Joe Knight & the Graveyard Song (Joe Knight Series Book 3)

The Final Battle Begins: Joe Knight & The Graveyard Song

The Headmaster is back—not to rule, but to destroy. In the explosive conclusion to M.L. Fowler’s Joe Knight series, Joe is once again summoned by the mysterious Ma Apples. Alongside his courageous friend Lily, Joe must face ancient powers, deceitful allies, and an otherworldly enemy armed with the Melody of the Damned—a tune pulling children across the nation toward a deadly fate.

As the boundaries between life and death, truth and fiction, blur, Joe seeks guidance from ghosts, questions a cryptic teacher who may be his greatest threat or only hope, and uncovers a terrifying secret buried in his own home. With the fate of the world—and his own story—on the line, Joe must decide who to trust, and what kind of hero he really is.

Get your copy of Joe Knight & The Graveyard Song and discover how the story ends.

Excerpt from the book

I’d just got home from school when I heard the phone ringing. Somehow, I knew, even before I answered it.

“Joe Knight?” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“Miss Applemore?”

Her voice sounded so tense I could practically hear her nerves bending. It was the sound of someone struggling to keep the panic at bay that scared me the most.

“I need to book you in for a lesson, Joe,” she said. “Is this evening convenient? 6.30?”

Two hours. “I’ll be there,” I said.

“I know you will. You have to be.”

The line went dead.

It had been scarcely a month since Greenfields High had crumbled under the weight of evil that had seeped into its brickwork. A month since our demonic headmaster had fled these shores for Iceland.

Despite reports he’d been shipwrecked and rumoured drowned, I knew the story was far from over.

I arrived promptly at the house of Miss Applemore—Ma Apples—at my old time slot. As I rang the bell I thought back to my very first lesson. How Ma Apples had reminded me of the Hansel and Gretel witch.

She answered the door on the first ring and ushered me into the familiar music room, where I took my place next to her at the piano, a fire blazing behind us. She looked even older and more like a witch than ever.

“If you have any questions, Joe, then I suggest we get them out of the way now,” she said. “We have to begin again and quickly.”

I asked all the obvious stuff. About what she’d said only a few weeks ago, telling me I would have to leave the piano alone for a while. That it was the price to be paid for messing around in the dark world of alchemy. About me needing time to repair the damage done.

She listened to my questions and then answered them all in a single sentence.

“The headmaster isn’t dead.”

I started to say something. “There’s nothing more to say, Joe,” she interrupted. “We haven’t the time to do things properly. The headmaster is alive and he’s heading back to England as we speak.”

“But you said—”

“It doesn’t matter what I said or what I didn’t say. Not now. If we take the time to do things as I would have liked, then the world goes to hell. It’s as simple as that.”

She lifted the lid up on the piano. “You’ll want to know how I know these things. Watch and listen.”

Ma Apples played a short melody. It was nothing special. So completely forgettable, in fact, that no sooner had she finished playing it than I’d already forgotten it. She handed me a page of manuscript.

“When you get home, play it on your piano at the tempo I’ve just demonstrated. And take careful note. I need to know exactly what happens. Playing that melody on your piano will explain more to you in a minute than I could explain in a year of Sundays.”

She was looking at me, reading the question frothing up on my lips.

“The melody was given to me in a dream, Joe. Only your piano can decode that dream entirely.”

With that she stood up. The lesson, it seemed, was already over.