The Dragon Charmer

by Jan Siegel

  In her room on the floor below, Fern, too, had heard the owl. Its eerie call drew her back from that fatal world on the other side of sleep, the world that was always waiting for her when she let go of mind and memory, leaving her spirit to roam where it would. In London she worked too hard to think and slept too deeply to dream, filling the intervals of her leisure with a busy social life and the thousand distractions of the metropolis; but here on the edge of the moor there was no job, few distractions, and something in her stirred that would not be suppressed. It was here that it had all started, nearly twelve years ago. Sleep was the gateway, dream the key. She remembered a stair, a stair in a picture, and climbing the stair as it wound its way from Nowhere into Somewhere, and the tiny bright vista far ahead of a city where even the dust was golden. And then it was too late, and she was ensnared in the dream, and she could smell the heat and taste the dust, and the beat of her heart was the boom of the temple drums and the roar of the waves on the shore. “I must go back!” she cried out, trapped and desperate, but there was only one way back and her guide would not come. Never again. She had forfeited his affection, for he was of those who love jealously and will not share. Nevermore the cool smoothness of his cloud-patterned flank, nevermore the deadly luster of his horn. She ran along the empty sands looking for the sea, and then the beach turned from gold to silver and the stars crisped into foam about her feet, and she was a creature with no name to bind her and no flesh to weigh her down, the spirit that breathes in every creation and at the nucleus of all being. An emotion flowed into her that was as vivid as excitement and as deep as peace. She wanted to hold on to that moment forever, but there was a voice calling, calling her without words, dragging her back into her body and her bed, until at last she knew she was lying in the dark, and the owl’s hoot was a cry of loneliness and pain for all that she had lost.

  An hour or so later she got up, took two aspirin (she would not use sleeping pills), tried to read for a while. It was a long, long time before exhaustion mastered her, and she slipped into oblivion.

  Will slumbered undisturbed, accustomed to the nocturnal small talk of his nonhuman neighbors. When the bagpipes began, he merely rolled over, smiling in his sleep.

  II

  The smoke thickens, pouring upward into a cloud that hangs above the fire. The cloud expands in erratic spurts and billows, stretching its wings to right and left, arching against the cave roof as it seeks a way of escape. But the flue is closed and it can only hover beneath the vaulted roots, trapped here until we choose to release it. More and more vapor is drawn into its heart till the heaviness of it seems to crush any remaining air from the chamber. I see flecks of light shifting in its depths, whorls of darkness spinning into a maelstrom, throwing out brief sparks of noise: a rapid chittering, an unfinished snarl, a bass growl that shrills into a cackle. Then both sound and light are sucked inward and swallowed, and the smoke opens out into a picture.

  The moon, thin and curved as a bull’s horn, caught on a hook of cloud. It is suspended in a splinter of midnight sky between mountain ranges higher than any mountains of earth, and its dead-white glow streams down into a valley so deep and narrow that neither moon nor sun should penetrate there. The valley is dry, so dry that I can taste its aridity, shriveling my tongue. Everything is in monochrome. I see lakes of some opaque liquid that is not water, shrunken in their stony depressions; luminous steams shimmer on the air above them. At the bottom of the valley there is a garden of petrified vegetation: brittle knots of stems, the black filigree of leaf skeletons, writhen stumps of tree and shrub. A breath of wind would blow it all to powder, but no wind comes there. Beyond looms the temple: the moon reaches in through the broken roof with probing rays, touching the face of an idol whose nose has long eroded and whose lip crumbles. The hearth at its feet is empty even of ash.

  “He has gone,” says Sysselore, and her voice croaks on a whisper. “He has gone at last.”

  “He will be back.” I know him too well, the god in the dark. “The others may fade or fall into slumber, but he is always persistent. He believes that even Time is on his side. He will be back.”

  For a moment the moonlight falters, then the shadow of the mountains sweeps across the valley, and in that shadow the shapes of things are changed, and there is a rustle among the vanished leaves, and a stirring like an infinitesimal breeze in that place where no breeze ever blew.

  He will be back.

  And then the darkness turns to smoke, and the picture is lost.

