The Changeover (14 page)

"I'm drowning, I'm drowning," she told herself, forcing reality back into her surroundings, and suddenly her lungs were filled with chilly water. She coughed and spluttered, but there was only more water and she began struggling to find the surface again with no clear view of which way to go. Yet the weight of water lessened. She held out her hand and it broke a surface somewhere, was seized even before her head came free by a hand cold with gold and silver. Sorry helped her to her feet in a furious cloud of clear water. He was as white as paper but the shadow of tiger stripes lay across his face. Like her, he was gasping and soaking wet.

"I thought you'd blown it there," he said, "but you brought triumph out of disaster. You took a short cut. Look!"

He pointed and she saw Miryam and Winter sitting high on the bank watching them.

"Give me the sword," he said. "Come on, quickly. And I'll give you the wand in its place. There's nothing much more I can do for you now."

"I won't look back again," Laura promised shaking, as he took the sword from its sheath at her side and gave her instead a long rod with a silver tip.

"It doesn't matter now," he said. "You're too far in. There's only one way out for you now."

Laura came up and looked boldly at Winter.

"You took a risk too," she said. "What are you doing it for?"

"I hope to make something right that I did wrong a long time ago," Winter said. "We all have separate purposes hidden in your changeover. Look around you."

They were high on a range of hills as bare as if they were covered with nothing more than a sinewy, brown skin, stretched over stones — no grass, no flowers, no butterflies, no trees, only tanned soil, red rock and grey slopes of shingle, the only sound that of water leaping and flowing down the naked hillside. Far below, a plain billowed with the irregular green surges of a forest that stretched away from them, vanishing into the mists and thunderstorms that had marked the beginning of her journey back through dreams and time to this place of powerful simplicity. At her feet the water leaped and fell into a wide pond lined with stone, and was directed down a channel of stone by a shutter that swung on a pivot. Another dry channel led away from the pond to a forest lying beside the first, but apparently dead. Though she was many miles away, Laura could see its skeletal trees make an intricate but rhythmic lace beside the green flanks of the forest she had traversed. Beyond the forest was the estuary and the long straight line of breakers rolling in from the sea. Laura looked behind her and saw the bare, silent land continue folding and falling away to another ocean she recognized in a mysterious inner way, for she had never seen it before.

"I've been here before though, haven't I!" she said, not asking a question but answering one that hadn't been spoken. "I was here before I even began remembering. It's the beginning land." No one said anything. "It's bare, but isn't it beautiful?" she said. "Have we all got this inside us?"

"It's partly the memory of space we're moving in now," Winter said. "And partly the memory of all living things. But the forests are all your own, and the bare forest down there stands for the forest that, by some accident, grows green in Miryam, Sorensen and me. You don't need me to tell you what to do. But only you can do it." She touched the shutter as she spoke, and her hand flowed through it as if it was made of water.

"No," said Laura and leaned against the shutter so that it swung half-way over and water began to flood out of the pond in two directions, turning in double spirals in the pool without seeming to be any less than it had been when she first saw it. She felt the shift painlessly in her head — in every last part of her.

"You must find your own way back now," Winter said. "I am the Concluder. You must pay to pass me. Give me the coin." Laura hesitated. "You do have it?" cried Winter, suddenly horrified.

"I think so," said Laura, and creakingly opened her clenched left hand. The stone coin was there, clutched so desperately that the skin on her hard palm was swollen and bruised around it. She picked it up with her other hand and passed it to Winter, who received it gravely and then lifted a measuring gaze to her face.

"You'll make a very strong witch, Laura," she said thoughtfully. "But you can't return the way you came. Follow the water to its source," Winter said. "You can use the wand to begin with." Laura looked at Sorry.

"I can't walk any further," she said. "I just can't walk any further." Her skin was stitched and seamed with thin, red lines, scratches from briars and from the lines of her own blows severing the briars.

