The Dragon Charmer (21 page)

   Ragginbone stayed long enough to help Moonspittle clear up, offering to replace the shattered windowpane. Moon-spittle was vaguely philosophical about the breakages, making temporary repairs to the window with tape and carefully collecting the segments of the smashed retorts in order to reconstruct them later with an ancient and evil-smelling pot of glue. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “People bring me things. Deliveries. There’s a little shop round the corner…”

“How do you know? I thought you didn’t go out.”

“It was there when I did. Maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago. I suppose it might have different owners now. I saw the boy once, when he came round. Through the grille, of course: he didn’t see me. He looked very
dark
. Hobbs, the name was. He didn’t look like a Hobbs. I’ve wondered if the new people might be
Welsh
” He made it sound impossibly exotic. “They’re always dark, the Welsh. Little and dark. I never heard him sing, though.”

Ragginbone considered explaining about the twentieth century, and abandoned the idea on the grounds that it would take most of the twenty-first.

“I send Mogwit round there,” Moonspittle went on, “with a note on his collar. He’s very intelligent, Mogwit.”

“He must be,” said Ragginbone. “He hasn’t got a collar.”

“Of course he has a collar!” Moonspittle was startled into indignation. “I’ll put my hand on it in a minute…”

Eventually the collar was found, dangling from the corner of a bookshelf.

“See?” said Moonspittle proudly. “Now, you thought I’d
forget… Didn’t you? My payment—my city in a snowstorm. You thought you were going to keep it, but you shan’t. Give it to me. You promised.”

Ragginbone gave him the trinket and left him gazing raptly into its depths. No one saw him go. There was activity in Selena Place, very different from its daytime business: but the night people paid no attention to a stranger. The vast metropolis, with its motley inhabitants, its eccentric fashions, its myriad lives and lifestyles, seemed to absorb all comers into its shifting patterns: it had stood too long and seen too much ever to be surprised by anything. Wizards and warlocks, demons and dervishes might have passed unremarked in the crowd. Ragginbone strode off down the street and merged into the wilderness of the city.

IX

Gaynor was in Fern’s room at Dale House looking for her night cream when she found the Atlantean veil. At the hospital, she would rub moisturizer into her friend’s face herself, as if in this act of touching, caring, performing Fern’s own daily ritual, Gaynor would draw closer to Fern, hoping against hope that the gentle pressure of her fingertips might somehow reach into lost consciousness, lost mind. The body of an absentee remains a point of contact, a dear familiar thing, even when the spirit has strayed too far ever to return. When Gaynor came across the veil she held it up to the light, trying to catch the pattern, seeing only faint spectral shapes that seemed to melt and change even as she gazed at them. On an impulse, she thrust it in her bag to take with her.

That afternoon at Fern’s bedside she pulled it out and folded it as best she could, though the gossamer was too soft to crease, too tissue-thin for her to make out where the creases should be. Then she draped it carefully around the sleeper’s neck, tying the ends in a loose knot, feeling suddenly certain that in this futile gesture she had done something inexplicably significant, as if this silken bond might somehow protect its wearer from further harm and bind the distant spirit to its long-lost home. The nurse on duty said: “What a beautiful thing.”

“Isn’t it?” Gaynor glanced up, snatched from her reverie. “I don’t suppose she knows it’s there, but…”

“We can’t tell what she knows,” said the nurse. “Coma patients tell strange stories when they return to consciousness. Touch her, talk to her, go on hoping. She may hear you.”