  There are changing landscapes, cities and villages, hovels, temples, castles. Ruins sprout new walls, which crumble and fall in their turn. Weeds grow over all. Mountains melt into plains, hills heave upward like waves. The picture falters, pausing on a lonely needle of rock jutting into a flawless sky. For a moment I hear music, a silvery tinkling without a tune, as if the wind is thrumming on forgotten harp strings. I inhale a whiff of air that is both cold and thin: we must be very high up. There are voices chanting, though I see no one. And then I realize that the needle of rock is a tower, a tower that seems to have grown from the jawbone of the mountain like a tooth, and below it gray walls interface with the cliff, and window slots open as chinks in the stone, and the rumor of the liturgy carries from within. The chant grows louder, but the wind takes it and bears it away, and the scene shivers into other peaks, other skies. Rain sweeps over a grim northern castle and pockmarks the lake below. The shell of the building is old but inside everything is new: carpets lap the floors, flames dance around logs that are never consumed, heat glazes the windowpanes. Briefly I glimpse a small figure slipping through a postern, too small to be human. It moves with a swift limping gait, like a spider with a leg too few. There is a bundle on its back and something that might be a spear over one shoulder. The spear is far too long in the shaft and too heavy for its carrier, yet the pygmy manages without difficulty. It hurries down the path by the lake and vanishes into the rain. A man walking his dog along the shore passes by without seeing it.

  “A goblin!” Sysselore is contemptuous. “What do we want with such dross? The spell is wandering; we do not need this trivia.” She moves to extinguish the fire, hesitating, awaiting my word. She knows my temper too well to act alone.

  I nod. “It is enough. For now.”

  We open the flue and the smoke streams out, seeking to coil around the Tree and make its way up to the clouds, but the wind cheats it and it disperses and is gone. This is not the season of the heads, this is the season of nesting birds. The smallest build their nests in the lower branches: the insect pickers, the nibblers of worms and stealers of crumbs. Higher up there are the lesser predators that prey on mice and lizards and their weaker neighbors. Close to the great trunk woodpeckers drill, tree creepers creep, tiny throats, insatiable as the abyss, gape in every hollow. But in the topmost boughs, so they say, live the giant raptors, eagles larger than a man, featherless fliers from the dawn of history, and other creatures, botched misfits of the avian kingdom, which are not birds at all. So they say. Yet who has ever climbed up to look? The Tree is unassailable, immeasurable. It keeps its secrets. It may be taller than a whole mountain range, piercing the cloud canopy, puncturing the very roof of the cosmos: I do not wish to find out. There are ideas too large for the mind to accept, spaces too wide to contemplate. I know when to leave alone. I found an egg on the ground once, dislodged from somewhere far above: the half shell that remained intact was as big as a skull. The thing that lay beside it was naked, with clawlike wings and taloned feet and the head of a human fetus. I did not touch it. That night, I heard the pig rooting there, and when I looked again it was gone.

  The birds make a lot of noise when they are nesting: they scold, and squabble, and screech. I prefer the murmuring of the heads. It is a gentler sound.

  The next day was spent mostly on wedding preparations. The girls having brought the Dress with them, Mrs. Wicklow exercised her royal prerogative and took charge of it, relegating Trisha to the sidelines, personally pressi
ng it into creaseless perfection and arraying it in state in one of the spare bedrooms. Will had unearthed a rather decrepit tailor’s dummy from the attic, formerly the property of a long-deceased Miss Capel, and they hung the Dress on it, arranging the train in a classic swirl on the carpet, tweaking the empty sleeves into place. He even stuck a knitting needle in the vacancy of the neck and suspended the veil from its point, draping it in misty folds that fell almost to the floor. Fern found something oddly disquieting in that faceless, limbless shell of a bride; she even wondered if Will was trying to make a subtle point, but he was so helpful, so pleased with his and Mrs. Wicklow’s handiwork, that she was forced to acquit him of deviousness. It was left to Gaynor to offer comment. “It looks very beautiful,” she said. “It’ll walk down the aisle all by itself.”

  “Up the aisle,” said Fern. “It’s up.”

