The Dragon Charmer Page 7

  She didn’t like the word “target,” but she retorted as hotly as she could: “Of course I won’t leave! For one thing, I can’t miss the wedding, even if I’m not mad keen on the idea. Fern would never forgive me.”

  “You know, I’ve been wondering …” Will paused, caught on a hesitation.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s too much of a coincidence, everything blowing up again just now. There has to be a connection.”

  “With Fern’s wedding?”

  “It sounds ridiculous, but… I think so.”

  They discussed this possibility for some time without arriving at any satisfactory conclusions. None of this is true, Gaynor told herself. Witchcraft, and malignant spirits, and a goblin in the house who plays the bagpipes at six o’clock in the morning … Of course it isn’t true. But although much of what had happened to her could be dismissed as dreams and fancy, her experience in front of the television with the reaching hand had been hideously real. And Will had not doubted her or laughed at her. As he had believed her, so she must believe him. Anyway, it was so much easier than agonizing about it. Yet even as the thought occurred, uncertainty crept in. “If you’re inventing this to make fun of me,” she said, suddenly shaky, “I’ll—I’ll probably kill you.”

  “I don’t need to invent,” he said, studying her with an air of gravity that reminded her of Fern. “You saw the hand. You dreamed the idol. You heard the pipes. The evidence is all yours. Now, let’s go up to your room. At least I can get rid of that bloody TV set.”

  They went upstairs.

  The television stood there, squat, blank of screen, inert. Yet to Gaynor it seemed to be imbued with a new and terrifying potentiality, an immanent persona far beyond that of normal household gadgetry. She wondered if it was her imagination that it appeared to be waiting.

  She sat down on the bed, feeling stupidly weak at the knees, and there was the remote under her hand, though she was almost sure she had left it on the side table. The power button nudged at her finger.

  “Please take it away,” she said tightly, like a child for whom some ordinary, everyday object has been infected with the stuff of nightmares.

  Will crouched down by the wall to release the plug—and started back abruptly with a four-letter oath. “It shocked me!” he said. “The bloody thing shocked me!”

  “Did you switch it off?”

  He reached out once more, this time for the switch and again pulled his hand back sharply. Gaynor had glimpsed the blue spark that flashed out at his touch. “Maybe you have a strong electric aura,” she offered hesitantly, coming over and bending down beside him. The instant her tentative finger brushed the socket she felt the stab of pain, violent as a burn. For a fraction of a second a current of agony shot up her arm, her fingertip was glued to the power source, the individual hairs on her skin crackled with static. Then somehow she was free, her finger red but otherwise unmarked.

  “Leave it,” said Will. “We need Fern. She could deal with this. She has the right kind of gloves.”

  They went down to the kitchen, where they found Mrs. Wicklow extracting a cake from the oven. With her firm conviction that young people nowadays were all too thin and in constant need of sustenance, she cooked frequently and to excess, although only Will could be said to justify her efforts. But after the horrors of the afternoon Gaynor munched happily on calories and carbohydrates, thankful for their comforting effect. Fern was late back, having gone from the caterers to the wine merchants, from the wine merchants to the church. “We’re invited to the vicarage for dinner,” she called out as she came in. “Is the bath free?”

  Gaynor called back in the affirmative and was vaguely relieved to hear Will following his sister upstairs, sparing her the necessity of relating her story again. Despite all that Will had told her, she could not visualize her friend receiving it with anything but polite disbelief. She waited several minutes and then she, too, went up to the second floor.

  Fern was standing in the bathroom doorway, with the chundering of the hot tap coming from behind her and translucent billows of steam overflowing into the corridor. She had obviously been in the preliminary stages of undress when Will interrupted her: her shoes lay where they had been kicked and her right hand was still clutching a crumpled ball of socks that she squeezed savagely from time to time, apparently unaware of what she was doing. There was an expression on her face that Gaynor had never seen before, a kind of brittleness that looked as if it might fragment at a touch and re-form into something far more dangerous. Gaynor could smell a major row, hovering in the ether like an inflammable gas, waiting for the wrong word to spark it off.

