Prospero's Children

by Jan Siegel

  For the first time Alison faltered. “He’s too strong,” she said. “I might not be able to bind him in the circle.”

  “His power is wasted, burned out: he is nothing more than a man. Surely you are not afraid of a man? Summon him!”

  Alison lifted her hand in the customary gesture, but the chant of command sounded less clear than before, slurred with uncertainty. The figure which appeared in the circle wore a bulky garment like a coat; his hood was thrown back, showing a shaggy head of hair brindled like Lougarry’s fur. At the sight of him, Fern went suddenly cold. “I have come, Alimond,” said Ragginbone. “What do you want?”

  “You know what I want,” she responded. His tone was mild enough but her doubt remained, blunting the edge of her words. “Do you think I haven’t felt you watching? Not that it matters: watching is all you’re good for now. What have you seen, Brokenwand?”

  “I have seen someone taking an axe to sever a spider’s web. Very clumsy. I should have guessed it was you. No one else would send a hound that scents blood on the trail of something that has neither blood nor scent. That seemed peculiarly pointless.”

  “I wanted to deter the inquisitive,” she said frostily.

  “I will try to remember that,” he responded in dulcet accents.

  “You should be asking the questions,” the idol told Alison. “You’re bleating like a novice. The hound was a serious miscalculation. A conspicuous hunter draws attention to the trail.”

  “What happened to it, Caracandal?” Alison demanded. “It does not answer my call.”

  “Ask Lougarry,” said Ragginbone. “If you dare.”

  “Enough of this!” The luminosity in the carved orbs of the idol appeared to intensify, a glow radiating from within the stone itself, kindling to a flame. “The key. We want the key.”

  “Where is it? If you have a clue—a trace—tell me, Caracandal. I conjure you—I order you—tell me!” Once again Alison raised her hand with a peculiar twisting motion, and the veins of light from the rim of the circle streamed toward her fingers. Her fist clenched, grasping the air itself, warping the cone of space that enclosed the Watcher till the buildup of pressure within bandaged him in his own coat, strangling him in his hair, dragging his features sideways. Fern saw the dreadful concentration that fettered his brows, tug against pull, force against force, the struggle not of muscle but of will. Gradually, the pressure was thrust aside: his hair loosened, flesh and feature slid back into place. Alison snatched at the cone but the light frayed from her clutch and dissolved downward; the glinting lines grew dim; the fire sank; Ragginbone towered dark and ominous at the center of the circle, and the last motes of brilliance spiraled slowly around him until they too were gone.

  “Not . . . good enough,” he said. His breath came short and fast but he stood like a rock, the rock Fern had seen before, solid as Earth. Immovable.

  “You have not—the power!” Alison gasped. “You cannot—”

  “I do not need power.” His voice steadied. “Only habit.” He pulled up his hood, and vanished.

  The circle blazed back into light; the fire leaped. Fern felt a draft on her face like an icy burn; involuntarily she retreated behind the chair. She heard Alison swear, and the rasping derision of the idol. “Was that well done? You are afraid of him, and he knows it, he trades on it, he takes you by the fear and drags you down into weakness. He uses your own power against you. He is an old man with nothing to cling to but his age, crippled in strength, tramping the hills on a quest that is never fulfilled, yet you are afraid of him. You would trap the wild unicorn for its horn, whistle up a hound from the packs of Arawn—yet you are afraid of him. He learned his tricks from a mountebank, he peddled arsenic to a streetwitch and aphrodisiacs to the mistress of a king, he sneaked his way through the centuries, toying with wizardry, squandering his Gift— yet you are afraid of him. You would do better to fear me. You have shown me nothing tonight but the depth of your own ignorance. Quench the fire. Clear the circle. It is enough.”

  “Wait!” she said. “There is one I have not questioned. It may be useless, but . . .”

  “Hurry,” said the idol. “The fire will die soon. I cannot dally.”

