The Dragon Charmer Read online

  “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.”

  Now we search the smoke for her, skimming other visions, bending our dual will to a single task. But the fire-magic is wayward and unpredictable: it may sometimes be guided but it cannot be forced. The images unravel before us in a jumble, distorted by our pressure, quick-changing, wavering, breaking up. Irrelevancies intrude, a cavalcade of monsters from the long-lost past, mermaid, unicorn, Sea Serpent, interspersed with glimpses that might, or might not, be more significant: the hatchling perching on a dark, long-fingered hand, a solitary flower opening suddenly in a withered garden like the unlidding of a watching eye. Time here has no meaning, but in the world beyond Time passes, years maybe, ere we see her again. And the vision, when it comes, takes us off guard, a broad vista unwinding slowly in an interlude of distraction, a road that meanders with the contours of the land, white puffball clouds trailing in the wake of a spring breeze. A horseless car is traveling along the road: the sunlight winks off its steel-green coachwork. The roof is folded back to leave the top open; music emanates from a mechanical device within, not the raucous drumbeat of the rabble but a music of deep notes and mellow harmonies, flowing like the hills. The girl is driving the car. She looks different, older, her small-boned face hollowed into shape, tapering, purity giving way to definition, a slight pixie look tempered by the familiar gravitas. More than ever, it is a face of secrets. Her hair is cut in a straight line across her brow and level with her jaw. As the car accelerates the wind fans the hair out from her temples and sweeps back her fringe, revealing that irregularity of growth at the parting that we call the Witch’s Crook. Her mouth does not smile. Her companion—another girl—is of no importance. I resist the urge to look too closely, chary of alarming her, plucking Sysselore away from the smoke and letting the picture haze over.

  When we need her, we will find her. I know that now.

  We must be ready.

  V

  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 semidark. 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.

  After she returned from the post office Fern had to drive into Whitby to sort out a problem with the caterers. “Do you want to come?” she asked, but Gaynor declined. Will was out painting somewhere and she welcomed the idea of some time to herself. She stood in the room gazing in the mirror—Alison’s mirror—willing it to show her something, part fanciful, part skeptical, seeing only herself. A long pale face, faintly medieval, or so she liked to think, since medieval was better than plain. Brown eyes set deep under serious eyebrows. A thin, sad mouth, though why it should be sad she did not know, only that this was what she had been told. And the hair that was her glory, very long and very dark, falling like a cloak about her shoulders. Alison Redmond had had such hair, Maggie had said, though for some reason Gaynor pictured it as fairer than her own, the color of dust and shadows.

  “You stare much harder at t’glass you’ll crack it,” came a voice from the doorway. Gaynor had forgotten Mrs. Wick-low. She jumped and flushed, stammering something incoherent, but the housekeeper interrupted. “You want to be careful. Mirrors remember, or so my mother used to say. You never know what it might show you. That was the one used to hang in her room. I’ve cleaned it and polished it up many a time, but the reflection never looks right to me.”

  “What was she like?” asked Gaynor, seizing the opportunity. “Alison, I mean.”

  “Out for what she could get,” Mrs. Wicklow stated. “This house is full of old things antiques and stuff that the Captain brought back from his travels. Her eyes had a sort of glistening look when she saw them. Greedy. Wouldn’t have surprised me if she were mixed up with real criminals. She didn’t like anyone in t’bedroom when she was away. We didn’t have no key then but she did something to the doorknob something with electricity. Funny, that.” She turned toward the stairs. “You come down now and have a bite of lunch. You young girls, you’re all too thin. You worry too much about your figures.”

  Gaynor followed her obediently. “I gather Alison drowned,” she continued cautiously. “In some kind of freak flood?”

  “That’s what they say,” said Mrs. Wicklow. “Must have been an underground spring, though I never heard of one round here. Swept most of the barn away, it did; they pulled down t’rest. She’d had the builders in there, ‘doing it up’ she said. Happen they tapped into something.”

  “I didn’t know there was a barn,” said Gaynor.

  “The Captain used to keep some of his stuff in there. Rubbish mostly, if you ask me. He’d got half a boat he’d picked up somewhere, part of a wreck he said, with a woman on the front baring her all. Fern insisted they give it to a museum. Will wanted to keep it, but it wasn’t healthy for a young man. There’s trouble enough him messing around with Art.”

  “Alison worked for an art gallery, didn’t she?” Gaynor persisted, resisting diversion.

  “Aye,” said the housekeeper. “She and that man with the white hair. I didn’t like him at all, for all his greasy manners. Oily as a tinned sardine, he was. They never found out what happened to him.”

  “What do you mean?” Gaynor had never heard of a man with white hair.

