The Spook's Secret

The Spook's Secret

Book cover for The Spook's Secret
Author Joseph Delaney
Country Great Britain
Language English
Series

The Wardstone Chronicles - UK

The Last Apprentice - America
Genre Children's Fiction
Publisher The Bodley Head, an imprint of Random House Children's Books
Publication date
 6 July 2006
Pages 464
ISBN 0-370-32828-0
OCLC 60768093
Preceded by The Spook's Mistake
Followed by The Spook's Curse

The Spook's Secret is the fourth is a children's book by Joseph Delaney.

Plot summary

The Spook takes his apprentice Tom and young witch Alice to his winter house on Anglezarke Moor where Meg Skelton, the domestic Lamia Witch whom the Spook loves, is kept under lock and key. When domesticated, lamias look like human women, but if they return to their feral state, they are winged creatures covered in scales who feed upon the blood of humans.

When they reach Anglezarke, Tom and the Spook leave Alice with the Hursts, who owe the Spook a favor. They then head to the Spook's winter house. There they wake Meg, who is kept asleep in a locked cellar when the Spook is at his other home through a large dose of a special tea. Even when she is awake, the Spook keeps her drugged (without her knowledge) so she will forget what she is and not harm anyone.

The Spook shows Tom that there is a second lamia witch – this one feral – locked in a special pit in the deepest cellar. She is Marcia, Meg’s sister. The dosed tea keeps Meg from remembering her sister and freeing her. Tom and the Spook have to face a stone-chucking boggart. They win, but the Spook is severely injured. With Alice's help, he pulls through, but is still weak. Alice then moves back to the winter house with Tom to help him and undertakes the task of giving Meg the potion that keeps her docile.

Tom receives word that his father is dying and sets out back to his family’s farm to say good-bye, but before he even gets out of town, he meets the Hursts’ grown son Morgan, who is the Spook’s former apprentice. Morgan has turned to necromancy and is trying to revive one of the Old Gods, Golgoth. He tells Tom that his father has been dead a week already. Tom arrives home to learn it is true.

When Tom returns to Anglezarke, Morgan tells him that his father is trapped in limbo. Morgan uses his powers of necromancy to torment Tom’s father, making him believe he is in Hell and burning. He will not release him unless Tom brings him the grimoire, a book of dark magic that the Spook took from him years earlier.

Tom returns to the winter house to search for the grimoire, but finds that in his absence, Meg has remembered who she is and is angry. She locks Tom up in the cellar, where the Spook has already been imprisoned. Marcia, Meg’s feral sister, has gotten free of her own cell and is loose. Tom gets free but has to leave the Spook behind.

The Spook’s brother Andrew, a locksmith, has his shop nearby. Tom finds Alice working for Andrew there, having been sent away by the Spook before he was imprisoned and unwilling to return to the Hursts because of her distrust of Morgan. Andrew and Alice will help Tom try to free the Spook from the cellar, but first Tom meets with Morgan again.

Morgan reveals to Tom that he is in fact the Spook’s own son. His real mother was Emily Burns, a woman who the Spook had loved before he took up with Meg. He tells Tom that the Spook never married Emily, but had seven sons with her (Morgan was the youngest) before deserting the family.

Tom and Alice go back to the Spook’s house. Alice heads for the cellar to free the Spook, and Tom manages to bind Meg with his silver chain, then put her in a pit in the cellar. The Spook saved, Tom searches the house for the grimoire. But feral Marcia is free and has been feeding on birds in the attic to regain her strength. Tom drives her off and in the morning, the Spook arrives back at the house with his brother Andrew and Marcia on a silver chain. Once she is bound again, Tom resumes his search for the grimoire, but he is caught by the Spook.

Tom tells the Spook what Morgan is forcing him to do, and the Spook tells him that he has been lied to: the Spook has no children. Morgan was the son of Emily Burns and the man she left the Spook for years earlier. The Hursts adopted him as a teenager, and he fell in love with their daughter, who drowned herself in despair when her parents would not accept the romance.

Morgan sends the Spook and Tom on a wild goose chase after a boggart, and steals the grimoire from the Spook’s study while they are gone. While the Spook is off trying to locate Morgan and the book, Alice tells Tom that Morgan is in a chapel where he raises the dead for their paying loved ones. Tom goes there and confronts him.

Still threatening to harm Tom’s father in limbo, Morgan forces Tom to assist him in his goal: raising Golgoth, Lord of Winter. He plans to make the Old God give him unlimited power. But as Golgoth comes forth into the world, he appears inside the pentacle of protection that Morgan is in. Golgoth freezes and shatters Morgan's body, killing him. Golgoth demands that Tom set him free from the pentacle, but Tom refuses just before passing out.

When he awakens, Golgoth is gone. Meg and her sister Marcia arrive, freed from the Spook’s cellar again. They have dug him out from the wreckage of the chapel that was caused by Golgoth’s arrival, and now they lead Tom back to his master.

The Spook explains that Morgan had tried to raise Golgoth years earlier when he was the Spook’s apprentice, but failed. The Spook wanted to bind Morgan in a pit then, but his old love Emily implored him to spare her son. So the Spook set a trap for Morgan instead: he had the grimoire copied but with one change to the Latin that would cause the Old God to appear inside the pentacle instead of outside it, killing the one who raised him. His time within the pentacle was limited, and when Tom refused to free him, he had to return to his own domain.

When the Spook could not dig Tom out on his own, he was forced to strike a deal with the two lamia witches: they helped him in exchange for not being locked up any more. A few weeks later, Spring arrives and the spook encases Marcia in a coffin. She will be transported back to her home country, Greece, accompanied by her sister Meg.

Soon Tom and the Spook are headed back to Chipenden, along with Alice. Tom stops at his family farm on the way. His mother is there and tells him that she will soon leave the County forever. She will return to her own homeland, Greece, to fight the Dark there. But first, she takes him up to her secret room, which was willed to Tom in his father’s will (the rest of the house was left to his brother Jack). She tells him that nothing evil can ever enter the room, but he must never bring anyone but himself and Alice into it.

Characters

The main characters include:

Reception

The book received positive reviews, but not as good as its predecessor's, scoring only 4.09/5 on Goodreads.[1]

References

  1. ↑ The Spook's Secret, general information on Goodreads.

External links

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