THE
DRAGON-
CHARMER

Jan Siegel

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents in are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper Voyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by Voyager 2000

Copyright © Jan Siegel 2000

Jan Siegel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780002258371

Ebook Edition © MAY 2009 ISBN: 9780007321810

Version: 2016-10-24

Contents

Title Page Copyright After Blake: Dragon Prologue: Fernanda Part One: Witchcraft Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Part Two: Dragoncraft Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Epilogue: Morgus Glossary: Names On Dragons On The Gift Keep Reading Acknowledgements About the Author By Jan Siegel About the Publisher

After Blake: DRAGON

We dreamed a dream of fire made flesh –

we gave it wings to soar on high –

an earthquake tread, and burning breath –

a thunderbolt that clove the sky –

its belly seethed with ancient bile;

its brain was forged in human guile and human strength with Vulcan’s art beat out the hammer of its heart.

We dreamed a dream of hide and horn –

the wonder of a thousand tales –

we built from prehistoric bones –

we armoured it in iron scales –

and all our rage, ambition, greed

re-shaped our dream into our need

with mortal hands to seize the fire –

to more-than-mortal power aspire.

And when the heav’n threw down the sun

and seared whole cities from the earth,

when silence fell of endless death

and wail of demons brought to birth –

when far above the shattered skies

the angels hid their rainbow eyes –

did we smile our work to see? Did Man, who made the gods, make Thee?

PROLOGUE

Fernanda

That night, she dreamed she was back in the city. It was not the first such dream: she had had many in the weeks since she left, some blurred, beyond the reach of memory, some clearer; but this was the most painfully vivid. She was standing on the mountainside wrapped in the warm southern dusk, in a blue garden musky with the ghosts of daytime flower-scents. Here were the villas and palaces of the aristocracy, set amongst their terraced lawns and well-watered shrubberies. There was a house nearby: she could see the golden arch of door or window floating somewhere behind a filigree of netted stems. Its light drew her; and then she was close by, staring inside.

There were three people in the room: a woman, a young man, and a girl. They were sitting close together, deep in talk. She knew them all – she knew them well – so well that it hurt to look at them – the youth with his averted profile, just as he had appeared the first time she saw him properly, and the woman with silver glints in her long hair, though she was not very old, and the girl with her back to the window. Herself. She wore the veil she had been given on the last day, hiding her cropped head, but the colours and patterns which had always seemed so dim and elusive poured down her back like some inscrutable liquid script, tinted in rainbows. It had the power of protection, she had been told. Her unspecified anguish crystallised into the horror of imminent doom; she saw herself marked out by the veil, designated for a future in which the others had no part. She tried to enter through the glassless window, but an invisible barrier held her back; she cried out – Take it off! Take off the veil! – but her voice made no sound. The whorls and sigils of the design detached themselves from the material and drifted towards her, swirling together into a maelstrom, and she was rushing into it, sucked down and down into deep water.

And now the blue which engulfed her was the ultramarine of an undersea world. Great weeds arose in front of her, billowing like curtains in the currents of the wide ocean. They divided, and she passed through into a coral kingdom. But beyond the branching fans of white and scarlet and the groping tentacles of hungry flowerets she saw isolated pillars, roofless walls, broken towers. She floated over gaping rooms where tiny fish played at hide-and-seek with larger predators, and the spotted eel and giant octopus laired in cellar and well-shaft. And ahead, in the shallows, the sun turned the water all to golden green, and she made out the gleaming spire of a minaret, the curve of a fractured dome. Then at last she found what she knew she had been seeking. He lay in a dim hollow beyond the reach of the sun, and stones weighted the rags of his clothing, and his dark hair moved like filmy weed in the current, and white shells covered his eyes. She lifted the stones which pinned him down, and removed the white shells, and kissed his cold, cold lips – a witch’s kiss, to break the spell – and his eyes opened, and gazed at her. The water receded like waves from a beach, and he was lying on an apricot shore under a sky of bronze, and his arms were reaching for her …

The dream faded towards awakening, and, as always, there was a moment in between, a moment of unknowing, when the past lingered and the present was void, a waking to hope and the brightness of a new day. Then realisation returned, and all that she had gained, and all that she had lost, rushed over her in a flood of suffering reborn, so she thought her spirit was too frail a thing to endure so much pain. And it was the same every day, every waking. She remembered that it was her birthday, her seventeenth. Tomorrow she would return to London, to school, to study, to the slow inexorable unrolling of her predictable life. She was a diligent student: she would take exams and go to university and succeed in a suitable career. And one day perhaps she would marry, because that was what you did, and have children, and live to be forty, fifty, ninety, until, unimaginable though it seemed, she was old and tired, and the dream came from which there was no awakening. A life sentence. Maybe eventually the acuteness of her loss would dull to an ache, and the routine of her daily existence would numb her feelings and deaden her heart; but in the morning of her youth she knew that this moment, this emptiness was relentless and forever. She had been told she had the Gift, setting her apart from other mortals – that if she willed it she might live ageless and long – but that fantasy had gone with the city, if indeed it had ever been real. And why should she wish to lengthen the time of her suffering?

When she got up she found the veil discarded on a chair – the veil that was all she had left – its patterns dimmed to shadows, its colours too subtle for the human eye. For a minute she held it, letting its airy substance slide through her fingers; then her grip tightened, and she pulled with sudden violence, trying to tear it apart, but the gossamer was too strong for her. She made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cry, looked in vain for scissors, not knowing whether to be relieved or angry when none came to hand. Finally, she folded it up small – she was always methodical – and thrust it into the back of a drawer, willing it to be gone with her dreams, back into the otherworld from whence it came.

Downstairs there was melon for breakfast – her favourite – and presents from her father and brother. ‘What do you want to do for your birthday?’ they asked.

‘Go back to London,’ she said. ‘For good.’

PART ONE

Witchcraft

I

The battle was over, and now Nature was moving in to clean up. The early evening air was not cold enough to deter the flies which gathered around the hummocks of the dead; tiny crawling things invaded the chinks between jerkin and hauberk; rats, foxes, and wolves skirted the open ground, scenting a free feast. The smaller scavengers were bolder, the larger ones stayed under cover, where the fighting had spilled into the wood and bodies sprawled on the residue of last year’s autumn. Overhead, the birds arrived in force: red kites, ravens, carrion-crows, wheeling and swooping in to settle thickly on the huddled mounds. And here and there a living human scuttled from corpse to corpse, more furtive than bird or beast, plucking rings from fingers, daggers from wounds, groping among rent clothing for hidden purse or love-locket.

But one figure was not furtive. She came down from the crag where she had stood to view the battle, black-cloaked, head covered, long snakes of hair, raven-dark, escaping from the confines of her hood. Swiftly she moved across the killing ground, pausing occasionally to peer more closely at the dead, seeking a familiar face or faces among the silent horde. Her own remained unseen but her height, her rapid stride, her evident indifference to any lurking threat told their own tale. The looters shrank from her, skulking out of sight until she passed; a carrion-crow raised its head and gave a single harsh cry, as if in greeting. The setting sun, falling beneath the cloud-canopy of the afternoon, flung long shadows across the land, touching pallid brow and empty eye with reflected fire, like an illusion of life returning. And so she found one that she sought, under the first of the trees, his helmet knocked awry to leave his black curls tumbling free, his beautiful features limned with the day’s last gold. A deep thrust, probably from a broadsword, had pierced his armour and opened his belly, a side-swipe had half-severed his neck. She brushed his cheek with the white smooth fingertips of one who has never spun, nor cooked, nor washed her clothes. ‘You were impatient, as always,’ she said, and if there was regret in her voice, it was without tears. ‘You acted too soon. Folly. Folly and waste! If you had waited, all Britain would be under my hand.’ There was no one nearby to hear her, yet the birds ceased their gorging at her words, and the very buzzing of the flies was stilled.

Then she straightened up, and moved away into the wood. The lake lay ahead of her, gleaming between the trees. The rocky slopes beyond and the molten chasm of sunset between cloud and hill were reflected without a quiver in its unwrinkled surface. She paced the shore, searching. Presently she found a cushion of moss darkly stained, as if something had lain and bled there; a torn cloak was abandoned nearby, a dented shield, a crowned helm. The woman picked up the crown, twisting and turning it in her hands. Then she went to the lake’s edge and peered down, muttering secret words in an ancient tongue. A shape appeared in the water-mirror, inverted, a reflection where there was nothing to reflect. A boat, moving slowly, whose doleful burden she could not see, though she could guess, and sitting in the bows a woman with hair as dark as her own. The woman smiled at her from the depths of the illusion, a sweet, triumphant smile. ‘He is mine now,’ she said. ‘Dead or dying, he is mine forever.’ The words were not spoken aloud, but simply arrived in the watcher’s mind, clearer than any sound. She made a brusque gesture as if brushing something away, and the chimera vanished, leaving the lake as before.

‘What of the sword?’ she asked of the air and the trees; but no one answered. ‘Was it returned whence it came?’ She gave a mirthless laugh, hollow within the hood, and lifting the crown, flung it far out across the water. It broke the smooth surface into widening ripples, and was gone.

She walked off through the wood, searching no longer, driven by some other purpose. Now, the standing hills had swallowed the sunset, and dusk was snared in the branches of the trees. The shadows ran together, becoming one shadow, a darkness through which the woman strode without trip or stumble, unhesitating and unafraid. She came to a place where three trees met, tangling overhead, twig locked with twig in a wrestling match as long and slow as growth. It was a place at the heart of all wildness, deep in the wood, black with more than the nightfall. She stopped there, seeing a thickening in the darkness, the gleam of eyes without a face. ‘Morgus,’ whispered a voice which might have been the wind in the leaves, yet the night was windless, and ‘Morgus’ hollow as the earth’s groaning.

‘What do you want of me?’ she said, and even then, her tone was without fear.

‘You have lost,’ said the voice at the heart of the wood. ‘Ships are coming on the wings of storm, and the northmen with their ice-grey eyes and their snow-blond hair will sweep like winter over this island that you love. The king might have resisted them, but through your machinations he is overthrown, and the kingdom for which you schemed and murdered is broken. Your time is over. You must pass the Gate or linger in vain, clinging to old revenges, until your body withers and only your spirit remains, a thin grey ghost wailing in loneliness. I did not even have to lift my hand: you have given Britain to me.’

‘I have lost a battle,’ she said, ‘in a long war. I am not yet ready to die.’

‘Then live.’ The voice was gentled, a murmur that seemed to come from every corner of the wood, and the night was like velvet. ‘Am I not Oldest and mightiest? Am I not a god in the dark? Give me your destiny and I will remould it to your heart’s desire. You will be numbered among the Serafain, the Fellangels who shadow the world with their black wings. Only submit yourself to me, and all that you dream of shall be yours.’

‘He who offers to treat with the loser has won no victory,’ she retorted. ‘I will have no truck with demon or god. Begone from this place, Old One, or try your strength against the Gift of Men. Vardé! Go back to the abyss where you were spawned! Néhaman! Envarré!’

The darkness heaved and shrank; the eye-gleams slid away from her, will-o’-the-wisps that separated and flickered among the trees. She sensed an anger that flared and faded, heard an echo of cold laughter. ‘I do not need to destroy you, Morgus. I will leave you to destroy yourself.’ And then the wood was empty, and she went on alone.