  “Done a bunk, so they said. Left his car here, too: a flash white car to match the hair. Happen that’s why he bought it: he was the type. A proper mystery, that was. He walked into t’drawing room and never walked out. Mind, that was the same time Fern got lost, so we thought she might have gone with him, though not willing, I was sure of that. They were bad days for all of us, and bad to remember, but she came back all right. They said she’d been sick, some fancy name they gave it, one of these newfangled things you hear about on t’telly. She was well enough after, but she wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “I know,” said Gaynor as they entered the kitchen. “But—the man…?”

  “I reckon he was a crook, like his Alison. They were in it together, whatever it was. Anyhow, that fancy car of his sat here and sat here till the police came and towed it away. He didn’t come back at all.” She concluded, with a certain grim satisfaction: “And good rid
dance to both of ‘em.”

  Gaynor digested this with the sandwich lunch Mrs. Wicklow insisted on feeding her, though she wasn’t really hungry. Afterward, Fern and Will still being absent, she returned to her room. A flick through the newspaper had reminded her there was a program she wanted to catch on the television, an afternoon repeat of a documentary that she thought might be of professional interest. She told herself it was stupid to be nervous about switching the set on. She had had a nightmare the previous day, that was all, probably suggested by an item on the news—one of those vivid, surreal spasms of dreaming that can invade a shallow sleep. (Nightmares and dreams, pervading the dark, spilling over into reality…) All the same, she was secretly relieved when she pressed the button on the remote and a normal picture appeared, flat and off-color. Her program was already under way, the camera following a conscientiously enthusiastic presenter around a succession of museums and private collections. Presently Gaynor forgot her qualms, becoming totally absorbed in her subject. The camera panned over early printing on cracked paper, incunabula and scrolls, wooden plaques and broken sections of stone tablets. “Here we are in the little-known Museum of Ancient Writings,” announced the presenter, “hidden away in a back street in York …” Near enough, thought Gaynor. I ought to pay it a visit. The curator, a dingy young man of thirty-odd who appeared to have been prematurely aged by the manuscripts that surrounded him, talked in a lengthy drone that Gaynor tuned out, wishing instead that the image would focus longer and more closely on some of the documents. “A Historie of Dragonf,” she read on the cover of a medieval book gloriously inlaid with serpentine monsters in gold leaf. Invisible hands turned the pages, but too swiftly for her to catch more than a line here and there. “A grate dragon, grater than anye other lyving beaste … and the Knyghte cast his speare at yt, but yt was not slaine … Its mouthe opened, and the shafte was consumed with fire, but yt swallowed the hedde, which was … stone yet not stone, a thyng of grate power and magicke…” The picture changed, returning to the presenter, now interviewing a much older man who was evidently on the board in some significant capacity. A subtitle indicated that this was Dr. Jerrold Laye, a university lecturer specializing in this field. “Not a name I know,” Gaynor said aloud, and for a fraction of a second his hooked profile froze, almost as if he had overheard.

  Gaynor felt suddenly very cold. The camera veered from profile to full face, closing in until Dr. Laye’s physiognomy filled the whole screen. She was staring at him as if hypnotized, unable to avert her gaze without a degree of effort that seemed all but impossible. She saw a high, sloping brow from which the hair was receding in a double arch, the nose of a Roman emperor, the flinty jawline of a fanatic. Pronounced cheekbones pulled his skin into taut, sharp creases that had little to do with smiling. What hair he still possessed was gray; so was his complexion, gray as paste, though whether this was the result of poor color quality on the television or the aftereffect of disease she could not guess. His eyebrows formed another double arch, shaggy with drooping hairs, beneath which his eyes lurked, half hidden by membranous lids of a curiously scaly appearance, like the extra eyelid possessed by certain reptiles. As the camera angle altered so did the direction of his regard, until he seemed to be looking not at the interviewer but at the viewer, staring straight out of the screen at Gaynor herself. His eyes were pale blue, and cold as a cleft in an ice floe. He can’t really see me, she told herself. He’s just looking into the lens: that’s all it is. He can’t see me. The interview wound down; the voice of the presenter faded out. Dr. Laye extended his hand—a large, narrow hand, the fingers elongated beyond elegance, supple beyond nature. He was reaching toward her, and toward her … out of the picture, into the room. The image of his head and shoulders remained flat but the section of arm emerging from it was three-dimensional, and it seemed to be pulling the screen as if it were made of some elastic substance, distorting it. Gaynor did not move. Shock, horror, disbelief petrified every muscle. If it touches me, she thought, I’ll faint…

  But it did not touch her. The index finger curled like a scorpion’s tail in a gesture of beckoning, at once sinister and horribly suggestive. She could see the nail in great detail, an old man’s nail like a sliver of horn with a thin rind of yellow along the outer edge and a purplish darkening above the cuticle. The skin was definitely gray, the color of ash, though the tint of normal flesh showed in the creases and in a glimpse of the palm. On the screen, something that might have been intended for a smile stretched Dr. Laye’s mouth.