  This time, the shape in the circle grew very slowly into being, as though coerced from some secure region of invisibility, dredged from an anonymous existence into a shy materialization. It was a squat, dumpy creature less than four feet high, its head sunken onto its chest, a lopsided hump distorting its shoulders, bat-like ears adorning its bald skull, each endowed with independent motion. It stood bundled up in its few rags as if in a motheaten sack, and it hugged itself with many-fingered hands in a pitiful attempt to conceal its poverty and ugliness. Its face was shriveled, its pouched eyes sorrowful and scared. Fern, venturing once more to squint around the chair-back, knew she had seen it before. This was the thing which had skulked in the passage outside her room, after the hound had gone. And with a surge of conviction she knew what it must be. The house-goblin.

  “Malmorth,” said Alison. “Malmorth the misshapen: is that what they called you? One of a hundred malmorths, hiding in shadows, terrified of your own reflection. Or do you have another name?”

  The tiny monster made a whimpering sound in which Fern could identify no words.

  “Pegwillen, was it? Is that the name the children gave you—the children you used to play with, all those years ago? What became of the children, Pegwillen? Do you remember? Do you remember who or what you are? Shall I tell you where they went?” An imploring look came into the mournful eyes; a knobbly digit reached out toward her. “They died,” Alison said. “A stranger came down the valley with a buzz in his head and a pustule under his arm, and they all died. You were there, Pegwillen, but you could not help them. The cottage was burned with the bodies in it and you were alone. Always alone. And when they built this house you crept in and waited, but the children did not come again. Never again.”

  The hideous creature closed its eyes, trapped in a terrible memory of suffering. Alison surveyed it without compunction. “What about the man?” she said. “The sea captain who lived here recently. Do you remember him too?” It shook its head, lost in misery. Fern had a brief glimpse of an interminable sentence of wretchedness and desolation, a futile grubbing in a lumber-room of buried souvenirs, searching for something which had long been forgotten. “As you wish,” said Alison. “Shall we see what other recollections I can revive?”

  The monster stared at her in horror, seeming to quail in upon itself. Its wizened countenance was so full of sadness it appeared to Fern no longer ugly, merely pathetic.

  “The man,” Alison reiterated. “Did you notice the man? Good. Where did he keep his keys? Did you notice that too?”

  “In his pocket,” mumbled Pegwillen.

  “Which pocket?” Alison’s patience was labored. “The average man has many coats, many pockets. Which one did he favor?”

  “Whichever pocket he was wearing,” the goblin said. Its voice was too quiet for any distinctive tone but at least Fern could hear it now.

  “Where else did he put them,” Alison pursued, “when not using his pockets?”

  “In the desk.”

  “The writing desk in his study?”

  “Yes.”

  “The desk that’s locked with one of the missing keys?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stop this gibberish,” the idol interrupted. “The creature is three parts imbecile. You’ll get nothing from it but cobwebs in the head. Send it away.”

  “It might know something,” Alison insisted. “It’s always been here.”

  “Dismiss it.”

  She made a quick, curt gesture, and the goblin diminished into nothingness. The glimmering lines seemed to wane and Fern, restored to a tardy awareness of her precarious situation, judged it was time to leave. But she had knelt too long behind the chair: her cramped legs would not move. Frantically she massaged numb calves. The light sank with the fire, making the shadows less dense
, her concealment less sure. Alison was speaking quietly in the unknown language she had used before, perhaps a closing incantation. If she walked to the door she could not miss the figure huddled in the gloom.

  And then came a tumult of wind and something rushed past Fern into the room, scattering circle and symbol, springing in front of Alison, crouched low as if ready to pounce. Lougarry’s ears were flattened against her skull, her hackles lifted as if charged with electricity, her ragged fangs shone blue in the light of the flaring fire. The silence she carried with her was as palpable as a smell, a physical aura that deadened all neighboring sound. Her voiceless growl seemed to fill the room.

  “Get out!” Alison cried. “I did not summon you, demon. Go back to your master! Go!”

  “Kill her,” said the idol.

