Prospero's Children

by Jan Siegel

  “Did you paint that?” asked Will, indicating the trompe l’oeil.

  “I did. To her requirements. Personally, it gives me the creeps.”

  “You did it very fast,” said Fern.

  “Nah. ” Amused, Rollo lapsed into his improbable cockney. “She h’ordered it monfs ago.”

  Fern said no more, but she looked pensive.

  That afternoon, Mrs. Wicklow took a call from Alison to say she was delayed in London and would not return to Yorkshire till Saturday. Javier’s keeping her there, Fern concluded privately. She may not know he’s an ambulant. It’s probably easier for him to manipulate her if she believes her only contact with the Oldest Spirit is through the idol. He’s keeping her in London because he wants me to find the key . . .

  The dark came late in the long summer evening, the lingering sunset gradually giving way to a green afterglow that hung over the skyline far into the night. Fern left Will in the kitchen and went upstairs early with a glass of milk and a plate of Mrs. Wicklow’s handmade biscuits, claiming she wanted to study. Will, bemoaning the lack of a television in a routine manner, turned up the volume on the music center and plunged into a pile of John Buchan novels he had found in Ned Capel’s library. In her room, Fern placed the milk and biscuits on the floor not far from the window, climbed into bed, and switched off the lamp. The pallor of the leftover day filled the room with a silvery dimness, softening the boundaries that distinguish one object from another, blending light and shade so that hard outlines were lost and everything was transformed by a gentle unreality. The curtains were drawn back and the plate and glass stood alone and somehow expectant in the edgeless glimmer that still came through the window. Fern sat very still, arms clasped around bent knees. She did not feign sleep, only patience, curbing the urge to whisper or call, summoning him only with the voice of her mind. Whether he would hear she did not know, but she was certain that he would see, and in the end he would come to her. The evening with Javier might have filled her with alarms and indecisions but since then, though she had not yet realized it, she had acquired an unthinking confidence in her own ability: she did not doubt that the shadows would respond to her need. She had been tempted to read with the aid of the bedside lamp but she was afraid even that small, artificial light might discourage her prospective visitor. She could picture him shrinking from the revelation of his ugliness or simply of his actual being, such as it was, an insubstantial thing half-phantom, half-memory, warped with suffering, misshapen in loneliness, blurred over the long centuries by the dim recollections of a twilit imagination. She had touched his hand with its assorted fingers but she had learned to distrust her senses: things were not always as solid as they felt, and the house-goblin, she believed, existed merely as a vague consciousness on the borders of reality, projecting an unsteady image into the penumbra of the living universe.

  An hour or more passed slowly and the residue of day was almost gone when she saw it. A single digit, disproportionately long, crooked and knotted like a thin twig, reaching out from the darkness below the window. The shadows there seemed to have clotted into a small hunched shape, a dwarfling crouching out of the lastlight, both skulking and shy, lured by the homely tribute no one had left him for many hundreds of years. Presently, several other fingers joined the first, the tiny hand creeping spider-like toward plate and glass, the extended arm skimpy and knobbled about the elbow. Then the body followed the arm, an awkward, stealthy bundle scarcely visible even to Fern’s dusk-adapted eye. She waited until he had sampled both milk and biscuits before she spoke his name. Her voice was softer than the wind’s sigh, soft as nightfall, a sound for only a shadow to hear.

  “Pegwillen.”

  For an instant the bundle froze and she feared he would slip away, scuttling back across the frontier into unreality; but he turned toward her and she saw the gleam of eyes long luster-less fixed on her face.

  “I was told milk was what you would like,” she said.

  “Who . . . ?”

  She thought he was afraid even to be talked about, to be mentioned in passing, to be looked for or called. So long unwanted and alone . . .

  “Someone said it was the tradition.”

  “The children,” he said in his whimper-thin, whisper-weak voice. “I thought the children had come back. Little Nan, and Peter, and Wat . . . always sly, Wat . . . and Joseph who was so noisy, and Tammy who was so quiet . . . I was sure they would come back one day.”

  “They are playing somewhere else now,” said Fern very gently, as if it were a child to whom she spoke.

  “The others grew up . . . and then there were more children, always more. But Tammy, and Peter, and little Nan . . . they never grew up. And there were no more children to come after.” The Black Death, Fern deduced. That was what Alison was referring to. A whole family, maybe a whole village, wiped out in a matter of days. Involuntarily she stretched out her hand, and presently an attenuated finger slid into the cup of her palm and stayed there.

