Prospero's Children (22 page)

“Is
that
what whales sing for?” said Will. Fern merely looked skeptical.

“So he hunted less and slept the more,” concluded Ragginbone, quirking an eyebrow at her, “until at last he sank deep into the seabed, and roused no more. They say that long cleft in the midst of the Pacific was formed by the greatest of his coils. Of course, it is only a legend. Still, most legends germinate from a seed of truth and feed on the imagination of Man. We need our demons: they are symbols, overblown maybe, often exaggerated, but effective. They offer simple confrontations between Good and Evil. War, famine, and pestilence are much less straightforward.”

“You mean the Sea Serpent
isn’t
real?” queried Will, becoming confused.

“Who knows?” said Ragginbone unhelpfully. “What is Reality?”

“What I don’t understand,” Fern interrupted, “is what happened to the key. When Alimond had turned it in the lock it just disappeared. Where did it go?”

“At a guess,” said the Watcher, “once in the lock it connected with itself, and as the Door opened it moved into the Past. You cannot have two aspects of one object in the same zone of space and time. Therefore, when the key Here moved into There, it became the key There. It hadn’t disappeared, it was just on the other side of the Door. It’s what’s called a time trap. That’s why, if you journey into the Past, you must be very careful never to coincide with yourself. It can happen to people too.”

“I’ll remember that,” said Fern.

“The Door was destroyed,” Ragginbone continued. “Atlantis was destroyed. The key must have wound up at the bottom of the sea. That’s where it was found.”

“What happened to the bits?” asked Fern.

“The
bits
?”

“Of the Door. Are they Here, or There?”

“Does it matter?” shrugged Will.

“I hope not,” said Ragginbone, but he was frowning.

The conversation drifted on into silence; the level sank in the brandy bottle; Lougarry let her eyes close completely, though her ears remained alert even in slumber.

“Would you like to stay the night?” Fern offered hesitantly, unsure if the invitation was appropriate. “We have plenty of room.”

“Thank you,” said Ragginbone, evidently a little surprised, “but I don’t think so. I’ve lost the habit of sleeping under a roof. Caves now, caves are different. More natural. Lougarry will be here, if you feel nervous.”

“We’ll be all right,” said Fern. “Anyway, Pegwillen will come back now, won’t he? With Alimond dead. I know you didn’t like him, but it felt right for him to be here. He
belonged
.”

“Not anymore,” said the Watcher, hovering between grimness and a reluctant pity. “Death can break a spell but it does not restore life. Alimond turned me into a rock; the house-goblin she simply exterminated. These delicate shades of vindictiveness! She wanted me to know my fate and suffer accordingly, but with Malmorth she didn’t care. She tore his slight spirit from its semblance of a body and hurled it into Limbo like an unwanted rag. It—he—cannot return. Don’t mourn for him. Ultimately, it was probably a relief. Misery and loneliness had eaten at his mind for too long.”

“I’m glad Alison’s dead,” said Will after a minute or two. “She deserved it.”

“I suppose so,” said Fern.

When she finally went to bed, reeling from a sudden blast of tiredness after a day whose length might have been measured in centuries, she found herself glancing with fading hope into corners and shadows; but there was nothing there. The house seemed to have lost the essence of its personality: now, it was just a stack of rooms. The corners and shadows held no more secrets. The house-goblin was gone, and the witch was gone, and the key to Death and Time was lost forever.

In the morning, Fern picked a bunch of wildflowers and put them in a jam jar on the kitchen windowsill.

Not to mourn, she told herself, but to remember.

They found Alimond later that day, floating in the Yarrow where the river ran dark under the trees. Her hair, caught in a net of twigs and weed, matted the surface of the water like thick colorless algae. The young constable who helped to haul her out was inexperienced in the matter of dead bodies; he had to sit down and duck his head between his knees. Even his older companion said it gave him “quite a turn,” not so much the bloating and bruising of the face or the slime that drooled from the open mouth but that dreadful vacant stare, as if those eyes had looked into an emptiness more terrible than any vision of Hell. At the inquest, a pathologist confirmed that she had drowned. Formal identification was provided by Rollo, his studded leather traded for a jacket of mauve-gray silk which he clearly believed appropriate, his mock-cockney accent not in evidence. Gus Dinsdale described the so-called flash flood, and Fern, looking as youthful and vulnerable as she could manage, pleaded memory loss. The coroner was kindly; Robin guilt-stricken. (He had returned from the States in a rush despite Fern’s careful downplaying of the whole affair and now blamed everything on his own wanton absence.) Fern was profoundly relieved that Javier Holt did not put in an appearance. She was almost sure that he would come, one day soon, and although Alimond was dead and the key out of reach still she feared him, a lingering irrational fear that she could not reason away.

