Prospero's Children (11 page)

The hideous creature closed its eyes, trapped in a terrible memory of suffering. Alison surveyed it without compunction. “What about the man?” she said. “The sea captain who lived here recently. Do you remember him too?” It shook its head, lost in misery. Fern had a brief glimpse of an interminable sentence of wretchedness and desolation, a futile grubbing in a lumber-room of buried souvenirs, searching for something which had long been forgotten. “As you wish,” said Alison. “Shall we see what other recollections I can revive?”

The monster stared at her in horror, seeming to quail in upon itself. Its wizened countenance was so full of sadness it appeared to Fern no longer ugly, merely pathetic.

“The man,” Alison reiterated. “Did you notice the man? Good. Where did he keep his keys? Did you notice that too?”

“In his pocket,” mumbled Pegwillen.

“Which pocket?” Alison’s patience was labored. “The average man has many coats, many pockets. Which one did he favor?”

“Whichever pocket he was wearing,” the goblin said. Its voice was too quiet for any distinctive tone but at least Fern could hear it now.

“Where else did he put them,” Alison pursued, “when not using his pockets?”

“In the desk.”

“The writing desk in his study?”

“Yes.”

“The desk that’s locked with one of the missing keys?”

“Yes.”

“Stop this gibberish,” the idol interrupted. “The creature is three parts imbecile. You’ll get nothing from it but cobwebs in the head. Send it away.”

“It might know something,” Alison insisted. “It’s always been here.”

“Dismiss it.”

She made a quick, curt gesture, and the goblin diminished into nothingness. The glimmering lines seemed to wane and Fern, restored to a tardy awareness of her precarious situation, judged it was time to leave. But she had knelt too long behind the chair: her cramped legs would not move. Frantically she massaged numb calves. The light sank with the fire, making the shadows less dense, her concealment less sure. Alison was speaking quietly in the unknown language she had used before, perhaps a closing incantation. If she walked to the door she could not miss the figure huddled in the gloom.

And then came a tumult of wind and something rushed past Fern into the room, scattering circle and symbol, springing in front of Alison, crouched low as if ready to pounce. Lougarry’s ears were flattened against her skull, her hackles lifted as if charged with electricity, her ragged fangs shone blue in the light of the flaring fire. The silence she carried with her was as palpable as a smell, a physical aura that deadened all neighboring sound. Her voiceless growl seemed to fill the room.

“Get out!” Alison cried. “I did not summon you, demon. Go back to your master! Go!”

“Kill her,” said the idol.

For the last time, Alison raised her arm—

But the fire went out, exploding in a dust of sparks, and the wind howled like wolves, and in the sudden blackness the only illumination came from the eyes of the stone idol, still shining with a baleful luster. A small hand reached out to Fern, taking hers, a hand with many fingers of assorted lengths. She heard Alison shrieking in fury, her rage sharpened with fear, the thud of a fall, the curse of the stone, but the tiny voice close by was more distinct. “Quick,” it said. “Quick, quick.” She was drawn away from the din, through the hall. “Stairs,” said her guide, and she climbed after him, her sight readjusting, until she thought she could make out the diminutive figure ahead of her, a bundle of dark in the darkness. “Pegwillen?” she whispered. But as they reached the landing the hand slipped from hers, and the bundle seemed to shrink and blur, and she was alone in the empty passage, standing beside her door.

Inside her room she closed the door, resisting the urge to try and wedge the handle, and got back into bed. She began to shiver with reaction, thinking of what she had seen since she tiptoed downstairs after her brother, an hour, a lifetime, an aeon ago. She had crossed the frontier into another world beyond any further possibility of denial; she might return but reality would never look the same to her.

Sometime later she heard footsteps approaching along the corridor. Not Will again: the feet were shod, the pace measured. They stopped outside her room, waited a while, and then, reluctantly, or so she imagined, they moved on toward the upper floor.

