Changeling

by Sarah Rayne

  Flynn said, as if it had only just occurred to him, ‘It’s quite difficult to convey the – the strangeness of this Shadow creature to someone who hasn’t seen him.’ He drank more wine, looking at them both blandly over the rim of the glass.

  There was a silence. Then Danilo said, ‘You know, don’t you? That we – that I was at some of those Sunday-night gatherings?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Flynn, setting down his glass and reaching for a wedge of bread, ‘the doorman at the Greasepaint told me.’

  He glanced up, and Gilly said angrily, ‘What? What did he tell you?’

  ‘Only that there was a guy who had managed to get off the drag club circuit into the Harlequin company – deservedly so, he said. And that he had a girl with him who looked like something out of a Burne Jones painting. He’s surprisingly erudite, that doorman.’ Flynn grinned at Gilly, and then looked back at Danilo. ‘It was you he meant, wasn’t it? Yes, I thought it must be. Only someone who genuinely understood about cross-dressing and drag – in a stage sense, I mean – could have managed such brilliant characterisation of Aillen.’

  Danilo said defensively, ‘I was on the club circuit—’

  ‘We were only on the fringes of that world—’ chimed in Gilly, and thought: Well, you knew it would come out at some point. Here’s the point. She said, furiously, ‘I suppose that’s the only reason you involved us. Because we already knew some of the story.’ She glared at him, and pushed back her chair, ready to fling out of the restaurant in a temper.

  ‘Listen,’ said Flynn, putting out a hand to stop her, ‘we’d better clear the air on this. I don’t care where you were or what you did – well, short of murder or terrorism or drug-dealing, I don’t care. All right?’

  ‘Well,’ said Gilly. ‘I suppose so. Yes, all right.’ She subsided into her chair.

  Flynn said, ‘In any case, I’m the only one allowed to throw fits of temper.’ He looked at her for a moment and Gilly was unable to decide if he was being serious. ‘The fact that you knew about the Shadow made it easier to explain,’ said Flynn, ‘but I wouldn’t have approached either of you if I hadn’t thought you’d be trustworthy. Or,’ he said, speaking very deliberately, ‘if I thought you were short on guts.’

  ‘You think there’s danger?’ began Danilo, and then said impatiently, ‘Yes, of course there’s danger. He’s killed twice that we know of—’

  ‘Three times,’ said Gilly. ‘There’s Leila.’

  ‘God yes, poor Leila.’

  Flynn leaned forward. He’s forgotten about being rude and outrageous, thought Gilly. He’s absorbed in this and because it’s caught his interest he hasn’t time to be bored or impatient. And he’s concerned as well – is that for Cauldron, or for Tod Miller’s daughter, I wonder? She said, ‘OK, so we know about this Shadow, and we understand about his oddness and the hypnotic powers he possesses or whatever else they are – so what? What do you want from us?’

  ‘I want you to help me to trap him,’ said Flynn.

  ‘That’s mad.’ Gilly stared at him. ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No, but look here, you should go to the police.’

  ‘I did go to the police,’ said Flynn. ‘And they didn’t believe me. In fact the inspector practically accused me of sensationalism.’ He grinned, and said, ‘Admit it now. It’s pretty difficult to describe the Shadow to a police officer.’

  ‘If you described him, I should think it sounded impossible.’

  Flynn grinned, but said, ‘The thing is that you’ve both seen him; you’ve talked to him.’

  ‘Well, only briefly,’ said Gilly, repressing a shiver.

  ‘Yes, but you understand about him. That’s why I asked you out tonight. You see, if the police won’t do anything about this villain, then I must. And that means I’ve got to find out as much as I can about him. To do that, I need a couple of allies who won’t think I’m in the first stages of insanity.’

  ‘“Allies”?’ said Gilly, pouncing on this suspiciously.

  ‘Us?’ said Danilo.

  ‘Yes, but it’s all right, you won’t be asked to do anything dangerous. I’ll explain about that in a minute.’

  Flynn picked up his glass again, and Gilly said, absently, ‘You’ll be too drunk to do anything at all if you keep sloshing that wine back.’

  ‘I know it.’ Flynn drained his wine glass and set it down. ‘Now listen. There’s another aspect to all this that also has to be considered.’

