I asked one of the stallholders why the man was doing that.

“She’s a witch,” the trader replied with a scowl, polishing an apple on his dirty apron. “That’s Spook Johnson. He has at least fifteen witches in pits. He’s got a big garden, but he’s going to run out of space soon. He does a good job keeping us all safe from the evil eye.”

I’d heard of spooks before, but Johnson was the first I’d ever seen. I knew that these men fought the dark and dealt with witches, boggarts, and ghosts, keeping farms and villages safe. My know-it-all foster dad thought they were frauds; he didn’t believe in creatures from the dark. I did. By now I’d seen at least three ghosts and often sensed unseen things in dark, quiet places.

It was horrible to watch Johnson at work, but it also fascinated me, and the seed of an idea started to germinate within my head. I hung around Salford for a few days and managed to find out where he lived. I learned that he had a big house on the edge of town, and I studied it from a distance. It was built of ugly brown stone with rusty iron railings around the garden and a thick hawthorn hedge so that you couldn’t see inside. But I could hear noises—faint groans and the occasional scream.

Then I made a mistake. A big one.

Spook Johnson caught me spying on him.

He ran at me through the trees, roaring like a bull, and grabbed me by the shoulder, spinning me around to face him.

“What you want, girl?” he demanded in a big booming voice. “Been spying on me, have you? Don’t try to deny it. I’ve seen you watching me!”

I was really scared. He looked hard and cruel, and I don’t think he knew how to smile. To make it worse, he had really big ears with tufts of brown hair sprouting from within them. Some people shudder at spiders. For me, it’s hairy ears. They’re revolting.

“I was just curious,” I told him, trembling with fear.

“Curious? Curious! Don’t you know what curiosity did? It killed the cat. Well, little kitten, I’ll give you two minutes to explain yourself. And if you can’t, you’re going into a pit. My guess is that you’re either a witch or the relative of one of those I’ve got bound in my garden. Thinking of a way to help her escape, were you? So which is it, eh? Come on, speak up!”

I was already slipping into his mind, trying to change his mood. Not everybody was susceptible to my gifts, and he was harder to affect than most folk, but suddenly I felt his anger soften, and he began to relent.

“I want to be a spook!” I blurted out, putting into words what had been spinning around in my head for days. “I want you to train me!”

My words sent him into fits of laughter. “You’re just a slip of a girl and still wet behind the ears!” he roared. “You have to be a seventh son of a seventh son to be taken on as a spook’s apprentice. Be off with you! Get back to your mother. Learn how to be a seamstress or, even better, a good obedient wife—that’s what a girl like you should aspire to. Be off with you, I say, before I change my mind about that pit!”