"Then crawl, Chant, crawl," he told her, smiling and growing even paler. "I'd even crawl beside you, Chant, but as things are I can't, I can't."

"It'll never get into Poetry Today," said Laura, naming a well-known school textbook, and began to crawl on knees largely made of cotton-wool and rubber, but unlike cotton-wool and rubber able to bleed. At first the rocks shrank back from the wand but as she went on, they closed in, tighter and tighter, so that she had to squeeze through cracks no bigger than that under a door which grudgingly gave way to the wand and let her slide through. At one moment she seemed to be climbing a wet, helical path leading upwards, but a sudden twitch of perspective made her see she was, in fact, climbing down. It grew so tight she began to despair, for though the wand, like a rod divining spaces in solid rock, showed her a path, she was not sure she could follow it. Like Alice she did not think she would ever be small enough to reach the beautiful garden. "Even if my head did go through," she whispered, hearing the echo of the whisper from the adjacent rock, "it would be very little use without my shoulders." It suddenly occurred to her she was being born again and, as this thought formed, the helix took her as if it had come alive. She was held and expelled, moved in a great vice, believing her intransigent head with its burdens of thoughts, dreams and memory must split open, and she came out somewhere into darkness. Reviving water continued to fall on her face. At last she opened her eyes to see her hand lying like a pale shell, not on sand but on fabric and, woven into the cloth on which it lay, small and clear and insignificant, the words tam htab. She was in the bathroom at Janua Caeli under the tree of candles, watched by the cat with the fire in its belly, and Sorensen's little black cat whose eyes had their own green fire. She lay, like a romantic heroine in the arms of the succouring hero, her head on Sorry Carlisle's shoulder.

"Oh, Chant," he said. "I felt the bones of your head move, do you know that?" He looked at her with a look of wonder and dread. "I thought you'd die." Laura stared at him, saying nothing. Slowly his expression became more recognizable. He kissed her very briefly and said, "The Sleeping Beauty always loves the prince who wakes her. You've had it now, Chant... no hope for you, I'm afraid."

"I woke myself," Laura said. She sat up, every joint aching as if she had indeed experienced all the things she had lived out in her dream. Her white dress was splashed with bright, clear crimson from waist to hem.

"You see — it's partly real too. It builds up pressure, like diving very deep, and you have a nose bleed," Sorry said. "I get them all the time in football." He looked like no one she could ever imagine, commonplace and supernatural, the divided face he had turned to her earlier, modified, beginning, perhaps, to come together under the pressure of something new and nameless in him, as if her adventure had been his as well, and was continuing to affect him.

"Did it work?" she asked.

"See for yourself!" said Winter, who had been squeezing water over her face from a cloth. Laura climbed up Sorry like an arthritic bean climbing a stick. He turned her gently to the mirror and by candlelight she saw plainly that she was remade, had brought to life some sleeping part of herself, extending the forest in her head.

She was no longer formed simply from warring Stephen and Kate, but, through the power of charged imagination, her own and other people's, had made herself into a new kind of creature. She turned to Sorry and found he was looking, not into her eyes, eloquent with transformation but, absentmindedly almost, down at her breasts.

"You don't change," she said to him crossly and he looked, first startled, then bewildered, and, for the first time that she could remember, ashamed.

"I d-didn't mean to," he stammered. "It's j-just that..." For a moment he appeared to be terrified, looking furiously at his grandmother kneeling and his mother standing, like a tall shadow on the rim of the pool of light. "I'm sorry," he said, and then suddenly laughed. Laura looked too, and saw their calm faces touched with what she thought might be a springtime change, a tentative relief, not fully developed, still at an experimental stage.

"Look!" said Winter standing beside her and holding out her hand. Laura watched as her long fingers unfolded, and there, in her palm, was a little, cheap, self-inking stamp with a perfectly circular smiling face on it that might even have been bought at Kate's own shop. Laura frowned at it for a second, and then her expression changed and she looked up at Winter who nodded once, gravely. The stamp was a ridiculous object to consider, after such a threatening journey as Laura's, yet lying in Winter's palm it became sinister in its own way.