  ‘The real composer of Cauldron.’

  ‘Yes.’ Flynn looked at Danilo curiously. ‘How did you know I meant that?’

  ‘Obvious, really,’ said Danilo. ‘We all know that poor, stupid old bugger Tod Miller could never have written Cauldron.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Gilly was glad Danilo had added the word ‘poor’ to his description of Miller.

  Danilo glanced at her with indulgent impatience. ‘Gilly, my love, do you truly believe that Tod Miller wrote Cauldron?’ he said. ‘The man hadn’t the – the depth. The subtlety.’

  ‘Are you saying that – the Shadow wrote it?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Danilo, looking to Flynn. ‘Are we saying that?’

  ‘I’m not sure either.’ Flynn was pleased to find them both so perceptive. ‘But if we add up all the bits of information we’ve got they make a remarkable total.’ He leaned forward again, ticking the points off on his fingers. Sensitive hands, thought Gilly. Artist’s hands. I’ll bet he’s dynamite in the sack.

  ‘Think about what we know about our man,’ said Flynn. ‘For starters he looked as if he was living in Professor Roscius’s old house.’

  ‘He knew the secret way into the Harlequin,’ said Danilo.

  ‘And he was in the Harlequin the night Tod Miller was killed,’ contributed Gilly.

  ‘And,’ said Flynn, ‘the first time I saw him, he was watching Cauldron with a kind of hungry intensity.’

  They stopped and looked at one another. ‘You think he wrote it,’ hazarded Gilly. ‘But – would he be capable— The musical side—’ She stopped and stared at Flynn. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’ve just seen what you’re getting at. But I still don’t see why he would kill Mia Makepiece.’

  ‘If it’s his show he’d kill her to stop her ruining it,’ said Flynn at once. ‘I’d have killed her myself at times if somebody had handed me the means.’

  Danilo said, impatiently, ‘Oh, we’d all have killed her for two pins. No, it’s all right, Gilly, I don’t mean it literally. But she was crap in the part.’

  ‘Isn’t killing her a bit – extreme?’

  ‘Listen, Gilly, he’s an extreme man, this villain,’ said Flynn.

  ‘Well, all right, I’ll allow the Shadow Mia’s murder – if he’s mad, that is – but why would he kill Tod Miller?’

  ‘Any number of reasons.’

  ‘Name them.’

  ‘Revenge is the likeliest,’ said Flynn. ‘If Miller refused to acknowledge the Shadow as Cauldron’s creator he could have flown into a rage and—’

  ‘Chopped out his heart?’

  ‘And Julius Sherry accused me of lack of taste,’ said Flynn, eyeing Danilo with amusement and reaching for the wine again. ‘But yes, that could be the way of it.’

  ‘You really think he’s linked with Professor Roscius?’

  ‘He means more than that,’ said Gilly, watching Flynn. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I do mean more than that,’ said Flynn. He looked at Gilly. ‘You’ve guessed, haven’t you?’

  Gilly said, softly, ‘He’s Professor Roscius’s son. That’s what you think, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a logical conclusion,’ said Flynn.

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been known if Roscius had had a son? Wouldn’t you have known?’

  ‘Not necessarily. If he was disfigured to this extent—’ Flynn stopped, remembering with an inward shudder the man’s face. ‘If he was bo
rn like that,’ he said, ‘Roscius might have kept him in seclusion, for the boy’s own good as much as anyone else’s.’

  ‘But even if all this is right, I still don’t see where we come in.’

  ‘If I’m right,’ said Flynn, ‘the Shadow won’t be able to bear letting his show go to the Gallery Theatre without him. He’ll follow it – he won’t be able to help himself. And that’s where you come in.’ He paused, and then said, ‘You’ll be there already – you’ll be at the Gallery, God help you.’

  ‘Is it as bad as all that?’ asked Gilly, momentarily diverted.

  ‘Oh God, it’s worse,’ said Flynn, with a return to his normal abrasive manner. ‘It’s a dismal, squalid slum of a theatre and you’ll be fighting cockroaches in the dressing rooms and tinkers and hookers in the stalls.’

  ‘I didn’t think Ireland had hookers. I thought it was against your Church.’

  ‘Believe me, Gilly, we have a great many things in Ireland that are against the Church. Hookers are only one of them.’

