The Dragon-Charmer

‘All my sides are light,’ Will said.

Gaynor was still concentrating on the pictures. ‘You’ve got something, though,’ she said. ‘I’m no judge, but … you’ve definitely got something. I just hope it isn’t contagious.’

As they talked she considered asking him some of the questions that were pent up inside her head, but she dithered too long, torn between a doubt and a doubt, and they were interrupted.

Later, after an unsuccessful session with the plastic shower attachment jammed onto the bath taps, Gaynor retired to her room, shivering in a towel, and switched on both bars of the electric fire and the television. She was not particularly addicted to the small screen, but she had not seen a daily paper and at twenty past six she hoped for some news and a weather report. There seemed to be only the four main channels on offer, with reception that varied from poor to unwatchable. The best picture was on BBC 1. She left it on, paying only cursory attention to the final news items, while trying to warm her body lotion in front of the fire before applying it to the gooseflesh of her legs. Afterwards, she could never recall exactly what happened, or at which precise moment the picture changed. There came a point when she noticed the bad reception had ceased. She found herself staring at an image that looked no longer flat but three-dimensional, as real as a view through a window – but a window without glass. Her gaze was caught and held as if she were mesmerised; she could not look away. She saw a valley of rock opening out between immeasurable cliffs, many-coloured lakes or pools, blue and emerald and blood-scarlet, and a garden mazy with shadows where she could hear a faint drumming like dancing feet and the sound of eerie piping, though she could see no one. She did not know when she began to be afraid. The fear was like fear in a dream, huge and illogical, aggravated by every meaningless detail. A fat yellow moth flew out of the picture and looped the room, pursued by a gleaming dragonfly. For an instant, impossibly, she thought its head was that of an actual dragon, snapping jaws bristling with miniature teeth, but the chase had passed too swiftly for her to be sure, vanishing back into the garden. Then there were pillars, stone pillars so old that they exuded ancientry like an odour. They huddled together in a circle, and spiky tree-shadows twitched to and fro across their grey trunks. But as she drew nearer they appeared to swell and grow, opening out until they ringed a great space, and she could see thread-fine scratchings on them like the graffiti of spiders, and sunlight slanting in between. The shadows fled from her path as she passed through the entrance and into the circle, beneath the skeleton of a dome whose curving ribs segmented a fiery sky. ‘The light only falls here at sunset,’ said a voice which seemed to be inside her head. ‘Wait for the dark. Then we will make our own light out of darkness, and by that darklight you will see another world. We do not need the sun.’ No! she thought, resisting she knew not what. She had forgotten it was only a picture on television; she was inside the image, a part of it, and the idol leaned over her, gigantesque and terrible, its head almost featureless against the yellow sky. It was a statue, just a statue, yet in a minute, she knew, she would see it move. There would be a flexing of stiffened fingers, a stretching of rigid lips. Suddenly, she saw the eye-cracks, slowly widening, filled with a glimmer that was not the sun. She screamed … and screamed …

Somehow, she must have pressed the remote control. She was in the bedroom, shivering by the inadequate fire, and the television was blank and dark. Will and Fern could be heard running up the stairs towards her, with Mrs Wicklow faint but pursuing. Will put his arms round her, which was embarrassing since she was losing her towel; Fern scanned her surroundings with unexpected intensity. ‘I had a nightmare,’ Gaynor said, fishing for explanations. ‘I must have dropped off, just sitting here. Maybe it was something on the news. Or those bizarre pictures of yours,’ she added, glancing up at Will.

‘You had the television on?’ Fern queried sharply. She picked up the remote and pressed one: the screen flicked to a vista of a fire in an industrial plant in Leeds. Behind the commentator, ash-flakes swirled under an ugly sky.

‘That was it,’ said Gaynor with real relief. ‘It must have been that.’ And: ‘I can’t think why I’m so tired …’

‘It’s the Yorkshire air,’ said Will. ‘Bracing.’

‘You don’t want to go watching t’news,’ opined Mrs Wicklow. ‘It’s all murders and disasters – when it isn’t sex. Enough to give anyone nightmares.’

Will grinned half a grin for Gaynor’s exclusive benefit. Fern switched off the television again, still not quite satisfied.

‘Have you had any other strange dreams here?’ she asked abruptly when Mrs Wicklow had left.