  “They passed the Gate,” she said, the words coming to her unbidden. “It was their time.”

  “Gone,” whispered Pegwillen. “Peter, and Nan, my Nan . . . all gone . . .” His sad mumblings merged slowly into the night silence.

  “What about the Capels?” Fern asked after a pause. “Three—or four—girls, and a little boy. They came much later, after this house was built. Do you remember them? They must have been children, to begin with.”

  “Not my children.” The house-goblin evidently had various categories of childkind. “There were little girls, too many little girls, wearing too many clothes. All frills and curls and fuss. They were always stitching, drawing, baking . . . One of them had her own garden. I made the flowers grow for her, but she didn’t see me. They never left me any food. I stole some cake once, but it tasted of sand.” Fern smiled to herself. “Their faces got older, but not their clothes. Always girls . . .”

  “And the boy?”

  “He went away to school. Or maybe he ran away. He was very tall.”

  “When he came back,” Fern prompted, “he was an old man, retired. He’d been at sea. Captain Capel. You remember.”

  Pegwillen made a faint noise, presumably affirmation.

  “He had a dog,” Fern went on, feeling her way. “He used to go walking with the dog, over the moors, and along the beach.”

  The finger she held seemed to flinch, curling into her palm. The word dog appeared to affect him adversely. “Sniffing,” Pegwillen said. “It came sniffing in the night. It was outside, trying to get in. Then it was inside, in the house. She let it in. It looked like a dog, but it didn’t feel like a dog. Then the other one came, and chased it away.”

  “The other one? You mean Lougarry?”

  “I watched them fight,” Pegwillen said, shivering at the recollection. “The other one never made a sound, even when the fangs tore its flank. It ran after her dog, down the stairs, into the dark, but I never heard the beat of its paws.” One bat-ear twitched back and forward. “Tonight . . . I could hear the boy breathing, in spite of the noise-box. His hands turning the pages. I hear most things. If I listen. Sometimes, I forget to listen.”

  “You aren’t afraid of Lougarry,” said Fern, “are you?”

  Pegwillen did not answer, but the small nugget of his deformed body seemed to shrink in upon itself, becoming still smaller with an unspoken terror. He’s afraid of everything, she thought. Of seeing, and being seen, of newcomers, strangers, intruders, of evil powers, and good . . .

  “But you aren’t afraid of me,” she said.

  Pegwillen shook his head. “You were hiding,” he explained, “like me. Only you’re brave. I’m not brave.”

  “Yes, you are,” Fern said resolutely. “We have to be brave together. Then we can defeat her, and she’ll go away.” In the dimness the sorrowful eyes appeared to brighten for a moment or two; then their gleaming waned, and the tiny hand clasping hers began to fade into insubstantiality. “Don’t go,” Fern pleaded, suppressing
urgency. “I only need a little help from you. I’ll do the rest. I’ll deal with her. I promise.”

  The warmth nestling in her palm became finger once more; the dwindling shadow at her bedside thickened and darkened. “Help?” came the incredulous whisper. “From me?”

  “Of course,” said Fern. “You know this house, you know everyone who lived here, everything that happened. You’ve been here so long. You know where the captain put the key, the special key, the key he brought back from abroad. Do you remember it?”

  “Stone,” said Pegwillen unexpectedly. “Stone, and not stone. Sometimes I touch things. I touch them to find out what they are. I touched the key.” He gave a curious shudder, not fear this time, mere reaction.

  “Do you remember what he did with it?” Fern asked. “Try to remember.”

  “She came,” said Pegwillen. “She wanted to know about furniture, and the statue that talks, only it was silent then, and keys. Old keys to old locks. She wanted to unlock doors, poke in drawers. Looking for secrets. He sent her away, but he was worried. I could see the worry in his face. He used to sit in the study, fiddling with the key. A luck-charm, he said, a sea-charm. The key to Davy-Jones’s-locker.” A flicker of bafflement altered his voice as he jumbled remembered words together. “Then someone came at night, on a machine that roared. Up and down, up and down on the road below. It tried to get in once—a thing in a helmet, with no face—but I made the window fall on its hand.”

  “Well done,” Fern said warmly. “You are brave, you see.”

  She could not tell if Pegwillen was pleased but he continued his story without further prompting. “After that, the captain put the key—all the keys—in his desk. In the secret place.”

