The Spook's Bestiary - By Joseph Delaney Page 0,29

woman suffering night terrors; another too afraid to venture beyond her own front door. This time the local constable didn’t get involved because the people of Adlington had a strong sense of community and believed in sorting things out for themselves.

I told Meg not to visit Adlington again and employed the village carpenter, a man called Shanks, to bring groceries up to the house. She was angry at that and we quarreled bitterly. After this, there was a coldness between us to rival that of the winter on Anglezarke Moor. It persisted, and three days later, despite my protests, Meg went shopping again.

This time the village women resorted to violence. Over a dozen of them seized her in the market square. Shanks told me that she’d fought with her fists like a man but also scratched like a cat, almost blinding the ringleader of the women. Finally they struck her down from behind with a cobblestone; once felled, she was bound tightly with ropes.

Only a silver chain can hold a witch for long, but they rushed her down to the pond and threw her into the deep, cold water. If she drowned, they would accept that she was innocent of witchcraft; if she floated, they’d burn her.

Meg did float, but facedown, and after five minutes or so became very still in the water. The women were satisfied that she had drowned, so they left her where she was.

It was Shanks who pulled her out of the pond. By rights she should have been dead, but Meg was exceptionally strong. To Shanks’s amazement, she soon began to twitch and splutter, coughing up water onto the muddy bank. He brought her back to my house across the back of his pony. She looked a sorry sight, but within hours she was fully recovered and soon started to plot her revenge.

I’d already thought long and hard about what needed to be done. I could cast her out—let her take her own chances in the world. But that would have broken my heart because I still loved her.

My knowledge of a special herb tea seemed to be the answer. It is possible to administer this to keep a witch in a deep sleep for many months. If the dose is reduced, she can be kept awake but docile: She can walk and talk but the tea impairs the memory, making her forget her knowledge of the dark arts. So this was the method I decided to use.

It was very difficult to get the dosage right, and painful to see Meg walking about so subdued and mild, her fiery spirit (something that had attracted me to her in the first place) now dampened. So much so that she often seemed a stranger to me. The worst time of all was when I left her alone in my Anglezarke house and returned to Chipenden for the summer. It had to be done, lest the law catch up with her. There was still the danger of her being hanged at Caster. So I locked her in a dark room off the cellar steps in so deep a trance that she was hardly breathing.

I left for Chipenden with a heavy heart. Although I’d experimented through the winter, I still worried about whether or not I’d gotten the dose right. Too much herb tea, and Meg might stop breathing; too little, and she could wake up alone in that dark cell with many long weeks to wait until my return. So I spent our enforced separation riddled with sorrow and anxiety.

Fortunately I had calculated the dose correctly and returned late the following autumn just as Meg was beginning to stir. It was hard for her, but at least she wasn’t hanged, or exiled to Greece. The County was spared the harm she could inflict.

But a lesson must be learned from this, one that my apprentices should note carefully. A spook should never become romantically involved with a witch; it compromises his position and draws him dangerously close to the dark. I have fallen short in my duty to the County more than once, but my relationship with Meg Skelton was my greatest failing of all.

Water Witches

These witches are far more animal than human and have mostly lost the power of speech. They dwell in marshes, rivers, canals, and ditches, and, unlike human witches, have the ability to cross running water.9 However, they cannot use mirrors, either to com-municate or to spy on others. One name commonly given to water