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‘Her cover? She was a crook?’
‘Of course not.’ He smiled half a smile. ‘Well, not in the sense you mean.’
‘In what sense, then?’
‘She was a witch,’ said Will.
She looked for the rest of the smile, but it did not materialise. The narrowing of his eyes and the slight crease between his brows was merely a reaction against the sun. His expression was unfathomable.
After a pause that lasted just a little too long, she said: ‘Herbal remedies – zodiac medallions – dancing naked round a hilltop on Midsummer’s Eve? That sort of thing?’
‘Good Lord no,’ Will responded mildly. ‘Alison was the real McCoy.’
‘Satanism?’
He shook his head. ‘Satan was simply a label of convenience. Mind you, if Jesus had come back a few hundred years later, and seen what had been done in his name – the crusades, or the Inquisition, or even just a routine schism with heretics burning at the stake over a point of doctrine – he’d probably have given up on all religion then and there. The atheist formerly known as Christ. He might even have decided it would be best – or at least much easier – to corrupt and destroy the human race instead of wasting time trying to save it. You get the gods you deserve.’
‘You’re wandering from the point,’ Gaynor said, determined the discussion was going to go somewhere, though she had no idea precisely where. It occurred to her that his outlook – she could not think of a better word – must have something to do with his paintings, or vice versa, but it didn’t seem to clarify anything. ‘What kind of a – what kind of a witch was Alison?’
‘She had the Gift,’ Will explained. (She could hear the capital letter.) ‘The ability to do things … beyond the range of ordinary human capacity.’ He did not appear to notice the doubt in Gaynor’s questioning gaze. ‘When the universe was created something – alien – got into the works, a lump of matter from outside. They called it the Lodestone. A friend of ours had the theory that it might have been a whole different cosmos, imploded into this ball of concentrated matter, but… Well, anyhow, it distorted everything around it. Including people. Especially people. It affected their genetic makeup, creating a freak gene which they passed on even when the Stone itself was destroyed. A sort of gene for witchcraft.’ He gave her a sudden dazzling and eminently normal smile. ‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to believe me. I just think you ought to know. In case anything happens which shouldn’t.’
‘Do you think something is going to happen?’ asked Gaynor, mesmerised.
‘Maybe. I’d whistle up a demon if I could, just to stop this idiotic wedding.’
‘Idiotic?’ She was bemused by his choice of adjective.
‘Can you think of a better word? Fern’s marrying a man she doesn’t love, probably as a gesture of rejection. That seems fairly idiotic to me.’
‘What is she supposed to be rejecting?’
‘The Gift,’ he said. ‘That’s the whole problem. Don’t you understand? Fern’s a witch too.’
Gaynor stopped abruptly for the second time, staring at him in a sudden violent uncertainty. They had walked quite a way and she was aware of the empty countryside all around them, the wind ruffling the grasses, the piping voice of an isolated bird. The wild loneliness of it filled her with an upsurge of panic which nudged her into anger. ‘If this is your idea of a joke –’
And then normality intruded. The dog came out of nowhere, bounding up to them on noiseless paws, halting just in front of her. Its mouth was open in a grin full of teeth and its tongue lolled. Will bent down to pat its muzzle but the yellow-opal eyes were fixed on Gaynor. The man followed briskly on its heels. He too gave the uncanny impression of appearing from nowhere. But this was normality, or so Gaynor assured herself. A man and his dog, walking on the moors. The dog was friendly, the man, dressed like a tramp, at least unequivocally human. Will evidently knew them.
‘This is Ragginbone,’ he told Gaynor. The man, not the dog. And: ‘This is Gaynor Mobberley. She’s a close friend of Fern’s.’ A firm handclasp, bright eyes scanning her face. He looked very old, she thought, or perhaps not so much old as aged, reminding her of an oak chest her mother had inherited recently from an antique relative. The wood was scored and blackened but tough, unyielding, half way to carbonisation. The man’s face seemed to have been carved in a similar wood, a long time ago, scratched with a thousand lines which melted into mobility when he smiled at her. His scarecrow hair was faded to a brindled straw but his brows were still dark and strong, crooked above the bright bright eyes that shone with a light that was not quite laughter but something deeper and more solemn. She wondered about his name (a soubriquet? a nickname?) but was too polite to ask.