Emerging from the trees, she came to an open space where the few survivors of the conflict had begun to gather the bodies for burial, and dug a pit to accommodate them. But the gravediggers had gone, postponing their sombre task till morning. A couple of torches had been left behind, thrust into the loose soil piled up by their labours; the quavering flames cast a red light which hovered uncertainly over the neighbouring corpses, some shrouded in cloaks too tattered for re-use, others exposed. These were ordinary soldiers, serfs and peasants: what little armour they might have worn had been taken, even their boots were gone. Their bare feet showed the blotches of posthumous bruising. The pit itself was filled with a trembling shadow as black as ink.

Just beyond the range of the torches a figure waited, still as an animal crouched to spring. It might have been monstrous or simply grotesque; in the dark, little could be distinguished. The glancing flamelight caught a curled horn, a clawed foot, a human arm. The woman halted, staring at it, and her sudden fury was palpable.

‘Are you looking for your brother? He lies elsewhere. Go sniff him out, you may get there before the ravens and the wolves have done with him. Perhaps there will be a bone or two left for you to gnaw, if it pleases you. Or do you merely wish to gloat?’

‘Both,’ the creature snarled. ‘Why not? He and his friends hunted me – when it amused them. Now he hunts with the pack of Arawn in the Grey Plains. I only hope it is his turn to play the quarry.’

‘Your nature matches your face,’ said she.

‘As yours does not. I am as you made me, as you named me. You wanted a weapon, not a son.’

‘I named you when you were unborn, when the power was great in me.’ Her bitterness rasped the air like a jagged knife. ‘I wanted to shape your spirit into something fierce and shining, deadly as Caliburn. A vain intent. I did not get a weapon, only a burden; no warrior, but a beast. Do not tempt me with your insolence! I made you, and I may destroy you, if I choose.’

‘I am flesh of your flesh,’ the creature said, and the menace transformed his voice into a growl.

‘You are my failure,’ she snapped, ‘and I obliterate failure.’ She raised her hand, crying a word of Command, and a lash of darkness uncoiled from her grasp and licked about the monster’s flank like a whip. He gave a howl of rage and pain, and vanished into the night.

The torches flinched and guttered. For an instant the red light danced over the cloaked shape and plunged within the cavern of the hood, and the face that sprang to life there was the face of the woman in the boat, but without the smile. Pale-skinned, dark-browed, with lips bitten into blood from the tension of the battle and eyes black as the Pit. For a few seconds the face hung there, glimmering in the torchlight. Then the flames died, and face and woman were gone.

I have known many battles, many defeats. I have been a fugitive, hiding in the hollow hills, spinning the blood-magic only in the dark. The children of the north ruled my kingdom, and the Oldest Spirit hunted me with the hounds of Arawn, and I fled from them riding on a giant owl, over the edge of being, out of the world, out of Time, to this place which was in the very beginning. Only the great birds come here, and a few other strays who crossed the boundary in the days when the barrier between worlds was thinner, and have never returned. But the witchkind may find the way, in desperation or need, and then there is no going back, and no going forward. So I dwell here, in the cave beneath the Tree, I and another who eluded persecution or senility, beyond the reach of the past, awaiting a new future. This is the Ancient of Trees, older than history, older than memory – the Tree of Life, whose branches uphold Middle-Earth and whose roots reach down into the deeps of the underworld. And maybe once it grew in an orchard behind a high wall, and the apples of Good and Evil hung from its bough. No apples hang there now, but in due season it bears other fruit. The heads of the dead, which swell and ripen on their stems until the eyes open and the lips writhe, and sap drips from each truncated gorge. We can hear them muttering sometimes, louder than the wind. And then a storm will come and shake the Tree until they fall, pounding the earth like hail, and the wild hog will follow, rooting in the heaps with its tusks, glutting itself on windfalls, and the sound of its crunching carries even to the cave below. Perhaps apples fell there, once upon a time, but the wild hog does not notice the difference, or care. All who have done evil in their lives must hang a season on that Tree, or so they say; yet who amongst us has not done evil, some time or other? Tell me that!

You may think this is all mere fancy, the delusions of a mind warped with age and power. Come walk with me then, under the Tree, and you will see the uneaten heads rotting on the ground, and the white grubs that crawl into each open ear and lay their eggs in the shelter of the skull, and the mouths that twitch and gape until the last of the brain has been nibbled away. I saw my sister once, hanging on a low branch. Oh, not my sister Sysselore – my sister in power, my sister in kind – I mean my blood-sister, my rival, my twin. Morgun. She ripened into beauty like a pale fruit, milky-skinned, raven-haired, but when her eyes opened they were cold, and bitterness dragged at her features. ‘You will hang here too,’ she said to me, ‘one day.’ The heads often talk to you, whether they know you or not. I suppose talk is all they can manage. I saw another that I recognised, not so long ago. We had had great hopes of her once, but she would not listen. A famine devoured her from within. I remember she had bewitched her hair so that it grew unnaturally long, and it brushed against my brow like some clinging creeper. It was wet not with sap but with water, though we had had no rain, and her budding face, still only half-formed, had a waxy gleam like the faces of the drowned. I meant to pass by again when her eyes had opened, but I was watching the smoke to see what went on in the world, and it slipped my mind.

Time is not, where we are. I may have spent centuries staring into the spellfire, seeing the tide of life sweeping by, but there are no years to measure here: only the slow unrelenting heartbeat of the Tree. Sysselore and I grate one another with words, recycling old arguments, great debates which have long degenerated into pettiness, sharp exchanges whose edges are blunted with use. We know the pattern of every dispute. She has grown thin with wear, a skeleton scantily clad in flesh; the skin that was formerly peach-golden is pallid and threaded with visible veins, a blue webbing over her arms and throat. When she sulks, as she often does, you can see the grinning lines of her skull mocking her tight mouth. She has come a long way from that enchanted island set in the sapphire seas of her youth. Syrcé they named her then, Seersay the Wise, since Wise is an epithet more courteous than others they might have chosen, and it is always prudent to flatter the Gifted. She used to turn men into pigs, by way of amusement.

‘Why pigs?’ I asked her, listening to the wild hog grunting and snorting around the bole of the Tree.

‘Laziness,’ she said. ‘That was their true nature, so it took very little effort.’

She is worn thin while I have swollen with my stored-up powers like the queen of a termite mound. I save my Gift, hoarding it like miser’s gold, watching in the smoke for my time to come round again. We are two who must be three, the magic number, the coven number. Someday she will be there, the she for whom we wait, and we will steal her soul away and bind her to us, versing her in our ways, casting her in our mould, and then we will return, over the borderland into reality, and the long-lost kingdom of Logrèz will be mine at last.

The smoke thickens, pouring upwards into a cloud which hangs above the fire. The cloud expands in erratic spurts and billows, stretching its wings to right and left, arching against the cave-roof as it seeks a way of escape. But the flue is closed and it can only hover beneath the vaulted roots, trapped here until we choose to release it. More and more vapour is drawn into its heart till the heaviness of it seems to crush any remaining air from the chamber. I see flecks of light shifting in its depths, whorls of darkness spinning into a maelstrom, throwing out brief sparks of noise: a rapid chittering, an unfinished snarl, a bass growl that shrills into a cackle. Then both sound and light are sucked inward and swallowed, and the smoke opens out into a picture.

The moon, thin and curved as a bull’s horn, caught on a hook of cloud. It is suspended in a splinter of midnight sky between mountain ranges higher than any mountains of earth, and its dead-white glow streams down into a valley so deep and narrow that neither moon nor sun should penetrate there. The valley is dry, so dry that I can taste its aridity, shrivelling my tongue. Everything is in monochrome. I see lakes of some opaque liquid that is not water, shrunken in their stony depressions; luminous steams shimmer on the air above them. At the bottom of the valley there is a garden of petrified vegetation: brittle knots of stems, the black filigree of leaf-skeletons, writhen stumps of tree and shrub. A breath of wind would blow it all to powder, but no wind comes there. Beyond looms the temple: the moon reaches in through the broken roof with probing rays, touching the face of an idol whose nose has long eroded and whose lip crumbles. The hearth at its feet is empty even of ash.

‘He has gone,’ says Sysselore, and her voice croaks on a whisper. ‘He has gone at last.’

‘He will be back.’ I know him too well, the god in the dark. ‘The others may fade or fall into slumber, but he is always persistent. He believes that even Time is on his side. He will be back.’

For a moment the moonlight falters, then the shadow of the mountains sweeps across the valley, and in that shadow the shapes of things are changed, and there is a rustle among the vanished leaves, and a stirring like an infinitesimal breeze in that place where no breeze ever blew.

He will be back.

And then the darkness turns to smoke, and the picture is lost.

There are changing landscapes, cities and villages, hovels, temples, castles. Ruins sprout new walls, which crumble and fall in their turn. Weeds grow over all. Mountains melt into plains, hills heave upward like waves. The picture falters, pausing on a lonely needle of rock jutting into a flawless sky. For a moment I hear music, a silvery tinkling without a tune, as if the wind is thrumming on forgotten harp strings. I inhale a whiff of air that is both cold and thin: we must be very high up. There are voices chanting, though I see no one. And then I realise that the needle of rock is a tower, a tower that seems to have grown from the jawbone of the mountain like a tooth, and below it grey walls interface with the cliff, and window-slots open as chinks in the stone, and the rumour of the liturgy carries from within. The chant grows louder, but the wind takes it and bears it away, and the scene shivers into other peaks, other skies. Rain sweeps over a grim northern castle and pock-marks the lake below. The shell of the building is old but inside everything is new: carpets lap the floors, flames dance around logs that are never consumed, heat glazes the window-panes. Briefly I glimpse a small figure slipping through a postern, too small to be human. It moves with a swift limping gait, like a spider with a leg too few. There is a bundle on its back and something which might be a spear over one shoulder. The spear is far too long in the shaft and too heavy for its carrier, yet the pygmy manages without difficulty. It hurries down the path by the lake and vanishes into the rain. A man walking his dog along the shore passes by without seeing it.

‘A goblin!’ Sysselore is contemptuous. ‘What do we want with such dross? The spell is wandering; we do not need this trivia.’ She moves to extinguish the fire, hesitating, awaiting my word. She knows my temper too well to act alone.

I nod. ‘It is enough. For now.’

We open the flue and the smoke streams out, seeking to coil around the Tree and make its way up to the clouds, but the wind cheats it and it disperses and is gone. This is not the season of the heads, this is the season of nesting birds. The smallest build their nests in the lower branches: the insect-pickers, the nibblers of worms and stealers of crumbs. Higher up there are the lesser predators who prey on mice and lizards and their weaker neighbours. Close to the great trunk woodpeckers drill, tree-creepers creep, tiny throats, insatiable as the abyss, gape in every hollow. But in the topmost boughs, so they say, live the giant raptors, eagles larger than a man, featherless fliers from the dawn of history, and other creatures, botched misfits of the avian kingdom, which are not birds at all. So they say. Yet who has ever climbed up to look? The Tree is unassailable, immeasurable. It keeps its secrets. It may be taller than a whole mountain-range, piercing the cloud-canopy, puncturing the very roof of the cosmos: I do not wish to find out. There are ideas too large for the mind to accept, spaces too wide to contemplate. I know when to leave alone. I found an egg on the ground once, dislodged from somewhere far above: the half-shell that remained intact was as big as a skull. The thing that lay beside it was naked, with claw-like wings and taloned feet and the head of a human foetus. I did not touch it. That night, I heard the pig rooting there, and when I looked again it was gone.

The birds make a lot of noise when they are nesting: they scold, and squabble, and screech. I prefer the murmuring of the heads. It is a gentler sound.

