Free Return to Groosham Grange by Anthony Horowitz

prove it.”
    “I told Mr. Kilgraw I wanted to leave Groosham Grange,” David said.
    “What?” Jill stiffened beside him, genuinely shocked.
    David sighed. “I didn’t know what I was saying, but . . . you remember when we first came here? We didn’t want to be witches or magicians. We hated it here!”
    “That was before we knew about our powers.”
    “Yes. And now we’re happy here. But that means we’ve changed, Jill. Maybe we’ve changed for the worse. Maybe we’ve become . . .”
    “What?”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
     
     
    But lying in bed, two hours later, David couldn’t get the thought out of his mind. Had he become evil? It was true that he had cheated in the race, and despite what Jill had said, he would have done anything to get his hands on the Unholy Grail. Even the name worried him. Unholy. Did it also describe him?
    What is good and what is evil? Sometimes it’s not as easy as you think to tell them apart . . .
    He remembered what Mr. Fitch (or was it Mr. Teagle?) had said to him, but he still wasn’t sure what the head had meant. Good or evil? Stay or go? Why did everything have to be so complicated?
    On the other side of the dormitory, Vincent turned in his sleep and pulled the sheets over him. David thought back to their first meeting. Vincent had arrived one July morning, carried over on the ferry that connected Skrull Island with the mainland. Handsome, athletic and quiet, Vincent seemed to fit in much faster than David had. In just a few weeks he had found his way through the mirror in the library and been given his own black ring. Maybe that was part of the trouble. The two of them had been in competition almost from the start and David had never bothered to find out anything about him—his home life, his parents, where he had come from.
    How had he come to mistrust Vincent? Because of the East Tower. He had spotted Vincent coming out of the forbidden tower, next to the school’s graveyard, and that had been the start of it. There was some sort of mystery connected with the place. Gregor knew. The school porter had stopped David from going in.
    David pushed his covers back and got out of bed. It was three o’clock in the morning; a cold, foggy night. He was probably crazy. But he couldn’t sleep anyway and he had nothing else to do. Whatever Vincent was really up to, he would find the answer in the East Tower. And he would go there now.
     
     
    The night was bitterly cold. As David tiptoed through the school’s graveyard his breath frosted and hung in the air around his head. Somewhere an owl hooted. A fat spider clambered down one of the gravestones and disappeared into the soil. Something moved at the edge of the graveyard. David froze. But it was only a ghost, leaving its grave for a few hours’ haunting. It hadn’t seen him. Slowly, he moved on.
    And there was the East Tower, looming out of the darkness ahead of him. David gazed at the crooked brickwork, the tangle of dark green ivy that surrounded it, the empty windows and, far above him, the broken battlements. He checked one last time. There was nobody around. He moved toward the entrance.
    The only way into the East Tower was through a curved oak door, at least three feet thick. David was sure it would be locked, but no sooner had he touched it than it swung inward, its iron hinges creaking horribly. There was something very creepy about the sound. For a moment he was tempted to go back to bed. But it was too late now. He had to settle this. He stepped inside.
    The inner chamber of the tower was pitch-black. A few tiny shafts of moonlight penetrated the cracks in the brickwork, but the central area was a gaping hole. David didn’t have a flashlight or even a box of matches with him. But he didn’t need them. He closed his eyes and whispered a few words set down by the Elizabethan magician called John Dee. When he opened them again, the interior glowed with a strange green light. It was still gloomy but he could