"You must name it and instruct it," Miryam said taking it from Winter's hand and putting it in Laura's. "You must do it now. I know you're tired but there's very little time."

"I don't know what to say," Laura stammered, for her head still rang and ached, her legs trembled beneath her and she rather clung to Sorry, who took her left arm and hooked it around his shoulders, saying as he did so,

"You do know what you want it to do. Make up the words! Put your fingers right around it and look into the eyes of your reflection."

"Say what you see there," Miryam agreed. "It's yourself reversed ..."

"... made sinister ..." said Sorry, and laughed close to her left ear. "Be sure you really mean it!"

"I'll really mean it all right," Laura said passionately, holding the stamp tightly. Her reflection swam in the glass. Beside her own face she could see the faces of the three witches: Winter, lacy with age, Miryam, whose lopsided smile mocked the world and herself along with it, and Sorry, watching her mouth as if he would put words into it if she faltered. Her own eyes, in spite of her weariness, were round and shining, and something in their expression made her blush all over with an involuntary fright, but she did not hesitate, holding the stamp and speaking firmly to it.

"Stamp, your name is to be Laura. I'm sharing my name with you. I'm putting my power into you and you must do my work. Don't listen to anyone but me." She thought for what seemed like a long time, though it was really only a single second, and in that time, oddly enough, the picture of the old, whistling kettle at home came into her mind. "You are to be my command laid on my enemy. You'll make a hole in him through which he'll drip away until he runs dry. As he drips out darkness, we'll smile together, me outside, you inside. We'll..." (she found her voice rising higher and growing a little hysterical) "... we'll crush him between our smiles." She looked up at the reflected witches and said nervously, "Is that enough?"

"Quite enough," Winter said, and behind the fine lace of her age, Laura saw a reflection of Sorry's wariness.

"Terrific!" exclaimed Sorry. "Chant, can I be on your side? I'd hate to be your enemy." He looked at Winter with a triumph Laura could not understand. "You've got two of us to worry about now, haven't you?" He held out, in his left hand, a handkerchief spotted with scarlet. "It's one of Winter's," he said. "Pure silk — but the blood is yours. I myself blotted it off you. Wrap your mark up in here."

Laura looked at the little stamp, frowning again. The outline had changed, but she could not quite see how.

"Shall I try it out?" she asked.

"No point!" said Sorry with a sigh. "You've already put your mark on me, Chant. Wrap it in silk! Sleep with it under your pillow! Speak to it by name! Hold it against your heart!" Laura surrendered the stamp with reluctance, but Sorry simply wrapped it in the handkerchief and returned it to her.

"And welcome!" said Winter with her rare smile. She kissed Laura's left cheek.

"Welcome!" said Miryam kissing her right cheek. Sorry and Laura looked at each other.

"Well, why not?" Sorry asked her. "Let's do it because I want to this time, Chant," and he kissed her very gently. It reminded Laura of the soft but heavy kisses Jacko used to give when he was just learning to kiss, and found it very disturbing, for it seemed as if he kissed her for Jacko in the past, himself in the present and for another unknown child somewhere in the future. Indeed, he looked startled himself when the kiss was over, as if he too had found it haunted.

"But Jacko first!" Laura said to him, almost as if he had asked her to marry him and she was putting it off for a little.

"Of course Jacko first!" he agreed. "We'll take a day off school tomorrow, I think. And a good sleep before anything else, I'd say."

"You're a brave girl," said Winter with puzzled respect. "Sleep is certainly what you need now."

"I'd carry you upstairs," Sorry said, "but you're so bloody heavy."

"That's not what a hero would say," Laura grumbled, "but it's all right. I'd rather walk."

"There he is!" said Sorry, his eyes glued to his field- glasses, his voice affectionate. He was smiling like a huntsman who has located a notable quarry. "Chant

he's — he's actually pruning roses!"

