Joseph Delaney - The Spook's Curse

For a while the Spook just sat there staring at his bowl of steaming hot soup but then he picked up a slice of bread and dunked it in.

‘It’s been hard, lad. And it’s good to be home,’ he said.

I was so surprised that he was speaking again that I almost fell off my chair.

‘Are you feeling better?’ I asked.

‘Aye, lad, better than I did. A good night’s sleep and I’ll be right as rain. Your mam’s a good woman. Nobody in the County knows their potions better.’

‘I didn’t think you’d remember anything,’ I said. ‘You seemed distant. Almost like you were sleepwalking.’

“That’s what it was like, lad. I could see and hear everything but it didn’t seem real. It was just like I was in a nightmare. And I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t seem to find the words. It was only when I was outside, standing there looking up at this house, that I found myself again. Have you still got the key to the Silver Gate?’

Surprised, I reached into my left breeches pocket and pulled out the key. I held it out to the Spook.

‘Caused a lot of trouble, this,’ he said, turning it over in his hand. ‘But you did well, all things considered.’

I smiled, feeling happier than I had in days, but when my master spoke again, his voice was harsh.

‘Where’s the girl?’ he snapped.

‘Probably not too far away,’ I admitted.

‘Well, we’ll deal with her later.’

All through supper I thought of Alice. What would she find to eat? Well, she was good at catching rabbits so she wouldn’t starve – that was one thing sorted out. However, in the spring, after Bony Lizzie had kidnapped a child, the men from the village had set fire to her house and the ruin wouldn’t provide much shelter on an autumn night. Still, as Alice had said, the weather still hadn’t turned cold. No, her biggest threat was from the Spook.

As it turned out, it was the last mild night of the year: the following morning there was a distinct chill in the air. The Spook and I sat on the bench staring towards the fells, the wind getting stronger. The leaves were falling in earnest. The summer was well and truly over.

I’d already got my notebook out but the Spook seemed in no hurry to start the lesson. He wasn’t recovered from his ordeal with the Quisitor. During breakfast he’d said little and spent most of the time staring into space, as if deep in thought.

I was the one who finally broke the silence. ‘What does the Bane want now that it’s free? What will it do to the County?’

‘That’s easily answered,’ said the Spook. ‘Above all it wants to grow bigger and more powerful. Then there will be no limit to the terror it will cause. It will cast a shadow of evil over the County. And no living thing will be able to hide from it. It will take blood and read minds until its powers are complete. It will see through the eyes of people who can walk in daylight while it’s forced to hide in the dark somewhere underground. Whereas before it just controlled the priests in the cathedral and extended its influence into Priestown, now nowhere in the County will be safe.

‘Caster could well be the next to suffer. But first the Bane might just pick on some small hamlet and press everyone to death as a warning, just to show what it can do! That was the way it controlled Heys and the kings who ruled before him. Disobedience meant a whole community would be pressed.’

‘Mam told me that it’ll be looking for Alice,’ I said miserably.

‘That’s right, lad! Your foolish friend Alice. It needs her to regain its strength. She’s twice given it her blood, so while she remains free she’s fast on her way to becoming totally under its control. If nothing happens to stop it, she’ll become part of the Bane and have hardly any will left of her own. It could move her, use her just as easily as I can bend my little finger. The Bane knows this – it’ll be doing all it can to feed from her again. It’ll be searching for her now.’

‘But she’s strong,’ I protested. ‘And anyway, I thought the Bane was afraid of women. We both met it in the catacombs when I was trying to rescue you. It had shape-shifted into you in order to trick me.’

‘So the rumours were true – it had learned to take on a physical form down there.’

‘Yes, but when Alice spat at it, it ran off. Perhaps she could just keep doing that.’

‘Yes, the Bane does find it harder to control a woman than a man. Women make it nervous because they’re wilful creatures and often unpredictable. But once it’s drunk the blood of a female all that changes. It’ll be after Alice now and give her no peace. It’ll worm its way into her dreams and show her the things she can have – the things that can be hers just for the asking -until finally she’ll think there’s a need to summon it again. No doubt that cousin of mine was under the Bane’s control. Otherwise he’d never have betrayed me like that.’

The Spook scratched at his beard. ‘Aye, the Bane will grow and grow and there’ll be little to stop it working its evil through others until everything becomes rotten in the County. That’s what happened to the Little People until, finally, desperate measures were called for. We need to find out exactly how the Bane was bound; even better, how it can be killed. That’s why we need to go to Heysham. There’s a big barrow there, a burial mound, and the bodies of Heys and his sons are in stone graves nearby.

‘As soon as I’m strong enough, that’s where we’re going. As you know, those who suffer violent deaths sometimes have trouble moving on from this world. So we’ll visit those graves. If we’re lucky, a ghost or two might still linger there. Maybe even the ghost of Naze, who did the binding. That might well be our only hope because, to be honest, lad, at the moment I haven’t a clue how we’re going to bring this to an end.’

With those words the Spook hung his head and looked really sad and worried. I’d never seen him so low.

‘Have you been there before?’ I asked, wondering why the ghosts hadn’t been given a talking to and asked to move on.

‘Aye, lad, just once. I went there as an apprentice. My master was there to deal with a troublesome sea wraith that had been haunting the shore. That done, on the hill above the cliffs we passed the graves and I knew there was something there because what had been a warm summer’s night suddenly became very cold. When my master kept on walking, I asked him why he wasn’t stopping to do something.

‘ “Leave well enough alone,” he told me. “It’s a bother to nobody. Besides, some ghosts stay on this earth because they’ve a task to perform. So it’s best to leave ‘em to it.” I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but as usual he was right.’

I tried to imagine the Spook as an apprentice. He’d have been a lot older than me because he’d trained as a priest first. I wondered what his own master had been like, a man who would take on an apprentice so old.

‘Anyway,’ said the Spook, ‘we’ll be going to Heysham very soon, but before that happens there’s something else that has to be done. Know what it is?’

I shivered. I knew what he was going to say.

‘We have to deal with the girl, so we need to know where she’s hiding. My guess would be in the ruin of Lizzie’s house. What do you think?’ the Spook demanded.

I was going to tell him that I disagreed but he stared at me hard until I was forced to drop my gaze to the ground. I couldn’t lie to him.

‘That’s where she’d probably stay,’ I admitted.

‘Well, lad, she can’t stay there for much longer. She’s a danger to everyone. She’ll have to go into a pit. And the sooner the better. So you’d better start

I looked at him, hardly able to believe what I was hearing.