* * *

The spellfire burns anew, the smoke blurs. Among the shifting images I see the tower again, nearer this time: I can make out the rhythms of the liturgy, and the silver tinkling of the chimes has grown to a clamour. I sense this is a place where the wind is never still. The air is too thin to impede its progress. Later, the castle by the lake. A scene from long ago. I see shaggily-bearded men dressed in fur and leather and blood with strange spiked weapons, short swords, long knives. There is fighting on the battlements and in the uncarpeted passageways and in the Great Hall. The goblin moves to and fro among the intruders, slashing at hamstrings with an unseen dagger. Those thus injured stumble and are swiftly killed. Surprise alerts me: it is rare for a goblin to be so bold. On the hearth a whole pine-tree is burning: a giant of a man, red of face and hair, lifts it by the base of the trunk and incredibly, impossibly, swings it round like a huge club, mowing down his foes in an arc of fire. A couple of warriors from his own band are also laid low, but this is a detail he ignores. His surviving supporters give vent to a cry of triumph so loud that the castle walls burst asunder, and the picture is lost.

It re-forms into the shape of a house. A dour, grey-faced house with the moorland rising steeply behind it. The goblin is descending a footpath towards the garden gate. He is tall for his kind, over three feet, and unusually hirsute, with tufted eyebrows and ear-tips and a fleece-like growth matting his head. His body is covered in fragments of worn pelts, patches of cloth and hide, and his own fur: it is difficult to distinguish the native hair from that which has been attached. His feet are bare, prehensile, with a dozen or more toes apiece which grasp the earth as he walks. His skin is very brown and his eyes are very bright, the eyes of the werefolk, which are brighter than those of humankind. They show no whites, only long slits of hazel lustre. He pauses, skimming hillside, house and garden with a gaze that misses nothing, sniffing the air with nostrils that flare individually. Then he continues on down the slope.

‘Why do we see him so clearly?’ Sysselore is easily irritated: she takes umbrage where she can find it. ‘He’s a goblin. A house-goblin. He cannot possibly be important.’

‘Something is important,’ I retort.

More people follow, a succession of faces, overlapping, intermingling, many too dim to make out. Some are familiar, some not. There is a man in a cloak and a pointed hood, trading a potion in an unlabelled bottle for a bag whose contents are muffled so they will not chink. And the same man, older, poorer, though he retains his distinctive garb, striding across an empty landscape under the sweeping wings of clouds. Once he was called Gabbandolfo, in the country of his origin, meaning Elvincape, though he had other names. But he lost his power and his titles and now he roams the world on a mission that can never be achieved, going nowhere. Nonetheless, when his image intrudes I am wary: it is a strange paradox that since his impotence his presence has become more ominous, grim as an indefinite warning. He stalks the smoke-scenes like a carrion crow, watching the field for a battle of which only he has foreknowledge. ‘I don’t like it,’ I assert. ‘We should be the sole watchers. What has he seen that we missed? What does he know?’

Outside, night lies beneath the Tree. I hear the whistling calls of nocturnal birds, the death-squeal of a tiny rodent. In the smoke, a new face emerges, growing into darkness. It belongs to no known race of men, yet it is mortal – sculpted in ebony, its bone structure refined to a point somewhere the other side of beauty, emphasised with little hollowings and sudden lines, its hair of a black so deep it is green, its eyes like blue diamonds. For all its delicacy, it is obviously, ruthlessly masculine. It stares straight at me out of the picture, almost as if the observer has somehow become the observed, and he watches us in our turn. For the first time that I can remember I speak the word to obliterate it, though normally I leave the pictures to fade and alter of their own accord. The face dwindles until only a smile remains, dimming into vapour.

‘He saw us,’ says my coven-sister.

‘Illusion. A trick of the smoke. You sound afraid. Are you afraid of smoke, of a picture?’

As our concentration wavers, the billows thin and spread. I spit at the fire with a curse-word, a power-word to recall the magic, sucking the fumes back into the core of the cloud. The nucleus darkens: for a moment the same image seems to hover there, the face or its shadow, but it is gone before it can come into focus. A succession of tableaux follow, unclear or unfinished, nothing distinguishable. At the last we return to the grey house, and the goblin climbing in through an open window. In the room beyond a boy somewhere in his teens is reading a book, one leg hooked over the arm of his chair. His hair shows more fair than dark; there are sun-freckles on his nose. When he looks up his gaze is clear and much too candid – the candour of the naturally devious, who know how to exploit their own youth. He stares directly at the intruder, interested and undisturbed. He can see the goblin. He has no Gift, no aura of power. But he can see it.

He says: ‘I suppose you’ve come about the vacancy.’

The goblin halts abruptly, half way over the sill. Unnerved.

‘The vacancy,’ the boy reiterates. ‘For a house-goblin. You are a house-goblin, aren’t you?’

‘Ye see me, then.’ The goblin has an accent too ancient to identify, perhaps a forgotten brogue spoken by tribes long extinct. His voice sounds rusty, as if it has not been used for many centuries.

‘I was looking,’ the boy says matter-of-factly. ‘When you look, you see. Incidentally, you really shouldn’t come in uninvited. It isn’t allowed.’

‘The hoose wants a boggan, or so I hairrd. I came.’

‘Where from?’

‘Ye ask a wheen o’ questions.’

‘It’s my hoose,’ says the boy. ‘I’m entitled.’

‘It was another put out the word.’

‘He’s a friend of mine: he was helping me out. I’m the one who has to invite you in.’

‘Folks hae changed since I was last in the worrld,’ says the goblin, his tufted brows twitching restlessly from shock to frown. ‘In the auld days, e’en the Lairrd couldna see me unless I wisht it. The castle was a guid place then. But the Lairrds are all gone and the last of his kin is a spineless vratch who sauld his hame for a handful o’ siller. And now they are putting in baths – baths! – and the pipes are a-hissing and a-gurgling all the time, and there’s heat without fires, and fires without heat, and clacking picture-boxes, and invisible bells skirling, and things that gae bleep in the nicht. It’s nae place for a goblin any more.’

‘We have only the one bathroom,’ says the boy, by way of encouragement.

‘Guid. It isna healthy, all these baths. Dirt keeps you warrm.’

‘Seals the pores,’ nods the boy. ‘I’m afraid we do have a telephone, and two television sets, but one’s broken, and the microwave goes bleep in the night if we need to heat something up, but that’s all.’

The goblin grunts, though what the grunt imports is unclear. ‘Are ye alone here?’

‘Of course not. There’s my father and my sister and Abby – Dad’s girlfriend. We live in London but we use this place for weekends and holidays. And Mrs Wicklow the housekeeper who comes in most days and Lucy from the village doing the actual housework and Gus – the vicar – who keeps an eye on things when we’re not here. Oh, and there’s a dog – a sort of dog – who’s around now and then. She won’t bother you – if she likes you.’

‘What sort of dog wid that be?’ asks the goblin. ‘One o’ thae small pet dogs that canna barrk above a yap or chase a rabbit but sits on a lady’s knee all day waiting tae be fed?’

‘Oh no,’ says the boy. ‘She’s not a lapdog or a pet. She’s her own mistress. You’ll see.’

‘I hairrd,’ says the goblin, after a pause, ‘ye’d had Trouble here, not sae long ago.’

‘Yes.’

‘And mayhap it was the kind of Trouble that might open your eyes to things ordinary folk are nae meant to see?’

‘Mayhap.’ The boy’s candour has glazed over; his expression is effortlessly blank.

‘Sae what came to the hoose-boggan was here afore me?’

‘How did you know there was one?’ Genuine surprise breaks through his impassivity.

‘Ye can smell it. What came tae yon?’

‘Trouble,’ says the boy. ‘He was the timid sort, too frightened to fight back. In a way, his fear killed him.’

‘Aye, weel,’ says the goblin, ‘fear is deadlier than knife-wound or spear-wound, and I hae taken both. It’s been long awhile since I kent Trouble. Do ye expect more?’

‘It’s possible,’ the boy replies. ‘Nothing is ever really over, is it?’

‘True worrds. I wouldnae be averse to meeting Trouble again. Belike I’ve been missing him. Are ye going tae invite me in?’

The boy allows a pause, for concentration or effect. ‘All right. You may come in.’

The goblin springs down from the window-sill, hefting his antique spear with the bundle tied to the shaft.

‘By the way,’ says the boy, ‘what’s your name?’

‘Bradachin.’

‘Bradachin.’ He struggles to imitate the pronunciation. ‘Mine’s Will. Oh, and… one more thing.’

‘What thing is that?’

‘A warning. My sister. She’s at university now and she doesn’t come here very much, but when she does, stay out of her way. She’s being a little difficult at the moment.’

‘Will she see me?’ the goblin enquires.

‘I expect so,’ says the boy.

The goblin moves towards the door with his uneven stride, vanishing as he reaches the panels. The boy stares after him for a few minutes, his young face, with no betraying lines, no well-trodden imprint of habitual expressions, as inscrutable as an unwritten page. Then he and the room recedes, and there is only the smoke.

* * *

The images wax and wane like dreams, crystallising into glimpses of solidity, then merging, melting, lost in a drift of vapour. Sometimes it seems as if it is the cave that drifts, its hollows and shadows vacillating in the penumbra of existence, while at its heart the smoke-visions focus all the available reality, like a bright eye on the world. We too are as shadows, Sysselore and I, watching the light, hungering for it. But I have more substance than any shadow – I wrap myself in darkness as in a cocoon, preserving my strength while my power slumbers. This bloated body is a larval stage in which my future Self is nourished and grows, ready to hatch when the hour is ripe – a new Morgus, radiant with youth revived, potent with ancientry. It is a nature spell, old as evolution: I learned it from a maggot. You can learn much from those who batten on decay. It is their kind who will inherit the earth.

Pictures deceive. The smoke-screen opens like a crack in the wall of Being, and through it you may see immeasurable horizons, and unnavigable seas, you may breathe the perfume of forgotten gardens, taste the rains on their passage to the thirsty plain – but the true power is here in the dark. With me. I am the dark, I am the heartbeat of the night. The spellfire may show you things far away, but I am here, and for now, Here is all there is.

The dark is always waiting. Behind the light, beyond reality, behind the visions in the smoke. Look now, look at the egg. It glows with cold, its white shell sheened like clouded ice, the velvet that wraps it crackling with frost. It is secreted in a casket of ebony bound with iron, but the metal is chilled into brittleness, the lock snaps even as the lid is shut, tampering fingers are frozen into a blue numbness. It has lain there for many centuries, a sacred charge on its caretakers, or so they believe, having no knowledge of what it is they cherish, or for Whom. The image returns often, its mystery still unrevealed. Maybe it is a symbol: the deepest, truest magic frequently manifests itself through symbols. Maybe it is just what it appears to be. An egg. If so, then we at least can guess what lies curled within, unhatching, sleeping the bottomless sleep of a seed in midwinter. The men who watch over it have gentle hands and slender, otherworldly features. They do not suspect the germ of darkness that incubates within the egg.

The picture shifts, pulling back, showing us for the first time that the casket stands on an altar of stone, and the altar is in a circular chamber, and the chamber … the chamber is at the top of a lonely tower, jutting like a tooth into the blue mountain air. A few pieces of the pattern fall into place. Others drift, disembodied, like jigsaw-fragments from the wrong puzzle.

‘Why there?’ asks Sysselore, forever scathing. ‘A monastery, I suppose, remote, almost inaccessible – but almost is never enough. Why not hide it outside the world?’

