Changeling

by Sarah Rayne

  What else could the adults do? There was Dickens, of course: Nicholas Nickleby would work well and it did not need to be a huge, grand, RSC production. Perhaps it might be a bit dark. How about Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War? That was more or less a series of musical sketches centring on World War One and it could be quite simply staged. Everyone, including the audience, would enjoy joining in the songs: ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, and ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, although it would depend on how many of the patients could sing reasonably in tune. This began to seem like a reasonable idea. One would have to find out about royalties . . . And costumes, and lighting . . . Two or three very strong spotlights against a dark background to depict the Blitz . . .? Had they called it Blitz then, or had that been only the Second World War . . .? The sound effects would need to be convincing . . .

  Fael was tumbling over the warm shifting boundaries of sleep; she was in the pleasant half-stage where she was not quite awake but not quite asleep either. But sleep was certainly starting to fold around her and intriguing dreams were beckoning. She could hear the river tonight, just very faintly. You could only hear it on very quiet nights, but tonight was one of those nights. There it went, splashing away to itself, like a Vivaldi concerto. It made her feel warm and secure.

  She could hear the tiny night sounds of the house as well. All houses had their own sounds, and you grew so used to them that you stopped noticing the fridge switching off or the central heating switching on, or the timbers settling in the roof at night. Even though Fael’s room was downstairs on account of the wheelchair, she still heard the roof timbers and sometimes the scrabbling of house martins.

  It was at this point that there was a sound and then the blurred impression of movement somewhere outside of sleep. On the wrong side of sleep. On the waking side. She frowned and tried to banish it and burrow back into sleep, but it came again, insistent, tinged with some kind of warning. There’s something wrong, thought Fael, opening her eyes. There’s something intrusive. With the acknowledgement of this, sleep fled, and she sat up sharply in bed, pulling the sheets around her, listening intently.

  Yes, there it went again: soft sounds, oddly regular, with a furtiveness about them. Footsteps? If you wanted to really frighten yourself you could say they were footsteps, creeping along the side of the house. A prowler, thought Fael, her heart thudding painfully. There’s a prowler out there, an intruder. The step came again.

  Fael reached to the bedside table for the cordless telephone she kept to hand, and remembered she had left it in the kitchen. Panic bubbled up, and in the same moment, the soft green light of the moonlit garden shivered, and the outline of a man, blackly silhouetted against the trees, stepped in front of the window. A gloved hand came up to tap on the glass.

  Fael drew breath to scream, and a soft remembered voice said, ‘Fael? Don’t be frightened.’ The words were low, but because the top window was open they came clearly into the room.

  It was the man she had seen outside the clinic earlier that evening. Fael shrank back, her eyes on him. But he knew she was here, of course. He could see her quite plainly. Oh God, why didn’t I draw the curtains? Oh God, what do I do? With a feeling of incredulity, she heard her voice say, ‘Who is it? Who’s there?’ and was conscious of the grim humour of the words, which were the words uttered by every time-honoured, beleaguered victim to the sinister stranger at the gates. Stunning lack of originality there, Fael. But what else did you say? She called a bit louder, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

  ‘We met earlier, Fael. We acknowledged that we had met somewhere or other, sometime or other. It might have been in another time or another world, and we might have been different people. But we recognised one another.’ The words were unreal; they had a dream-like quality to them, and they were all mixed up with the moonlight silvering the old garden. He moved nearer to the window. But I still can’t see his face, thought Fael, trying not to panic.

  ‘Didn’t you know I would be back, Fael?’

  ‘No, of course I didn’t! What do you want anyway?’ There I go again, behaving like some crass, witless, romantic heroine. Some romance. Some heroine. ‘You’d better leave now,’ said Fael. ‘Immediately. Or I’ll scream. In fact I’ll yell bloody murder.’

  ‘Scream away,’ said the stranger. ‘Tod’s out, isn’t he? And the neighbours are too far away to hear you.’

  ‘He—’ Fael looked involuntarily at the bedside clock. It was one a.m. When Tod went out he almost always found his way to one of the small clubs frequented by actors. Most of them did not open until around ten or eleven at night when the theatres were spilling out, and most of them did not close until three or four in the morning, which meant that Tod was unlikely to return for some time. Then I’m on my own. Panic welled up again. She said, ‘There’s some money in the house if that’s what you want. I’ll tell you where it is, and you can—’

  ‘I’m not a burglar, Fael.’ The contempt was impossible to miss.

  He was not a burglar. But he might be a rapist. He might be one of the weirdos who got their kicks from crippled females. And if he broke in, there would not be very much Fael could do to get away. She could get herself out of bed and she could just get from the bed to the door or the window or the phone. But it was still a long, difficult process. And if I start for the kitchen phone now, or the one in the hall, if he’s really determined, he could be in here before I’ve got four steps. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to smash the window and reach through to lift the latch. Oh God.

  She dredged up her courage and said, ‘You ought to know that I have a knife under my pillow. If you try to get in, I’ll stab you.’

  Unexpectedly he laughed. ‘I’m not a rapist any more than I’m a burglar, Fael. I’m here because I want to get to know you.’

