‘It’s just that some say that is what you do to those you hate most,’ Thorne continued quickly.
‘My enemies must fear me,’ I replied. ‘With my scissors I snip the flesh of the dead; the clan enemies that I have slain in combat. Then I cut out their thumb-bones, which I wear around my neck as a warning to others. What else would I do? Without ruthlessness and savagery I could not survive even a week of the life I lead.’
‘But the living? Have you ever done it to the living?’ Thorne persisted. She was brave to pursue the matter when I was clearly angry – courage was one of her best qualities. But it also displayed another side of her; a fault. She could be reckless.
She did not know when to back off.
‘I do not wish to speak of it,’ I said quietly. ‘The matter is closed.’
I have looked into the darkness, into the greatest darkness of all, and now I fear nothing.
ONE HOUR AFTER nightfall we approached the dell but halted beneath the wide branches of a solitary oak a hundred yards short of its nearest trees.
‘Call her,’ I whispered.
The night of the full moon had been and gone. Somewhere within those trees Agnes Sowerbutts would now have awoken to a new existence as a dead witch. In time, as her body slowly decayed, a witch sometimes became bitter and twisted, hating all those whom they had befriended and cared for in life. But those taken to the dell did not change their loves, hatreds and allegiances immediately. To a certain extent she would still be the same Agnes, and I hoped that we could rely on her to effect our safe entry to the dell – or at least to let us know the situation there.
Thorne gave a long mournful cry – something close to that made by a corpse-fowl but subtly modified into the signal that she always used when approaching Agnes’s cottage. I had introduced Thorne to the old witch soon after I had begun her training and Agnes had taken the child under her wing, teaching her about potions, and occasionally, when I was away from Pendle, offering her a place to stay.
We waited in silence. There were faint rustles in the distant trees but nothing alive or dead ventured into the open. After about five minutes I instructed Thorne to try again. Once more we waited while the wind sighed through the branches of the oak. It was a night of sudden showers, and at that moment a particularly heavy one was falling; for a while all we could hear was rain drumming on the ground. The shower passed as quickly as it had started and the moon came out briefly. It was then that I saw the dark shape crawling towards us across the clearing. Without doubt it was a dead witch. I could hear her sniffing and snuffling, her nose almost touching the wet grass, her gown a slithering shadow. Only when she lifted her face into the moonlight did I recognize her as Agnes. Death had already changed her for the worse.
She came in under cover of the branches, gasping and wheezing, and pulled herself up into a sitting position, resting her back against the tree trunk. For a while nobody spoke, and I listened to the drops of water dripping from leaf to leaf on their long slow journey to the ground.
I looked at Agnes with my keen eyes, and she was a sorry sight indeed. Some dead witches are strong and can run for miles, hunting human prey; others are weak, and theirs is a miserable existence crawling through the slime and leaf-mould, searching for small creatures such as rats and mice. If this was indeed Agnes’s existence now, I pitied her. She had always been a proud woman; although at first glance her cottage had appeared cluttered, her bottles and jars were placed in perfect order upon her shelves and her house was immaculate – never even a speck of dust in sight. Very few witches cared about cleanliness; Agnes had been the exception. She had changed her clothes every day and her pointy shoes were so highly polished that you could see your refection in them.
Thorne looked shocked and momentarily covered her face with her hands. I too was dismayed to see the change that had befallen Agnes in so short a time. Her tattered dress was caked in dirt. No doubt she’d been crawling through brambles in search of prey. As for her once clean, shining hair, it was now greasy and infested with wriggling white maggots, while her gaunt face was smeared with mud and blood.
There was no point in trying to pretend that things were better than they appeared. Agnes had always been kind but plain-speaking, so I didn’t mince my words, even though she was dead.
‘It sorrows me to see you in this state, Agnes,’ I told her kindly. ‘Is there anything that we can do to help?’
‘I never thought I would come to this,’ she said, shaking her head so that maggots dropped from her hair into her lap. ‘I was strong in life and hoped to be the same in death. But I thirst! I thirst so much and can never get enough blood. I am not strong enough to hunt large creatures or humans. Small rodents are all I can manage. Rabbits are too fast.’
‘Don’t the other dead help? Don’t the strong help those weaker than themselves?’ asked Thorne.
Agnes shook her head. ‘Dead witches hunt alone and care for nought but themselves.’
‘Then at least tonight your thirst will be quenched,’ I said. I turned to Thorne: ‘Bring Agnes something large.’
In an instant the girl had sped away.
‘I still have the Fiend’s head,’ I told Agnes. ‘It is in all our interests that it remains detached from his body. Will you help? Our enemies are approaching, and we need to take refuge in the dell. We need some of our dead sisters to fight alongside us.’
‘Others rule here,’ Agnes croaked. ‘I am feeble and my word counts for little within dark place.’
‘Are those within for the Fiend or against him?’ I asked.
‘Dead witches, be they strong or weak, care for nothing but blood. If they think at all, it is blood that fills their thoughts. I hope that I will never be like them. My memories of my life are precious and I want to hold onto them for as long as I can. But you needn’t attempt to win them to your cause. They will kill anything living that enters the dell – you too if they can catch you.’
‘How many of the strong ones are close at hand?’ I said, listening to the rustles and scratching sounds from the dell, which told me that some of the weaker witches were close by.
‘Only a pair. The third has been away for more than two nights but could return at any time.’
‘It is as I thought. So if we can get to the centre of the dell before our enemies arrive, the dead will effectively be our allies whether they wish it or not.’