Mother Malkin, one of the vilest witches imaginable, has been bound in a pit in the Spook’s garden for years. Then the Spook’s apprentice, Tom Ward, is tricked into giving her blood cakes, and she gains enough strength to break free.
She looked up at me then, lifting into the moonlight a face that was something out of a nightmare, a face that didn’t belong to a living person. Oh, but she was alive all right. You could tell that by the noises she was making eating that rat.
But there was something else about her that terrified me so much that I almost fainted away on the spot. It was her eyes. They were like two hot coals burning inside their sockets, two red points of fire.
And then she spoke to me, her voice something between a whisper and a croak. It sounded like dry, dead leaves rustling together in a late autumn wind.
“It’s a boy,” she said. “I like boys. Come here, boy.”
I didn’t move, of course. I just stood there, rooted to the spot. I felt dizzy and light-headed.
She was still moving toward me and her eyes seemed to be growing larger. Not only her eyes; her whole body seemed to be swelling up. She was expanding into a vast cloud of darkness that within moments would darken my own eyes forever.
Without thinking, I lifted the Spook’s staff. My hands and arms did it, not me.
“What’s that, boy, a wand?” she croaked. Then she chuckled to herself and dropped the dead rat, lifting both her arms toward me.
It was me she wanted. She wanted my blood. In absolute terror, my body began to sway from side to side. I was like a sapling agitated by the first stirrings of a wind, the first storm wind of a dark winter that would never end.
I could have died then, on the bank of that river. There was nobody to help, and I felt powerless to help myself.
But suddenly it happened. . . .
The Spook’s staff wasn’t a wand, but there’s more than one kind of magic. My arms conjured up something special, moving faster than I could even think.
They lifted the staff and swung it hard, catching the witch a terrible blow on the side of the head.
She gave a sort of grunt and fell sideways into the river. There was a big splash, and she went right under but came up very close to the bank, about five or six paces downstream. At first I thought that that was the end of her, but to my horror, her left arm came out of the water and grabbed a tussock of grass. Then the other arm reached for the bank, and she started to drag herself out of the water.
I knew I had to do something before it was too late. So, using all my willpower, I forced myself to take a step toward her as she heaved more of her body up onto the bank.
When I got close enough, I did something that I can still remember vividly. I still have nightmares about it. But what choice did I have? It was her or me. Only one of us was going to survive.
(For the full story, read The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch)