Curse of the Bane by Joseph Delaney

Author:Joseph Delaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER XII

The Silver Gate

oNCE back in the cellar, Alice turned to me, her eyes blazing with anger.

“It ain’t fair, Tom! Poor Maggie. She doesn’t deserve to burn. None of ’em do. Something’s got to be done.”

I shrugged and just stared into space, my mind numb. Soon Alice lay back and fell asleep.

I tried to do the same, but I started thinking about the Spook again. Even though it seemed hopeless, should I still go to the burning and see if I could do anything to help? After turning it over in my mind for some time, I finally decided that, at nightfall, I would leave Priestown and go home to talk to my mam.

She’d know what I should do. I was out of my depth here, and I needed help. I’d be walking all night and would get no sleep then, so it was best to grab what I could now. It took me a while to nod off, but when I did, almost immediately I started to dream, and the next thing I knew I was back in the catacombs.

In most dreams you don’t know that you’re dreaming. But when you do, one of two things usually happens. Either you wake up right away, or you stay in the dream and do what you want. That’s the way it’s always been with me, anyway.

But this dream was different. It was as if something was controlling my movements. I was walking down a dark tunnel with the stub of a candle in my left hand, and I was approaching the dark doorway to one of the crypts that held the bones of the Little People. I didn’t want to go anywhere near it, but my feet just kept on walking.

I halted at the open doorway, the flickering light of the candle illuminating the bones. Most were on shelves at the rear of the crypt, but a few broken ones were scattered across the cobbled floor and lying in a heap in the corner. I didn’t want to go in there, I really didn’t, but I seemed to have no choice. I stepped into the crypt, hearing small fragments of bone crunching beneath my feet, when suddenly I felt very cold.

One winter when I was young, my brother James chased me and filled my ears with snow. I tried to fight back, but he was only one year younger than my eldest brother, Jack, and just as big and strong, so much so that my dad had eventually got him apprenticed to a blacksmith. He shared the same sense of humor as Jack, too. Snow in the ears had been James’s daft idea of a joke, but it had really hurt and all my face had gone numb and ached for almost an hour afterward. It was just like that in the dream. Extreme cold. It meant that something from the dark was approaching. The cold began inside my head until it felt frozen and numb, as though it didn’t belong to me anymore.

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