An eerie glow lights up the far wall of the chamber and in the hazy purple light Polly sees the cavernous space is crammed with ghosts. Some of them are playing a strange kind of board game with rocks and gems. Others are chatting, and others float around on their own. The ghosts all look up in astonishment as Polly and Buster step into the chamber. They are monster ghosts, mainly, all different shapes and sizes, but Polly spots a couple of ghostly witches and warlocks, too.

Suddenly, Polly realises who the ghosts are. These are the ghosts of the miners who were buried here five years ago! Her heart begins to race. Could it be? Is it possible? Is this what the stones have brought her to find?

‘Polly!’ comes a familiar voice. ‘Is that really you?’

She spins around to where the voice has come from, her heart racing. It couldn’t be, could it? She can hardly bear to think it. ‘Papa?’

But there he is. It is truly him. His kind, sweet face and dark brown eyes are just as she’d remembered them. ‘Papa!’ she cries, and rushes towards his ghostly figure. The other ghosts look on in surprise.

‘Polly!’ her father cries. ‘You’re here! Oh, my little jamcake. I knew you’d make it eventually!’ He holds his ghostly arms out wide and Polly runs into them.

‘Papa!’ Polly sobs, tears pushing up through her chest and down her cheeks. ‘It’s you!’

Polly sinks into the cool mist of her father’s ghostly form. She sobs and sobs as she thinks of all the years she had hoped desperately that she might see him again. And now he is here.

Eventually, she stops crying and her father smiles at her tenderly, his ghostly eyes shimmering with tears. ‘Yes, my darling witchkin. It’s me. The stones brought you to me. At last!’

Polly looks up at her father in amazement. ‘I thought that was you calling me!’ she says. ‘I kept seeing you in the visions the stones were sending me. But how did you do it?’

‘The how is not as important as the why, my darling,’ her father explains, his voice grave and sorrowful. ‘Blackmoon Coven is in terrible danger. I called you here to help me save it. But we must be quick. Time is running out!’

‘Me?’ says Polly. ‘But why? What is happening?’

Her father lowers his sad face closer to Polly’s. ‘Tell me how you felt when you walked into these mines?’

‘Oh, awful!’ Polly says, remembering. ‘Sad and angry and hopeless. Like the world was a terrible place.’ She lowers her voice in shame. ‘It even made me think horrible things about Buster.’

She looks up towards dear, kind Buster, feeling bad for having hurt him. He has joined a ghostly board game and the other ghosts are thrilled to finally play with someone who can move the pieces with their fingers, instead of having to do it with their minds. It makes for a much faster game.

Her father continues. ‘What you felt was all the darkest parts of yourself, Polly. The parts you don’t necessarily like or feel proud of, but manage to keep buried away.’

He sees the embarrassed look on Polly’s face and smiles. ‘It’s OK, though, my lovely. Everybody has a dark side. You don’t need to feel ashamed.’

‘Buster didn’t,’ Polly says, frowning. ‘He stayed the same. He didn’t become mean to me, like I was with him.’

Polly’s father smiles. ‘There aren’t many witches, warlocks or monsters who don’t have a mean bone in their body,’ he tells her. ‘So I would say Buster is quite an extraordinary monster.’

Polly grins and looks over at her friend, who is picking his nose while he considers his next move. She giggles. ‘Extraordinary, but also occasionally gross.’

Her father laughs. Then his face grows serious again. Very serious. He runs a ghostly hand across the top of Polly’s head and she feels a coolness shiver through her. ‘That bad feeling you felt, Polly, comes from the gorvan.’

‘The gorvan?’ Polly gasps. ‘Not like the gorvan from witchtales? But I didn’t think they were real!’

‘I didn’t believe in them either, my love,’ her father sighs. ‘Even though my monster crew warned me about them. They begged me not to dig our mines too deep into the mountain in case we woke one. But I’m afraid I didn’t listen. The lure of the gorvan made me greedy. I became obsessed, digging deeper and deeper, hoping to find the rarest, most precious stones I could. This was a grave mistake, Polly. A very grave mistake.’ He shudders and looks off into the distance, his eyes sad and heavy.