"What a dummy!" Laura said, taking the field- glasses, her own smile the echo of Sorry's, no less threatening, no less confident.

"I don't know," Sorry said. "It's a good disguise. He looks very innocent, very arcadian... I think that's the right expression."

"Yes, but it's the wrong time of year," Laura said. "We've got a rose bush round the back and you have to prune it in July or August."

They had found Carmody Braque quite easily by looking him up in the 'phone book. There he was in black print standing out on the page. CARMODY BRAQUE

Antique dealer — and three addresses. "Antique is the operative word," Sorry said. They had set off on the Vespa, feeling unnatural and

furtive — out on a school day without being in uniform, leaving early so that they would avoid the time when most people were on their way to school and might identify them as truants, bound on personal projects.

The home address led them to a fashionable hill suburb, every home designed by some architect, every garden the result of professional landscape design. PRIVATE ROAD said the sign. NO EXIT.

Laura enjoyed the ride. She saw and smelt the trees in handsome gardens on either side of the steep road and heard the wind among the leaves, but, as if a new sense had opened up in her overnight, she could actually feel the life in them like a green pulse against her skin, a constant, natural caress like wind or sunlight, but apart from either. High above her the gulls cried, seeing the estuary and the promise of good feeding.

"Someday I'll fly," she cried to Sorry, daringly holding her arms wide.

"Sooner than you think if you don't hold on," he shouted back. "Don't be silly, Chant."

The private road was a horseshoe of particularly stylish houses.

Rich people's houses, Laura thought, envying them gardens and garages. Sorry slowed the bike and put one foot on the ground holding them steady for a moment or two.

"Up that right-of-way," he said. "Very select! Look — the road ends right outside that little park. Let's spy out the land a bit. If we get up there we should be able to look down into all the gardens at the back with my field-glasses."

"You and your birdwatching," Laura said. "It's just an excuse. I expect you use them mostly to watch girls sunbathing on their private lawns."

"Don't think I haven't tried," Sorry said.

Exploring together, they found they could look down into Carmody Braque's backyard, had seen him hanging out immaculate underwear and shirts on his washing line, and now saw him emerging once more to potter in his garden.

"By the pricking of my thumbs..." Sorry said. "It is him, isn't it? You're looking doubtful."

"It is him," Laura replied, "but he's changed so much."

"He's all but sucked your brother dry," Sorry said, his half smile becoming more of a snarl. He laughed to himself. "It's people like him who give witchcraft a bad name."

The glasses brought Carmody Braque within inches of Laura. His face had swelled into something much fuller, much more pouchy than it had been on Thursday last. His skin shone, pink and clear. His blotches had cleared away and his cheeks had even become rosy. Laura thought he looked an improbable cross between Dracula and Mr Pickwick. She could even see that his round dome was covered with a fine fluff of new hair, like the down on a rabbit only a few days old, little more than a mist invading a bare plateau. It was the same colour as Jacko's and for some reason this upset her almost more than anything else. Mr Braque suddenly stopped his ill-judged pruning operations and looked around.

"Right!" said Sorry. "Stop! He'll feel us watching him in another moment. Let's go."

It was a glittering morning, though cold for summer, for there had been a change of weather inland; snow had fallen on the distant mountains and was cooling the wind that came across the range and over the plain. Sorry in his heavy jacket, Laura in her old parka, put on their helmets once more, even though they had such a short way to go. Laura shivered a little as they went into the right-of-way.

"We'll tempt him with variety," Sorry said, "with the prospect of a willing sacrifice. Can you manage to look alluring and yet act as if you were constantly shrinking away from the thought of him."

"Shall I try to look slinky?" Laura asked.

"You? That's a laugh," Sorry replied. "No need to make a fool of yourself. You're too young for 'slinky'. Be young! Young and knobbly — you know, like a foal! But you're a bit of a mixture, for all that, and that's what just might get him. Winter thought it might, and she's clever."

