‘All doomed,’ Otis agreed.
They were probably right. I punched Hugo’s arm lightly. ‘Drive faster.’
In the endboth vehicles got stuck behind a tractor and we pulled into a layby not far from the Fonaby Sack Stone at the same time. I jumped out of the Jeep, checked the location on my phone and glanced around. There was a narrow path leading up a low hill towards a copse of pine trees. ‘I think it’s that way,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t look spooky or cursed,’ Hester said. ‘It just looks like farmland.’
‘Maybe we’ll get lucky and discover the tales of the curse have been exaggerated,’ I told her. She stared at me without blinking. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Alright. I know. Given the way our lives have been going, I’ll knock the stone over by accident and we’ll be cursed for a thousand generations.’
‘Sounds about right,’ Otis muttered and I grinned.
We headed for the path. Although it hadn’t rained for several days, the ground was thick with dark mud and our footsteps squelched noisily; at one point, Slim’s wellington boot got stuck and we had to pull him free. If this had been merely a casual stroll, I might have been tempted to use a skein of magic to suck away the moisture and make the ground easier to cross, but we were heading for a spot steeped in its own unpleasant magic. Until we knew exactly what we were dealing with, even an innocuous spell seemed like a bad idea.
Our slow progress meant that the sun was already dipping by the time we reached the place where the Sack Stone was supposed to be. ‘This is the spot.’ Hugo frowned. ‘I don’t see any stones.’
‘Maybe Smiggleswith was playing us,’ Slim offered.
Miriam clicked her tongue. ‘You’re not looking hard enough.’ She pointed at several fallen branches several metres away from the path. ‘See?’
We turned and looked. She was right: there was a large, moss-covered stone, but it was almost entirely hidden fromview by the branches and only one corner of it was visible from the path. Had someone shielded it on purpose to deter curious hikers from invoking the curse? A shudder ran down my spine.
The shape of the stone did remind me of a sack of corn. This was what we’d come to find so we couldn’t simply stand and gawk, although strangely nobody seemed willing to abandon the path and move closer. The playful, competitive atmosphere had vanished.
‘I know it’s getting dark,’ Becky whispered, ‘but shouldn’t there be more noise?’ She was right. This was the countryside in late spring: there should have been a cacophony of nesting birds, buzzing insects and rustling from the undergrowth. I couldn’t hear a single thing – and now that I was aware of the deathly silence, I felt unsettled.
Otis flew towards me and buried himself in the folds of my jacket. ‘I don’t like it here.’ Hester watched his head disappear beneath my collar. A second later, she followed him, burrowing even deeper.
My gaze lifted to Hugo. For a few seconds, we shared a mutual – albeit silent – look of deep foreboding. ‘I think that we can all agree the curse is real,’ he said quietly.
I steeled myself and stepped off the path. Night was on its way and the sky wouldn’t get any lighter until the morning; we had to act now before we lost what little visibility there was. Although I didn’t say anything, I was relieved when the rest of the group followed me. Soon we were all standing around the strange stone and staring down at it.
‘We can’t risk moving it,’ Miriam said. ‘Not even by an inch.’
‘Agreed.’ Hugo scratched his chin. ‘Thankfully we have a special technique, created by Daisy herself, that will help us search for any items buried beneath it.’
‘Using earth magic to sense for what’s buried there is a goodidea,’ Slim said. ‘But we can’t remove anything without disturbing the stone.’
I toed the ground. ‘The skull is small. We could dig a small tunnel and send the brownies in to retrieve it.’
Hester’s head immediately popped up from inside my jacket. ‘Oh, fine,’ she snapped. ‘Give us the hard jobs, why don’t you? Give us the opportunity to be cursed for the rest of time.’ She glared at me. ‘Save yourselves, sacrifice the brownies.’
‘You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. In fact, if you have a better idea, Hes, I’m more than willing to hear it,’ I said.
She wrinkled her nose.
‘I’ll do it.’ Otis’s voice was muffled and shaky but still audible. ‘I’ll burrow underneath and find the skull.’
‘It could be close to the surface – we might be able to retrieve it without you.’ Becky sounded doubtful but she was right: until we knew exactly where the skull was, we couldn’t tell what digging would be required.
I nodded. ‘Step back. I’ll do a quick magical search and see what I find.’
Otis and Hester reluctantly extricated themselves from their hiding spot while I delved into my pocket and drew out another two pills of spider’s silk. Hugo’s jaw tightened but he knew as well as I did that I couldn’t let my magic get the better of me and mess this up.
I swallowed the pills then unclipped Gladys from my side and handed her to Hugo. Pretending that my heart wasn’t thumping loudly enough to rattle my rib cage, and that my stomach was not churning with greasy nausea, I forced a smile. Then, before my trepidation got the better of me, I pushed out a brief nudge of questing earth magic.
The flash of pain that reverberated through my bones came instantly. I winced and beamed at the same time; annoying as the pain was, it indicated that there was definitelysomething underneath the Sack Stone that didn’t belong there – and it wasn’t far beneath the surface. Retrieving it might be easier than we’d expected.
Suddenly buoyed up, I ignored the grim aura and damp moss clinging to the Fonaby Stone and lowered myself to the ground. The gloopy mud would wash off. ‘Keep out of the way,’ I said to the others. ‘If anything goes wrong and I end up triggering the curse, it’ll be better if it only affects me rather than all of us.’