‘Oh no,’ said Gaynor. ‘Well … only the bagpipes. I thought I heard them last night, but that must have been a dream too.’

‘Of course.’

Fern and Will followed the housekeeper, leaving Gaynor to dress, but as the door closed behind them she was sure she caught Fern’s whisper: ‘If you don’t get that little monster to shut up, I’m going to winkle him out and stuff his bloody pipes down his throat …’

At supper, thought Gaynor, at supper I’m going to ask her what she’s talking about.

But at supper the argument began. It was an argument that had been in preparation, Gaynor suspected, since they arrived, simmering on a low heat until a chance word – a half-joking allusion to premarital nerves – made it boil over. Without the subject ever having been discussed between them, she sensed that Will, like her, was unenthusiastic about his sister’s marriage and doubted her motives. Yet he had said nothing and seemed reluctant to criticise; it was Fern, uncharacteristically belligerent, who pushed him into caustic comment, almost compelling him towards an open quarrel. On the journey up she had listened without resentment to her friend’s light-worded protest, but with Will she was white-faced and bitter with rage. Maybe she wanted to clear the air, Gaynor speculated; but she did not really believe it. What Fern wanted was a fight, the kind of dirty, no-holds-barred fight, full of below-the-belt jabs and incomprehensible allusions, which can only occur between siblings or people who have known each other too long and too well. It struck Gaynor later that what Fern had sought was not to hurt but to be hurt, as if to blot out some other feeling with that easy pain. She herself had tried to avoid taking sides.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Fern said afterwards, on their way up to bed. ‘I shouldn’t have let Will provoke me. I must be more strung-up than I thought.’

‘He didn’t provoke you,’ Gaynor said uncertainly. ‘You provoked him.’

Fern shut her bedroom door with something of a snap.

The owl woke Gaynor, calling in its half-human voice right outside her window. She had started up and pulled back the curtains before she really knew what she was doing and there it was, its ghost-face very close to her own, apparently magnified by the glass so that its enormous eyes filled her vision. Its talons scrabbled on the sill; its wings were beating against the panes. Then somehow the window was open and she was straddling the sill, presumably still in her pyjamas, and then she was astride the owl, her hands buried in its neck-ruff, and it was huge, huger than a great eagle, and silent as the phantom it resembled. They were flying over the moors, and she glimpsed the loop of a road below, and the twin shafts of headlights, and the roofs of houses folded as if in sleep, and a single window gleaming like a watchful eye. But most of the landscape was dark, lit only by the moon that kept pace with their flight, speeding between the clouds. Above the grey drift of cirrus the sky was a black vault; the few stars looked remote and cold. They crossed a cliff and she saw the sea wheeling beneath her, flecked with moon-glitter, and then all detail was lost in the boom of wings and the roar of the wind, and Time rolled over her like waves, maybe months, maybe years, and she did not know if she woke or slept, if she lived or dreamed. At one point another face rushed towards her, a pale expanse of a face with a wide hungry mouth and eyes black as the Pit. There was a hint of smoke in the air and a smell of something rotting. ‘This is not the one,’ said a voice. ‘Not the one …’ The unpleasant smell was gone and she felt the plumage of the owl once more, and the wind and the cloud-wisps and the dying moon flowed over her, and sleep came after, closing the window against the night.

She woke fully just before moonset, when its last ray stole across the bed and slipped under her eyelids. She got up to shut the curtains, and was back between the sheets when it occurred to her she had done so already, before she went to bed.

Fern, too, was dreaming. Not the dreams she longed for and dreaded – fragments of the past, intimations of an alternative future – dreams from which she would wrench herself back to a painful awakening. This dream appeared random, unconnected with her. Curious, she dreamed on. She was gazing down on a village, a village of long ago, with thatched roofs and dung-heaps. There were chickens bobbing in farmyard and backyard, goats wandering the single street. People in peasant clothing were going about their business. A quickfire sunset sent the shadows stretching across the valley until it was all shadow. One red star shone low over the horizon. It seemed to be pulsing, expanding – now it was a fireball rushing towards them – a comet whose tail scorched the tree-tops into a blaze. Then, as it drew nearer, she saw. Bony pinions that cut up the sky, pitted scales aglow from the furnace within, blood-dark eyes where ancient thoughts writhed like slow vapour. A dragon.

