Prospero's Children (21 page)

Part Two

The Door

VII

Someone was choking, someone very close by; she could hear the coughing, retching noises, feel the horrible tightness of asphyxia in her lungs. There was a rhythmic pressure on her chest and Will’s voice calling, calling her out of the warm darkness, nearer and nearer to unpleasant reality. And then her vague apprehension crystallized and she knew it was she who was choking, she who struggled and gasped, vomiting sea water in a great rush onto the grass. “She’ll be all right now,” said Gus Dinsdale, who had evidently been giving her artificial respiration, “but we’ve got to keep her warm.” She wondered what Gus was doing there, when surely she must be in Atlantis. Then she recollected that a long time ago she had asked Will to fetch him, but she couldn’t think why. Something to do with Alison—no, not Alison, Alimond. Alimond standing in front of the Door with the light of another time on her face. As memory came flooding back Fern tried to sit up and saw she was lying on the hillside in the early dusk: she was not sure quite where but it seemed to be some way below the house. The chatter of the Yarrow sounded very loud and near. She started to shiver convulsively, wet clothing and dripping hair increasing her discomfort. Gus wrapped his jacket around her, lifted her in his arms, and carried her up the slope.

“It looks almost like there was some kind of flash flood,” he said. “Will and I saw it on our way to your house—a great cascade pouring down the hill, sweeping away everything in its path. Your barn seems to have been completely destroyed. One moment it was like Niagara Falls, and then it was over. Quite extraordinary. I never heard of such a thing in this part of the country before. You were lucky: we found you wedged against a tree. It probably saved your life. If you’d been washed into the river . . .” He left the sentence unfinished. “Maggie’s at Dale House,” he went on. “We’ll have you warm and comfortable soon.”

Back in the kitchen, swathed in several towels and clutching a hot-water bottle, Fern sipped cocoa generously laced with brandy while Maggie Dinsdale scrubbed potatoes to add to the stew Mrs. Wicklow had left in the oven. “Now,” said Gus, “are you going to tell us what’s been going on here? Will comes rushing over in a fearful panic saying Alison is up to something and you are in trouble, and when we get here either there’s a flash flood or a water main explodes—only as far as I’m aware there isn’t a water main on that spot—and we find you half drowned draped round a tree-trunk. I’d like an explanation.”

“Where
is
Alison anyway?” added Maggie. “She’s not in the house.”

“She’s in the sea.” Fern shivered again, though not from cold.

“The
sea
?” said Will, Maggie, and Gus with varied degrees of surprise and bafflement.

“The flood may have been pretty strong,” Gus elaborated after a pause, “but she couldn’t have been carried that far. Still, we’d better inform the police, if you think she’s missing. They’ll find her soon enough. They’ll be wanting to look into this business, anyway. And we ought to get hold of your father. What’s the matter?”

“Not the
police
!” Will was horrified.

And: “Daddy’ll call soon himself,” said Fern. “He moves around a lot: I don’t have a current number for him. Please— please don’t worry him. He worries awfully easily.”

“What’s wrong with the police?” Gus was looking suspicious.

“Nothing,” said Fern, digging her brother with her foot. “It’s just—”

“I think you’d better tell us exactly what happened here.”

“I can’t,” said Fern. “I don’t—I don’t remember.”

“Well, what was Alison up to?” Maggie asked reasonably, turning to Will. “Or don’t you remember either?”

“You wouldn’t believe the truth,” Fern said simply, “and I’m too tired to lie. Don’t pester Will: it isn’t fair. Couldn’t we just leave it that I don’t remember?”

There was a silence that lasted long enough for her to know she had made her point. Then Gus said quietly: “I’m good at believing things, you know. It goes with my job. Try me.”

“All right,” Fern sighed. “Alimond—that was her real name—she came here to find something. Something Great-Cousin Ned picked up abroad.”

“An antique,” supplied Maggie, nodding her understanding. “I always thought Alison was a crook.”

“Don’t interrupt,” said her husband. “Go on, Fern.”

“I suppose it was an antique,” she said. “It came from Atlantis. That’s about as antique as you can get. We found it first but she took it from us and locked us in the cellar, and when we got out I sent Will to find you. I’d climbed into the barn through one of the upper windows: I had to try and stop her.”

“Stop her doing what?” asked Gus.

