Jan Siegel - Prospero’s Children

‘Maybe,’ said Fern. ‘She’s on our side: that’s all that matters. We’re rather short of allies.’

‘And the old man?’

‘He watches. I told you. He has a tendency to look like a rock. I thought I might have imagined him, but Gus has seen him too, so he must be real. Perhaps it was the rock I imagined.’

‘Gus is a vicar,’ Will remarked captiously. ‘He’s supposed to see things. Angels, you know, and visitations.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Fern. ‘He’s C of E.’

There was a pause; then she got to her feet. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’d better get on with it.’

‘Get on with what?’ asked Will, but he knew.

They went upstairs to Alison’s room. The landing was grey and dim, surrounded by closed doors; no sunlight penetrated the narrow window in the north wall. Will took hold of the handle and tried to turn it, but it would not move. It seemed to be not so much jammed as fixed, petrified into stasis: it didn’t even rattle. He pulled his hand away, complaining of pins and needles. ‘It can’t be locked,’ said Fern. ‘There’s no key.’ She seized the knob herself, but her grip squeaked on brass; Will kicked and shoved at panels that did not stir. When she drew back she could see the pins and needles, angry pinpoints of red flickering and fading on her palm. ‘This won’t do,’ she said. ‘This is our house . We have a right to enter any room we please. She can ask us to stay out if she likes, but she can’t force us. I don’t know what she’s done, but we’re going to get in.’

‘The window?’ Will suggested.

From a neighbouring room they leaned out to check, but Alison’s window also appeared shut. ‘We might be able to open it,’ Will said, ‘if she hasn’t done anything fancy to it like she has to the door.’ He didn’t mention the word magic but they both knew the omission was not born of modern scepticism. ‘This window’s on a latch; hers probably is too. You could lift it from the outside with something thin enough to slip through the crack. I’ve seen it done on TV with a credit card.’

‘I don’t have a credit card,’ said Fern. ‘We’ll try a knife. But first, we’re going to need a ladder.’

Knowing Mrs Wicklow’s antipathy to Alison, Fern did not hesitate to enlist her aid. The housekeeper had reservations, not about the propriety of their actions, but about the risks of illicit entry via a window more than twenty feet off the ground. Ladders, she claimed, were notoriously chancy, especially under inexpert control. However, suspicion of the alien finally persuaded her. ‘I don’t know what she’s done to t’ door,’ she said. ‘Fair made my hand sting. It must be some kind of electricity.’

Introduced to a small-time builder in the village, Fern and Will were able to borrow a ladder long enough for their needs on the following Wednesday afternoon. As instigator of the plan Will climbed up first, armed with the slimmest of the kitchen knives; his sister waited at the bottom, holding the ladder to steady it. Rather to her surprise, the methods of television drama did not let them down.

‘Done it,’ Will called out, and she saw him disappearing over the window-sill. She wriggled the two prongs deeper into the flower-bed and ascended a little nervously after him.

The room was transformed. The balding velvet of cushion and curtain now appeared thick and soft, the dingy carpet glowed with the tracery of long-lost designs. Shelves formerly empty were stacked with books and cassettes, a portable music centre, a pair of candles in iron holders, a pot-plant which resembled a cactus, its spines glistening, its single flower gaping like a small red mouth with the tongue-shaped stamen lurking inside. Fern glanced at the books: they seemed mainly concerned with art and antiquities, though there were a couple in a language, and a script, which she could not understand. Several new pictures adorned the walls, one of which looked vaguely familiar: it took her a few moments to recognise the etching she had once seen at the gallery. The imprisoned horse was not on show but in the far corner stood an easel shrouded in a piece of stained cloth. There was a different cover on the bed, all emerald and peacock-blue, embroidered with twining feathers and iridescent eyes: it was very beautiful but somehow it repelled her. She could imagine it stitched in pain by women with blistered fingers and vision weakened from peering at their labour. She caught its reflection in the spotless mirror, turned away; and then her gaze was drawn back to the glass. The image showed her a bedroom within a bedroom, the alien invasion of Alison’s possessions, the books, the paintings, the plant. But the sumptuous curtains were threadbare as before, the carpet dim with age, murky with ingrained dirt. ‘Will…’ Fern whispered, suddenly pale, struggling with the evidence of her senses.

