Prospero's Children (23 page)

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said. “Where have you been?”

“Somewhere,” she said vaguely. “Or nowhere. This is beautiful.”

“It’s a pity it isn’t intact.”

“Keep it anyway. It comes from Atlantis, after all.”

She stood up to leave but as they turned Will’s foot seemed to be caught. He bent to free it and saw there was something twisted round his ankle, something snake-like, camouflagecolored, gleaming wet. Something that tightened like a noose on his leg and pulled him back toward the river. “Fern!” he cried. “What is it?
Fern—!
” She seized a fallen branch and began to beat the serpentine limb just below the coil; its grip loosened but a second came slithering out of the stream, feeling its way through the leaf-mold, and she dodged only just in time. Will yanked his leg free, gasping with fright. Fern pounded furiously at the tentacles; as they slid back into the water she leaned over the bank and looked down. The Yarrow was not deep; slanting rays of sunshine would pick out pebbles and clumps of twig on its bed. But the sun was too low now and the rising dusk filled the shallows. Fern craned forward, forgetful of danger, peering into the dimness. Her face was a yard from the water when its substance seemed to change. The riverbed opened up into an abyss deep as midnight, huge swirls of weed came billowing toward the surface and a half-seen shape sank swiftly into the murk, many-limbed, amorphous, blurring quickly into shadow. Fern drew back, grabbed Will’s arm, and dragged him away up the hillside at something close to a run.

“What did you see?” he asked her when the slope slowed their pace.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but whatever it was, it shouldn’t have been there.”

That night, she
did
dream. She was floating in that strange, out-of-body state she had experienced before, following the line of the Yarrow down the valley toward the sea. Trees leaned across her path, their branches trailing seaweed whose long ribbons rustled and stirred as she passed through. An enormous fish brushed the surface of the water: Fern thought it might be a pike but then realized it was a swordfish. As she emerged from the river-cleft above the sea her feet skimmed the wave-peaks, breaking the water without a ripple, foam-scuds blowing through her. She plunged down into a greenish twilight, her speed accelerating until she seemed to be rushing through the depths faster than thought: the great tides of ocean flowed over her. She had swift glimpses of undulating forests and sunken mountains, stalky eyes peering from chasm and crevasse, a long defile of blue lobsters marching across the seabed, the steel-trap mouth of a cruising shark. But the visions and the dangers had barely time to leave their imprint on her mind before they were swept away, lost in the wheeling vastness of the seas. When she slowed down she found herself drifting over a coral reef. The water around her appeared to be shot with silver, until she saw she was in the midst of a huge shoal which turned on a shimmer and dived, vanishing into a dimension of blue. Beyond, she saw a garden, a surreal garden with waving clumps of spaghetti and macaroni-beds and swimming tubes with flower-heads and gaudy fish fanning like blown petals over all. A basking stone pounced on a stray shrimp before settling back into inconspicuity. A large grouper coasted alongside her, its thick purple lips drawn down in an expression of perpetual disapproval. She wondered if it could see her. But it veered away and she was gliding on toward a rocky overhang beneath which the coral had grown into shapes strange even for a submarine garden: long thin branches laid end to end; an unexpectedly regular ladder-formation of stems; a hollow sphere, sea-smoothed, gleaming through the dim water like bluish ivory. It took her a moment or two to realize what it was, and perhaps because she was dreaming she felt no horror, only curiosity. An anemone blossomed in one empty socket; minute polyps had already begun to stake out the fallen jaw. It seemed to Fern a good place to leave your remains, where the ocean could recycle them and tiny lives could batten and thrive on the discarded leftovers of one departed life. She extended an insubstantial hand to touch the brow-bone in an inexplicably necessary gesture of acknowledgment.

