Prospero’s Children
Jan Siegel
English fantasy at its finest, the first in this exciting new trilogy steps into the gap that exists between The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Clive Barker’s Weaveworld.A mysterious, isolated house awaits sixteen-year-old Fern and her brother Will for the summer holidays. As the old house reveals its secrets, their familiar world starts to fracture, giving access to a magical and corrupt land destroyed thousands of years ago.For hidden in the house is a talisman which has been sought by the forces of good and evil for millennia. And only someone possessed of the Gift can use it.Soon, Fern finds herself being courted by the enigmatic wanderer, Ragginbone, and the sinister art-dealer, Javier Holt, who know that she has the Gift. Both want her to find the talisman, and use it to unlock the door, but what awaits her on the other side…?This is English fantasy at its finest. Prospero’s Children steps into the gap that exists between The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Clive Barker’s Weaveworld, and is destined to become a modern classic.
Voyager
PROSPERO’S CHILDREN
Jan Siegel
Contents
Title Page (#uecc5ed2a-490b-5a82-b3c4-1e271b5acac0)Prologue: The Mermaid (#ud5a81df3-0238-518f-8b68-327c2b23b5d7)Part One: The Key (#u08732ea8-35c7-500b-8c85-89db5b214569)Chapter I (#u704fa36f-030d-56f8-8e0e-0b664faac2b7)Chapter II (#u1400433c-b28d-50ae-b9d6-169cdda97b96)Chapter III (#u3db40fc7-f5d5-57eb-be66-8da8a8203ea3)Chapter IV (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter V (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter VI (#litres_trial_promo)Part Two: The Door (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter VII (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter VIII (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter IX (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter X (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XI (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter XII (#litres_trial_promo)Epilogue: The Unicorn (#litres_trial_promo)Glossary: Names (#litres_trial_promo)Language (#litres_trial_promo)Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)Praise (#litres_trial_promo)About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#u519aa59a-8bef-5d1c-b362-9aa72a4b0a25)
The Mermaid (#u519aa59a-8bef-5d1c-b362-9aa72a4b0a25)
The mermaid rose out of deep water into the stormheart. Being a creature with no soul, she was without fear of the elements which had engendered her. She rode the giant waves like a child on a switchback, sucked laughing into terrible black chasms of water, then hurled skywards towards the plunging clouds, riding the sea-crests with her hair lashing in the wind. Lightning illumined her for an instant, an efreet of the ocean, face a-scream with glee, slanting bones and elongated eyes sloping back from the pointed nose and tapering chin. It was a misshapen imitation of a human visage, formed perhaps by some pagan Creator who had caught only the briefest glimpse of Man. Her storm-tossed body was almost androgynous, flat-breasted, fish-pale, the ectopic nether limb glistening steel-silver with scales, each jagged fin shot with the needle-glint of poisonous spines. Above her, thunderhead clouds were piled into toppling cliffs of airborne water; the wind came roaring from the throat of the sky. More lightning-flashes, almost incessant now, picked her out in every motion of her wild play, leaping, diving, tumbling, amidst the heaving mountains and rocking valleys of the ocean. She could not remember another such storm, never in all her uncounted years on earth. Always alone, alienated both from Man and beast, a careless elemental for whom the waters were mother and lover, lifeblood and home.
She saw the barque ahead of her through a cleft between rearing waves, broken and desperate, clinging precariously to the skirts of the tempest. Drums rolled from the chasing clouds; storm-fires flashlit the ragged sail streaming like torn skin from a skeletal wreck of mast and spar. She was a small boat, sturdily built; the last remnants of her crew had secured themselves to tilting deck and sides with frayed rigging. Spume-capped ridges lifted her skyward, spun her round, then sent her plummeting nose-first into liquid ravines; but she was in her element even as the mermaid, and each time she would right herself and battle onward.
Strong arms gripped the useless wheel, not to steer but for an anchor against the greedy undertow that would have sucked the sailor from the deck. Lightning gleamed on a sea-glossed interplay of muscle in forearm and shoulder. The mermaid saw him as she drew astern, her hand on the gunwale, cold fingers touching the boat’s skin with the chill of the uttermost deep, weed-green hair crackling with secret electricity. He glanced round, some instinct warning him of the deadly gaze on his back. She saw the brine-blackened locks webbing his face, the narrowing of eyes both dark and bright. He saw he knew not what: a mirage of fear, a phantom of the storm, gone too swiftly for his mind to compass it, leaving only the impression of a wild white face and unhuman eyes depthless as glass. Yet moments later when his ears picked up the sound, a single distinctive note within the howling chorus of wave and tempest, he knew what it must be. He knew it in the marrow that froze in his bones and the hairs that stirred on his nape: a recognition beyond memory. It was a high thin keening—a call without words—a piercing thread of sound that sang even in the waves’ roaring. It swelled with the wind, until the fragile timbers of the boat shook with it, and he could imagine it penetrating even to the still deep places far below. One of the other sailors shouted a question but he shook his head and turned away. Still grasping the ruptured helm, he whispered to the boat a lover’s encouragement—his greatheart, his brave one, his dearling, his dear—though he knew it was all in vain. Behind him the siren-call had done its work: the hunt was up.
Orca and octopus, giant eel and electric serpent, countless sharks—sharks tiger-striped and leopard-spotted, ghost-pale and shadow-black—all gathered in their wake. In the coral-groves beneath, nameless creatures waited with glittering antennae and sharpened pincers, knowing it would not be long now. A mottled flank heaved out of the waves to starboard, many times the length of the boat; Crawling tentacles twined the boom, thick as a man’s arm: the water became opaque with a writhing flood of ink. And in the midst of the chase rode the mermaid, mounted on the back of an enormous shark—she whom the beasts of the sea had often hunted, never caught, now summoning them to her need with the feckless arrogance that was her most human characteristic. At the helm, the young man heard his companions’ cry of warning, but he did not look back again. The storm had ripped the shirt from his chest; salt clogged his lashes and stung his lips. The wind pricked his eyes into tears that evaporated on his cheek. Something which hung on a chain about his neck glinted against his breast with its own light, but the flicker of power was lost in the raging of the elements, helpless as a firefly in a hurricane.
The end came suddenly. A glassy cavern yawned behind the boat, rushing forward to swallow it; the sweep of a monstrous tail cracked the hull. The crew were borne away between tooth and tentacle, into the gullet of the sea. The young man found himself clutching a wheel without helm or vessel, see-sawing between peaks of water, holding on, not in hope or fear, but because survival is Man’s first and last instinct. Then he saw the face again, rising from the surge less than a yard away, its flat eyes aglow, its hair uncoiling like a nest of snakes in the wind. The pale lips were parted as if to suck his last breath. The fantasies of imminent death seized his mind, and the alien face became one more familiar, and the din of thunder was blotted out by the sea-surge in his head. He murmured something—a word, a name—and the mermaid, hearing, though she understood neither language nor affection, knew it was the name of his mortal love, whose spectre had driven her from his sight. Then she wound her arms around him, and drew him down and down into the deep.
* * *
In a murky grotto a few fathoms below she hid him, weighting his ragged clothes with rocks to keep him from drifting away. The tiny nibblers of the reef did not touch him for they were afraid of her: she would pull off their claws in hunger or caprice and suck the jelly from their transparent shells, or tear slender bodies apart with wanton fingers. Even the giant crayfish and monster crabs were wary of her, for she was a cunning huntress, thrusting a sliver of rock into the chink under horned carapace or between linked plates and using the makeshift tool to wrench them asunder. Too quick and too clever for the larger predators, she roamed her domain in fear of nothing, having not yet learnt the fear of Man which would soon infect all living creatures—Man her cousin and her kinsman, a killer more ruthless than the shark, deadlier than the kraken. She gazed on the sailor’s still face with a strange yearning, a tugging at her heart, or where her heart should have been, touching his cheek with her cold caresses, closing his eyes with shells, binding his hair with weed. Then she would grow irritated or bored with her dead plaything and swim away, forgetting him for an hour or a week, only to return and gaze on him again.
He was beyond the reach of the sun but the thing on his breast still gleamed erratically, sending glancing rays through the moving currents. Sometimes it seemed to grow hot, as if emitting pulses of fretful power: the water around it would hiss and shrink, forming bubbles full of steam which floated upwards in broken trails. When the mermaid tried to remove it her fingers prickled as if with pins and needles; once her whole hand grew numb. She left it alone, and as time passed it became dark and dull, and the face of the sailor was eaten away by creatures too microscopic to torment, and the sea washed his bones, leaving them moon-white among the hidden colours of the coral, and an anemone blossomed in one empty socket, and angelfish kissed his hollow cheek. Yet still she came back, once a month or once a year, as a miser returns to his hoard, and her gloating dwindled and her games, and she gazed long and long on the mystery of his death. She had never before been so close to a being which resembled herself, having no memory of parents, brother or sister, if indeed she had ever possessed any, born of the wind’s breath and the sea’s tears. Ever alone, for the first time in the aching shallows of her spirit she knew that she was lonely, and the seeds of her ultimate destruction were sown.
The Earth turned, season melted into season, the timeless morning of the world drew on to noon. The years were numbered, events arranged into history; the age of magic gave way to reason and science, knowledge and prejudice, religion and heresy. Men attempted to limn the continents with maps and web the seas with charts. A fisherman from a coastal village, more daring than his compeers, was casting his nets in unfamiliar waters when he hauled in a clotted mass that looked like weed. He bent over the side of the boat and plunged his hands in it to free it from the net, and it felt lithe as silk and curiously alive, writhing between his fingers. He pulled hard, sensing an alien weight below, and the weed parted beneath his hands even as the head emerged from the water. A terrible head with the blanched clammy complexion of the drowned, bloodless mouth agape, glaring eyes above slanting bones. But the head lived. The eyes flashed like the glint of light on broken glass and an eldritch wail came from between the pallid lips, rising in pitch and slowly strengthening, vibrating from the long throat as from a living flute. The fisherman knew that call from race memory or traveller’s tale, and he dragged the head close to the ship’s side and laid the naked blade of his gutting knife against her neck, ordering silence in a tone that transcended the barriers of language. Her mouth shut tight and he called to his sons to help him heave her on board, staring in wonder as the water ran from the unnatural tail squirming against the bonds of the net. One of the boys received a handful of spines in the struggle, and in the night he sickened and lay in the cabin burning with fever, but the fisherman would not throw the mermaid back. He poured water over her to keep her moist and fed her raw fish from their catch, drawing near to press his knife into her flesh even while her live hair coiled about his ankles.
Whether this was the same mermaid or another no legend tells: certainly this one understood something of mortal speech, or learnt understanding in the extremity of her need. She was alone as always, divided by a few flimsy planks from the sea that was her element, prisoner of her enemy, her only real predator, her kin. Perhaps she had sought that capture, driven by centuries of isolation or a fatal curiosity; but here was no storm-tossed seafarer, his hard beauty softened by the phantom of love, here was only a weather-weary peasant, toughened by the long slow battle for survival, and in his face the blending of fear and anger, and a deadly greed.
After two days in a babbling delirium the boy died, and in the morning the fisherman went to his captive with a raw heart and new-sharpened knife, grasping her green hair and dragging her head back for the death-blow. Her angled eyes stared into his, impenetrable as the eyes of an animal, and he could not tell if there was terror behind them, or intelligence, or deceit. And then for the first time in memory or legend she spoke, and her voice throbbed harshly from unused vocal chords; but there was an echo in it of the wind, and an echo of the sea. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t kill.’ She could not say please because the word was beyond her understanding.
‘My son is dead,’ said the fisherman. ‘A death for a death. You should have found your voice the sooner. It is too late now to beg.’
‘Your son was careless. He died easy. If not now, then later. Is no loss.’
‘I loved him,’ said the fisherman, and his hand tightened on her twisting hair and the knife gleamed before her.
‘You have other sons. What is love?’
The fisherman knew few words for the gentler emotions. ‘He sprang from my loins,’ he responded at last. ‘Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. You could offer me the treasures of a dozen shipwrecks, the pearls from a hundred oysters, but it would not buy your life. That is love.’ The blade sank into her flesh until a thin trickle ran down her white skin, and he saw with something close to desire that her blood was as red as his.
‘I have not found love,’ said the mermaid, and her voice was as thin as the wind hissing through a chink in a wall of ice. ‘There is none in the deep sea. But I have treasure. I have a great treasure.’
The knife was withdrawn an inch or two; the fisherman’s tone changed very slightly. ‘What treasure?’
‘From a ship,’ said the mermaid. ‘A ship that sank long ago. The treasure lies in the coral. Even the bones are coral now.’
‘What kind of treasure?’ the fisherman reiterated, and there was no mistaking the eager glint in his eye. ‘Gold?’
‘It glittered,’ said the mermaid. ‘In the dark beyond the sun it gleamed like the storm-fire. It is my treasure, my secret.’
‘I will trade you this treasure,’ said the fisherman, ‘for your life. My son is gone and neither love nor gold can bring him back. But I will take your treasure as blood money, the price of my revenge.’
At that his two remaining sons cried out against him, for their brother had been very dear to them, and they found the mermaid both alien and unchancy, too wayward to trust, too perilous to spare. No oath would bind her to her bargain: principle and mercy alike were outside her comprehension. ‘Release her,’ they said, ‘and she will swim fast and far, and we will have neither vengeance nor payment. We want blood for our brother.’
‘Gold is better than blood,’ said the fisherman, and they were silenced. Then he cut a single tress from the mermaid’s hair and knotted it, though it seemed to resist him, the separate strands seeking to slip away between his fingers. ‘I will let you go,’ he told her, ‘and for three days I will keep this lock of hair in a jar of water. But if in that time you do not return—if you try to cheat me—if you do not bring me the treasure, then I will pin the lock to the mast and let it dry in the wind, and if you never come at all then when I am back on shore I will lay it out in the noonday heat until it shrivels away, and even in the ocean’s depths you too will shrivel, burned by a sun you cannot see. Do you understand?’
‘I understand,’ said the mermaid.
‘Go then.’
He snapped the rope that held her and she pulled herself over the side, diving like a flying fish in an arc of silver, lost in an instant beneath hurrying waves. ‘You will not see her again,’ said the boys.
But the fisherman clasped the lock of hair and smiled a smile without humour, confident and grim.
‘I will see her,’ he said.
On the afternoon of the third day the mermaid returned. The fisherman had lingered in the area against the wishes of his sons, although the body of the youngest was starting to putrefy and the sweet smell of death had begun to permeate the whole boat. By day they fished, but the nets which had been replete now came up empty: only a sprat or two twitched on the brine-washed deck among a few knots of weed, and some strange creatures which resembled living fungi and leaked a noxious ooze at the pressure of a finger. The wind had dropped; the sails hung limp as the drapes on a tomb; thin tides of cloud had seeped across the sky, blearing the face of the sun. Late that day the last rays, issuing from beneath the cloudline, filled the narrow space between sky and sea with a concentrated brilliance. The clouds were burnt bronze, the air turned to gold, glancing fires sparked from every wave. The mermaid rose from a pool of dazzle, dark against the brightness, her long hair netting the sea-fire. She swam warily to the side of the boat, staying out of reach of both the fisherman and his knife. Her hands were hidden under the gilded water; her face was as expressionless as that of an animal.
‘Where is it?’ he demanded. ‘Where is my treasure?’
‘I have it,’ she said. ‘Where is my hair?’
One of his sons brought him the jar; he lifted the contents out and held them up for her to see. The single tress still twitched and twisted like the newly-severed tail of a live serpent.
‘My treasure?’ he repeated.
Her hand emerged from the water; she stretched out her arm. The fisherman closed hungry fingers on a hard irregular shape, lumpy with tiny polyps, slimy with tendrils of weed. The touch of the mermaid’s skin was colder than the coldest fish. In the same instant one of his sons, bitter beyond any gold-lust at his brother’s death, started forward to seize her, knife at the ready. But she was too sudden and too slippery for him: she had broken free even before he tightened his grasp, before his father’s shout, before the knife had done its work. She was gone in a swirl of fractured sunlight, leaving only a wisp of blood—too little blood—uncurling beneath the bright reflections. The fisherman still clasped her violated hair. In the silence that followed he looked down at the object in his other hand, the small, jagged thing, coral-studded, begreened with weed: the treasure. It took him a minute or two to realise what it was. A key.
The fisherman was seized with a fury far greater than the anger he had known for the loss of his son, the pent-up fury of his toil-filled, empty-bellied, mean-hearted life, the fury of a dream shattered, of greed cheated, of hope extinguished forever. It distorted his mouth and dragged his features this way and that, it mounted in him like a tidal wave, it howled through him like a storm. His sons shrank from it; the very boards of the ship seemed to quiver in fear. Yet after the first terrible curse he grew quiet again; poverty had taught him the hardest lessons in self-control. ‘A key!’ he said. ‘A key. And no doubt the lock that it should fit is fathoms deep, in a treasure chest accessible only to the crabs. God damn the lying nixie! May she writhe in a waterless hell for all eternity!’ So saying, he went to hurl away his useless prize. Then, with an abrupt change of mind, he thrust it into a deep pocket and descended into the cabin, the fury set like stone in his face. When he returned he was carrying a tinder-box. He struck a light and held the tress of hair above it. The strands parted, billowing, fanning away as though trying to escape the lethal fire. Then he lowered the hair onto the flame and slowly, smiling, he watched it burn.
