Changeling

by Sarah Rayne

  He sat at the table, and switched on a strong desk light that shone onto them all, so that the pouring smoke of people’s cigarettes showed blue in the beam, and he stayed behind the light so you only ever saw him as a black silhouette. And one by one they had to go up to the table and pay over the five per cent of the week’s earnings.

  It was quite a lot, five per cent, but it was not so bad for what you got in return. Protection, that was what you got. Nobody ever beat up one of the Shadow’s girls and got away with it, and nobody ever tried to charge any of them extortionate rent for a flat or a bedsit. And if you had a grievance or a trouble you brought it along, and you spoke up when it was your turn at the desk, and although the Shadow seldom said much, he listened and nodded, and the next thing you knew the cheating landlord, or the sadistically-minded punter had received his comeuppance. It made you feel safe; it made you feel that you had someone fighting in your corner.

  But for all that, he was still a sinister figure to them; a thin, crouching spider sitting at the centre of a black, sticky web. Nobody quite knew who his people were and who his spies were. It was not thought that he had any friends, but it was certain that he had a great many spies. This was the trouble; you did not know when you might be sitting next to one of them. They were probably in the room tonight.

  Leila had said before tonight’s meeting that she had had enough. It was a greedy, unfair system, and she was going to break out of it tonight. She had had a very good week, with a windfall on Friday night: a group of businessmen had taken her back to their hotel and between them they had given her six hundred pounds. The Shadow could not possibly know about that, she said, and she was not going to tell him. And if he started any of his scary tricks, she had another card up her sleeve, she said, and paused. It was Gilly who said, ‘What?’ and Leila smiled smugly.

  ‘I think I know who the Shadow is,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve found out his name.’

  ‘How?’ demanded Gilly.

  ‘Never mind how. But he’s got a bloody arrogance, thinking he can come and go and give orders, and no one so much as asking a question.’

  For once this was a reasonable thing for Leila to say. London had its share of weirdos, of course, and Soho took a large part of that share, but the Shadow was in a class by himself. Gilly even wondered if it was a bit naive of him not to realise that more people might notice him than he realised. But it was oddly uncomfortable to find this chink in the Shadow’s defences, and so she asked Leila what she was going to do.

  Leila smiled and said, ‘I’m going to tell him tonight that I know who he is. And then we’ll see about paying five per cent to bloody faceless pimps every week.’

  Infuriatingly, she would not say any more about the Shadow’s identity, not even when Lori jeered and said Leila was a pissartist and it was all lies. Danilo bet Leila twenty pounds that she would chicken out when it came to it, and Leila took the bet. Gilly was in agonies, but you could not stop Leila from doing something she had set her mind on and Danilo and Lori were as bad, egging her on.

  The meeting took its usual course. People went up to the table one by one. The Shadow addressed them all by name. He said, ‘A good week, Lori?’ or Michelle, or Gina, whoever it happened to be. His voice was low and soft, and there was a slurred, blurry note to it. Danilo, who read books and had ambitions to break into the real theatre, once said it was as if he had had to learn human speech because it was not natural to him, but this was such a grisly idea that everyone had told Danilo to shut his row.

  There were several street musicians here tonight – people still called them buskers sometimes. Gilly pointed them out to Leila and Danilo, and Leila said at this rate the Shadow would end up owning half of London, never mind Soho. The buskers had their own community, and they sat together, not mixing with everybody else. They worked the tube entrances – Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus and Piccadilly – and the theatre crowds in Shaftesbury Avenue.

  When it was Leila’s turn she went up defiantly, tossing back her hair, and clopping her heels loudly on the floor. Gilly and Danilo moved to a front seat to see and hear better. Gilly thought Danilo was beginning to regret making the bet. He was very good-hearted underneath, Danilo.

  Leila was handing over a wad of banknotes and the Shadow put them to one side, not counting them, barely even looking at them. He sat back and looked at Leila – just looked, raking her from head to toe, so slowly and so fixedly that Gilly remembered how she had thought he could see into people’s minds.