IV

Waking the next morning reminded Fern of those awakenings just after her mother’s death, when she had opened her eyes each day to the realization that the world was forever different. One of the foundation stones of her existence was gone, and her environment felt no longer stable; her very spirit seemed to falter on a cliff-edge, above an unimaginable depth of uncertainty. Over the years she had tried to build a barrier of solid, everyday things between herself and that abyss: small plans, realizable dreams, material comforters, walling herself in, shutting out not only the abyss but the view. Now, the walls had fallen in, the wide world had come close with all its dark possibilities. She felt naked and afraid, beset by shadows, and yet at the same time curiously alive, as if a faint current of discordant energy had begun to seep through her veins, filling her with a fledgling strength, a desperate resource. She sat down to breakfast with an assumption of normality, studying Alison covertly: she looked sleepless and haunted, her lips pale, her eyes bruised, elfin lines marking the passage of telltale expressions. “I’ve seen a stray dog round here,” she said to Mrs. Wicklow. “If you see it, chase it off. I won’t have a stray hanging about. It could be dangerous, and it’s bound to have fleas.”

Under the table, Fern dug her brother with her foot. “Mrs. Wicklow doesn’t like dogs,” she said, making no attempt to catch the housekeeper’s eye.

“Happen I don’t,” grunted Mrs. Wicklow, but she did not mention Lougarry.

“Are you all right?” Fern asked Alison solicitously. “You look as if you haven’t slept well.”

“Of course I’m all right,” Alison snapped.

Her friend arrived to view the barn later that morning. He was a bronzed, hairless individual with the physique of a workout fanatic and a BBC accent that lapsed into an affectation of cockney with every few phrases. He wore Italian jeans which clung tightly to buttock and thigh and a leather jacket with the sleeves ripped out, lavishly ornamented with studs. Alison called him “Rollo, darling”; he called her dear, dearie, luv, and even ducks. He seemed willing to extend his careless affection to Will and Fern, patting Will’s hair with suspicious frequency, but Alison was politely discouraging and although the Capels trooped after her into the barn to keep an eye on the well-being of the
Seawitch
they were soon bored away by the talk of open-plan interiors, multi-level structure, layout, perspective, and feng shui. By common consent they rambled up the hill and found themselves a hummock where they could sit and survey their domain. It was sunny and growing hot: the wind-rippled air was filled with the thrumming of grasshoppers, the honey-drone of a laden bee, a far-off aria of birdsong. Very faintly they heard the bubbling voice of the Yarrow where it tumbled over a low fall. High white clouds chased their own shadows across the upland moor. “It’s so peaceful,” said Will. “You can’t believe in witchcraft and evil up here.”

“There is evil everywhere under the sun,” Fern quoted, and the gravity in her tone made him turn and study her thoughtfully.

There was a long pause before she ventured somewhat gingerly to broach the subject on her mind. “You were sleepwalking last night.”

“
Was
I? I don’t remember that. I had this weird dream, though. Really weird. At least . . . I think it was a dream.”

“Go on.”

“I woke up,” Will said, “in my dream, I mean. I felt as if I was awake but I sort of knew I was only dreaming. I suppose it was a relief. Knowing it was just a dream kept it from being frightening. I’d have been scared shitless if I’d thought it was real.”

Fern considered taking him to task on his choice of language but was too anxious for him to continue his story. “What happened?”

“I went downstairs and across the hall to the drawing room—”

“Why?” Fern interrupted.

“I don’t know,” Will responded. “It was just part of the dream. You don’t know why you do things in dreams. Anyway, the drawing room was all different—the same room, but much bigger, and the ceiling was so high I could barely see it, and the fireplace was huge, like a great cavern, with a fire burning in it, but the flames were blue and cold-looking. The room was full of a pale light which made everything else look bluish too. That awful stone idol was sitting beside the fire on a kind of dais, only it was enormous, like a statue in a pagan temple, and its eyes were alive, not stone anymore but luminous, like an animal in the dark.”

“Did it speak?” Fern asked quickly.

“I don’t remember. It’s funny: it sounds so terrifying when I describe it but I wasn’t terrified in the dream, just numb. I went to stand in the circle in the middle of the room, and the circle seemed to expand, and the walls receded until I couldn’t see them anymore. It was like standing in the center of a giant ice rink with a spotlight on you. The fire burned round the edge of the circle, but it radiated cold, not heat.
She
was there too, outside the circle.”