Not the dragon of fantasy and storyland, a creature with whom you might bandy words or hitch a ride. This was a real dragon, and it was terrible. It stank like a volcanic swamp. Its breath was a pyroclastic cloud. She could sense its personality, enormous, overwhelming, a force all hunger and rage. Children, goats, people ran, but not fast enough; against the onset of the dragon they might almost have been running backwards. Houses exploded from the heat. Flesh shrivelled like paper. Fern jerked into waking to find she was soaked in sweat and trembling with a mixture of excitement and horror. Special effects, she told herself: nothing more. She took a drink of water from the glass by her bed and lay down again. Her thoughts meandered into a familiar litany. There are no dragons, no demons … no countries in wardrobes, no kingdoms behind the North Wind. And Atlantis, first and fairest of cities, Atlantis where such things might have been, was buried under the passing millennia, drowned in a billion tides, leaving not a fossilised footprint nor a solitary shard of pottery to baffle the archaeologists.

But she would not think of Atlantis …

Drifting into sleep again she dreamed of wedding presents, and a white dress that walked up the aisle all by itself.

‘What’s happening?’ Will asked the darkness. ‘Even allowing for circumstances, I’ve never known Fern so on edge.’

‘I dinna ken,’ said the darkness, predictably. ‘But there’s Trouble coming. I can smell him.’

The following morning was devoted to thank-you letters, which Fern, being efficient, penned beforehand. Then there were long phone-calls – to the caterers, to prospective guests, to Marcus Greig. Will, not so much unhelpful as uninvolved, removed Gaynor from the scene and took her for a walk.

‘What do you make of it all?’ he asked her.

‘Make of what?’ she said, her mind elsewhere. ‘You mean – that business of Alison Redmond? Or –’

‘Actually,’ said Will, ‘I meant Marcus Greig. Who’s been talking to you about Alison? Fern tries never to mention her.’

‘Gus Dinsdale,’ Gaynor explained. She continued hesitantly: ‘I don’t want to be nosy, but I can’t help wondering … Was her death really an accident? You’re both rather – odd – about it.’

‘Oh no,’ said Will. ‘It wasn’t an accident.’

Gaynor stopped and stared at him, suddenly very white. ‘N-not Fern –?’

Will’s prompt laughter brought the colour flooding back to her cheeks. ‘You’ve been thinking in whodunits,’ he accused. ‘Poor Gaynor. A Ruth Rendell too many!’

‘Well, what did happen?’ demanded Gaynor, feeling foolish.

‘The truth is less mundane,’ Will said. ‘It often is. Alison stole a key that didn’t belong to her and opened a Door that shouldn’t be opened. I wouldn’t call that an accident.’

‘Gus said something about a flood?’

Will nodded. ‘She was swept away. So was Fern – she was lucky to survive.’

Gaynor felt herself becoming increasingly bewildered, snatching at straws without ever coming near the haystack. ‘I gather Fern was ill,’ she said. ‘They thought – Gus and Maggie – that she would have told me, only she never has. Some sort of post-traumatic shock?’

‘Shock leading to amnesia, that’s what the doctors said. They had to say something. She was gone for five days.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

‘To shut the Door, of course. The Door Alison had opened. The flood had washed it away.’ He was studying her as he spoke, his words nonsense to her, his expression inscrutable. She could not detect either mockery or evasion; it was more as if they were speaking on different subjects, or in different languages.

‘Can we start again?’ she said. ‘With Alison. I was told – she was a girlfriend of your father’s?’

‘Maybe,’ said Will. ‘She slipped past Fern – for a while. But she wasn’t really interested in Dad.’

‘What did she do?’

‘She stole a key –’

‘I mean, what did she do for a living?’

‘She worked in an art gallery in London. At least, that was what you might call her cover.’

‘Her cover? She was a crook?’

‘Of course not.’ He smiled half a smile. ‘Well, not in the sense you mean.’

‘In what sense, then?’

‘She was a witch,’ said Will.

She looked for the rest of the smile, but it did not materialise. The narrowing of his eyes and the slight crease between his brows was merely a reaction against the sun. His expression was unfathomable.

After a pause that lasted just a little too long, she said: ‘Herbal remedies – zodiac medallions – dancing naked round a hilltop on Midsummer’s Eve? That sort of thing?’

‘Good Lord no,’ Will responded mildly. ‘Alison was the real McCoy.’