  Then he said, in his soft voice, ‘Is this all, Leila?’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, that’s all.’ She was over-doing it; Gilly could hear that from where she sat. ‘Oh yes, that’s everything.’

  The Shadow said, ‘Are you sure about that? Wouldn’t you like to think again, Leila?’

  The silence lengthened. He knows, thought Gilly, in growing fear. He knows about the evening with the businessmen, because he’s got spies everywhere that tell him. She glanced nervously around the room and then looked back at the table.

  Leila placed her hands palm-down on the table, and leaned forward. There was a moment when Gilly almost thought the Shadow flinched, but this was not really believable. Leila said something to him in so low a whisper that even Gilly, straining her ears, could not catch it.

  The quality of the silence was suddenly and frighteningly different. The Shadow remained motionless, but it was as if he had suddenly changed; as if his whole being had altered and he had turned into something quite different. Like the wolfman in the old film changing from man to wolf, or one of those creatures from a child’s fairy story. Gilly shivered.

  And then the Shadow made a brief dismissive gesture, and Leila shook back her hair again and straightened up, and looked round the room triumphantly.

  A sigh of something that might have been regret, but that might as easily have been fear, stirred the room.

  As Leila walked back to her lodgings after the meeting, she thought she could feel pretty pleased about tonight. She had shown the Shadow where he got off, and she had done it in front of everyone! She had stood up to the stupid tosser and she had defied him and told him she knew who he was. She was going to tell them all his name, she had said; this silly nonsense would be over then, and there would be no more five per cents and no more creepy meetings with them all forced to attend like school children. As for all this talk about spies and people in hotels and bars being in his pay, it was just a load of old balls! she said.

  It had knocked him for six, Leila had known that at once. She had felt the shock go through him like an electrical current, and triumph had surged up. Got you! she thought, looking straight into the hidden eyes. He had been wearing the dense black glasses tonight, and the wide-brimmed hat, and the lower part of his face was covered by a kind of scarf-muffler. But she had disturbed him; she had upset the cold control.

  Her stock would go up no end after tonight. Danilo and Gilly and that spiteful cat Lori would all treat her with a bit more respect now. Gilly and Danilo were good pals, and of course Gilly was not really one of the working girls, not properly. She had had some rotten luck, Gilly; Leila did not know all the details, because Gilly was not the kind to moan.

  But that Lori jeered at Leila behind her back and called her the walking pox (which was bloody unjust, she had never had the pox in her life), and told everyone she was a slack old has-been. Vicious little bitch.

  What was really good was that Leila would keep the whole of the six hundred quid. This was only fair as well, because she had bloody earned it with those four businessmen, three of whom had been so soddenly drunk they could not get it up. She had had to work on them non-stop for half an hour but she had managed it in the end. They had all felt very macho as a result, and had ordered up a huge supper from room service on top of the money. Leila had been so pleased she had told them to ask for ice-cream with the supper, so that she could give them all an ice-cream dick-lick as an extra, which none of them had ever heard of. The ice-
cream had been flavoured with cherry brandy and tasted very good indeed.

  She had even begun to have visions of moving out of Soho and setting up in a classy house, with a maid to answer the door and punters coming in by appointment. No need to drag out in the depths of winter; no need to pad the streets any more. She was a bit older than the rest, although there was no call for Lori to be so hurtful about it, and she felt the cold. She remembered the word vulnerable. You felt vulnerable as you got older, especially in this game.

  She felt very vulnerable tonight. She ought to have gone with Gilly and Danilo or someone. There was never a great deal on at this time of a Sunday night, and they often went back to Danilo’s place or to one of the all-night bars. It was quiet and a bit deserted out here; Leila’s flat was in one of the tall old houses among the warehouses. It felt lonely tonight. Still, there might be a punter or two around. It sounded as if someone was following her now, in fact. Yes, she could hear soft footsteps coming along behind her. She slowed down to see what would happen, and it was then that she caught the sound of someone singing very softly. The tune was vaguely familiar. Leila frowned, trying to place it, and then with a thrill of icy fear, she knew what it was.