  “Where? Can you describe it exactly?” She sensed a faltering, a momentary hesitation, groped for suitable phrases to reassure him. “I must find the key. If I don’t, she will. And . . . the captain left us this house, and everything in it. I have the right.”

  She felt Pegwillen clenching himself in an unaccustomed effort of concentration: the captain—the house—the right— the key. And her. Alimond, who called speech from a statue and clawed at his diminutive spirit with recollected pain. Her. He looked up, and saw the pallor of Fern’s face, far clearer to his dim gaze than he to hers, a face still pure and spotless with the touch of first youth. Doubts vanished, leaving a kind of trust.

  “It’s behind the drawers,” he said at last. “A hole. A slot. When you open the desk, there are two sets of drawers. Three on each side. On this side—” he indicated with his right hand “—the drawers are shorter. The top slides forward, so you can reach into the slot. That side fixed, this side moves. It’s a clever desk. A desk for hiding things.”

  “What about the key to the desk itself?” Fern pursued. “What did he do with that?”

  “Took it off the ring,” said the house-goblin, “to lock away other keys. Then . . .”

  “Then?”

  “In his pocket.”

  “But they went through his pockets,” Fern said. “The lawyers—executors—whoever. They must have done. Can you remember what he was wearing that day?”

  “Jacket.”

  “What sort of jacket?”

  “His favorite jacket. Old. The one he always wore.”

  “What color was it? What sort of material? Try to picture it. It’s very important. I don’t want to have to force the lock on the desk, even if that’s possible. Alison would notice—and Daddy would have a fit.”

  Pegwillen’s sad puckered face scrunched still further into a tight little mesh of dimly seen features. His obvious effort affected Fern painfully, yet he did not seem to be afraid anymore. “Wool,” he pronounced. “It was made of wool. Thick. Rough to feel. Sort of speckledy.”

  “Tweed,” said Fern.

  “Leather elbows,” Pegwillen went on. “Hole in pocket. I saw him pull it inside-out to look, and poke his finger through. He said: ‘I must give this to Mrs. Wicklow to mend for me. It’s a good jacket.’ His favorite.”

  “Maybe,” Fern said thoughtfully, “maybe he forgot.”

  Pegwillen did not comment, waiting in uncertain patience, still clutching her hand. He appeared quite real now, she thought, more goblin than ghost. She wondered if the very density of his being was an act of faith.

  “I don’t suppose you know what happened to the jacket after Great-Cousin—after the captain died?”

  “Given away,” said Pegwillen doubtfully. “All his clothes— given away.”

  Fern heaved a sigh that stretched into a yawn. “It sounds hopeless,” she admitted. “I’ll ask Mrs. Wicklow in the morning: perhaps she can help. Still . . . I wonder if you could twist the lock with a screwdriver? Or . . . magic might do the trick. If I borrowed Alison’s dragonskin gloves . . .”

  “Not magic,” said Pegwillen, startling her from a drift of hazy ideas. “Magic can seal and unseal, fix and unfix. But for a lock you must have a key. It is an ancient law.”

  “Like not crossing the threshold uninvited,” Fern murmured. She was growing very sleepy. “I see. It’s a kind of etiquette. A lot of magic seems to be about etiquette. I like that: it makes things more orderly, somehow. It’s nice to think that even the powers of chaos are bound by courtesy if not by physics. Good manners are the one eternal constant . . .” She slid down into a horizontal position and her hand disengaged from his. “Don’t forget . . . to finish your milk and biscuits . . .”

  In minutes she was asleep.

