So it was not until the following evening, just before twilight, that Lizzie finally set to work. She used the largest of her cauldrons, which was always positioned close to the rear door of her cottage. I was ordered to light a fire beneath it and then fill it three-quarters full of water. That meant half an hour’s hard work winding the bucket up from the well at the bottom of the garden. Once it started to boil, I stepped back and Lizzie began her ritual.

She positioned a wooden stool close to the cauldron and sat gazing into the steam that wafted up from the bubbling surface. Next she threw in Jacob Stone’s thumbs; each made a splash before sinking towards the bottom. As I watched from a distance, she began to mutter under her breath, adding sprinklings of herbs and other plants to the pot.

During a ritual Lizzie would usually explain to me what she was doing and the purpose of each addition to the cauldron, but this was too important; she couldn’t be bothered with teaching me now. As it happened, I already knew the names of most of the plants she used, and what they could do, and I knew that the crisis would occur when the meat softened and boiled off the bones; that was when she would try to seize control of the old spook’s spirit and make him tell her the information she needed.

It was getting dark now, but Lizzie didn’t bother lighting a candle. Soon I knew why. There was a faint glow from the inside of the cauldron; gradually it grew brighter, until I could see the witch’s face clearly. Her mouth was twisted downwards and her eyes were wide open, the pupils rolled right up into
her head. Faster and faster she muttered the incantation. The water was boiling furiously now, and suddenly two white things bobbed to the surface, sticking up like twigs with the bark removed. Jacob’s thumb-bones were floating.

Moments later, the bones were lost to sight. It wasn’t because they’d sunk. The great cloud of steam from the cauldron swelled and grew into a huge thunderhead that soared to the height of the cottage. It was glowing too, and I half expected to see forked lightning. Instead, a face began to form within the cloud; one that I’d last seen staring at the moon with dead, sightless eyes.