Deep below the surface the mermaid felt herself scorched with a sudden, impossible pain. Heat flared on her cold skin, bubbling it into blisters, searing into her flesh. Her bright tail blotched and blackened, moulting poisonous spines that charred even as they fell. Water surrounded her, yet she burned. Her body arched and buckled, struggling to be free of the agony that invaded it. The last clear note of her clouding mind was one of utter incomprehension. Then the sea fizzed around her as her very substance withered, melted, and was dispersed, minute grains swept away on the many currents of ocean, feeding the unseen creatures who are the seeds of all life.
PART ONE (#u519aa59a-8bef-5d1c-b362-9aa72a4b0a25)
The Key (#u519aa59a-8bef-5d1c-b362-9aa72a4b0a25)
I (#u519aa59a-8bef-5d1c-b362-9aa72a4b0a25)
She had been standing in front of the picture for several minutes before she began to notice it. The other paintings in the gallery were purely abstract but as she stared at this one, waiting for her father, passing the time, shapes began to emerge from the field of nondescript colour, vague as shadows on smoke: disconnected fragments of stair, random archways, openings into nowhere, ghostly glimpses of an unfinished labyrinth. Here and there a detail was highlighted, a splinter of sky beyond a broken vault, a segment of window with branching latticework, eye-blinks of clarity which seemed to flicker into being even as her gaze skimmed over them. The artist drew her attention to and fro with a skill that was almost disquieting, letting her roam the boundaries of image, then pulling her gradually towards the focus, where an irregular patch of vividly contrasting colour was set like a gaudy postage stamp at the very centre of the picture. Initially the truncated rectangle, perhaps three inches high, appeared so crowded with microscopic detail that it resembled a vast and complex mosaic, miniaturised until all coherence was lost. But as she studied it, either because her vision became acclimatised or by some contrivance of the artist, the tiny shapes seemed to shift, like a kaleidoscope falling into place, and she found herself looking through a doorway or casement out over a city. Wide streets lined with columns and colonnades, clustered roofs hiding secret alleys, glistening domes, steeples, spires, palaces and terraces, temple-walls and tavern-walls, courtyards, backyards, fountains, gardens. Everything was bathed in the gold of a falling sun, enriching paintwork and stonework, touching the gilding on the domes with pure fire. She did not know what city it was yet it looked both ancient and timeless, a Rome that lived on free of traffic and tourism, a new-built Jerusalem unscarred by warring factions, the seat, maybe, of a higher civilisation, older than history, fresh as the world in which it flourished, whose ruins had since crumbled to dust and whose wisdom had long been forgotten. She was not a fanciful girl, or so she told herself, yet her dormant fancy was stirred: she was pierced by a nostalgia for a place she had never seen, for the fairytale realms she had always rejected.
‘Do you like it?’ inquired a voice behind her. ‘You seem to be rather absorbed.’
She turned abruptly. The gallery was carpeted and the owner—she was sure he must be the owner—had approached so quietly she had not heard him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I haven’t decided. It’s very interesting.’
‘So you don’t believe in impulsive judgements.’ The voice was as smooth as pouring cream with a faint intonation of mockery, but whether lofty or merely teasing it was impossible to tell. There was little humour visible in his expression. Glossy pale grey hair framed his face like a steel halo; his café-crème complexion was unlined, creating an effect of careful preservation rather than enduring youth; his eyes were almond-shaped and flecked with glints of yellow light. He was delicately suave, discreetly elegant, gracefully tall. She disliked him immediately, on impulse. ‘It’s an etching,’ he went on. ‘Did you know?’
‘No, I didn’t.’ Of course she didn’t. ‘I thought etchings had to be in black and white.’
‘The technique is very complex.’ Once again, that trace of superiority. ‘Bellkush has always favoured the most difficult approach. The effect, I think, is almost unearthly—those diaphanous layers of subtle colour. Almost unearthly. Appropriate, perhaps, to the subject matter.’
‘What is it called?’ she asked, rather as if the question had been wrung out of her.
‘Lost City.’ There was a pause while she felt herself drawn back to the contemplation of that crowded portal. ‘Are you here to buy?’
‘I’m waiting for my father.’ She dragged her eyes away from the picture. He must know who she was: he had seen them arrive.
‘Ah…yes. Robin Capel’s daughter. And your name is?’
‘Fernanda.’
‘How pretty. Also unusual.’ Her name might have been a piece of bric-a-brac which had attracted his wandering attention.
‘I had a Spanish grandfather,’ she explained, lapsing into her routine excuse. It was untrue, but she had always felt such an exotic appellation needed more justification than her mother’s erratic taste. She did not approve of foreign names without foreign blood to back them up.
‘Fern!’ Her father, his discussions concluded, came towards them, wearing his habitual expression of slightly anxious goodwill. The young woman who worked at the gallery followed in his wake. ‘So you’ve met Javier. Er—terrific. Terrific. What were you chatting about?’
‘The pictures.’ The man answered for her.
‘I’m afraid you must have found my daughter’s taste a bit—well, conservative. She’s a very down-to-earth young lady, you know. Likes sitters in portraits to have all their features in the right place, trees to be the proper shade of green—that sort of thing. Only abstract painter I’ve ever known her to admire is Mondrian. She says he’d make nice kitchen wallpaper.’
‘That would be a very expensive kitchen,’ said the man called Javier. Robin and the woman both laughed.
‘Daddy, don’t make me sound so boring,’ Fern said, wanting to leave.
‘Just a joke, darling. Oh—I’d like you to meet Alison Redmond. We’re definitely going to collaborate on the witchcraft book. She’ll organise several of the artists here to do the illustrations. It should be a big success. Alison, my daughter Fernanda.’
They exchanged a polite handshake. Close up, the woman was not so young: her face was long and pointed with an incongruously full mouth adorning its thin structure and pale narrow eyes between heavily mascaraed lashes. Her off-blonde hair was waist-length and worn loose. Had Fern not been too prosaic for such comparisons she would have thought her father’s future collaborator resembled a witch herself.
‘Terrific,’ murmured Ms Redmond. Possibly Fern imagined the same elusive mockery in her voice that she had detected in Javier’s smooth accents. For a moment, seeing her father standing between them, she was visited with the illusion that he was somehow trapped, hemmed in by two predatory figures, the man with his superior height and superior smile, the woman with her warmth of manner and coldness of eye. The impression of danger, though fleeting, disturbed her because it seemed out of all proportion to the actual threat. In the six years since her mother died Fern had monitored her father’s love-life with the skill of an international statesman, dismissing a succession of unsuitable candidates out-of-hand. The menace here was surely similar, the standard hazard of marauding huntress and hapless prey; she had dealt with it a hundred times, and she had never before experienced any doubts or premonitions. But then, Fern did not believe in premonitions.
Robin shook more hands in farewell, while she resisted an irrational urge to drag him away.
That was the beginning, she decided long afterwards. The meeting at the gallery, the sense of menace, the picture. The incident seemed trivial enough at the time but it left her feeling vaguely perturbed, as if the outlying penumbra of some far-flung shadow had brushed the borderline of her bright safe world, or she had caught a few isolated notes of an eerie music which would soon come booming from every corner of the universe, obliterating all other sound. The events of that extraordinary and terrifying summer became perhaps easier to assimilate because she was in some sort prepared: from the moment of that initial encounter an unfamiliar atmosphere began to seep into her life, unsettling her, unbalancing her cultivated equilibrium, making her vulnerable, unsure, receptive to change. She was sixteen years old, well-behaved, intelligent, motivated, a product of the Eighties in which she lived, viewing the world with a practical realism engendered by the early death of her mother and the responsibilities which had devolved on her as a result of it. Her father’s easy-going manner had acquired its undercurrent of anxiety from that time, left alone with a small daughter and smaller son, but it was Fern who had gradually taken charge of the household, trading au pair for housekeeper, seeing the bills were paid, bossing her surviving parent, attempting to boss her younger brother. She had coasted through puberty and adolescence without rebellion or trauma, avoiding hard drugs, excessive alcohol, and underage sex. Her future was carefully planned, with no room for surprises. University; a suitable career; at some point, a prudent marriage. She thought of herself as grown up but behind the sedate façade she was still a child, shutting out the unknown with illusions of security and control. That summer the illusions would be dissipated and the unknown would invade her existence, transforming the self-possessed girl into someone desperate, frightened, uncertain, alone—the raw material of an adult.
The day after their visit to the Holt Gallery they collected her brother from school and drove out of London to see the house. That was the next thing. The house. On the death of a distant relative Robin had inherited a property in a remote part of Yorkshire, and before putting it on the market his accountant had suggested he might like to take a look at it. ‘Good idea,’ Robin had responded. ‘Could do with a break. Nice for the kids. They’re a real pair of townies: need a taste of the country. Never know, might decide to keep it, do it up a bit, that sort of thing. Use it for weekends and holidays. Good idea.’ Perceiving too late the pitfalls ahead, his accountant’s heart sank visibly. Robin Capel had a flair for turning potential assets into costly liabilities. Fortunately, Fernanda could be counted on to veto the additional expense. Robin ran a small but lucrative publishing company producing coffee-table books of the type bought by the illiterate as a substitute for reading, but although he was an excellent editor with a genuine enthusiasm for the banal, financial management was beyond him.
‘We never take a holiday in England, Daddy,’ Fern pointed out en route north. We generally rent a villa in Tuscany in the summer and go skiing in France or Switzerland in winter. You can’t ski in Yorkshire and they don’t make very good Chianti. It just isn’t sensible to keep a place we’ll hardly ever use.’
‘You’re obsessed with being sensible,’ said William from the back seat. ‘Women go through life with a shopping list, and when someone gives them anything that isn’t on it—even if it’s something really precious—they simply throw it out of the basket.’
‘Who said that?’ Fern asked sharply.
‘Mr Calder. History.’
His sister shook her head. ‘You’re slipping, Will,’ she said. ‘Last time you made a nasty remark about women you attributed it to the English master. You can’t expect me to believe all your teachers are male chauvinists.’
‘Why not?’ he retorted, unabashed. At twelve, he was as tall as his sister and slight and supple as a whip. His face had that quality of luminous clarity, common to elves and angels, which the unwary so often mistake for innocence. He changed the subject without apology or embarrassment.
‘If Great-Uncle Edward barely knew you,’ he asked Robin, ‘why did he leave you his house?’
‘No one else to leave it to,’ Robin surmised. ‘He wasn’t really my great-uncle. Or yours. My grandfather’s cousin. Might make him my great-cousin, I suppose. Maybe a couple of greats.’
‘One will do,’ said Fern.
‘He must have been awfully old,’ Will mused.
‘Youngest of his family,’ Robin explained. ‘Lots of sisters. Story goes, he ran away to sea when he was a boy—merchant navy—and didn’t come back till they’d all died. Part of the Capel legend. Don’t know if that’s what really happened. None of the sisters married—unless some of them were widowed—anyway, there were no children. Ned Capel didn’t marry either. Overdosed on women at an early age, I expect. The sisters all lived in that house until they sort of faded away and then he came home and vegetated there too. Must have been about ninety when he died. The sisters were fairly ancient as well. Remember visiting once with my grandparents: I think I was about Will’s age. There were three or four of them left by then: Esme and Deirdre and Irene—don’t recall any other names. Esme—no, Eithne—they called her the baby. Seventy-five at least. Very small with a wrinkled little face all eyes, like a marmoset in flowered chiffon. “I made the seed cake myself,” she told me. Frightful stuff. Tasted of sand.’
‘What’s seed cake?’ asked Will, intrigued.
‘Told you,’ said Robin. ‘Sand.’
They arrived in Yorkshire around ten that evening. Fern, normally a faultless map-reader, was in an edgy mood after losing them twice. Although it was May the weather was cold and a thin drizzle misted the windscreen whenever Robin tried switching off the wipers. The lights of a straggling village glittered through the rain as they crossed the Yarrow and climbed uphill; few lights and far between, lurking behind deep-set windows and close-drawn curtains, not unwelcoming but distant, keeping themselves to themselves. Following directions conveyed by Ned Capel’s solicitors they left the village and continued on into the dark, turning off at last up a steep drive which proved to be more like a cart-track, their rough passage shaking the Audi until its Vorsprung seemed about to come unsprung. The drive widened and levelled out in front of the house and Robin stopped the car. Little of the façade was visible through the rain-swept gloom except for the tall windows, many of them arched, black in the grey wall. The former housekeeper, a local woman, had been informed of their advent but there were no lights showing, no indications that they were expected. The house might have stood unoccupied for years. It looked dour, unfriendly, desolate as the surrounding countryside, hugging itself around the hollow darkness of its dusty rooms. Fern produced a torch and the roving beam picked out the entrance, tag-ends of creeper casting wavering fingers of shadow across the front door. In the blurred lozenge of light this was seen to be of unvarnished oak, splintered and weather-bleached, and as solid as the door to a dungeon. A modern Yale lock had been added, but the key turned reluctantly and the door creaked open under duress, scraping over bare boards. The hall inside was chilly and almost pitch-black. Fern took a long time finding the lightswitch: the skittering beam glanced over the lower treads of a winding stair and flicked in and out of curious niches and past angled doorways, blinking back abruptly from the depths of a stained mirror. Low-wattage illumination did little to improve matters, showing the details of cobwebs trailing from ceiling and lamp-shade and patches of discoloration on walls which might originally have been painted white.
Will gazed about him without enthusiasm. ‘Fern’s right,’ he said. ‘What’s the point of a house we won’t use? I think we should sell.’
‘I must say,’ Robin averred, ‘it looks a bit off-putting. Could move on, I suppose. Find a B & Β. Come back in the morning.’
‘No.’ Fern’s tone did not admit of argument. ‘We’re here and we’re going to stay. You were both so set on coming: well, I don’t intend to run away just because there isn’t a red carpet. Mrs Wicklow was asked to leave us tea and milk and so on. Let’s find the kitchen.’
She deposited the torch on a table and opened the door to her left, flicking an adjacent switch. A yellow glow sprang into being, no mellow radiance but a tired, sickly, off-colour light, as if the bulbs which provided it were continuously on the verge of expiring. It illumined a long drawing room with a few pieces of cumbersome furniture, the velvet upholstery rubbed raw by past occupants, a carpet mottled with age and dirt, and a wide empty fireplace bringing to her the dreary moan of the wind in the chimney. A grandfather clock ticked loudly, but there were no other sounds. At the far end of the room was an alcove, and peering out of it was the Face. For an instant, for all her resolute nerves, Fern stifled a gasp that was almost a cry. It was the face of a malevolent Buddha, not pensive and serene but gloating, somehow sly, the broad lips half parted in an unholy smile, the eyelids creased at some inscrutable jest, stubby horns protruding above a low brow. One of the light-bulbs flickered and she had the illusion that the idol had winked at her. ‘It’s a statue,’ she told herself. ‘Only a statue.’ Inadvertently, she spoke aloud.
Will and Robin had been investigating other doors but her brother heard her and came back to the hall. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Did you call?’
‘It was the statue,’ she said, ‘It gave me a shock.’
Will pushed past her to take a closer look. ‘It’s hideous,’ he said gleefully. ‘I’ll bet Great-Cousin Ned brought it back from his travels. Sailors always pick up stuff in foreign parts, don’t they? This place could be full of strange things. Some of them might be valuable.’
‘Pirates’ treasure, I suppose?’ said Fern, reassured by his ebullience. ‘Doubloons, and pieces of eight.’
‘I thought a doubloon was something you wore.’ Will had stopped a couple of feet in front of the idol, and suddenly he turned away. ‘Actually, I don’t think I do like it very much. I wonder what it’s laughing at?’
‘I don’t really want to know,’ said Fern.
Robin found the kitchen, at the back of the house. It was stone-flagged, cold but clean, with the barren air of a kitchen where nothing had been cooked in a long while. A jar of coffee, packets of sugar and tea, and a plate of sandwiches in clingfilm stood on the table, looking like the isolated relics of an alien visitation. There was milk in the fridge. They had snacked at a pub on the way, but Will and Robin tucked into the sandwiches, one eagerly, the other absent-mindedly. Fern searched for a teapot to make tea.
‘It’s a depressing sort of house, isn’t it?’ Robin commented between mouthfuls.
‘That’s Yorkshire for you,’ said his daughter.
The building was on three storeys, with eight bedrooms but only one bathroom and an extra loo downstairs. ‘The Victorians,’ Robin explained. ‘Grubby lot. Didn’t reckon too much to bathrooms.’ The cistern slurped and gurgled at the slightest provocation; hot water was not forthcoming. They went to bed unwashed, like the Victorians. Mrs Wicklow had made up the beds in three of the first-floor rooms; Robin chose the front room, Fern and Will slept at the back of the house. Fern lay awake for some time, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of a country night. The rain was silent and there was no traffic, although once she heard the grating roar of an untuned engine on the road below, possibly a motorbike. A strange mewing cry must, she assumed, have been some nocturnal creature, maybe a bird: it was only the unfamiliarity of it which disturbed her. She slept fitfully, falling between uneasy dreams, not sure if the snuffling she could hear, along the wall beneath her window, was real or simply another phantom from the shadows of sleep.
