Joseph Delaney - The Spook's Mistake

Despite the danger from the dark, we needed to build up our strength, so at dawn, before continuing south, we breakfasted on rabbits caught and cooked by Alice. Although Arkwright was somewhat better, our progress was still slow and we were further delayed by a detour to Cartmel to buy him a new pair of boots.

On finally reaching the coast, we had a long wait for the tide to reach full ebb. The Spook kept his promise to the hermit, and in addition to paying the guide, contributed three silver coins to the fund to support the families of those who'd drowned.

We approached the mill at dusk. But at the edge of the moat Claw warned us that something was badly wrong. Her hackles rose and she began to growl. Then Alice sniffed three times and turned to me, alarm on her face.

'Something nasty ahead. Don't like it, Tom!'

Arkwright looked down at the moat and frowned. Then he knelt, dipped his forefinger into the murky water and touched it briefly to his lips.

'The salt concentration's high. Nothing from the dark could cross that. Maybe something's got out.'

I remembered the water witch and the skelt, both captive in pits under the house. Had they escaped?

'I tipped five barrels of salt into the moat,' I told him. 'But I didn't put any into the pits.'

'Even so, Master Ward, there should still be enough in there to keep them docile. If anything's got loose, it must've had some serious help!' said Arkwright.

'Aye,' the Spook agreed, 'and that moat would be no barrier to the most powerful creature from the dark — the Fiend himself!'

Arkwright nodded and the three of us followed in his wake as he strode across the moat. He led us down the side of the house towards the waterwheel, with Claw at his side. Suddenly he halted. There was a body lying face down on the ground. He turned it over with his new boot.

The man's throat had been torn out, yet there was little blood to be seen. His body had been drained, probably by a water witch. But then I looked at the corpse's face, which was frozen in horror and pain. The mouth was open, the front teeth broken stumps. It was one of the press gang — the sergeant, who'd fled the house first and run towards me before changing his mind at the sight of the dogs.

'It's one of a gang of deserters I'd a run-in with north of the bay,' Arkwright said to the Spook. 'They made what I thought were empty threats. Said they'd find me and sort me out. Well, this one got sorted out all right. In the wrong place at the wrong time just about sums it up.'

He walked on and halted at the porch and I heard him utter a curse. When we drew level, I saw why. The front door had been ripped from its hinges. It might well be the work of a water witch.

'We need to search the house first to see if anything's still lurking inside. It's not the deserters we need to worry about. It's what killed them,' Arkwright said.

He lit two candles and handed one to Alice. My master left his bag just inside the door and moved cautiously into the first room, his staff in his right hand, his silver chain in his left. Carrying the other candle, Arkwright was unarmed and so was Alice, but I had my staff at the ready.

Claw began to growl as we crossed the bare wooden floorboards and I expected something to rush at us from the shadows at any moment. That didn't happen but we saw something that brought us to a sudden halt.

Burned into the floor was a series of footprints, nine in all, and each had the shape of a cloven hoof. They began in the middle of the room and ended just short of the kitchen door. It suggested that the Fiend had materialized there, taken those nine steps and then disappeared again. So where was he now? It sent a chill right to my heart. He might appear again at any moment.

But there was nothing to do but go on, and without a word we nervously entered the kitchen. Here Arkwright reached across the sink to the window ledge and grasped the large knife he'd shown me during our first lesson together. The door that gave access to the stairs was wide open. Was there something up in one of the bedrooms?

After commanding Claw to stay in the kitchen and guard our backs, Arkwright led the way up, with the Spook at his shoulder. I stood with Alice on the landing while they searched, waiting tensely, listening to their boots clumping through each bedroom. Again there was nothing. After that there was just the large room at the top of the house which housed Arkwright's library. No sooner had they entered it than Arkwright let out a loud cry of anguish. Thinking he was hurt or under attack, I rushed up the stairs to help.

As soon as I entered the room it was clear why he'd cried out. The coffins of his mam and dad had been hurled from their trestles and smashed. Earth and bones were heaped on the floorboards. And there were more cloven hoof prints burned into the boards.

Arkwright was beside himself with grief and rage, shaking from head to foot. Only gradually did the Spook manage to calm him down.

'The Fiend did this,' my master told him. 'He did it to rile you. He wants a red mist of anger to cloud your judgement. Stay calm for all of our sakes. When this is over, we'll put your parents to rights again but now we need to check the pits.'

Arkwright took a deep breath and nodded. We left Claw in the kitchen, and instead of using the trapdoor, we went outside again and approached the door next to the waterwheel.

'You stay outside, lad,' the Spook whispered. 'Bill and I will deal with this!'

I obeyed as Alice, giving me a little wave, followed them inside. But they'd been gone for less than a minute when something gleamed in the darkness to my right. There was a loud, angry hiss and two menacing eyes stared back into mine. I watched apprehensively as something resembling the leg of an enormous insect slowly emerged from the shadows.

It was grey, multi-jointed and very long indeed. The leg of something thin but monstrous. A second limb followed and next came a head. And what a head! Something I'd never seen even in my most scary nightmares: a very thin snout, the nose flat, the ears laid back against the bony, elongated head, and close-set eyes which stared right into mine. It was the skelt.

I tried to call out but I couldn't even manage to open my mouth. As it moved closer and closer, its eyes never left mine and I felt the strength leaving me. I was like a rabbit transfixed by the gaze of a deadly stoat. My brain didn't seem to be working properly and my body was paralysed.

Upright, it would have been taller than me. In addition to that narrow head, its long tubular body had two segments which were hard and ridged, like that of a crab or lobster, and barnacle-encrusted like the bottom of a boat. Its eight legs, however, were more like those of a spider, its movements delicate and precise, its joints creaking and crepitating as it moved.

Suddenly the skelt surged towards me, all eight legs a flickering blur, and scuttled right up my body, hurling me backwards to the ground. I was winded by the fall and now its weight was pressing against me: its scrabbling legs lay across my arms and legs, pinning me down so that I was helpless. I stared up into the ugly toothless snout, which opened just inches from my face, the creature enveloping me in a stench of dank mouldering loam and rot from stagnant pools. And from the widening mouth a long tube of translucent white bone began to extend towards me. I remembered how Arkwright had told me that a skelt had no tongue; instead it used this bone-tube to pierce its victim and suck up its blood.

Something forced my head back and there was a sudden excruciating pain in my throat. The sharp tube that protruded from the mouth of the skelt suddenly changed colour and became red. It was sucking my blood and there was nothing I could do. The pain intensified. How much would it take? I began to panic. It might continue to feed until my heart stopped.