The Dragon Charmer Read online

  “Well,” said Fern, “that’s that.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t done very much,” Gaynor said guiltily, conscious of a day’s truancy with Will.

  “You stayed,” said Fern. Unexpectedly she took her friend’s hand. “That means a lot. Anyway, I’m used to organizing things: it’s my job. All this—it’s just another product launch. Fern’s wedding: the latest thing in rural chic. Don’t drive your Range Rover without one. I only hope it doesn’t rain.”

  Outside the tent, the gray afternoon was darkening into a murky evening. Clouds mobbed the horizon. If the light sought a chink, in order to provide the obligatory flash of sunset, it did not find one. Gaynor was suddenly aware of an overwhelming sense of oppression. The farrago of matrimonial preparations, which had seemed frivolous and almost grotesque after the events of the previous night, an element of farce in a potential tragedy, now felt ill-fated, part of a deadly momentum, building toward an unimaginable climax. Her brain told her that tomorrow everything would go according to plan, Fern would be married, and the surreal world of which she had had a brief, horrifying glimpse would vanish. But her heart quailed at the receding daylight, and the dark hours stretched endlessly ahead of her. She knew she must find time to tell Fern what Ragginbone had said, to warn her, but Robin appeared, laying a hand on his daughter’s shoulder that made her jump, and the opportunity was lost.

  “Nervous?” he said.

  “A little.” Her expression of pale composure defeated any scrutiny.

  “You’ll be all right. Marcus is a pretty good chap. Bit old for you, but—” He broke off, doubtless remembering the list of subjects that Abby had primed him not to mention.

  Fern’s gravity lightened with a glimmer of mischief. “I like older,” she said. “It’s my Oedipus complex.”

  Robin grinned, inexplicably relieved, and they went back indoors.

  Fern had rejected the concept of a hen night on the grounds that she didn’t wish to lay an egg and Abby had suggested dinner out at a local pub, but in the rush of the afternoon no one had made any reservations. “If you don’t mind,” Fern said diffidently, accepting a restorative gin and tonic, “what I’d really like is to go out with Gaynor somewhere and talk. Not exactly a hen party—no clucking just a quiet supper for the two of us. If that’s okay with you?” She turned to appeal to her friend.

  “I’d love it,” Gaynor said.

  On Will’s recommendation they booked a table at the Green Man, a pub in a village about half an hour’s drive from Yarrow-dale. Gaynor took the car keys so Fern would be free to drink and scribbled down directions from Will. Lougarry, who had spent much of the afternoon loftily ignoring Yoda, padded after them out to the car, apparently intent on coming, too, but Fern dismissed her. “Take her inside,” she told her brother. “Most restaurants don’t allow dogs. We’ll be fine.”

  “The weather looks ugly,” said Will. “We could be in for a storm.”

  “Good,” said Fern. “I need a storm. It would suit my mood.”

  “Ragginbone said”

  “He talks too much.”

  She felt curiously light-headed a light-headedness born not of elation but of emptiness, the aftermath of that yawning sensation when the last bridges are burned, the one remaining lifeboat is sunk, and the future looms ahead with no loopholes and no way out. As Gaynor drove up out of the Yarrow valley the wind hit them, buffeting the car like a punching bag. Breaks in the cloud showed more cloud, piled up into enormous towers: one great shape resembled a sumo wrestler, leaning threateningly over the landscape, its sagging belly black with forthcoming rain. “It looks awful,” said Gaynor. “Maybe we should have stayed in.”

  “It looks wonderful,” said Fern, and Gaynor, glancing sideways, saw the gleam of an elusive wildness in her face.

  “So what did Ragginbone say?” she enquired after a while.

  Gaynor told her, trying to remember everything, but Fern’s reaction was not what she expected. “Beware the Ides of March,” she concluded flippantly. “Or April, in this case if April has any ides. Doom is at hand. Ragginbone was always telling us that: it was his favorite line. Doom, doom. Perhaps Azmordis will come to my wedding, and bore everyone with ranting. He holds him with his glittering eye The Wedding Guest stands still, And listens like a three-years’ child: Azmordis hath his will.”