Gaynor sat clasping the limp hand as the long hours dragged
past. She had brought a book but it could not hold her attention: her gaze and her thought kept returning to Fern’s face. Sounds of activity reached her now and then from the corridor: the rattle of a trolley, a fragment of conversation, rarely medical in content. (“Where did you get that? It can’t be true—” “Of course it’s true: it was on the telly.”) Birdsong came from the garden outside. A bee drifted through the window and began to investigate the vase of freesias on the table. Yet these small noises merely punctured the silence within the room, dimpling its surface, unable to penetrate the nucleus of quiet where Gaynor sat with Fern. Gaynor’s mind planed, soaking up irrelevant details.
On the telly
…
it was on the telly
… And suddenly the elusive recollection clicked into place. The story about the dragon—the story she knew she had seen somewhere—had been in one of the manuscripts that came under the scrutiny of the camera on that television program. The program about the museum in York, the one with Dr. Jerrold Laye… She had tried very hard not to dwell on the incident—the elastic distortion of the screen, the horror of that beckoning finger—which was perhaps why she had mislaid the connection. But now the knowledge was there, in the forefront of her brain, and it could not be ignored. The core of quiet was broken, without the impact of sound. Her thoughts seemed to clatter in her head; her stomach quailed in advance of terror. They would have to follow up the clue—they would have to visit the museum. (
I look forward to meeting you
, he had said.) She found she was shaking and her grip had tightened on Fern’s hand; hastily, she forced herself to relax. “It was a nightmare,” she said aloud. “A nightmare in three-D.” But she had moved into the borderland of a world where nightmares walked, and she could find no easy comforters. Instead she gazed at her friend’s face, remote and aloof in its stillness, and at the drips that fed her and the catheter that purged her and the steady green line of her heartbeat, slow as a hibernating animal, and Gaynor knew that whatever her fears, she must do what she could.

It seemed an interminable length of time until Will arrived. She wanted to telephone him, but Ragginbone’s instructions had been clear and she was loath to leave Fern. She told Will all she could remember of the few lines she had glimpsed so
briefly: “It was the story of your dream, I know it was. The spearhead was mentioned specifically:
a thyng of grate power and magicke
. I can picture the words now…”

“Hmm.” Will was frowning. “Odd, isn’t it? One moment forgotten, then vividly clear. The clue materializes, just when we need it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s too neat,” he said. “Too pat. We’re desperate—snatching at straws—and suddenly there’s an obvious trail to follow. Even if it leads into a dragon’s den—literally, perhaps—we can’t afford to neglect it. I don’t like it at all.”

“You think it’s some kind of a—what do you call it?—a plant?”

“I think … it’s very convenient. Like the cigarette butt at the scene of the crime. The Old Spirit can send dreams, manipulate your thoughts… Did you get around to checking up on this Dr. Laye?”

Gaynor shook her head. “I meant to,” she said, “but with everything that’s been happening, I suppose it slipped my mind.”

“Make a start when you get home,” said Will, “if it’s not too late to call people. Any background information would be useful. Here—I came in Dad’s car, you take it.” He handed her the keys. “I’ll get a taxi back.”

Gaynor drove home to Dale House—it was curious how she had begun to think of it as “home”—feeling increasingly ill at ease. Overhead, a heavy sky seemed to reflect her sense of foreboding: clouds dark as indigo were rolling in from the sea, advancing rain obliterated the horizon. Trees lashed out in erratic gusts of wind and then were suddenly still, their new leaves shivering as if with cold. When she came to the barren moor the gale tugged and pummeled the car as if trying to push her off the road. It reminded her too much of the eve of Fern’s wedding, and she was thankful to see the drive to Dale House approaching on her left. Indoors, there was a welcome smell of cooking emanating from the kitchen; Robin descended briefly from the study, his expression of forlorn hope dying as Gaynor shook her head. When she was able, she appropriated the telephone and sat down to make her calls.

*  *  *

“I didn’t have much luck,” she told Will the next day. “Several people had heard of the museum but no one seems to have visited it. Ditto Dr. Laye. He’s supposed to be a private collector with academic pretensions—a doctorate from somewhere or other, an obscure publication or two. No known source of income but they say he has money, a bit too much money to be perfectly respectable. This morning I managed to get hold of the producer of that TV program. She can’t have known what happened—his talking to
me
, I mean—but she said he was very manipulative about which manuscripts they showed, what questions they asked, that sort of thing. She obviously didn’t like him. I said was his skin that awful gray color in real life and she said yes, if anything worse, they’d tried to do something with makeup but it didn’t help much. Apparently they’d been warned by the curator not to mention it to him: it’s a sensitive subject.” She added after a moment’s hesitation: “I feel it’s important—this business of his skin color—but I don’t know why.”