‘Satanism?’

He shook his head. ‘Satan was simply a label of convenience. Mind you, if Jesus had come back a few hundred years later, and seen what had been done in his name – the crusades, or the Inquisition, or even just a routine schism with heretics burning at the stake over a point of doctrine – he’d probably have given up on all religion then and there. The atheist formerly known as Christ. He might even have decided it would be best – or at least much easier – to corrupt and destroy the human race instead of wasting time trying to save it. You get the gods you deserve.’

‘You’re wandering from the point,’ Gaynor said, determined the discussion was going to go somewhere, though she had no idea precisely where. It occurred to her that his outlook – she could not think of a better word – must have something to do with his paintings, or vice versa, but it didn’t seem to clarify anything. ‘What kind of a – what kind of a witch was Alison?’

‘She had the Gift,’ Will explained. (She could hear the capital letter.) ‘The ability to do things … beyond the range of ordinary human capacity.’ He did not appear to notice the doubt in Gaynor’s questioning gaze. ‘When the universe was created something – alien – got into the works, a lump of matter from outside. They called it the Lodestone. A friend of ours had the theory that it might have been a whole different cosmos, imploded into this ball of concentrated matter, but… Well, anyhow, it distorted everything around it. Including people. Especially people. It affected their genetic makeup, creating a freak gene which they passed on even when the Stone itself was destroyed. A sort of gene for witchcraft.’ He gave her a sudden dazzling and eminently normal smile. ‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to believe me. I just think you ought to know. In case anything happens which shouldn’t.’

‘Do you think something is going to happen?’ asked Gaynor, mesmerised.

‘Maybe. I’d whistle up a demon if I could, just to stop this idiotic wedding.’

‘Idiotic?’ She was bemused by his choice of adjective.

‘Can you think of a better word? Fern’s marrying a man she doesn’t love, probably as a gesture of rejection. That seems fairly idiotic to me.’

‘What is she supposed to be rejecting?’

‘The Gift,’ he said. ‘That’s the whole problem. Don’t you understand? Fern’s a witch too.’

Gaynor stopped abruptly for the second time, staring at him in a sudden violent uncertainty. They had walked quite a way and she was aware of the empty countryside all around them, the wind ruffling the grasses, the piping voice of an isolated bird. The wild loneliness of it filled her with an upsurge of panic which nudged her into anger. ‘If this is your idea of a joke –’

And then normality intruded. The dog came out of nowhere, bounding up to them on noiseless paws, halting just in front of her. Its mouth was open in a grin full of teeth and its tongue lolled. Will bent down to pat its muzzle but the yellow-opal eyes were fixed on Gaynor. The man followed briskly on its heels. He too gave the uncanny impression of appearing from nowhere. But this was normality, or so Gaynor assured herself. A man and his dog, walking on the moors. The dog was friendly, the man, dressed like a tramp, at least unequivocally human. Will evidently knew them.

‘This is Ragginbone,’ he told Gaynor. The man, not the dog. And: ‘This is Gaynor Mobberley. She’s a close friend of Fern’s.’ A firm handclasp, bright eyes scanning her face. He looked very old, she thought, or perhaps not so much old as aged, reminding her of an oak chest her mother had inherited recently from an antique relative. The wood was scored and blackened but tough, unyielding, half way to carbonisation. The man’s face seemed to have been carved in a similar wood, a long time ago, scratched with a thousand lines which melted into mobility when he smiled at her. His scarecrow hair was faded to a brindled straw but his brows were still dark and strong, crooked above the bright bright eyes that shone with a light that was not quite laughter but something deeper and more solemn. She wondered about his name (a soubriquet? a nickname?) but was too polite to ask.

‘And Lougarry.’ Will indicated the dog. A shaggy animal without a collar who looked part Alsatian and all wolf. But Gaynor had grown up with dogs and was not particularly deterred. She extended her hand and the dog sniffed briefly, apparently more out of courtesy than curiosity.

‘And how is Fernanda?’ asked the man called Ragginbone.

‘Still resolved on matrimony,’ said Will. ‘It’s making her very jumpy. She picked a fight with me last night, just to prove she was doing the right thing.’

‘She has to choose for herself,’ said the old man. ‘Neither you nor I have the right to coerce her, or even advise.’