‘Magic finds out magic. Who would look for such an object in the hands of Men? It has been safe in ignorant hands, hidden in plain view, one of a thousand holy relics guarded by monks in a thousand mountain retreats. They will have cradled it in their own legends, endowed it with a dozen meanings. No one has ever sought for it there.’

Somewhere in the tower a bell is struck, drowning out the rumour of the wind in the chimes and the rise and fall of the chant. The swelling of its single note fills the cave; the walls seemed to shake; flakes of earth drop from above. The tower trembles in its sky-gulf. Or perhaps it is the smoke that trembles, unbalancing the picture. We see the egg again, but it is no longer cold. Heat pulses from within, turning the thick shell to translucency. Bent over it is a dark face among the golden ones, dark as the wood of the casket, a face subtle as poison, sharp as a blade. The gaze is lowered: it does not seek for concealed watchers now. Its whole attention is focused on the egg. The throb of the bell is a long time dying. And then comes another sound, a tiny crack, echoless, all but inaudible, yet the aftershock of that minute noise makes the very floor vibrate. The shell fractures, seamed by countless threadlines which glow with a red light as if from a fire in its heart. The ruby glow touches the dark face leaning closer, ever closer, fascinated, eager …

The egg hatches.

‘What now?’ whispers Sysselore, and the quiet in her voice is almost that of awe. ‘Where will it go? They cannot call it holy now, and … it won’t stay hidden. Not long.’

‘We shall see.’

The smoke thins, swirls, re-forms, showing us great events and small. The moor unrolls like a carpet beneath a sky tumbling with clouds. The valley opens, the hillside plunges, the wind rushes in from the sea. And there is the house, lifting blind windows to the rain. Behind closed curtains there is firelight and lamplight, the murmur of conversation, the smell of roasting meat uncoiling from the oven. The sunless evening blurs gradually into night. When dinner is long over, feet climb the stairs to bed. A glass tumbler stands alone on a sideboard in the kitchen, containing a small measure of golden liquid. Not discarded or forgotten but placed there deliberately. A gesture. Presently, the house-goblin materialises, sitting on the end of the table. He samples the leftover roast and drains the tumbler, declaiming an incomprehensible toast, probably to the red-bearded Laird who swatted his foes with a tree-trunk. Then he roams through the house, patrolling his domain.

In a bedroom on the first floor a girl is seated in front of an antique dressing-table, studying herself in the mirror. There is no vanity in her contemplation: her expression is grave and unusually detached. She stares at her reflection, you feel, simply because it is there. Yet she might be termed beautiful, if mere youth is beauty, clarity of skin and eye, elfin slenderness of body. I was beautiful once, I and Morgun, my twin, but beauty alters with time, as all else, and in a different age Helen wears a different face. So maybe she is beautiful, this pale, dispassionate girl, with her gravity and her small breasts. Fashion is a poor judge of such things. The adjacent lamp puts a gloss on her short hair which it may not merit and shades the moulding of invisible bones. But as we look closer I see something in her face, or in its reflection, something beneath the unblemished exterior. Imperceptible. Almost familiar. A secret too well hidden, a scar too perfectly healed. It shows in a certain fragility, a certain strength, a trace element of pain. But the image begins to withdraw from her, and the flicker of not-quite-recognition is gone.

The goblin, too, is watching her, just inside the door, his crouched body only a shadow in the corner to the discerning eye. Even the mirror cannot see him. She is still staring at her reflection but now the direction of her gaze switches to a point beyond her shoulder. Her eyes widen; shock or fury expels the hint of colour from her cheek. To us, the glass is empty, but she sees the intruder. She sees him in the mirror. ‘Get out!’ She rounds on him, screaming like a virago. ‘Toad! Contemptible little sneak! Creeping in here, spying on me – how dare you! How dare you! Get out, do you hear? If I see even your shadow again, I’ll – I’ll squeeze you to pulp – I’ll blast you into Limbo – I’ll blow your atoms to the four winds! Don’t you ever – ever! – come near me again!’ The unleashing of power is sudden and terrifying: her hair crackles with it, the air thickens around her outstretched fingers. The goblin vanishes in a flash of startled horror. She is on her feet now but her rage ebbs as rapidly as it came, and she casts herself face down on the bed, clutching the pillow, sobbing briefly and violently. When the storm is over she lifts her head; she is red-eyed and tearless, as if tears were a rain that would not come. Her expression reverts to a wary stillness: her gaze roves round the room. ‘It’s gone,’ she murmurs, ‘I know it’s gone, but … there’s someone … somewhere … Watching me.’

‘She feels us,’ says Sysselore. ‘The power. Did you see the power in her…?’

‘Hush.’

The picture revolves cautiously as I lean forward, close to the smoke; the fire-draught burns my face. I am peering out of the mirror, into the room, absorbing every detail, filling my mind with the girl. This girl. The one I have waited for.

Slowly she turns, drawn back to the mirror, staring beyond the reflections. Our eyes meet. For the second time, the watcher becomes the watched. But this is no threat, only reconnaissance. A greeting. In the mirror, she sees me smile.

She snatches something – a hairbrush? – and hurls it at the glass, which shatters. The smoke turns all to silver splinters, spinning, falling, fading. In the gloom after the fire dies, Sysselore and I nurse our exultation.

She is the one. At last.

I will have her.

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 which 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 travelling 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 on level with her jaw. As the car accelerates the wind fans it 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.

II

She felt it only for an instant, like a cold prickling on the back of her neck: the awareness that she was being watched. Not watched in the ordinary sense or even spied on, but surveyed through occult eyes, her image dancing in a flame or refracted through a crystal prism. She didn’t know how she knew, only that it was one of many instincts lurking in the substratum of her mind, waiting their moment to nudge at her thought. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. The sensation was gone so quickly she almost believed she might have imagined it, but her pleasure in the drive was over. For her, Yorkshire would always be haunted. ‘Fern –’ her companion was talking to her, but she had not registered a word ‘– Fern, are you listening to me?’

‘Yes. Sorry. What did you say?’

‘If you’d been listening you wouldn’t have to ask. I never saw you so abstracted. I was just wondering why you should want to do the deed in Yarrowdale, when you don’t even like the place.’

‘I don’t dislike it: it isn’t that. It’s a tiny village miles from anywhere: short stroll to a windswept beach, short scramble to a windswept moor. You can freeze your bum off in the North Sea or go for bracing walks in frightful weather. The countryside is scenic – if you like the countryside. I’m a city girl.’

‘I know. So why –?’

‘Marcus, of course. He thinks Yarrowdale is quaint. Characterful village church, friendly local vicar. Anyway, it’s a good excuse not to have so many guests. You tell people you’re doing it quietly, in the country, and they aren’t offended not to be invited. And of those you do invite, lots of them won’t come. It’s too far to trek just to stay in a draughty pub and drink champagne in the rain.’

‘Sounds like a song,’ said Gaynor Mobberley. ‘Champagne in the rain.’ And: ‘Why do you always do what Marcus wants?’

‘I’m going to marry him,’ Fern retorted. ‘I want to please him. Naturally.’

‘If you were in love with him,’ said Gaynor, ‘you wouldn’t be half so conscientious about pleasing him all the time.’

‘That’s a horrible thing to say.’

‘Maybe. Best friends have a special licence to say horrible things, if it’s really necessary.’

‘I like him,’ Fern said after a long pause. ‘That’s much more important than love.’

‘I like him too. He’s clever and witty and very good company and quite attractive considering he’s going a bit thin on top. That doesn’t mean I want to marry him. Besides, he’s twenty years older than you.’

‘Eighteen. I prefer older men. With the young ones you don’t know what they’ll look like when they hit forty. It could be a nasty shock. The older men have passed the danger point so you know the worst already.’

‘Now you’re being frivolous. I just don’t understand why you can’t wait until you fall in love with someone.’

Fern gave a shivery laugh. ‘That’s like … oh, waiting for a shooting star to fall in your lap, or looking for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow.’

‘Cynic.’

‘No. I’m not a cynic. It’s simply that I accept the impossibility of romantic idealism.’

‘Do you remember that time in Wales?’ said her friend, harking back unfairly to college days. ‘Morwenna Rhys gave that party at her parents’ house on the bay, and we all got totally drunk, and you rushed down the beach in your best dress straight into the sea. I can still see you running through the waves, and the moonlight on the foam, and your skirt flying. You looked so wild, almost eldritch. Not my cool, sophisticated Fern.’

‘Everyone has to act out of character sometimes. It’s like taking your clothes off: you feel free without your character but very naked, unprotected. Unfinished. So you get dressed again – you put on yourself – and then you know who you are.’

Gaynor appeared unconvinced, but an approaching road junction caused a diversion. Fern had forgotten the way, and they stopped to consult a map. ‘Who’ll be there?’ Gaynor enquired when they resumed their route. ‘When we arrive, I mean.’

‘Only my brother. I asked Abby to keep Dad in London until the day before the wedding. He’d only worry about details and get fussed, and I don’t think I could take it. I can deal with any last minute hitches. Will never fusses.’

‘What’s he doing now? I haven’t seen him for years.’

‘Post-grad at York. Some aspect of art history. He spends a lot of time at the house, painting weird surreal pictures and collecting even weirder friends. He loves it there. He grows marijuana in the garden and litters the place with beer cans and plays pop music full blast; our dour Yorkshire housekeeper pretends to disapprove but actually she dotes on him and cossets him to death. We still call her Mrs Wicklow although her Christian name is Dorothy. She’s really too old to housekeep but she refuses to retire so we pay a succession of helpers for her to find fault with.’

‘The old family retainer,’ suggested Gaynor.

‘Well … in a way.’

‘What’s the house like?’

‘Sort of grey and off-putting. Victorian architecture at its most unattractively solid. We’ve added a few mod cons but there’s only one bathroom and no central heating. We’ve always meant to sell it but somehow we never got around to it. It’s not at all comfortable.’

‘Is it haunted?’

There was an appreciable pause before Fern answered.

‘Not exactly,’ she said.

They had been friends since their days at college, but Gaynor sometimes felt that for all their closeness she knew little of her companion. Outwardly, Fern Capel was smart, successful, self-assured, with a poise that more than compensated for her lack of inches, a sort of compact neatness which implied I am the right height; it is everyone else who is too tall. She had style without flamboyance, generosity without extravagance, an undramatic beauty, a demure sense of humour. A colleague had once said she ‘excelled at moderation’; yet Gaynor had witnessed her, on rare occasions, behaving in a way that was immoderate, even rash, her slight piquancy of feature sharpened into a disturbing wildness, an alien glitter in her eyes. At twenty-eight, she had already risen close to the top in the PR consultancy where she worked. Her fiancé, Marcus Greig, was a well-known figure of academe who had published several books and regularly aired both his knowledge and his wit in the newspapers and on television. ‘I plan my life,’ she had told her friend, and to date everything seemed to be proceeding accordingly, smooth-running and efficient as a computer programme. Or had it been ‘I planned my life’? Gaynor wondered, chilling at the thought, as if, in a moment of unimaginable panic and rejection, Fern had turned her back on natural disorder, on haphazard emotions, stray adventure, and had dispassionately laid down the terms for her future. Gaynor’s very soul shrank from such an idea. But on the road to Yorkshire, with the top of the car down, the citified sophisticate had blown away, leaving a girl who looked younger than her years and potentially vulnerable, and whose mood was almost fey. ‘She doesn’t want to marry him,’ Gaynor concluded, seeking a simple explanation for a complex problem, ‘but she hasn’t the courage to back out.’ Yet Fern had never lacked courage.