In the morning she woke around nine and got up to look at her surroundings in daylight. There was a small garden at the back of the house but the flower-beds were scantily planted and the grass grew in tufts on what might have been intended for a lawn; only weeds and a few hardy shrubs thrived there. Beyond, the bare hillside, treeless and grey with dew, climbed up towards the moors and the sky. Occasional rocks broke the skin of turf, moss-padded, the outthrust bones of Earth; a bridle path skirted the garden and ascended the slope, a shadowy line against the contouring of the land. Above it Fern noticed something which might have been a solitary boulder or stump, curiously shaped, looking almost like an old man sitting hunched up, cloaked and hooded against the weather. It was not actually raining but a layer of pale cloud covered the sky and the air felt damp. A budding inclination to explore the path died when Fern realised she had come without suitable boots.
Downstairs, she found her brother in the kitchen, bemoaning a lack of cereal, while the water boiled away from the old-fashioned iron kettle which Robin had left on the hob.
‘Dad’s gone to the village shop,’ Will reported. ‘I asked him to get me some Frosties. He said he’d bring orange juice, too.’
‘Is there a village shop?’ Fern inquired, transferring the kettle to an unheated surface.
‘Probably.’
Robin returned about three quarters of an hour later with squash instead of juice and no Frosties. ‘Only cornflakes,’ he explained, ‘and porridge oats. Didn’t think you’d like those. Sorry about the juice. Said they’d run out.’
‘No Frosties!’ Will bewailed.
‘You took a long time,’ said Fern.
‘Met the vicar. Nice chap. Name of Dinsdale—Gus Dinsdale. Invited us to tea. Thought we might like to visit Edward Capel’s grave, pay our respects, I suppose. He’s buried here: local churchyard. Anyway, I said fine. Nothing else to do.’
‘A visit to a grave and tea with the vicar,’ said Will. ‘Lovely weekend we’re having.’
They spent the rest of the morning going through the house. Fern found a long-handled broom for the cobwebs and an antiquated vacuum cleaner which made a noise like a small tornado and seemed bent on sucking up the carpets. In the drawing room, she moved the idol to a place where it would not catch her eye every time she opened the door. It was much heavier than she had anticipated and the stone felt rough and chill; she shivered when she set it down. On the first floor, Robin became absorbed in the paintings and estimated that a couple of murky landscapes and the portrait of a little girl with Shirley Temple ringlets clutching a puppy might possibly be worth something. Will, disappointed to find that the vaulted gloom of the cellar contained nothing more promising than a wine-rack with several bottles of superior burgundy, was cheered by the discovery of an attic running the length of the house, colonised by spiders and littered with bric-a-brac, including an iron-bound chest which might have come straight from a pirates’ hoard. His enthusiasm was enhanced rather than mitigated when the chest proved to be locked, with no immediate sign of a key.
‘Looking for it will give you something useless to occupy your time,’ said Fern, who had stubbed her toe on a lurking footstool and was determined to find nothing intriguing in an overcrowded attic. She was too old for treasure hunts.
‘I say,’ said Robin from behind her. ‘Quite a place. Might find all kinds of stuff here—family heirlooms, missing works of art…That chair looks like a Chippendale. Pity it’s broken. Not much light, is there? We need Fern’s torch.’
They came down finally at lunchtime when Mrs Wicklow arrived carrying a covered dish. Her greeting was abrupt and her face only slightly less stony than that of the idol but the dish emanated an agreeable aroma of steak-and-kidney and Fern concluded that her attitude was not actively grudging, it was simply that she was resistant to change and unused to the incursion of strangers. ‘Solicitors told me t’ Captain was your great-uncle,’ she said to Robin over their meal.
‘Well, not exactly…’
‘We decided he was our great-cousin,’ Will said, ‘with an extra great for Fern and me.’
‘You must miss him,’ Fern offered.
‘He was a good man,’ Mrs Wicklow conceded, ‘but tired. He was old and he didn’t like it. He couldn’t go walking the way he used to. Folks say long life is a thing to wish for, but I’m not so sure. It can’t be pleasant to outlive your friends. T’ Captain, he wasn’t t’ same since his dog died.’
‘Was he really a captain?’ Will asked.
‘He was that. Been all over the world, he had. I don’t know as how he ever really took to it, being what he called a landsman all the time. Of course, we’re near the coast here. He’d go down to look at t’ sea often and often, and come back sad about the eyes. Can’t say I trust it myself, t’ sea: it can seem so blue and gentle, but t’ water’s always cold and tricksy underneath.’
‘He must have collected a lot of things on his travels,’ Will said opportunely. ‘I don’t suppose you know where I could find the key to that big chest in the attic?’
‘Could be anywhere.’ Mrs Wicklow achieved a shrug. ‘House is full of stuff. Most of it’s rubbish, if you ask me; he wasn’t one for throwing things away. T’ key’ll be tucked in a drawer in t’ study or bedroom if you’re that set on it.’
‘Which was the Captain’s room?’ Will pursued.
‘One Mr Capel has now,’ Mrs Wicklow said. She had done some investigative bed-making before serving the pie.
‘Er—make it Robin,’ their father interjected. ‘Mr Capel…bit formal.’
‘Mr Robin, then.’
‘Might not all be rubbish, you know,’ Mr Robin remarked, discarding any further attempt at informality. ‘There are some good pictures, although I expect those came to him through the family.’
‘I don’t mind pictures,’ said Mrs Wicklow. ‘It’s that heathen idol in the drawing room I don’t like. Evil-looking object, I told t’ Captain to his face. Unchristian. He said it amused him. There’s different kinds of God, he used to say, all over t’ world. That’s not a kind I’d want in my prayers, I told him, nor any respectable person.’
‘I don’t care for it much either,’ said Fern.
‘And then there’s that woman,’ Mrs Wicklow continued, obscurely. ‘Carved out of a whole tree, according to t’ Captain, painted up as bright as life, and showing her all just like in t’ Sunday papers. She came from a shipwreck, he said, back in t’ old days when ships had a real lady up front for t’ sailors to warm to, only she doesn’t look much like a lady to me. T’ prow, that’s what they call it. He kept it in t’ barn next door, and a big piece of t’ ship with it.’
‘We haven’t looked in the barn yet,’ said Will, glancing compellingly at his father, his interest in sea chests temporarily in abeyance.
‘We ought to go and see,’ Robin affirmed. ‘A ship’s figurehead—sounds pretty exciting.’ His eyes were as bright as his son’s.
Fern stayed in the kitchen, although her offer to help with the washing up was firmly rejected.
‘Funny thing, what your brother was asking,’ Mrs Wicklow resumed. ‘There was a young woman over from Guisborough, not long before t’ Captain died. Something to do with antiques. They’re all crooks, so I hear. Wanting him to sell stuff, she was. He sent her about her business. Anyway, I was doing t’ drawing room when they came downstairs, and I heard them talking. She was asking about keys.’
Later that afternoon they paid a brief visit to the churchyard, where Ned Capel lay in the lee of a dry stone wall, with the turf plumped up like a pillow over his grave. It was a quiet place hollowed into the hillside, with the petals of a hawthorn drifting across the ground like a spring snowfall. ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea,’ Fern quoted, and for an instant she felt, irrationally, that she too had come home—home to the grimness of Dale House and the wild country waiting in the wings. ‘Is it supposed to be haunted?’ she asked the vicar, over tea.
‘Extraordinary question,’ said Robin. ‘Didn’t think you believed in ghosts.’
‘I don’t. It’s just—when we arrived, the house appeared, not exactly menacing, but reserved, sort of sullen, unwilling—or afraid—to let us in. I almost fancied…’ She checked herself, remembering her vaunted distrust of fancies.
‘I’ve never been too sure about hauntings,’ said the Reverend Dinsdale. He was younger than Fern had expected, probably under forty, with a friendly bony face and a long neck in which a mobile Adam’s apple fluctuated expressively. ‘I can’t really imagine a human spirit is going to mope around the same old place for centuries just because it was murdered there, or something equally nasty. All the more reason to move on, I would have thought. On the other hand, some houses have a definite personality. I’ve often wondered if it’s the buildings themselves which remember—and maybe sometimes the memory can be strong enough to reproduce an old image, a sound, even a smell, so that human senses can detect it Perhaps there’s a kind of house-spirit which lives in such places, a degenerate form of something that was once akin to mankind, craving the company of the living even while it resents them, reminded of what it might have been.’
‘A sort of genius loci,’ Will supplied knowledgeably. He was in a beatific mood after the vicar’s wife had donated a packet of Frosties from her larder.
‘That’s it. Pure speculation, of course. Mind you, it’s fairly well grounded in folk mythology. In the past, every house in Yorkshire had its own hobgoblin. The occupants would put out a saucer of milk or a choice morsel of food to keep it sweet, and in return it would look after the house, see off danger and disease, that kind of thing. Much more efficient than a burglar alarm.’
‘Maybe we should get Fern to put out some milk for ours,’ Robin suggested slyly.
‘Don’t be silly, Daddy,’ his daughter retorted.
‘I don’t know about ghosts,’ Will said, ‘but I heard a weird sniffing noise last night, going along the wall under my window. It was awfully loud.’ Fern glanced at him with suddenly widening eyes.
‘Could be a badger,’ the vicar said. ‘They always sound as if they have a cold in the head. What you want to do is go out in the morning and check for tracks. I’ve got a book in my study with some good illustrations: I’ll show you what to look for.’
By the time they returned to Ned Capel’s house the daylight was failing. The cloud-cover had begun to break up and chinks of fire appeared in the far west above a muffled sunset, while eastwards great lakes of pale green had opened up, with a star or two winking in their depths. The motorcyclist Fern had heard the previous night roared past them on the narrow road, a little too close for comfort, his exhaust rattling and a black visor hiding his face. Their temporary home loomed up ahead of them, its unyielding frontage looking no longer threatening but merely solid, sternly dependable, as safe as a castle wall which would keep them from the night. Fern went straight up to her room and gazed out towards the sunset: twilight dimmed the rugged hillside but she could still distinguish the paler thread of the path and the stump or boulder that resembled a seated man on the bank above, maintaining its timeless vigil over the house. Something like a bird swooped past, its wing-beat too swift for the eye to follow, its flight-path erratic. Then there was another, and another. They made a faint high-pitched chittering unlike any birdsong. ‘Bats!’ Fern thought with a sudden shiver, part fear, part pleasure. She had never seen a bat outside the nature programmes on television and although she was not really frightened of them they seemed to her alien and fantastical, messengers symbolising her transition into another world. The teeming man-made metropolis where she had grown up shrank in her mind until it was merely a blob of meaningless ferment, and beyond it she glimpsed a boundless universe, with pock-marked moons sinking behind drifting hills, and blue voids opening in between, and dusty nebulae floating like clouds across the backdrop of space, and at the last a starry sea whose glittering waves hissed forever on the silver beaches at the margin of being. For a moment she was spellbound, panic-stricken; and then the endless vistas vanished from her head and there was only the hillside climbing to the barren moor and the zigzagging of the bats. The sunset had faded from behind the cloud-wrack and in the softened light details were briefly clearer: Fern squinted at the view, striving after uncertainty, knowing that what she saw was against logic, against sense. The solitary boulder had gone. The path was empty, the slope bare; in an eyeblink, the duration of a mirage, the hunched up rock or stump had disappeared. Fern flinched away from the window with a lurching heart and made herself walk slowly from the room.
Tea had been heavy on scones and cake and accordingly the three of them ate a cursory supper and spent the rest of the evening trying to elucidate the rule-book for a box of Mah Jongg tiles unearthed in the attic.
‘Good thing, no telly,’ said Robin a little doubtfully. ‘Makes you create your own amusements. Stretches the mind.’
‘We’ll have to get a TV here,’ said Will. ‘Also a music centre.’
‘No point,’ Fern said. ‘We’re going to sell. Will, you’re cheating. There’s no such thing as a King Kong.’
‘I’m not cheating,’ Will retorted. ‘I’m creating my own amusements.’
It was well after eleven by the time they went up to bed, worn out by the intricacies of the game. Fern tumbled into a bemused sleep where ivory tiles tap-danced along the table and an elaborate Oriental character uncurled into a bat-winged creature which skittered around the room, bumping into walls and lamp-shades. ‘It’s a dragon,’ said a voice in her ear. ‘Don’t look into its eyes’—but it was too late, she was already falling into the hypnotic orbs as if into a crimson abyss, clouded with shifting vapours of thought, and a single iris dilated in front of her, black as the Pit. Then she crossed into a dreamland so crowded with incident and adventure that she woke exhausted, snatching in vain at the fraying threads of recollection. She had a feeling her dream had possessed some overwhelming significance, but it was gone in a few seconds and there were only the raindrops beating on the window-panes like the tapping of Mah Jongg tiles. She slept and woke again, this time into silence. And then below her window came the snuffling noise, bronchial and somehow eager, as if the animal outside was desperately seeking ingress through the steadfast wall. ‘A badger,’ thought Fern. ‘I’d like to see a badger,’ but a huge reluctance came over her, pressing her into the bed like a dead weight, forcing her back into the inertia of sleep, and when she woke again it was morning.
The hot water had come on eventually but there was no shower attachment so Fern had a quick bath. When she finally nerved herself to look out at the view, the boulder—she had decided to think of it as a boulder since the area was virtually devoid of trees—was back in place as if it had never been gone; she could almost convince herself its absence the previous evening had been a trick of the twilight. Will was grubbing around in the flower-bed below, presumably hunting for badger-tracks as instructed by Gus Dinsdale. In the kitchen, Robin was trying to make toast without the assistance of a toaster. Several charred slices on the table bore mute witness to his failure. Fern packed him off to the bathroom and took over; Will came in from the garden, unashamedly earth-stained, in time to appropriate the first round.
‘Any luck?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Badger-tracking.’
Will set down his slice of toast unfinished, a frown puckering his forehead. ‘No. I can’t understand it. I heard it last night, that same sniffing, really loud, just where the flower-bed is. It had rained earlier, and Gus said damp soil is perfect for holding prints, but there isn’t a mark. Yet I know I heard it. I was sort of half asleep at the time, and I thought about getting up and taking a look, but somehow I didn’t want to, or I was just too tired. I wish I had now. Maybe I dreamed it.’
‘If you did,’ said Fern, ‘then I did too. Both nights.’
‘Perhaps the house is haunted,’ Will said after a pause.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Fern asked.
‘Well, Mr Burrows—Physics—he says Science has proved so many impossible things that it would be a great mistake to rule out the supernatural just because we haven’t sussed it out yet. He got us all talking about it one afternoon: he said he’d had an experience which he couldn’t explain, and Rebecca Hollis told us about her grandmother’s house, and this room which is always cold, and something she’d seen there. She isn’t the fanciful type, either, and she doesn’t boast; she wouldn’t even have talked about it if her best friend hadn’t nudged her into it.’ Absent-mindedly, he took another bite of toast and reached for the Frosties. ‘I rather like that idea Gus had, about the house-spirit,’ he concluded with his mouth full.
‘But the sniffing is outside the house,’ Fern said thoughtfully, ‘and it wants to get in.’
For a minute Will stopped eating and stared at her. She contemplated telling him about the boulder but decided against it; he was only twelve, and the light had been poor, she might have been mistaken. ‘I’m imagining things,’ she said, suddenly impatient with her own credulity. ‘It’s the Yorkshire landscape. Overexposure to nature is bad for city-dwellers. We need to get back to the bright lights of reality.’
‘The lights are man-made,’ Will pointed out. ‘Electricity and neon. Only the stars are real.’
And then: ‘What’s that awful smell?’
‘Damn,’ said Fern. ‘Now I’ve burnt the toast.’
They drove back to London after lunch at the local pub, where surly rustics eyed them sidelong and thick Yorkshire accents made the language barrier almost insurmountable. ‘Interesting house,’ Robin said in the car. ‘Must go through all that stuff some time. Quite a collection. Didn’t see the figurehead, did you, Fern? You ought to have a look. She’s pretty impressive. Next time we’re there—’
‘We really have to sell, Daddy,’ Fern interrupted resolutely. ‘We don’t need the house and we’re not likely to use it very much. It’ll be far too expensive to maintain just as a storehouse for marine antiquities.’
‘Of course. Of course.’ Robin’s agreement was too quick and too hearty. ‘Just a thought. We’ll go back in the summer, sort out, tidy up, sell later. No hurry. Market’s still picking up. Best to wait a bit. Invest some time and effort in the place: makes good business sense. James’ll approve. He’s all for investment.’ James was his accountant.
Fern’s grip tightened on the AA Road Atlas.
‘We’ve got to go back,’ Will insisted. ‘The house-spirit will be waiting for us.’
