As we drew closer, even nature seemed to change. The leaves vanished from the trees—the branches were stark and bare. I was seeing something from the past.

On the morning I’d begun my apprenticeship all those years ago, my master and I had left Dad’s farm and come straight up this hill. We could have taken a different route, but the Spook had brought me this way deliberately. He wanted our first confrontation with the dark to be close to home, close to something that had scared me as I’d grown up.

He’d taken me up to one of the dead soldiers. Now, suddenly, I heard my master’s voice inside my head, as clear as if he was standing next to me. I remembered his advice.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing that can hurt you. Think about what it must have been like for him. Concentrate on him rather than yourself. How must he have felt? What would be the worst thing?”

And it had worked. I’d become sad rather than afraid. Soon the ghasts had faded away.

I came to a halt. “What can you see?” I asked Jenny.

“Dead soldiers hanging from the trees.” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper. “They’re just young boys. It’s not right. They were too young to fight in a war.”

“Are you afraid?” I asked.

“Yes, it’s scary. But I’m more sad than afraid. They didn’t deserve to die like this.”

“Do you see that one?” I pointed to a boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen. His mouth was opening and closing as he struggled for air, and his eyes bulged in his head. “Let’s go and stand in front of him. I want you to walk right up to him—so close that if you reached out, you could touch his shoulder.”

Jenny nodded. I could tell that she had to force herself to take each step. We walked forward, side by side, until we were as close as I’d instructed.

“His name is George, and he’s only fourteen,” Jenny said suddenly. “He lied about his age so that he could join the army. Now he’s terrified and in awful pain. But there’s something wrong with his mind. It’s as if he isn’t all there. Maybe the terror of being hanged has done that to him. . . . Send him to the light, please! Don’t let this go on any longer.”

I was stunned. My master had simply asked me to imagine what it was like to be in a dead soldier’s place. That way I identified with his plight and overcame my fear. Jenny seemed to know what it was like, as if she could read his mind in some way. It was something that was beyond me.

“He’s not a ghost, Jenny, he’s a ghast,” I explained gently. “The largest part of him has already gone to the light. This is just the fragment that’s broken away from his spirit and stayed behind to haunt this hill with the others. That’s what ghasts are—the parts of a spirit that suffered terrible pain or committed acts they couldn’t bear to remember, like the miner who killed his wife. They couldn’t go to the light with that part of them, so it broke away and became a ghast. Do you understand?”