  They met the vicar, Gus Dinsdale, in the church that afternoon and retired to the vicarage for tea. Gus in his forties looked very much as he had in his thirties, save that his hair was receding out of existence and his somewhat boyish expression had been vividly caricatured by usage and time. On learning that Gaynor’s work was researching and restoring old books and manuscripts, he begged to show her some of his acquisitions, and when Will and Fern left he took her into his study. Gaynor duly admired the books, but her mind was elsewhere. She hovered on the verge of asking questions but drew back, afraid of appearing vulgarly inquisitive, a busybody prying into the affairs of her friend. And then, on their return to the drawing room, chance offered her an opening. “You have lovely hair, dear,” Gus’s wife Maggie remarked. “I haven’t seen hair that long since Alison—and I was never sure hers was natural. Of course, I don’t think they had extensions in those days, but—”

  “Alison?” Gaynor nearly jumped. “Will mentioned her. So did Fern. Who was she?”

  “She was a friend of Robin’s,” Maggie replied. “She stayed at Dale House for a while, more than a decade ago now. We didn’t like her very much.”

  “You didn’t like her,” Gus corrected, smiling faintly. “She was a very glamorous young woman. Not all that young really, and not at all beautiful, but … well, she had It. As they say.”

  “She looked like a succubus,” Maggie said.

  “You’ve never seen a succubus.”

  “Maybe not,” Maggie retorted with spirit, “but I’d know one if I did. It would look like Alison.”

  “My wife is prejudiced,” Gus said. “Alison wasn’t the kind of woman to be popular with her own sex. Alison Redmond, that was her full name. Still, we shouldn’t speak harshly of her. Her death was a terrible tragedy. Fern was completely overset by it.”

  “She died?”

  “Didn’t you know?” Gus sighed. “She drowned. Some kind of freak flood, but no one ever really knew how it happened. Fern was saved, caught on a tree, but Alison was swept away. They found her in the river. Dreadful business. I’ve always wondered” He broke off, shaking his head as if to disperse an invisible cobweb. Gaynor regarded him expectantly.

  “There was that story she told us,” said Maggie. “I know it was nonsense, but it’s not as if she was a habitual liar. She must have been suffering from some kind of post-traumatic shock. That’s what the doctors said about her illness later on, wasn’t it?” She turned to Gaynor. “But you’re her best friend; you must know more about that than we do.”

  What illness? The query leapt to Gaynor’s lips, but she suppressed it. Instead she said—with a grimace at her conscience for the half-truth—“Fern doesn’t discuss it much.”

  “Oh dear.” Now it was Maggie’s turn to sigh. “That isn’t good, is it? You’re supposed to talk through your problems: it’s essential therapy.”

  “That’s the theory, anyway,” said Gus. “I’m not entirely convinced by it. Not in this case, anyway. There was one thing that really bothered me about that explanation of Fern’s.”

  “What was that?” asked Maggie.

  “Nobody ever came up with a better one.”

  Gaynor walked back to Dale House very slowly, lost in a whirl of thought. She had refrained from asking further questions, reluctant to betray the extent of her ignorance and still wary of showing excessive curiosity. Fern had never spoken of any illness, and although there was no particular reason why she should have done, the omission, coupled with her distaste for Yorkshire, was beginning to take on an unexplained significance. If this were a Gothic novel, Gaynor reflected fancifully, say, a Daphne du Maurier, Fern would probably have murdered Alison Redmond. But that’s ridiculous. Fern’s a very moral person, she’s totally against capital punishment—and anyway, how could you arrange a freak flood? It ought to be impossible in an area like this, even for Nature. I have to ask her about it. She’s my best friend. I should be able to ask her anything…

  But somehow when she reached the house and found Fern in the kitchen preparing supper, hindered rather than helped by Mrs. Wicklow’s assertion of culinary bylaws, Gaynor couldn’t. She decided it was not the right moment. Will took her into the studio drawing room, retrieved a bottle of wine from the same shelf as the paint thinner, and poured some into a couple of bleared glasses. Bravely Gaynor drank. “Are you going to show me your paintings?” she enquired.

  “You won’t understand them,” he warned her. “Which is a euphemism for ‘you won’t like them.’”

  “Let me see,” said Gaynor.