The house was a disappointment: solidly, stolidly Victorian, watching them from shadowed windows and under frowning lintels, its stoic façade apparently braced to withstand both storm and siege. ‘This is a house that thinks it’s a castle,’ Fern said. ‘One of these days, I’ll have to change its mind.’

Gaynor, who assumed she was referring to some kind of designer face-lift, tried to visualise hessian curtains and terracotta urns, and failed.

Inside, there were notes of untidiness, a through-draught from too many open windows, the incongruous blare of a radio, the clatter of approaching feet. She was introduced to Mrs Wicklow, who appeared as grim as the house she kept, and her latest assistant, Trisha, a dumpy teenager in magenta leggings wielding a dismembered portion of hoover. Will appeared last, lounging out of the drawing room which he had converted into a studio. The radio had evidently been turned down in his wake and the closing door suppressed its beat to a rumour. Gaynor had remembered him tall and whiplash-thin but she decided his shoulders had squared, his face matured. Once, he had resembled an angel with the spirit of an urchin; now, she saw choirboy innocence and carnal knowledge, an imp of charm, the morality of a thief. There was a smudge of paint on his cheek which she almost fancied might have been deliberate, the conscious stigma of an artist. His summer tan turned grey eyes to blue; there were sun-streaks in his hair. He greeted her as if they knew each other much better than was in fact the case, gave his sister an idle peck, and offered to help with the luggage.

‘We’ve put you on the top floor,’ he told Gaynor. ‘I hope you won’t mind. The first floor’s rather full up. If you’re lonely I’ll come and keep you company.’

‘Not Alison’s room?’ Fern’s voice was unexpectedly sharp.

‘Of course not.’

‘Who’s Alison?’ Gaynor asked, but in the confusion of arrival no one found time to answer.

Her bedroom bore the unmistakable stamp of a room that had not been used in a couple of generations. It was shabbily carpeted, ruthlessly aired, the bed-linen crackling with cleanliness, the ancient brocades of curtain and upholstery worn to the consistency of lichen. There was a basin and ewer on the dresser and an ugly slipware vase containing a hand-picked bunch of flowers both garden and wild. A huge mirror, bleared with recent scouring, reflected her face among the spots, and on a low table beside the bed was a large and gleaming television set. Fern surveyed it as if it were a monstrosity. ‘For God’s sake remove that thing,’ she said to her brother. ‘You know it’s broken.’

‘Got it fixed.’ Will flashed Gaynor a grin. ‘This is five-star accommodation. Every modern convenience.’

‘I can see that.’

But Fern still seemed inexplicably dissatisfied. As they left her to unpack, Gaynor heard her say: ‘You’ve put Alison’s mirror in there.’

‘It’s not Alison’s mirror: it’s ours. It was just in her room.’

‘She tampered with it…’

Gaynor left her bags on the bed and went to examine it more closely. It was the kind of mirror that makes everything look slightly grey. In it, her skin lost its colour, her brown eyes were dulled, the long dark hair which was her principal glory was drained of sheen and splendour. And behind her in the depths of the glass the room appeared dim and remote, almost as if she were looking back into the past, a past beyond warmth and daylight, dingy as an unopened attic. Turning away, her attention was drawn to a charcoal sketch hanging on the wall: a woman with an Edwardian hairstyle, gazing soulfully at the flower she held in her hand. On an impulse she unhooked it, peering at the scrawl of writing across the bottom of the picture. There was an illegible signature and a name of which all she could decipher was the initial E. Not Alison, then. She put the picture back in its place and resumed her unpacking. In a miniature cabinet at her bedside she came across a pair of handkerchiefs, also embroidered with that tantalising E. ‘Who was E?’ she asked at dinner later on.

‘Must have been one of Great-Cousin Ned’s sisters,’ said Will, attacking Mrs Wicklow’s cooking with an appetite that belied his thinness.

‘Great-Cousin –?’

‘He left us this house,’ Fern explained. ‘His relationship to Daddy was so obscure we christened him Great-Cousin. It seemed logical at the time. Anyway, he had several sisters who preceded him into this world and out of it: I’m sure the youngest was an E. Esme … no. No. Eithne.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s a romantic mystery attached to her?’ Gaynor said, half ironic, half wistful. ‘Since I’ve got her room, you know.’

‘No,’ Fern said baldly. ‘There isn’t. As far as we know, she was a fluttery young girl who became a fluttery old woman, with nothing much in between. The only definite information we have is that she made seed cake which tasted of sand.’

‘She must have had a lover,’ Will speculated. ‘The family wouldn’t permit it, because he was too low class. They used to meet on the moor, like Heathcliff and Cathy only rather more restrained. He wrote bad poems for her – you’ll probably find one in your room – and she pressed the wild flower he gave her in her prayer book. That’ll be around somewhere too. One day they were separated in a mist, she called and called to him but he did not come – he strayed too far, went over a cliff and was lost.’

‘Taken by boggarts,’ Fern suggested.

‘So she never married,’ Will concluded, ‘but spent the next eighty years gradually pining away. Her sad spectre still haunts the upper storey, searching for whichever book it was in which she pressed that bloody flower.’

Gaynor laughed. She had been meaning to ask about Alison again, but Will’s fancy diverted her, and it slipped her mind.

It was gone midnight when they went up to bed. Gaynor slept unevenly, troubled by the country quiet, listening in her waking moments to the rumour of the wind on its way to the sea and the hooting of an owl somewhere nearby. The owl-cry invaded her dreams, filling them with the noiseless flight of pale wings and the glimpse of a sad ghost-face looming briefly out of the dark. She awoke before dawn, hearing the gentleness of rain on roof and window-pane. Perhaps she was still half dreaming, but it seemed to her that her window stood high in a castle wall, and outside the rain was falling softly into the dim waters of a loch, and faint and far away someone was playing the bagpipes.

In her room on the floor below, Fern too had heard the owl. Its eerie call drew her back from that fatal world on the other side of sleep, the world that was always waiting for her when she let go of mind and memory, leaving her spirit to roam where it would. In London she worked too hard to think and slept too deep to dream, filling the intervals of her leisure with a busy social life and the thousand distractions of the metropolis; but here on the edge of the moor there was no job, few distractions, and something in her stirred that would not be suppressed. It was here that it had all started, nearly twelve years ago. Sleep was the gateway, dream the key. She remembered a stair, a stair in a picture, and climbing the stair as it wound its way from Nowhere into Somewhere, and the tiny bright vista far ahead of a city where even the dust was golden. And then it was too late, and she was ensnared in the dream, and she could smell the heat and taste the dust and the beat of her heart was the boom of the temple-drums and the roar of the waves on the shore. ‘I must go back!’ she cried out, trapped and desperate, but there was only one way back and her guide would not come. Never again. She had forfeited his affection, for he was of those who love jealously and will not share. Nevermore the cool smoothness of his cloud-patterned flank, nevermore the deadly lustre of his horn. She ran along the empty sands looking for the sea, and then the beach turned from gold to silver and the stars crisped into foam about her feet, and she was a creature with no name to bind her and no flesh to weigh her down, the spirit that breathes in every creation and at the nucleus of all being. An emotion flowed into her that was as vivid as excitement and as deep as peace. She wanted to hold on to that moment forever, but there was a voice calling, calling her without words, dragging her back into her body and her bed, until at last she knew she was lying in the dark, and the owl’s hoot was a cry of loneliness and pain for all that she had lost.

An hour or so later she got up, took two aspirin (she would not use sleeping pills), tried to read for a while. It was a long, long time before exhaustion mastered her, and she slipped into oblivion.

Will slumbered undisturbed, accustomed to the nocturnal smalltalk of his non-human neighbours. When the bagpipes began, he merely rolled over, smiling in his sleep.

The next day was spent mostly on wedding preparations. The girls having brought the Dress with them, Mrs Wicklow exercised her royal prerogative and took charge of it, relegating Trisha to the sidelines, personally pressing it into creaseless perfection and arraying it in state in one of the spare bedrooms. Will had unearthed a rather decrepit tailor’s dummy from the attic, formerly the property of a long-deceased Miss Capel, and they hung the Dress on it, arranging the train in a classic swirl on the carpet, tweaking the empty sleeves into place. He even stuck a knitting-needle in the vacancy of the neck and suspended the veil from its point, draping it in misty folds that fell almost to the floor. Fern found something oddly disquieting in that faceless, limbless shell of a bride; she even wondered if Will was trying to make a subtle point, but he was so helpful, so pleased with his and Mrs Wicklow’s handiwork, that she was forced to acquit him of deviousness. It was left to Gaynor to offer comment. ‘It looks very beautiful,’ she said. ‘It’ll walk down the aisle all by itself.’

‘Up the aisle,’ said Fern. ‘It’s up.’

They met the vicar, Gus Dinsdale, in the church that afternoon and retired to the vicarage for tea. Gus in his forties looked very much as he had in his thirties, save that his hair was receding out of existence and his somewhat boyish expression had been vividly caricatured by usage and time. On learning that Gaynor’s work was researching and restoring old books and manuscripts he begged to show her some of his acquisitions, and when Will and Fern left he took her into his study. Gaynor duly admired the books, but her mind was elsewhere. She hovered on the verge of asking questions but drew back, afraid of appearing vulgarly inquisitive, a busybody prying into the affairs of her friend. And then, on their return to the drawing room, chance offered her an opening. ‘You have lovely hair, dear,’ Gus’ wife Maggie remarked. ‘I haven’t seen hair that long since Alison – and I was never sure hers was natural. Of course, I don’t think they had extensions in those days, but –’

‘Alison?’ Gaynor nearly jumped. ‘Will mentioned her. So did Fern. Who was she?’

‘She was a friend of Robin’s,’ Maggie replied. ‘She stayed at Dale House for a while, more than a decade ago now. We didn’t like her very much.’

‘You didn’t like her,’ Gus corrected, smiling faintly. ‘She was a very glamorous young woman. Not all that young really, and not at all beautiful, but … well, she had It. As they say.’

‘She looked like a succubus,’ Maggie said.

‘You’ve never seen a succubus.’

‘Maybe not,’ Maggie retorted with spirit, ‘but I’d know one if I did. It would look like Alison.’

‘My wife is prejudiced,’ Gus said. ‘Alison wasn’t the kind of woman to be popular with her own sex. Alison Redmond, that was her full name. Still, we shouldn’t speak harshly of her. Her death was a terrible tragedy. Fern was completely overset by it.’

‘She died?’

‘Didn’t you know?’ Gus sighed. ‘She drowned. Some kind of freak flood, but no one ever really knew how it happened. Fern was saved, caught on a tree, but Alison was swept away. They found her in the river. Dreadful business. I’ve always wondered –’ He broke off, shaking his head as if to disperse an invisible cobweb. Gaynor regarded him expectantly.

‘There was that story she told us,’ said Maggie. ‘I know it was nonsense, but it’s not as if she was a habitual liar. She must have been suffering from some kind of post-traumatic shock. That’s what the doctors said about her illness later on, wasn’t it?’ She turned to Gaynor. ‘But you’re her best friend; you must know more about that than we do.’

What illness? The query leapt to Gaynor’s lips, but she suppressed it. Instead she said – with a grimace at her conscience for the half-truth – ‘Fern doesn’t discuss it much.’

‘Oh dear.’ Now it was Maggie’s turn to sigh. ‘That isn’t good, is it? You’re supposed to talk through your problems: it’s essential therapy.’