  “I thought it was dangerous to name him?”

  “So they say. Azmordis. Azmordis! Let him come.”

  “Stop it,” said Gaynor. “There isn’t room in the car.”

  “Sorry,” said Fern. “No lunch, and too much gin in too little tonic. I’ll be better when I’ve eaten.”

  She’s not drunk, thought Gaynor, struggling to suppress her fear. She’s fey…

  The first squall struck just before they reached their destination. Fortunately Will’s directions were straightforward and Gaynor found the pub without difficulty, though it was identifiable only as a splash of colored lights through a blowing curtain of rain. She pulled into the parking lot and they got out, making a dash for the entrance. It was not until they were inside and the manageress had shown them into the restaurant that Fern, looking around, said: “I’ve been here before.” For an instant, her expression had frozen; she halted as if unwilling to proceed—but at a nudge from Gaynor she moved on. They sat down at a corner table, ordered drinks. Fern, not normally a heavy drinker, asked for a double gin, Gaynor a St. Clement’s. A waiter came to light the candle in the center of the table. Fern watched with peculiar intentness as the flame flickered and caught, settling into a tiny cone of brilliance. When the waiter had gone she moved it carefully to one side. “I can’t see you,” she told Gaynor, “behind the light.” Her friend had a feeling the phrase meant more than it said.

  “Are you sure you want to stay here?” she asked in a low voice. “You looked as if… as if this place has some unpleasant association.”

  “It’s not important,” said Fern. “It was a long time ago. Funny: I never noticed the name of the pub then, or even the village.” She paused a moment to reflect. “Anyway, I can’t remember much about the food myself but Will says it’s the best in the district. I don’t know the area at all well; we could drive round for hours looking for somewhere else.”

  “What happened here? If you don’t mind talking about it …”

  Fern shook her head. “I don’t mind now”

  Their drinks arrived; Fern tipped the tonic slowly into her glass, watching the brief rush of bubbles up the sides. “It’s as if I spent the last twelve years—nearly twelve—looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, so everything seemed small and cold and far away. And then last night the telescope flipped over, and now the world looks huge and close, and very bright. It ought to be frightening, but I’m not frightened. Maybe I’m just a bit numb.”

  “What about the wedding?” Gaynor asked before she could stop herself.

  But Fern was no longer on the defensive. “The strange thing is, I can’t really believe it’s going to happen. When we stood in the tent this evening, and I saw the tables all laid out—what a choice of verb, laid out, like a body dolled up for a funeral when I saw them all there, with their rose-pink tablecloths and rose-pink napkins and rose-pink roses in every vase, my brain told me this was the end but my—my instinct denied it. My brain said: She got married and lived happily ever after. Instinct said: In a pig’s eye. I can’t imagine it, you see. I can’t imagine wearing the dress, walking up the aisle on Daddy’s arm, saying ‘I do.’ I can’t imagine—any future?” A sudden shiver seemed to run down her spine. “Anyway, if you can’t imagine something, it can’t happen.”

  “It will happen,” said Gaynor, “if you don’t call it off.”

  “Poor Marcus: how could I? He’d be so humiliated. Not heartbroken, just humiliated. You know, when I spoke to him today he sounded so … distant. Not his manner, I don’t mean that, nor the telephone line. It was the way I heard him, as if his voice was reaching me from somewhere yea
rs and years in the past…” She laughed, shrugged, the two gestures becoming confused, uniting in a single motion of uncertain meaning. “Maybe a whirlwind will sweep away the tent with all the wedding guests and spin them over the rainbow. Maybe moles will undermine the church foundations and the whole building will collapse. Maybe Marcus will lose his way on the moors and be kidnapped by boggarts.”

  “What are boggarts?” Gaynor enquired.

  “I’ve often wondered,” Fern admitted. “Some special kind of Yorkshire pixie, I think.” And then they both laughed, and the constraint and tension of the previous day melted away, and Gaynor saw her dearest friend again, with no shadows coming between them. They had scrutinized the menu and given their order before Gaynor reverted to her earlier question. “You were going to tell me what happened, the last time you came here. Who were you with?”