  In fact, he was right. They were complex compositions in various styles: superficial abstractions where a subliminal image lurked just beyond the borders of realization, or representational scenes—landscapes and figures—distorted into abstract concepts. A darkness permeated them, part menace, part fantasy. There were occasional excursions into sensuality—a half-formed nude, a flower molded into lips, kissing or sucking—but overall there was nothing she could connect with the little she knew or guessed of Will. The execution was inconsistent: some had a smooth finish almost equal to the gloss of airbrushing, others showed caked oils and the scrapings of a knife. Evidently the artist was still at the experimental stage. She found them fascinating, vaguely horrible, slightly immature. “I don’t like them,” she admitted, “in the sense that they’re uncomfortable, disturbing: I couldn’t live with them. They’d give me nightmares. And I don’t understand them because they don’t seem to me to come from you. Unless you have a dark side—a very dark side—that you never let anyone see.”

  “All my sides are light,” Will said.

  Gaynor was still concentrating on the pictures. “You’ve got something, though,” she said. “I’m no judge, but … you’ve definitely got something. I just hope it isn’t contagious.”

  As they talked she considered asking him some of the questions that were pent up inside her head, but she dithered too long, torn between a doubt and a doubt, and they were interrupted.

  Later, after an unsuccessful session with the plastic shower attachment jammed onto the bath taps, Gaynor retired to her room, shivering in a towel, and switched on both bars of the electric fire and the television. She was not particularly addicted to the small screen, but she had not seen a daily paper, and at twenty past six she hoped for some news and a weather report. There seemed to be only the four main channels on offer, with reception that varied from poor to unwatchable. The best picture was on BBC 1. She left it on, paying only cursory attention to the final news items, while trying to warm her body lotion in front of the fire before applying it to the gooseflesh of her legs. Afterward, she could never recall exactly what happened, or at which precise moment the picture changed. There came a point when she noticed the bad reception had ceased. She found herself staring at an image that looked no longer flat but three-dimensional, as real as a view through a window—but a window without glass. Her gaze was caught and held as if she were mesmerized; she could not look away. She saw a valley of rock opening out between immeasurable cliffs, many-colored lakes or pools, blue and emerald and blood-scarlet, and a garden mazy with shadows where she
could hear a faint drumming like dancing feet and the sound of eerie piping, though she could see no one. She did not know when she began to be afraid. The fear was like fear in a dream, huge and illogical, aggravated by every meaningless detail. A fat yellow moth flew out of the picture and looped the room, pursued by a gleaming dragonfly. For an instant, impossibly, she thought its head was that of an actual dragon, snapping jaws bristling with miniature teeth, but the chase had passed too swiftly for her to be sure, vanishing back into the garden. Then there were pillars, stone pillars so old that they exuded ancientry like an odor. They huddled together in a circle, and spiky tree shadows twitched to and fro across their gray trunks. But as she drew nearer they appeared to swell and grow, opening out until they ringed a great space, and she could see thread-fine scratchings on them like the graffiti of spiders, and sunlight slanting in between. The shadows fled from her path as she passed through the entrance and into the circle, beneath the skeleton of a dome whose curving ribs segmented a fiery sky. “The light only falls here at sunset,” said a voice that seemed to be inside her head. “Wait for the dark. Then we will make our own light out of darkness, and by that darklight you will see another world. We do not need the sun.” No! she thought, resisting she knew not what. She had forgotten it was only a picture on television; she was inside the image, a part of it, and the idol leaned over her, gigantesque and terrible, its head almost featureless against the yellow sky. It was a statue, just a statue, yet in a minute, she knew, she would see it move. There would be a flexing of stiffened fingers, a stretching of rigid lips. Suddenly she saw the eye cracks, slowly widening, filled with a glimmer that was not the sun. She screamed … and screamed…

  Somehow, she must have pressed the remote control. She was in the bedroom, shivering by the inadequate fire, and the television was blank and dark. Will and Fern could be heard running up the stairs toward her, with Mrs. Wicklow faint but pursuing. Will put his arms around her, which was embarrassing since she was losing her towel; Fern scanned her surroundings with unexpected intensity. “I had a nightmare,” Gaynor said, fishing for explanations. “I must have dropped off, just sitting here. Maybe it was something on the news. Or those bizarre pictures of yours,” she added, glancing up at Will.