The Last Apprentice: Complete Collection

by Joseph Delaney

  “He’s not said that much about witches,” I said, suddenly feeling annoyed with the Spook. Most of my training so far had been about boggarts, with little bits on ghasts and ghosts, while all my problems had been caused by witches.

  I still didn’t trust Alice, but now, after what she’d just said, I couldn’t leave for Chipenden. I’d never get the Spook back here in time. Her warning about the threat to Ellie’s baby seemed well intentioned, but if Alice were possessed, or on Mother Malkin’s side, they were the very words that gave me no choice but to go back down the hill toward the farm. The very words that would keep me from warning the Spook, yet keep me where the witch could get her hands on me at a time of her own choosing.

  On the way down the hill, I kept my distance from Alice, but she was at my side when we walked into the yard and crossed close to the front of the barn.

  Snout was there, sharpening his knives; he looked up when he saw me and nodded. I nodded back. After he’d nodded at me, he just stared at Alice without speaking, but he looked her up and down twice. Then, just before we reached the kitchen door, he whistled long and loud. Snout’s face had more in common with a pig’s than with a wolf’s, but it was that kind of whistle, heavy with mockery.

  Alice pretended not to hear him. Before making the breakfast, she had another job to do: She went straight into the kitchen and started preparing the chicken we’d be having for our midday meal. It was hanging from a hook by the door, its neck off and its insides already pulled out the evening before. She set to work cleaning it with water and salt, her eyes concentrating hard on what she was doing so that her busy fingers wouldn’t miss the tiniest bit.

  It was then, as I watched her, that I finally remembered something that might just work against a possessed body.

  Salt and iron!

  I couldn’t be sure, but it was worth a try. It was what the Spook used to bind a boggart into a pit, and it might just work against a witch. If I threw it at someone possessed, it might just drive Mother Malkin out.

  I didn’t trust Alice and didn’t want her to see me helping myself to the salt, so I had to wait until she’d stopped cleaning the chicken and left the kitchen. That done, before going out to start my own chores, I paid a visit to Dad’s workshop.

  It didn’t take me long to find what I needed. From among the large collection of files on the shelf above his workbench I chose the biggest and roughest toothed of them all. Soon I was filing away at the edge of an old iron bucket, the noise setting my teeth on edge. But it wasn’t long before an even louder noise split the air.

  It was the scream of a dying pig, the first of five.

  I knew that Mother Malkin could be anywhere, and if she hadn’t already possessed someone, she might choose a victim at any moment. So I had to concentrate and be on my guard at all times. But at least now I had something to defend myself with.

  Jack wanted me to help Snout, but I was always ready with an excuse, claiming that I was finishing this or just about to do that. If I got stuck working with Snout, I wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on everyone else. As I was just his brother visiting for a few days, not the hired help, Jack wasn’t able to insist, but he came very close to it.

  In the end, after lunch, his face as black as thunder, he was forced to help Snout himself, which was exactly what I wanted. If he was working in front of the barn, I could keep an eye on him from a distance. I kept using excuses to check on Alice and Ellie, too. Either one of them could be possessed, but if it were Ellie, there’d not be much chance of saving the baby: most of the time it was either in her arms or sleeping in its cot close to her side.

  I had the salt and iron, but I wasn’t sure whether it would be enough. The best thing would have been a silver chain. Even a short one would have been better than nothing. When I was little, I’d once overheard Dad and Mam talking about a silver chain that belonged to her. I’d never seen her wearing one, but it might still be in the house somewhere—maybe in the storeroom just below the attic, which Mam always kept locked.

  But their bedroom wasn’t locked. Normally I’d never have gone into their room without permission, but I was desperate. I searched Mam’s jewelry box. There were brooches and rings in the box, but no silver chain. I searched the whole room. I felt really guilty looking through the drawers, but I did it anyway. I thought there might have been a key to the storeroom, but I didn’t find it.