Fern was not entirely sure he was joking.
II (#u519aa59a-8bef-5d1c-b362-9aa72a4b0a25)
The summer holidays had arrived before they found time to return to Yarrowdale. Robin was seeing a fair amount of Alison Redmond, apparently in the course of literary collaboration; but Fern did not perceive any reason for undue anxiety. Although they dined out together almost every week he never brought her home, and in his daughter’s experience serious intentions always involved getting on terms with the children. On her own terrain, she could demolish all invaders: her sweet, aloof smile quelled both patronage and gush, camaraderie wilted in the face of her perfect manners, domestic aspirants blenched at her competent management and delectable cuisine. As a child, she had used a cultivated artlessness to undermine overconfidence; when she grew older, she honed her conversational skills at the dinner table until she knew to a nicety how to wrong-foot her opponents and expose, as if by accident, pretension, bossiness, self-importance—even when such defects were not really there. Will, an indifferent ally, usually left her a clear field. Robin was the charming, helpless type of man who invariably attracted forceful women wanting to mould him to suit their own inclinations, an ambition that would only work as long as he was unaware of it. Once these plans had been revealed, resistance would set in, and Fern, who had been moulding him for years, knew she had won another unobtrusive skirmish. She wanted her father to marry again eventually, but only to someone who would make him comfortable, whose authority would be gentle, who would refrain from pushing him down roads he did not wish to travel. She had almost decided in favour of Abigail Markham, a thirtysomething Sloane currently employed by Robin’s publicity department in a low-key capacity, who combined a certain serenity of outlook with a pleasant scattiness over dress and social engagements. But Robin’s penchant for her company seemed to have abated under Alison’s influence. Fern, keeping a routine eye on him, trusted the friendship would not outlast the germination of the book.
Attending a party at the gallery with her father, she noticed Alison greeting him with an extra inch of smile and a sideways glitter of her pale eyes. She wore several clinging, drooping, fluttering garments of some vague shade between beige and taupe which echoed the dark fairness of her hair, and her overfull mouth was painted a deep red so that it blossomed like a rampant peony against the whiteness of her skin. There was a bizarre fascination in her sidelong gaze, the point-edged smile that never came close to laughter, the sinuous fingers that punctuated her every gesture, the rippling motion of the material that wrapped her body, as fluid and as neutral as water. And her strange, dull, endless hair, veined with hues of shadow, enfolding her like a cloak: Fern wondered what treatment had made it grow so long—too long, surely, for European locks—and what had leeched the colours of life from its waving masses. It might almost have provided her with a mantle of invisibility, effective by dusk and dark, hiding her from wary eyes as she stole abroad on some unspecified but nefarious business. ‘Nonsense,’ Fern scolded herself. ‘What is the matter with me? I’m seeing too many ghosts lately. This is the West End, this is an art gallery, this is a room full of people drinking cheap champagne and chattering about the decline of the image. There are no spectres here.’ In passing, she glanced at one of the champagne bottles. Long after, she knew that should have warned her, evidence rather than intuition: the champagne was not cheap. She had been attending and sometimes assisting at such parties since she was fourteen and she knew quite well that no normal person wastes good drink on a crowd.
‘And what do you think of the pictures tonight, Fernanda?’ The voice at her side caught her unawares. For the second time.
‘It’s a bit difficult to study them properly with so many people around,’ she said after a moment, mentally putting herself on guard. She had not noticed the pictures yet.
‘Of course,’ Javier Holt responded smoothly. ‘The problem with a private view is that it isn’t private and nobody gets to view anything.’ His face looked like a mask, she thought, a perfect mask of some seamless metal with topaz eyes and hair of spun steel. The focus of her apprehension shifted. At least Alison Redmond was a living hazard, whereas Javier Holt appeared dead, suavely, immaculately dead, and the spark that animated him might have come from elsewhere, controlled by a pressing of buttons, a turning of wheels.
‘You seemed very intent nonetheless,’ he went on. ‘If not the pictures, what were you studying?’
‘People,’ said Fern coolly. ‘You have an interesting selection here.’
He smiled automatically. ‘Anyone in particular?’ He obviously knew who had claimed her attention.
‘Alison,’ said Fern with a pose of candour, a hint of defiance.
‘Naturally. Your father seems very taken with her. She is a most unusual woman.’
‘She moves like water,’ Fern said, ‘like a twisting stream, all bright deceptive reflections, hidden currents, dangerous little eddies. She might be very shallow, she might be very deep. She’s much too unusual for my father.’
‘I am sure she knows that,’ Javier responded with that faint mockery in his tone.
Fern was not entirely reassured.
It was something of a relief to be leaving for Yorkshire. Fern’s two closest friends were going on holiday early and although she would miss London it was hot enough for the country to have its attractions. Robin might spend part of the week in the metropolis on business but long weekends at Dale House, rifling among the hotch-potch of Ned Capel’s collection, would provide both distance and distraction from urban perils. He evidently anticipated the visit with a brand of schoolboy pleasure which even exceeded Will’s. Fern found it more difficult to analyse her own emotions when she saw Yarrowdale again: there was no obvious surge of gladness, rather a feeling of acknowledgement, a falling-into-place of her life’s pattern, as if she had returned to somewhere she was meant to be after a careless and unscheduled absence. The grim façade of the house seemed to relax a little; recognition peered out of the empty windows. She went up to her room and, with a doubt bordering on fear, scanned the hillside for that strange-shaped boulder. It was there in its place, a silent Watcher, maintaining surveillance through all weathers, unmoving as the rock it resembled. But it is a rock, Fern reminded herself, afraid to find she was no longer afraid; it was never gone; I imagined that.
She slept undisturbed by birdcall or badger and in the morning, encouraged by a lightening breeze and a brightening sun, they walked the half mile or so to the coast. Yarrowdale was not one of the Dales, being situated on the edge of the moors between Scarborough and Whitby, where a series of steep valleys wind down to a rocky shore buffeted by the storms from the North Sea. That day, however, the sea was blue and tranquil, the waves tumbling gently onto the beach and melting into great fans of foam, while a coaxing wind seemed to take the fire out of the noonday heat. The Capels strolled along the wide sweep of beach and smelt the sea-smell and removed their shoes to paddle at the waves’ edge—‘The water’s freezing,’ said Fern, and ‘Got to be careful swimming,’ Robin added. ‘Mrs Wicklow’s right: currents are chancy round here.’ There were few people, no litter. Scavenging gulls skimmed the shoreline in vain: their lonely cries sounded harsh as screams and desolate as the ocean’s heart. Yet to Fern they seemed to be a summons to an unknown world, a growing-up unlike anything she had planned, where her mind and her experience would be broadened beyond the bounds of imagination.
* * *
On Monday Robin set off for London with a car full of paintings which would undoubtedly prove to be worth a fraction of his optimistic valuations, something that would in no way damage his hopes for the rest of Great-Cousin Ned’s jumble. Mrs Wicklow had agreed to assist with cooking and housekeeping and Gus Dinsdale’s wife had promised to drive Fern to Whitby for essential shopping. Will had started on cleaning the ship’s figurehead. As Mrs Wicklow had said, there was a sizeable section of ship attached. ‘See,’ Will told his sister, ‘she’s got a name. When I’ve got the rest of those barnacles off we should be able to read it. I wonder how old she is?’
‘This is really a job for a professional,’ Fern remarked.
‘We haven’t got a professional. Anyway, I’m being careful.’ He proceeded to notch a kitchen knife against a particularly stubborn crustacean. ‘She’s been on the sea-bed a while. She must have survived much rougher handling than anything she’s getting from me.’
‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Fern, abandoning her careful indifference to succumb to the lure of a mystery.
After about an hour of rather awkward chipping the name emerged, semi-obliterated but legible. Fern had known what it would be all along, with the strange prescience which comes from that region of the brain they say is never used, a zone of thought still unconscious and untabulated. Seawitch, ran the lettering. The carving did not resemble Alison, for all its flowing hair and parted lips: the improbable bosom was outthrust, the belly a sleek curve, the face as knowing as Dodona. Nonetheless, Fern was unsurprised. Her awareness was touched with an elusive familiarity, but whether from the future or the past she could not tell.
‘She’s wonderful,’ said Will. ‘Those tits look like nuclear warheads.’
‘You’re much too young to notice such things,’ his sister said loftily.
‘You’re just jealous,’ said Will.
That evening Mrs Wicklow left around five. Fern made omelettes and they ate in the kitchen listening to Will’s ghettoblaster pumping out the latest from the Pet Shop Boys. Even when Robin was with them, they never sat in the drawing room: it was always a degree colder than the rest of the house and the stone idol squatted there wrapped in its secret gloating like a diminutive Moloch. Fern did her best to keep the door closed, hindered by Mrs Wicklow’s penchant for opening both doors and windows at every opportunity, in order, so she said, to let in air. ‘There’s air in here already,’ Will had pointed out, ‘otherwise we wouldn’t be breathing.’ But Mrs Wicklow believed air had to be specially admitted.
The sky had clouded over and by the time they went to bed the night outside had grown very dark. ‘We ought to have candles,’ said Will, ‘guttering in the draught, making huge spidery shadows on the wall.’
‘Don’t talk about spiders,’ said Fern.
Slightly to her surprise, she fell asleep immediately, untroubled by nightmares.
She woke abruptly in the small hours to find herself sitting up in bed, intensely alert, her nerve-endings on stalks. The curtains were half drawn but the space between was merely a paler shade of black, barely discernible against the velvet dark of the room. There was no wind and the absolute quiet, without even a distant rumour of traffic, was something to which she had not yet become accustomed. The silence had a quality of tension about it, as if the night itself were holding its breath, waiting for a board to creak, a pin to drop, the warning screech of a bird. Fern’s pulse beat so hard that her whole body seemed to shake with it. And then came the snuffling, just as she had expected, horribly familiar and so loud it might have been directly below her window-sill. The rasping, stertorous breath of some creature that left never a print, an incorporeal hunter who had no existence except to scent its prey. The reluctance that held her back she recognised as fear, a fear that was not only inside her but all around her, a dread that was part of the room itself: she had to thrust it aside like a physical barrier. The floor made no sound beneath her tread; the window, thanks to Mrs Wicklow, was already ajar. She leaned out into the night.
There was something at the foot of the wall, something that was darker than the surrounding darkness, a clot of shadow whose actual shape was impossible to make out. Not a badger: the white bands on its mask would have been visible at that range. Besides, although she had no idea how large a badger was supposed to be she was sure this must be larger, larger than a fox, larger than a sheepdog. It moved to and fro, to and fro, as if worrying at the wall; then suddenly it stopped, and the sniffing was accompanied by a furious scrabbling, the unmistakable sound of paws burrowing frenziedly in the soil, as though seeking to unearth the very foundations of the house. Afterwards, Fern knew she must have made some slight noise to betray her presence. The thing below her froze, and lifted its head. She saw neither form nor feature, only the eyes, slanting ovoids filled with a glow that mirrored nothing around them, a livid flame that came only from within. The terror that rushed over her was beyond all reason, a wild, mindless force not pushing her back but pulling her down, down towards the ground and the waiting eyes. With a vast effort of will she wrenched herself free—and then she was back in her room, latching the window with unsteady fingers, and the silence outside was unbroken, and a board creaked in welcome as she stumbled across to her bed. She thought of going to her brother’s room to see if he was awake and what he had heard, but a great tiredness overwhelmed her and she decided it could wait till morning. Now she needed to sleep…and sleep…and by daylight the horror would be a matter for nightmare and the flower-bed would be pocked with the tracks of some mongrel stray.
But it rained before dawn, and any prints there might have been were washed away.
Fern went to the window as soon as she got up, and there was Will searching the ground, still in his pyjamas and slippers: the latter would be soaked through. ‘Come in and get dressed,’ she called. And: ‘Have you found anything?’
‘No. The rain was too heavy.’ His upturned face was curiously solemn despite a lavish smudge of dirt. ‘You heard it too?’
‘Yes. Come on in.’
He disappeared through the back door and Fern’s gaze lifted automatically to the path straddling the hillside. In the grey morning light there could be no mistaking what she saw. The Watcher had gone.
‘It wasn’t a badger,’ said Fern over breakfast. ‘There were no markings. It was big, and dark: that’s all I could see.’ She didn’t want to mention the reasonless terror that had tried to drag her from the window. Fern disliked both terror and unreason.
‘A dog?’ Will suggested.
‘Maybe.’
‘A wolf?’
‘There aren’t any wolves left in Britain.’
‘It could have escaped from a zoo,’ Will theorised, ‘only…’
‘Why would it want to get into the house? An escaped wolf would be out on the moors killing sheep—supposing it was a wolf, which I doubt. Anyway, I don’t think there are any zoos near here,’
There was a short pause filled with the crunching of cereal. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible,’ Will pronounced eventually, ‘whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle was a great believer in the supernatural. And that’s what we’re left with. There’s something strange going on, something to do with this house. I thought so all along. So did you really, only you’re so grownup and boring that you won’t let yourself believe in anything any more. Remind me not to grow up if that’s how it takes you. Did you know that they’ve conducted experiments in telekinesis in the laboratory? Did you know that there are alternative universes round every corner? Did you know—’
‘Shut up,’ said Fern. ‘I’m not boring, just sceptical. That’s healthy.’ And: ‘Did you know…did you know there’s a boulder on the hill behind the garden that’s shaped like a seated man, and sometimes it’s there, and sometimes it isn’t? It’s been there all weekend—always in the same place—and this morning it was gone. How’s that for a did-you-know?’
‘Perhaps it is a man,’ Will said uncertainly, baffled by the introduction of a new element in the situation. ‘Perhaps it’s a tramp.’
‘It’s a rock,’ said Fern. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my eyesight. It sits there for days, in all kinds of weather, like a rock is supposed to. I think it’s watching us.’
‘Rocks don’t watch,’ Will pointed out.
‘This one does.’
‘It all centres on the house,’ Will reiterated. ‘It could be something to do with the stuff Great-Cousin Ned picked up on his travels. Maybe there’s a magic talisman hidden in the attic, or an amulet, or the green eye of the little yellow god, or—what about that chest? It must be in there—whatever it is.’
‘Too obvious.’
‘Well, we ought to look. The key should be around somewhere.’
An arrested expression appeared on Fern’s face. ‘I don’t know if it’s relevant,’ she said slowly, ‘but Mrs Wicklow said there was a woman here asking about keys, before Great-Cousin Ned died. She was in the antiques business.’
‘She must have known about the chest.’
‘How?’
They spent the morning rooting among the jumble in the attic, finding neither talisman nor key but an assortment of items which Will at least considered promising, including an evil-looking curved knife, a devil-mask which was probably African, a hookah happily empty of opium, and an antiquated map of the Indian sub-continent with elephants, tigers, maharajahs and palaces drawn in where appropriate. Also a great deal of dust and several spiders, the largest and leggiest of which sent Fern into retreat, claiming it was time she checked out the study. Unfortunately, the most interesting feature of Ned Capel’s sanctum was a mahogany writing desk the top of which proved to be locked and, like the chest, keyless. ‘Damn,’ said Fern, who had been brought up to moderate her language. ‘I bet all the keys are in one place. The question is where.’ Her sweat-shirt, she noticed, had acquired several dust-smears as a result of her foraging, and she went to her room to change it. She had no intention of returning to the attic that day.
A routine glance out of the window showed her a sky of gunmetal grey and rain blowing in waves across the bleak landscape. Her gaze shifted—then switched back again. Seconds later she was running down the stairs, kicking off her sandals at the bottom with uncharacteristic carelessness. In the hall, she plunged her feet into an old pair of galoshes, snatched Robin’s Barbour from the peg, and crammed on her head a shapeless waterproof hat which had formerly belonged to Ned Capel. Then she ran out of the back door and through the garden to the gate. The latch was stiff from infrequent use and the wood had swollen in the wet: it took a hard thrust of her shoulder to open it. The oversized boots slopped around her feet as she scrambled up the path. The wind swept across the hillside unhindered. And then she was standing in front of him with the water dripping off her hat-brim and her unfastened jacket letting the rain soak through her sweat-shirt. He no longer resembled a boulder, though there was something rock-like about his absolute stillness and the patience it implied. He wore a loose, bulky garment with a pointed hood overhanging his face: the material was heavy and laminated with long weathering, its brindled hues at once earth-coloured and stone-coloured, moss-patched and grass-grimed. Under the hood she saw a countenance as battered as the coat, with sparse flesh on strong bones and wind-worn, sun-leathered skin gathered into wrinkles about the mouth and eyes, some of them for laughter, some for thought, many for grimness and sorrow. But it was the eyes themselves which held her: they were green and gold and brown like a woodland spring and they sparkled brighter than the rain, so bright that they seemed to pierce the walls of her mind and see into her very soul. And after the first shocked recoil her soul opened in response, and her life changed forever. It was as if the personality she had made for herself, matter-of-fact, positive, conscientiously hidebound, began to peel away like a chrysalis and a different Fernanda, wet-winged and shy, poked a tentative antenna into the unfamiliar air. In that moment she realised that she did not know herself, she never had, and all her certainties had been merely the pretence of a child afraid of maturity; but ignorance did not frighten her now, for he knew who she was, and what she was, and in that knowing she could be at ease. She said ‘Hello’, and he said ‘Hello’, and their greeting dissolved the walls of her little world, and let in the unimaginable from Outside.
