Bone Sense

‘Hold out your left hand, girl . . .’ She strode over to face me again. I could see that she was holding a pair of thumb-bones. She placed them in the palm of my left hand.

‘Grip ’em tightly and tell me who they belonged to and how their owner died.’

It was something I’d often practised with Lizzie. I had learned to tell a lot from just touching a bone.

I did as instructed, and shivered immediately. They were as cold as ice. Instantly the images of a terrible murder flashed into my head. A priest was walking down a narrow woodland track towards a bridge over a fast-flowing stream. It was dark, but a thin crescent moon dappled the ground with shadows of twigs and leaves. He turned to glance back down the track, and I saw his eyes widen with fear. He was being followed by witches.

The priest began to run. If only he could reach the stream, he’d be safe because witches couldn’t cross running water. But he was too old to run quickly and they caught him easily. There were three witches, and I recognized two of them: one was Maggie, the other Lisa Dugdale – a sour-faced witch who didn’t know what a smile was. They held him down, and he began to scream as they cut his thumbs away while he was still alive. He had a large chalice in his bag, and they used that to collect his blood. Then they threw his body into the river and it was carried away downstream by the torrent. The last thing I saw was his sightless eyes staring up at the moon.

I suddenly realized that he had been killed only the previous night. Not only was I holding his thumb-bones, from which the flesh had been boiled less than an hour ago; it was his blood that I’d been forced to drink.

B12 C22