“You see, that’s one of my gifts as a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. I have a strong empathy with others. I can’t read their minds, but sometimes I can sense their emotions so strongly that they become my own. So that’s why I ran. I couldn’t stand being so close to the miner and his wife any longer. When he came up the stairs, I just had to get away.”
She seemed to speak from the heart, and my instincts told me that she wasn’t lying. I was impressed. Empathy could be very useful for a spook’s apprentice. She had been able to attune her mind to the anguish of ghasts, something I certainly couldn’t do.
“Right,” I told her. “Turn round!”
She turned to face me, her eyes swollen, her face wet with tears.
I held out my bag to her. “Carry this!” I said. “It’s one of the advantages of being a spook that you don’t have to carry your own bag. That’s what an apprentice is for.”
“You’re giving me another chance?” she asked, her eyes widening in astonishment.
“Yes, one more chance!” I told her. “The very last.”
However, I still needed to find out how strong she really was.
The Spook had used his haunted house test on all of his apprentices.
I’d just thought up one of my own.
13
Tom Ward’s Test
JENNY had been aware of the ghasts in Watery Lane, but it was supposedly her feelings of empathy with them that had caused her to flee. Could she get really close to one and stand her ground? If not, there was no way I could take her on as my apprentice. To deal with the dead, you had to be able to do exactly that. It was a necessary part of the job.
Many years ago, there’d been a bitter civil war, and the victorious army had hanged some soldiers in a place that became known as Hangman’s Hill. It was on the northern boundary of Dad’s farm, the place where I’d been brought up.
When the ghasts of the dead soldiers were particularly active, I’d been able to hear them twisting and groaning on the ends of their ropes. It had even kept some of my older brothers awake and made them uneasy—though my eldest brother, Jack, had slept through it all like a log!
Jack was one of the least sensitive people I’d ever encountered, but even he wouldn’t go into the north pasture when the ghasts were at their most active. So you see, everybody has some sensitivity to the dark.
The fact that Jenny had been so aware of the ghasts in the haunted house didn’t mean that she had what was necessary to become my apprentice. She had to demonstrate courage too. For all I knew, all that talk about empathy was just an excuse, and she’d fled in fear. I had to be sure.
My test would be to take her to confront these ghasts on Hangman’s Hill.
We approached it from the north, heading up into the gloom beneath the trees. It got colder as we climbed—that special kind of cold that sometimes warns a seventh son of a seventh son that something from the dark is close by.
I wondered if Jenny could sense it too.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“A bit chilly,” she replied.
I made no further comment.
I heard the branches creaking and groaning before I saw them. The dead soldiers were in among the trees just below the summit, hanging from the branches, still in their uniforms and boots. Some dangled, inert, with bulging eyes and twisted necks; others danced and kicked or spun; all had their hands bound behind their backs. They were young too, mostly about my age. It was a pitiful sight.
As we drew closer, even nature seemed to change. The leaves vanished from the trees—the branches were stark and bare. I was seeing something from the past.
On the morning I’d begun my apprenticeship all those years ago, my master and I had left Dad’s farm and come straight up this hill. We could have taken a different route, but the Spook had brought me this way deliberately. He wanted our first confrontation with the dark to be close to home, close to something that had scared me as I’d grown up.
He’d taken me up to one of the dead soldiers. Now, suddenly, I heard my master’s voice inside my head, as clear as if he was standing next to me. I remembered his advice.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing that can hurt you. Think about what it must have been like for him. Concentrate on him rather than yourself. How must he have felt? What would be the worst thing?”
And it had worked. I’d become sad rather than afraid. Soon the ghasts had faded away.
I came to a halt. “What can you see?” I asked Jenny.
“Dead soldiers hanging from the trees.” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper. “They’re just young boys. It’s not right. They were too young to fight in a war.”
“Are you afraid?” I asked.
“Yes, it’s scary. But I’m more sad than afraid. They didn’t deserve to die like this.”
“Do you see that one?” I pointed to a boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen. His mouth was opening and closing as he struggled for air, and his eyes bulged in his head. “Let’s go and stand in front of him. I want you to walk right up to him—so close that if you reached out, you could touch his shoulder.”
Jenny nodded. I could tell that she had to force herself to take each step. We walked forward, side by side, until we were as close as I’d instructed.
“His name is George, and he’s only fourteen,” Jenny said suddenly. “He lied about his age so that he could join the army. Now he’s terrified and in awful pain. But there’s something wrong with his mind. It’s as if he isn’t all there. Maybe the terror of being hanged has done that to him. . . . Send him to the light, please! Don’t let this go on any longer.”
I was stunned. My master had simply asked me to imagine what it was like to be in a dead soldier’s place. That way I identified with his plight and overcame my fear. Jenny seemed to know what it was like, as if she could read his mind in some way. It was something that was beyond me.
“He’s not a ghost, Jenny, he’s a ghast,” I explained gently. “The largest part of him has already gone to the light. This is just the fragment that’s broken away from his spirit and stayed behind to haunt this hill with the others. That’s what ghasts are—the parts of a spirit that suffered terrible pain or committed acts they couldn’t bear to remember, like the miner who killed his wife. They couldn’t go to the light with that part of them, so it broke away and became a ghast. Do you understand?”