‘You took your time.’ the Watcher went on. He studied her thoughtfully, seeing a girl with a raindrop on her nose—a very young girl—small for her age, her face heart-shaped, her features delineated with the precision and clarity of a pen-and-ink drawing. The wind slipped under her hat-brim, tugging it back from her forehead, showing hair that was leaf-brown and close-cut, the would-be fringe dividing obstinately into a widow’s peak above her brow. Her eyes were wide and wide-set, their grey veined with celadon, and even in that instant of her mind’s opening he glimpsed depths that were incalculable, an intelligence that would always be wary. He had made her trust him, an elementary manoeuvre, but she would not hesitate to return to doubt if—and when—he let her down.
‘You looked like a rock,’ she said accusingly.
‘It’s useful,’ he replied. ‘Nobody wonders what you’re up to, if you’re a rock. No questions, no trouble. There’s nothing as unremarkable as a rock.’
‘It isn’t possible,’ said Fern, but the conviction was gone from her voice. ‘I saw the rock.’
‘Appearances can deceive,’ the Watcher said. ‘You see many things which are not there. A mirage, a reflection, a star that died thousands of years ago. You should trust your instinct, not your eyes. You knew me long before today.’
Fern did not attempt to answer that. ‘You’ve been spying on us.’
‘Observing,’ he corrected gently. ‘Fortunately, I am still an observant man, whatever else I may have lost. I seem to have spent centuries just watching.’
She was not entirely sure he was exaggerating. ‘That’s how I thought of you,’ she said. ‘The Watcher.’
‘It’s appropriate,’ he said. ‘I have grown very tired of it, over the years. There are too many things that need watching, and far too few of us to keep watch. Have you found it yet?’
‘Found what?’
‘What you are looking for.’
‘I don’t know what I’m looking for,’ Fern pointed out.
‘A profound philosophical statement. Not many people do, and if they did, it would be far worse. To find what you seek would be an anticlimax, to fail, a tragedy. But I am talking concepts, which is beside the point. Here, there is clearly something specific to be found. There has been a certain amount of attention focused on this house for some time: callers who were not what they seemed, prowlers by night, some human, some less so. Which reminds me, next time you hear noises in the dark, curb your curiosity. It would be safer.’
‘You saw it,’ Fern said. ‘That creature last night. What was it?’
‘Something which should not have been there. Whoever sent it made a thoroughly unsuitable choice of instrument. Don’t worry too much: even if it finds an opening, it can’t come in, not without being invited. The ancient law still stands. Ignore it and it will go away.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No. It would be rash to be too sure. But this thing was ill-chosen for our hunt: the sender may well have selected it simply to show that he—or she—has the power to summon such beings.’ He rubbed his finger along the crooked bridge of his nose in a gesture of reflection. ‘His next move should be more practical. I hope.’
‘Whose next move?’ Fern demanded.
‘I don’t know. I know very little right now. There are so many possibilities. It could be someone working alone, seeking self-aggrandisement, personal power—alas, we all want those. It could be an agent or emissary. It depends what we’re looking for. There are certain indications.’ His eyes seemed to dim and then brighten again, their light fluctuating with the vagaries of memory. ‘Something was lost, long, long ago, before the beginnings of history: few remain who would recognise it, fewer still who would know the secret of its use. When it was recovered the recipient thought it an object of no value, the symbol of a cheat; his family kept it as they would keep a grudge, passing it on with legend and moral attached, until a young bride traded it to a tinker for a knot of ribbons. He stole a kiss as well, which was not part of the bargain; they said she looked coldly on her husband ever after. The tinker took his purchase to a collector of such things, sensing its mystery if not its power, a backstreet alchemist one eighth sorcerer, seven-eighths charlatan. They studied it, he and his apprentice, scanning the smoke for visions and peering into crystal balls, learning the sort of things that you learn from staring at smoke and Venetian glassware. The alchemist also dealt in love potions and poisons—not very successfully: his potions were over-optimistic and his poisons half-hearted. Unfortunately, a dissatisfied client among the warring nobility decided to take his revenge: the alchemist was beaten senseless, his lodgings ransacked, his possessions commandeered. The object was lost again, and never found.’ He paused, sighed, as indifferent to rain and wind as the rock he had chosen to imitate. Fern was reminded of a venerable hippy, beyond the reach of marijuana or hallucinogen, looking back with cold eyes on the psychedelic phantoms he once pursued. She was damp and chilled; but she did not move. ‘We searched for it,’ he went on, ‘long after, when we learnt its importance, but it was too late. The feuding families of that time had hidden their treasures so efficiently that even their descendants could not find them. They left clues, and ciphers, but the clues were mislaid and the ciphers indecipherable. The trail had vanished. And then, about twenty years ago, a famous chalice was sold at auction—one that had gone missing during the relevant period. Apparently it had been retrieved in the last great war when a bomb demolished the wall concealing a secret vault. I could not trace the minor items which might have been found with it, but I imagine a traveller collecting flotsam could well have bought one of them for a few pounds from a market stall. It seems a likely theory.’
‘Great-Cousin Ned,’ Fern said. ‘And then? How did you find him?’
‘He was found: I don’t know how. A chance meeting; a spell—it doesn’t matter. The interest of others drew me. This thing could be here—may be here—if it is, you must get to it first.’
‘I must?’
He ignored the interruption. ‘In the wrong hands, it could be put to the wrong use. What would happen I’m not sure—and I don’t want to find out. I’ve been watching the investigations very carefully: they—whoever they are—know hardly more than we do. So far. You have to stay ahead of them. You have to find it.’
‘What is it?’
The answer came slowly, softly, as if the Watcher feared to be overheard, there on the empty hillside without even a bird in sight. ‘A key,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you guess? It’s a key.’
‘Of course,’ said Fern. ‘We’ve been looking for the keys to open the writing desk and the chest in the attic, when all the time…it was the keys themselves which mattered.’
‘Just one key. It’ll be smaller than the others, made of stone or something that looks like stone. You’ll know it when you see it. Hide it from everyone.’
‘And then…I give it to you.’ The doubt crept back, darkening her mind. ‘And then what? What will you do with it?’
For the first time he smiled, an unexpectedly impish smile which dug punctuation marks in his cheeks and buckled the lines round his eyes. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ve been at this search for decades—centuries—and when I find it, if I find it, I won’t even know what to do. It could prove the ultimate jest—if we get the chance to laugh.’
‘Who are you?’ she asked, suddenly aware that she was very wet, and cold, and Mrs Wicklow was calling her in to lunch, and she was standing on a barren slope talking to a rock.
‘Who am I?’ The mischief faded; what was left of his smile grew ghostly. ‘That is a short question with a long answer, and we haven’t the leisure now. Who do you think I am?’
Fern shrugged, striving to sound flippant. ‘A Watcher—a wizard—a trickster—a tramp.’
‘Mainly just a tramp. You can call me Ragginbone, if you need a name. They called me that a long while back, when all this—’ he indicated his dilapidated garb ‘—was merely a disguise. Now, it’s my only self. And how should I call you?’
‘Fernanda,’ she said. ‘Fern will do. I thought you would know that already.’ There was a shade of disappointment in her tone.
‘I read your mind, not your birth certificate,’ he retorted. ‘You’d better go now, Fernanda. Your lunch is waiting, and you should change into dry clothes. I’ll be here tomorrow. Or the next day. Remember: find the key. You must…find the key…’
The wind snatched at her hat and as she turned to recapture it the rain seemed to swirl around her, blurring the landscape, and when she looked back up the path there was only a rock—she could see it was a rock—shaped like a seated man with his hood pulled forward over his face. She ran on down the hill towards the house.
For the time being, Fern said nothing to Will about her encounter with Ragginbone. It was not that she expected disbelief: on the contrary, Will was only too prone to believe in the improbable or even the impossible, while dismissing probabilities as too dull to merit his faith. But Fern needed a while to assimilate her own reactions and come to terms with what she had learned. In any case Will, she told herself, was still very young, obviously imprudent, easily carried away by overenthusiasm; oblivious to real danger, he would see this shadowy world into which they had strayed as merely an adventurous game. And she was sure there was danger, lying in wait, a little way ahead of her: she could sense it even as the hunter senses the tiger in the thicket.
Will had struck up an unlikely friendship with the vicar and over the next few days, when not rummaging in the attic, he accompanied Gus on leisurely rambles up on the moors, identifying wildlife and listening to local folklore. Fern declined to go with them, beginning a methodical search for keys, turning out drawers and emptying cupboards to no avail. ‘He’ll have put them in a safe place,’ opined Mrs Wicklow. Fern, who had done that herself on occasion, was not encouraged. She wanted another talk with Ragginbone but the hillside was bare again, leaving her oddly bereft, and it was small consolation that no snuffling disturbed her slumber. The most disquieting incident was when the black-visored motorcyclist passed her and Will on the road one evening, cutting in so close that they had to leap for the verge. But this, surely, could only be an act of mindless bravado, a young tough out to terrify and impress; it could have no connection with the mystery of Dale House.
On Friday morning, Robin telephoned. There was a lot of background noise and although Fern could hear him he didn’t seem to be able to hear her very clearly. He said he was at the airport, about to emplane for New York: an urgent business trip, Alison Redmond had given him some contacts, an American historian working on witch-trials, all very exciting. He might be gone some time. ‘But, Daddy—!’ Anyway, she wasn’t to worry. He’d arranged everything. Alison would come and stay with them, take care of things, help fix up the house: she had a real flair for interior design. He knew Fern would get on with her. (Robin always knew Fern would get on with his various girlfriends.) Over the phone she heard the tuneless tinkle that precedes an announcement over the tannoy. ‘Must go, darling. I’m awfully late—’ and then the line went dead and Fern was left clutching a silent receiver, a pale anger tightening her face. Gradually, it drained away, to be replaced by bewilderment. Accustomed as she was to her father’s erratic behaviour, this level of impetuosity appeared extreme. ‘I detect Ms Redmond’s Machiavellian hand behind the whole business,’ she declared over lunch, putting Will and Mrs Wicklow in the picture. ‘What I don’t understand, is what she’s after.’
‘Happen she’s looking for a husband,’ said Mrs Wicklow sapiently. Her dourness had long been revealed as purely external and she had evidently ranged herself on the side of the young Capels.
‘Well, naturally,’ said Fern. ‘That was what I assumed from the start. I’ve never had any problems dealing with that kind of thing.’
‘Cunning little lass, isn’t she?’ Mrs Wicklow almost grinned.
‘But,’ Fern persisted, ‘if it’s Daddy she wants, why send him to America? It’s almost as if—’ She stopped, closing her mouth on the unspoken words. It’s almost as if she were interested in this house. It was not cold in the kitchen but Fern felt a sudden chill.
‘What’s she like?’ Will asked. ‘I haven’t met her, have I?’
Fern shook her head. ‘She’s clever,’ she said. ‘I think. I don’t really know. She has a lean and hungry look, like Cassius in Julius Caesar. But…there’s something there you can’t catch hold of, something fluid. She can look all bright and glittering and slippery, like water, and yet you always feel there’s a hardness underneath. I can’t explain it very well. See for yourself.’
‘Is she pretty?’
‘Sometimes,’ Fern admitted dubiously. ‘She can exude a kind of shimmering fascination one moment, and the next she’s just a thin ugly woman with a big mouth. It’s not looks: it’s all in her manner.’
‘Those are t’ ones you have to watch out for,’ said Mrs Wicklow.
‘You’ll take care of it,’ said Will. ‘You always do.’
In the afternoon Fern, annoyed with herself for not having thought of it earlier, rang the solicitors to enquire if they had the rest of Mr Capel’s keys. Her brainwave, however, failed to bring results; a man with an elderly voice suggested that she search in drawers, cupboards, and so on. ‘I already have,’ said Fern.
‘He’ll have put them in a safe place, then,’ said the solicitor comfortably.
‘I’ve been afraid of that,’ said Fern.
She tried vainly to stop herself looking out of the window every few minutes; Ragginbone’s continued absence might be irrelevant, but it provided an extra irritant. At tea, Will startled her by remarking: ‘That rock’s gone again.’
‘Which rock?’ The question was a reflex.
‘The one that looks like a man. It’s been gone for several days now.’
You’re imagining things, ‘said Fern.’ Forget it.’ She was still reluctant to talk about the Watcher.
Will studied his sister with limpid detachment. ‘This woman who’s coming here,’ he said, ‘do you suppose she could be part of it?’
‘How could she?’ said Fern, without pretending to misunderstand.
‘I don’t know,’ said Will, ‘but I can see you thinking.’
Alison Redmond arrived later that day, driving a Range Rover loaded with paintings, samples of carpet and furnishing fabrics, several cardboard boxes taped shut and three or four items of Gucci luggage. She was wearing her point-edged smile and a passing flicker of sunshine found a few strands of colour in her dim hair. She greeted the Capels with a diffidence designed to undermine hostility, apologised to Mrs Wicklow for any possible inconvenience, and demanded instantly to be taken over the house, praising its atmosphere and period discomforts. She did not say ‘I do so hope we’re all going to be friends’, nor scatter kisses in their vicinity: her gestures were airy, tenuous, almost filmy, her fingertips would flutter along an arm, her hair brush against a neighbouring body, and Fern knew it was paranoia that made her fancy these feather-touches contaminated her. Alison managed to adore everything without quite crossing the line into effusion, drawing Will out on his attic researches so skilfully that his sister grew anxious, throwing her arm around him with unaccustomed affection and digging her nails into his shoulder to silence him. The only thing that checked Alison’s flow, just for a moment, was the main drawing room. She hesitated on the threshold, glancing round as though something were missing, her smile blurring; and then she seemed to regain her self-command, and the charm was back in play. Afterwards, pondering that temporary glitch in her manner, an explanation occurred to Fern, but she discarded it as too far-fetched. Alison had never been in that room before. She could not possibly be disconcerted because the idol had been moved.
‘I’ll help you bring your things in,’ Will offered, clearly reserving judgement.
Alison, just grateful enough and not too grateful, passed him a valise and a book of carpet patterns and began hefting the boxes herself. ‘Most of the pictures can stay in the car,’ she said. ‘One of our artists lives in York: I picked up a load of stuff on my way here to take back on Monday. There are just a couple of mine I’d like to have in my room; I never go anywhere without my own pictures.’ The sweep of her smile deprecated affectation. ‘Some people won’t travel without a particular cushion, or a bag, or an item of jewellery. With me I’m afraid it’s paintings. It’s disastrous on planes: it makes my baggage so heavy.’
Fern went to assist her, largely out of curiosity. The paintings in question were propped up against the bumper, shrouded in a protective cloth. Alison vanished indoors and Fern lifted the material to steal a glance at the topmost canvas. She had been expecting an abstract but this work was representational, though it struck her as strangely distorted, not for effect but because of some clumsiness on the part of the artist. It showed a horse’s head peering over a stable door, a conventional enough subject, but there were bars impeding it and an odd discoloration creeping in from the borders of the image like mould. The horse’s mane was unnaturally long and tangled and its forehead seemed somehow misshapen, as though its creator had made no real effort for verisimilitude, yet its eyes were intensely alive, heart-breakingly real, dark wild eyes gazing out at Fern with a mixture of pleading and defiance. Being in London most of the time Fern had had few opportunities to ride, but she loved horses and still dreamed of having the chance to learn. She found herself reaching out to touch the canvas, her hand going instinctively to the lock on the stable door; the paint felt rough and hard, like metal, like rust. ‘Leave it!’ The voice behind her was Alison’s, almost unrecognisable in its abrupt alteration.
Fern jumped. Her hand dropped; the cloth slipped back into place. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said with exquisite politeness. ‘I wasn’t aware the pictures were private.’
For a second, she thought Alison was discomfited; then both curtness and awkwardness melted away and a thin veil of warmth slid over her face, leaving it as before. ‘The paintings are old,’ she explained, ‘and very fragile. If you touch the paint you could damage them. I’m keeping them for restoration work: my own personal project. As a matter of fact, I think that whole scene has been applied on top of something else. The layers have to be removed very carefully. As you saw, I’ve only just started.’ The area that looks like mould, Fern thought, only half satisfied. ‘A lot of stolen masterpieces get painted over to make them easier to hide or transport. I keep hoping I’m going to come across something special.’
She carried the pictures upstairs herself. They had installed her, by common consensus, on the top floor—‘Out of the way,’ said Will—in a room that felt chill and gloomy from long vacancy. Alison, however, professed herself delighted with the crooked ceiling, the balding velvet of cushion and curtain, the smoky mirror above the mantle. ‘I trust you won’t think me obsessive,’ she said, ‘but if I might just have the key? I have this thing about privacy. My own space is vital to me—I can’t help it, it’s just how I am. I grew up sharing with three sisters: I expect that’s how it started.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Fern blandly. ‘We only have the house keys. Great-Cousin Ned seems to have put all the others in a safe place.’