  While I was searching, I heard Jack’s big boots coming up the stairs. I kept very still, hardly daring to breathe, but he just came up to his bedroom for a few moments and went straight down again. After that, I completed my search but found nothing, so I went down to check on everyone once more.

  That day the air had been still and calm, but when I walked by the barn, a breeze had sprung up. The sun was beginning to go down, lighting up everything in a warm, red glow and promising fine weather for the following day. At the front of the barn three dead pigs were now hanging, head down, from big hooks. They were pink and freshly scraped, the last one still dripping blood into a bucket, and Snout was on his knees wrestling with the fourth, which was giving him a hard time of it—it was difficult to tell which of them was grunting the loudest.

  Jack, the front of his shirt soaked in blood, glared at me as I passed, but I just smiled and nodded. They were just getting on with the work in hand and there was still quite a bit to do, so they’d be at it long after the sun had set. But so far there wasn’t the slightest sign of dizziness, not even a hint of possession.

  Within an hour it was dark. Jack and Snout were still working by the light of the fire that was flickering their shadows across the yard.

  The horror began as I went to the shed at the back of the barn to fetch a bag of spuds from the storeroom.

  I heard a scream. It was a scream filled with terror. The scream of a woman facing the very worst thing that could possibly happen to her.

  I dropped the sack of potatoes and ran around to the front of the barn. There I came to a sudden halt, hardly able to believe what I was seeing.

  Ellie was standing about twenty paces away, holding out both her arms, screaming and screaming as if she were being tortured. At her feet lay Jack, blood all over his face. I thought Ellie was screaming because of Jack—but no, it was because of Snout.

  He was facing toward me, as if he were waiting for me to arrive. In his left hand he was holding his favorite sharp knife, the long one he always used to cut a pig’s throat. I froze in horror, because I knew what I’d heard in Ellie’s scream.

  With his right arm, he was cradling her baby.

  There was thick pig blood on Snout’s boots, and it was still dripping onto them from his apron. He moved the knife closer to the baby.

  “Come here, boy,” he called in my direction. “Come to me.” Then he laughed.

  His mouth had opened and closed as he spoke, but it wasn’t his voice that came out. It was Mother Malkin’s. Neither was it his usual deep belly rumble of laughter. It was the cackle of the witch.

  I took a slow step toward Snout. Then another one. I wanted to get closer to him. I wanted to save Ellie’s baby. I tried to go faster. But I couldn’t. My feet felt as heavy as lead. It was like desperately trying to run in a nightmare. My legs were moving as if they didn’t belong to me.

  I suddenly realized something that brought me out in a cold sweat. I wasn’t just moving toward Snout because I wanted to. It was because Mother Malkin had summoned me. She was drawing me toward him at the pace she wanted, drawing me toward his waiting knife. I wasn’t going to the rescue. I was just going to die. I was under some sort of spell. A spell of compulsion.

  I’d felt something similar down by the river, but just in time my left hand and arm had acted by themselves to knock Mother Malkin into the water. Now my limbs were as powerless as my mind.

  I was moving closer to Snout. Closer and closer to his waiting knife. His eyes were the eyes of Mother Malkin, and his face was bulging horribly. It was as if the witch inside were distorting its
shape, swelling the cheeks close to bursting, bulging the eyes close to popping, beetling the brow into craggy overhanging cliffs; below them the bulbous, protruding eyes were centered with fire, casting a red, baleful glow before them.

  I took another step and felt my heart thud. Another step and it thudded again. I was much nearer to Snout by now. Thud, thud went my heart, a beat for each step.

  When I was no more than five paces from the waiting knife, I heard Alice running toward us, screaming my name. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, moving out of the darkness into the glow from the fire. She was heading straight toward Snout, her black hair streaming back from her head as if she were running directly into a gale.

  Without even breaking her stride, she kicked toward Snout with all her might. She aimed just above his leather apron, and I watched the toe of her pointy shoe disappear so deeply into his fat belly that only the heel was visible.

