I got undressed and climbed into bed. I was tired but still found it hard to get to sleep. The old house creaked and groaned a lot, and at one point there were patterings near the foot of the bed. It was probably just mice under the floorboards, but being a seventh son of a seventh son, I might well have been hearing something very different.

    Despite that, I finally managed to drift off to sleep -only to awake suddenly in the middle of the night. I lay there feeling uneasy, wondering why I'd woken up so abruptly. It was pitch dark and I couldn't see a thing, but I just felt that something was wrong. There'd been a noise of some sort. I felt sure of it.

    I didn't have to wait long before hearing it again. Two different sounds that began gradually, becoming louder and louder as the seconds passed. One was a sort of high-pitched humming noise and the other a much lower, deep rumble, as if someone were rolling huge boulders down a stony mountainside.

    Only it seemed to be happening somewhere beneath the house, and it was so bad that the windowpanes were rattling and even the walls seemed to be shaking and vibrating. I began to feel afraid. If it got any worse then the whole house seemed sure to collapse. I didn't know what it could be, but a thought crashed through my mind. Was an earthquake causing the clough to collapse onto the house?

What Lay Beneath

    Earthquakes did happen, but they were very rare in the County. There hadn't been a serious one in living memory. Yet the house was shaking so much, I really was worried. So I dressed quickly, pulled on my boots and went downstairs.

    The first thing I noticed was that the cellar door was open. Faint sounds were coming from below so, feeling curious, I went down a couple of steps. The rumbling sounded even worse down there and I distinctly heard a shrill scream, more animal than human.

    But immediately following that I heard the gate clang and a key turn in the lock. A candle flickered in the darkness below and footsteps drew nearer. For a second I was afraid, wondering who it could be, but I soon saw that it was the Spook.

    'What is it?' I asked, thinking that he'd been dealing with something down there.

    The Spook looked at me, a startled expression on his face. 'What are you doing up at this hour?' he demanded. 'Get off with you, back to bed at once!'

    'I thought I heard somebody cry out,' I told him. 'And what's causing all that noise? Is it an earthquake?'

    'Nay lad, it's not an earthquake. And it's nothing to bother yourself about! I've more on my mind at the moment than answering your questions. It'll be over in a few moments so just get yourself back to your room and I'll tell you all about it in the morning,' he said, ushering me from the steps and locking the door behind him.

    His tone of voice told me that it was no use arguing, so I went back upstairs, still concerned about the way the house continued to shake and vibrate.

* * *

    Well, the house didn't fall down, and as the Spook had promised, everything became quiet again. I managed to get back to sleep but woke up about an hour before dawn and went down to the kitchen. Meg was asleep in her rocking chair and I wasn't sure if she'd been there all night or had crept down from her room when the noises began. She wasn't exactly snoring, but each time she breathed out, there was a faint whistling sound.

    Taking care not to make too much noise and wake her, I added a bit more coal to the fire and soon had it blazing away. That done, I settled down on a stool by the hearth and began to revise my Latin verbs. I had two notebooks with me: one to write down everything the Spook taught me about boggarts and other spook business; the second for my Latin lessons.

    Mam had taught me Greek, which saved me from having to study that language as well, but I was still hard pressed to keep up with Latin, and the verbs in particular gave me a lot of trouble. Many of the

    Spook's books were written in Latin, so I had to work hard to learn it.

    I started at the beginning with the first verb the Spook had ever drummed into me. He'd taught me to learn Latin verbs in a sort of pattern. That's important because the ending of each word is different according to what you're trying to say. It's also useful to recite them aloud because, as the Spook explained, it helps to fix them into your memory. I didn't want to wake Meg so I kept my voice to hardly more than a whisper.

    'Amo, amas, amat,' I said, without glancing at my notebook, reciting three words which mean 'I love, you love, he, she or it loves'.

    'I used to love someone once,' said a voice from the rocking chair, 'but now I can't even remember who it was.'

    It startled me so much that I almost dropped my notebook and fell off my stool. Meg was looking into the fire rather than at me, with an expression on her face that was a mixture of puzzlement and sadness.

    'Good morning, Meg,' I said, managing a smile.'I hope you've had a good night's sleep.'

    'It's nice of you to ask, Billy' Meg replied, 'but I didn't sleep well at all. There were a lot of loud noises and I've been trying to remember something all night but it just keeps whirling round in my head. If s something very fast and slippery and I just can't manage to catch hold of it. I don't give up easily though, and I'm just going to sit here by the fire until it comes back to me.'

    At that I became alarmed. What if Meg remembered who she was? What if she realized that she was a lamia witch! I had to do something quickly before it was too late.

    'Don't worry about it, Meg' I said, putting down my notebook and leaping to my feet. 'I'll make you a nice hot drink.'

    Quickly I filled the copper kettle with water and hung it from the hook in the chimney so that, as my dad says, the fire could warm its bottom. Then I picked up a clean cup and took it with me into the parlour. There, I took the brown bottle from the cupboard and poured half an inch of the mixture into the cup. That done, I went back into the kitchen and waited for the kettle to boil before topping up the cup almost to the brim and stirring it thoroughly as the Spook had instructed.

    'Here, Meg, here's your herb tea. It'll help to keep your joints supple and your bones strong.'

    'Thank you, Billy' she said with a smile. She accepted the cup and began to blow into it, then sipped very slowly, still staring into the flames.

    'This is delicious' she said after a while. 'You really are a kind boy. It's just what I need to get my old bones started in the morning .. .'

    I felt sad when she said that. Part of me wasn't happy about what I'd done. She'd been awake most of the night trying to remember something and now the drink would make her memory even worse. While she was busy leaning forward and sipping her drink, I moved behind her to get a better look at something that had bothered me the previous evening.

    I stared hard at the thirteen white buttons that did up her brown dress from neck to hem. Of course, I couldn't be absolutely certain but I was sure enough.

    Each button was made out of bone. She wasn't a witch who practised bone magic; she was a lamia witch, a type that wasn't native to the County. But I wondered about the bone buttons. Had they come from victims she'd killed in the past? And underneath those buttons, inside the dress, I knew that as a domestic lamia witch she'd have line of green and yellow scales running the length of her spine.

    Soon afterwards there was a knock at the back door. I went to answer it as my master was still sleeping after his disturbed night.

    A man stood outside wearing a strange leather cap with flaps that came down over his ears. He was holding a lantern in his right hand; with his left he led a little pony which was loaded up with so many brown sacks that it was a wonder its legs weren't buckling.