‘That’s the theory, anyway,’ said Gus. ‘I’m not entirely convinced by it. Not in this case, anyway. There was one thing that really bothered me about that explanation of Fern’s.’

‘What was that?’ asked Maggie.

‘Nobody ever came up with a better one.’

Gaynor walked back to Dale House very slowly, lost in a whirl of thought. She had refrained from asking further questions, reluctant to betray the extent of her ignorance and still wary of showing excessive curiosity. Fern had never spoken of any illness, and although there was no particular reason why she should have done, the omission, coupled with her distaste for Yorkshire, was beginning to take on an unexplained significance. If this were a Gothic novel, Gaynor reflected fancifully, say, a Daphne du Maurier, Fern would probably have murdered Alison Redmond. But that’s ridiculous. Fern’s a very moral person, she’s totally against capital punishment – and anyway, how could you arrange a freak flood? It ought to be impossible in an area like this, even for Nature. I have to ask her about it. She’s my best friend. I should be able to ask her anything …

But somehow, when she reached the house and found Fern in the kitchen preparing supper, hindered rather than helped by Mrs Wicklow’s assertion of culinary by-laws, she couldn’t. She decided it was not the right moment. Will took her into the studio drawing-room, retrieved a bottle of wine from the same shelf as the white spirit, and poured some into a couple of bleared glasses. Bravely, Gaynor drank. ‘Are you going to show me your paintings?’ she enquired.

‘You won’t understand them,’ he warned her. ‘Which is a euphemism for “you won’t like them”.’

‘Let me see,’ said Gaynor.

In fact, he was right. They were complex compositions in various styles: superficial abstractions where a subliminal image lurked just beyond the borders of realisation, or representational scenes – landscapes and figures – distorted into abstract concepts. A darkness permeated them, part menace, part fantasy. There were occasional excursions into sensuality – a half-formed nude, a flower moulded into lips, kissing or sucking – but overall there was nothing she could connect with the little she knew or guessed of Will. The execution was inconsistent: some had a smooth finish almost equal to the gloss of airbrushing, others showed caked oils and the scrapings of a knife. Evidently the artist was still at the experimental stage. She found them fascinating, vaguely horrible, slightly immature. ‘I don’t like them,’ she admitted, ‘in the sense that they’re uncomfortable, disturbing: I couldn’t live with them. They’d give me nightmares. And I don’t understand them because they don’t seem to me to come from you. Unless you have a dark side – a very dark side – which you never let anyone see.’

‘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.

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 sceptical, 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 colour 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 Wicklow. 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 towards 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 riddance to both of ’em.’

Gaynor digested this with the sandwich lunch Mrs Wicklow insisted on feeding her, though she wasn’t really hungry. Afterwards, Fern and Will still being absent, she returned to her room. A flick through the newspaper had reminded her there was a programme she wanted to catch on the television, an afternoon repeat of a documentary which 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-colour. Her programme was already under way, the camera following a conscientiously enthusiastic presenter round 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 which surrounded him, talked in a lengthy drone which 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 living 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 specialising 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 hypnotised, 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 which had little to do with smiling. What hair he still possessed was grey; so was his complexion, grey as paste, though whether this was the result of poor colour quality on the television or the after-effect 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 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 towards her, and towards 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 grey, the colour 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 emphasise 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, 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 grey 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 growing 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 programme, 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, scepticism 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 sombrely: ‘I’ve seen enough. More than enough.’

Will put his arms round 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 worshipped 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.’

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 agonising 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 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 visualise her friend receiving it with anything but polite disbelief. She waited several minutes and then she, too, went up to the first 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 which she squeezed savagely from time to time, apparently unaware of what she was doing. There was an expression on her face which Gaynor had never seen before, a kind of brittleness which 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 she 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 which 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 fairytales – 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 easy-going charm of manner, Fern, perhaps feeling that she might have over-reacted 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 clear of uncomfortable subjects, admiring the stars which had chosen to put in an appearance in the clearing sky, and pausing to listen for nightbirds, or to glimpse a furtive shadow which might have been a fox, slinking across the road towards 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 goodnight 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 glamour, which 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 pot-plant whose single flower resembled puckered red lips, a bedspread made of peacock feathers. A smoked glass shade softened the light-bulb to a dull glow. This isn’t my room, she realised. 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 which 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 multi-faceted glitter of cut crystal. A dull pallor rippled through her hair, transforming it into the dim tresses of a phantom. Gaynor was paralysed, unable to twitch a muscle, but in the mirror her mouth widened into a thin crimson smile, curling up towards 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.

She 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 reconnection as the plug slid home. Alimond guided her hand towards 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 floorwards 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 colour. The furniture was still again; the picture glowed in the darkness like an extra-terrestrial 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 which 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 pyjamas 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 round 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 lightning ran up and down the flex.

‘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 re-entered 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 reverted 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 apologised 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 whisky. Mindful of the shuddering cold that so often follows on shock, Fern had pressed a hot-water bottle on her friend and wrapped her in a spare blanket. ‘If you want to leave,’ she said, ‘I’ll understand. Something, or someone, is trying to use you, victimise 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, remoulded its squashed contours into 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?’

‘Do you think what Gaynor saw was really Alison?’ Will pursued. ‘Alison returned from the dead?’

‘N-no. The dead don’t return. Ghosts are those who’ve never left, but Alison had nothing to stay for. I suppose he might use a phantom in her image, possibly to confuse us.’

‘I’m confused,’ Gaynor confirmed.

‘Will you be okay for the rest of the night?’ Fern asked. ‘We could change rooms if you like. I’ll drive you into York in the morning: there are trains for London every hour.’

‘I’m not leaving.’ Behind the dark curtains of her hair Gaynor achieved a twisty smile. ‘I’m frightened – of course I am. I don’t think I’ve ever been so frightened in my life. But you’re my friend –my friends – and, well, you’re supposed to stand by friends in trouble …’

‘Sentimentality,’ Fern interjected.

‘Hogwash,’ said Will.

‘Whatever. Anyway, I’m staying. You invited me; you can’t disinvite me. I know I wasn’t very brave just now but I can’t help it: I hate bats. I hate the way they flutter and their horrible ratty little faces. That’s what they are: rats with wings. I’ll be much braver as long as there are no more bats.’

‘We can’t absolutely guarantee it,’ Fern said.

‘Besides,’ Gaynor continued, ignoring her, ‘you’re getting married on Saturday. I’m not going to miss that.’

For an instant, Fern looked totally blank. ‘I’d forgotten,’ she said.

They went back to bed about half an hour later, warm with the twin comforts of chocolate and alcohol. Will dossed down in the room next to Gaynor’s, wrapped in the ubiquitous spare blanket. Worn out by events, reassured by his proximity, she fell asleep almost at once; but he lay with his eyes open, staring into the dark. Presently, he made out a hump of shadow at the foot of his bed which had not been there before.

He said softly: ‘Bradachin?’

‘Aye.’

‘Did you see what happened?’

‘Aye.’

There was an impatient silence. ‘Well?’ Will persisted. ‘Did you see a woman come out of the mirror?’

‘I didna see ony woman. There was a flaysome creature came slinking through the glass, all mimsy it was, like a wisp o’ moonlicht, and the banes shining through its hand, and cobwebs drifting round its heid. Some kind o’ tannasgeal maybe. It was clinging round the maidy like mist around a craig. She seemed all moithered by it, like she didna ken what she was doing.’

‘Where did it go?’ Will asked.

‘Back through the glass. I’m nae sure where it gaed after, but it isna here nae mair.’

‘But how could it get in?’ Will mused. ‘No one here summoned it, did they?’

‘Nae. But a tannasgeal gangs where the maister sends it – and ye asked him in long ago, or sae ye seid.’

‘You mean Az–– the Old Spirit sent it?’

‘Most likely.’

‘Yes, of course … Bradachin, would you mind spending the night in Gaynor’s room? Don’t let her see you, just call me if – if anything happens.’

‘I’m no a servant for ye tae orrder aboot.’

‘Please?’ Will coaxed.

‘Aye, weel … I was just wanting ye tae keep it in mind. I’m nae servant …’

The hunched shadow dimmed, dissolving into the surrounding dark. After a few minutes Will closed his eyes and relapsed into sleep.

In the room on the floor below, Fern was still wakeful. She was trying to concentrate on her marriage, re-running a mental reel of her possible future with Marcus Greig. Cocktail parties in Knightsbridge, dinner parties in Hampstead, all-night parties in Notting Hill Gate. Lunches at the Ivy, launches at the Groucho. First nights and last nights, previews and private views, designer clothes, designer furniture. The same kind of skiing trips and Tuscan villas which she had experienced as a child, only rather more expensive. In due course, perhaps, there would be a second home in Provence. Her heart shrank at the prospect. And then there was Marcus himself, with his agile intelligence, his New Labour ethics, his easy repartee. She liked him, she was even impressed by him – though it is not difficult for a successful forty-six to impress a rising twenty-eight. She knew he had worked his way up from lower middle-class origins which he preferred to call proletarian, that his first wife had been a county type who left him for a farmer and a horse. She had contemplated marrying him on their third date. He fulfilled the standards she had set for her partner, and if his hair was thinning and his waistline thickening he was still generally considered an attractive man. She was nearly thirty, too old for fairytales, uninspired by casual love. The more she thought about it, the more she had wanted this marriage – and she still wanted it, she knew she did, if only she could keep hold of her reasoning, if she could just remind herself what made those scenes from her life-to-be so desirable. She should never have left London. Away from the polluted air and the intrusive voices of traffic, telephones, and technology, her head was so clear it felt empty, with too much room for old memories and new ideas. She had done her best to fence them out, to fill up the space with the fuss and flurry of wedding preparations, but tonight she sensed it had all been in vain. The future she had pursued so determinedly was slipping away. She had worn the witch’s gloves, opened her heart to power. Trouble and uncertainty lay ahead, and the germ of treachery in her soul was drawing her towards them.

She languished in the borderland of sleep, too tired now to succumb. Her mind planed: recollections long buried re-surfaced to ensnare her, jumbled together in a broken jigsaw. Alimond the witch combing her hair with a comb of bone like a lorelei in a song, her lips moving in what Fern thought was an incantation, until she heard the words of an antique ballad: Where once I kissed your cheek the fishes feed … And then the siren dived into deep water, and there was the skeleton lying in the coral, and she set the comb down on its cavernous breast, and Fern saw it slot into its place among the ribs. And the head looked no longer like a skull: its eyes were closed with shells, and its locks moved like weed in the current. Sleep well forever there, my bonny dear. A ship’s foghorn drew her out of the depths – no, not a foghorn, an albatross, crying to her with a half-human voice. They said in Atlantis that albatrosses were the messengers of the Unknown God. It was very near now, almost in her room. How ridiculous, thought Fern. There are no albatrosses in Yorkshire. It must be the owl again, the owl Gaynor talked about …

She was not aware of getting up but suddenly she was by the open window, leaning out into the night. She heard the sough of the wind in the trees although there were no trees anywhere near the house. The owl’s cry was somewhere in her dream, in her head. And then it came, hurtling out of the dark, a vast pale blur too swift and too sudden to see clearly. There was a rushing tumult of wings, the close-up of a face – a mournful heart-shaped face with nasal beak and no mouth, black button eyes set in huge discs, like a ghost peeping through the holes in a sheet. She thrust out her hands to ward it off, horrified by the impression of giant size, the predatory speed of its lunge. The power came instinctively, surging down her arms with a force dream-enspelled, unsought and out-of-control … The owl reeled and veered away, gone so fast she had no time to check if its size had been real or merely an illusion of terror. But its last shriek lingered in her mind, haunting and savage. She stumbled away from the window, her body shaking with the aftermath of that power-surge. When she touched the bed she collapsed into it, too exhausted to disentangle herself from the blankets, helpless as with a fever. Dream or reality faded, and in the morning when she finally awoke, late and heavy-eyed, she was not sure if it had happened at all.