Afterward, Maggie Dinsdale found her husband curiously thoughtful. “I had a word with that chap from the path lab,” he said. “He didn’t mention it in his evidence—he was obviously puzzled and presumably didn’t wish to complicate things—but apparently Alison drowned in
salt water
.” He paused. “She’s in the sea, Fern said.
In the sea . . .
”

For no particular reason, Maggie shivered.

The funeral was held in London. Robin went, Fern declined. She was relieved to note that with Alimond’s death her hold over Robin had evaporated so completely he seemed slightly bewildered by his own recent behavior—a bewilderment, however, that was easily swallowed up in the overreaction of his conscience. For a short while he became so protective that Fern found herself plotting distractions to keep him away from Yorkshire. “We’ll go down to the south of France for a couple of weeks,” he informed his children on his return from the funeral. “I had coffee with Jane Cleary: they’ve invited us to the villa. She was really shocked when I told her about this business. You’d like to go, wouldn’t you?” His gaze latched hopefully onto his daughter. “You were never very keen on Yorkshire.”

But Fern returned a noncommittal answer. Even though their adventures seemed to be over, she was reluctant to let go. Ragginbone was still in the vicinity and Lougarry continued to patronize the kitchen. “She belongs to this local guy,” Will had explained to his father, tip-toeing through the truth. “He’s a bit eccentric. We look after her sometimes.” Robin, who felt he ought to be a dog-lover even when he wasn’t, accepted this without further question, patting her cautiously from time to time and wondering why her yellow stare made him uncomfortable. It was all of a piece with the other factors which contributed to his inner discomfort, many of which seemed the more disquieting because he could not specify what they were. “You do
want
to go to France, don’t you?” he reiterated, almost pleading. Will said: “Yes, of course” much too enthusiastically; Fern, apparently lost in abstraction, said nothing at all. He knew from other parents that teenagers were habitually abstracted, it was a teenage state of mind: they mooned after boyfriends or girlfriends, agonized over spots and exam results, wrapped themselves in a fog of alienation which might be the result of drug-taking or might be merely hormones. But Fern had never been that kind of teenager. Fern, envious acquaintances had opined darkly, was too good to be true. Sooner or later she would go off the rails.

“You are all right, old girl, aren’t you?” he inquired awkwardly.

“Yes, Daddy. Of course I’m all right.”

“You’re usually so keen on going to France.”

“I’m just not in the mood, that’s all.” She’s upset because of Alison, he thought. That’s what it is. She probably blames herself. “I like it here,” Fern went on with the flicker of a smile, shattering illusions. “Don’t worry, Daddy. I expect I’ll feel differently in a week or so.”

“Saw Javier Holt at the funeral,” he resumed after a minute or two. “I gather he took you out to dinner when he was up here.” Vague suspicions reared their half-formed heads at the back of his mind.

“Yes, he did.” Fern infused her voice with mild boredom although her stomach clenched.

“What happened?”

“We went to a pub somewhere. It was all right really. I didn’t think they’d have any decent restaurants round here. It just goes to show.”

Robin appeared to relax a little. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Yorkshire food—roast beef—pudding—it’s famous.”

“The menu was French,” said Fern.

“Javier said he’d be passing through here in a day or so,” Robin pursued. “On his way to Scotland. Said Alison had some stuff here belonging to the gallery—pictures she’d borrowed, I think it was. Anyhow, he’s going to pick them up. Thought that chap Rollo took all her things, myself.”

“Yes,” said Fern, “he did. I helped him pack.”

“That’s what I told him,” said Robin. “Still, he’s coming anyway.”

Fern and Will had entered Alimond’s room the day after her death. The door handle no longer resisted them; inside, the carpet was faded and the fixtures and fittings had reverted to their former moth-eaten condition. The peacock bedspread looked tawdry and out-of-place. Lougarry padded in after them, her hackles stirring. “Well,” said Ragginbone from the hallway, “what are you going to do with all this?” His gesture indicated the books, the videotapes, the paintings, the familiar box on the bedside table.

“I suppose we ought to burn her magic things,” Will said. He did not sound very keen. “I wonder if you could re-tune this TV set for ordinary channels?” He toyed with the remote control, producing various types of crackle.

Fern grimaced. “Paranormal service will be resumed presently.”

“You ought to keep the important items,” Ragginbone insisted. “The box, the gloves, some of these books. Most of it’s rubbish—Alimond had a taste for pointless gadgetry and the general bric-a-brac of ritual—still, you never know. There are a few bits and pieces which might be interesting.”

“None of it belongs to us,” said Fern. “She must have made a will. It belongs to her heirs.”

“The only proper legatee for a witch is another witch,” stated the Watcher.

“So?” Fern was defiant.

“One may show up. Someday.”