‘We’ve looked everywhere,’ Will added. ‘At least, Fern has.’
Watching Alison, Fern was convinced there was another flicker in her expression, a momentary freezing-over. ‘I’d be obliged,’ she said, ‘if you didn’t come into my room when I’m not here. I’m sure you understand.’
Do I? thought Fern.
She and Will went back downstairs, leaving Alison to unpack.
‘She’s very nice,’ said Will, ‘if you like niceness. It’s hard to tell how sincere she is. She seems to be working at it—but if she’s keen on Dad she would, wouldn’t she?’
‘The niceness is all on the surface,’ declared Fern. ‘All sparkle, no substance. It’s called charm.’
‘Like tinsel,’ said Will, ‘on a shoddy Christmas tree. I don’t think I trust her. I haven’t quite made up my mind.’
‘I have,’ said his sister. ‘You don’t.’
In the hall, Mrs Wicklow was putting on her coat. ‘I’ll be off now,’ she said. ‘There’s a pie in t’ oven. I daresay Madam won’t eat it, she’s too skinny to eat pie: probably lives off brown rice and that muesli. Still, I know you two appreciate my cooking.’
‘We do,’ Will concurred warmly.
‘Queer thing about her,’ she added, glancing up in the direction of Alison’s room. ‘Odd fancies you do get sometimes.’
‘What fancy?’ asked Fern.
‘Miss Redmond comes from London: that’s what you said?’
Fern nodded. ‘She works in an art gallery in the West End.’
‘There was a young woman over from Guisborough, three…four months before t’ Captain died. Happen I mentioned it. Something to do with antiques. I didn’t get a good look at her, of course, and she didn’t have all that hair—I think she had a kind of bob, just about shoulder-length—but I could swear it was t’ same woman. Heard her, I did, chattering away to t’ Captain, sweet as sugar. She didn’t notice me, mind: she’s t’ sort who sees them as interest her and doesn’t bother to look at t’ rest of us. I’d have bet five pounds it was your Miss Redmond.’ She gave a brisk shake, as if throwing off a cobweb. ‘Must be my fancy. Still, you take care. Third house from end of t’ village if you need me.’
‘Thanks,’ said Fern, smiling, making light of the matter. But the smile vanished with Mrs Wicklow and she went to check on the pie with a sombre face.
Dinner was a polite meal. Alison kept the conversation going by discussing her ideas for the house. ‘I think we could do something really exciting with that barn,’ she said, having duly admired the Seawitch and her current residence. ‘Your father’s very keen to have my advice. Hell be calling from the States in a day or two: I’m going to ask him if I can make a start. I have a friend in the building trade who specialises in these sort of commissions. I thought I’d get him up here to give us an estimate. Of course, we must take care of that wonderful boat. It should be all right outside for the time being, if we cover it in tarpaulins. After all, it is supposed to be summer, even if it hasn’t reached Yorkshire yet.’
‘We like the Yorkshire summer,’ Will said. ‘It’s bracing.’
Fern sucked in her cheeks to suppress a smile. Will had never been noted for appreciating a bracing climate. ‘We only need to tidy the place up before putting it on the market,’ she pointed out. ‘Daddy doesn’t want to spend any money on it.’
‘It would be a good investment,’ Alison insisted. ‘Convert the barn and you can sell two properties instead of one. I’ll discuss it with Robin when he calls.’
The inference was unmistakable: Fern was a child, it was none of her business, financial matters were beyond the zone of her responsibility. The hairs bristled on her nape; her small face set in lines that might have been etched in steel. But for the moment there was little she could do: final authority rested officially with her father, and while he was in America it would be difficult for her to counteract Alison’s influence. She had a suspicion the telephone would not lend itself to an assertion of filial control. She was conscious of a frustration that bordered on panic, but she fought it down.
‘Delicious pie,’ Alison said, pushing the pastry to the side of her plate.
They went to bed early. Inevitably, Fern lay sleepless for an hour or more before drifting into an uneasy doze. Suppressed anxieties surfaced as garbled dreams: she was at a private view in New York trying to reach her father who was on the far side of the room, but a huge crowd of people impeded her, and her father saw her, and waved and smiled as if there was nothing wrong at all. He was talking to a woman who had to be Alison Redmond, but when she turned round it was a stranger, and Alison was right next to Fern, wearing a dress that rippled like water, and her hair rippled as she moved, so you could not tell where the hair ended and the dress began. ‘Come,’ she said, laying a long-fingered hand on Fern’s shoulder, and there was Javier Holt, standing beside the etching of the LostCity, and the door was open, and the streets unravelled below her, and the drums were beating in the temple, and she knew she must not cross the threshold, but she couldn’t remember why. She awoke from a jumble of colour and incident more vivid than life, but recollection faded even as she tried to hold onto it, and there was only her heart’s pounding and a disproportionate sense of loss. The night-noises that were growing familiar came to her ears: the endless sough of the wind; sudden and startling, the screech of a bird. She was floating back towards sleep when the snuffling began.
Despite the fear that seemed to invade the very air around her she felt a flicker of indignation. She cultivated it, gritting her teeth, smothering cowardice, not forgetting but rejecting Ragginbone’s advice. This was her place, her home, if only temporarily, and no intruder, canine or feline, mongrel or monster, had the right to terrorise her here. She had not formed any specific plan for driving it off but she was determined at least to see it, to face it down, to prove to herself once and for all that it was merely a stray dog, half savage maybe but solid, flesh and blood and smell, and no bodiless hunter from a dimension of shadows. She sat up, picking up the torch which she now kept beside her bed. She thought she had closed the window but it had to be open: the snuffling sounded so loud and near. And then she froze. The noise wasn’t coming from under her window. It was outside her door.
She sat absolutely still, all resolution forgotten. It can’t come in, Ragginbone had said, but it was in. In the house, in the passage; she could hear it scraping at the floorboards, rucking the worn drugget. Her thought stopped, her limbs seemed to petrify, but she could not control the violence of her pulse: it must be audible even through the barrier of the walls. The door was not locked: something which had no hand to grasp rattled at the knob. For a few seconds, Fern ceased to breathe.
It moved on. She heard the gentle pad-pad of stealthy paws, receding down the corridor, the guttural hiss of hoarse panting. When the sounds had died away she sat for what seemed like hours, waiting and listening. The thudding of her pulse did not abate. Gradually, the tension in the air around her appeared to diminish: the house settled into a nervous quietude. Fern got out of bed so cautiously the duvet barely rustled, feeling her way to the door without switching on the torch. It took an effort of courage that made her sweat to turn the handle and peer into the passageway. Her vision was well-adjusted to the darkness and for an instant she thought she saw something, not a black animal shape with glowing orbs but something much smaller, furtive, skulking in a corner by the end window, shrinking into invisibility even as she caught its eye. Her heart leaped into her mouth—but whatever it was, it had gone. The corridor was empty. She could sense its emptiness. She groped her way along the wall to Will’s room and entered without knocking.
‘Who is it?’ He was awake.
‘Me. Shush.’ She closed the door carefully, switched on the torch. ‘I don’t want to make too much light. Move your legs: I’ll sit on the bed.’
‘Did you hear it?’
‘Yes.’
‘It was inside. How could it be inside? Did we leave a door open?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Fern said. They were talking in whispers and the torch was on the table; little light reached their faces. She found she was holding his hand for mutual reassurance, something He would never have allowed if he could see it. ‘It can’t come in unless invited. That’s the ancient law.’
‘What law? How do you know?’
‘Never mind. I just do.’
‘Laws can be broken.’ Will sounded sceptical.
‘Maybe.’ Ragginbone, after all, had not been sure. ‘Maybe not.’ She glanced upwards towards Alison’s room; Will saw the whites of her eyes gleam, followed her gaze.
‘You think she—?’
‘It’s too much of a coincidence. The day she arrives, it comes inside. She invited it in. She must have done.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘There’s more,’ she persisted, adhering to her train of thought. ‘There was something in the corridor when I came out of my room—something else, I mean. It was quite small and it vanished very quickly but there was definitely something there.’
‘It’s too much,’ Will said. ‘Alison Redmond and the Sniffer and the Seawitch and the chest and the rock that isn’t there and the missing treasure…and now this. Whatever it was. It’s too much. I can’t cope. Do you think…do you think we should try to tell Dad?’ She knew from the note in his voice even more than his words that he was struggling not to betray the level of his terror. Despite her own fears, she was comforted to feel herself the stronger. If she could only be strong enough.
‘Pointless,’ she said. ‘For one thing, there’s a limit to what you can say over the phone. For another, what would we tell him? That we heard some unknown creature sniffing inside the house and we can’t find the keys to the treasure chest and we think his girlfriend could be a witch? He’d probably assume we were both on drugs—or raving. And even if he did come home, there’s nothing he can do. Alison’s a lot smarter than he is. We’ll have to handle it ourselves.’
Will’s soft gasp might have been sudden laughter. ‘You’ve dealt with all Daddy’s girlfriends to date,’ he said.
‘This might be a bit more difficult,’ Fern admitted.
There was a short pause. She reached for the torch but did not move from the bed. ‘I think you ought to stay here for the rest of tonight,’ Will said with an air of selfless chivalry which deceived neither of them. ‘We’ll be safer together.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Move over.’
The bed was large but they curled up, back to back, each warmed by the other’s nearness, falling swiftly and unexpectedly into sleep.
III (#u519aa59a-8bef-5d1c-b362-9aa72a4b0a25)
Fern got up early the following morning and returned to her own room. Instinct warned her that it would be preferable if Alison did not suspect they were on their guard. However, although it was barely seven she was no longer sleepy, and she dressed and went out into the garden, her footsteps leading her inevitably towards the back gate and the path up the hill. The sun had not yet risen far above the eastern horizon and the shadow of the house lay long and black across the grass, but the slope beyond glittered with dew. There was no sign of the Watcher; he seemed to have been gone so long she had almost ceased to believe in their meeting. As she climbed higher emptiness stretched in every direction. A few sheep grazed across the valley; cloud-shadows mottled the upland moors; a lone bird soared, its whistling call like the music of some unearthly piper, summoning errant spirits back to their hollow hills before the gates closed on the mortal day. The Day—the Day to Man! thought Fern, remembering her Kipling. The wind that touched her cheek felt totally clean and free, a wind that knew neither bonds nor boundaries, which might have blown straight from some virgin height, over grass and gorse, rock and river, to be breathed only by her. The skyline above was unbroken, except where she saw the twin tufts of a wild plant poking upwards like the cocked ears of a couched animal. Below, the valley opened out, a river-delved cleft in the rolling plateau, still cupping the last shades of retreating darkness, winding down towards the coast and the distant blue glimmer of the sea.
She was nearly at the brow of the hill when the animal rose up in front of her. One moment there was only turf and that telltale glimpse of ear-tufts, and then the grass shivered into fur and the creature was on its feet, pink tongue lolling between ragged teeth, amber eyes fixed unblinking on her face. It was a dog: it must be a dog. It had a pointed vulpine muzzle with a ruff around its neck not quite long enough for a mane and a lean body built for running. Its coat was matted and dew-draggled, white-streaked, grey-flecked, shaded with brown, stippled with black. It might have been part sheep-dog, part Alsatian, part vixen, part wolf. But Fern reminded herself that there had been no wolves in Britain since the Middle Ages. She knew immediately that it was female, though she could not have said how. Its unwavering stare was filled with latent meaning.
Hesitantly, half afraid for herself, half nervous of inducing fear, Fern held out her hand. The animal sniffed, then licked. The wicked incisors were less than an inch from her fingers, yet she felt curiously at ease. ‘Did he send you here?’ she asked softly. ‘Do you come from Ragginbone? Are you a Watcher too?’ And then, as an afterthought: ‘Are you on guard?’
The yellow eyes returned her questioning gaze with a steady intensity.
‘It was inside the house last night,’ Fern went on, progressing from the preliminary introduction to a tentative pat, then to stroking the thick ruff. The fur was damped into rats’ tails as if the dog—she was definitely a dog—had been outside a long time. ‘I don’t know what kind of creature it is: it moves like a hound, only it’s too big for any species of hound I know. Ragginbone recognised it. He said it couldn’t come in without being invited, but it did, and I think…I think Alison must have let it in. She arrived yesterday, and that’s the first time it’s been inside the house.’
The dog accepted Fern’s caresses with a quiver of uncertainty, a dignified restraint. Fern received the impression—she could not say how—that she was, not alarmed, but slightly unnerved, an aloof outcast unaccustomed to such demonstrations. This is ridiculous, Fern told herself. First I talk to a rock, now it’s a dog. ‘I don’t suppose you really understand,’ she said aloud. ‘There’s probably a natural explanation for everything that’s happened. My imagination’s running away with me. Only why now? That’s what’s so confusing. I’m too old for fairytales and anyhow, when I was a child I never let my fantasy take over. After my mother died, when I saw my father cry and I knew she was really gone, I was afraid all the time. I used to lie in bed at night seeing a demon in every shadow. I told myself over and over: there’s nothing there. There are no demons, no dragons, no witches, no elves, no Santa Claus. There are no vampires in Transylvania, no kingdoms in wardrobes, no lands behind the sun. A shadow is only a shadow. I made myself grow up, and put away childish things. I thought the adult world was a prosaic sort of place where everything was clear-cut, everything was tangible; but it isn’t, it isn’t. I don’t know who I am any more. I’m not sure about anyone. Who are you? Are you a dog? Are you a wolf?’ The yellow stare held her; a rough tongue rasped her palm.
‘Cancel that question,’ said Fern. ‘There are no wolves in England now. I have to go. Take care.’ A strange thing to say to a dog, but then, Fern reflected uncomfortably, the entire one-sided conversation was strange. She hurried down the path almost as if she were running away.
At the gate, she glanced round to find the dog at her heels. ‘You can’t come in,’ she said, wondering why the words disturbed her, tapping at something in the back of her mind. Her companion, undeterred, slipped through the gate behind her before she could close it. Reaching the back door, Fern turned with more determination. ‘I’m sorry,’ she began, but the dog stood a little way off, making no attempt to cross the threshold. Fern noted that she did not bark, or wag her tail, or do any of the things that dogs normally do. She simply stood there, waiting. ‘Would you like some water?’ Fern said, relenting. And: ‘Come on then.’ The animal slid past her in a movement too swift to follow, lying down beside the kitchen stove with her chin on her paws. And in the same instant something clicked in Fern’s head and she knew what she had done. For good or evil, she had invited the outcast in.
Later, when Fern had had her morning bath, she found the kitchen unoccupied and the back door ajar. The latch was old-fashioned, the kind that an intelligent animal might be able to lift with its nose. On the outside, however, there was an iron ring which required the grip of a hand. Fern, in a deviation from her usual policy, resolved to see that the door was left slightly open at all times.
It was a difficult day. Fern did not feel she could continue her search for the key with Alison in the vicinity, so she and Will escaped to the vicarage, where Maggie Dinsdale made them sandwiches and Gus drove them up onto the moors for a picnic. Back at Dale House, they found Alison in the barn with a measuring tape. She and Gus shook hands and exchanged pleasantries, thus disappointing Will, who confided in an aside to his sister that if she had been a witch she would surely not have been so friendly with a vicar. ‘Don’t be idiotic,’ Fern responded. ‘Next you’ll expect her to wear a pointed hat.’
Supper was happily brief: Alison retired straight afterwards claiming she wanted to work on her picture. Will, going up to her room later with the excuse of an offer of coffee, reported that she had brought her own television. That settles it, ‘he concluded.’ I don’t like her. Why can’t she share it with us? That isn’t just selfishness, it’s…it’s sadism. We must have a TV. Speak to Daddy about it.’
‘Mm.’
‘Do you know, when I opened the door she switched it off, as if she couldn’t bear me to see it even for a couple of minutes? I think she’s got a video too. I wish we had a video.’
‘Maybe she was watching something she considered unsuitable for little boys,’ Fern suggested unkindly.
They fell back on Mah Jongg and a plate of Mrs Wicklow’s biscuits, becoming so engrossed that it was almost midnight when Fern glanced at the clock. ‘Are you going to sleep in my room again?’ Will asked, not looking at his sister, his voice carefully devoid of any wistfulness.
‘I don’t think it’s necessary,’ Fern said. ‘Put something against your door, though—something heavy. You can bang on the wall if you really need me. I feel it’s important to…well, act nonchalant. As if we haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. Then either she’ll think we’re unobservant, which means she’ll be underestimating us, or she’ll be as baffled as we are. She’s behaving as if there’s nothing going on; so can we.’
‘Do you suppose Mrs Wicklow was right,’ Will said abruptly, ‘when she said she’d seen Alison before?’
‘Yes,’ said Fern. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Can you put a short wig over long hair?’
‘I think so. Actresses do it sometimes. I’m sure they do.’
This ought to be very exciting, ‘Will remarked.’ I just wish I wasn’t scared. Are you scared?’
