Prospero's Children

by Jan Siegel

  “We’ll be all right,” said Fern. “Anyway, Pegwillen will come back now, won’t he? With Alimond dead. I know you didn’t like him, but it felt right for him to be here. He belonged.”

  “Not anymore,” said the Watcher, hovering between grimness and a reluctant pity. “Death can break a spell but it does not restore life. Alimond turned me into a rock; the house-goblin she simply exterminated. These delicate shades of vindictiveness! She wanted me to know my fate and suffer accordingly, but with Malmorth she didn’t care. She tore his slight spirit from its semblance of a body and hurled it into Limbo like an unwanted rag. It—he—cannot return. Don’t mourn for him. Ultimately, it was probably a relief. Misery and loneliness had eaten at his mind for too long.”

  “I’m glad Alison’s dead,” said Will after a minute or two. “She deserved it.”

  “I suppose so,” said Fern.

  When she finally went to bed, reeling from a sudden blast of tiredness after a day whose length might have been measured in centuries, she found herself glancing with fading hope into corners and shadows; but there was nothing there. The house seemed to have lost the essence of its personality: now, it was just a stack of rooms. The corners and shadows held no more secrets. The house-goblin was gone, and the witch was gone, and the key to Death and Time was lost forever.

  In the morning, Fern picked a bunch of wildflowers and put them in a jam jar on the kitchen windowsill.

  Not to mourn, she told herself, but to remember.

  They found Alimond later that day, floating in the Yarrow where the river ran dark under the trees. Her hair, caught in a net of twigs and weed, matted the surface of the water like thick colorless algae. The young constable who helped to haul her out was inexperienced in the matter of dead bodies; he had to sit down and duck his head between his knees. Even his older companion said it gave him “quite a turn,” not so much the bloating and bruising of the face or the slime that drooled from the open mouth but that dreadful vacant stare, as if those eyes had looked into an emptiness more terrible than any vision of Hell. At the inquest, a pathologist confirmed that she had drowned. Formal identification was provided by Rollo, his studded leather traded for a jacket of mauve-gray silk which he clearly believed appropriate, his mock-cockney accent not in evidence. Gus Dinsdale described the so-called flash flood, and Fern, looking as youthful and vulnerable as she could manage, pleaded memory loss. The coroner was kindly; Robin guilt-stricken. (He had returned from the States in a rush despite Fern’s careful downplaying of the whole affair and now blamed everything on his own wanton absence.) Fern was profoundly relieved that Javier Holt did not put in an appearance. She was almost sure that he would come, one day soon, and although Alimond was dead and the key out of reach still she feared him, a lingering irrational fear that she could not reason away.

  Afterward, Maggie Dinsdale found her husband curiously thoughtful. “I had a word with that chap from the path lab,” he said. “He didn’t mention it in his evidence—he was obviously puzzled and presumably didn’t wish to complicate things—but apparently Alison drowned in salt water.” He paused. “She’s in the sea, Fern said. In the sea . . .”

  For no particular reason, Maggie shivered.

  The funeral was held in London. Robin went, Fern declined. She was relieved to note that with Alimond’s death her hold over Robin had evaporated so completely he seemed slightly bewildered by his own recent behavior—a bewilderment, however, that was easily swallowed up in the overreaction of his conscience. For a short while he became so protective that Fern found herself plotting distractions to keep him away from Yorkshire. “We’ll go down to the south of France for a couple of weeks,” he informed his children on his return from the funeral. “I had coffee with Jane Cleary: they’ve invited us to the villa. She was really shocked when I told her about this business. You’d like to go, wouldn’t you?” His gaze latched hopefully onto his daughter. “You were never very keen on Yorkshire.”

  But Fern returned a noncommittal answer. Even though their adventures seemed to be over, she was reluctant to let go. Ragginbone was still in the vicinity and Lougarry continued to patronize the kitchen. “She belongs to this local guy,” Will had explained to his father, tip-toeing through the truth. “He’s a bit eccentric. We look after her sometimes.” Robin, who felt he ought to be a dog-lover even when he wasn’t, accepted this without further question, patting her cautiously from time to time and wondering why her yellow stare made him uncomfortable. It was all of a piece with the other factors which contributed to his inner discomfort, many of which seemed the more disquieting because he could not specify what they were. “You do want to go to France, don’t you?” he reiterated, almost pleading. Will said: “Yes, of course” much too enthusiastically; Fern, apparently lost in abstraction, said nothing at all. He knew from other parents that teenagers were habitually abstracted, it was a teenage state of mind: they mooned after boyfriends or girlfriends, agonized over spots and exam results, wrapped themselves in a fog of alienation which might be the result of drug-taking or might be merely hormones. But Fern had never been that kind of teenager. Fern, envious acquaintances had opined darkly, was too good to be true. Sooner or later she would go off the rails.