And it began to change. The coral-polyps melted away and the anemone retreated into its sack, shriveling into non-existence. The skeleton re-formed, lost fragments of humerus and sternum solidifying out of nowhere, sprouting internal organs that appeared to have coalesced from the very plankton which had fed on them, finally mantling itself in a creeping growth of flesh which washed over the exposed anatomy like rising tide. Even as she withdrew her hand, he was whole. He. He was young, only a few years older than herself—Too young to die, thought Fern—naked but for the rag-ends of unrecognizable garments. He had obviously not come to rest there naturally: his clothes were weighted with stones, his eyelids with shells; strands of weed were braided in his dark hair. His face was pale in the sea-glimmer, and peaceful, and somehow familiar. (It was only later that it occurred to her he was beautiful.) And on a chain around his neck hung the key. Oddly enough she did not remember Alimond’s tape of the past, and her fleeting impression of the boat foundering, and the mermaid, and the drowning man. It was as if fate had drawn a blind in her head, screening out anything that might get in its way. Memory nagged at her, telling her there was something she had missed, but her conscious thought focused solely on that elusive familiarity, trying in vain to pin it down and put a label on it. She was sure she had never met him before and yet . . . she knew him. And gradually her frustration grew into a slow anger that he was lying there serenely dead, somewhere in the ocean waters thousands of years ago, when he should have been alive and real and Now. The emotion poured through her like wine into a clear glass, giving her color and substance, hardening and defining her. The dream shrank from her increasing reality, the grotto receding into a blue disc at the end of a lengthening tunnel until at last it was swallowed up and, fighting oblivion, she struggled through layers of darkness into awakening. When she opened her eyes she was still angry, although it took her several minutes to remember why.

In the morning, there was still no sign of Ragginbone. Will went into the garden before breakfast, calling for Lougarry, but she did not come. An air of unease hung over the house, unsettling even Mrs. Wicklow, who had arrived early for a projected shopping expedition to the supermarket in Guisborough. “There’s been strange goings-on,” she said, “since that flood business. People seeing things that didn’t ought to be there. Of course, boys get worked up, over-excited, and then they imagine anything, from beasties to boggarts, but Mr. Snell, he’s not the type to go seeing things.”

“Who’s Mr. Snell?” asked Fern, and “What did he see?” from Will.

“He lives just up t’ road from us,” Mrs. Wicklow explained. “Walks his dog every evening, down t’ beach if it’s fine. He come by yesterday on his way back when we was in t’ garden: he was in a right pother, pale as dough, and the dog shivering and yapping away. Mind you, it’s a nasty little creature: once bit a child. We asked him what was t’ trouble and he said he’d seen something on t’ beach. Wouldn’t say what it was. Well, we thought it was all just boys’ stories, but Mr. Snell . . .”

Fern and Will abandoned breakfast, murmured a passing excuse to their father, and headed for the sea. The beach was popular in summer but recent bad weather had kept tourists to a minimum. As they walked, a thin veil of cloud drew over the sun and the wind turned chill. Down on the shore, the dull light washed everything with gray; a solitary beachcomber picked his way along the waterline, but there was no one else around. The Capels left their shoes by the steps and wandered down to where the foam-swirl poured over low rocks and fanned across the sand-flats. They paddled through the ebb and flow of the waves, searching with their eyes for anything unusual or alarming; once, Will flinched from a thick strand of weed that looked, for a moment, like the tip of a tentacle. Passing the beachcomber with a brief “hello” they soon found themselves alone. The mouth of the Yarrow was a long way behind; ahead, sea and shore drew together, squeezing the beach against the crumbling cliff of rock and impacted mud. And across the sand, there were tracks. Fern and Will bent over them, initially more baffled than afraid. They saw pronounced indentations running in two parallel bands, up the beach toward the cliff: the distance between the most widely spaced marks was more than three feet. Gradually a picture formed in their minds. It was a picture with few specific features but it included a great many legs, spiky, single-clawed legs that all scuttled in unison, like a cross between a lobster and a woodlouse. Only bigger. Much bigger.

The rising tide sent a wave sprawling up the beach which spread itself thinly across the sand, eroding the imprints to dimples. “We haven’t got long,” said Fern. “We could get cut off here.”

But Will was already following the tracks to where they vanished under a large boulder. He dropped to his knees; coming up behind, Fern saw him peering into a hole beneath the stone. It had obviously been silted up but
something
had scrabbled away at the entrance, clearing an opening that was low but broad enough to swallow the tracks, a narrow crack into utter blackness. Will said with a marked fall in enthusiasm: “I suppose I
could
try to crawl in . . .”

