Fat chance. At that moment a cloud drifted across the moon, making things a lot darker, but I could see the bent ferns. I could see the direction she’d taken. There was enough light to follow her trail.
So I followed her into the gloom. I wasn’t moving too quickly and I was being very, very cautious. What if she was hiding and waiting for me just ahead? I also knew that she probably hadn’t got very far. For one thing, it wasn’t more than five minutes or so after midnight. Whatever was in the cakes she’d eaten, I knew that dark magic would have played some part in getting her strength back. It was a magic that was supposed to be more powerful during the hours of darkness – particularly at midnight. She’d only eaten two cakes, not three, so that was in my favour, but I thought of the terrible strength needed to bend those bars.
Once out of the trees, I found it easy to follow her trail through the grass. She was heading downhill but in a direction that would take her away from Bony Lizzie’s cottage. That puzzled me at first, until I remembered the river in the gully below. A malevolent witch couldn’t cross running water – the Spook had taught me that – so she would have to move along its banks until it curved back upon itself, leaving her way clear.
Once in sight of the river, I paused on the hillside and searched the land below. The moon came out from behind the cloud, but at first, even with its help, I couldn’t see anything much down by the river because there were trees on both banks, casting dark shadows.
And then suddenly I noticed something very strange. There was a silver trail on the near bank. It was only visible where the moon touched it, but it looked just like the glistening trail made by a snail. A few seconds later I saw a dark, shadowy thing, all hunched up, shuffling along very close to the riverbank.
I started off down the hill as quickly as I could. My intention was to cut her off before she reached the bend in the river and was able to head directly for Bony Lizzie’s place. I managed that and stood there, the river on my right, facing downstream. But next came the difficult part. Now I had to face the witch.
I was trembling and shaking and so out of breath that you’d have thought I’d spent an hour or so running up and down the fells. It was a mixture of fear and nerves, and my knees felt as if they were going to give way any minute. It was only by leaning heavily on the Spook’s staff that I was able to stay on my feet at all.
As rivers went it wasn’t that wide, but it was deep, swollen by the spring rains to a level where it had almost burst its banks. The water was moving fast too, rushing away from me towards the darkness beneath the trees where the witch was. I looked very carefully, but it still took me quite a few moments to find her.
Mother Malkin was moving towards me. She was a shadow darker than the tree shadows, a sort of blackness that you could fall into, a darkness that would swallow you up for ever. I heard her then, even above the noise made by the fast-flowing river. It wasn’t just the sound of her bare feet, which were making a sort of slithery noise as they moved towards me through the long grass at the stream’s edge. No – there were other sounds that she was making with her mouth and perhaps her nose. The same sort of noises she’d made when I’d fed her the cake. There were snortings and snufflings that once again brought into my mind the memory of our hairy pigs feeding from the swill bucket. Then a different sound, a sucking noise.
When she moved out from under the trees into the open, the moonlight fell on her and I saw her properly for the first time. Her head was bowed low, her face hidden by a tangled mass of white and grey hair, so it seemed that she was looking at her feet, which were just visible under the dark gown that came down to her ankles. She wore a black cloak too, and either it was too long for her or the years she had spent in the damp earth had made her shrink. It hung down to the ground behind her and it was this, dragging over the grass, that seemed to be making the silver trail.
Her gown was stained and torn, which wasn’t really surprising, but some were fresh stains – dark, wet patches. Something was dripping onto the grass at her side and the drips were coming from what she gripped tightly in her left hand.
It was a rat. She was eating a rat. Eating it raw.
She didn’t seem to have noticed me yet. She was very close now, and if nothing happened, she’d bump right into me. I coughed suddenly. It wasn’t to warn her. It was a nervous cough and I hadn’t meant it to happen.
She looked up at me then, lifting into the moonlight a face that was something out of a nightmare, a face that didn’t belong to a living person. Oh, but she was alive all right. You could tell that by the noises she was making eating that rat.
But there was something else about her that terrified me so much that I almost fainted away on the spot. It was her eyes. They were like two hot coals burning inside their sockets, two red points of fire.
And then she spoke to me, her voice something between a whisper and a croak. It sounded like dry dead leaves rustling together in a late autumn wind.
‘It’s a boy,’ she said. ‘I like boys. Come here, boy.’
I didn’t move, of course. I just stood there, rooted to the spot. I felt dizzy and light-headed.
She was still moving towards me and her eyes seemed to be growing larger. Not only her eyes; her whole body seemed to be swelling up. She was expanding into a vast cloud of darkness that within moments would darken my own eyes for ever.
Without thinking, I lifted the Spook’s staff. My hands and arms did it, not me.
‘What’s that, boy, a wand?’ she croaked. Then she chuckled to herself and dropped the dead rat, lifting both her arms towards me.
It was me she wanted. She wanted my blood. In absolute terror, my body began to sway from side to side. I was like a sapling agitated by the first stirrings of a wind, the first storm wind of a dark winter that would never end.
I could have died then, on the bank of that river. There was nobody to help and I felt powerless to help myself.
But suddenly it happened…
The Spook’s staff wasn’t a wand, but there’s more than one kind of magic. My arms conjured up something special, moving faster than I could even think.
They lifted the staff and swung it hard, catching the witch a terrible blow on the side of the head.
She gave a sort of grunt and fell sideways into the river. There was a big splash and she went right under but came up very close to the bank about five or six paces downstream. At first I thought that that was the end of her, but to my horror her left arm came out of the water and grabbed a tussock of grass. Then the other arm reached for the bank and she started to drag herself out of the water.
I knew I had to do something before it was too late. So, using all my willpower, I forced myself to take a step towards her, as she heaved more of her body up onto the bank.
When I got close enough, I did something that I can still remember vividly. I still have nightmares about it. But what choice did I have? It was her or me. Only one of us was going to survive.
I jabbed the witch with the end of the staff. I jabbed her hard and I kept on jabbing her until she finally lost her grip on the bank and was swept away into the darkness.
But it still wasn’t over. What if she managed to get out of the water further downstream? She could still go to Bony Lizzie’s house. I had to make sure that didn’t happen. I knew it was the wrong thing to kill her and that one day she’d probably come back stronger than ever, but I didn’t have a silver chain, so I couldn’t bind her. It was now that mattered, not the future. No matter how hard it was, I knew I had to follow the river into the trees.
Very slowly I began to walk along the riverbank, pausing every five or six steps to listen. All I could hear was the wind sighing faintly through the branches above. It was very dark, with only the occasional thin shaft of moonlight managing to penetrate the leaf canopy, each like a long silver spear embedded in the ground.