  “A man named Javier Holt. He was an art dealer of sorts: he ran the gallery in London where Alison worked. I never knew if she realized the truth about him.”

  “The truth—?”

  “He was an ambulant,” Fern said, adding, in response to Gaynor’s bewildered expression: “A human being possessed—expelled—by an alien spirit. In this case, the Oldest of all Spirits. What became of the real Javier, the original person, I don’t know. Lost perhaps, or in Limbo, or thrust through the Gate before his time. The Javier that I knew was—a vehicle. A puppet with the eyes of the puppeteer. A dead thing that spoke and breathed only because someone pressed the requisite buttons. We sat here and discussed literature and drama and witchcraft, and suddenly the walls of the restaurant disappeared, and we were on a bare heath, and there were trees floating above the mist, and stars above the trees. Javier had the power of his occupant: he could conjure the past, or an illusion of the past, and use it against you. That wasn’t the only time he did it. I remember how the candle flame between us burned thin and tall, a needle of light, and how I looked at him and thought: I’m dining with a demon.”

  Gaynor’s face showed her horror and sympathy. “You must have been terrified,” she said.

  “No,” said Fern. “Not then. That was the dangerous part. I was—exhilarated.”

  There was no background music in the restaurant and general conversation broke off at a sudden crack of noise outside, which melted into a rolling growl as if some vast ill-tempered animal were stravaiging around the building. The lights flickered.

  “Lovely weather for a wedding,” said Gaynor with a dash of bravado. She disliked storms.

  For a moment the sound of the rain penetrated, streaming down the night-darkened windows. “Never mind,” said Fern. “With luck, by the time we want to leave it should have blown over.”

  She had graduated from gin and tonic to red wine, a half bottle since Gaynor would take only a single glass, and she now tipped the dregs into hers. Despite a career spent at PR parties she was not normally a heavy drinker, and Gaynor wondered if she should be concerned. But Fern, having at last opened up the secret closet of her memories, seemed determined to spill all the contents, and Gaynor forgot her niggling anxiety as she listened and listened, needing no more questions to prompt. She knew she would have been incredulous and even downright cynical if it had not been for her own recent experiences and her knowledge of her friend. This was Fern talking, cool, pragmatic Fern, relating her incursions into the darker side of Being, dreams and spirit journeys beyond the boundaries of the normal world, the search for a key that would open a Door in space and time. Finally, she came to the last part of her tale, a hopeless, fearless venture into the Forbidden Past, to the downfall of Atlantis more than ten thousand years ago. Dessert had come and gone, largely untouched, and she was cupping a brandy bubble in her hands, gazing at the tilting liquid as it curved its leisurely way around the glass. “The trouble with the past,” she said, “is that it takes over. History protects itself. Wherever you are, you think that’s where you belong. I had a whole background, a life story, a stockpile of memories. I knew what I had to do, but I didn’t properly understand why. I didn’t know what had happened before or what was to come. I arrived in a city on the edge of doom, and all I could see was the wonder of it. There were people there who became my friends and allies, people I cared for. And I fell in love. We met in a dungeon and fled the city together and hid out in a cave on the beach. We had two… three days. I can’t really recall how it felt, or even how he looked: just occasional glimpses of memory, stabs of feeling, twisting inside… Funny: I used to try and blot it out, afraid to remember, and now—now I want to remember, I can’t. But I’ll never forget the sound of the sea there. I hear it sometimes, in the hollow of a shell, or walking along the shoreline here, listening to the falling waves, like an echo of those waves long ago. And sometimes I get it mixed up, and the golden beaches of Atlantis turn to silver, and the sea sound is the wash of starmelt on that other beach, the endless beach where I rode the unicorn along the Margin of the World.”