“Alison?”

“I suppose so,” Will said. “She was like Alison, but different.”

“Bigger?” Fern suggested doubtfully.

Will frowned, concentrating on the effort of memory. “Taller,” he concluded. “I’m sure she was taller. And more witch-like. The firelight made dramatic shadows in her face, like the hollows in a skull, and her mouth was purple, and she wore a purple dress that changed to blood-color when she moved, and there was a greenish shade in her hair. She was asking me questions, and I had to answer them, although deep down inside I knew it wasn’t a good idea.” He had been gazing down the valley toward the river, but he turned back to his sister with troubled eyes. “It wasn’t, was it?” he said. “The more I think about this, the more I feel it wasn’t exactly a dream. Fern . . .”

“It’s all right,” she said. “Just tell me, can you remember any of the questions?”

“Not really. Except one: she asked me about the missing treasure, and I was going to tell her about Atlantis, only a picture came into my head—pirates with cutlasses in their teeth, and chests overflowing with gold coins, and the
Seawitch
with a skull-and-crossbones flapping at her mast—and I didn’t mention Atlantis after all.” He added, after a brief silence: “That sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?”

“It was a very good thing,” said Fern.

“Did you see me sleepwalking?”

“Yes.”

“Where did I go?”

“To the drawing room,” said Fern. “I followed you. Everything looked normal size to me, but there was a circle, like you said, inside a pentagram, and a blue fire, and the idol was alive. It
spoke
. And I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t numb. And I’ve never been so scared in my whole life.” The sun shone down on them. The bee bumbled around a nearby patch of gorse. The grasshoppers rubbed their knee-joints together like a frenetic chorus of gypsy guitars. Yet night and nightmare lay as close as a shadow. “We’re out of our depth,” said Fern. “We need help.”

“Gus?”

“No. I think we should leave Alison and her chum to mess around in the barn, and go for a long walk. On our own.”

They collected a liter bottle of lemonade from the fridge and Mrs. Wicklow made them sandwiches. “Don’t go too far,” she cautioned, “and don’t get lost. Folks get mazed up on t’ moors, specially when t’ mist comes down. Pixy-led, they used to call it. Still, it’s a fine day and like to stay fine, and Fern here looks enough like a pixy herself. Happen t’ boggarts would treat you as friends, any road. What shall I say to Madam, if she asks for you?”

“Nothing,” said Fern. “We don’t want company. Or fuss.”

“What’s a boggart?” asked Will, as they climbed the hillside path.

“I don’t know,” said Fern, “and I don’t want to know. We’ve got problems enough.”

Lougarry was waiting over the brow of the hill, lying so still in the grass that a butterfly had perched within an inch of her nose. The stems bent and shimmered as she rose to her feet, and the butterfly floated away like a wind-borne petal. Fern wondered if, like Ragginbone, the she-wolf possessed the faculty of making herself at one with her surroundings, not invisible but transmuted, so close to nature that she could blend with it at will and be absorbed into its many forms, becoming grass-blade and wildflower, still earth and moving air, resuming her true self at the prompting of a thought. It came to Fern that we are all part of one vast pattern of Being, the real world and the shadow-world, sunlight and werelight, Man and spirit, and to understand and accept that was the first step toward the abnegation of ego, the affirmation of the soul. To comprehend the wind, not as a movement of molecules but as the pulse of the air, the pulse of her pulse, was to become the wind, to blow with it through the dancing grasses to the edge of the sky . . .

“Fern!” Will’s voice was urgent, his grip on her arm imperative.

“Yes?”

“Just for a moment I thought—you looked sort of ghostly, as if—I must have been imagining it. Everything is so peculiar right now.”

“You imagined it,” said Fern.

They followed Lougarry away from the path, over the moorland to a distant height where the bare rock broke free of its green covering and shouldered skyward. Ragginbone was waiting on the leeside, his weather-mottled overcoat merging with the maculation of moss and lichen on the face of the stone. He looked far too warm, swathed in the heavy, coarse material, but he seemed as impervious to sunshine as to rain and wind. “Well?” he said. “Have you found it yet?”