Gaynor found his air of authority somewhat incongruous, but before she had time to consider her surprise he had turned to talk to her, and was enquiring about her work and displaying an unexpected familiarity with the subject. The three of them walked along together for some distance, the dog padding at their heels. Will said little. They turned back towards Yarrowdale, following a different path which plunged down into the valley and brought them eventually to the river. Spring was unfolding among the trees but the leaves of many winters lay thickly on the ground.

‘Was this where Alison drowned?’ Gaynor said suddenly.

‘Yes and no,’ said Will. ‘This is where they found her. In the Yarrow. Further down from here.’

Ragginbone made no comment, but she felt his gaze.

Where the path branched they separated, man and dog going their own way.

‘You’ll stay around, won’t you?’ Will said to him.

‘There’s nothing I can do.’

‘I know, but …’

‘Something troubles you? Something more than your sister’s obduracy?’

‘There’s too much tension in the air. I don’t think it’s all coming from her.’ He appealed to Gaynor. ‘You’ve felt it too, haven’t you?’ She remembered her nightmare in front of the television, and the owl-dream, and for no reason at all there was a sick little jolt of fear in her stomach. ‘It isn’t like the last time, hounds sniffing in the night: nothing like that. But I have a sense of someone or something watching … spying. An uncomfortable tingle on the nape of my neck. I might be imagining it.’

‘We’ll be here,’ said Ragginbone.

He strode off at great speed, the dog always beside him, unbidden and silent. ‘I suppose he’s a wizard?’ Gaynor said with a wavering attempt at sarcasm.

‘Oh no,’ said Will. ‘Not any more.’

Fern was sitting at the kitchen table, an untidy pile of cards, gifts and wrappings on one side of her, a tidy pile of sealed and addressed envelopes on the other. There was a cup of coffee at her elbow, almost untouched. She glanced up as her friend came in, her expression preoccupied, a brief smile coming and going. Perhaps because she wore no makeup she looked visibly strained, the small bones showing sharply beneath her skin, faint shadow-bruises under her eyes. But she did not look like a witch. Gaynor’s concept of the twentieth-century sorceress was drawn from books and films: she visualised something between the Narnian Jadis and Cher in one of her more glamorous roles, a statuesque creature with aquiline profile and waist-length elflocks. Fern looked compact, practical, wearily efficient. A PR executive frustrated by rural privations. A bride with pre-marital nerves. The antithesis of all that was magical and strange. ‘I’ve run out of stamps,’ she announced. ‘I wish I could do these things on the laptop: it would take half the time and at least they’d be legible. My handwriting’s turning into Arabic.’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘The older generation would be offended. Etiquette hasn’t caught up with technology yet.’

‘Shall I go and get the stamps for you?’ Gaynor offered. ‘I can find the post office. I saw it yesterday.’

‘That would be wonderful,’ Fern said warmly, ‘but you’ve only just got in. Have some coffee first. The pot’s on the stove. I made the real thing: I thought we might need it. Instant doesn’t have the same kick.’

Gaynor helped herself and replaced the contents of Fern’s mug, which had begun to congeal.

‘How are you getting on with my brother?’ Fern enquired, scribbling her way automatically through another note.

‘I like him,’ Gaynor responded tentatively, thinking of the row the previous night.

‘So do I,’ said Fern. ‘Even if he is a pain in the bum.’

‘He lives in a world of his own, doesn’t he?’ Gaynor said rather too casually, seating herself on the opposite side of the table.

‘Not exactly.’ Fern’s head was still bent over her work. ‘He lives in someone else’s world – a world where he doesn’t belong. That’s just the trouble.’

III

Long before, when she was five or six years old, Gaynor had stayed in a haunted house. She still retained a vivid memory of the woman who had bent over her bed, staring at her with eyes that saw someone else. A woman in a long dress, shadowy in the semi-dark. She had brought a chill into the room that made Gaynor shiver, even under the bedclothes, but she could remember no sense of evil. Only a presence, and the cold. ‘She’s a sensitive,’ a friend had told her mother, and for some time she had worried about that, afraid of what she might sense, but no further incidents had occurred and the matter had faded from her mind, though her recollection of the phenomenon remained very clear. Now, she found herself reviving that image, reaching out with her so-called sensitivity, half in hope, half in fear, though the house did not respond. It felt not so much haunted, she decided, as inhabited: she always had the impression there were more people around than was actually the case.