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Outside, night lies beneath the Tree. I hear the whistling calls of nocturnal birds, the death-squeal of a tiny rodent. In the smoke, a new face emerges, growing into darkness. It belongs to no known race of men, yet it is mortal – sculpted in ebony, its bone structure refined to a point somewhere the other side of beauty, emphasised with little hollowings and sudden lines, its hair of a black so deep it is green, its eyes like blue diamonds. For all its delicacy, it is obviously, ruthlessly masculine. It stares straight at me out of the picture, almost as if the observer has somehow become the observed, and he watches us in our turn. For the first time that I can remember I speak the word to obliterate it, though normally I leave the pictures to fade and alter of their own accord. The face dwindles until only a smile remains, dimming into vapour.
‘He saw us,’ says my coven-sister.
‘Illusion. A trick of the smoke. You sound afraid. Are you afraid of smoke, of a picture?’
As our concentration wavers, the billows thin and spread. I spit at the fire with a curse-word, a power-word to recall the magic, sucking the fumes back into the core of the cloud. The nucleus darkens: for a moment the same image seems to hover there, the face or its shadow, but it is gone before it can come into focus. A succession of tableaux follow, unclear or unfinished, nothing distinguishable. At the last we return to the grey house, and the goblin climbing in through an open window. In the room beyond a boy somewhere in his teens is reading a book, one leg hooked over the arm of his chair. His hair shows more fair than dark; there are sun-freckles on his nose. When he looks up his gaze is clear and much too candid – the candour of the naturally devious, who know how to exploit their own youth. He stares directly at the intruder, interested and undisturbed. He can see the goblin. He has no Gift, no aura of power. But he can see it.
He says: ‘I suppose you’ve come about the vacancy.’
The goblin halts abruptly, half way over the sill. Unnerved.
‘The vacancy,’ the boy reiterates. ‘For a house-goblin. You are a house-goblin, aren’t you?’
‘Ye see me, then.’ The goblin has an accent too ancient to identify, perhaps a forgotten brogue spoken by tribes long extinct. His voice sounds rusty, as if it has not been used for many centuries.
‘I was looking,’ the boy says matter-of-factly. ‘When you look, you see. Incidentally, you really shouldn’t come in uninvited. It isn’t allowed.’
‘The hoose wants a boggan, or so I hairrd. I came.’
‘Where from?’
‘Ye ask a wheen o’ questions.’
‘It’s my hoose,’ says the boy. ‘I’m entitled.’
‘It was another put out the word.’
‘He’s a friend of mine: he was helping me out. I’m the one who has to invite you in.’
‘Folks hae changed since I was last in the worrld,’ says the goblin, his tufted brows twitching restlessly from shock to frown. ‘In the auld days, e’en the Lairrd couldna see me unless I wisht it. The castle was a guid place then. But the Lairrds are all gone and the last of his kin is a spineless vratch who sauld his hame for a handful o’ siller. And now they are putting in baths – baths! – and the pipes are a-hissing and a-gurgling all the time, and there’s heat without fires, and fires without heat, and clacking picture-boxes, and invisible bells skirling, and things that gae bleep in the nicht. It’s nae place for a goblin any more.’
‘We have only the one bathroom,’ says the boy, by way of encouragement.
‘Guid. It isna healthy, all these baths. Dirt keeps you warrm.’
‘Seals the pores,’ nods the boy. ‘I’m afraid we do have a telephone, and two television sets, but one’s broken, and the microwave goes bleep in the night if we need to heat something up, but that’s all.’
The goblin grunts, though what the grunt imports is unclear. ‘Are ye alone here?’
‘Of course not. There’s my father and my sister and Abby – Dad’s girlfriend. We live in London but we use this place for weekends and holidays. And Mrs Wicklow the housekeeper who comes in most days and Lucy from the village doing the actual housework and Gus – the vicar – who keeps an eye on things when we’re not here. Oh, and there’s a dog – a sort of dog – who’s around now and then. She won’t bother you – if she likes you.’
‘What sort of dog wid that be?’ asks the goblin. ‘One o’ thae small pet dogs that canna barrk above a yap or chase a rabbit but sits on a lady’s knee all day waiting tae be fed?’