  “I look forward to meeting you,” he said.

  The hand withdrew, the bent fingertip wriggling slowly to emphasize its meaning. Then the flat image swallowed it, and it was back in its former place on Dr. Laye’s lap, and he turned again to the presenter, who appeared to have noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Her voice gradually resumed its earlier flow, as if someone were gently turning up the volume. Gaynor switched off the television, feeling actually sick from the release of tension. When she was able she went over and touched the blank screen, but it felt solid and inflexible. She ran downstairs to find Mrs. Wicklow, not to tell her what had happened—how could she do that?—but for the reassurance of her company.

  But she had to tell someone.

  Will came home first.

  “There was this amazing cloud effect,” he said, pushing his studio door open with one shoulder, his arms full of camera, sketch pad, folding stool. “Like a great gray hand reaching out over the landscape… and the sun leaking between two of its fingers in visible shafts, making the dark somehow more ominous. I got the outline down and took some pictures before the light changed, but now now I need to let the image develop, sort of grow in my imagination…”

  “Until the cloud really is a hand?” suggested Gaynor with an involuntary shudder.

  “Maybe.” He was depositing pad, stool, camera on various surfaces but he did not miss her reaction. “What’s the matter?”

  She told him. About the program, and Dr. Laye, and the hand emerging from the television screen, and her waking nightmare the preceding evening, with the idol that came to life. She even told him about the dreams and the sound of bagpipes. He listened without interruption, although when she came to the last point he laughed suddenly.

  “You needn’t worry about that,” he said. “It’s just the house-goblin.”

  “House-goblin?” she echoed faintly.

  “In the old days nearly every house had its own goblin. Or gremlin, bogey, whichever you prefer. Nowadays, they’re much rarer. Too many houses, too much intrusive technology, too few goblins. This house had one when we first came here, but Alison … got rid of him. She was like that. Anyway, the place felt a bit empty without one, so I advertised for a replacement. In a manner of speaking. Bradachin came from a Scottish castle and I think his heart’s in the Highlands still at least in the wee small hours. He turned up with a set of pipes and a rusty spear that looks as old as war itself. Anyway, don’t let him trouble you. This is his house now and we’re his people: that means he’s for us.”

  “Have you ever seen him?” asked Gaynor, skepticism waning after her own experiences.

  “Of course. So will you, I expect when he’s ready.”

  “I don’t particularly want to see a goblin,” Gaynor protested, adding somberly: “I’ve seen enough. More than enough.”

  Will put his arms around her for the second time, and despite recent fear and present distress she was suddenly very conscious of his superior height and the coiled-wire strength of his young muscles. “We’ll have to tell Ragginbone about all this,” he said at last. “He’ll know what’s going on. At least, he might. I don’t like the sound of that business with the idol. We’ve been there before.” She glanced up, questioning. “There was a statue here when we came, some kind of ancient deity, only a couple of feet high but… Fortunately, it got smashed. It was being used as a receptor—like a transmitter—by a malignant spirit. Very old, very powerful, very dangerous.”


  “What spirit?” said Gaynor, abandoning disbelief altogether, at least for the present.

  “He had a good many names,” Will said. “He’d been worshiped as a god, reviled as a demon … The one I remember was Azmordis, but it’s best not to use it too freely. Demons have a tendency to come when they’re called. Ragginbone always referred to him simply as the Old Spirit. He is—or was—very strong, too strong for us to fight, but because of what Fern did he was weakened, and Ragginbone thought he might not return here. It seems he was wrong.”

  “I don’t like any of this,” said Gaynor. “I’ve never trusted the supernatural.”

  Will smiled ruefully. “Neither have I.”

  “I went to a séance once,” she continued. His arms were still around her and she found a peculiar comfort in conversing with his chest. “It was all nonsense: this dreadful old woman who looked like a caricature of a tea lady, pretending to go into a trance and faking these silly voices. If I were dead, and I wanted to communicate with somebody, I’m sure I could do it without all that rigmarole. But there was something coming through, something … unhealthy. Maybe it was in the subconscious minds of the participants. Anyway, whatever it was, it felt wrong. I don’t want to be mixed up in anything like that again.”

  “You could leave,” said Will, releasing her. “For some reason, you’re a target, but away from here you’d be safe. I’m sure of that.”