"What do you mean— I'm a mixture?" Laura asked coming to a standstill.

Sorry looked back at her over his shoulder.

"You know!" he said. "At first you look skinny, but you're quite voluptuous in your way. If anyone thinks about you, that is!"

"Voluptuous!" Laura exclaimed.

"Shhh! I'll tell you what it means later," Sorry said. "Don't try to put things off by starting an argument."

"I know what it means," Laura declared, following him again.

"Are you frightened?" Sorry asked, but not as if he cared.

"Yes, I am!" Laura admitted. "Suppose it doesn't work?"

Sorry turned on her yet again. "Make it work!" he hissed in a low, urgent voice. Before her eyes his expression heightened, and he shone once more with the faint bloom of awe and, maybe, fear. "You're just as scary as he is. Last night you were. Look, something shifted in you, do you know that? I'll never forget it. I felt your head shift, the cranial bones— I was holding you, and you remade yourself."

"But not on my own," Laura said, taken aback by his vehemence.

"People have died trying," Sorry said. "That's in our records. If Winter had been wrong ... but she's not often wrong. Wrong about me perhaps, but not about you. She'll be right about this as well. She says you'll win."

"I'll think of Jacko," Laura said, and dipped into memory, where Jacko's picture had been recorded in minute detail.

"Have you got the mark?" Sorry asked.

"It's in my pocket," Laura said, pushing her hands into her pockets as she spoke.

"Hold it ready then," he said. "You'll only have the one chance."

A climbing rose grew over an arched, rustic gate.

"There's a bell," Laura said, detecting it and holding its clapper, while Sorry opened the gate. There was a name over the gate. " 'Jolidays'," Laura read. "Who does he think he's fooling?"

"Most people, probably," Sorry replied. "He's got to seem like a real person."

Carmody Braque, among his roses, turned a smiling face to meet them, but he was repelling them, not welcoming them.

"Church of England!" he cried as if we were giving a warning and then his new face changed as he recognized Laura. He looked from her to Sorry and then back again.

"My dear!" he cried. "I thought you were Jehovah's Witnesses! Do forgive me!"

"Yes!" said Laura in a low voice. "No— I'm sorry to bother you, Mr Braque."

"I'm sure you are!" he cried cordially. "I can't mistake profound sincerity. And just what do you hope to achieve, intruding on me at this early hour with your young follower?" His round eyes squinted thoughtfully at Sorry.

"Oh..." he cried, flinging up his hand and snipping the air with the secateurs in a peculiar, exultant gesture. "Yes, I see. On the right track, dear, but alas too late. And anyway, there's not a witch, young or old, can undo what I'm doing— what I have almost done in fact. But I'm grateful to you for bringing him. I'm intrigued to see a young male witch... it's years since I saw one and the last one, poor fellow, was not very young and had a harelip. Young man... I suppose I do call you young man ..."

"I'm a genetic freak, I suppose, like a male tortoise- shell cat," Sorry said amiably, "but I'm not here to try and compel you, Mr Braque. I know my limits."

"And how few people do!" exclaimed Carmody Braque, inclining his head with its nap of fine, silky down.

"I'm a sort of procurer really — a go-between," Sorry said. "The girl has a proposition she wants to put to you, and I'm here to watch over her and maybe negotiate on her behalf."

"Really!" said Carmody Braque. "I am, of course, quite intrigued. Reeeeaally!" he said, turning his round gaze on Laura. "Speak on, my little spring bud."