  ‘So, all right,’ said Danilo, ‘we’re in the squalid old slum-theatre, fighting cockroaches—’

  ‘And keeping a watch for the Shadow,’ said Flynn. ‘That’s what I want you both to do. To watch for him – see if he appears, or if anyone catches sight of him prowling around.’

  Gilly and Danilo exchanged glances. Then Danilo said, slowly, ‘OK. That seems fair enough. But while we’re doing that, what about you? What will you be doing?’

  ‘I’ll be in Ireland with you. Did you think I’d miss out on a fight?’ demanded Flynn.

  ‘No, silly of me.’

  ‘But I’ll be scouring the west coast trying to find Professor Roscius’s old house.’

  ‘Oh I see. Can you – er – afford the time to do that? I mean,’ said Gilly, a bit awkwardly, ‘can you just go off and leave your work?’

  ‘In the normal way, no,’ said Flynn. ‘Not any more than you can. But it so happens that I’ve just roughed out an initial set of designs for submission for the Barrie festival in March, and I won’t hear for a while whether I’ve got the commission. I couldn’t take a year off to search for our lost lady and our vanished villain, but I can spend two or three weeks in Ireland without going bankrupt. Wouldn’t you know that for luck?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you just,’ murmured Danilo, and Flynn smiled.

  ‘Are you sure about Roscius living on the west coast?’ asked Gilly.

  ‘I am. I don’t know precisely where his house is, because nobody ever did know – the old boy rather liked surrounding himself with mystery. But I do know it’s somewhere just outside of Galway City, near the Moher cliffs. It oughtn’t to be that hard to find – it isn’t a very densely populated part of Ireland. And if I’m right then that’s where we’ll run our man to earth. That’s where his lair is.’

  Gilly shivered, and wished the word ‘lair’ had not been used. To counteract this, she said, half to herself, ‘We don’t even know his name.’

  ‘First name your villain and then set a trap for him,’ said Flynn, and sat back and surveyed the littered table. ‘And now will we order some more of Luigi’s ciabatta bread? And another bottle of wine to go with it?’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  After Scathach went, Fael had finally faced the fact that she might not be entirely alone in Maise. This feeling had grown over the last two days and two nights, and now she was beginning to separate and identify the sounds; the stirrings and the night rustlings.

  What had he said? ‘The legend tells how this house is directly over an ancient subterranean water cave, where the leanan-sidhe once held their strange court.’

  If you were going to be outrageously fanciful, if you really wanted to spook yourself, you would start wondering if that was true, and whether the creatures of the Moher legends sometimes found their way into the house, and even whether it was your own arrival that had woken them. Fael did not want to spook herself in the least – the entire situation was spooky enough already, for God’s sake! – but it was impossible to stop her mind from looping back to those half-sinister, half-romantic fragments of myth and legend that her captor had fed her. It was impossible, as well, not to keep visualising a great dark void like a monstrous well somewhere beneath her, and to imagine wizened-faced, hobgoblin beings assembling there to plot evil.

  She had no idea if her fears were because she was alone in an unfamiliar place, or if Maise’s strange atmosphere was spinning a dark fantasy around her nerves, or if the sounds she heard once darkness fell were in fact real sounds, made by real, explainable creatures. Rats and bats and ravens and owls, thought Fael. But aren’t they all part of a darkly sinister romance of their own? The spectral owl dwelling in his hollow in the old grey tower – night’s fatal bellman, Macbeth had called him, and if Macbeth did not know about fate and its heralds, then no one did. And the raven with his dreaming demon’s eyes trailing his own lamplit fantasies in his wake . . . Yes, owls and ravens were undoubtedly creatures loaded with the macabre. And bats and rats had never had a good press, of course.

  And this is all the wild, nightmare imaginings of a disordered mind, said Fael, firmly. If there are owls and bats or ravens out here, they’re simply going quietly about their lawful nocturnal occasions. They aren’t converging on Maise, full of malice aforethought, unless it’s aforethought to raid the larder – that’s always a possibility, I daresay. So let’s keep a sense of proportion here.

