Prospero's Children

by Jan Siegel

  A picture of rabbits came into Fern’s head—rabbits scattering in a panic, scuts flashing white. “We’ll fix up something,” she said evasively. “Anyhow, she doesn’t belong to us. She comes round sometimes: that’s all.”

  “Scrounging,” said Mrs. Wicklow, hunching a disapproving shoulder.

  A knock on the back door heralded the arrival of Gus Dinsdale, further complicating the argument. “If she’s a stray,” he said, “you ought to hand her over to the authorities.”

  “She’s not a stray,” Fern snapped, feeling beleaguered. “She belongs to this old man: I don’t know his name but I’ve seen him round here quite a lot. I think he’s a kind of tramp.” Will glanced quickly at her, his eyebrows flicking into a frown.

  “I know the one you mean,” Gus said unexpectedly. “Interesting type. Seems to be out in all weathers and there are more lines on his face than a street map, but I’ve seen him striding over the moor at a pace that puts most hikers to shame. We’ve exchanged a few words now and then; he’s intelligent and cultured, certainly not a drunk. I would guess he’s one of those who choose a life on the road—they feel hemmed in by the walls of civilization, trapped in the kind of surroundings we would call home. A free spirit. I never realized he had a dog. I must say, this creature appears to be an appropriate companion. She looks more than half wild. A free spirit herself, no doubt.”

  “It’s wild all right,” said Mrs. Wicklow, still refusing to allow the visitor the dignity of gender. “If Fern touches t’ cuts it’ll bite her for sure.”

  (“Who’s the old man?” Will inquired, for his sister’s private ear; but she shook her head.)

  “The dog seems to trust her,” Gus was saying, evidently won over by his own image of the free-spirited wanderer and his maverick pet. “Animals can very often sense when they’ve found a friend. After all, you’ve heard the story of Androcles and the lion, haven’t you?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Mrs. Wicklow retorted, scoring points where she could.

  But Gus had turned back to Fern. “Does she have a name?” he asked.

  “Lougarry,” said Fern. She didn’t say how she knew.

  “Odd,” the vicar mused. “I wonder . . . it sounds almost as if it might come from the French. Lougarry . . . loup garou. ”

  “Loup garou,” Will repeated, struggling with his accent. “What does that mean?”

  “Werewolf,” said Gus.

  It was after lunch and Lougarry had departed on affairs of her own before the Capels were left to themselves. “It’s time we had a serious discussion,” said Will. “There are too many things you’re not telling me. The old man, for instance. And Lougarry. Do you think she really is a werewolf?”

  “Maybe,” said Fern. “She’s on our side: that’s all that matters. We’re rather short of allies.”

  “And the old man?”

  “He watches. I told you. He has a tendency to look like a rock. I thought I might have imagined him, but Gus has seen him too, so he must be real. Perhaps it was the rock I imagined.”

  “Gus is a vicar,” Will remarked captiously. “He’s supposed to see things. Angels, you know, and visitations.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Fern. “He’s C of E.”

  There was a pause; then she got to her feet. “Come on,” she said. “We’d better get on with it.”

  “Get on with what?” asked Will, but he knew.

  They went upstairs to Alison’s room. The landing was gray and dim, surrounded by closed doors; no sunlight penetrated the narrow window in the north wall. Will took hold of the handle and tried to turn it, but it would not move. It seemed to be not so much jammed as fixed, petrified into stasis: it didn’t even rattle. He pulled his hand away, complaining of pins and needles. “It can’t be locked,” said Fern. “There’s no key.” She seized the knob herself, but her grip squeaked on brass; Will kicked and shoved at panels that did not stir. When she drew back she could see the pins and needles, angry pinpoints of red flickering and fading on her palm. “This won’t do,” she said. “This is our house . We have a right to enter any room we please. She can ask us to stay out if she likes, but she can’t force us. I don’t know what she’s done, but we’re going to get in.”

  “The window?” Will suggested.

