The Dragon Charmer (15 page)

“She found me,” said Gaynor through a falling wave of hair. Having saturated the first dishcloth, Will had set to with a second. “When I was sure I knew the way I sent her back to the car. I thought—she would watch over Fern. Thanks,” she added, referring to Will’s drying efforts. “That’s enough, honestly. As long as it’s not dripping … I must get these clothes off.”

Once Abby had appeared to minister to her, Will and Robin set out to find Fern. Gaynor’s directions were vague—she had no idea how far she had walked—but she maintained that if they followed the road and stopped at intervals to call Lougarry, the she-wolf would come to guide them. Robin was dubious, finding it difficult to believe that a half-feral mongrel, the property of an eccentric tramp, could be, as he put it, sufficiently well-trained. But Will waived his reservations aside and, clad in weatherproof clothing snatched from the hall closet, they went out to Robin’s car. In the kitchen, Gaynor was mopped clean of excess mud, stripped, dried, enveloped in Will’s bathrobe, and padded with hot-water bottles. She wanted to have a bath, but Abby dissuaded her. She was shivering in spasms now, her teeth chattering from the aftermath of cold and shock. “The main thing is to get you really warm,” Abby said. “Will’s very sensible. It always surprises me—although I don’t know why it should, because, of course, Fern is sensible, too.” She scooped up Yoda, who had followed her downstairs. “Perhaps you’d like to stroke him? It’s supposed to be awfully therapeutic. Oh, well … have some more whiskey. There’s always lots in this house, though no one drinks it much. I’m never sure whom it’s for.”

Bradachin, thought Gaynor, but she only stammered, through her shivers: “M-medicinal.”

“I’ll make you some coffee,” said Abby, depositing Yoda on a spare chair. He promptly jumped down and wandered around the kitchen, looking for scraps that he could chew and spit out again in disgust. It was the bad habit that had earned him his name, after Yoda’s first screen appearance where his rooting about irritates Luke’s fragile patience. “Are you …
are you quite sure Fern wasn’t injured? It’s so unlike her to drink too much, and I’ve never known her to pass out before.”

“N-nor me,” said Gaynor. She saw no need to elaborate.

“I do hope she’ll be all right for tomorrow,” Abby said.

To that, Gaynor made no answer at all.

   It was nearly three when they brought Fern home. By that time, Gaynor was dry and the men were wet. Lougarry endeared herself to no one by shaking her coat heartily in the middle of the kitchen, soaking Yoda who had appropriated her place by the stove. The small dog fled into the hall, for once ignored by Abby, who had other things on her mind. They carried Fern to her room and put her to bed. Her condition appeared normal: her pulse was steady if slow, her breathing ditto. She was cold from her long sojourn in the damaged car, but assisted by Gaynor’s discarded hot-water bottles she warmed up fairly quickly. Yet she made no sound not the wisp of a snore, not a grunt, not a sigh and her body stayed where it had been placed, unmoving, inanimate as a broken dummy. Robin wanted to call a doctor but the others overruled him. “What would you tell him?” Will demanded. “That she had too much to drink and slept through a minor car crash in which she wasn’t hurt? There isn’t a mark on her.”

“Perhaps we should tell Marcus …”

“Good God, no,” Gaynor murmured faintly.

“I’m sure she’ll be fine in the morning,” Abby said. “She’s just sleeping it off. Anyway, there’s nothing more we can do now. We ought to go to bed before all this bother wakes Aunt Edie.”

“I’ll stay with her for a bit,” said Gaynor.

Abby herded Robin down the corridor to their own room and Will and Gaynor were left alone with Fern. Gaynor took the chair, Will the low stool from in front of the dressing table. “What haven’t you told me?” he asked.

Carefully, pausing often to ask or answer extra questions, Gaynor went through her story. At some point Lougarry came in and began to lick Fern’s hand, a typical doglike gesture that was rare for her. When Gaynor had finished Will stood up and went to the window, pulling back the curtain. But whatever he was looking for, it wasn’t there. “We need
Ragginbone,” he said, moving irresolutely to the bedside. “He probably won’t know what to do, but he might be able to explain this. Well… if she doesn’t wake up at least the marriage is off. Funny: that seemed such a good idea earlier on, and it seems such a bad one now.”

“She won’t wake up,” said Gaynor. “She isn’t there.”

Fern’s still face appeared no longer tired, or strained, or tense. It was just a face, arranged into features, unmarked by thought or dream, with less expression than a statue. Gaynor had once done some voluntary work in a hospice and she knew that peaceful look that comes after the passage of death, when the vacant body subsides into a semblance of tranquility. But here was no peace, no death; only vacancy. The full realization was so horrifying, there in that quiet, safe room far away from the perils of an illusory past, that panic rose in her, and she had to fight herself not to start screaming. Instead she demanded, in the age-old cliché of helplessness and desperation: “What can we Jo?”