  Snout gasped, doubled over, and dropped Ellie’s baby, but, lithe like a year-old cat, Alice dropped to her knees and caught it just before it hit the ground. Then she spun away, running back toward Ellie.

  At the very moment that Alice’s pointy shoe touched Snout’s belly, the spell was broken. I was free again. Free to move my own limbs. Free to move. Or free to attack.

  Snout was almost bent in two, but he straightened back up, and although he’d dropped the baby, he was still holding the knife. I watched as he moved it toward me. He staggered a bit, too—perhaps he was dizzy, or maybe it was just a reaction to Alice’s pointy shoe.

  Free of the spell, a whole range of feelings surged up inside me. There was sorrow for what had been done to Jack, horror at the danger Ellie’s baby had been in, and anger that this could happen to my family. And in that moment I knew that I was born to be a spook. The very best spook who’d ever lived. I could and would make Mam proud of me.

  You see, rather than being filled with fear, I was all ice and fire. Deep inside I was raging, full of hot anger that was threatening to explode. While on the outside I was as cold as ice, my mind sharp and clear, my breathing slow.

  I thrust my hands into my breeches pockets. Then I brought them out fast, each fist full of what it had found there, and hurled each handful straight at Snout’s head, something white from my right hand and something dark from my left. They came together, a white and a black cloud, just as they struck his face and shoulders.

  Salt and iron—the same mixture so effective against a boggart. Iron to bleed away its strength; salt to burn it. Iron filings from the edge of the old bucket and salt from Mam’s kitchen store. I was just hoping that it would have the same effect on a witch.

  I suppose having a mixture like that thrown into your face wouldn’t do anybody much good—at the very least it would make you cough and splutter—but the effect on Snout was much worse than that. First he opened his hand and let the knife fall. Then his eyes rolled up into his head and he pitched slowly forward, down onto his knees. Then he hit his forehead very hard on the ground, and his face twisted to one side.

  Something thick and slimy began to ooze out of his left nostril. I just stood there watching, unable to move as Mother Malkin slowly bubbled and twisted from his nose into the shape that I remembered. It was her all right, but some of her was the same, while other bits were different.

  For one thing, she was less than a third of the size she’d been the last time I saw her. Now her shoulders were hardly past my knees, but she was still wearing the long cloak, which was trailing on the ground, and the gray-and-white hair still fell onto her hunched shoulders like mildewy curtains. It was her skin that was really different. All glistening, strange, and sort of twisted and stretched. However, the red eyes hadn’t changed, and they glared at me once before she turned and began to move away toward the corner of the barn. She seemed to be shrinking even more, and I wondered if that was the salt and iron still having an effect. I didn’t know what more I could do, so I just stood there watching her go, too exhausted to move.

  Alice wasn’t having that. By now she’d handed the baby to Ellie, and she came running across and made straight for the fire. She picked up a piece of wood that was burning at one end, then ran at Mother Malkin, holding it out in front of her.

  I knew what she was going to do. One touch, and the witch would go up in flames. Something inside me couldn’t let that happen because it was too horrible, so I caught Alice by the arm as she ran past and spun her around so that she dropped the burning log.

  She turned on me, her face full of fury, and I thought I was about to feel a pointy shoe. Instead she gripped my forearm so tightly that her fingernails actually bit deep into the flesh.

  “Get harder or you won’t survive!” she hissed into my face. “Just doing what Old Gregory says won’t be enough. You’ll die like the others!”

  She released my arm, and I looked down at it and saw beads of blood where her nails had cut into me.

  “You have to burn a witch,” Alice said, the anger in her voice lessening, “to make sure they don’t come back. Putting them in the ground ain’t no good. It just delays things. Old Gregory knows that, but he’s too soft to use burning. Now it’s too late. . . .”

  Mother Malkin was disappearing around the side of the barn into the shadows, still shrinking with each step, her black cloak trailing on the ground behind her.

