Penny shook her head. ‘I don’t think there’s a man, woman or child in the whole of Sanctuary who’d come within a mile of Pharisees’ Clearing after dark,’ she said. She hesitated for some seconds as if debating whether to go on. ‘I get on very well with the country folk,’ she added suddenly, ‘and naturally I hear a good deal of local chatter. They believe that this wood and the clearing are haunted — not by a ghost, but by something much worse than that. No one’s ever seen it that I know of, but you know what country people are.’