‘Shitless,’ said Fern coolly, going over to the back door. The vulgarism was unusual for her and Will grinned.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Leaving the door open.’
‘What? If that creature comes—’
‘Our prowling visitor,’ she pointed out, ‘can already get in: we know that. I want to be sure—’ She hesitated, changed her tack. ‘I’m like Mrs Wicklow. I want to let in the air.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘And don’t use that kind of language.’
‘But you said—’
‘I’m sixteen,’ said Fern haughtily. ‘I’m allowed.’
They went upstairs still squabbling, falling silent, by mutual consent, at the foot of the second flight. Fern mounted a few steps, but there was no sound from Alison’s room. The low wattage lighting favoured by Great-Cousin Ned did not reach far, and the upper landing was swathed in shadow. She could see Alison’s door but it was firmly closed and she hoped the sense of oppression which seemed to emanate from it was the result of pure fancy and overstrained nerves. She stole quietly back to her brother and the two of them went to their respective beds.
For all his apprehension, Will fell asleep quickly; but Fern sat up, reading by torchlight so no betraying gleam could be seen under the door, her senses on alert, half fearful, half in a sort of desperate expectancy. More than an hour passed while she tried in vain to concentrate on the story, unable to restrain herself from regular glances at her travelling clock: the luminous hands seemed to snail around the dial, spinning out the minutes, dragging her down into slumber. A brief shower battered on the window, until a rush of wind swept it away. When the snuffling finally started, she had almost given up. Her body jerked upright on a reflex, snatching her cheek from the pillow; her breath was caught in her throat; her eyes dilated, though there was nothing to be seen. She switched off the torch and retrieved the book, which was slipping floorwards. In the corridor outside she heard the sniffing moving closer, hesitating at Will’s door, progressing on to hers. There was the familiar ragged panting, the not-quite-noiseless footfalls, the sudden scrabble of claws on wood. And then silence. A new silence, invading the passageway, tangible as a presence. The snuffling and the clawing had ceased, the panting changed into a low snarl, a soft, dark noise on the edge of hearing, rising slowly to a growl, a sound neither feline nor canine but somewhere in between. Fern thought she had never in her life heard anything so totally evil. Then came a sudden rush, the skidding of paws on bare board, the swish of bunching drugget, a clamour of snapping, worrying, grumbling, an ugly yowl. Heavy bodies seemed to be struggling and writhing; a crash told of an overturned table, a shattered vase. Yet throughout Fern was convinced it was the intruder who made most of the noise: the challenger was mute, with no voice to cry defiance or pain. She heard a scurrying as of something bent on escape: one set of paws fled towards the stairs, chasing or being chased, and then quiet supervened. Out in the garden there was a howl of baffled rage, maybe of fear; but it died away, and only the wind returned, droning among the chimneys, and under the eaves. Fern had grown used to the wind; they had become friends. She lay down, smiling faintly, heedless of the damage she envisaged outside her door. A name came into her mind, clear and certain as a call: Lougarry.
She fell asleep.
At breakfast, Alison was irritable. ‘Nightmares,’ she said. ‘I thought I could hear voices crying, shrieks, moans. I expect it was the wind.’ Will looked innocent, Fern bland. She had risen early to dispose of the broken vase; it was one Robin had said might be valuable; but then, his daughter reflected, he always said that. A rapid confabulation had revealed that Will, too, had witnessed the fight in the night.
‘I slept well.’ Fern asseverated sweetly.
Will merely smiled, and attacked his Frosties.
A little to their surprise, Alison chose to go for a walk later, declining company even before they had had an opportunity not to offer it. Afterwards the back door, unlatched, swung open; the dog was waiting outside. ‘Come in,’ Fern said. ‘You don’t have to wait for permission. You’re always welcome.’ She came in, hobbling on three legs: there was blood on the fourth, dried into brownish crystals, and more blood clogging the thick fur of her ruff. She lay down at Fern’s feet and fixed her with that steady unhuman gaze.
That’s a wolf, ‘said Will.’ I know it is. Where did you find it?’
‘She found me. Get some antiseptic; I’ve seen a bottle of Dettol somewhere. She’s hurt.’
‘It was her,’ Will said, ‘last night—wasn’t it?’
‘Fetch the Dettol.’
The animal was docile while Fern cleaned her wounds and applied cream from a tube of Savlon, crusted from long disuse, which was all they could find. The tears in her shoulder were deep and ugly but her expression appeared indifferent, beyond suffering. ‘Lougarry,’ Fern murmured. The tired muzzle lifted; the ears pricked.
‘Thank you,’ said Will.
Robin phoned that evening: Alison spoke to him at length and hovered when Fern took over, making confidences impossible. Of course we’re selling, ‘he reiterated a little too forcefully.’ Leave it to Alison. Bright girl. Knows what she’s doing. Gave me the name of a useful chap over here—professor of witchcraft—they have professorships for everything in America. What’s that, darling? Can’t hear you.’
The line shouldn’t be this bad, thought Fern, giving up. We live in an age of satellite technology. Supposing it isn’t the phone…
Alison left on Monday, promising to return by the end of the week. ‘She may be involved in this business,’ Will said, ‘but I don’t believe she’s the real enemy. She’s not…she’s not frightening enough.’
‘What do you want?’ asked Fern. ‘The Devil in person? Yesterday you complained you were scared; today you’re complaining you’re not scared enough. That isn’t logical.’
‘I’m still scared,’ Will explained, ‘but not of Alison. She’s all slippery charm: you think you’ve caught her out—you think you can pin her down—but her personality just slithers away from you as if it were greased. Mrs Wicklow says she saw her before, but she isn’t absolutely sure. She must have come here after something, but she hasn’t tried to search the house. We think she’s controlling that creature that sniffs in the night, but we don’t know. We can’t prove anything.’
‘I thought you believed in the impossible,’ said Fern. ‘Now you want proof.’ She was anointing Lougarry’s injuries as she spoke: once Alison had gone, the dog had come into the kitchen and lain down in the place beside the stove which she had taken for her own.
‘Not exactly. I want to know what we’re up against.’ Will cupped his chin in his hand, gazing dreamily into the middle distance. ‘What’s really going on? Sometimes I feel we’re tangled in a dark web of supernatural forces, but if you try to snatch at a single strand it frays into a shadow and then there’s nothing there. What the hell are we all looking for, anyway?’
‘Actually,’ Fern began, finally resolved to tell him about the key—but Mrs Wicklow came in, cutting her short, and the impulse to confide passed.
Inevitably, the housekeeper objected to Lougarry. ‘Great-Cousin Ned had a dog,’ Fern reminded her. ‘You told us so.’
‘That’s not a dog,’ said Mrs Wicklow. ‘Looks more like a wolf. It’s probably savage, anyway. If it’s been killing sheep there’ll be real trouble, police and that. I’d better go call someone to fetch it away.’
‘Have any sheep been killed?’ Fern challenged, unobtrusively crossing her fingers. She had a feeling that taking mutton on the hoof would be well within Lougarry’s scope.
Mrs Wicklow conceded grudgingly that they hadn’t. ‘Been fighting, though, by the look of it,’ she said. ‘Those cuts look nasty. You want to take it to t’ vet: he’ll see to it. I daresay t’ reverend would give you a lift.’
Lougarry’s lip lifted in a soundless snarl.
‘I don’t think she’d like that,’ Fern said.
‘What’ll you do about feeding it? Haven’t thought about that, have you? You can’t just give it Madam Slimline’s leftovers.’
A picture of rabbits came into Fern’s head—rabbits scattering in a panic, scuts flashing white. ‘We’ll fix up something,’ she said evasively. ‘Anyhow, she doesn’t belong to us. She comes round sometimes: that’s all.’
‘Scrounging,’ said Mrs Wicklow, hunching a disapproving shoulder.
A knock on the back door heralded the arrival of Gus Dinsdale, further complicating the argument. ‘If she’s a stray,’ he said, ‘you ought to hand her over to the authorities.’
‘She’s not a stray,’ Fern snapped, feeling beleaguered. ‘She belongs to this old man: I don’t know his name but I’ve seen him round here quite a lot. I think he’s a kind of tramp.’ Will glanced quickly at her, his eyebrows flicking into a frown.
‘I know the one you mean,’ Gus said unexpectedly. ‘Interesting type. Seems to be out in all weathers and there are more lines on his face than a street map, but I’ve seen him striding over the moor at a pace that puts most hikers to shame. We’ve exchanged a few words now and then; he’s intelligent and cultured, certainly not a drunk. I would guess he’s one of those who choose a life on the road—they feel hemmed in by the walls of civilisation, trapped in the kind of surroundings we would call home. A free spirit. I never realised he had a dog. I must say, this creature appears to be an appropriate companion. She looks more than half wild. A free spirit herself, no doubt.’
‘It’s wild all right,’ said Mrs Wicklow, still refusing to allow the visitor the dignity of gender. ‘If Fern touches t’ cuts it’ll bite her for sure.’
(‘Who’s the old man?’ Will inquired, for his sister’s private ear; but she shook her head.)
‘The dog seems to trust her,’ Gus was saying, evidently won over by his own image of the free-spirited wanderer and his maverick pet. ‘Animals can very often sense when they’ve found a friend. After all, you’ve heard the story of Androcles and the lion, haven’t you?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ Mrs Wicklow retorted, scoring points where she could.
But Gus had turned back to Fern. ‘Does she have a name?’ he asked.
‘Lougarry,’ said Fern. She didn’t say how she knew.
‘Odd,’ the vicar mused. ‘I wonder…it sounds almost as if it might come from the French. Lougarry…loup garou.’
‘Loup garou,’ Will repeated, struggling with his accent. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Werewolf,’ said Gus.
It was after lunch and Lougarry had departed on affairs of her own before the Capels were left to themselves. ‘It’s time we had a serious discussion,’ said Will. ‘There are too many things you’re not telling me. The old man, for instance. And Lougarry. Do you think she really is a werewolf?’
‘Maybe,’ said Fern. ‘She’s on our side: that’s all that matters. We’re rather short of allies.’
‘And the old man?’
‘He watches. I told you. He has a tendency to look like a rock. I thought I might have imagined him, but Gus has seen him too, so he must be real. Perhaps it was the rock I imagined.’
‘Gus is a vicar,’ Will remarked captiously. ‘He’s supposed to see things. Angels, you know, and visitations.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Fern. ‘He’s C of E.’
There was a pause; then she got to her feet. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’d better get on with it.’
‘Get on with what?’ asked Will, but he knew.
They went upstairs to Alison’s room. The landing was grey and dim, surrounded by closed doors; no sunlight penetrated the narrow window in the north wall. Will took hold of the handle and tried to turn it, but it would not move. It seemed to be not so much jammed as fixed, petrified into stasis: it didn’t even rattle. He pulled his hand away, complaining of pins and needles. ‘It can’t be locked,’ said Fern. ‘There’s no key.’ She seized the knob herself, but her grip squeaked on brass; Will kicked and shoved at panels that did not stir. When she drew back she could see the pins and needles, angry pinpoints of red flickering and fading on her palm. ‘This won’t do,’ she said. ‘This is our house. We have a right to enter any room we please. She can ask us to stay out if she likes, but she can’t force us. I don’t know what she’s done, but we’re going to get in.’
‘The window?’ Will suggested.
From a neighbouring room they leaned out to check, but Alison’s window also appeared shut. ‘We might be able to open it,’ Will said, ‘if she hasn’t done anything fancy to it like she has to the door.’ He didn’t mention the word magic but they both knew the omission was not born of modern scepticism. ‘This window’s on a latch; hers probably is too. You could lift it from the outside with something thin enough to slip through the crack. I’ve seen it done on TV with a credit card.’
‘I don’t have a credit card,’ said Fern. ‘We’ll try a knife. But first, we’re going to need a ladder.’
Knowing Mrs Wicklow’s antipathy to Alison, Fern did not hesitate to enlist her aid. The housekeeper had reservations, not about the propriety of their actions, but about the risks of illicit entry via a window more than twenty feet off the ground. Ladders, she claimed, were notoriously chancy, especially under inexpert control. However, suspicion of the alien finally persuaded her. ‘I don’t know what she’s done to t’ door,’ she said. ‘Fair made my hand sting. It must be some kind of electricity.’
Introduced to a small-time builder in the village, Fern and Will were able to borrow a ladder long enough for their needs on the following Wednesday afternoon. As instigator of the plan Will climbed up first, armed with the slimmest of the kitchen knives; his sister waited at the bottom, holding the ladder to steady it. Rather to her surprise, the methods of television drama did not let them down.
‘Done it,’ Will called out, and she saw him disappearing over the window-sill. She wriggled the two prongs deeper into the flower-bed and ascended a little nervously after him.
The room was transformed. The balding velvet of cushion and curtain now appeared thick and soft, the dingy carpet glowed with the tracery of long-lost designs. Shelves formerly empty were stacked with books and cassettes, a portable music centre, a pair of candles in iron holders, a pot-plant which resembled a cactus, its spines glistening, its single flower gaping like a small red mouth with the tongue-shaped stamen lurking inside. Fern glanced at the books: they seemed mainly concerned with art and antiquities, though there were a couple in a language, and a script, which she could not understand. Several new pictures adorned the walls, one of which looked vaguely familiar: it took her a few moments to recognise the etching she had once seen at the gallery. The imprisoned horse was not on show but in the far corner stood an easel shrouded in a piece of stained cloth. There was a different cover on the bed, all emerald and peacock-blue, embroidered with twining feathers and iridescent eyes: it was very beautiful but somehow it repelled her. She could imagine it stitched in pain by women with blistered fingers and vision weakened from peering at their labour. She caught its reflection in the spotless mirror, turned away; and then her gaze was drawn back to the glass. The image showed her a bedroom within a bedroom, the alien invasion of Alison’s possessions, the books, the paintings, the plant. But the sumptuous curtains were threadbare as before, the carpet dim with age, murky with ingrained dirt. ‘Will…’ Fern whispered, suddenly pale, struggling with the evidence of her senses.
But her brother was concentrating on the television. He had wheeled the unit away from its place against the wall and was toying with the remote control, obtaining nothing but crackle and snow. He had not noticed the mirror, and Fern found that she shrank from drawing his attention to it, more than half afraid he would not see what she saw. She forced herself to look elsewhere, her glance alighting on a box at the bedside, a rectangle of some dark wood, its sombre hue veined as if with faint gold, the lid inlaid with ominous characters in red enamel. When she touched it a scent came to her, as if carried on a nonexistent breeze in a room with barely a draught: the smell of a northern forest, of sap rising, leaves opening, roots drinking, as if the wood still lived, dreaming of the days when it was a tree among trees. She felt round the rim of the lid, encountered the metal clasp which closed it, and bit back the beginnings of a scream. The stab of pain was like a burn, though her hand was unmarked. ‘What is it?’ Will inquired, distracted from the television screen.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Fern. ‘It felt like the door handle, only worse. I need gloves.’
The gloves were in a drawer under the bedside table. Fern noted with disapproval that they were made from the skin of a reptile, snake or lizard; the mottled patterns appeared to alter in a changing light, as if, like the wood, some elusive memory of life lingered in the dead scales, shifting colours like a chameleon. She pulled on the righthand one: it had looked overlarge but the fingers seemed to shrink onto hers, skin melding with skin, until it no longer resembled a glove and she knew a sudden terror that it would never come off. Her arm would terminate for all time in a claw. ‘Can you open it now?’ Will demanded. She pressed the clasp without ill effect; the lid lifted of its own accord. Inside, the box was divided into sections. There were tiny jars and bottles with labels too minute to decipher; a squat book, leatherbound and handwritten, its pages sere with age; strangest of all, an unmarked video cassette, the tape invisible in its opaque casing. ‘Let’s try it,’ said Will, his expression bright with a mixture of curiosity and daring; but he could not pick it up. Fern took it in her gloved hand and inserted it in the machine, then they sat on the peacock bed-cover to watch. Will pressed play. There was a click, and the screen disappeared. The square outline of the TV set framed a hole, bottomless as the Pit, a window into nothing. A solitary star, infinitely remote, no bigger than a grain of dust, winked and died in its depths. ‘They do it with computers,’ Will said. He did not sound convinced.