‘Polly, my crew and I have never known such fear in all our lives, and you know as well as anyone I am not a cowardly warlock – and I worked with some of the bravest monsters you could ever know. But even the approaching fog of the gorvan, curling thick and purple up through the cracks of the earth, chilled us to our very bones. Luckily, before the tunnel came crumbling down and took our living bodies with it, and before the gorvan could escape out into the world, I was able to cast one last spell to hold it behind that wall over there. But I’m afraid it won’t hold for much longer, Polly. The gorvan is becoming too strong.’

Polly looks over at the far wall of the chamber. It glows an eerie purple and, as she watches, it seems to shimmer and buckle, almost as if it were breathing. Her tummy butterflies when she remembers all the spooky tales of gorvans she heard when she was growing up.

‘But how is it getting stronger?’ Polly says.

‘The gorvan feeds on fear,’ her father explains, ‘and transforms it into hate. Something must have happened in Blackmoon Coven recently that has begun to feed it. It has been getting stronger every day. That’s why I called you here so urgently through the stones, even though I knew it would be dangerous for you to come.’

Polly’s heart sinks. ‘My spell!’ she says. She never dreamed that the trouble she started on that day could have travelled so far. ‘Papa, it was my spell that began all this!’ And she tells her father all about that day in the gallery and how, ever since then, things have gone from bad to worse.

Her father sighs. ‘This is not your fault, my poppet. Fear and hatred have always existed among witches and monsters, and there will always be witches like Deidre Halloway just waiting for any opportunity to stir up the worst in all of us. Your spell may have been the spark, but I suspect even Deidre Halloway would have no idea what has been happening down here in this mine. You see, the more hatred and fear she stirs up, the more powerful the gorvan becomes. And, in turn, the more powerful the gorvan becomes, the more anger, hatred and fear seeps out into the world.’

‘Oh Papa! But what can we do?’ Polly says, her eyes on the oozing purple wall behind him.

‘I need you to do the spell to put the gorvan back to sleep. Only then will Blackmoon Coven be safe,’ her father explains.

‘Why can’t you just do it?’ Polly asks.

Her father smiles. ‘I can no longer do magic now that I’m a ghost. It has to be you, Polly.’

‘But I’m hopeless at spells!’ she stammers.

‘You just told me you did a protector spell to save Buster in the gallery,’ her father reminds her.

Polly shrugs.

‘And then again to escape from Deidre Halloway?’

‘But it’s not like I was even trying to do them,’ she explains. ‘They just sort of came out of me. When I try to do spells they come out all wrong. Seriously, Papa. I’m worst in my class at school! I really don’t think I’m the right witch to do this. Any other witch would be better than me!’

Polly’s father takes both of Polly’s little hands in his big ghostly ones. They feel cool and mist-like, not like her real father’s hands, but his voice is still the same. She looks up into his deep dark eyes, full of love and longing in his pale, shadowy face.

‘Polly, you are a Silver Witch. I saw it in you when you were born. And it sounds like your teacher can see it, too. Any old witch can go to school and learn to be a Black Witch and do ordinary spells and potions. But you have true magic in you. That is something very powerful, and very rare.’

‘Really?’ says Polly in a little voice. She wants to believe her father, but it seems too impossible to be true.

‘Yes,’ her father insists. ‘It’s in our family. Your Aunt Hilda was a Silver Witch, too, but she ran away from home before anyone outside of our family could know. So, I’m afraid the responsibility has been passed down to you, like it or not,’ her father says, smiling at the disbelief in Polly’s face. ‘I wouldn’t have left you the magic stones and called you here to do such an important thing if I didn’t believe in you. The future of Blackmoon Coven is depending on you, Polly. Now you just have to believe in yourself.’

Polly takes a deep breath. All this information is making her head spin. Up until a few days ago Polly would never have thought there was such a thing as gorvans! Or magic stones or even Silver Witches. Let alone that she’d be meeting her father’s ghost after such a long time.

But now that all of these things have come together in one strange moment in a spooky chamber deep underground, she realises she has no choice but to believe.

‘Well, OK,’ she says nervously. ‘If you really think I can do it then I’ll try. But you’d better tell me exactly what I have to do.’

‘That’s my witchkin,’ her father says proudly, and stands up to call all the other ghosts to attention.