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.
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.