  For the last time, Alison raised her arm—

  But the fire went out, exploding in a dust of sparks, and the wind howled like wolves, and in the sudden blackness the only illumination came from the eyes of the stone idol, still shining with a baleful luster. A small hand reached out to Fern, taking hers, a hand with many fingers of assorted lengths. She heard Alison shrieking in fury, her rage sharpened with fear, the thud of a fall, the curse of the stone, but the tiny voice close by was more distinct. “Quick,” it said. “Quick, quick.” She was drawn away from the din, through the hall. “Stairs,” said her guide, and she climbed after him, her sight readjusting, until she thought she could make out the diminutive figure ahead of her, a bundle of dark in the darkness. “Pegwillen?” she whispered. But as they reached the landing the hand slipped from hers, and the bundle seemed to shrink and blur, and she was alone in the empty passage, standing beside her door.

  Inside her room she closed the door, resisting the urge to try and wedge the handle, and got back into bed. She began to shiver with reaction, thinking of what she had seen since she tiptoed downstairs after her brother, an hour, a lifetime, an aeon ago. She had crossed the frontier into another world beyond any further possibility of denial; she might return but reality would never look the same to her.

  Sometime later she heard footsteps approaching along the corridor. Not Will again: the feet were shod, the pace measured. They stopped outside her room, waited a while, and then, reluctantly, or so she imagined, they moved on toward the upper floor.

  IV

  Waking the next morning reminded Fern of those awakenings just after her mother’s death, when she had opened her eyes each day to the realization that the world was forever different. One of the foundation stones of her existence was gone, and her environment felt no longer stable; her very spirit seemed to falter on a cliff-edge, above an unimaginable depth of uncertainty. Over the years she had tried to build a barrier of solid, everyday things between herself and that abyss: small plans, realizable dreams, material comforters, walling herself in, shutting out not only the abyss but the view. Now, the walls had fallen in, the wide world had come close with all its dark possibilities. She felt naked and afraid, beset by shadows, and yet at the same time curiously alive, as if a faint current of discordant energy had begun to seep through her veins, filling her with a fledgling strength, a desperate resource. She sat down to breakfast with an assumption of normality, studying Alison covertly: she looked sleepless and haunted, her lips pale, her eyes bruised, elfin lines marking the passage of telltale expressions. “I’ve seen a stray dog round here,” she said to Mrs. Wicklow. “If you see it, chase it off. I won’t have a stray hanging about. It could be dangerous, and it’s bound to have fleas.”

  Under the table, Fern dug her brother with her foot. “Mrs. Wicklow doesn’t like dogs,” she said, making no attempt to catch the housekeeper’s eye.

  “Happen I don’t,” grunted Mrs. Wicklow, but she did not mention Lougarry.

  “Are you all right?” Fern asked Alison solicitously. “You look as if you haven’t slept well.”

  “Of course I’m all right,” Alison snapped.

  Her friend arrived to view the barn later that morning. He was a bronzed, hairless individual with the physique of a workout fanatic and a BBC accent that lapsed into an affectation of cockney with every few phrases. He wore Italian jeans which clung tightly to buttock and thigh and a leather jacket with the sleeves ripped out, lavishly ornamented with studs. Alison called him “Rollo, darling”; he called her dear, dearie, luv, and even ducks. He seemed willing to extend his careless affection to Will and Fern, patting Will’s hair with suspicious frequency, but Alison was politely discouraging and although the Capels trooped after her into the barn to keep an eye on the well-being of the Seawitch they were soon bored away by the talk of open-plan interiors, multi-level structure, layout, perspective, and feng shui. By common consent they rambled up the hill and found themselves a hummock where they could sit and survey their domain. It was sunny and growing hot: the wind-rippled air was filled with the thrumming of grasshoppers, the honey-drone of a laden bee, a far-off aria of birdsong. Very faintly they heard the bubbling voice of the Yarrow where it tumbled over a low fall. High white clouds chased their own shadows across the upland moor. “It’s so peaceful,” said Will. “You can’t believe in witchcraft and evil up here.”

  “There is evil everywhere under the sun,” Fern quoted, and the gravity in her tone made him turn and study her thoughtfully.

