The Dragon-Charmer. Jan Siegel
say. You never know what it might show you. That was the one used to hang in her room. I’ve cleaned it and polished it up many a time, but the reflection never looks right to me.’
‘What was she like?’ asked Gaynor, seizing the opportunity. ‘Alison, I mean.’
‘Out for what she could get,’ Mrs Wicklow stated. ‘This house is full of old things – antiques and stuff that the Captain brought back from his travels. Her eyes had a sort of glistening look when she saw them. Greedy. Wouldn’t have surprised me if she were mixed up with real criminals. She didn’t like anyone in t’bedroom when she was away. We didn’t have no key then but she did something to the doorknob – something with electricity. Funny, that.’ She turned towards the stairs. ‘You come down now and have a bite of lunch. You young girls, you’re all too thin. You worry too much about your figures.’
Gaynor followed her obediently. ‘I gather Alison drowned,’ she continued cautiously. ‘In some kind of freak flood?’
‘That’s what they say,’ said Mrs Wicklow. ‘Must have been an underground spring, though I never heard of one round here. Swept most of the barn away, it did; they pulled down t’rest. She’d had the builders in there, “doing it up” she said. Happen they tapped into something.’
‘I didn’t know there was a barn,’ said Gaynor.
‘The Captain used to keep some of his stuff in there. Rubbish mostly, if you ask me. He’d got half a boat he’d picked up somewhere, part of a wreck he said, with a woman on the front baring her all. Fern insisted they give it to a museum. Will wanted to keep it, but it wasn’t healthy for a young man. There’s trouble enough him messing around with Art.’
‘Alison worked for an art gallery, didn’t she?’ Gaynor persisted, resisting diversion.
‘Aye,’ said the housekeeper. ‘She and that man with the white hair. I didn’t like him at all, for all his greasy manners. Oily as a tinned sardine, he was. They never found out what happened to him.’
‘What do you mean?’ Gaynor had never heard of a man with white hair.
‘Done a bunk, so they said. Left his car here, too: a flash white car to match the hair. Happen that’s why he bought it: he was the type. A proper mystery, that was. He walked into t’drawing room and never walked out. Mind, that was the same time Fern got lost, so we thought she might have gone with him, though not willing, I was sure of that. They were bad days for all of us, and bad to remember, but she came back all right. They said she’d been sick, some fancy name they gave it, one of these newfangled things you hear about on t’telly. She was well enough after, but she wouldn’t talk about it.’
‘I know,’ said Gaynor as they entered the kitchen. ‘But – the man … ?’
‘I reckon he was a crook, like his Alison. They were in it together, whatever it was. Anyhow, that fancy car of his sat here and sat here till the police came and towed it away. He didn’t come back at all.’ She concluded, with a certain grim satisfaction: ‘And good riddance to both of ’em.’
Gaynor digested this with the sandwich lunch Mrs Wicklow insisted on feeding her, though she wasn’t really hungry. Afterwards, Fern and Will still being absent, she returned to her room. A flick through the newspaper had reminded her there was a programme she wanted to catch on the television, an afternoon repeat of a documentary which she thought might be of professional interest. She told herself it was stupid to be nervous about switching the set on. She had had a nightmare the previous day, that was all, probably suggested by an item on the news – one of those vivid, surreal spasms of dreaming that can invade a shallow sleep. (Nightmares and dreams, pervading the dark, spilling over into reality …) All the same, she was secretly relieved when she pressed the button on the remote and a normal picture appeared, flat and off-colour. Her programme was already under way, the camera following a conscientiously enthusiastic presenter round a succession of museums and private collections. Presently, Gaynor forgot her qualms, becoming totally absorbed in her subject. The camera panned over early printing on cracked paper, incunabula and scrolls, wooden plaques and broken sections of stone tablets. ‘Here we are in the little-known Museum of Ancient Writings,’ announced the presenter, ‘hidden away in a back street in York …’ Near enough, thought Gaynor. I ought to pay it a visit. The curator, a dingy young man of thirty-odd who appeared to have been prematurely aged by the manuscripts which surrounded him, talked in a lengthy drone which Gaynor tuned out, wishing instead that the image would focus longer and more closely on some of the documents. ‘A Historie of Dragonf,’ she read on the cover of a medieval book gloriously inlaid with serpentine monsters in gold leaf. Invisible hands turned the pages, but too swiftly for her to catch more than a line here and there. ‘A grate dragon, grater than anye other living beaste … and the Knyghte cast his speare at yt, but yt was not slaine … Its mouthe opened, and the shafte was consumed with fire, but yt swallowed the hedde, which was … stone yet not stone, a thyng of grate power and magicke …’ The picture changed, returning to the presenter, now interviewing a much older man who was evidently on the board in some significant capacity. A subtitle indicated that this was Dr Jerrold Laye, a university lecturer specialising in this field. ‘Not a name I know,’ Gaynor said aloud, and for a fraction of a second his hooked profile froze, almost as if he had overheard.
Gaynor felt suddenly very cold. The camera veered from profile to full face, closing in until Dr Laye’s physiognomy filled the whole screen. She was staring at him as if hypnotised, unable to avert her gaze without a degree of effort that seemed all but impossible. She saw a high, sloping brow from which the hair was receding in a double arch, the nose of a Roman emperor, the flinty jawline of a fanatic. Pronounced cheekbones pulled his skin into taut, sharp creases which had little to do with smiling. What hair he still possessed was grey; so was his complexion, grey as paste, though whether this was the result of poor colour quality on the television or the after-effect of disease she could not guess. His eyebrows formed another double arch, shaggy with drooping hairs, beneath which his eyes lurked, half hidden by membranous lids of a curiously scaly appearance, like the extra eyelid possessed by certain reptiles. As the camera-angle altered so did the direction of his regard, until he seemed to be looking not at the interviewer but the viewer, staring straight out of the screen at Gaynor herself. His eyes were pale blue, and cold as a cleft in an ice-floe. He can’t really see me, she told herself. He’s just looking into the lens: that’s all it is. He can’t see me. The interview wound down; the voice of the presenter faded out. Dr Laye extended his hand – a large, narrow hand, the fingers elongated beyond elegance, supple beyond nature. He was reaching towards her, and towards her … out of the picture, into the room. The image of his head and shoulders remained flat but the section of arm emerging from it was three-dimensional, and it seemed to be pulling the screen as if it were made of some elastic substance, distorting it. Gaynor did not move. Shock, horror, disbelief petrified every muscle. If it touches me, she thought, I’ll faint …
But it did not touch her. The index finger curled like a scorpion’s tail in a gesture of beckoning, at once sinister and horribly suggestive. She could see the nail in great detail, an old man’s nail like a sliver of horn with a thin rind of yellow along the outer edge and a purplish darkening above the cuticle. The skin was definitely grey, the colour of ash, though the tint of normal flesh showed in the creases and in a glimpse of the palm. On the screen, something that might have been intended for a smile stretched Dr Laye’s mouth.
‘I look forward to meeting you,’ he said.
The hand withdrew, the bent fingertip wriggling slowly to emphasise its meaning. Then the flat image swallowed it, and it was back in its former place on Dr Laye’s lap, and he turned again to the presenter, who appeared to have noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Her voice gradually resumed its earlier flow, as if someone were gently turning up the volume. Gaynor switched off, feeling actually sick from the release of tension. When she was able she went over and touched the blank screen, but it felt solid and inflexible. She ran downstairs to find Mrs Wicklow, not to tell her what had happened – how could she do that? – but for the reassurance of her company.
But she had to tell someone.
Will