  But all Fern said was: “I told you that TV was a mistake.”

  She led the way up to Gaynor’s room and headed straight for the socket where the set was plugged in.

  “You’ll need the gloves,” Will said. “Alison’s gloves…”

  Fern rounded on him, her eyes bright with pent-up rage and some other feeling, something that might have been a deep secret hurt. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you’re really after. You want me to open her box—Pandora’s box—play with her toys. You want to drag me down into her world. It’s over, Will, long, long over. The witches and the goblins have gone back into the shadows where they belong. We’re in the real world now—for good—and I’m getting married on Saturday, and you can’t stop it even if you call up Azmordis himself.”

  “From the sound of things,” Will said quietly, “he’s coming anyway.”

  “If I didn’t know you better,” Fern said, ignoring him, switching the glare to her friend, “I might think you’d been primed.”

  Gaynor, absorbing the accusation with incredulity, opened her mouth to refute it, but Fern had turned away. She bent down to the socket, the sock ball still crumpled in one fist, and flicked the switch on and off with impunity. “Well, well. Seems perfectly normal to me. On, off. On, off. How unexpected. And the plug—plug out, plug in, plug out. What do you know. If you’ve finished with this farce I’m going to have my bath. I told Maggie we’d be there at seven; please be ready promptly. Let’s not add bad manners to everything else.”

  And to Gaynor: “I thought better of you. I know you don’t like Marcus—”

  “I do like him,” Gaynor said, speaking faster than she thought. “But I’d like him a lot more if you were in love with him.”

  “Love!” Fern cried scornfully—but for all the scorn her voice held an undertone of loss and suffering that checked Gaynor’s rising anger. “That belongs with all those other fairy tales—in the dustbin.”

  She ran out and downstairs: they heard the bathroom door slam. Gaynor had moved to follow but Will held her back. “No point,” he said. “If there’s trouble coming she can’t stop it, not even by marrying boring Marcus.”

  “But I still don’t see what her marriage can have to do with this?” Gaynor said in bewilderment, indicating the television set. “Why is everything getting mixed up?”

  “I think,” Will said, “it’s all to do with motives. Her motives for getting married.”

  “She’s in pain,” said Gaynor. “I heard it in her voice.”

  “She’s in denial,” said Will.

  It was not a scene that augured well for the forthcoming dinner party, but although the three of them walked down to the vicarage in comparative silence, once there the warmth of the Dinsdales’ welcome, the aroma of roasting chicken, and copious quantities of cheap red wine all combined to bring down their hastily erected barriers. Will relaxed into his usual easygoing charm of manner, Fern, perhaps feeling that she might have overreacted earlier on, made a conscious effort to unwind, appealing to her friend for corroboration of every anecdote, and Gaynor, too generous to nurse a sense of injury, responded in kind, suppressing the bevy of doubts and fears that gnawed at her heart. By the time they were ready to leave, their mutual tensions, though not forgotten, were set aside. They strolled homeward in harmony, steering the conversation clea
r of uncomfortable subjects, admiring the stars that had chosen to put in an appearance in the clearing sky, and pausing to listen for night birds, or to glimpse a furtive shadow that might have been a fox, slinking across the road toward the river. For Gaynor, a city girl like Fern, though more from career necessity than choice, the country held its own special magic. The belated child of a flagging marriage with three siblings already grown up, she had never really felt part of a family, and now, with Fern and her brother, she knew something of the closeness she had missed. The wine warmed her, the night bewitched her. She would have subordinated a whole catalogue of private doubts to preserve that feeling undamaged.

  “Perhaps we’ll see the owl,” she said as they drew near the house.

  “I thought that was a dream,” said Will. “Riding on the back of a giant owl… or did you see a real one?”

  “I’m not sure,” Gaynor admitted. “Maybe it was just a dream.”

  “I’ve heard one round here at night,” Fern said, and a quick shiver ran through her, as if at a sudden chill.

