‘Here, lad,’ he said, handing me a small piece. ‘Don’t eat it all at once.’

Doing as he advised, I nibbled on it slowly.

‘You do know the girl’s following us?’ the Spook asked.

I looked at him in astonishment and shook my head.

‘She’s about a mile or so back there,’ he told me, gesturing south. ‘Now we’ve stopped, she’s stopped. What do you suppose she wants?’

‘I suppose she’s nowhere else to go, apart from east to Pendle and she doesn’t really want to go there. And she’d no choice but to leave Chipenden. It wouldn’t be safe when the Quisitor and his men arrived.’

‘Aye, and maybe it’s because she’s taken a shine to you and just wants to go where you go. I wish I’d had time to deal with her before we left Chipenden. She’s a threat because wherever she is, the Bane won’t be too far away. It’ll be hiding underground for now, but once it’s dark she’ll draw it to her like a moth to a candle flame and it’ll be hovering about for sure. If she feeds it again, it’ll grow stronger and start seeing through her eyes. Before then it may chance upon other victims – people or animals, the effect will be the same. After bloating itself with blood, it’ll grow stronger and soon be able to clothe itself in flesh and bones again. Last night was just the start.’

‘If it hadn’t been for Alice we’d never have left Chipenden,’ I pointed out. ‘We’d be prisoners of the Quisitor.’

But the Spook chose to ignore me. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’d best get on. I’m not getting any younger while I’m sitting here.’

But after another hour we rested again. This time the Spook stayed down longer before finally forcing himself to his feet. It went on like that throughout the day, with the periods of rest getting longer and the time we were on our feet getting shorter. Towards sunset the weather began to change. The smell of rain was strong in the air and soon it began to drizzle.

As darkness fell we began to descend towards a patchwork of drystone wall enclosures. The fell side was steep and the grass was slippery and we both kept losing our footing. What’s more, the rain was getting heavier and the wind starting to build from the west.

‘We’ll rest while I get my breath back,’ the Spook said.

He led the way to the nearest section of wall and we clambered over and hunkered down on its eastern edge, to shelter from the worst of the rain.

‘The damp gets deep into your bones when you’re my age,’ said the Spook. “That’s what a lifetime of County weather does to you. It gets us all eventually. Either your bones or your lungs suffer.’

We crouched against the wall miserably. I was tired and weary, and even though we were outside on such a night it was a struggle to keep awake. Before long I fell into a deep sleep and began to dream. It was one of those long dreams that seem to go on all night. And towards the end it became a nightmare…

CHAPTER 18

Nightmare On The Hill It was quite definitely the worst nightmare I’d ever had. And in a job like mine I’d had a lot. I was lost and trying to find my way home. I should have been able to manage it easily enough because everything was bathed in the light of the full moon, but every time I turned a corner and thought I recognized some landmark, I was soon proved wrong. At last I came over the top of Hangman’s Hill and saw our farm below.

As I walked down the hill, I began to feel very uneasy. Even though it was night time everything was too still and too quiet and nothing was moving below. The fences were in a poor state of repair, something that Dad and Jack would never have allowed to happen, and the barn doors were hanging half off their hinges.

The house looked deserted: some of the windows were broken and there were slates missing from the roof. I struggled to open the back door, and when it yielded with the usual jerk, I stepped into a kitchen that looked as though it hadn’t been lived in for years. There was dust everywhere and cobwebs hung from the ceiling. Mam’s rocking chair was right at the centre of the room and on it was a piece of folded paper, which I picked up and carried outside to read by the light of the moon.

Your dad’s, Jack’s Ellie’s and Mary’s graves are up on Hangman’s Hill. You’ll find your mother in the barn.

My heart aching to bursting point, I ran out into the yard. Then I halted outside the barn, listening carefully. Everything was silent. There wasn’t even a breath of wind. I stepped nervously into the gloom, hardly knowing what to expect. Would there be a grave there? Mam’s grave?

There was a hole in the roof almost directly above, and within a shaft of moonlight I could see Mam’s head. She was looking straight at me. Her body was in darkness, but from the position of her face she seemed to be kneeling on the ground.

Why would she do that? And why did she look so unhappy? Wasn’t she pleased to see me?

Suddenly Mam let out a scream of anguish. ‘Don’t look at me, Tom! Don’t look at me! Turn away now!’ she cried as if in torment.

The moment I looked away Mam rose up from the floor, and out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed something that turned my bones to jelly. From the neck down Mam was different. I saw wings and scales and a glint of sharp claws as she flew straight up into the air and smashed her way out through the barn roof, taking half of it with her. I looked up, shielding my face from the pieces of wood and debris that were falling towards me, and saw Mam, a black silhouette against the disc of the full moon as she flew upwards from the wreckage of the barn roof.

‘No! No!’ I shouted. ‘This isn’t true, This isn’t happening!’

In reply, a voice spoke inside my head. It was the low hiss of the Bane.

‘The moon shows the truth of things, boy. You know that already. All you have seen is true or will come to pass. All it takes is time.’

Someone began to shake my shoulder and I woke up in a cold sweat. The Spook was bending over me.

‘Wake up, lad! Wake up!’ he called. ‘It’s just a nightmare. It’s the Bane trying to get into your mind, trying to weaken us.’

I nodded but didn’t tell the Spook what had happened in the dream. It was too painful to talk about. I glanced up at the sky. Rain was still falling but the cloud was patchy and a few stars were visible. It was still dark, but dawn was not far off.

‘Have we slept all night?’

‘We have that,’ replied the Spook, ‘but I didn’t plan it that way.’

He rose stiffly. ‘Better move on while we still can,’ he said anxiously. ‘Can’t you hear ‘em?’

I listened and finally, above the noise of the wind and rain, I heard the distant baying of hounds.

‘Aye, they’re not too far behind,’ the Spook said. ‘Our only hope is to throw them off our scent. We need water to do that but it needs to be shallow enough for us to walk in. Of course, we’ll have to get back on dry land sometime but the dogs will have to be taken up and down the bank to pick up the scent again. And if there’s another stream close by it makes the job a lot easier.’

We scrambled over another wall and walked down a steep slope, moving as fast as we dared across the damp, slippery grass. There was a shepherd’s cottage below us, a faint silhouette against the sky, and next to it an ancient blackthorn tree, bent over towards it by the prevailing winds, its bare branches like claws clutching at the eaves. We kept walking towards the cottage for a few moments but then came to a sudden halt.

There was a wooden pen ahead and to our left. And there was just enough light to see that it contained a small flock of sheep, about twenty or so. And all of them were dead.

‘I don’t like the look of this one little bit, lad.’

I didn’t like the look of it either. But then I realized that he didn’t mean the dead sheep. He was looking at the cottage beyond.