“No,” said Fern, “and all is not well.” She introduced her brother and they sat down on either side of the old man, suddenly conscious of how thirsty they were after the long hot walk. Fern wrestled in vain with the cap of the lemonade bottle; Ragginbone untwisted it with ease, fingers gripping like roots. Will offered to share their sandwiches. The urgency which had seized Fern earlier, bordering on panic, eased a little in the company of the Watcher. He was her ally, or so she hoped, a dependable adult in an alien world where she felt herself helpless as a child.

“Does Lougarry really belong to you?” Will asked, feeding her his crusts.

“No,” said the Watcher. “She belongs only to herself. Being with me was a choice she made, a long time ago. An imprudent choice: I told her so at the time.”

“Gus—the vicar—said Lougarry comes from
loup garou
,” Will went on. “Is she—is she a werewolf?”

He sighed. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe she was—once. Do you like stories?” Will nodded, his mouth full of sandwich. “Very well. I’ll tell you a story. Once upon a time . . . once upon a time there was an enchantress who hunted in wolf-shape in a northern forest far away from here. At first she was careful, avoiding the trails of men when she assumed her animal form, but she became enamoured of the hunt and forgot her caution, and took to slaying even her own kind. Eventually the local people sent for a wizard to help them. The sorcerer who came was very powerful and had recently acquired morality: he saw himself as a dispenser of justice. He bound her in her wolf-shape and told her that thus she must remain, until, as a beast, she had rediscovered her humanity. He ordered her to come to him in a hundred years, and then, if the woman in her was renewed, he would restore her to herself. And so she was driven out of the village where she had lived, and shunned by other wolves who sensed she was not one of them, and for a hundred years she roamed alone in the forest. She ran free until she could run no more, and drank the hot blood until it burned her throat, and when she lifted her voice to howl her loneliness and her loss no sound emerged, for the werewolf is as silent as a ghost. When the time of her punishment was over she went to find the wizard, and he looked into her unhuman eyes and saw a woman’s soul.”

“Didn’t he change her back?” asked Will. Lougarry’s chin was resting on his leg; her yellow eyes never blinked.

“He could not,” said Ragginbone. “He had lost his power, and no other could complete the spell he initiated. So she stayed with him, at first in the hope that he might find some way to aid her, later—who knows?—out of habit, or even affection. The capacity for affection is the best part of humankind. Of course, if she had killed him, the spell would have been broken. But she was a monster no longer: she chose otherwise.” He smiled at Will, who was looking half doubtful, half tragic. “Never mind. It’s only a story.”

“How could a wizard lose his power?” Fern demanded.

“By over-reaching himself, trying to do something that was beyond his strength. When ambition outstrips ability, that is always a recipe for disaster.”

“Could he get it back?”

“Unlikely.” Ragginbone gave her a sharp look from beneath lowered brows. “The Gift once spent—or misspent— cannot be given again.”

The Gift,
had said the idol.
If she has the Gift . . .
“What is the Gift?” asked Fern.

“That’s another story,” said the Watcher. “I’ve given you one; now it’s your turn. I infer you have a lot to tell.”

And so they told him. Fern described the activities of Alison/ Alimond, their invasion of her room and what they found there. Will related his dream-sequence, then his sister gave a detailed account of what she had witnessed the previous night in the drawing room. Initially Ragginbone interpolated few comments. “Dragonskin,” he said of the gloves. “It has many properties,” and “Gadgetry,” scathingly, when Fern came to the television set. “A new way of doing an old trick. The crystal ball cubed. Alimond loves to keep abreast of the fashion. Still, she has learned a great deal that I didn’t know. A great deal . . .” During the latter part of the recital, however, he was very silent. His eyebrows scrunched together above the lean hook of his nose; his mouth stiffened. When Fern stopped speaking he barely seemed to notice. Thought sat heavily on his face.

“Isn’t it time you explained what’s going on?” she said at last. “Or we could fall in a pit from not knowing it’s there.”

“I suppose so.” The Watcher uncreased his scowl and looked long at them both. “You know too much for the safety of others, too little to look out for yourselves. I don’t like it. You are very young for such troubles, but trouble, alas, is no respecter of youth.”