  From a neighboring room they leaned out to check, but Alison’s window also appeared shut. “We might be able to open it,” Will said, “if she hasn’t done anything fancy to it like she has to the door.” He didn’t mention the word magic but they both knew the omission was not born of modern skepticism. “This window’s on a latch; hers probably is too. You could lift it from the outside with something thin enough to slip through the crack. I’ve seen it done on TV with a credit card.”

  “I don’t have a credit card,” said Fern. “We’ll try a knife. But first, we’re going to need a ladder.”

  Knowing Mrs. Wicklow’s antipathy to Alison, Fern did not hesitate to enlist her aid. The housekeeper had reservations, not about the propriety of their actions, but about the risks of illicit entry via a window more than twenty feet off the ground. Ladders, she claimed, were notoriously chancy, especially under inexpert control. However, suspicion of the alien finally persuaded her. “I don’t know what she’s done to t’ door,” she said. “Fair made my hand sting. It must be some kind of electricity.”

  Introduced to a small-time builder in the village, Fern and Will were able to borrow a ladder long enough for their needs on the following Wednesday afternoon. As instigator of the plan Will climbed up first, armed with the slimmest of the kitchen knives; his sister waited at the bottom, holding the ladder to steady it. Rather to her surprise, the methods of television drama did not let them down.

  “Done it,” Will called out, and she saw him disappearing over the windowsill. She wriggled the two prongs deeper into the flower-bed and ascended a little nervously after him.

  The room was transformed. The balding velvet of cushion and curtain now appeared thick and soft, the dingy carpet glowed with the tracery of long-lost designs. Shelves formerly empty were stacked with books and cassettes, a portable music center, a pair of candles in iron holders, a pot-plant which resembled a cactus, its spines glistening, its single flower gaping like a small red mouth with the tongue-shaped stamen lurking inside. Fern glanced at the books: they seemed mainly concerned with art and antiquities, though there were a couple in a language, and a script, which she could not understand. Several new pictures adorned the walls, one of which looked vaguely familiar: it took her a few moments to recognize the etching she had once seen at the gallery. The imprisoned horse was not on show but in the far corner stood an easel shrouded in a piece of stained cloth. There was a different cover on the bed, all emerald and peacock-blue, embroidered with twining feathers and iridescent eyes: it was very beautiful but somehow it repelled her. She could imagine it stitched in pain by women with blistered fingers and vision weakened from peering at their labor. She caught its reflection in the spotless mirror, turned away; and then her gaze was drawn back to the glass. The image showed her a bedroom within a bedroom, the alien invasion of Alison’s possessions, the books, the paintings, the plant. But the sumptuous curtains were threadbare as before, the carpet dim with age, murky with ingrained dirt. “Will . . .” Fern whispered, suddenly pale, struggling with the evidence of her senses.

  But her brother was concentrating on the television. He had wheeled the unit away from its place against the wall and was toying with the remote control, obtaining nothing but crackle and snow. He had not noticed the mirror, and Fern found that she shrank from drawing his attention to it, more than half afraid he would not see what she saw. She forced herself to look elsewhere, her glance alighting on a box at the bedside, a rectangle of some dark wood, its somber hue veined as if with faint gold, the lid inlaid with ominous characters in red enamel. When she touched it a scent came to her, as if carried on a nonexistent breeze in a room with barely a draft: the smell of a northern forest, of sap rising, lea
ves opening, roots drinking, as if the wood still lived, dreaming of the days when it was a tree among trees. She felt round the rim of the lid, encountered the metal clasp which closed it, and bit back the beginnings of a scream. The stab of pain was like a burn, though her hand was unmarked. “What is it?” Will inquired, distracted from the television screen.

  “I’m not sure,” said Fern. “It felt like the door handle, only worse. I need gloves.”