‘Oh no,’ says the boy. ‘She’s not a lapdog or a pet. She’s her own mistress. You’ll see.’
‘I hairrd,’ says the goblin, after a pause, ‘ye’d had Trouble here, not sae long ago.’
‘Yes.’
‘And mayhap it was the kind of Trouble that might open your eyes to things ordinary folk are nae meant to see?’
‘Mayhap.’ The boy’s candour has glazed over; his expression is effortlessly blank.
‘Sae what came to the hoose-boggan was here afore me?’
‘How did you know there was one?’ Genuine surprise breaks through his impassivity.
‘Ye can smell it. What came tae yon?’
‘Trouble,’ says the boy. ‘He was the timid sort, too frightened to fight back. In a way, his fear killed him.’
‘Aye, weel,’ says the goblin, ‘fear is deadlier than knife-wound or spear-wound, and I hae taken both. It’s been long awhile since I kent Trouble. Do ye expect more?’
‘It’s possible,’ the boy replies. ‘Nothing is ever really over, is it?’
‘True worrds. I wouldnae be averse to meeting Trouble again. Belike I’ve been missing him. Are ye going tae invite me in?’
The boy allows a pause, for concentration or effect. ‘All right. You may come in.’
The goblin springs down from the window-sill, hefting his antique spear with the bundle tied to the shaft.
‘By the way,’ says the boy, ‘what’s your name?’
‘Bradachin.’
‘Bradachin.’ He struggles to imitate the pronunciation. ‘Mine’s Will. Oh, and… one more thing.’
‘What thing is that?’
‘A warning. My sister. She’s at university now and she doesn’t come here very much, but when she does, stay out of her way. She’s being a little difficult at the moment.’
‘Will she see me?’ the goblin enquires.
‘I expect so,’ says the boy.
The goblin moves towards the door with his uneven stride, vanishing as he reaches the panels. The boy stares after him for a few minutes, his young face, with no betraying lines, no well-trodden imprint of habitual expressions, as inscrutable as an unwritten page. Then he and the room recedes, and there is only the smoke.
* * *
The images wax and wane like dreams, crystallising into glimpses of solidity, then merging, melting, lost in a drift of vapour. Sometimes it seems as if it is the cave that drifts, its hollows and shadows vacillating in the penumbra of existence, while at its heart the smoke-visions focus all the available reality, like a bright eye on the world. We too are as shadows, Sysselore and I, watching the light, hungering for it. But I have more substance than any shadow – I wrap myself in darkness as in a cocoon, preserving my strength while my power slumbers. This bloated body is a larval stage in which my future Self is nourished and grows, ready to hatch when the hour is ripe – a new Morgus, radiant with youth revived, potent with ancientry. It is a nature spell, old as evolution: I learned it from a maggot. You can learn much from those who batten on decay. It is their kind who will inherit the earth.
Pictures deceive. The smoke-screen opens like a crack in the wall of Being, and through it you may see immeasurable horizons, and unnavigable seas, you may breathe the perfume of forgotten gardens, taste the rains on their passage to the thirsty plain – but the true power is here in the dark. With me. I am the dark, I am the heartbeat of the night. The spellfire may show you things far away, but I am here, and for now, Here is all there is.
The dark is always waiting. Behind the light, beyond reality, behind the visions in the smoke. Look now, look at the egg. It glows with cold, its white shell sheened like clouded ice, the velvet that wraps it crackling with frost. It is secreted in a casket of ebony bound with iron, but the metal is chilled into brittleness, the lock snaps even as the lid is shut, tampering fingers are frozen into a blue numbness. It has lain there for many centuries, a sacred charge on its caretakers, or so they believe, having no knowledge of what it is they cherish, or for Whom. The image returns often, its mystery still unrevealed. Maybe it is a symbol: the deepest, truest magic frequently manifests itself through symbols. Maybe it is just what it appears to be. An egg. If so, then we at least can guess what lies curled within, unhatching, sleeping the bottomless sleep of a seed in midwinter. The men who watch over it have gentle hands and slender, otherworldly features. They do not suspect the germ of darkness that incubates within the egg.
