Prospero’s Children

‘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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