  The gloves were in a drawer under the bedside table. Fern noted with disapproval that they were made from the skin of a reptile, snake or lizard; the mottled patterns appeared to alter in a changing light, as if, like the wood, some elusive memory of life lingered in the dead scales, shifting colors like a chameleon. She pulled on the right-hand one: it had looked overlarge but the fingers seemed to shrink onto hers, skin melding with skin, until it no longer resembled a glove and she knew a sudden terror that it would never come off. Her arm would terminate for all time in a claw. “Can you open it now?” Will demanded. She pressed the clasp without ill effect; the lid lifted of its own accord. Inside, the box was divided into sections. There were tiny jars and bottles with labels too minute to decipher; a squat book, leatherbound and handwritten, its pages sere with age; strangest of all, an unmarked video cassette, the tape invisible in its opaque casing. “Let’s try it,” said Will, his expression bright with a mixture of curiosity and daring; but he could not pick it up. Fern took it in her gloved hand and inserted it in the machine, then they sat on the peacock bed-cover to watch. Will pressed PLAY. There was a click, and the screen disappeared. The square outline of the TV set framed a hole, bottomless as the Pit, a window into nothing. A solitary star, infinitely remote, no bigger than a grain of dust, winked and died in its depths. “They do it with computers,” Will said. He did not sound convinced.

  The image came rushing up toward them from the point where the star had died, spinning to a halt, shuddering into coherence. This was no two-dimensional film but a spyhole on reality, a street with exhaust fumes and erratic sunshine, an old man getting into an old car. He tugged a bunch of keys out of his pocket, glanced at it in irritation, and put it back, subsequently producing a much smaller bunch which evidently included the key to the ignition. It came to Fern that this must be Great-Cousin Ned, and on that first keyring was the one key they sought. But the image was gone; another crowded on its heels, and another, a quickfire succession of instant and incident, fragments of history tumbling over each other, hurtling back further and further into the past. A market stall with a tray of trinkets where sifting fingers brushed over an object she could not see; a coved cellar piled with cases on which the dust lay undisturbed; a uniformed figure picking up something from a blood-smeared floor; two men staring into a flame, their faces lit from below, one chubby and eager, the other very young but already shrewd, his forelock limp with sweat, premature lines in his thin cheek. For a second, his eyes lifted, and they were brown and golden and green as a sunlit wood. Then the chimera was lost, overwhelmed in a chaos of other faces: a gypsy, a woman with languorous eyes, a man with a bitter mouth. A waveless sea trailed at the stern of a seedy fishing boat, the sails hanging immobile in the torpid air. The setting sun spilled from beneath the cloud-shelf and flashed like fire across the ocean, igniting a path of gold where a dark silhouette rose to a fatal rendezvous. And then the water closed over all, and far below a skull blossomed, growing slowly into flesh and form, but before Fern could see any clear features white hands covered it, and it was gone. At the last there came another boat, a struggling vessel with bent mast and splitting timbers, riding on a storm beyond imagining. The tempest shook the television set as if it were made of card; a gust of wind tore round the room, wrenching at the curtains, snapping the window wide. Lightning crackled in the gap where the screen used to be. Fern and Will felt themselves lifted up, they and the house and the hillside without, as if the dimension in which they dwelled had turned into a giant elevator, and the only fixed universe was inside the television. They clung to the bedposts like children on a Ferris wheel, soaring through the tumult of sky and sea, until they could see the many-colored flares pulsing like a phantom coronet above the roof of the clouds, and hear the thunder-drums rolling down below. And then a hole was ripped in the canopy and a chasm opened amidst the waves, and there was the ship plunging into it, and the helmsman was swept away, and Fern knew the glimmer at his throat was the missing key, and she saw the pale arms of the mermaid dragging him to his death. A swift darkness spread across the vision, blotting out even the storm, and a voice boomed out of it as cold and empty as the deeps of space. “It is forbidden to go further back,” it said. “The city has been banished from Time and Forever, history and memory. No man shall look on Atlantis again.” There was a snick like the closing of a door, and the screen was back in place. The room around them was stationary; house and hillside did not stir. Fern was trembling so violently she did not trust herself to speak.

  “My G-God,” stammered Will. “My God.” And: “What was that? What did it all mean?”

  “It means we’re in trouble,” Fern said briefly, when she was sure she could keep the quiver out of her voice. She pressed the eject button and replaced the video in the box.

  Will was recovering his nerve, too quickly for her taste. “It felt like a rollercoaster ride through the Big Bang,” he declared. “I’ve never been so terrified—never. Wow. Bloody wow. What do we do now?”