IV

Weddings have their own momentum. Once the machinery has been set in motion – once invitations have been issued and accepted, present lists placed with suitable department stores, caterers conjured, live music laid on, flowers, bridesmaids, and multi-storey cakes all concocted – once male relatives have hired or resurrected morning suits and female ones have bought outfits in the sort of pastel colours that should only be worn by newborn infants – the whole circus rolls on like a Juggernaut with no brakes, crushing anything and anyone who may get in its way. The groom is sidelined, the bride traumatised. Couples who are madly in love lose track of their passion, floundering in a welter of trivial details, trapped by the hopes and expectations of their devoted kith and kin. Those less in love find in these chaotic preliminaries the wherewithal to blot out their doubts, giving themselves no leisure to think, no leeway to withdraw. So it had been with Fern. She had made her decision and intended to stand by it, obliterating any last-minute reservations, and now, when she felt a sudden need to stop, to reconsider, to take her time, there was no time left to take. It was Friday already, and although she had overslept she did not feel rested, and the morning was half gone, and the phone was starting to ring downstairs. Someone answered it, and Fern stretched and lay still, temporarily reprieved, and for the first time in more than a decade she opened her waking mind to memories of Atlantis. A villa on a mountainside, a room golden with lamplight and candlelight, the blue evening deepening outside. The echo of a thought, bittersweet with pain: This is how I shall remember it, when it is long gone … She got up in a sudden rush and began rummaging furiously in her dressing-table drawer, and there it was, tucked away at the back where she had hidden it all those years ago. A skein of material, cobweb-thin and sinuous as silk, so transparent that it appeared to have neither hue nor pattern, until a closer look revealed the elusive traces of a design, and faint gleams of colour like splintered light. As Fern let it unfold the creases of long storage melted away, and it lay over her arms like a drift of pale mist. She was still holding it when she went down to the kitchen in search of coffee. Will frowned: he thought he had seen it before.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Gaynor, touching it admiringly. ‘It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. What is it – a scarf?’

‘Something old,’ said Fern. ‘Like it says in the rhyme. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. This is very old.’

‘What will you do for t’rest of them?’ asked Mrs Wicklow.

‘A new dress, a borrowed smile, the three-carat sapphire in my engagement ring. That should cover it.’

Gaynor started at her flippancy; Mrs Wicklow found excuses for it. ‘Poor lass. Happen it’s all been too much for you. It’s always hard on t’bride just before t’big day, specially if she hasn’t a mother to help her. You don’t want to go drinking so much coffee: it’ll wind up your nerves even tighter.’

Fern smiled rather wanly, pushing the empty cup away. ‘I’ll switch to tea,’ she said.

After a breakfast which only Will ate, Mrs Wicklow departed to make up beds and bully Trisha, and Will and Gaynor went out in search of Ragginbone.

‘You won’t find him,’ said Fern. ‘He’s never there when you want him. It’s a habit of his.’

She went to the upstairs room where the dress waited in solitary splendour. It was made of that coarse-textured Thai silk which rustles like tissue paper with every movement, the colour too warm for white but not quite cream. The high neck was open down the front, the corners folded back like wings to show a glimpse of hidden embroidery, similar to the neckline worn by Mary Tudor in so many sombre portraits. The sleeves were tight and long enough to cover the wrist; the waist tapered; the skirt flared. Further decoration was minimal. It had beauty, simplicity, style: everything Fern approved. If I was in love, she thought irrationally, I’d want frills and flounces and lace. I’d want to look like a cloud full of pearls, like a blizzard in chiffon. No woman in love wants understatement. But there was no such thing as love, only marriage. On an impulse she took the dress off the dummy and put it on, wrestling with the inaccessible section of the zip. There was a hair ornament of silver wire, fitting like an Alice band, in order to secure the veil. She arranged it rather awkwardly and surveyed herself in the mirror – Alison’s mirror, which Will had moved from Gaynor’s room. In the spotted glass the sheen of the silk was dulled, making her look pale and severe. Her face appeared shadowed and hard about the mouth. I look like a nun, she decided. The wrong kind of nun. Not a blossoming girl abandoning her novitiate for the lure of romance, but a woman opting out of the world, for whom nunhood was a necessary martyrdom. A passing ray of sunlight came through the window behind her, touching that other veil, the gift of Atlantis, which she had left on the bed, so that for an instant it glowed in the dingy mirror like a rainbow. Fern turned quickly, but the sun vanished, and the colours, and her dress felt stiff and cumbersome, weighing her down; she struggled out of it with difficulty. I must have time to think, she told herself. Maybe if I talk to Gus …

She could hear Mrs Wicklow coming up the stairs and she hurried out, feeling illogically guilty, as if, in trying on the dress before the appointed hour, she had been indulging in a culpable act. Mrs Wicklow’s manner was even more dour than usual: Robin, Abby, and Robin’s only surviving aunt were due later that day, and it transpired that although Dale House was lavishly endowed with bedrooms there was a shortage of available linen. An ancient cache of sheets had proved to be moth-eaten beyond repair. ‘It’s too late to buy new ones,’ Fern said, seizing opportunity. ‘I’ll go down to the vicarage and see if I can borrow some.’

She felt better out of doors, though the sky to the east looked leaden and a hearty little wind had just breezed in off the North Sea. At the vicarage, she explained to Maggie about the bedding and then enquired for Gus.

‘He had to go out,’ Maggie said. ‘Big meeting with the archdeacon about church finances. It’s a funny thing: the smaller the finances, the bigger the meeting. Did you want him for anything special?’

Maybe she would be better off talking to Maggie, woman to woman, Fern thought, tempted by the hazy concept of universal sisterhood. Haltingly, she began to stammer out her doubts about the forthcoming marriage. She felt like a novice curate admitting to the lure of religious schism. Maggie’s face melted into instant sympathy. Her normal Weltanschauung combined genuine kindness and conscientious tolerance with the leftovers of Sixties ideology at its woolliest. In her teens she had embraced Nature, pacifism, and all things bright and beautiful, Freudian and Spockian, liberal and liberationist. She had worn long droopy skirts and long droopy hair, smoked marijuana, played the guitar (rather badly), and even tried free love, though only once or twice before she met Gus. At heart, however, she remained a post-Victorian romantic for whom a wedding day was a high point in every woman’s life. Relegating the loan of sheets to lower on the agenda, she pressed Fern into an armchair and offered coffee.

‘No, thanks, I …’

‘It’s not too much trouble, honestly. The percolator’s already on. What you need is to stop rushing around and sit down and relax for a bit. All brides go through this just before a wedding, believe me. I know I did. It’s all right for the men – they never do any of the work – but the poor bride is inundated with arrangements that keep changing and temperamental caterers and awkward relatives, and there always comes a moment when she stops and asks herself what it’s All For. It’s a big thing, getting married, one of the biggest things you’ll ever do – it’s going to alter your whole life – so it’s only natural you should be nervous. You’ll be fine tomorrow. When you’re standing there in the church, and he’s beside you, and you say “I do” – it all falls into place. I promise you.’ She took Fern’s hand and pressed it, her face shining with the fuzzy inner confidence of those fortunate few for whom marriage really is the key to domestic bliss.

‘But I’m not sure that I –’

‘Hold on: I’ll get the coffee. Keep talking. I can hear you from the kitchen.’

‘I had this picture of my future with Marcus,’ Fern said, addressing the empty chair opposite. ‘I’d got it all planned – I’ve always planned things – and I knew exactly how it would be. I thought that was what I wanted, only now I – I’m not sure any more. Something happened last night – it doesn’t matter what – which changed my perspective. I’ve always assumed I liked my life in London, but now I wonder if that was because I wouldn’t let myself think about it. I was afraid to widen my view. It isn’t that I dislike it: I just want more. And I don’t believe marrying Marcus will offer me more – just more of the same.’

‘Sorry,’ said Maggie, emerging with two mugs in which the liquid slopped dangerously. ‘I didn’t catch all that. The percolator was making too much noise. You were saying you weren’t sure –?’

‘I’m not sure I want to get married,’ Fern reiterated with growing desperation.

‘Of course you’re not.’ Maggie set down the mugs and glowed at her again. ‘No one is ever one hundred per cent sure about anything. Gus says that’s one of the miraculous things about human nature, that we’re able to leave room for doubt. People who are too sure, he says, tend to bigotry. He told me once, he even doubts God sometimes. He says that if we can deal with doubt ultimately it strengthens our faith. It’ll be like that with your marriage: you’ll see. When you get to the church –’

‘Maggie,’ Fern interrupted, ruthlessly, ‘I’m not in love with Marcus.’

The flow of words stopped; some of the eager glow ebbed from Mrs Dinsdale’s face. ‘You don’t mean that?’

‘I’ve never been in love with him. I like him, I like him a lot, but it’s not love. I thought it didn’t matter. Only now –’ Seeing Maggie’s altered expression, she got to her feet. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have saddled you with all this. I’ve got to sort it out for myself.’

‘But Fern – my dear –’

‘Could I have the sheets?’

Equipped with a sufficiency of linen, Fern and Trisha made up the beds together while Mrs Wicklow prepared a salad lunch for anyone who might arrive in time to eat it. Marcus and his family were to stay in a pub in a neighbouring village, maintaining a traditional distance until D-Day – something for which Fern was deeply grateful. Having to cope with her own relations was more than enough, when all she wanted, like Garbo, was to be left alone. Shortly after one the sound of a car on the driveway announced the advent of Robin, Abby, and Aunt Edie, the latter an octogenarian with a deceptive air of fragility and an almost infinite capacity for sweet sherry. Robin, at fifty-nine, still retained most of his hair and an incongruous boyishness of manner, though where his children were concerned he radiated an aura of generalised anxiety which neither their maturity or his had been able to alleviate. Abby in her forties was getting plump around the hips but remained charmingly scatty, easily lovable, impractical in small matters but down-to-earth in her approach to major issues. They had lapsed into the habits of matrimony without ever having formalised the arrangement and Fern, suspecting her father of a secret mental block, had never pushed the subject. Abby had received her seal of approval long before and she was content not to disrupt the status quo. However, even the nicest people have their defects. Abby had a passion for pets, usually of the small furry variety and invariably highly-strung to the point of psychosis. There had been a vicious Pomeranian, a sickly Pekinese, a succession of neurotic hamsters, gerbils, and guinea-pigs. Unfortunately, she had brought her latest acquisition with her, a chihuahua salvaged from a dog’s home whom she had rechristened Yoda. Fern tried not to fantasise about what might happen if the canine miniature came face to face with Lougarry. There was much cheek-to-cheek kissing, hefting of luggage and presentation of presents. Fern felt she was functioning increasingly on automatic pilot: her mouth made the right noises while inside her there was a yawning emptiness where her uncertainties rattled to and fro like echoes in a gorge. At Abby’s insistence she showed her the dress, thrown in haste back over the dummy, and while Abby touched and admired it a sudden cold fatalism told her that all this was meaningless, because she would never wear it now. She would never wear it at all.