  ‘It’s a screamingly peculiar time to call.’

  ‘It is. But then I’m a creature of the night, Fael.’ And then, with a kind of silken allure in his voice that brushed Fael’s senses like velvet being stroked the wrong way, he said, ‘May I come in?’

  You did not, unless you were completely witless, let anyone you did not know into the house if you were on your own. Especially you did not let in sinister gentlemen who stood in the shadows and spoke in persuasive, slightly sibilant tones. Fael was not about to do it.

  He had said earlier that he had known her mother, and he had certainly been familiar with the Dwarf Spinner, but this was still not sufficient reason to invite him in. Also, it was possible that this was some kind of plot: that he thought the family was very rich because of the Dwarf Spinner and was planning a break-in, or even – horrid thought! – to kidnap Fael and hold her hostage for a huge cash payment, which Tod would not be able to pay.

  She said, hotly, ‘You’ve got a nerve creeping around in the dark and asking to be let in! No, of course you can’t come in.’ And tried to think what she could do if he really did break the window and climb through.

  But he stayed where he was, and as the moment lengthened, a patch of moonlight slid across the window. The man stepped back at once. He’s flinching from the light again, thought Fael. That’s what he did earlier.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, and although he still spoke softly, his voice was infused with a different note that sounded far more genuine. ‘Listen, Fael, I think something’s about to happen – something connected with your father – that’s going to affect you. But I think it’ll be something I can help you with.’

  ‘What?’

  A pause. ‘Tod’s just returned from the north, hasn’t he?’ said the stranger. ‘He’s been trying to get a backer for a new show.’

  ‘He’s always trying to get a backer for a new show,’ said Fael impatiently. ‘Everyone knows that. He never succeeds.’

  ‘But if he did succeed, Fael, have you thought what might happen? Have you thought that it might be more than he could cope with?’ Another of the pauses. He does that for effect, thought Fael suddenly, and felt even better. He
’s a creature who has to hide from the light, and he’s a creature who has to make use of planned effects.

  ‘Have you thought,’ said the soft voice, ‘that it’s nearly twenty years since your father created the Dwarf Spinner? And that he’s done nothing worth mentioning since then? He’s a spent force, Fael.’

  ‘No he is not!’ said Fael, so angry that she forgot about being frightened. ‘But even if he does bite off more than he can chew, what’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘Listen now,’ said the voice, and again there was the haunting familiarity. ‘Listen, Fael, if Tod brings this deal off, you might need—’

  ‘What deal? And what might I need? I might need a whole lot of things, but I don’t see where you figure in any of them! Whoever you are,’ added Fael for good measure, and thought she sounded quite reasonably angry and unafraid.

  ‘You might need a friend,’ said the voice.

  ‘Oh sure, some friend who tries to break into the house in the middle of the night!’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you I was a creature of the night?’

  ‘You’re only saying that for effect!’ said Fael, crossly, and thought: I don’t believe I actually said that. I don’t think this is really happening.

  ‘Yes, but it works, doesn’t it?’ This time she caught the faint amusement. ‘You know, you are going to need me,’ he said. ‘You’re going to need— We’ll call it a familiar,’ he said. ‘A dark, satanic familiar.’ The expression seemed to afford him a rather bitter amusement. Fael could almost feel it ruffling the surface of his mind. ‘Someone to be summoned in time of need.’

  ‘How? Are you leaving a telephone number?’ demanded Fael sarcastically. ‘Or do I just summon you out of the night?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Well, I won’t! I think you’re mad. If you turn up here again you’ll have the police to face!’

  ‘Oh Fael,’ he said. ‘You won’t turn me over to the police.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure.’

  ‘You won’t. You’re too intrigued.’

  ‘And you,’ said Fael, furiously, ‘are too arrogant for your own safety!’

  He moved back, but this time the shaft of moonlight was too quick for him, and Fael glimpsed darkness where his face ought to be. A mask? Dear God, was he wearing a mask? Fear trickled back and she said, very sharply, ‘You know, if you’d tell me who you are – or where I know you from – I might be more inclined to trust you.’

  For a moment she thought he was not going to answer, and then he said, ‘We have a mutual acquaintance, Fael. A mutual memory.’ The measured pause once more. ‘James Roscius.’

  ‘Oh, the professor! Then you were one of his pupils!’ said Fael. ‘But why, for God’s sake, didn’t you say?’

  ‘I can’t imagine,’ he said, and there was a whisper of sound and then he was gone.

  The mask could only be discarded when the privacy of the tall, narrow house near Christchurch Street was reached. The young man with the soft, blurred voice peeled it off impatiently and tossed it onto a table and then sat down to think.

  Fael Miller was so like her dead mother that it had set all the old memories tumbling. Aine had been a shining, slender creature with luminous skin and silver-gilt hair; to the small boy who seldom left the house on Ireland’s wild, west coast and who wove dreams on the dark stuff of Ireland’s legends, she was a being straight out of Celtic myth. Aine, the daughter of the sinister seductive cave spirits . . . To a lonely child who peopled his world with the creatures of the old legends, she might well have become the focus upon which he would one day weave the illusions and the fledgling passions of moonish youth. Because whoever loved that loved not at first sight? thought the young man in the tall, narrow, river-side house. And I might have been faithful to you, Cynara, in my fashion, or then again, I might not. Except that he had never dared allow himself adoration or affection, or even admiration for any other living thing.