“Hmm.” Lost in reflection, Will made no comment. “We should talk to Ragginbone,” he concluded eventually, “but God knows when he’ll get back. As it is, we can’t afford to wait. Fern’s in danger—wherever she is—and we have to help her. We can’t ignore a clue when it’s the only one we’ve got—even if it means walking into a trap. I’d better go to York and take a look at this museum.”

“Walking into a trap?” Gaynor echoed faintly. “That doesn’t sound like an awfully good idea.”

“So we walk warily. Anyway, you’re staying with Fern. She can’t be left alone.”

“N-no,” Gaynor demurred. “You need me. I’m the expert on ancient manuscripts.”

After some argument, he conceded her point. “Someone has to stay with Fern, though. Dad can’t be there all the time. I could ask Gus, I suppose…”

“Won’t he think it odd,” said Gaynor, “the two of us going off on a wild-goose chase in the middle of a crisis?”

“Not necessarily. I’ll tell him the truth, or some of it. He’s a vicar: belief in unearthly powers goes with his job. Demonic possession—or dispossession, in this case—should be
something he can take in his stride. It won’t be the first time he’s known us to get mixed up in matters … outside normal experience.”

“What about Lougarry?” asked Gaynor. “Should we take her with us?”

“That’s up to her.”

While he enlisted the support of the Dinsdales, Gaynor, with an abrupt access of practicality that kept her fears at a safe distance, checked the museum’s opening hours and tried in vain to locate it on a rather basic street map of York. Mrs. Wicklow had produced the map—one of an armful—from Robin’s study after tentative enquiries about the area. Gaynor rifled through Provence and Tuscany, the Peak District and the Brecon Beacons, before finding what she wanted. “We’re going to see a … a doctor,” she said feebly, tiptoeing round the facts. “He’s a specialist in coma conditions.”

“Ahh.” Mrs. Wicklow gave the single syllable a wealth of hidden meaning that Garbo could not have equaled. “And Will’s gone to see the vicar. Happen
he s
on the right track.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s something bad in the house, something that came here near on twelve years ago. She may be dead, but if you ask me she’s still around, that Ms. Redmond. My husband always says you shouldn’t have no truck with the supernatural, but when the supernatural comes a-pestering you, there’s little you can do about it. I saw her in the mirror t’other day when I went in to dust. Gave me quite a turn. Only for a minute, so I thought I’d been dreaming; but she wasn’t no dream. I never liked her, never.”

“I’m moving that mirror outside,” Gaynor muttered.

“First the television, now the mirror,” Mrs. Wicklow remarked sapiently. “Happen you’ve been seeing things, too.”

“Happen,” Gaynor said.

That night, Will sat with Fern until two o’clock. When his father arrived to take over, Will offered Gaynor’s explanation for their forthcoming absence, this time with all the conviction of a gifted liar.

“A specialist?” said Robin, baffled. “But we’ve got a specialist coming next week. From Edinburgh,” he added, as if it were a clincher.

“This chap favors the holistic approach,” Will said, trying to recall the precise meaning of “holistic.” “New Age stuff. We thought anything was worth a shot.”

“Oh, yes,” said Robin, with a sad, twisted look that made him appear very much older. “Anything.”

   In the kitchen at Dale House, Will poured whiskey into two tumblers with slow deliberation. A soft noise made him glance up: Gaynor was standing in the doorway wearing the type of candlewick dressing gown that could only have been unearthed from one of the murkier upstairs wardrobes. With her long dark hair and unmade-up face she had an old-fashioned appeal, unglamorous, homely, yet somehow reassuring, like comfort food on a cold day. He was very glad to see her.