‘What’s this?’ Abby enquired, picking up the drift of gossamer on the bed.

‘It’s mine,’ Fern said quickly, almost snatching it from her. ‘It was given to me – ages ago. Ages ago.’ And then, seeing Abby’s expression of hurt: ‘I’m sorry if I … It’s very fragile. I must put it away. I shouldn’t have left it lying about.’

The intrusion of Yoda put paid to further embarrassment. Abby scooped him up in her arms to prevent him soiling the dress and marvelled aloud how he could have managed to climb so many flights of stairs when the treads were nearly his own height. Fern could not resist a sneaking hope that he might slip on the descent and roll all the way to the bottom.

Will and Gaynor walked up the hill towards the moors. The same gleam of sunlight which spun a rainbow from the Atlantean veil as Fern gazed into the mirror danced across the landscape ahead of them, pursued by a grey barrage of cloud. The sun’s ray seemed to finger the farthest slopes, brushing the earth with a fleeting brilliance of April colour: the green and straw-gold of the grasses, the brown and bronze and blood-purple of thrusting stems, vibrant with spring sap, and in an isolate clump of trees the lemon-pale mist of new leaves.

‘Spring comes later here than in the south,’ Gaynor said.

‘Like a beautiful woman arriving long after the start of the party,’ Will responded. ‘She knows we’ll appreciate her that much more if she keeps us waiting.’

He seemed to know where he was going, changing from track to track as if by instinct, evidently treading an accustomed route. In due course Lougarry appeared, though Gaynor did not see from where, falling into step beside them. Her coat was scuffed and ruffled as if she had slept out, the fur tipped here and there with dried mud, burrs and grass seeds adhering to her flank. Gaynor tried to imagine her and her owner living in an ordinary house, sharing a sofa, watching Eastenders; but it was impossible. They were, not quite wild, but outsiders: outside walls, outside society, outside the normal boundaries in which we confine ourselves. She sensed that Ragginbone’s knowledge, his air of culture, had been acquired by watching and learning rather than taking part – endless years of watching and learning, maybe even centuries. She could picture him standing sentinel, patient as a heron, while the tumult of history went rushing and seething past. The wind would be his cloak and the sky his shelter, and Lougarry would sit at his heels, faithful as his shadow, silent as the wolf she resembled.

‘If Ragginbone is a retired wizard,’ she asked Will, ‘where does that leave Lougarry? Is she a retired werewolf?’

‘Reformed,’ said Will.

Gaynor had spoken lightly, her manner mock-satirical; but Will, as ever, sounded purely matter-of-fact.

They found Ragginbone on the crest of a hill where the bare rock broke through the soil. Gaynor did not know how far they had come but she was tired and thirsty, grateful for a long drink from the flask he carried. It was cased in leather like a hip-flask, though considerably bigger, but the contents tasted like water – the way water ought to taste but so rarely does, cool and clear and straight-off-the-mountain, without that tang of tin and the trace chemicals that so often contaminate it. But afterwards she thought perhaps its purity was mere fancy: thirst can transform any drink into an elixir. Will related most of her story, Gaynor speaking only in response to direct questions from Ragginbone. He made her repeat the description of Dr Laye several times.

‘Could he be an ambulant?’ Will suggested.

‘Maybe. However … You are sure his skin was actually grey? It was not an effect of the television?’

‘I’m sure,’ said Gaynor. ‘When his hand reached out I could see it quite clearly. I can’t describe how horrible it was. Not just shocking but somehow … obscene. The greyness made it look dead, but it was moving, beckoning, and the fingers were very long and supple, as if they had no bones, or too many …’ She broke off, shuddering at the recollection.

‘Yet the picture remained flat – it wasn’t like your three-dimensional vision of Azmodel?’

‘The screen went sort of rubbery, and the arm was pushing at it, stretching it out like plasticine, but – yes, the image behind stayed flat.’

‘And this was a programme you expected to see?’ Ragginbone persisted. ‘It was listed in the newspaper?’

‘Yes.’

To her frustration, Ragginbone made no further comment, his bright eyes narrowing in an intensity of thought. Will, better acquainted with him, waited a while before resuming the subject. ‘You know him, don’t you?’

‘Let us say, I know who he might be. If the skin tint is natural, and not the result of disease, that tone – or something like it – was a characteristic of a certain family, though it has been diluted over the ages. There is the name, too … Clearly, since this was a real programme, and he was invited to appear on it, he is a person of some standing in his field. Possibly Gaynor could use her contacts to learn more about him?’

‘I never thought of that,’ Gaynor admitted. ‘Of course, it’s obvious. How stupid of me.’

‘Not at all.’ Unexpectedly, Ragginbone smiled at her, a maze of lines crinkling and wrinkling at eye and cheek. ‘You had a disconcerting experience, but you seem to have kept your head very well. It was a pity you were so upset by the bats.’

‘I hate bats,’ said Gaynor.

‘What about the Old Spirit?’ asked Will. ‘He has to be behind all this.’

‘I fear so. He was weakened by his failure in Atlantis, but alas, not for long. And no other has ever laired in Azmodel.’

‘But why is he targeting Gaynor?’

‘Possibly because you put Alison’s television set in her room,’ Ragginbone retorted, with a flourish of his eyebrows. ‘Technology lends itself to supernatural control, and after all, what is a television but the mechanical equivalent of a crystal ball? Gaynor was not targeted, she was merely on the spot. It is Fern, I suspect, who is the target.’

‘Revenge?’ Will asked after a moment’s reflection.

‘Possibly. He has always been peculiarly subject to rancour, especially where the witchkind are concerned. The first Spirits hated the rumour of men aeons before they arrived, fearing them as potential rivals for the dominion of the planet, knowing nothing of who they were or from whence they would come. When they realised that their anticipated enemies were no fiery angels descending from the stars but only hairless apes who had clambered down from the trees, their hatred turned to derision.’ Ragginbone paused, smiling a wry smile as if at some secret joke. ‘Time passed. For the immortals, time can move both very fast and very slow: a week can stretch out indefinitely, or a million years can slip by almost unnoticed. Man grew up while their eyes were elsewhere, the Gift was given and Prospero’s Children learned to vie with the older powers. And of all the Spirits, his self-blame for such wilful myopia – the contempt and enmity that he has nourished for mortals ever after – was the greatest. Yet he yearned for Men – to rule, to manipulate, to control. And down the ages he has grown close to them, learning too well their follies and weaknesses, becoming their god and their devil, their genius and nemesis. Learned but never wise, he has remade himself in their image: the dark side of Man. Revenge gnaws him, but power motivates him. And Fern … Fern has power. How much, I do not know. In Atlantis, he must have seen more than we. In the years when the loss he had suffered there drained him like a slow-healing wound he may still have dreamed of using her, turning her Gift into his weapon. The Old Spirits have sought before now to corrupt witchkind and force them into their service, though such bargains have usually achieved little for either partner in the end. Remember Alimond. Still, it is said that the Fellangels, his most potent servants, were numbered among Prospero’s Children, until both their souls and their Gift were warped into the form of his purpose. Fern would not listen to the whispers of the Old Spirit – at the moment, she listens to no one – but … she might be subjugated through those she loves. Or so he may calculate. I think …’

‘You mean us?’ Will interrupted.

‘You, and others. You two seem to be the most readily available. You will have to be careful.’

‘You aren’t very reassuring,’ said Gaynor. ‘I thought I was scared before, but now … I suppose I could decide not to believe in any of this: it might be more comfortable.’

‘Is it comfortable,’ Ragginbone enquired, ‘to be afraid of something you don’t believe in?’

Gaynor did not attempt to respond, relapsing into a nervous habit of childhood, restless fingers plaiting and unplaiting a few strands of her hair. Presently, she broke into Will’s murmur of speculation, addressing the old man: ‘Why did you say “them” all the time?’ Ragginbone frowned, baffled. ‘When you talked about mankind, you said “them”, not “us”. I was wondering why.’

‘I wasn’t aware of it,’ Ragginbone admitted. ‘You are very acute. Little things betray us … I was born into the dregs of humanity, my Gift raised me higher than the highest – or so I thought at the time – and when I lost it I felt I was neither wizard nor man. The human kernel was gone: all that remained was the husk of experience. I became a Watcher on the periphery of the game, standing at the elbow of this player or that, giving advice, keeping the score. The advice usually goes unheeded and the score, at least on this last hand, was evidently wrong.’

Will grinned. ‘That’s how it goes.’

‘You’re an outsider,’ said Gaynor. ‘I thought so on the way here. Outside life, outside humanity, perhaps even outside time. Are there – are there others like you?’

‘Some that I know of. Probably some that I do not. We are the invigilators: events unfold before us, and occasionally we may try to give them a nudge in the right direction, or what we hope is the right direction. Our task is neither to lead nor to follow, only to be there. I have been an onlooker for so long it is hard to remember I was once part of the action. The human race … that is a club from which I was blackballed centuries ago.’

‘But –’ Gaynor broke off, gathering her courage for the question she was suddenly afraid to ask.

‘But?’ Ragginbone repeated gently.

‘Who appointed you?’ asked Gaynor. ‘There must be someone – Someone you work for, Someone who gives you orders …’

‘There are no orders,’ said Ragginbone. ‘No one tells us if we have succeeded or failed, if we have done right or wrong. We work for everyone. All we can do is all anyone can do: listen to the voice of the heart, and hope. I should like to think that we too are watched, and by friendly eyes.’

‘You will never get a straight answer from him,’ Will said. ‘Only twisted ones. He could find curves in a plumb-line. Ragginbone, Bradachin said the thing that came out of the mirror was not Alison but a tannasgeal. What did he mean?’

‘They are the spirits of those who died but feared to pass the Gate. They have long forgotten who they were or why they stayed; only the shreds of their earthly emotions linger, like a wasting disease. Hatred, greed, bitterness: these are the passions that bind them here. They loathe the living, and lust after them, but alone they have little power. However, the Oldest has often used such tools.’

‘How could it look like Alison?’ Will demanded.

‘People – and events – leave an impression on the atmosphere. Such creatures are parasites: they batten onto the memories of others, taking their shape. No doubt the tannasgeal saw her in the mirror.’

‘Mirrors remember,’ said Gaynor.

‘Exactly.’

They were silent for a while, leaning against the rock where once, long before, Ragginbone had shown Will and Fern the Gate of Death. Every so often there was the rumour of a passing car on the distant road, but nearer and clearer were the tiny sounds of insects, the call of an ascending skylark. The colours of the landscape were dulled beneath the cloud-cover; the wind was chill.

‘What can we do to protect Fern?’ Gaynor said eventually, shivering now from cold rather than the recollection of horror.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ragginbone.

‘I thought you were supposed to advise us?’ Gaynor protested indignantly.

Will laughed.

‘Advice is a dangerous thing,’ the Watcher responded. ‘It should be given only rarely and cautiously, and taken in small doses, with scepticism. What can I say? Keep your nerve. Use your wits. Premonition is an unchancy guide to action, but there is a shadow lying ahead of you, through which I cannot see. Remember: the Old Spirit is not the only evil in the world. There are others, less ancient maybe, less strong – as the tempest is milder than the earthquake, the tsunami cooler than the volcano – but not less deadly. And mortality gives the Gifted an edge that the undying cannot match. Your dream about the owl puzzles me, Gaynor. Of all the things you have told me, that is the one that does not fit. There is something about it that I ought to recognise, a fragment that eludes me. Tread carefully. The shadow ahead of you is black.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.