‘And Lougarry.’ Will indicated the dog. A shaggy animal without a collar who looked part Alsatian and all wolf. But Gaynor had grown up with dogs and was not particularly deterred. She extended her hand and the dog sniffed briefly, apparently more out of courtesy than curiosity.
‘And how is Fernanda?’ asked the man called Ragginbone.
‘Still resolved on matrimony,’ said Will. ‘It’s making her very jumpy. She picked a fight with me last night, just to prove she was doing the right thing.’
‘She has to choose for herself,’ said the old man. ‘Neither you nor I have the right to coerce her, or even advise.’
Gaynor found his air of authority somewhat incongruous, but before she had time to consider her surprise he had turned to talk to her, and was enquiring about her work and displaying an unexpected familiarity with the subject. The three of them walked along together for some distance, the dog padding at their heels. Will said little. They turned back towards Yarrowdale, following a different path which plunged down into the valley and brought them eventually to the river. Spring was unfolding among the trees but the leaves of many winters lay thickly on the ground.
‘Was this where Alison drowned?’ Gaynor said suddenly.
‘Yes and no,’ said Will. ‘This is where they found her. In the Yarrow. Further down from here.’
Ragginbone made no comment, but she felt his gaze.
Where the path branched they separated, man and dog going their own way.
‘You’ll stay around, won’t you?’ Will said to him.
‘There’s nothing I can do.’
‘I know, but …’
‘Something troubles you? Something more than your sister’s obduracy?’
‘There’s too much tension in the air. I don’t think it’s all coming from her.’ He appealed to Gaynor. ‘You’ve felt it too, haven’t you?’ She remembered her nightmare in front of the television, and the owl-dream, and for no reason at all there was a sick little jolt of fear in her stomach. ‘It isn’t like the last time, hounds sniffing in the night: nothing like that. But I have a sense of someone or something watching … spying. An uncomfortable tingle on the nape of my neck. I might be imagining it.’
‘We’ll be here,’ said Ragginbone.
He strode off at great speed, the dog always beside him, unbidden and silent. ‘I suppose he’s a wizard?’ Gaynor said with a wavering attempt at sarcasm.
‘Oh no,’ said Will. ‘Not any more.’
Fern was sitting at the kitchen table, an untidy pile of cards, gifts and wrappings on one side of her, a tidy pile of sealed and addressed envelopes on the other. There was a cup of coffee at her elbow, almost untouched. She glanced up as her friend came in, her expression preoccupied, a brief smile coming and going. Perhaps because she wore no makeup she looked visibly strained, the small bones showing sharply beneath her skin, faint shadow-bruises under her eyes. But she did not look like a witch. Gaynor’s concept of the twentieth-century sorceress was drawn from books and films: she visualised something between the Narnian Jadis and Cher in one of her more glamorous roles, a statuesque creature with aquiline profile and waist-length elflocks. Fern looked compact, practical, wearily efficient. A PR executive frustrated by rural privations. A bride with pre-marital nerves. The antithesis of all that was magical and strange. ‘I’ve run out of stamps,’ she announced. ‘I wish I could do these things on the laptop: it would take half the time and at least they’d be legible. My handwriting’s turning into Arabic.’
‘Why can’t you?’
‘The older generation would be offended. Etiquette hasn’t caught up with technology yet.’
‘Shall I go and get the stamps for you?’ Gaynor offered. ‘I can find the post office. I saw it yesterday.’
‘That would be wonderful,’ Fern said warmly, ‘but you’ve only just got in. Have some coffee first. The pot’s on the stove. I made the real thing: I thought we might need it. Instant doesn’t have the same kick.’
Gaynor helped herself and replaced the contents of Fern’s mug, which had begun to congeal.