“The thing we found,” said Fern, looking anywhere except at her audience, “it was a key. It was supposed to be the key to the Gate of Death. Alimond had made an image of the Gate in the barn, a
trompe l’oeil
. I think she wanted to find the soul of her stillborn child. She used magic: she was a witch. But it wasn’t the Gate, it was only a Door, and when she opened it all she found was Atlantis, the Forbidden Past, and the tidal wave coming to engulf the city. I tried to make her shut the Door but her mind had gone and I couldn’t reach her, I couldn’t break the circle, and I felt the earthquake coming and I ran to get out, and then the water hit me and I don’t remember anymore. I really don’t.” She shifted her gaze, meeting Gus’s eyes. “That’s all.”

“I never liked her,” Maggie declared at last.

“You’ve
got
to believe us,” said Will. “My Science master says there are millions of other worlds—with other rules— and time travel is feasible, at least in theory: it’s been
proved
.”

“I’m not saying we don’t believe you,” Gus said soothingly. “I saw the flood, after all. And I don’t imagine your sister is on hallucinogenic drugs, nor has she shown any previous signs of being a chronic liar. But we
will
have to call the police. Meanwhile, I think I need some of that brandy too.”

The police came, admired the barn, which was now a three-sided ruin, and went, promising to look for Alison Redmond by daylight. Maggie served the stew. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?” she reiterated several times. “We could stay here for tonight. Or you could come back with us.”

“We’ll be fine,” said Fern, and “I’ll take care of her” from a resolutely mature Will.

The Dinsdales left them to their supper and walked slowly down the hill, arm in arm. “What do you make of it all?” Maggie asked. “Was she inventing, or suffering from some kind of delusion, or—?”

“She wasn’t lying,” said Gus. “People who are in shock don’t lie.”

“It couldn’t be schizophrenia, could it? She’s such a sweet girl; it would be awful. But they say it’s mostly young people who get it, and she might have had some kind of paranoid fantasy, and set up that flood herself.”

“Impossible,” said Gus. “For a few seconds there were literally tons of water pouring down the hill. It was like . . . like a tidal wave.”

There was a long pause. “You know,” he went on, “I sometimes think mankind is dangerously arrogant. We do a few sums, and then claim we have the universe off pat. We measure the spaces between the stars, and declare them empty. We set a limit on infinity. We are like the occupants of a closed room; having worked out everything within the range of our knowledge, we announce that the room and its contents are all that exists. Nothing beyond. Nothing unseen or unknown, incalculable or ineffable. This is it. And then every so often God lifts the veil—twitches the curtain—and gives us a glimpse, just a glimpse, of something more. As if He wishes to show us how narrow is our vision, how meaningless the boundaries we have set for ourselves. I felt that when Fern was talking. Just for a minute I thought: This is truth, there’s a world beyond all the jargon of unbelief.”

“But you can’t
really
believe her,” Maggie insisted.

“I believe in God,” he admitted. “The modern Church is skeptical of His powers, but we used to believe God could do anything. Right now, I’m ashamed of the hesitance of my faith. If God can do anything, anything is possible. For the moment, at any rate, I intend to keep a
very
open mind.”

“They didn’t believe us,” said Will.

“Of course not,” said Fern. “It doesn’t matter.” She pushed her stew aside and sat staring at nothing very much, trying to assimilate the events of that endless day.

“Will you tell me about it?” Will asked. “Properly, I mean. In detail.”

“I was just thinking . . .” Of Lougarry. Of Ragginbone. Of poor helpless treacherous Pegwillen, screwed into a ball like plasticine and blown away like dust. Of Alimond, cheated by her own invocation, confronting Zohrâne through the Door in mindless bewilderment and despair.

Will was silent, reading something of her thought in her still face.

“How did you guess what Alison was after?” he asked eventually. “What you said, about the soul of her stillborn child: how could you know that?”

“I dreamed of her once,” said Fern. “No, more than once. But in this dream I
was
her, I knew how she felt, how she hungered. Then that day on the beach it came to me. She was very . . . unbalanced.” Her expression altered, tainted with a curious sadness. “Poor Alimond. It must be so terrible to feel that way. Starved—empty—desperate. And then, when she opened the Door, to find even the key had failed her...” After a pause, she continued with a slight effort: “I’ve been wondering if—if it was her Gift which helped to unbalance her. Ragginbone said the people of Atlantis became warped from inbreeding, but he can’t know for sure. Supposing it’s the Gift itself which affects you.”

