‘I haven’t one paying customer staying here and it’s been the same for nearly six months. They’re too scared. Nobody will come near the place since it arrived – so I’m afraid I can’t pay you in coin. But if you get rid of it, I’ll let you have three rooms free of charge for a week. How does that sound?’
‘Get rid of what?’ demanded the Spook.
‘Anyone who meets it goes stark staring mad within minutes,’ the innkeeper told him. ‘It’s a jibber, and a very nasty one at that!’
‘WHAT EXACTLY IS a jibber?’ my master enquired.
‘Don’t you know?’ asked the landlord, his face once more showing doubt.
‘We don’t have anything called a jibber back in the County, where I come from,’ explained the Spook. ‘So take your time and tell me all about it – then I’ll know better what I’m dealing with.’
‘A jibber often appears within a week of somebody killing themselves, and that’s what’s happened here,’ the landlord told us. ‘The chambermaid had been in my employment for over two years – a good hard-working girl, she was, and pretty as a picture. That was her downfall. She attracted someone above her station. I warned her, but she wouldn’t listen.
‘Well, to cut a long story short, he made her promises – ones that he had no intention of keeping. And even if he’d meant what he said, there’s no way his family would have approved of their liaison. He was a young man with an inheritance to come and a good family name to uphold. I ask you – was he likely to marry a poor servant girl with not a penny to her name? He told her he loved her. She certainly loved him. But, predictably, it turned out badly. He married a titled lady – it seemed the marriage had been arranged for months. He’d been lying all the time, and when the girl found out her heart was broken. The silly creature cut her throat. Not an easy way to go. I heard her choking and coughing, and ran upstairs to see what the matter was. There was blood everywhere.’
‘Poor thing,’ murmured Alice, shuddering.
I nodded, trying to get the image of the chambermaid’s terrible death out of my head. It was a big mistake to kill yourself, no matter how bad the situation seemed. But the poor girl would have been desperate, not really knowing what she was doing.
‘There are still stains on the floorboards,’ continued the landlord, ‘and no amount of scrubbing will get ’em out. She took a long time to die. Got her a doctor, but he couldn’t help. Doctors are useless, and that’s a fact. I wouldn’t give one the time of day. Anyway, she’d have gone to a pauper’s grave, but she’d been a good worker, as I said, so I paid for her funeral myself. She’d been dead less than a week when the jibber arrived. The poor girl was hardly cold in her grave and—’
‘What were the first signs of its arrival?’ interrupted the Spook. ‘Think carefully. It’s important.’
‘There were strange rappings on the floorboards – there was a rhythm to them: two quick knocks, then three slow ones, over and over again. After a few days, an icy chill could be felt at the spot where the poor girl had died – right above the bloodstains. A day later, one of my guests went mad. He jumped through the window and broke both his legs on the cobbles below. His legs will heal, but his mind is beyond repair.’
‘Surely you weren’t still using that room? No doubt you warned him about the rappings and the cold spot?’
‘He wasn’t staying in the room where the girl died – that was a servant’s room in the attic, right at the top of the building. A jibber haunts the very spot where a suicide occurs, and I assumed that it would stay there. Now they tell me that it can wander anywhere inside the building.’
‘Why do they call the thing a jibber?’ I asked.
‘Because of the noise it makes, boy,’ the landlord replied. ‘It makes jibbering and jabbering noises. It natters and prattles away to itself – sounds that don’t make any sense but are terrifying to hear.’ He turned back to the Spook. ‘So, can you sort it out? Priests can do nothing. This is a city full of priests, but they’re no better than doctors.’
The Spook frowned. ‘Now, as I said, I come from a different place – the County, which is a land across the sea to the east,’ he explained. ‘I have to admit that I’ve never heard of what you’re describing. You’d have thought that news of something so odd would have reached us by now.’
‘Well, you see,’ said the landlord, ‘jibbers are new to the city. They first started to appear about a year ago. They’re like a plague. They were first sighted in the southwest, and have slowly spread east. The first cases reached the city just before Christmas. Some think they’re the work of the goat mages of Kerry, who are always dabbling in dark magic. But who can say?’
We knew little about the Irish mages – only that they were in a state of constant war with some of the landowners. There was just a short reference to them in the Spook’s Bestiary. They supposedly worshipped the Old God, Pan, in return for power. It was rumoured that human sacrifice was involved. It was a nasty business.
‘Am I right in saying that this jibber of yours is only active after dark?’ enquired the Spook.
The landlord nodded.
‘Well, in that case we’ll try to sort it out tonight. Would you mind if we took our rooms in advance of the job? We’d like to catch up on our sleep so that we’re fit to face this jibber of yours.’
‘By all means, but if you fail to sort it out, I’ll expect to be paid for every day you stay here. I don’t spend one minute in this place after dark – I sleep at my brother’s. So, if it proves necessary, pay me in the morning.’
‘That’s fair enough,’ said the Spook, shaking hands with the landlord to clinch the deal. Most folk didn’t like to get too near to a spook, but this man was in serious financial trouble and grateful for my master’s help.
We each chose a room, and spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon catching up on our sleep, having arranged to meet in the kitchen about an hour before dark. Mine was a troubled sleep: I had a terrifying dream.
I was in a forest. There was no moon, but the trees were glowing with an unearthly silver light. Alone and unarmed, I was crawling on all fours, searching for something that I needed very badly – my staff. Without it, I realized, I wouldn’t survive.