  Indoors, they said good night with more affection than was customary, Fern even going so far as to embrace her friend, although she had never acquired the London habit of scattering kisses among all and sundry. Gaynor retired to her room, feeling insensibly relieved. As she undressed she found herself looking at the television set, disconnected now but still retaining its air of bland threat, as if at any moment the screen might flicker into unwholesome life. She thought: I don’t want it in here; but when she tried to move it, overcoming a sudden reluctance to approach or handle it, the machine felt awkward, at once slippery and heavy, unnaturally heavy. She could not seem to get a grip on it. In the end she gave up, but the blank screen continued to trouble her, so she draped a towel over it, putting a china bowl on the top to prevent the makeshift covering sliding off. Will would probably be asleep now; she could not disturb him just to help her shift the television. She climbed into bed and after some time lying wakeful, nerves on the stretch, she, too, slept.

  She was standing in front of the mirror, face-to-face with her reflection. But it looked different from earlier in the day: it had acquired a sort of intense, serious beauty, an antique glamor that had little to do with the real Gaynor. It isn’t me, she thought, but I wish it was. Behind the reflection her room, too, had changed. There were books, pictures, a potted plant whose single flower resembled puckered red lips, a bedspread made of peacock feathers. A smoked glass shade softened the lightbulb to a dull glow. This isn’t my room, she realized. This is Alison’s room, the way it must have looked when she lived here. Mirrors remember. Her gaze returned to her own image with awakening dread: she knew what would happen with that dream-knowing that is both terrible and ineffectual, a vain striving to alter the unalterable. Dream turned to nightmare: the face before her shrank into a tapering oval, hollow cheeked, broad browed; the deep eyes were elongated into slits, not dark but bright, shining with the multifaceted glitter of cut crystal. A dull pallor rippled through her hair, transforming it into the dim tresses of a phantom. Gaynor was paralyzed, unable to twitch a muscle, but in the mirror her mouth widened into a thin crimson smile, curling up toward her cheekbones, image surveying reality with cold mockery. The surface of the glass was no longer hard and solid: it had become little more than a skin, the thickness of a molecule, dividing her from the other room, the other person. And then the reflection reached out, and the skin broke, and the stranger stepped out of the mirror into Gaynor’s bedroom.

  “Alison,” said Gaynor.

  “Alimond,” said the stranger. “Alison was just a name. Alimond is my true Self.”

  “Why have you come back?”

  The smile became laughter, a tinkling silvery laughter like the sound of breaking glass. “Why do you think?” she said. “To watch television, of course. I’ll tell you a secret: there is no television beyond the Gate of Death. Neither in heaven nor in hell. All we are allowed to see is our own lives and the lives of those we touched; an endless replaying of all our yesterdays, all our failures, all our mistakes. Think of that, ere your time comes. Live yourself a life worth watching, before it’s too late.”

  She took Gaynor’s hand as she spoke: her grip felt insubstantial, light as a zephyr, but cold, so cold. The icy chill stabbed Gaynor to the bone.

  Alimond said: “Plug the television in, and switch it on.”

  Gaynor tried to pull free of the cold ethereal grasp but her nerve withered and her strength turned to water. “You are too sensitive,” murmured Alimond. “Too delicate to resist, too feeble to fight. You have neither the backbone nor the Gift to stand against me. Fernanda chooses her friends unwisely. Push the plug in…”

  She’s right, Gaynor’s thought responded, taking control of mind and body. You’re betraying Fern, betraying yourself. You cannot help it…

  She was on her knees by the wall; she heard the click of re-connection as the plug slid home. Alimond guided her hand toward the switch. Then the dream faded into sleep, and darkness enveloped her.