  “You are all right, old girl, aren’t you?” he inquired awkwardly.

  “Yes, Daddy. Of course I’m all right.”

  “You’re usually so keen on going to France.”

  “I’m just not in the mood, that’s all.” She’s upset because of Alison, he thought. That’s what it is. She probably blames herself. “I like it here,” Fern went on with the flicker of a smile, shattering illusions. “Don’t worry, Daddy. I expect I’ll feel differently in a week or so.”

  “Saw Javier Holt at the funeral,” he resumed after a minute or two. “I gather he took you out to dinner when he was up here.” Vague suspicions reared their half-formed heads at the back of his mind.

  “Yes, he did.” Fern infused her voice with mild boredom although her stomach clenched.

  “What happened?”

  “We went to a pub somewhere. It was all right really. I didn’t think they’d have any decent restaurants round here. It just goes to show.”

  Robin appeared to relax a little. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Yorkshire food—roast beef—pudding—it’s famous.”

  “The menu was French,” said Fern.

  “Javier said he’d be passing through here in a day or so,” Robin pursued. “On his way to Scotland. Said Alison had some stuff here belonging to the gallery—pictures she’d borrowed, I think it was. Anyhow, he’s going to pick them up. Thought that chap Rollo took all her things, myself.”

  “Yes,” said Fern, “he did. I helped him pack.”

  “That’s what I told him,” said Robin. “Still, he’s coming anyway.”

  Fern and Will had entered Alimond’s room the day after her death. The door handle no longer resisted them; inside, the carpet was faded and the fixtures and fittings had reverted to their former moth-eaten condition. The peacock bedspread looked tawdry and out-of-place. Lougarry padded in after them, her hackles stirring. “Well,” said Ragginbone from the hallway, “what are you going to do with all this?” His gesture indicated the books, the videotapes, the paintings, the familiar box on the bedside table.

  “I suppose we ought to burn her magic things,” Will said. He did not sound very keen. “I wonder if you could re-tune this TV set for ordinary channels?” He toyed with the remote control, producing various types of crackle.

  Fern grimaced. “Paranormal service will be resumed presently.”

  “You ought to keep the important items,” Ragginbone insisted. “The box, the gloves, some of these books. Most of it’s rubbish—Alimond had a taste for pointless gadgetry and the general bric-a-brac of ritual—still, you never know. There are a few bits and pieces which might be interesting.”

  “None of it belongs to us,” said Fern. “She must have made a will. It belongs to her heirs.”
/>   “The only proper legatee for a witch is another witch,” stated the Watcher.

  “So?” Fern was defiant.

  “One may show up. Someday.”

  In the end, whatever Ragginbone considered essential went into Fern’s wardrobe, on the top shelf at the back. She herself appropriated one of the pictures, driven by a peculiar compulsion, hiding it under her bed for safe-keeping and sandwiching it in a pile of reserve blankets. She expected to sleep badly, haunted by the concealed arcana in her room, but her slumber for several nights now had been unbroken, and her dreams beyond the reach of memory. Will had kept the television set after Rollo declared it broken.

  And now Javier was coming, as Fern had anticipated. As she had dreaded.

  “What do you think he’s after?” Will asked the following morning. Mrs. Wicklow was dusting in a ubiquitous manner while Robin attempted to conduct business by telephone; the younger Capels had wandered outside to put themselves out of earshot.

  “Whatever he can get.” Fern shrugged. She decided it was important to present at least the appearance of indifference.

  Their stroll carried them in a circuit of the wrecked barn; Will, who had picked up several fragments of what he insisted was Atlantean debris over the past few days, was carefully scanning the grass. The tarpaulined shape of the Seawitch lay round the back, well clear of the wave’s passage. As they approached it Will gave an eager exclamation and crouched down, reaching for something on the ground that seemed to be running away from him. When Fern gazed into his cupped palm she saw a tiny crab no bigger than a thumbnail, its fragile carapace tinted some translucent shade between gray and green and gold. She brushed it with her fingertip, feeling the nip of fairy claws.