  It was then that I realized the witch had made a big mistake. She’d taken the wrong route, right across the largest pigpen. By now she was small enough to fit under the lowest plank of wood.

  The pigs had had a very bad day. Five of their number had been slaughtered, and it had been a very noisy, messy business that had probably scared them pretty badly. So they weren’t best pleased, to say the least, and it probably wasn’t a good time to go into their pen. And big hairy pigs will eat anything, anything at all. Soon it was Mother Malkin’s turn to scream, and it went on for a long time.

  “Could be as good as burning, that,” said Alice when the sound finally faded away. I could see the relief in her face. I felt the same. We were both glad it was all over. I was tired, so I just shrugged, not sure what to think, but I was already looking back toward Ellie, and I didn’t like what I saw.

  Ellie was frightened, and she was horrified. She was looking at us as if she couldn’t believe what had happened and what we’d done. It was as if she’d seen me properly for the first time. As if she’d suddenly realized what I was.

  I understood something, too. For the first time I really felt what it was like to be the Spook’s apprentice. I’d seen people move to the other side of the road to avoid passing close to us. I’d watched them shiver or cross themselves just because we’d passed through their village, but I hadn’t taken it personally. In my mind it was their reaction to the Spook, not to me.

  But I couldn’t ignore this, or push it to the side of my mind. It was happening to me directly, and it was happening in my own home.

  I suddenly felt more alone than I ever had before.

  CHAPTER XIV

  The Spook’s Advice

  BUT not everything turned out badly. Jack wasn’t dead after all. I didn’t like to ask too many questions because it just got everybody upset, but it seemed that one minute Snout had been about to start scraping the belly of the fifth pig with Jack, and the next he’d suddenly gone berserk and attacked him.

  It was just pig’s blood on Jack’s face. He’d been knocked unconscious with a piece of timber. Snout had then gone into the house and snatched the baby. He’d wanted to use it as bait to get me close so that he could use his knife on me.

  Of course, the way I’m telling it now isn’t quite right. It wasn’t really Snout doing these terrible things. He’d been possessed, and Mother Malkin was just using his body. After a couple of hours Snout recovered and went home puzzled and nursing a very sore belly. He didn’t seem to remember anything about what had happened, and none of us wanted to enlighten him.

  Nobody slept much that night. After building the fire up high,
Ellie stayed down in the kitchen all night and wouldn’t let the baby out of her sight. Jack went to bed nursing a sore head, but he kept waking up and having to dash outside to be sick in the yard.

  An hour or so before dawn, Mam came home. She didn’t seem very happy either. It was as if something had gone wrong.

  I lifted her bag to carry it into the house. “Are you all right, Mam?” I asked. “You look tired.”

  “Never mind me, son. What’s happened here? I can tell something’s wrong just by looking at your face.”

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “We’d better get inside first.”

  When we walked into the kitchen Ellie was so relieved to see Mam that she started to cry, and that set the baby off crying, too. Jack came down then and everybody tried to tell Mam things at once, but I gave up after a few seconds because Jack started off on one of his rants.

  Mam shut him up pretty quickly. “Lower your voice, Jack,” she told him. “This is still my house, and I can’t abide shouting.”

  He wasn’t happy at being told off in front of Ellie like that, but he knew better than to argue.

  She made each one of us tell her exactly what had happened, starting with Jack. I was the last, and when it was my turn, she sent Ellie and Jack up to bed so that we could talk alone. Not that she said much. She just listened quietly, then held my hand.

  Finally she went up to Alice’s room and spent a long time talking to her alone.

  The sun had been up less than an hour when the Spook arrived. Somehow I’d been expecting him. He waited at the gate, and I went out and told the tale again, while he leaned on his staff. When I’d finished, he shook his head.

  “I sensed that something was wrong, lad, but I came too late. Still you did all right. You used your initiative and managed to remember some of the things I’d taught you. If all else fails, you can always fall back on salt and iron.”

  “Should I have let Alice burn Mother Malkin?” I asked.