THE WARDSTONE.
DRIVEN BY THE gentlest of breezes, our small fishing boat was sailing slowly west, bobbing gently towards the distant shore. I was staring ahead towards the green hills of Ireland, trying to take in as much as I could before the light failed. In another twenty minutes it would be dark.
Suddenly there was a roaring, howling sound, and the fisherman looked up in alarm. From nowhere a great wind blew up. A black cloud raced towards us from the north, zigzag lightning flickering down into the sea, which was now boiling and surging so that the small boat rolled alarmingly. Our three dogs began to whimper. The usually fearless wolfhounds, Claw, Blood and Bone, didn’t like sea voyages at the best of times.
I was on my knees, clinging to the prow, cold pinching my ears, sea-spray stinging my eyes.
The Spook and my friend Alice were cowering down below the gunwales, doing their best to take shelter. The waves had suddenly become much bigger – unnaturally so, I thought. We seemed about to capsize. As we slid down into a trough, a gigantic wave, a sheer wall of water, came out of nowhere and loomed above us, threatening to smash our fragile craft to matchwood and drown us all.
But somehow we survived and rode up the wave to its crest. A torrent of hail came then – pebbles of ice, raining down onto the boat and us, beating at our heads and bodies with stinging force. Again lightning flashed almost directly overhead. I looked up at the mass of churning black cloud above us, and suddenly saw two orbs of light.
I stared up at them in astonishment. They were quite close together and made me think of two staring eyes. Then, as I watched, they began to change. They were eyes – very distinctive eyes too, peering down from the black cloud. The left one was green, the right blue, and they seemed to glitter with malice.
Was I imagining it? I wondered. I rubbed my own eyes, thinking that I was seeing things. But no – they were still there. I was about to shout to get Alice’s attention, but even as I watched, they faded away to nothing.
The wind dropped as suddenly as it had arisen, and within less than a minute the huge waves were no more. The sea was still livelier than it had been before the storm, though, and the wind was once more at our backs, driving us towards land at a much faster rate.
‘Five minutes and I’ll put you ashore!’ cried the fisherman. ‘There’s a good side to everything, even a storm.’
I thought about the eyes in the cloud again. Maybe I’d only imagined them. It might be worth mentioning to the Spook later, but this wasn’t the time.
‘It was strange the way that storm came up so suddenly!’ I shouted.
The fisherman shook his head. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘You see strange things at sea, but that was just a squall. They often blow up out of nowhere. Mind you, that sea was something. Almost like a tidal wave. But this old tub is sturdier than she looks.’ He looked quite pleased with himself. ‘I need to be back well before dawn, and we’ve got a bit o’ wind to fill our sails now.’
The Spook had paid him generously with almost the last of his money, but even so the fisherman had taken a big risk. We’d sailed away from the Isle of Mona about eight hours earlier, making the crossing west towards Ireland. We were refugees from the invasion of the County, and the Spook, Alice and I had spent many dangerous months on that island. Now the inhabitants of Mona were returning any refugees they found to the County – into the hands of the occupying forces. Intensive searches were being made. It had been time to get away.
‘I hope we get a better welcome here,’ said Alice despondently.
‘Well, girl, it couldn’t be much worse than last time,’ said the Spook.
That was true enough. On Mona we’d been on the run almost immediately.
‘You should have little trouble here!’ shouted the fisherman, trying to make himself heard above the whine of the wind. ‘Very few of your folk will have ventured this far, and it’s a big island. A few more mouths to feed won’t worry them much. You might find there’s work for a spook too. Some call it the “Haunted Isle”. It certainly possesses more than its fair share of ghosts.’
Spooks dealt with the dark. It was a dangerous trade, and I was in the third year of my apprenticeship to my master, John Gregory, learning how to deal with witches, boggarts and all manner of supernatural creatures. Ghosts usually posed little threat and were the least of our worries. Most didn’t even know they were dead and, with the right words, could be persuaded to go into the light.
‘Don’t they have spooks of their own?’ I asked.
‘They’re a dying breed,’ said the fisherman. There was an awkward silence. ‘I hear tell there are none working in Dublin, and a city like that is bound to be plagued by jibbers.’
‘Jibbers?’ I queried. ‘What’s a jibber?’
The fisherman laughed. ‘You a spook’s apprentice and don’t know what a jibber is? You should be ashamed of yourself! You need to pay more attention to your lessons.’
I felt annoyed by his comments. My master was lost in thought and didn’t seem to be listening to the fisherman. He had never mentioned a jibber, and I was sure there was no account of such things in his Bestiary, which was tucked safely away in his bag. He had written it himself; an illustrated record of all the creatures he’d encountered and heard of, with notes on how to deal with them. There was certainly no reference to a jibber in the ‘Ghosts’ section. I wondered if he even knew they existed.
‘Aye,’ continued the fisherman, ‘I wouldn’t like your job. Despite its storms and moods, the sea is a far safer place to be than facing a jibber. Beware the jibber! Better to be drowned than driven mad!’
At that point the conversation came to an end: the fisherman brought us alongside a small wooden jetty that ran out into the sea from a bank of shingle. The three dogs wasted no time in leaping from the boat. We clambered out more slowly. We were stiff and cold after the voyage.
Moments later, the fisherman put out to sea again, and we made our way to the end of the jetty and up the shingle, our feet crunching on the stones. Anyone would be able to hear our approach from miles away, but at least they wouldn’t be able to see us in the gloom. And in any case, if the fisherman was right, we should be in no danger from angry islanders.
There were dense clouds above and it was now very dark, but the shape of what we took to be a dwelling loomed up in front of us. It proved to be a dilapidated boathouse, where we sheltered for the night.