Free Demon Storm by Justin Richards Page B

lesson.
    Knight led Ben in through a door at the back of the hall. He looked down on to the semicircular stage below, where an elderly lady was standing at a wooden lectern. She leaned heavily on a walking stick as she peered through horn-rimmed glasses at a bundle of notes in front of her. She had white hair that stood out in a mass of curls round her head like a halo. She was wearing a tweed skirt and a dark knitted cardigan.
    ‘So the events at Widdecombe Hall would seem to bear out my earlier point,’ she was saying, ‘about the importance of checking thoroughly for curses and other enchantments that may have been placed on an area or property in antiquity.’
    She looked up over the top of her glasses as Knight led Ben down towards the stage.
    ‘Forgive me, Madam Sosostram,’ Knight said. ‘I’ve brought you a new pupil whom I’d like to introduce to everyone.’
    Ben stood nervously beside Knight. Gemma and Rupam smiled at him. Maria turned away, sitting sideways on her chair.
    ‘I’m sure you’ve met already,’ Knight announced, ‘but this is Ben Foundling. He’ll be joining you for the time being. Maria …’
    Maria swung slowly round to glare down at them.
    ‘Maria, I’m sure you and the others will make Ben very welcome. It’s all a bit new to him.’ Knight turned to Ben. ‘Maria has been my Personal Seer for a long time. For the last eighteen months she’s been helping to train Gemma to take over.’
    Maria’s scowl deepened and she looked away again.
    ‘Gemma you met briefly at the home,’ Knight went on. ‘And finally, Rupam is one of our star pupils. He’s still here because it’s too far for him to go home between terms. Partly, anyway. Our terms don’t match with the normal school terms,’ he added.
    Rupam gave Ben a wave and mouthed, ‘Hi.’
    ‘You can speak more over lunch. For now, I think it will do Ben good to sit in on your session, Madam Sosostram, if that’s all right. After lunch, he’ll be joining Gemma and myself.’
    The old lady nodded. ‘He will be most welcome.’
    Knight patted Ben reassuringly on the shoulder before leaving by a door at the back of the stage area.
    ‘You can sit at the front here with the children who are willing and ready to learn,’ Madam Sosostram told Ben. ‘Or,’ she added, her glasses twinkling in the light as she turned, ‘you can sit at the back with those who mistakenly think they know everything.’
    Ben looked up at Maria, who was inspecting her fingernails.
    ‘I’ll sit with Gemma and Rupam,’ he said.
    Madam Sosostram smiled. ‘I think you’re going to get on very well here, Ben. Welcome to the School of Night. Our subject for today is contemporary witchcraft …’

11
    I T WAS GETTING DARK AND THE MIST CLUNG TO the ground as if it was seeping out of the earth itself. Tombstones emerged from the grey as if they were floating in the mist. The church was a dark pencil sketch, vague and insubstantial. It was strange to find such a place in the middle of a modern city. Tower blocks of concrete and glass rose up either side of the cemetery. Monuments of a very different kind.
    There wasn’t room for three of them in Knight’s Morgan, so they’d come in a modern saloon car. Ben sat in the back with Gemma. Gemma spent the journey staring out of the window and biting her bottom lip.
    ‘Nervous?’ Ben whispered after over an hour.
    Gemma forced a thin smile. ‘Always. Schools are OK – just children and the Judgement Box. But a mission …’ She turned back to the window.
    ‘So where are we heading? What are we going to do?’
    She shrugged. ‘Dunno.’
    Ben looked at Knight and found the man was watching him in the rear-view mirror as he drove.
    ‘I like to get Gemma’s first impressions,’ he said. ‘That’s why I don’t give her the details. We’re nearly there.’
    Standing by the car at the gate into the graveyard, Ben knew what his own first impressions were. ‘Spooky,’ he said.
    ‘That’s the