  O never go walking in the fields of the flax

  At night when the looms are a-singing;

  For Rossani’s at work and he’s hungry for prey;

  He’ll melt down your eyes and he’ll spin them for gold.

  Rossani’s song from the Dwarf Spinner; the eerie melody that almost always preceded the Shadow’s meetings. He was following her.

  Leila glanced fearfully over her shoulder, and as she did so, she saw the slight figure with the deep-brimmed hat coming towards her out of the darkness.

  As Christian followed Leila through the dark streets, the shadow-world of Tod Miller’s brilliant macabre character was waking and coming to life all about him.

  He was Rossani; he was the dark, brilliant dwarf-magician whom he had seen on a lit stage fifteen years earlier and who had haunted him ever since. He had taken on Rossani’s twisted, hate-filled persona: the persona who had prowled the Samhain night and taken his victims, and who had spun the magic for the miller’s daughter when she could not spin it herself.

  Rossani’s at work and he’s hungry for prey . . .

  The words were singing in his head as he followed the bitch to her shoddy flat, and the London streets were dissolving all around him, giving way to the strange, hag-ridden, goblin-haunted realm that lay beneath, and that was only occasionally visible, and then only to madmen and drunkards. But it was in that dark nether-world that Rossani lived and ruled and had his lair. Christian could almost see the fields of the flax that Rossani spun out of human skins, and he could almost hear the looms singing.

  It was easy to catch up the raddled, raucous female who had threatened to name him to her sleazy friends, and easier still to pretend he wanted to talk to her. He felt her initial bolt of fear, but he softened his voice, infusing it with the low, caressing note that had taken so many years to master. It was rare these days for him to slip back to the ugly, formless, distorted speech of his childhood.

  A deal, he said. A deal with just the two of them knowing about it. If she really did know who he was, they could perhaps discuss an alliance. Could they do that? Just the two of them together?

  The unexpected intimacy of his tone disconcerted her, but he knew at once that it intrigued her. Despite her bluster Leila was afraid of him, as all these girls were: Christian was amusedly aware of the fear, and he had deliberately allowed his legend to grow up in this part of London. He could sense the fear in Leila now, but he could sense the interest beneath it as well, and he knew that she had experienced a stir of attraction bordering on the sexual. She was intrigued by the thought of getting closer to him, physically and mentally.

  Once in her flat it was as easy to overpower her as it had been to send out the subtle snake-thread of sexual beckoning. He waited until she turned her back to fill a kettle for coffee and then stunned her, using a marble paperweight he had brought with him for the purpose. He tied her up and sat her in a chair and then waited for her to regain consciousness. He needed her tied up, but he needed her conscious before he could do to her what Rossani had done to his victims.

  As he sat waiting for her eyes to open, he was humming Rossani’s song.

  When Leila did not turn up at the sandwich bar where she and Gilly usually met for a bit of lunch on Mondays, Gilly dragged Danilo along to Leila’s bedsit to find out if anything was wrong.

  It was unusual for Leila not to show up. It was worrying to find that her curtains were still closed as well. She had what the landlady called the garden flat and everyone else called the half-basement, and it got pretty dark if you didn’t keep the curtains open.

  Danilo tried to say that nothing would be wrong: Leila might have flu or a sprained ankle or simply have slept in late. He said this several times, chewing his lower lip before he remembered that it would look scabby through lipstick and he had a club gig tonight.

  The landlady lived on the first floor, and to start with was not going to open Leila’s door, not for Gilly and Danilo, nor the Emperor of China, nor anyone else who might ask. Privacy was privacy, and Leila paid her rent regular, you had to say that for her, even though the men tramping in and out were a pain in the bum at times, never mind the nosy-parkering social workers who came around giving out free condoms. In the landlady’s youth they’d been called johnnies or rubbers, and there’d been none of this AIDS thing. There was none of this rubbish about ‘working girls’ neither. You were a street-girl or a tart, or, if you felt a bit poetic-like, you could be a lady of the night. That was what you were, and you didn’t pretend different. But whatever you called yourself, providing you paid your rent regular and didn’t bring fights into the house, interfering folk couldn’t go barging into private rooms for the asking.