‘How are you getting on with my brother?’ Fern enquired, scribbling her way automatically through another note.
‘I like him,’ Gaynor responded tentatively, thinking of the row the previous night.
‘So do I,’ said Fern. ‘Even if he is a pain in the bum.’
‘He lives in a world of his own, doesn’t he?’ Gaynor said rather too casually, seating herself on the opposite side of the table.
‘Not exactly.’ Fern’s head was still bent over her work. ‘He lives in someone else’s world – a world where he doesn’t belong. That’s just the trouble.’
III (#u56f3e0f1-1d47-57a8-af29-372e72a54439)
Long before, when she was five or six years old, Gaynor had stayed in a haunted house. She still retained a vivid memory of the woman who had bent over her bed, staring at her with eyes that saw someone else. A woman in a long dress, shadowy in the semi-dark. She had brought a chill into the room that made Gaynor shiver, even under the bedclothes, but she could remember no sense of evil. Only a presence, and the cold. ‘She’s a sensitive,’ a friend had told her mother, and for some time she had worried about that, afraid of what she might sense, but no further incidents had occurred and the matter had faded from her mind, though her recollection of the phenomenon remained very clear. Now, she found herself reviving that image, reaching out with her so-called sensitivity, half in hope, half in fear, though the house did not respond. It felt not so much haunted, she decided, as inhabited: she always had the impression there were more people around than was actually the case.
After she returned from the post office Fern had to drive into Whitby to sort out a problem with the caterers. ‘Do you want to come?’ she asked but Gaynor declined. Will was out painting somewhere and she welcomed the idea of some time to herself. She stood in the room gazing in the mirror – Alison’s mirror – willing it to show her something, part fanciful, part sceptical, seeing only herself. A long pale face, faintly medieval, or so she liked to think, since medieval was better than plain. Brown eyes set deep under serious eyebrows. A thin, sad mouth, though why it should be sad she did not know, only that this was what she had been told. And the hair that was her glory, very long and very dark, falling like a cloak about her shoulders. Alison Redmond had had such hair, Maggie had said, though for some reason Gaynor pictured it as fairer than her own, the colour of dust and shadows.
‘You stare much harder at t’glass you’ll crack it,’ came a voice from the doorway. Gaynor had forgotten Mrs Wicklow. She jumped and flushed, stammering something incoherent, but the housekeeper interrupted. ‘You want to be careful. Mirrors remember, or so my mother used to 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 seeme. 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 came home first.
‘There was this amazing cloud-effect,’ he said, pushing his studio door open with one shoulder, his arms full of camera, sketch-pad, folding stool. ‘Like a great grey hand reaching out over the landscape … and the sun leaking between two of its fingers in visible shafts, making the dark somehow more ominous. I got the outline down and took some pictures before the light changed, but now – now I need to let the image develop, sort of growing in my imagination …’
‘Until the cloud really is a hand?’ suggested Gaynor with an involuntary shudder.
‘Maybe.’ He was depositing pad, stool, camera on various surfaces but he did not miss her reaction. ‘What’s the matter?’
She told him. About the programme, and Dr Laye, and the hand emerging from the television screen, and her waking nightmare the preceding evening, with the idol that came to life. She even told him about the dreams, and the sound of bagpipes. He listened without interruption, although when she came to the last point he laughed suddenly.
‘You needn’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘It’s just the house-goblin.’
‘House-goblin?’ she echoed faintly.
‘In the old days nearly every house had its own goblin. Or gremlin, bogey, whichever you prefer. Nowadays, they’re much rarer. Too many houses, too much intrusive technology, too few goblins. This house had one when we first came here, but Alison … got rid of him. She was like that. Anyway, the place felt a bit empty without one, so I advertised for a replacement. In a manner of speaking. Bradachin came from a Scottish castle and I think his heart’s in the Highlands still – at least in the wee small hours. He turned up with a set of pipes and a rusty spear that looks as old as war itself. Anyway, don’t let him trouble you. This is his house now and we’re his people: that means he’s for us.’