Roses around the gate, 'Jolidays', and all the stench of his true nature suddenly struck her like a blow, for, though the patches of his encroaching corruption had disappeared, they had only been the signs of an inner decay which a witch, or even a sensitive, could detect without hesitation. Laura thought she was going to be sick around the foot of the salmon-coloured standard rose to her left. But instead she looked up into his eyes and saw there, not the curious wolf, not the tiger that Sorry sometimes suggested, but something so insatiable that her recognition of it caused the sunlight to falter and the roses, the neat lawn and the expensive house to undergo a transformation. For a moment they became nothing more than a painted screen behind which a dreadful machinery was at work. Not only that, she recognized that this same machine operated at large in the world in mixed forms, many of them partial and largely impotent, sometimes tragically married to opposite qualities. On this occasion it was her lot to see it almost pure in the round, bird eyes, in the angle of his head, mirroring the more innocent, but none the less terrible, attitude of a hawk about to tear a live mouse in two, and all she had to combat it was an old ritual of possession which her hard-won new nature enabled her to use. But she knew she must not even think of that, and concentrated urgently on Jacko instead.

"Please, Mr Braque," she said humbly, "let my little brother go. Take someone else this time."

"Oh my dear ..." said Mr Braque. "I'm so sorry. I would if I could, but your charming young friend here will tell you I am an ancient spirit. I've lived off many, many people now and I have to admit the old tides are wearing a little thin. I can't take just anyone anymore. Besides, I have become something of a gourmet, you might say, and why not, since I can afford it. I look— I have to look — for just the right one, and your little brother was it this time. I stalked him for weeks. I knew your movements so well and to tell you the truth I was getting very near my limit when I pounced. Very near."

He looked at Laura, shaking his head sadly. He longed to be known, and, having the chance at last, he boasted with the most nostalgic pleasure. "And then I've fed on so many by now I'm very very choosy. Girls like you, with rather more vitality perhaps, or sleeker, or those younger still — eight is an attractive age I think, ten is almost too old ... But one should never make hard and fast rules. I enjoy an innocent, sucking baby, withering at its mother's breast. Dear me, no one knows what is wrong. How little medicine knows in spite of all its wonderful advances! Or I seize the mothers themselves, sometimes, just when they're happiest. Or those nice old men who never seem to run out of interest in life, retired and looking forward to golf or gardening, or women whose children have grown up and who open like flowers to the world's chances, of which I am one!" exclaimed Mr Braque sniggering. "I want people who look forward without caution, who embrace the world ..." He hugged himself. "Oh, the delectable banquet of possibility all you people offer me!" Mr Braque tossed his hands into the air where his fingers fluttered like horrid butterflies. His conceit was childish, but somehow that seemed to make it more evil, not less.

"The girl's got a proposition," Sorry said abruptly, sitting down on a white, cast-iron chair. Dimly Laura knew something had upset him in a personal way. She could not ask and he could not tell.

"Speak on," said Mr Braque with odious courtesy.

"I thought," Laura said, "I thought..." She didn't have to act or pretend. She was shaking with fear and began to sweat a little so that the sunglasses started to slide down her nose. She jammed them back on desperately with the palm of her hand. "I thought — if you — that is ..."

"Do stop snivelling, dear," said Carmody Braque, beginning to pick his teeth with the nail of his left-hand little finger. "I've enjoyed talking to you. Your friend there will tell you it's rare to come across anyone who understands. But do bear in mind, won't you, that all this talk is making me hungry, my dear."

Laura could tell, however, that Carmody Braque was enjoying himself, as a man with secret treasure might enjoy displaying it and boasting about it to someone who could never tell. In this confident and expansive mood he might put out his hand to her— he might invite her in. She hung back in hope and fear waiting, and, as if he guessed her thoughts, he added with scarcely a pause, "It's been such a treat to be so completely myself for a little that I'll thank you for the privilege by letting you choose."

"Choose?" Laura asked, apprehension immediately fizzing in her blood.

"Whether or not I end your brother now or spin him out over the next two or three days. While there's life there's hope (or so they say, though I wouldn't count on it) and some claim that even the last rattling moment, regardless of pain, enables us to conclude ourselves with spiritual grace. But I think he'll suffer the most terrible fear in his coma, shut away in the dark with only me for company. So I'll let you choose for him ... a sort of trade discount."