  There was quite an argument about it, with all of them standing in the narrow hallway, and a couple of the other tenants, attracted by the noise, came out to join in. Somebody said that Leila had brought home a punter last night, and somebody else agreed with this. There was some suggestion that the punter might still be in there with her, and the landlady said that if that was the case she was not going down there for the Chief Rabbi or the Pope, on account of not knowing what they might be interrupting.

  In the end Danilo, who was getting quite successful on the club circuit and not short of a pound or two, slipped the landlady a twenty-pound note which settled matters. She plodded down to unlock Leila’s rooms and everyone crowded after her.

  For a moment Gilly, who was at the front, thought that Leila had simply nodded off in the chair. She experienced a huge relief, because after all nothing had happened: the Shadow had not done anything and they had all gone over the top about the whole thing.

  Leila was sitting in one of the slightly worn, but very comfortable armchairs she had picked up cheap last summer. She was slumped down a bit; it did not look a very comfortable way to sleep. The small gas ring that she had for heating soup and beans, and that she sometimes used to cook spaghetti bolognese for Gilly and two or three of the others, had been moved alongside the chair, which was odd, because it usually lived in the cubbyhole kitchen. It was the first thing that Gilly identified as being out of kilter.

  And then gradually, with a creeping feeling of sick distortion, Gilly knew that it was not just that that was out of kilter here; it was everything, and in just a minute her mind would manage to get hold of the terrible wrongness and understand. At her side Danilo had drawn in his breath sharply and muttered, ‘Oh, Jesus,’ and there was the sound of the landlady tottering back into the narrow hall.

  Leila would not mind the uncomfortable position in the chair because she was dead; that was why she had not got up when they came in. And even if she had not been dead, she would not have got up because she would not have been able to see.

  Her eyes had been cut out of her face, leavin
g deep, dark, bloodied holes with a jagged frill of flesh. A trickle of blood had run down over the left cheekbone and dried there, brownish and crusted. On the little gas ring was a small pan, and in it was a glutinous mass, partly congealed, but still a bit jelly-like. It held a recognisable shape. Two recognisable shapes, each one about the size of a cherry, but with a whiteness like tiny poached eggs. Gilly felt sickness rising up from her stomach, and swallowed hard.

  Lying alongside the two glutinous things was a sprinkling of something light and frivolous and something that struck such an incongruous note that for a moment the sickness receded, and Gilly frowned, trying to make sense of it . . .

  And then Danilo spoke and everything clicked dreadfully into place. Danilo said, ‘It’s gold dust.’ And then in a voice of extreme disbelief,’ ‘“Rossani’s at work and he’s hungry for prey. He’ll melt down your eyes and he’ll spin them for gold . . .” Christ Almighty, he’s dissolved her eyes over the gas, and he’s sprinkled gold dust over them.’

  Gilly tumbled out of the room and dived into the lavatory at the end of the corridor just in time to be violently sick.

  Chapter Six

  [Witches] steal young children out of their cradles, ministerio daemonum, and put deformed ones in their rooms, which we call changelings . . .

  The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton

  Fael had the curious sensation that as she worked in the quiet music room with the underwater light from the garden, her mother was very near to her.

  This was strange; Aine was the dimmest of dim memories to Fael. A gentle, lovely lady with a beautiful voice and hair like rippling ivory silk. But Fael had barely been five years old when Aine died, and you only brought a few threadbare memories with you from that age.

  Even so, she thought she could almost feel Aine guiding her hand when she took down the first of the old books of Celtic legends, and as she opened the pages, she thought that mingling with the scent of old leather and foxed parchment was a drift of remembered perfume. Something sweet and sad and evocative. Rose-leaf memories, pressed between the pages of an old, forgotten book, or reminiscences folded between leaves of tissue-thin silk, so that when you unwrapped them, they came up as clear as the day you had put them there, only a very little dimmed by the years, only a very little faded and creased. I believe you’re with me, Aine, thought Fael, her skin prickling with delight and sadness. I can’t see you, but I almost believe that if I turned my head I might catch a blurred glimpse of you.