The image came rushing up towards them from the point where the star had died, spinning to a halt, shuddering into coherence. This was no two-dimensional film but a spyhole on reality, a street with exhaust fumes and erratic sunshine, an old man getting into an old car. He tugged a bunch of keys out of his pocket, glanced at it in irritation, and put it back, subsequently producing a much smaller bunch which evidently included the key to the ignition. It came to Fern that this must be Great-Cousin Ned, and on that first keyring was the one key they sought. But the image was gone; another crowded on its heels, and another, a quickfire succession of instant and incident, fragments of history tumbling over each other, hurtling back further and further into the past. A market stall with a tray of trinkets where sifting fingers brushed over an object she could not see; a coved cellar piled with cases on which the dust lay undisturbed; a uniformed figure picking up something from a blood-smeared floor; two men staring into a flame, their faces lit from below, one chubby and eager, the other very young but already shrewd, his forelock limp with sweat, premature lines in his thin cheek. For a second, his eyes lifted, and they were brown and golden and green as a sunlit wood. Then the chimera was lost, overwhelmed in a chaos of other faces: a gipsy, a woman with languorous eyes, a man with a bitter mouth. A waveless sea trailed at the stern of a seedy fishing boat, the sails hanging immobile in the torpid air. The setting sun spilled from beneath the cloud-shelf and flashed like fire across the ocean, igniting a path of gold where a dark silhouette rose to a fatal rendezvous. And then the water closed over all, and far below a skull blossomed, growing slowly into flesh and form, but before Fern could see any clear features white hands covered it, and it was gone. At the last there came another boat, a struggling vessel with bent mast and splitting timbers, riding on a storm beyond imagining. The tempest shook the television set as if it were made of card; a gust of wind tore round the room, wrenching at the curtains, snapping the window wide. Lightning crackled in the gap where the screen used to be. Fern and Will felt themselves lifted up, they and the house and the hillside without, as if the dimension in which they dwelt had turned into a giant elevator, and the only fixed universe was inside the television. They clung to the bedposts like children on a Ferris wheel, soaring through the tumult of sky and sea, until they could see the many-coloured flares pulsing like a phantom coronet above the roof of the clouds, and hear the thunder-drums rolling down below. And then a hole was ripped in the canopy and a chasm opened amidst the waves, and there was the ship plunging into it, and the helmsman was swept away, and Fern knew the glimmer at his throat was the missing key, and she saw the pale arms of the mermaid dragging him to his death. A swift darkness spread across the vision, blotting out even the storm, and a voice boomed out of it as cold and empty as the deeps of space. ‘It is forbidden to go further back,’ it said. ‘The city has been banished from Timer and Forever, history and memory. No man shall look on Atlantis again.’ There was a snick like the closing of a door, and the screen was back in place. The room around them was stationary; house and hillside did not stir. Fern was trembling so violently she did not trust herself to speak.
‘My G-God,’ stammered Will. ‘My God.’ And: ‘What was that? What did it all mean?’
‘It means we’re in trouble,’ Fern said briefly, when she was sure she could keep the quiver out of her voice. She pressed the eject button and replaced the video in the box.
Will was recovering his nerve, too quickly for her taste. ‘It felt like a rollercoaster ride through the Big Bang,’ he declared. ‘I’ve never been so terrified—never. Wow. Bloody wow. What do we do now?’
‘Leave,’ said Fern.
Will lowered himself over the window-sill, feeling for the topmost rung with an unsteady foot. ‘Careful,’ said his sister. She thought she might have been able to open the door with the glove on, but she could not be certain of resealing it afterwards, and she did not want Alison to realise anyone had been in the room. Will disappeared from view and she took a last look round, flinching automatically from the mirror, hesitating when her eye fell on the easel. She went over to it and twitched the cloth aside. The area that resembled mould seemed to have grown, closing in about the horse’s head: there was a note of panic in its midnight gaze. Fern caressed the surface of the painting with her gloved hand; its mottling altered immediately, coagulating into dark blotches which broadened into rippling bands, the colours flickering and changing like shadows in a jungle. Her fingertips skimmed the stable door, feeling for the lock that was not real; something jolted at her touch, and she began to tremble again, but with another kind of fear, a fear of her unknown self, of the glove that grew on her hand, of the thin current of power that trickled through the very core of her being. She retreated sharply and the cloth slid down over the picture: she would not lift it again. Will’s voice came to her from outside: ‘Fern! Fern!’ She pulled at the glove —she thought it was stuck but it slipped off easily. Putting it back in the drawer, she straightened the peacock coverlet and made her exit through the window, pausing to fiddle it shut before she descended the ladder.
‘Do you think she’ll guess we’ve been there?’ asked Will. He had obviously forgotten his light-hearted dismissal of Alison earlier that week.
‘I hope not,’ said Fern.
They were both relieved when Lougarry returned after supper, stretching out at their feet with the relaxed air of an animal settling down for the night. A huge yawn showed the pointed canines, dagger-sharp and yellow as ivory, but Fern was oblivious, sitting on the floor to treat her healing wounds and for the first time venturing to rub her cheek against the dense softness of the ruff. ‘Stay with us,’ she whispered. ‘Stay tonight. Make me as brave as a wolf. I need courage right now.’ She didn’t register her own admission of Lougarry’s true identity. She was thinking: this is what it means to grow up, this is how it feels—to be on your own, to have no one to depend on, no one between you and the dark. Belatedly she began to appreciate how much she had always relied on her father, not perhaps on his strength but on the strength of his position, on the certainties that accompany fatherhood and maturity. She might have run the household but he had empowered her, supported her, obeyed her, kept her safe. And now, America was a long way away. She did not even have a phone number. Mrs Wicklow and the Dinsdales were good friends, but they could not deal with Alison. She needed a rock to cling to. But the rock had turned into Ragginbone and told her: Find the key, and now he had disappeared on some errand of his own. Everything seemed to depend on her, yet she did not know what to do or how to do it. She was quite alone.
‘Not quite,’ said Will, squatting down beside her. She must have spoken her thought aloud. ‘We are three.’
Lougarry turned, and licked her cheek.
Gradually, night enfolded the house, an unchancy night filled with a fretful wind that muttered round the walls, and inside the shifting of ill-fitting doors, the creaking of untrodden boards. Glancing through a window Fern saw the moon ringed in a yellow nimbus, trailing a lacework of cloud. Once again, she heard the motorbike, roaring to and fro on the deserted road. It occurred to her that bikers usually hunt in packs, but this one was always solitary, a pariah maybe, a Black Knight of the highways, armoured in leather, anonymous in his helmet. She had never seen him stop the machine, dismount, lift the visor. She had never heard his name. ‘That dratted bike,’ Mrs Wicklow had said once; but she did not seem to know who he was. As if in response to her thought the engine cut suddenly, very nearby. Lougarry rose to her feet, her hackles stirring, showing her teeth in something that was not a yawn. She slipped out of the back door like a swift shadow, returning minutes later even as they heard the bike departing. She had neither barked nor growled—Lougarry was invariably silent—but the danger, if danger it was, had gone. There can’t be any more people ranged against us, Fern thought, verging on irritation. The biker might be a nuisance but not a threat, inquisitive maybe, but surely not malevolent. She closed but did not lock the door and made cocoa for herself and Will, although it was the wrong time of year, because the drink was hot and sweet and comforting.
‘What was Atlantis?’ Will asked, warming his hands on the mug though they could hardly be cold.
‘I don’t really know,’ Fern said. ‘No one knows. It’s one of those legends that’s so old nobody remembers where it came from. I think it was an island, or a city, or both, and it sank beneath the sea. I believe there are archaeologists who connect it with the Minoan dynasty on Crete—you know, Theseus and the Minotaur and the Labyrinth of Daedalus—but although Crete has had plenty of earthquakes it’s still there. I have a sort of recollection of reading somewhere that Atlantis was a great civilisation aeons before Greece and Rome, and they discovered some terrible secret, or invented the ultimate weapon, and so they were destroyed. However, that could be pure fiction. I’ve no idea where I got it.’
‘It’s a good story,’ said Will, ‘or it would be, if we weren’t mixed up in it. So…do we deduce that whatever we’re looking for must have come from there originally?’
Fern sighed. ‘I assume so. That seemed to be indicated on the tape.’
‘It wasn’t a tape. It was real.’
‘Virtual reality.’ Fern’s flippancy went no deeper than her words.
‘We have to find it then, don’t we? Whatever it is. We have to find it before she does.’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe we could force the lock on that desk in Great-Cousin Ned’s study,’ Will said pensively. ‘Or break into the chest in the attic. You must have searched nearly everywhere else.’
‘This is a big house,’ said Fern. ‘It’s full of corners and cupboards and crannies and hideaways—not to mention the jumble Great-Cousin Ned accumulated. I’ve made a start. That’s all.’
They kicked the subject around in a dispirited manner until their cocoa had cooled. Then they went to bed, staying close on the stair though not hand in hand, leaving Lougarry in the kitchen, apparently asleep.
In the morning, the builder came to collect his ladder. ‘Well,’ asked Mrs Wicklow, ‘did you get in?’
‘We couldn’t,’ said Fern. ‘The window was jammed as well.’
Mrs Wicklow made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a snort. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Nor do we.’
They avoided the second floor bedroom now, chary of trying the door again or being overlooked from the window, though there was no one inside to watch them. They felt as if the secrets it contained were so huge they might yet burst the seams of the walls and blow away house and hillside, moor and dale in a sudden gust of power, leaving only a black hole with a single star winking in its depths. When Alison came up on the Friday she no longer looked the same to them. It was she who had spoken the word to hold fast the door even in her absence, she who had worn the chameleon gloves that grew onto hand and arm, she who had used an ordinary television set to look into the abyss. Will seemed to see her witchy qualities emphasised: the narrowing of her bright cold eyes, the dancing lines that played about her smile, transient as water, the rippling quantity of hair that wrapped her like a dim mantle. But Fern thought she perceived something even more disturbing, a hunger that was beyond customary mortal appetite, a desire that outranged all earthly desires, as if beneath the flimsy veneer of her physical exterior was a warped spirit which had long lost touch with its humanity. ‘I wonder how old she really is?’ Fern speculated, observing her deadly pallor, the skin stretched taut over her bones as though her flesh had melted away. ‘She might be any age. Any age at all.’ A vision came into her mind of a different Alison, an Alison whose cheeks were as full as her lips, standing in a field of mud with her torn skirt kilted to her knee, gazing with the beginnings of that terrible hunger at a tail house on a far hill. Someone was calling her: Alys! Alys! The call echoed in Fern’s head: Alison met her regard and for an instant her eyes widened as if she too heard it—then voice and vision were gone and there was nothing between them but the supper table. In the hall, the telephone rang. Fern got there first, thankful to hear her father’s greeting, but Alison was on her heels, snatching the receiver almost before she had spoken, her smile a triangle of glitter, her grip on Fern’s wrist like a vice. Fern withdrew, frightened by the strength in those lissom fingers, annoyed with herself for her fright. The thought of Lougarry heartened her: the wolf had stayed out of sight since Alison’s return but Fern had seen her shadow in the garden and her silhouette atop the slope against the sky. She knew they were not abandoned.
‘Sorry,’ Alison said, coming back into the kitchen. ‘I didn’t mean to monopolise Robin like that, but there was something important I needed to ask him, and then I’m afraid he had to go.’
‘What was so important?’ asked Will.
‘It’s about the barn. Incidentally, my friend is coming to look at it tomorrow. Well probably move the boat out then. We have a lot of measuring to do.’
‘You won’t damage the boat, will you?’ Will was anxious.
‘Measuring,’ said Fern. ‘That sounds very important.’
Alison’s stare grew colder than ever, but Fern merely looked ingenuous. She was still young enough, she hoped, to get away with that.
That night, she fell asleep to dream of Alison in the mud-field, barefoot in the dirt, and the one calling her was a gipsy-faced man in patched breeches, but she did not listen: her attention was fixed on the distant house. She raised her hand, and the moisture poured out of the earth and condensed into great clouds, and the lightning fell, striking the gabled roof, and the man was on his knees in the field, but she would not see him. The thunder rolled, and in the next illumination Fern saw Alison’s face change, shrinking in upon itself until the bones shone white through transparent skin, and her heart was a red glow pounding visibly behind the webbing of her ribs. Fern woke up shivering, the sweat chill on her brow. She had an idea some noise had aroused her, a thunderclap maybe, spilling over from her dream; but the night outside was still. Then she heard the footsteps in the passage, light steady steps, moving towards the stair. There was no sniffing, nothing to suggest an unwanted visitor. She opened her door and looked out.
It was Will. She called his name very softly, inherently cautious, but he did not respond: as he turned to descend the staircase she saw that his eyes were closed. Just after their mother’s death he had developed a tendency to sleep-walk, but it had not lasted long and she had believed he was permanently cured. She followed him, knowing he should not be woken, determined to steer him back to his bed as soon as she had the opportunity. At the first bend of the stair she halted. The hall below should have been in darkness, but a single shaft of light cut across it like a path, and Will moved along it as if drawn by a magnetic pull. The light was not the feeble glow of waning electricity: it was a pale cold brilliance, like concentrated moonlight, and it ran from the door of the drawing room to the stair’s foot, where it was abruptly cut off, though Fern could see nothing that might occlude its passage. Within the drawing room there were voices which she could not distinguish. She whispered Will but her vocal chords were numb and anyway, it was too late. He had already disappeared through the open door.
She descended a few more steps, meticulously silent, circumspect beyond the reach of panic, though the panic was there inside her, tugging at her heart. But something deeper than instinct told her this was the moment, the borderline of danger: whatever was in that room was deadlier far than the night hunter who left no mark or the secrets of Alison’s personal sanctum. When she reached floor level she picked her way around the beam of light, letting not so much as a fingertip or a toe intrude on it. The voices were clearly audible now, two of them, one a woman, presumably Alison, though her usual deliberately modulated accents had acquired contralto depth and an edge of adamant, the other a grey, atonal sort of voice, way down the scale, a voice with a judder in it like stone grinding on stone, gravelly about the vowels, grating on the consonants. And in between, answering questions in the dulled timbre of a hypnotic, there came a third. Will. The urgency that gripped Fern was more powerful than fear, more desperate than curiosity. She crept towards the door, dropping to a crouch as she drew near. The back of an armchair a little way inside the room narrowed the beam, casting a shadow that stretched to the hall, and into that shadow Fern crawled, driven by a compulsion beyond courage, any whisper of movement overlaid by the loudness of the voices and a hissing, snapping noise like the erratic susurration of a damp fire. Very carefully, lowering her chin almost to the floor, she craned round in the lee of the chair until she could see what was happening.
Halfway down the long room, a fire burned in the unused hearth, a fire without smoke or ash, the crystalline fuel crackling into bluish-white flames and spitting vicious sparks that ate into nearby upholstery. In front of it the carpet had been rolled back and smouldering lines were drawn on the bare boards: a circle within a pentagram, and other symbols that Fern could not make out. She was not certain if the strange cold radiance came from the fire or the sizzling lines. Alison stood outside the pentagram, opposite the hearth, wearing a red wool dress empurpled by the light, so moulded to her thin figure that the shallow mounds of her breasts, her rigid nipples, the nodules of her hip-bones were all clearly delineated. There was a blue glow on her face and her streaming hair had a virescent tinge. Within the circle, his eyes still closed, stood Will. And beside the fire, on a low plinth, was the source of the grey voice. The idol. Fern saw the stone lips moving and a pale gleam between widened eyelids. Her reason told her it was impossible, sight and hearing must have cheated her; but although her brain screamed in protest what she saw did not change. Her shock was so great it took her several seconds to tune in to the interrogation.
‘Did you try the door to my room?’ Alison was asking.
‘Yes,’ Will said. Behind the chair Fern stiffened; her knees seemed to be glued to the floor.
‘Could you open it?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘It was stuck,’ Will said, ‘and it stung my hand.’
‘He knows nothing,’ said the idol. ‘You’re wasting your time.’
‘I must be sure.’ Outside the pentagram, Alison paced restlessly to and fro, her dress winnowing against her thighs. ‘Did your sister try it too?’ Will assented. ‘And with the same result? Good. Perhaps you will know better than to pry in the future.’
‘He’s asleep,’ said the idol. ‘Don’t indulge yourself.’
‘What about the key?’ Alison continued. ‘Have you found it?’
Will seemed puzzled. ‘Which key?’
‘Which key are you looking for?’
‘The key to the chest in the attic,’ he answered promptly, ‘and to Great-Cousin Ned’s writing desk.’
In her hiding-place, Fern blenched to recall how nearly she had told him, how close they trod to disaster. If Alison were to ask the wrong question…
‘What do you expect to find there?’
‘Treasure,’ Will responded after a pause.
‘What treasure?’
‘Great-Cousin Ned’s treasure that he brought back from abroad.’ Think of doubloons, besought Fern in the paralysis of her mind. Apes and peacocks. Pieces of eight. Don’t think of Atlantis. ‘Pirates’ treasure.’
‘Let the fool go,’ said the idol. ‘He’s a child playing storybook games. Send him to bed.’
‘Very well.’ Alison made a gesture of dismissal. ‘Go back to your room; sleep; in the morning, you will remember nothing.’ Will stepped out of the circle, walking towards the hall. Fern stayed where she was. The partial release of tension had left her shuddering, too unsteady to move; she could only trust the looming chair-back would be an adequate shield.
‘Now for the girl,’ Alison said.
‘No.’
‘Why not? She’s sly and much too clever for her own good. Do you think I can’t control her? A teenage brat? I will probe her brain like soft clay, I will pull out the strands of her thought until her consciousness is void, I will—’
‘No.’ The interdiction was final. Fern, clenching her will to resist she knew not what, felt disaster brush by her yet again. ‘She’s at a dangerous age. If she has the Gift, now is the time when it might be woken. Summon her to the circle, and the touch of power could rouse a response we do not need. Do you want to have to destroy her?’
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