‘Have you ever seen him?’ asked Gaynor, scepticism waning after her own experiences.
‘Of course. So will you, I expect – when he’s ready.’
‘I don’t particularly want to see a goblin,’ Gaynor protested, adding sombrely: ‘I’ve seen enough. More than enough.’
Will put his arms round her for the second time, and despite recent fear and present distress she was suddenly very conscious of his superior height and the coiled-wire strength of his young muscles. ‘We’ll have to tell Ragginbone about all this,’ he said at last. ‘He’ll know what’s going on. At least, he might. I don’t like the sound of that business with the idol. We’ve been there before.’ She glanced up, questioning. ‘There was a statue here when we came, some kind of ancient deity, only a couple of feet high but … Fortunately, it got smashed. It was being used as a receptor – like a transmitter – by a malignant spirit. Very old, very powerful, very dangerous.’
‘What spirit?’ said Gaynor, abandoning disbelief altogether, at least for the present.
‘He had a good many names,’ Will said. ‘He’d been worshipped as a god, reviled as a demon … The one I remember was Azmordis, but it’s best not to use it too freely. Demons have a tendency to come when they’re called. Ragginbone always referred to him simply as the Old Spirit. He is – or was – very strong, too strong for us to fight, but because of what Fern did he was weakened, and Ragginbone thought he might not return here. It seems he was wrong.’
‘I don’t like any of this,’ said Gaynor. ‘I’ve never trusted the supernatural.’
Will smiled ruefully. ‘Neither have I.’
‘I went to a séance once,’ she continued. His arms were still around her and she found a peculiar comfort in conversing with his chest. ‘It was all nonsense: this dreadful old woman who looked like a caricature of a tea-lady, pretending to go into a trance, and faking these silly voices. If I were dead, and I wanted to communicate with somebody, I’m sure I could do it without all that rigmarole. But there was something coming through, something … unhealthy. Maybe it was in the subconscious minds of the participants. Anyway, whatever it was, it felt wrong. I don’t want to be mixed up in anything like that again.’
‘You could leave,’ said Will, releasing her. ‘For some reason, you’re a target, but away from here you’d be safe. I’m sure of that.’
She didn’t like the word ‘target’, but she retorted as hotly as she could: ‘Of course I won’t leave! For one thing, I can’t miss the wedding, even if I’m not mad keen on the idea. Fern would never forgive me.’
‘You know, I’ve been wondering …’ Will paused, caught on a hesitation.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s too much of a coincidence, everything blowing up again just now. There has to be a connection.’
‘With Fern’s wedding?’
‘It sounds ridiculous, but … I think so.’
They discussed this possibility for some time without arriving at any satisfactory conclusions. None of this is true, Gaynor told herself. Witchcraft, and malignant spirits, and a goblin in the house who plays the bagpipes at six o’clock in the morning … Of course it isn’t true. But although much of what had happened to her could be dismissed as dreams and fancy her experience in front of the television with the reaching hand had been hideously real. And Will had not doubted her or laughed at her. As he had believed her, so she must believe him. Anyway, it was so much easier than agonising about it. Yet even as the thought occurred, uncertainty crept in. ‘If you’re inventing this to make fun of me,’ she said, suddenly shaky, ‘I’ll – I’ll probably kill you.’
‘I don’t need to invent,’ he said, studying her with an air of gravity that reminded her of Fern. ‘You saw the hand. You dreamed the idol. You heard the pipes. The evidence is all yours. Now, let’s go up to your room. At least I can get rid of that bloody TV set.’
They went upstairs.
The television stood there, squat, blank of screen, inert. Yet to Gaynor it seemed to be imbued with a new and terrifying potentiality, an immanent persona far beyond that of normal household gadgetry. She wondered if it was her imagination that it appeared to be waiting.
She sat down on the bed, feeling stupidly weak at the knees, and there was the remote under her hand, though she was almost sure she had left it on the side table. The power button nudged at her finger.
‘Please take it away,’ she said tightly, like a child for whom some ordinary, everyday object has been infected with the stuff of nightmares.