The picture shifts, pulling back, showing us for the first time that the casket stands on an altar of stone, and the altar is in a circular chamber, and the chamber … the chamber is at the top of a lonely tower, jutting like a tooth into the blue mountain air. A few pieces of the pattern fall into place. Others drift, disembodied, like jigsaw-fragments from the wrong puzzle.
‘Why there?’ asks Sysselore, forever scathing. ‘A monastery, I suppose, remote, almost inaccessible – but almost is never enough. Why not hide it outside the world?’
‘Magic finds out magic. Who would look for such an object in the hands of Men? It has been safe in ignorant hands, hidden in plain view, one of a thousand holy relics guarded by monks in a thousand mountain retreats. They will have cradled it in their own legends, endowed it with a dozen meanings. No one has ever sought for it there.’
Somewhere in the tower a bell is struck, drowning out the rumour of the wind in the chimes and the rise and fall of the chant. The swelling of its single note fills the cave; the walls seemed to shake; flakes of earth drop from above. The tower trembles in its sky-gulf. Or perhaps it is the smoke that trembles, unbalancing the picture. We see the egg again, but it is no longer cold. Heat pulses from within, turning the thick shell to translucency. Bent over it is a dark face among the golden ones, dark as the wood of the casket, a face subtle as poison, sharp as a blade. The gaze is lowered: it does not seek for concealed watchers now. Its whole attention is focused on the egg. The throb of the bell is a long time dying. And then comes another sound, a tiny crack, echoless, all but inaudible, yet the aftershock of that minute noise makes the very floor vibrate. The shell fractures, seamed by countless threadlines which glow with a red light as if from a fire in its heart. The ruby glow touches the dark face leaning closer, ever closer, fascinated, eager …
The egg hatches.
‘What now?’ whispers Sysselore, and the quiet in her voice is almost that of awe. ‘Where will it go? They cannot call it holy now, and … it won’t stay hidden. Not long.’
‘We shall see.’
The smoke thins, swirls, re-forms, showing us great events and small. The moor unrolls like a carpet beneath a sky tumbling with clouds. The valley opens, the hillside plunges, the wind rushes in from the sea. And there is the house, lifting blind windows to the rain. Behind closed curtains there is firelight and lamplight, the murmur of conversation, the smell of roasting meat uncoiling from the oven. The sunless evening blurs gradually into night. When dinner is long over, feet climb the stairs to bed. A glass tumbler stands alone on a sideboard in the kitchen, containing a small measure of golden liquid. Not discarded or forgotten but placed there deliberately. A gesture. Presently, the house-goblin materialises, sitting on the end of the table. He samples the leftover roast and drains the tumbler, declaiming an incomprehensible toast, probably to the red-bearded Laird who swatted his foes with a tree-trunk. Then he roams through the house, patrolling his domain.
In a bedroom on the first floor a girl is seated in front of an antique dressing-table, studying herself in the mirror. There is no vanity in her contemplation: her expression is grave and unusually detached. She stares at her reflection, you feel, simply because it is there. Yet she might be termed beautiful, if mere youth is beauty, clarity of skin and eye, elfin slenderness of body. I was beautiful once, I and Morgun, my twin, but beauty alters with time, as all else, and in a different age Helen wears a different face. So maybe she is beautiful, this pale, dispassionate girl, with her gravity and her small breasts. Fashion is a poor judge of such things. The adjacent lamp puts a gloss on her short hair which it may not merit and shades the moulding of invisible bones. But as we look closer I see something in her face, or in its reflection, something beneath the unblemished exterior. Imperceptible. Almost familiar. A secret too well hidden, a scar too perfectly healed. It shows in a certain fragility, a certain strength, a trace element of pain. But the image begins to withdraw from her, and the flicker of not-quite-recognition is gone.
