He entered the trees, and I followed, carrying his bag and both our staffs. Tom needed his hands free. He had salt and iron in his pockets, and the silver chain was tied loosely around his waist.

It was cold, and I shivered, but I knew that it was mainly fear that made me shake so badly. I wanted to pull the hood of my cloak over my ears to warm them, but that would restrict my view, and I didn’t want anything sneaking up behind me.

Then, suddenly, I heard the thumper. It was well named, because that was exactly what it sounded like—a sequence of heavy hollow thumps that met the ground with great force. They were getting nearer and louder with every second, and I could feel the rhythmic vibrations in the earth beneath my feet. Tom came to a halt and put both hands into the pockets of his breeches.

For some reason I’d thought that the thumper would be invisible or semitransparent and that Tom would have to direct his throws by sound alone.

I was wrong. There was a great dark shape looming over us, blotting out the light from the cottage window; a shape that threatened to tread us into the earth and pulverize our flesh and bones.

Tom pulled his hands out of his pockets. There was salt in his left hand, iron filings in his right, and he threw them perfectly so they came together in a cloud against the center of the dark shape.

Suddenly there was a thin wail, and the thumping ceased.

It was gone.

I couldn’t believe it had been so easy.

“Now for the witch,” Tom said as he headed toward the cottage.

Surely it wouldn’t be so easy to deal with the witch herself, I thought. What if he missed with the chain?

The witch came out to meet us, shrieking her hatred to the sky. She was tall and thin, with a great mass of long, tangled hair. Her eyes were wild and angry, her face like something from a nightmare—thin, bony, and warty; the flesh looked as if it had laid rotting underground for a long time. She radiated malevolence; it was a pain inside my head.

But suddenly things got a lot worse. She began to change into something truly grotesque and terrifying. Her hair became a nest of snakes writhing toward us with forked tongues spitting deadly poison. Her eyes bulged and turned red; her forehead distorted and erupted with yellow-headed boils. Now she had the face of a demon, and I was overcome by waves of terror and dread of the creature that was striding toward us.

How could anyone face that horror? It just wasn’t possible. I was indeed afraid of the witch—though my greater fear was that I might turn and run. Tom wouldn’t give me another chance after that. It would mean the end of my apprenticeship. It was at this moment that a strange calm came over me.