  But it could have happened. He might have kept the memories and he might certainly have penned a sonnet or two, a madrigal or so, on the strength of a romantic child’s dreams. That he had not done so was partly due to Tod Miller. Because fifteen years ago, Miller’s famous Dwarf Spinner had been revived for a single charity performance in Galway.

  It should have been a magical night to a boy of fourteen who lived a hermit life, seldom seeing anyone other than his clever musical father, and whose schooling had been at the hands of a series of solitary tutors who had been sworn to secrecy. Aine Miller was long since dead by then; she had died just before the Dwarf Spinner’s dazzling first night. The boy’s romanticism had already started to tarnish. Because I knew what I was by then, he thought grimly. But traces of the romantic lingered, and he had sat bolt upright in the stage box taken by his father, with the discreet curtains partly drawn, drinking in everything on the brightly-lit stage, absorbing the flashing gold and silver, and the shimmering colours through the pores of his skin, intoxicated by the music. Yes! he had thought, clenching his fists, tightly. Yes, yes!

  I might have become a writer or a composer or a playwright on that night, he thought bitterly. I was neither lunatic nor lover nor poet, and I might still have been tipped over into any one of those things.

  It had been Tod Miller’s grotesque finale that had jerked him out of his tumbling dream, and spun his senses into appalled horror and then into a cold, burgeoning hatred. He had gripped the padded parapet of the box, staring down at the stage, unable to look away from the final agonies of the dark, twisted creature who had served the captive heroine and spun the rainbow-dreams for her gaoler. The scene scalded into his senses and etched itself into his mind like acid, and he felt every death-pang of the lonely dwarf whose macabre face and evil witchery were only revealed in the closing minutes.

  When it was ended – when the audience were cheering and Tod Miller was persuaded onto the stage to receive the acclaim, the hatred for Miller and the thing he had created had hardened and set.

  Because what had been the genesis of Tod Miller’s deformed, evil villain? What had been the leaven, the stimulus, that had caused him to create the macabre Rossani? The programme explained that Miller had plundered European folklore for his story, and there was a brief article by Tod himself, telling how he had wandered not only in Central Europe, but also in Russia and Icelandic sagas for his tale. To the uninitiated it might have sounded as if Miller had travelled amongst the remoter villages and hill farms and mountain colonies of far-flung places.

  Rossani was the name by which the Italian story was told, and Rossani was the dwarf-magician of that version of the legend. But to have depicted the creature so precisely Tod Miller must have had a role-model.

  The son of his old friend Professor Roscius? The child whose first breath had been drawn against a background of its mother screaming in revulsion? Had Tod known of that child’s existence? Memory stretched back over the years, to Aine Miller, a close friend of his father, one of the very few people permitted to visit the Irish house. Tod had never accompanied Aine, but supposing Aine had told him about Christian? Supposing Miller had seen it as the springboard for his plot? The thought was black, bitter gall. But why had Miller called his villain Rossani, the name so close to Roscius?

  Christian Roscius, no longer a child, certainly no longer an impressionable romantic, fastened down the thrusting, hurting memories, and reaching for the concealing silk mask, went with his soft, cat-pawed tread out into the night once more.

  Chapter Three

  ‘And now,’ said the dwarf, ‘in return for spinning the straw into gold for you, you must promise me that when you are queen, your first-born child will be mine.’

  ‘That may never be,’ thought the Miller’s daughter, and knowing no other way, promised.

  German Popular Stories, Translated from the

  Kinder und Haus-Marchen, collected by M. M.

  Grimm from oral tradition, 1823

  Tod got up from the desk and threw the screwed-up paper
into the waste-paper basket in black fury.

  He had made some notes for the new show in which little Makepiece was going to invest so generously; in fact he had made quite a lot, but so far he had not hit upon a single idea that would work. He had not, in fact, hit upon anything that would straggle past more than a solitary page of A4-size paper. He had explored any number of avenues: some had been allegorical and some had been historical and some had been political. Quite a few had been pantomimic and one had even been mildly pornographic. And not one of them would do.

  He knew a moment of extreme self-pity. Here he was, an acclaimed composer and writer (yes he was!) and he was unable to apply his mind to his proper work. And why not? Money, that was why not! Wretched vulgar coinage!

  Tod hoped he had a soul above such materialism but he defied anyone to work properly while being harried and nagged by creditors. He would just like to know what kind of stuff Lloyd-Webber and W. S. Gilbert and Offenbach would have churned out if they were constantly being plagued by pettifogging money-lenders and usurers. The richness of this last phrase pleased him so much that he instantly sat down again to draft a version of Christ in the Temple with the Money Lenders, but really all that Biblical stuff had had its day – Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and so on. He wanted something different and something original. He wanted to write another Phantom or Evita or Les Miserables.