I wondered about Slake, the surviving lamia. How far had she progressed towards the winged form? She might well have lost the power of speech – which meant that I would be unable to question her properly. I needed to know as much about the sacred objects as possible. I also hoped to be able to communicate with Mam in some way.
Soon the three of us were walking along beside Crow Wood; the way into the tower was now close: the dense tangled copse that had grown over an old abandoned graveyard. The entrance to the tunnel was to be found roughly at its centre. You reached it by entering a sepulchre, built for the dead of a wealthy family. Although most of the bones had been removed when the graveyard was deconsecrated, theirs remained in place.
Alice suddenly came to a halt and raised her hand in warning. I could see nothing but a few tombstones amongst the brambles, but I heard her sniff quickly three times, checking for danger.
‘There are witches ahead, lying in wait. It’s an ambush. They must have scryed our approach.’
‘How many?’ I asked, readying my staff.
‘There are three, Tom. But they’ll soon sniff out our presence and then signal to the others.’
‘Then it’s best that they die quickly!’ Agnes said. ‘They’re mine!’
Before Alice or I had time to react, Agnes was surging forward, bursting through the thicket into the small clearing that surrounded the sepulchre. Witches have varying levels of skill when long-sniffing approaching danger; while Alice was very good at it, some are relatively weak. Moreover, an attack that is improvised and instantaneous rather than premeditated can take the enemy completely by surprise.
The screams that came from the clearing were shrill and earsplitting, filled with terror and pain. When we caught up with Agnes, two witches were already dead and she was feeding from the third: the woman’s limbs thrashed as Alice’s aunt sucked the blood from her neck in great greedy gulps.
I was appalled by the speed with which Agnes had changed; she no longer bore any resemblance to the kindly woman who had helped us so many times in the past. I stared down at her in horror, but Alice just shrugged at my look of disgust. ‘She’s hungry, Tom. Who are we to judge her? We’d be no different in her situation.’
After a few moments Agnes looked up at us and grinned, her lips stained with blood. ‘I’ll stay here and finish this,’ she said. ‘You get yourselves to safety in the tunnel.’
‘More enemies will be here soon, Agnes,’ Alice told her. ‘Don’t linger too long.’
‘Don’t you fear, child, I’ll soon catch you up. And if more come after these, so much the better!’
We could do no more to persuade Agnes, so, very reluctantly, we left her feeding and headed for the sepulchre. The building was almost exactly as I remembered it from my last visit – getting on for two years ago – but the sycamore sapling growing through its roof was taller and broader, the leafy canopy that shrouded this house of the dead even thicker, increasing the gloom within.
Alice pulled the stub of a candle out of her skirt pocket, and as we walked into the darkness of the sepulchre, it flickered into life, showing the cobwebbed horizontal tombstones and the dark earthen hole that gave access to the tunnel. Alice took the lead and we crawled through. After a while it widened and we were able to stand and make better progress.
Twice we paused while Alice sniffed for danger, but soon we’d passed the small lake once guarded by the killer wight – the eyeless body of a drowned sailor who’d been enchanted by dark magic. This one had been destroyed by one of the lamias and now no trace was visible, his dismembered body parts long since lost in the mud at the bottom. Only a faint unpleasant odour was testimony to the fact that this had once been a very dangerous place.
Before long we reached the underground gate to the ancient tower and were walking past the dark, dank dungeons, some still occupied by the skeletons of those tortured by the Malkin clan. No spirits lingered here now: on a previous visit to this place, my master had worked hard to send them all to the light.
We soon found ourselves in the vast cylindrical underground hall – and saw the pillar hung with chains; there were thirteen chains in all, and to each was attached a small dead animal: rats, rabbits, a cat, a dog and two badgers. I remembered their blood dripping down into a rusty bucket, but now it was empty and the dead creatures were desiccated and shrunken.
‘Grimalkin said that the lamias created the gibbet as an act of worship,’ Alice said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. ‘It was an offering to your mam.’
I nodded. On our previous visit, the Spook and I had wondered what the purpose of the gibbet was. Now I knew. I was dealing with things that had very little to do with the warm caring person I remembered. Mam had lived far beyond the normal human span, and her time spent on the farm as a loving wife and the mother of a family of seven boys had been relatively short. She had been the very first lamia; she had done things that I didn’t care to think about. Because of that I’d never told my master her true identity. I couldn’t bear the thought of him knowing what she’d done and thinking badly of her.
THERE WAS NO sign of the lamia so we began to climb the steps that spiralled up around the inner walls. High in the ceiling above, the lamias had enlarged the trapdoor into an irregular hole to allow themselves easier access. We clambered through this and continued up more stone steps, worn concave by the pointy shoes of many generations of Malkin witches, our footsteps echoing off the walls. We were still underground, and water was dripping from somewhere in the darkness far above. The air was dank, the light of Alice’s candle flickering in a cold draught.
We began to pass the cells where the witches had once incarcerated their enemies. On our last visit to the tower, we had spent some time in one of them, fearing for our lives. But when two of the Malkins had come to slay us, Alice and Mab Mouldheel had pushed them off the steps and they had fallen to their deaths.
There was a noise from inside and I saw Alice glance at the door of our former prison. She raised her candle and headed for the entrance. I followed, staff held at the ready, but it was just a rat, which darted past us and scampered down the steps, long tail trailing after it like a viper. As we started to climb again, Alice looked down to the place where her enemies had died. She shuddered at the memory.
In a strange way, that natural reaction gladdened my heart. By exerting her magical power, Alice might have moved closer to the dark, but she was still able to feel emotion and was not so hardened that she had lost herself, finally surrendering her innate goodness.