  As so often of late, she dreamed vividly. She was descending a narrow path between high cliffs. The path plunged steeply downhill, broken here and there into uneven steps, some three or four feet in height, but she seemed to be floating a little way above it, borne on an invisible dream-current which swept her along with ever-increasing speed. The path zigzagged and dived, dropping away beneath her into a falling tunnel; above, the cliffs leaned closer and closer together, squeezing the sky to a bright thread. Yet somehow she was conscious of neither vertigo nor fear, only acceptance. And then the thread vanished and she was spinning through a darkness illumined with fleeting gleams of phosphorescence, plummeting faster than a swooping eagle to an unguessable depth. She emerged abruptly into strong light in a valley of rock that seemed to be at the bottom of the world. Her speed slowed to a gentle drift above a chain of terraced pools, some as wide as lakes, stained extraordinary colors by the minerals that contaminated them. One was a pure turquoise shading to emerald, another venom-green, another a clear scarlet, with faint steams hovering over the water at the far end. But every pool was cupped in stone, and precipices of stone walled the valley on either side, natural bastions, topped with sheer cliffs, climbing at last to mountain-ranges too high and remote to measure. The sun was sinking slowly into a cleft of sky directly ahead. A long-legged bird waded in the scarlet lake, drinking the ominous water. It was bigger and brighter than a flamingo, with the beak of a raptor, a glittering crest, and feathers that caught the sun’s fire. It reminded her of a picture she had come across in a book of folktales when she was a child. It’s a firebird, she thought, a phoenix. I’ve seen a phoenix— She had long forgotten she was only dreaming. The bird beat its wings, ascending in a swirl of vapor toward the clear air, shedding a glimmer like falling sparks in its wake. She saw no other living thing.

  Then abruptly the landscape changed. The lakes were left behind, the valley floor ceased descending and leveled out into sudden fertility. She was in a garden. An impossible jungle-garden, flourishing unwatered, webbed with serpentine trees, mazed with pathways, tendriled with creeping plants. At first it appeared to her merely a labyrinth of convoluted vegetation but gradually she realized its wildness was artificial, the jungle stylized, every curl of every leaf had its own secret significance. There were no birds but many insects, moths marked with the vivid hues that denote poison, spiny caterpillars, hornets with three-inch stings. She saw a mantis as long as her arm and a dragonfly with the head of a lizard. The few flowers reminded her o
f those growing over Alison’s trompe l’oeil door in the barn. But it was not till she saw the building that she knew she ought to be afraid. From a distance it looked little bigger than a folly, a circular edifice with many pillars and the fretwork of a broken dome curving overhead. She could not have said why it was frightening but she reached for her elusive fear as a fainting man snatches at consciousness. She was being carried inexorably toward it, and she sensed it was the focus and center of the valley and inside it something waited which had called her out of sleep, into dream, and it was too late now to resist. The door grew larger as it approached, towering upward until it became a vast portal with columns marching on either hand, and then she was sucked into the temple, and it was huge, bigger than an amphitheater, bigger than a stadium, and the fingers of its fractured roof enclasped the whole sky. Her feet touched the ground; she saw the figures seated round the walls and the single idol facing her, larger than the rest; but they were all the same. The lamps were unlit, the sun occluded; in front of the main idol the hearth was cold. Fiery clouds streaked the sky-roof.

  “Come to me,” said the idol. “Light the blue fire. It is time. Time. Time!” The voice boomed around that empty place, reverberating from a hundred other mouths; yet it was familiar.

  “Who are you?” said Fern. Her own voice was a thin slight sound, like the fluting of a lost bird.

  “Do you not know me? I am Azmordis. (Azmordis. Azmordis.) Come to me!”

  And against her will, against her fear, she heard herself echoing: “Azmordis.”

  She took a step forward, and woke up.

  The name was still on her lips, the air vibrated with it. She knew immediately that she was alone in the room, yet she felt as alert and startled as if she had been jerked from slumber by a cry of warning or the jangle of an alarm bell. Perhaps it was her own cry which had roused her, wrenching her from some other place back into the earthly night. She looked at her clock: the green glimmer of hands pointed to ten past three. She got up without switching on the light, located the empty plate and glass and picked them up, intending to take them downstairs to the kitchen. She felt restless and uneasy, unable to lie down again and relax back into sleep. Her dream—if dream it was—still seemed too close for comfort. Familiar with the house now, she moved easily down the gloomy passageway to the landing, feeling for the topmost stair with her foot. At the first bend she slowed. There was no sinister shaft of radiance emanating from the drawing room, but nonetheless she thought the hall was not quite as dark as it should have been. With no windows it was normally almost pitch-black, yet as she drew nearer she could make out the shape of the boss on the banister at the stair’s foot, and the dim outline of the drawing room door, standing slightly ajar. It ought to be shut; she and Will always left it shut. Of course, Mrs. Wicklow would have opened it during the day, and they might both have forgotten to close it, or not closed it properly, allowing it to creak open a little way, as doors in old houses sometimes do. It seemed to her that the glimpse of the room beyond showed a paler shade of darkness, discernible only to the nocturnal eye; but she was not certain. She didn’t want to go and look. But she knew she must. Setting down the plate and glass, she stole across the hall.