The goblin, too, is watching her, just inside the door, his crouched body only a shadow in the corner to the discerning eye. Even the mirror cannot see him. She is still staring at her reflection but now the direction of her gaze switches to a point beyond her shoulder. Her eyes widen; shock or fury expels the hint of colour from her cheek. To us, the glass is empty, but she sees the intruder. She seeshim in the mirror. ‘Get out!’ She rounds on him, screaming like a virago. ‘Toad! Contemptible little sneak! Creeping in here, spying on me – how dare you! How dare you! Get out, do you hear? If I see even your shadow again, I’ll – I’ll squeeze you to pulp – I’ll blast you into Limbo – I’ll blow your atoms to the four winds! Don’t you ever – ever! – come near me again!’ The unleashing of power is sudden and terrifying: her hair crackles with it, the air thickens around her outstretched fingers. The goblin vanishes in a flash of startled horror. She is on her feet now but her rage ebbs as rapidly as it came, and she casts herself face down on the bed, clutching the pillow, sobbing briefly and violently. When the storm is over she lifts her head; she is red-eyed and tearless, as if tears were a rain that would not come. Her expression reverts to a wary stillness: her gaze roves round the room. ‘It’s gone,’ she murmurs, ‘I know it’s gone, but … there’s someone … somewhere … Watching me.’
‘She feels us,’ says Sysselore. ‘The power. Did you see the power in her…?’
‘Hush.’
The picture revolves cautiously as I lean forward, close to the smoke; the fire-draught burns my face. I am peering out of the mirror, into the room, absorbing every detail, filling my mind with the girl. This girl. The one I have waited for.
Slowly she turns, drawn back to the mirror, staring beyond the reflections. Our eyes meet. For the second time, the watcher becomes the watched. But this is no threat, only reconnaissance. A greeting. In the mirror, she sees me smile.
She snatches something – a hairbrush? – and hurls it at the glass, which shatters. The smoke turns all to silver splinters, spinning, falling, fading. In the gloom after the fire dies, Sysselore and I nurse our exultation.
She is the one. At last.
I will have her.
Now we search the smoke for her, skimming other visions, bending our dual will to a single task. But the fire-magic is wayward and unpredictable: it may sometimes be guided but it cannot be forced. The images unravel before us in a jumble, distorted by our pressure, quick-changing, wavering, breaking up. Irrelevancies intrude, a cavalcade of monsters from the long-lost past, mermaid, unicorn, Sea Serpent, interspersed with glimpses which might, or might not, be more significant: the hatchling perching on a dark, long-fingered hand, a solitary flower opening suddenly in a withered garden like the unlidding of a watching eye. Time here has no meaning, but in the world beyond Time passes, years maybe, ere we see her again. And the vision, when it comes, takes us off guard, a broad vista unwinding slowly in an interlude of distraction, a road that meanders with the contours of the land, white puffball clouds trailing in the wake of a spring breeze. A horseless car is travelling along the road: the sunlight winks off its steel-green coachwork. The roof is folded back to leave the top open; music emanates from a mechanical device within, not the raucous drumbeat of the rabble but a music of deep notes and mellow harmonies, flowing like the hills. The girl is driving the car. She looks different, older, her small-boned face hollowed into shape, tapering, purity giving way to definition, a slight pixie-look tempered by the familiar gravitas. More than ever, it is a face of secrets. Her hair is cut in a straight line across her brow and on level with her jaw. As the car accelerates the wind fans it out from her temples and sweeps back her fringe, revealing that irregularity of growth at the parting that we call the Witch’s Crook. Her mouth does not smile. Her companion – another girl – is of no importance. I resist the urge to look too closely, chary of alarming her, plucking Sysselore away from the smoke and letting the picture haze over.
When we need her, we will find her. I know that now.
We must be ready.
II (#u56f3e0f1-1d47-57a8-af29-372e72a54439)
She felt it only for an instant, like a cold prickling on the back of her neck: the awareness that she was being watched. Not watched in the ordinary sense or even spied on, but surveyed through occult eyes, her image dancing in a flame or refracted through a crystal prism. She didn’t know how she knew, only that it was one of many instincts lurking in the substratum of her mind, waiting their moment to nudge at her thought. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. The sensation was gone so quickly she almost believed she might have imagined it, but her pleasure in the drive was over. For her, Yorkshire would always be haunted. ‘Fern –’ her companion was talking to her, but she had not registered a word ‘– Fern, are you listening to me?’
