Much sooner than I’d expected, I began to hear small disturbances from the soil, and then three fingers were thrust upwards from the grave to our left to writhe in the moonlight. Moments later, two whole hands were clear and the top of a head was just showing. Then fingers began to wriggle out of the second grave as well.
‘Caused some trouble, has Jacob Stone, but he’s been sloppy here! Must be losing his touch!’ Lizzie remarked. ‘Buried them the right way up, he has. They’ll both be out in a jiffy!’
It didn’t take the two witches more than five minutes to drag themselves out of their graves. They certainly didn’t need any help from us – for which I was glad. I’d seen a dead witch before, but these two started my hands and knees trembling again. Jessie and Annie probably hadn’t been much to look at alive – but, dead, they were just about the ugliest, most repulsive creatures I’d ever seen.
They were coated in stinking mud and their lank hair was matted and stuck to their faces. Jessie, the larger witch, had only two teeth – big ones that curved downwards over her bottom lip like fangs. Both had long jaws and narrow-set eyes that gleamed white in the moonlight. And both started to advance towards me, sniffing and snuffling, hands outstretched, long nails at the ready, with just one thing on their minds.
For them, I was the only item on the menu.
My blood froze inside my veins and my whole body began to tremble. Dead witches are incredibly strong. Sometimes they just suck blood greedily until their victims are dead. Other times they go into a feeding frenzy and tear their prey to pieces. Terrified, I hid behind Lizzie. I don’t know what I was hoping for – she merely laughed at my predicament.
‘Had a taste of your blood, girl, and now they want some more,’ she gloated, before turning to the witches. ‘Listen well, Annie and Jessie,’ she shouted. ‘This girl’s blood ain’t for you! She’s done you a favour. Her blood it was that woke you up, and me it was who rolled back the two stones. Get you some rats, I will – enough to be going on with for a while. But it’s revenge on Jacob Stone you need. You need to kill him that done you in, not this girl here. Drink his blood, and then you’ll be free to hunt whoever you please.’
With that, Lizzie muttered something under her breath, and many more rats began to run, squealing, towards us, not realizing that they were scampering to their deaths. It was a spell that Lizzie had already taught me; another one that I was very unlikely to use.
Lizzie caught each rodent quickly and thrust them into the hands of the dead witches, who soon began to bite into them and slurp their blood.
‘Right, girl, while these two get their strength up, let’s go and look inside the old spook’s house. Never know what we might find there . . .’
Lizzie led the way, and I followed at her heels, only too glad to get away from the dead witches.
The front door was made of solid oak, but the magical strength that Lizzie had summoned was far from spent. She gripped the handle and tore the door off its hinges, throwing it aside on the path with a loud crash. Next she pulled a stubby black candle out of the pocket of her long skirt, and ignited it with a word muttered under her breath. With that to illuminate our way, we entered the spook’s house.
I didn’t want to be a witch and murder people and drink their blood – but later, I had to admit, there was something about Lizzie that one tiny part of my mind found interesting. In Pendle I spent a lot of my time feeling afraid and just hoping to survive. But Lizzie was so confident and competent as a witch . . . it would be good to be like that, in control of things and unafraid. It would be good to be strong enough to push away those who threatened me.
But those thoughts were far from me back then. I was nervous. This spook hadn’t bothered to set traps in his garden, but what if there was something waiting for us inside? Lizzie didn’t seem the slightest bit worried. She led us into a small room lined with bookshelves – all dusty and covered in cobwebs. It didn’t look like old Jacob Stone had read any of his books in a long time.
‘Let’s see what we’ve got here,’ Lizzie said, lifting the candle high, her eyes starting to dart along the shelves of the spook’s library.
There must have been a couple of hundred books, with titles such as The Binding of Boggarts and Daemons and Elementals, almost all of them dealing with some aspect of the dark. But after a quick inspection, Lizzie seized just one and, blowing away the cobwebs, thrust it under my nose. It was bound in brown leather and the title was on the spine:
The Practices of Malevolent Witches.
‘We’ll take that one with us.’ She gave it to me to carry. ‘It’ll be useful to know exactly what a spook believes about us. I’ll add it to my own library!’
I didn’t really care what spooks thought about us. I just wanted to get out of this house and garden as soon as possible.
But Lizzie insisted on making a thorough search of the house, finding little to interest her. It was only when we reached the very last room, the attic at the top of the house, that her eyes lit up with what appeared to be excitement and I heard her breathing quicken.
‘Something special here!’ she said. ‘Some sort of treasure!’
The attic was large, covering the whole top storey of the house. Mostly it was being used for storage, it seemed. There were lots of open boxes, heaped with junk; nothing to do with spook’s work – just discarded household items, and even a landscape painting with trees and a house in the distance. It looked like a scene somewhere in the County, because it was raining and a mist was rolling in.
However, it wasn’t the stored items that Lizzie was interested in. She made no search of the boxes. After handing me the candle, she went down on her hands and knees, sniffing at the floorboards, her nose almost touching the rough wood. Serve her right if she got a splinter up her nose!
I sniffed three times very quickly myself, doing it quietly so that Lizzie wouldn’t hear. She was right. There was something under the floorboards – something very strange.
‘It’s here!’ she cried, coming to a halt at last. She thrust her hand down hard, and her nails tore into the wood; in one convulsive heave she ripped up a floorboard and tossed it aside. Another one followed in seconds. Then she peered down into the darkness and started searching the cavity with both hands. Moments later she lifted something up into the candlelight.