“No,”
Fern said, rather more firmly than was strictly necessary.

She seized a handful of his T-shirt to emphasize her point. He did not attempt to break free, only sinking down to sand level, keeping a short distance from the slot. Then she felt the T-shirt pull as he inched closer.

“Will—!”

“I just want to take a look . . .”

A second later he shot backward, almost knocking her over.

“It’s in there,” he gasped, “whatever it is. I saw—eyes. Moving about. Only they weren’t synchronized. They moved separately, like—like two eyeballs, just floating around in the dark. What do you think—?”

“On stalks?” Fern suggested.

“It’s from Atlantis, isn’t it?”

“I think we should get away. Now—”

The claw shot out so fast that if Will hadn’t already begun to reverse he wouldn’t have stood a chance. Even in that one brief appearance they registered every detail. It resembled the pincers of a gigantic crab, huge chunks of armor-plating with the ragged edge of a badly sharpened saw. The ancient shell was crusted with barnacles and coral-polyps, weed-smeared and sea-stained. But it moved as if it had been oiled, and the snap of those pincers closing had the iron impact of a guillotine. Will’s leg was within millimeters of being sliced in half—but even as Fern yanked him backward the claw withdrew, disappearing into the dark beneath the rock.

Will swore.

His sister did not bother to admonish him. “Come on,” she said, maintaining her grip on his T-shirt.

“But—supposing someone else finds it?”

“They won’t. The tide’s coming in. It’ll go with the tide.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.”

They did not slacken their pace until they had retrieved their shoes and were walking up the road to the village. Will stopped at the vicarage to consult Gus’s ample library for any background information on primitive crustaceans. Fern returned home to find the house empty and a note on the kitchen table telling her Robin and Mrs. Wicklow had gone to Guisborough. She prepared coffee and toast to make up for the breakfast she had missed and then allowed the one to go cold, the other soggy, while she lost herself in fruitless speculation. Dale House felt curiously bleak deprived of the goblin’s furtive presence and the solitude began to be oppressive. When she heard a car on the drive, she started up without thinking and ran to open the door.

But it wasn’t her father’s Audi which had pulled up outside. This car was long, and low, and gleaming white. The driver unfolded himself from the front seat with pantheresque grace and came toward her, the familiar knowing smile shadowing his mouth. His hair shone like a steel helmet. Fern drew back into the hall, starting to close the door, but slowly, too slowly. She knew he was an ambulant, a manifestation of Azmordis, oldest of spirits, all-powerful and all-hungry—but he was also a social acquaintance, her father’s friend, and the lifelong habit of courtesy made her hesitate.

“Are you going to let me in,” he said, “or shut the door in my face?”

And of course she could not. Even now, knowing what she knew, she had to play the game, fulfill the demands of good manners. “I beg your pardon,” she said. And: “Was I expecting you?”

“Oh, I think so,” he responded, stepping over the threshold. She wasn’t sure if he closed the door or if it closed itself after him, the Yale lock sliding into place with a soft terminal snick. “I told your father I would be around one day. Where is he, by the way?”

“He’s out,” Fern said reluctantly. “He’ll be back soon”— and as she spoke she realized that somehow Javier knew she was alone, had known before he came, choosing his moment, relying on her weakness and the reflexes instilled by her polite middle-class upbringing.

She thought: Etiquette can be lethal . . .

“You might offer me coffee,” he suggested. She was conscious of how tall he was, and felt even smaller than usual.

“I might,” she said, “but it’s gone cold.”

“Heat it up.”

He followed her into the kitchen. She put the coffeepot on the hob and waited, resenting her passive role, striving to conceal both tension and fear. The next move had to be his. She had found the key, and lost it; she had summoned his presence into the idol, and it had been destroyed; she had tried to prevent Alimond opening the Door, and had failed. Now, every move had to be his.

“What happened to Alison?” he asked.

“You must know. She made an image of the Gate, and unlocked it, but it wasn’t what she expected. It wasn’t the Gate of Death. It was a Door into—somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Atlantis.” She could think of no good reason to withhold the information. “Zohrâne opened the Door
there
, and Alimond opened the Door
here
, and they found—each other.”