  “It’s over a week,” she said. “How could it still be alive?”

  “It came from the Seawitch,” Will volunteered. “Maybe it felt at home on the hull of a sunken ship.”

  On a mutual reflex, the two of them went over to the covered prow and lifted the tarpaulin. And stared—and stared— in blank astonishment.

  For the carved figurehead which Will had so diligently cleaned was festooned with seaweed. It hung down in long streamers, glossy as patent leather, beaded with pods and clotted here and there into knots and tangles. The wood of the ship’s side was damp, not rain-damp but sea-damp, smelling of ocean, glinting with salt-crystals where it had begun to dry. New limpets clung to the planks; startled antennae waved from the seaweed-tangles; diminutive snails, gaudy as flowers, studded the hulk. Something which might have been an eel slipped from a crack and slithered away into the grass.

  Fern was the first to recover the use of speech. “This is ridiculous,” she said.

  “The flood didn’t go this way,” said Will. “And anyhow—!”

  The ship might have been hauled off the seabed just ten minutes ago.

  “There’s something strange going on,” Fern concluded rather unnecessarily. “We ought to tell Ragginbone. He might know what it’s all about.” Experience had slightly dented her confidence in the Watcher’s omniscience.

  But although Lougarry came at a call a request to be taken to Ragginbone was met with an unmoving stare. “He’s never there when you want him,” Will complained. “What’s the point of a wizard who has no power and can’t even be on hand when he’s needed?”

  “He’ll be back,” Fern said, determined to be positive. “I hope.”

  They tugged the tarpaulin back into place, like conspirators concealing the evidence of a crime. They felt irrationally guilty, hiding a secret they did not understand yet which already seemed to be their business and theirs alone—a secret which must be safeguarded from the prying eyes of the wellintentioned. They were restless all that day: their adventures had been unpleasant and often terrifying but the possibility that they might not be over filled both Capels with a nervous excitement akin to anticipation. At Will’s insistence they spent the afternoon exploring, following the route of the flood down the hillside and along the valley of the Yarrow. Will, enthusiastic to the point of obsession, searched the ground like a detective hunting for clues; Fern wandered along the riverbank and eventually sat down in the spot she had favored before, losing herself in speculation. Almost out of habit, she began to tune in to the rhythms of her environment: the timeless reverie of the trees, the exhalation of the wind, the agelong heartbeats of the deep earth. The bubbling voice of the stream was like a few snatched notes from a greater music, the distant sea-music whose echoes she had heard on the beach at the Margin of Being; and as she listened her thought was carried away and away, back to the legendary shoreline where Imagination and Reality meet, and she smelled the star-smell like distilled silver, and breathed the air that had never been breathed before, and heard the foam hissing like fire upon the sand. Where did that beach exist? she wondered. Or had it been spun out of magic for the duration of a dream and the need of a moment, bounded by the scope of her own fantasy? Was it a place in the imagination of God, or only of Man? But surely the whole world was simply a place in the imagination of the Creator—a fortuitous accident or a divine inspiration, according to your state of belief. Man himself was born of a spark in the ultimate Mind; God had burgeoned from a spark in the mind of Man. Who had first imagined Whom? Her thought spread in endless circles, like the ripples from the fall of a star into a limitless sea, until at last they touched upon the riverbank, and she was sitting under the trees in the late sunshine, and a bird was whistling somewhere nearby. Will joined her shortly after, carrying part of a huge shell in whose broken whorls the music echoed again, faint as a sigh.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” he said. “Where have you been?”

  “Somewhere,” she said vaguely. “Or nowhere. This is beautiful.”

  “It’s a pity it isn’t intact.”

  “Keep it anyway. It comes from Atlantis, after all.”

  She stood up to leave but as they turned Will’s foot seemed to be caught. He bent to free it and saw there was something twisted round his ankle, something snake-like, camouflagecolored, gleaming wet. Something that tightened like a noose on his leg and pulled him back toward the river. “Fern!” he cried. “What is it? Fern—!” She seized a fallen branch and began to beat the serpentine limb just below the coil; its grip loosened but a second came slithering out of the stream, feeling its way through the leaf-mold, and she dodged only just in time. Will yanked his leg free, gasping with fright. Fern pounded furiously at the tentacles; as they slid back into the water she leaned over the bank and looked down. The Yarrow was not deep; slanting rays of sunshine would pick out pebbles and clumps of twig on its bed. But the sun was too low now and the rising dusk filled the shallows. Fern craned forward, forgetful of danger, peering into the dimness. Her face was a yard from the water when its substance seemed to change. The riverbed opened up into an abyss deep as midnight, huge swirls of weed came billowing toward the surface and a half-seen shape sank swiftly into the murk, many-limbed, amorphous, blurring quickly into shadow. Fern drew back, grabbed Will’s arm, and dragged him away up the hillside at something close to a run.