  There was a long pause before she ventured somewhat gingerly to broach the subject on her mind. “You were sleepwalking last night.”

  “Was I? I don’t remember that. I had this weird dream, though. Really weird. At least . . . I think it was a dream.”

  “Go on.”

  “I woke up,” Will said, “in my dream, I mean. I felt as if I was awake but I sort of knew I was only dreaming. I suppose it was a relief. Knowing it was just a dream kept it from being frightening. I’d have been scared shitless if I’d thought it was real.”

  Fern considered taking him to task on his choice of language but was too anxious for him to continue his story. “What happened?”

  “I went downstairs and across the hall to the drawing room—”

  “Why?” Fern interrupted.

  “I don’t know,” Will responded. “It was just part of the dream. You don’t know why you do things in dreams. Anyway, the drawing room was all different—the same room, but much bigger, and the ceiling was so high I could barely see it, and the fireplace was huge, like a great cavern, with a fire burning in it, but the flames were blue and cold-looking. The room was full of a pale light which made everything else look bluish too. That awful stone idol was sitting beside the fire on a kind of dais, only it was enormous, like a statue in a pagan temple, and its eyes were alive, not stone anymore but luminous, like an animal in the dark.”

  “Did it speak?” Fern asked quickly.

  “I don’t remember. It’s funny: it sounds so terrifying when I describe it but I wasn’t terrified in the dream, just numb. I went to stand in the circle in the middle of the room, and the circle seemed to expand, and the walls receded until I couldn’t see them anymore. It was like standing in the center of a giant ice rink with a spotlight on you. The fire burned round the edge of the circle, but it radiated cold, not heat. She was there too, outside the circle.”

  “Alison?”

  “I suppose so,” Will said. “She was like Alison, but different.”

  “Bigger?” Fern suggested doubtfully.

  Will frowned, concentrating on the effort of memory. “Taller,” he concluded. “I’m sure she was taller. And more witch-like. The firelight made dramatic shadows in her face, like the hollows in a skull, and her mouth was purple, and she wore a purple dress that changed to blood-color when she moved, and there was a greenish shade in her hair. She was asking me questions, and I had to answer them, although deep down inside I knew it wasn’t a good idea.” He had been gazing down the valley toward the river, but he turned back to his sister with troubled eyes. “It wasn’t, was it?” he said. “The more I think about this, the more I feel it wasn’t exactly a dream. Fe
rn . . .”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Just tell me, can you remember any of the questions?”

  “Not really. Except one: she asked me about the missing treasure, and I was going to tell her about Atlantis, only a picture came into my head—pirates with cutlasses in their teeth, and chests overflowing with gold coins, and the Seawitch with a skull-and-crossbones flapping at her mast—and I didn’t mention Atlantis after all.” He added, after a brief silence: “That sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?”

  “It was a very good thing,” said Fern.

  “Did you see me sleepwalking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did I go?”

  “To the drawing room,” said Fern. “I followed you. Everything looked normal size to me, but there was a circle, like you said, inside a pentagram, and a blue fire, and the idol was alive. It spoke. And I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t numb. And I’ve never been so scared in my whole life.” The sun shone down on them. The bee bumbled around a nearby patch of gorse. The grasshoppers rubbed their knee-joints together like a frenetic chorus of gypsy guitars. Yet night and nightmare lay as close as a shadow. “We’re out of our depth,” said Fern. “We need help.”

  “Gus?”

  “No. I think we should leave Alison and her chum to mess around in the barn, and go for a long walk. On our own.”

  They collected a liter bottle of lemonade from the fridge and Mrs. Wicklow made them sandwiches. “Don’t go too far,” she cautioned, “and don’t get lost. Folks get mazed up on t’ moors, specially when t’ mist comes down. Pixy-led, they used to call it. Still, it’s a fine day and like to stay fine, and Fern here looks enough like a pixy herself. Happen t’ boggarts would treat you as friends, any road. What shall I say to Madam, if she asks for you?”

  “Nothing,” said Fern. “We don’t want company. Or fuss.”