  When she woke again, the room was shaking. The bed juddered, the floor vibrated; above her she could make out the old-fashioned fringed lampshade twitching like a restless animal. She struggled to sit up and saw the television rattling and shuddering as if seized with an ague. Its fever seemed to have communicated itself to the rest of the furniture: even the heavy wardrobe creaked in response. As she watched, the china bowl on top of the set danced sideways, trembled on the edge, and fell to the ground, rolling unbroken on the carpet. The towel followed suit, sidling inch by inch across the screen and then collapsing floorward in a heap. In a sudden access of terror Gaynor reached for the remote and flung it with all her strength against the wall, but the impact must have jolted the power button, for even as it hit the television screen exploded into color. The furniture was still again; the picture glowed in the darkness like an extraterrestrial visitation. Gaynor sat bolt upright, clutching the bedclothes. It felt like a dream, dreadful and inexorable, but she knew she wasn’t dreaming now. The image was flat, two-dimensional, not the hole in the very fabric of existence through which she had seen the idol in the temple. But it had been from an apparently normal image that Dr. Laye had turned and looked at her, and stretched out his hand…

  She was watching a vintage horror film. Pseudo-Victorian costumes, men with sixties sideburns, a heroine with false eyelashes and heaving bosom. It was low camp, reassuringly familiar, unalarming. Improbable plastic bats circled a Gothic mansion that had loomed its way through a hundred such scenes.

  Presently one of the bats came too close to the screen, thrusting its wing tip into the room…

  Fern and Will woke to the sound of screaming.

  * * *

  The room was full of bats. They blundered into the passage when Will opened the door, ricocheted to and fro as he switched on the light. Gaynor was covered in them, her pajamas hooked and tugged and clawed, her hair tangled with wildly threshing wings. She beat at them in a frenzy, irrational with terror, but her fear only served to madden them, and they swarmed around her like flies on a corpse. Their squashed-up snouts resembled wrinkled leaves, their blind eyes were puckered, their teeth needle pointed. More flew out of the television at every moment, tearing themselves free of the screen with a sound like lips smacking. Miniature lightnings ran up and down the power cord.

  “Help her,” Fern said to her brother, and raced back to her room, extricating the box from under her bed—the box she never looked at, never touched catching the scent of the long-lost forest, fumbling inside for the gloves she had always refused to wear. Upstairs, Will was trying to reach the figure on the bed, arms flailing in a vain attempt to disperse the bat cloud.

  When Fern reentered, the gloves were already on her hands. The scales grew onto her flesh, chameleon patterns mottled her fingers. She reached for the socket with lizard’s paws; the plug spat fire as she wrenched it out. There was no explosion, no noise, just the suddenness of silence. The screen re
verted to blank; the bats vanished. Gaynor drew a long sobbing breath and then clung to Will, shaking spasmodically. Fern gazed down for a minute at the hands that were no longer hers, then very carefully, like a snake divesting itself of its skin, she peeled off the gloves.

  They deposited the television outside by the dustbins after Will, at Fern’s insistence, had attacked it with a hammer. “What about the mirror?” he said. “We can’t leave it there.”

  “Swap it with the one in the end room,” Fern suggested. “It’s even dirtier, I’m afraid,” she apologized to Gaynor, “but at least you know the nastiest thing you’ll ever see in it is Will, peering over your shoulder.”

  Gaynor managed an unsteady laugh. They were sitting in the kitchen over mugs of strong, sweet cocoa, laced and chased with whiskey. Mindful of the shuddering cold that so often follows shock, Fern had pressed a hot-water bottle on her friend and wrapped her in a spare blanket. “If you want to leave,” Fern said, “I’ll understand. Something, or someone, is trying to use you, victimize you … perhaps to get to me. I don’t know why. I wish I did.”

  “Ragginbone might know,” Will offered.

  “Then again he might not.” Fern opened a drawer and fished out a crumpled packet of cigarettes, left behind by a visitor months or even years ago. They were French, their acidic pungency only enhanced by the passage of time. She extracted one, remolded its squashed contours into a vaguely tubular shape, and lit it experimentally.

  “Why on earth are you doing that?” Will demanded. “You never smoke.”

  “I feel like making a gesture.” She drew on the cigarette cautiously, expelling the smoke without inhaling. “This is disgusting. It’s just what I need.”

  “It has to be Azmordis behind this business, doesn’t it?” Will said after a pause.

  “Don’t name him,” his sister admonished. “Not if he’s around. Ragginbone said he would be seriously weakened after Ixavo’s death, maybe for a long time—but how long is that? Twelve years? And what kind of time—real time or weretime, time here or elsewhere?”