  “Leave,” said Fern.

  Will lowered himself over the windowsill, feeling for the topmost rung with an unsteady foot. “Careful,” said his sister. She thought she might have been able to open the door with the glove on, but she could not be certain of resealing it afterward, and she did not want Alison to realize anyone had been in the room. Will disappeared from view and she took a last look round, flinching automatically from the mirror, hesitating when her eye fell on the easel. She went over to it and twitched the cloth aside. The area that resembled mold seemed to have grown, closing in about the horse’s head: there was a note of panic in its midnight gaze. Fern caressed the surface of the painting with her gloved hand; its mottling altered immediately, coagulating into dark blotches which broadened into rippling bands, the colors flickering and changing like shadows in a jungle. Her fingertips skimmed the stable door, feeling for the lock that was not real; something jolted at her touch, and she began to tremble again, but with another kind of fear, a fear of her unknown self, of the glove that grew on her hand, of the thin current of power that trickled through the very core of her being. She retreated sharply and the cloth slid down over the picture: she would not lift it again. Will’s voice came to her from outside: “Fern! Fern!” She pulled at the glove—she thought it was stuck but it slipped off easily. Putting it back in the drawer, she straightened the peacock coverlet and made her exit through the window, pausing to fiddle it shut before she descended the ladder.

  “Do you think she’ll guess we’ve been there?” asked Will. He had obviously forgotten his lighthearted dismissal of Alison earlier that week.

  “I hope not,” said Fern.

  They were both relieved when Lougarry returned after supper, stretching out at their feet with the relaxed air of an animal settling down for the night. A huge yawn showed the pointed canines, dagger-sharp and yellow as ivory, but Fern was oblivious, sitting on the floor to treat her healing wounds and for the first time venturing to rub her cheek against the dense softness of the ruff. “Stay with us,” she whispered. “Stay tonight. Make me as brave as a wolf. I need courage right now.” She didn’t register her own admission of Lougarry’s true identity. She was thinking: this is what it means to grow up, this is how it feels—to be on your own, to have no one to depend on, no one between you and the dark. Belatedly she began to appreciate how much she had always relied on her father, not perhaps on his strength but on the strength of his position, on the certainties that accompany fatherhood and maturity. She might have run the household but he had empowered her, suppo
rted her, obeyed her, kept her safe. And now, America was a long way away. She did not even have a phone number. Mrs. Wicklow and the Dinsdales were good friends, but they could not deal with Alison. She needed a rock to cling to. But the rock had turned into Ragginbone and told her: Find the key, and now he had disappeared on some errand of his own. Everything seemed to depend on her, yet she did not know what to do or how to do it. She was quite alone.

  “Not quite,” said Will, squatting down beside her. She must have spoken her thought aloud. “We are three.”

  Lougarry turned, and licked her cheek.

  Gradually, night enfolded the house, an unchancy night filled with a fretful wind that muttered round the walls, and inside the shifting of ill-fitting doors, the creaking of untrodden boards. Glancing through a window Fern saw the moon ringed in a yellow nimbus, trailing a lacework of cloud. Once again, she heard the motorbike, roaring to and fro on the deserted road. It occurred to her that bikers usually hunt in packs, but this one was always solitary, a pariah maybe, a Black Knight of the highways, armored in leather, anonymous in his helmet. She had never seen him stop the machine, dismount, lift the visor. She had never heard his name. “That dratted bike,” Mrs. Wicklow had said once; but she did not seem to know who he was. As if in response to her thought the engine cut suddenly, very nearby. Lougarry rose to her feet, her hackles stirring, showing her teeth in something that was not a yawn. She slipped out of the back door like a swift shadow, returning minutes later even as they heard the bike departing. She had neither barked nor growled—Lougarry was invariably silent—but the danger, if danger it was, had gone. There can’t be any more people ranged against us, Fern thought, verging on irritation. The biker might be a nuisance but not a threat, inquisitive maybe, but surely not malevolent. She closed but did not lock the door and made cocoa for herself and Will, although it was the wrong time of year, because the drink was hot and sweet and comforting.