“Ragginbone had it,” said Will, “and he’s normal. In a peculiar sort of way. I mean . . . he was.”

“He lost it,” Fern reminded Will. “And he seems to have done some pretty strange things when he had it.”

“He said
you
have it,” Will persisted, rather doubtfully.

“Perhaps.”

“Well, then. You’re the most normal person I know. You’re
boringly
normal.” His grin was intended for reassurance.

“I used to be.” She didn’t smile. “This summer, I’ve felt so many things I never felt before. As if my—my equilibrium— my internal balance was no longer steady but teetering this way and that like a seesaw. I don’t know myself anymore. There’s a new person growing inside me, a Me with whom I’m barely acquainted. I don’t
know
myself but I sense, I understand—sometimes I understand things I don’t
want
to understand. I suppose this is how a caterpillar feels when it’s turning into a butterfly. Only I’m not sure what I’m turning into. Maybe some vivid poisonous moth. Like Alimond.” And she concluded, with rare openness: “I’m scared. I’m scared of
myself
.”

There was a knock on the back door, light yet sharp; the panels seemed to quiver at the touch. The invading sound fell into the following silence like a single pebble into a motionless pool. The Capels, their nerves already on the stretch, froze.

“Who is it?” Fern demanded, her tone a little shrill.

“Can we come in?” said a familiar voice—a voice that had them both on their feet, Fern tripping over her dressing gown, Will pouncing on the latch. And outside in the dark stood Ragginbone, flesh and blood and swirling coat, the pointed hood pushed back from his scarecrow hair, Lougarry at his side. Her pelt was scuffed, her tongue lolling. The bones showed in her heaving flank, as if she had run herself visibly thinner in a flight beyond hope or help, until at last her pursuers had flagged and failed, sucked back into the pit from whence they came. “Death breaks the spell,” said the Watcher, smiling a smile with many wrinkles. “Have you forgotten? I think it’s safe to deduce that Alimond is dead. I would have called earlier but you seemed rather busy, and my friend here has only just returned. Now, what about some tea? And then you can tell me everything.”

They talked far into the night. Lougarry, having lapped her way through two bowls of water and disposed of all the uneaten stew, lay down in her usual place, listening with cocked ears though her head slumped and her eyes were closing with exhaustion. Will thoughtfully produced the brandy and poured a lavish measure for Ragginbone; Fern absentmindedly poured another, smaller one for herself. “You showed great courage,” the Watcher told her when she related the events in the barn. “It is dangerous to interfere with even a minor incantation: it can misfire with disastrous effect. But to intrude on something on that scale—”

“I couldn’t get in,” said Fern. “The air was like a wall. I wasn’t brave: just useless.”

“You were brave to try,” Ragginbone insisted. “Maybe that was why you survived. Magic may appear to be a mindless force, like electricity or the wind, but its use touches on powers from before the count of Time, the unknown and unknowable forces that monitor the fate of all worlds. The fact that you lived through this indicates a pattern, a small but essential strand in the greater pattern in which we all have a part.”

“Javier spoke of a pattern,” said Fern.

“We are not unalike in some things,” Ragginbone conceded. “The Lodestone brought men closer to the Old Spirits, not simply in terms of our abilities but also in our vision of the cosmos. That is why the Spirits both loathe and lust after it. The unearthly powers would be theirs alone without it. They must have watched the downfall of Atlantis with triumph but also with awe: the forces unleashed were stronger than any they could wield. You caught a glimpse of that storm on Alimond’s phantom tape: legend says the waves were higher than mountains and the air-spirits were blown out of the skies and the Nenheedra himself, the great Sea Serpent, woke from his unending sleep and reared out of the heaving waters to hunt.”

“Are there really such things as sea serpents?” Will interjected, torn between cynicism and wistfulness.

“There was only one,” responded Ragginbone, idly topping up his brandy. “The greatest of all living things. Long ago he hatched, in the dawn of Time, an Old Spirit who took a physical shape to outdo the earliest monsters and feast upon all creatures of flesh. The land could not bear him and he wound his giant coils through the oceans before the continents were fixed, sleeping the long sleep of snakes in the deep between his gargantuan meals. But the longer the snake, the longer the sleep, and one day he woke after an agelong slumber to find the monsters gone and the world changed. His own size defeated him: there were few creatures left big enough for him to eat. Only the great whales, and they sang lullabies to maze him—”