  “What did you see?” he asked her when the slope slowed their pace.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but whatever it was, it shouldn’t have been there.”

  That night, she did dream. She was floating in that strange, out-of-body state she had experienced before, following the line of the Yarrow down the valley toward the sea. Trees leaned across her path, their branches trailing seaweed whose long ribbons rustled and stirred as she passed through. An enormous fish brushed the surface of the water: Fern thought it might be a pike but then realized it was a swordfish. As she emerged from the river-cleft above the sea her feet skimmed the wave-peaks, breaking the water without a ripple, foam-scuds blowing through her. She plunged down into a greenish twilight, her speed accelerating until she seemed to be rushing through the depths faster than thought: the great tides of ocean flowed over her. She had swift glimpses of undulating forests and su
nken mountains, stalky eyes peering from chasm and crevasse, a long defile of blue lobsters marching across the seabed, the steel-trap mouth of a cruising shark. But the visions and the dangers had barely time to leave their imprint on her mind before they were swept away, lost in the wheeling vastness of the seas. When she slowed down she found herself drifting over a coral reef. The water around her appeared to be shot with silver, until she saw she was in the midst of a huge shoal which turned on a shimmer and dived, vanishing into a dimension of blue. Beyond, she saw a garden, a surreal garden with waving clumps of spaghetti and macaroni-beds and swimming tubes with flower-heads and gaudy fish fanning like blown petals over all. A basking stone pounced on a stray shrimp before settling back into inconspicuity. A large grouper coasted alongside her, its thick purple lips drawn down in an expression of perpetual disapproval. She wondered if it could see her. But it veered away and she was gliding on toward a rocky overhang beneath which the coral had grown into shapes strange even for a submarine garden: long thin branches laid end to end; an unexpectedly regular ladder-formation of stems; a hollow sphere, sea-smoothed, gleaming through the dim water like bluish ivory. It took her a moment or two to realize what it was, and perhaps because she was dreaming she felt no horror, only curiosity. An anemone blossomed in one empty socket; minute polyps had already begun to stake out the fallen jaw. It seemed to Fern a good place to leave your remains, where the ocean could recycle them and tiny lives could batten and thrive on the discarded leftovers of one departed life. She extended an insubstantial hand to touch the brow-bone in an inexplicably necessary gesture of acknowledgment.

  And it began to change. The coral-polyps melted away and the anemone retreated into its sack, shriveling into non-existence. The skeleton re-formed, lost fragments of humerus and sternum solidifying out of nowhere, sprouting internal organs that appeared to have coalesced from the very plankton which had fed on them, finally mantling itself in a creeping growth of flesh which washed over the exposed anatomy like rising tide. Even as she withdrew her hand, he was whole. He. He was young, only a few years older than herself—Too young to die, thought Fern—naked but for the rag-ends of unrecognizable garments. He had obviously not come to rest there naturally: his clothes were weighted with stones, his eyelids with shells; strands of weed were braided in his dark hair. His face was pale in the sea-glimmer, and peaceful, and somehow familiar. (It was only later that it occurred to her he was beautiful.) And on a chain around his neck hung the key. Oddly enough she did not remember Alimond’s tape of the past, and her fleeting impression of the boat foundering, and the mermaid, and the drowning man. It was as if fate had drawn a blind in her head, screening out anything that might get in its way. Memory nagged at her, telling her there was something she had missed, but her conscious thought focused solely on that elusive familiarity, trying in vain to pin it down and put a label on it. She was sure she had never met him before and yet . . . she knew him. And gradually her frustration grew into a slow anger that he was lying there serenely dead, somewhere in the ocean waters thousands of years ago, when he should have been alive and real and Now. The emotion poured through her like wine into a clear glass, giving her color and substance, hardening and defining her. The dream shrank from her increasing reality, the grotto receding into a blue disc at the end of a lengthening tunnel until at last it was swallowed up and, fighting oblivion, she struggled through layers of darkness into awakening. When she opened her eyes she was still angry, although it took her several minutes to remember why.