‘Yes. Sorry. What did you say?’
‘If you’d been listening you wouldn’t have to ask. I never saw you so abstracted. I was just wondering why you should want to do the deed in Yarrowdale, when you don’t even like the place.’
‘I don’t dislike it: it isn’t that. It’s a tiny village miles from anywhere: short stroll to a windswept beach, short scramble to a windswept moor. You can freeze your bum off in the North Sea or go for bracing walks in frightful weather. The countryside is scenic – if you like the countryside. I’m a city girl.’
‘I know. So why –?’
‘Marcus, of course. He thinks Yarrowdale is quaint. Characterful village church, friendly local vicar. Anyway, it’s a good excuse not to have so many guests. You tell people you’re doing it quietly, in the country, and they aren’t offended not to be invited. And of those you do invite, lots of them won’t come. It’s too far to trek just to stay in a draughty pub and drink champagne in the rain.’
‘Sounds like a song,’ said Gaynor Mobberley. ‘Champagne in the rain.’ And: ‘Why do you always do what Marcus wants?’
‘I’m going to marry him,’ Fern retorted. ‘I want to please him. Naturally.’
‘If you were in love with him,’ said Gaynor, ‘you wouldn’t be half so conscientious about pleasing him all the time.’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say.’
‘Maybe. Best friends have a special licence to say horrible things, if it’s really necessary.’
‘I like him,’ Fern said after a long pause. ‘That’s much more important than love.’
‘I like him too. He’s clever and witty and very good company and quite attractive considering he’s going a bit thin on top. That doesn’t mean I want to marry him. Besides, he’s twenty years older than you.’
‘Eighteen. I prefer older men. With the young ones you don’t know what they’ll look like when they hit forty. It could be a nasty shock. The older men have passed the danger point so you know the worst already.’
‘Now you’re being frivolous. I just don’t understand why you can’t wait until you fall in love with someone.’
Fern gave a shivery laugh. ‘That’s like … oh, waiting for a shooting star to fall in your lap, or looking for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow.’
‘Cynic.’
‘No. I’m not a cynic. It’s simply that I accept the impossibility of romantic idealism.’
‘Do you remember that time in Wales?’ said her friend, harking back unfairly to college days. ‘Morwenna Rhys gave that party at her parents’ house on the bay, and we all got totally drunk, and you rushed down the beach in your best dress straight into the sea. I can still see you running through the waves, and the moonlight on the foam, and your skirt flying. You looked so wild, almost eldritch. Not my cool, sophisticated Fern.’
‘Everyone has to act out of character sometimes. It’s like taking your clothes off: you feel free without your character but very naked, unprotected. Unfinished. So you get dressed again – you put on yourself – and then you know who you are.’
Gaynor appeared unconvinced, but an approaching road junction caused a diversion. Fern had forgotten the way, and they stopped to consult a map. ‘Who’ll be there?’ Gaynor enquired when they resumed their route. ‘When we arrive, I mean.’
‘Only my brother. I asked Abby to keep Dad in London until the day before the wedding. He’d only worry about details and get fussed, and I don’t think I could take it. I can deal with any last minute hitches. Will never fusses.’
‘What’s he doing now? I haven’t seen him for years.’
‘Post-grad at York. Some aspect of art history. He spends a lot of time at the house, painting weird surreal pictures and collecting even weirder friends. He loves it there. He grows marijuana in the garden and litters the place with beer cans and plays pop music full blast; our dour Yorkshire housekeeper pretends to disapprove but actually she dotes on him and cossets him to death. We still call her Mrs Wicklow although her Christian name is Dorothy. She’s really too old to housekeep but she refuses to retire so we pay a succession of helpers for her to find fault with.’
‘The old family retainer,’ suggested Gaynor.
‘Well … in a way.’
‘What’s the house like?’
‘Sort of grey and off-putting. Victorian architecture at its most unattractively solid. We’ve added a few mod cons but there’s only one bathroom and no central heating. We’ve always meant to sell it but somehow we never got around to it. It’s not at all comfortable.’
‘Is it haunted?’
There was an appreciable pause before Fern answered.
‘Not exactly,’ she said.
