Joseph Delaney - Spook’s Apprentice

When I got back, the Spook checked the contents of the sack carefully, ticking things off from a list.

‘Did you have any trouble down in the village?’ he asked, when he’d finally finished.

‘Some lads followed me up the hill and asked me to open the sack but I told them no,’ I said.

‘That was very brave of you,’ said the Spook. ‘Next time it won’t do any harm to let them have a few apples and cakes. Life’s hard enough as it is, but some of them come from very poor families. I always order extra in case they ask for some.’

I felt annoyed then. If only he’d told me that in advance! ‘I didn’t like to do it without asking you first,’ I said.

The Spook raised his eyebrows. ‘Did you want to give them a few apples and cakes?’

‘I don’t like being bullied,’ I said, ‘but some of them did look really hungry.’

‘Then next time trust your instincts and use your initiative,’ said the Spook. ‘Trust the voice inside you. It’s rarely wrong. A spook depends a lot on that because it can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. So that’s another thing we need to find out about you. Whether or not your instincts can be relied on.’

He paused, staring at me hard, his green eyes searching my face. ‘Any trouble with girls?’ he asked suddenly.

It was because I was still annoyed that I didn’t give a straight answer to his question.

‘No trouble at all,’ I answered.

It wasn’t a lie because Alice had helped me, which was the opposite of trouble. Still, I knew he really meant had I met any girls and I knew I should have told him about her. Especially with her wearing pointy shoes.

I made lots of mistakes as an apprentice and that was my second serious one – not telling the Spook the whole truth.

The first, even more serious one was making the promise to Alice.

After that my life settled into a busy routine. The Spook taught me fast and made me write until my wrist ached and my eyes stung.

One afternoon he took me to the far end of the village, beyond the last stone cottage to a small circle of willow trees, which are called ‘withy trees’ in the County. It was a gloomy spot and there, hanging from a branch, was a rope. I looked up and saw a big brass bell.

‘When somebody needs help,’ said the Spook, ‘they don’t come up to the house. Nobody comes unless they’re invited. I’m strict about that. They come down here and ring that bell. Then we go to them.’

The trouble was that even after weeks had gone by, nobody came to ring the bell, and I only ever got to go further than the western garden when it was time to fetch the weekly provisions from the village. I was lonely too, missing my family, so it was a good job the Spook kept me busy – that meant I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I always went to bed tired and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

The lessons were the most interesting part of each day but I didn’t learn much about ghasts, ghosts and witches. The Spook had told me that the main topic in an apprentice’s first year was boggarts, together with such subjects as botany, which meant learning all about plants, some of which were really useful as medicines or could be eaten if you had no other food. But my lessons weren’t just writing. Some of the work was just as hard and physical as anything I’d done back home on our farm.

It started on a warm, sunny morning, when the Spook told me to put away my notebook and led the way towards his southern garden. He gave me two things to carry: a spade and a long measuring rod.

‘Free boggarts travel down leys,’ he explained. ‘But sometimes something goes wrong. It can be the result of a storm or maybe even an earthquake. In the County there hasn’t been a serious earthquake in living memory but that doesn’t matter, because leys are all interconnected and something happening to one, even a thousand miles away, can disturb all the others. Then boggarts get stuck in the same place for years and we call them "naturally bound". Often they can’t move more than a few dozen paces in any direction and they cause little trouble. Not unless you happen to get too close to one. Sometimes, though, they can be stuck in awkward places, close to a house or even inside one. Then you might need to move the boggart from there and artificially bind it elsewhere.’

‘What’s a ley?’ I asked.

‘Not everybody agrees, lad,’ he told me. ‘Some think they’re just ancient paths that crisscross the land, the paths our forefathers walked in ancient times when men were real men and darkness knew its place. Health was better, lives were longer and everyone was happy and content.’

‘What happened?’

‘Ice moved down from the north and the earth grew cold for thousands of years,’ the Spook explained. ‘It was so difficult to survive that men forgot everything they’d learned. The old knowledge was unimportant. Keeping warm and eating was all that mattered. When the ice finally pulled back, the survivors were hunters dressed in animal skins. They’d forgotten how to grow crops and husband animals. Darkness was all-powerful.

‘Well, it’s better now, although we still have a long way to go. All that’s left of those times are the leys, but the truth is they’re more than just paths. Leys are really lines of power far beneath the earth. Secret invisible roads that free boggarts can use to travel at great speed. It’s these free boggarts that cause the most trouble. When they set up home in a new location, often they’re not welcome. Not being welcome makes them angry. They play tricks – sometimes dangerous tricks – and that means work for us. Then they need to be artificially bound in a pit. Just like the one that you’re going to dig now…

‘This is a good place,’ he said, pointing at the ground near a big, ancient oak tree. ‘I think there should be enough space between the roots.’

The Spook gave me a measuring rod so that I could make the pit exactly six feet long, six feet deep and three feet wide. Even in the shade it was too warm to be digging and it took me hours and hours to get it right because the Spook was a perfectionist.

After digging the pit, I had to prepare a smelly mixture of salt, iron filings and a special sort of glue made from bones.

‘Salt can burn a boggart,’ said the Spook. ‘Iron, on the other hand, earths things: just as lightning finds its way to earth and loses its power, iron can sometimes bleed away the strength and substance of things that haunt the dark. It can end the mischief of troublesome boggarts. Used together, salt and iron form a barrier that a boggart can’t cross. In fact salt and iron can be useful in lots of situations.’

After stirring the mixture up in a big metal bucket, I used a big brush to line the inside of the pit. It was like painting but harder work, and the coating had to be perfect in order to stop even the craftiest boggart from escaping.

‘Do a thorough job, lad,’ the Spook told me. ‘A boggart can escape through a hole no bigger than a pinhead.’

Of course, as soon as the pit was completed to the Spook’s satisfaction, I had to fill it in and begin again. He had me digging two practice pits a week, which was hard, sweaty work and took up a lot of my time. It was a bit scary too because I was working near pits that contained real boggarts, and even in daylight it was a creepy place. I noticed that the Spook never went too far away though, and he always seemed watchful and alert, telling me you could never take chances with boggarts even when they were bound.

The Spook also told me that I’d need to know every inch of the County – all its towns and villages and the quickest route between any two points. The trouble was that although the Spook said he had lots of maps upstairs in his library, it seemed I always had to do things the hard way, so he started me off by making me draw a map of my own.