Will put his arms around her, and said nothing.

   The following morning was one that all of them would later prefer to forget. No one had slept well, except Aunt Edie. Abby was the first to try to rouse Fern; Will and Gaynor knew it would be fruitless. Subsequent events unwound with a combination of chaos and inevitability, disaster broken with moments of pseudo-comic relief. Afterward, Gaynor remembered everything as a blur, shot here and there with highlights of detail, where her mind would focus briefly on some trivial point before losing its grip again. She found herself thinking, idiotically: If only Fern were here. She would be able to manage. The half-world on the shady side of existence, a world of dark magic and ethereal horror, had become a hideous reality.

They telephoned the doctor, they telephoned the vicar, they telephoned Marcus Greig. They telephoned a garage to tow away the smashed car. An ambulance came and went, taking Fern, accompanied by Robin, to a hospital for tests, and thence to a private nursing home specializing in coma patients. Marcus followed in his Saab. Meager information percolated back:
She’s doing well. There’s nothing wrong with her. The
doctors are baffled
. Abby, supported by Gus and Maggie Dins-dale, struggled to unarrange all the arrangements, delaying, canceling, collapsing into confusion when asked for definite directives. Stray guests arrived at the house and were rounded up by Will, who dispatched them, in default of other entertainment, to enjoy the Yorkshire countryside. Yoda located the wedding cake and ate a portion of the bottom tier, since that was all he could reach. Lougarry went to fetch Ragginbone and Gaynor took him into Will’s studio to relate the saga of the previous night. Mrs. Wicklow astonished everyone by bursting into tears. Endless cups of tea circulated, but nobody appeared to drink them, lunch sank without trace, morning staggered into afternoon, afternoon trickled into evening. The tent removers refused to remove the tent. Aunt Edie drank an entire bottle of sherry and claimed to have had a conversation with a hirsute Scottish gnome, thus convincing Abby that she was even farther down the road to alcoholic senility than they had realized. Yoda was sick.

Around seven the house lapsed into a species of dumb lassitude. Mrs. Wicklow and the Dinsdales went home; Ragginbone had already gone, promising to return later. Abby was in the sitting room with Aunt Edie, who had the constitution of a navvy and was proving obdurate about having an early night. The phone still rang intermittently: they didn’t dare take it off the hook in case it was Robin or Marcus with news of Fern. Will went to look for Gaynor, locating her eventually in the tent. The tables were still immaculately laid, the flowers only just beginning to wilt. Everything was spotlessly pink. The wedding cake alone appeared somewhat the worse for wear: Yoda’s inroads on the foundations had caused the upper stories to collapse, and now it resembled a block of jerry-built flats in an earthquake zone. Gaynor was standing in the middle of the tent, surveying the wedding that wasn’t. Even the reflection from so much pink could not hide the whiteness of her face. “What are you doing
here?”
said Will.

“Thinking.” Gaynor did not look at him. Her regard was fixed on the empty top table. “This was the only place I could be on my own. I keep wondering… if things could have been different. I mean, if I’d acted differently, or been more supportive, or”

“No,” Will said shortly. “For God’s sake, don’t start feeling guilty. People who blame themselves for every single thing that happens really get on my tit.”

“I don’t care who—or what—gets on your
tit!”
Gaynor flashed.

“Good. You know what’s wrong with you? You’ve had a bad shock, very little sleep, and no food. No wonder you look as if you’re about to faint. Maggie’s left a stack of sandwiches in the kitchen for us, and there’s stuff in the cupboard that’s been there for years. This is the kind of house where tins of soup accumulate on upper shelves, fermenting quietly. Some of them should be quite mature by now.”

Gaynor laughed weakly, but declined to eat. “I’m really not hungry.”

“That’s just in your mind,” said Will. “Your body’s famished.”

He took her back into the house, heated soup, teased her into eating a sandwich. After the first bite, she was a little shocked to discover she was hungry after all. “Don’t be silly,” Will adjured her. “Fern wouldn’t thank you for starving yourself. How could that help?”

He carried more soup and sandwiches into the sitting room for Abby and Aunt Edie, although Gaynor had to forcibly discourage him from adding pounded-up sleeping pills to the mug prepared for the latter. (“I didn’t know you had these Borgia tendencies.”) After the chaos of the day, the evening dragged. Robin rang to say he was staying at the nursing home and Marcus had booked himself into the nearest hotel. No, there was no change in Fern’s condition. Aunt Edie was finally coaxed up to bed; a worn-out Abby followed shortly after.

Ragginbone returned at ten-thirty, when Will and Gaynor were alone. Lougarry was with him.