  Gaynor stared at her, uncomprehending; but Fern seemed hardly aware of her anymore. “I sent my lover to his death,” she said. “I didn’t know it—I was trying to save him—but I sent him to his death. Atlantis was broken by the earthquake, and swallowed by the storm. Everyone in it perished. And the unicorn will never come again. I have lost the qualification to tame him.” She was silent for a minute, still toying with the brandy. Outside the thunder, which had been rumbling on and off for the last half hour, pulled itself together for a final drumroll. “Sixteen is very young to lose so much. It’s very young to gain so much—to live so much—to die so much. Azmordis wants revenge, you said? He has no need. I made my own punishment. I’ve been running away ever since: from the pain, the responsibility, the—the Gift.” It appeared to cost her an effort to say it. She uncurled her right hand from the glass and gazed into the palm as if she expected to see her doom written there. But the lines of fate were few, and inscrutable. “Enough is enough,” she concluded. “It’s time to stop hiding my eyes.” She smiled an unlikely smile, wan in the candlelight. “I suppose … this is a hell of a moment to choose.”

  Gaynor’s response was drowned out as a crack of thunder sounded directly overhead, so loud that it shook the room. She clasped her hands to her skull, covering her ears; for a second she seemed to see the other diners, the tables and chairs rattling like dice in a box. The lingering rumble that followed made the floor continue to vibrate as if to the padding of giant paws. A bolt of lightning, so near it must almost have struck the building, turned the windows white, bleaching the checked curtains into transparency.

  And then the lights went out.

  Fern’s face remained suspended in front of her, isolated against the darkness: a golden ovoid, conjured by the candle flame that hovered a little to one side of it. In that instant Gaynor could see nothing else. The buzz of dinner-table conversation had been wiped out; the silence was absolute. Slowly, almost reluctantly, Gaynor let her gaze travel around them. There were no other candles, no other faces. They were in the center of a pool of absolute blackness. But gradually, as she stared, she began to make out something beyond: the pale glimmer of snow, the spectral branches of a few lean winter trees. And far above there were stars, small and hard as grains of frost. She was bitterly cold.

  The whisper came so close to her ear she found herself imagining writhing lips, all but touching her. You called me, Fernanda, it said, and somehow she knew it was equally close to Fern. You called me, and I have come. What do you want?

  For a minute Fern made no answer. When she spoke at last, it was in a language Gaynor did not know, in a voice she hardly recognized. The words crackled with power like damp wood thrown on a fire. “Envarré! Varré inuur ai néan-charne!”

  The ghostly snow scene faded. There were walls around them again, dim in the glow of scattered candles; tables; people. People turning to gape at them as Fern’s voice died away. A waitress sidled up to their table. “The lights will be on again very shortly,” she said. “Is there anything I can get you?�
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  Fern lifted her brandy, finishing it in a single swallow. “Another,” she said.

  It took time and coffee before Gaynor felt able to drive.

  “It’s my fault,” said Fern, a little muzzily. “I called him. In a twisted sort of way, I hoped he would come.”

  “What did you want?” asked Gaynor, echoing Azmordis’s question.

  “To make an end,” said Fern. But that final brandy had been a drink too far, and she would not or could not elaborate, merely sitting gazing in a zombielike fashion at her empty glass. Gaynor had seen other drunks in this condition, but never Fern, and coming on top of everything else she found it deeply disturbing.

  “She’s in a bit of a state, isn’t she?” said the waitress.

  “She’s supposed to be getting married,” Gaynor said.

  “That explains it.”

  The electricity had been restored and Gaynor enquired after a telephone; she had no cell phone and Fern’s had been left in London. She knew Will would come on demand, and she felt the need of reinforcements. But the lines were down because of the storm.

  “Thunder’s stopped,” said the waitress encouragingly, wanting her bed. “It’s just raining.”

  The staff offered to help her shepherd her friend out to the car, but Fern stood up without assistance and Gaynor availed herself only of an umbrella that she returned once Fern was in the passenger seat. She got wet sprinting back to the car and she shut the door in haste, switching on engine and heating. Windshield wipers swept ineffectually at the unrelenting rain. She hoped she would not miss the road back to Yarrow-dale. She still had Will’s instructions, but pouring curtains of water obliterated the landscape and she could see nothing beyond the short range of the headlights. “Are you all right?” she asked Fern, and was thankful to get a response, although Fern’s conversation had shrunk to the purely monosyllabic.