In the end, whatever Ragginbone considered essential went into Fern’s wardrobe, on the top shelf at the back. She herself appropriated one of the pictures, driven by a peculiar compulsion, hiding it under her bed for safe-keeping and sandwiching it in a pile of reserve blankets. She expected to sleep badly, haunted by the concealed arcana in her room, but her slumber for several nights now had been unbroken, and her dreams beyond the reach of memory. Will had kept the television set after Rollo declared it broken.

And now Javier was coming, as Fern had anticipated. As she had dreaded.

“What do you think he’s after?” Will asked the following morning. Mrs. Wicklow was dusting in a ubiquitous manner while Robin attempted to conduct business by telephone; the younger Capels had wandered outside to put themselves out of earshot.

“Whatever he can get.” Fern shrugged. She decided it was important to present at least the appearance of indifference.

Their stroll carried them in a circuit of the wrecked barn; Will, who had picked up several fragments of what he insisted was Atlantean debris over the past few days, was carefully scanning the grass. The tarpaulined shape of the
Seawitch
lay round the back, well clear of the wave’s passage. As they approached it Will gave an eager exclamation and crouched down, reaching for something on the ground that seemed to be running away from him. When Fern gazed into his cupped palm she saw a tiny crab no bigger than a thumbnail, its fragile carapace tinted some translucent shade between gray and green and gold. She brushed it with her fingertip, feeling the nip of fairy claws.

“It’s over a week,” she said. “How could it still be alive?”

“It came from the
Seawitch
,” Will volunteered. “Maybe it felt at home on the hull of a sunken ship.”

On a mutual reflex, the two of them went over to the covered prow and lifted the tarpaulin. And stared—and stared— in blank astonishment.

For the carved figurehead which Will had so diligently cleaned was festooned with seaweed. It hung down in long streamers, glossy as patent leather, beaded with pods and clotted here and there into knots and tangles. The wood of the ship’s side was damp, not rain-damp but sea-damp, smelling of ocean, glinting with salt-crystals where it had begun to dry. New limpets clung to the planks; startled antennae waved from the seaweed-tangles; diminutive snails, gaudy as flowers, studded the hulk. Something which might have been an eel slipped from a crack and slithered away into the grass.

Fern was the first to recover the use of speech. “This is ridiculous,” she said.

“The flood didn’t go this way,” said Will. “And anyhow—!”

The ship might have been hauled off the seabed just ten minutes ago.

“There’s something strange going on,” Fern concluded rather unnecessarily. “We ought to tell Ragginbone. He
might
know what it’s all about.” Experience had slightly dented her confidence in the Watcher’s omniscience.

But although Lougarry came at a call a request to be taken to Ragginbone was met with an unmoving stare. “He’s never there when you want him,” Will complained. “What’s the point of a wizard who has no power and can’t even be on hand when he’s needed?”

“He’ll be back,” Fern said, determined to be positive. “I hope.”

They tugged the tarpaulin back into place, like conspirators concealing the evidence of a crime. They felt irrationally guilty, hiding a secret they did not understand yet which already seemed to be their business and theirs alone—a secret which must be safeguarded from the prying eyes of the wellintentioned. They were restless all that day: their adventures had been unpleasant and often terrifying but the possibility that they might not be over filled both Capels with a nervous excitement akin to anticipation. At Will’s insistence they spent the afternoon exploring, following the route of the flood down the hillside and along the valley of the Yarrow. Will, enthusiastic to the point of obsession, searched the ground like a detective hunting for clues; Fern wandered along the riverbank and eventually sat down in the spot she had favored before, losing herself in speculation. Almost out of habit, she began to tune in to the rhythms of her environment: the timeless reverie of the trees, the exhalation of the wind, the agelong heartbeats of the deep earth. The bubbling voice of the stream was like a few snatched notes from a greater music, the distant sea-music whose echoes she had heard on the beach at the Margin of Being; and as she listened her thought was carried away and away, back to the legendary shoreline where Imagination and Reality meet, and she smelled the star-smell like distilled silver, and breathed the air that had never been breathed before, and heard the foam hissing like fire upon the sand.
Where
did that beach exist? she wondered. Or had it been spun out of magic for the duration of a dream and the need of a moment, bounded by the scope of her own fantasy? Was it a place in the imagination of God, or only of Man? But surely the whole world was simply a place in the imagination of the Creator—a fortuitous accident or a divine inspiration, according to your state of belief. Man himself was born of a spark in the ultimate Mind; God had burgeoned from a spark in the mind of Man. Who had first imagined Whom? Her thought spread in endless circles, like the ripples from the fall of a star into a limitless sea, until at last they touched upon the riverbank, and she was sitting under the trees in the late sunshine, and a bird was whistling somewhere nearby. Will joined her shortly after, carrying part of a huge shell in whose broken whorls the music echoed again, faint as a sigh.