“What do you make of it?” said Will without preamble.

The old man sighed. He had pushed back his hood and disheveled wisps of hair stood out from his head, making him look more like a scarecrow than ever. His coat steamed gently from the rain that had punctuated the afternoon. He smelled of wet cloth and leaf mold, and his face was sere and withered, like the residue of autumn. Somewhere among the lines
and folds his eyes lurked under lowered lids, flickering into brightness in his rare upward glances. Only those eyes still seemed to hold some secret strength. For the rest, he looked ancient and frail, no longer a knotted oak but a twig that would snap at a touch, a leaf that would fall in the wind. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “We’ve been going over the area, Lougarry and I. There was little to find. I picked up this” He laid a long feather on the table, its pallor barred with dun ghost markings. “It might have come from the wing or tail of an owl. A very large owl. I think … I’m not sure what I think.” There was a further pause. Gaynor was too weary to ask questions; Will knew better. “It’s clear the Old Spirit was involved,” Ragginbone resumed. “Fern called him. Folly rashness—bravado who knows? He was here anyway. The specter that came for her must have been under his control. But the owl—the owl still puzzles me. That dream of yours” he nodded to Gaynor “tell me about it again.”

She complied, trying to recollect details submerged in later events. “I was flying, like you do in dreams, only sitting on its back … I saw fields, and houses … That part was magical. And then everything became very rapid and muddled. It felt as if a lot of time went past. I was—somewhere dark, and there was a face floating in front of me …”

“Describe it.”

“Sort of pale and flabby … like a slug. The way a slug might look if it were human size and had human features and the personality of a psycho. The eyes were horrible: black and malevolent. It said—I can’t remember.
Not the one
… something like that. Then it went away, or I went away, I’m not sure. There was a nasty smell, too. Decayed vegetation. Dryness. Dampness.”

“Which?” asked Will.

“All of them.”

“Not the one,”
Ragginbone mused. “So perhaps … Fern was the one. But who”

“Do you think it was more than just a dream?” Gaynor said.

“What is a dream? The mind can move in other worlds; so can the spirit. Who knows where we go, when the body sleeps? Or when the body dies?”

“Fern won’t die, will she?” said Will brusquely, betraying
a child’s need for reassurance. It was the first time Gaynor had been conscious that she was older.

“We all die,” said Ragginbone, “eventually. Still, she’s young and strong. I must see her. It is plain that she has gone, but until we know where it will be impossible to find her. I fear—” He stopped.

“What do you fear?” Will demanded.

“Many things. I have lived my life in fear; I am accustomed to it. Courage is a delusion of the young. Hold on to yours.”

After that, he refused to venture more than cryptic utterances, and they said good night, watching him stride off into the gloom. “Where does he sleep?” asked Gaynor.

“Out,” said Will. “Under the trees, under the stars, under the rain. Maybe he doesn’t sleep at all. I’ve known him to spend days—weeks—sitting like a boulder on a hillside. And I don’t mean that as a metaphor. Bugger him. Let’s have a drink.”

   It was Monday before they got to see Fern. Gaynor rang the museum where she worked and extended her holiday; Will seemed to be permanently on vacation. “That’s the point of a thesis,” he said. “You do nothing for a couple of years or so and then slog like hell for the last three months. I drop in on the college once in a while, read a book, paint. I’ve never really absorbed the work ethic.”

“I’d noticed,” said Gaynor.

Abby had driven Aunt Edie back to London; Robin stayed on. Marcus declined to move to Dale House—“There’s no fax”—conducting his life from hotel and nursing home by mobile and modem. On Sunday night he drove over to have supper with them, showing himself properly appreciative of Mrs. Wicklow’s cooking. He was a stocky, well-built man, his thickening waistline counterbalanced by breadth of shoulder, his dress of the sort usually labeled expensively casual (no tie and a vicuna coat). He had an aura of intense masculinity, the eyes of an intellectual, the mouth of a sensualist. He wore both his costly coat and his bald patch with a negligent air. Even Will admitted afterward that he was good company. But he shouldn’t be, thought Gaynor. The girl he was due to marry is lying in a coma from which she can’t be roused and
he still sounds clever, well-informed, wryly amusing. It occurred to her that at no time during the dinner-table conversation had he revealed his deeper feelings, using witticism or generalization to fend off personal comment. After all, he was forty-six years old, a worldly-wise sophisticate who would never wear his broken heart on his sleeve. “But Fern’s twenty-eight,” she said to Ragginbone, driving to the nursing home on Monday afternoon. “She deserves to be loved madly, even on the surface. He should be weeping and wringing his hands—pacing the floor abandoning himself to despair. He shouldn’t be cool and calm and collected and entertaining at dinner.”