  Yes, but you’re in a land where magic once ruled, Fael, and there’s no proportion in magic, or at least not the proportions that hold good in the ordinary world. Whether you like it or not – and on balance, you don’t like it one bit – you’ve been carried deep into one of the forgotten pockets of Ireland and dumped there, and it’s a pocket where the old ways are remembered, and where the creatures of the ancient myths are still sometimes glimpsed . . .

  The first night after Scathach left, she had sat in the deep old window seat, trying to think of a way of escaping, wondering whether she could bargain with her captor in some way. The lamps had burned steadily and the fire had sent out a gentle, comforting crackle, and the turret room had been a little oasis of warmth and light and safety, so that it had been possible to ignore – almost not to notice – the unfamiliar creaking of the old timbers, and the occasional scutterings outside.

  It was only when she finally tumbled into bed and felt the darkness settle all about her that the sounds seemed to change. They became little bony goblin-fingers tapping on the windowpane, and they became hoarse gloating chuckles outside her door, so that several times there formed in her mind an image of tiny, evil-featured creatures clustering together on the stair, plotting to snare her soul, or to steal away the human child that might be born here in exactly nine months’ time . . .

  It was all ridiculous. The tappings would be nothing more sinister than the wind outside, or the nocturnal birds and flying things indigenous to Moher’s wild coast (flapping bats and spectral owls after all?), and the throaty laughter was most likely the water gurgling in the pipes. And to become pregnant after a single encounter was unlikely in the extreme. I’ll keep telling myself that, thought Fael, determinedly.

  She eventually fell into an uneasy sleep, only to wake to a cold light slithering through the curtains and the leaden knowledge that she was still here, still shut away miles from anywhere, miles from human contact, and that there was no escape. For a truly terrible moment she wanted nothing so much as to pull the clothes over her head and burrow back into sleep – hours and hours of sleep so that she would not have to face any of it and so that she would not wake up until it was all over. But this could not be allowed; that was something she had learned from the days immediately following the accident. If you once gave in to that kind of despair you were lost for always.

  And so she got up, washed, brushed her hair and dressed, and determinedly made toast and a pot of tea. This was a comfortingly ordinary thing to do, and the hot tea acted like a charm against the muffled s
ilence of Maise. The large, L-shaped room was already becoming familiar, like a hotel room did after a couple of days, or a holiday cottage. Fael drank a second cup of tea in her favourite window spot, trying to see through the fog to the black cliffs beyond. No good. There was nothing to be seen outside. There was not a great deal to be seen inside either, really. But there were books – presumably left here by her captor’s mother. Fael eyed them thoughtfully. With food and drink and shelter, and something to read one could surely face out any situation.

  Most of the books were old and rather dusty: the covers calf-or leather-bound, some with rubbed gilt lettering on the front, some with the spines splitting. It’s almost all Irish folklore, by the look of it, thought Fael, sorting through them with interest. No, this one’s a Shakespeare, a bit battered, and there are several volumes of Frazer’s The Golden Bough as well. That’s the classic definitive study of magic and ancient religions, I think. That ought to be interesting. Oh, and that’s some of Yeats’s work, and with it is something called Ancient Legends of Ireland, by Lady Wilde. Lady Wilde – would she have been Oscar Wilde’s mother? The date’s about right. Yes, she was his mother, there’s a potted biography in the front. That looks intriguing as well.

  She began to tumble the books open, dipping first into one, then another. The Ancient Legends of Ireland turned out to be absorbing. I could almost write another musical out of all this, thought Fael, and with the thought her hand was arrested in the act of turning a page.

  I could write another musical . . .

  Excitement welled up at once, and with it a feeling of engaging in battle with him, with Scathach. I believe I’ll try, thought Fael. Hell’s teeth, I will! I’ll start drafting something out right away, and when he returns – because he will return, of course, I do know that – I’ll show it to him. And maybe he’ll be so interested that he’ll want me to finish it before he decides what he’s going to do with me, and maybe he’ll even want to compose the music again. I’ll be like Scheherezade, spinning stories to ward off her killer, or the French writer Colette, who had a husband who locked her up and fed her bread and water in return for writing books. And even if what I write turns out to be rubbish, at least I’ll have a shape to the days. And, she thought, with sudden confidence, if I work through the night, and sleep in snatches during the day, I shan’t be so frightened of the sounds outside my door. I probably shan’t even notice them.