But her brother was concentrating on the television. He had wheeled the unit away from its place against the wall and was toying with the remote control, obtaining nothing but crackle and snow. He had not noticed the mirror, and Fern found that she shrank from drawing his attention to it, more than half afraid he would not see what she saw. She forced herself to look elsewhere, her glance alighting on a box at the bedside, a rectangle of some dark wood, its sombre hue veined as if with faint gold, the lid inlaid with ominous characters in red enamel. When she touched it a scent came to her, as if carried on a nonexistent breeze in a room with barely a draught: the smell of a northern forest, of sap rising, leaves opening, roots drinking, as if the wood still lived, dreaming of the days when it was a tree among trees. She felt round the rim of the lid, encountered the metal clasp which closed it, and bit back the beginnings of a scream. The stab of pain was like a burn, though her hand was unmarked. ‘What is it?’ Will inquired, distracted from the television screen.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Fern. ‘It felt like the door handle, only worse. I need gloves.’

The gloves were in a drawer under the bedside table. Fern noted with disapproval that they were made from the skin of a reptile, snake or lizard; the mottled patterns appeared to alter in a changing light, as if, like the wood, some elusive memory of life lingered in the dead scales, shifting colours like a chameleon. She pulled on the righthand one: it had looked overlarge but the fingers seemed to shrink onto hers, skin melding with skin, until it no longer resembled a glove and she knew a sudden terror that it would never come off. Her arm would terminate for all time in a claw. ‘Can you open it now?’ Will demanded. She pressed the clasp without ill effect; the lid lifted of its own accord. Inside, the box was divided into sections. There were tiny jars and bottles with labels too minute to decipher; a squat book, leatherbound and handwritten, its pages sere with age; strangest of all, an unmarked video cassette, the tape invisible in its opaque casing. ‘Let’s try it,’ said Will, his expression bright with a mixture of curiosity and daring; but he could not pick it up. Fern took it in her gloved hand and inserted it in the machine, then they sat on the peacock bed-cover to watch. Will pressed play . There was a click, and the screen disappeared. The square outline of the TV set framed a hole, bottomless as the Pit, a window into nothing. A solitary star, infinitely remote, no bigger than a grain of dust, winked and died in its depths. ‘They do it with computers,’ Will said. He did not sound convinced.

The image came rushing up towards them from the point where the star had died, spinning to a halt, shuddering into coherence. This was no two-dimensional film but a spyhole on reality, a street with exhaust fumes and erratic sunshine, an old man getting into an old car. He tugged a bunch of keys out of his pocket, glanced at it in irritation, and put it back, subsequently producing a much smaller bunch which evidently included the key to the ignition. It came to Fern that this must be Great-Cousin Ned, and on that first keyring was the one key they sought. But the image was gone; another crowded on its heels, and another, a quickfire succession of instant and incident, fragments of history tumbling over each other, hurtling back further and further into the past. A market stall with a tray of trinkets where sifting fingers brushed over an object she could not see; a coved cellar piled with cases on which the dust lay undisturbed; a uniformed figure picking up something from a blood-smeared floor; two men staring into a flame, their faces lit from below, one chubby and eager, the other very young but already shrewd, his forelock limp with sweat, premature lines in his thin cheek. For a second, his eyes lifted, and they were brown and golden and green as a sunlit wood. Then the chimera was lost, overwhelmed in a chaos of other faces: a gipsy, a woman with languorous eyes, a man with a bitter mouth. A waveless sea trailed at the stern of a seedy fishing boat, the sails hanging immobile in the torpid air. The setting sun spilled from beneath the cloud-shelf and flashed like fire across the ocean, igniting a path of gold where a dark silhouette rose to a fatal rendezvous. And then the water closed over all, and far below a skull blossomed, growing slowly into flesh and form, but before Fern could see any clear features white hands covered it, and it was gone. At the last there came another boat, a struggling vessel with bent mast and splitting timbers, riding on a storm beyond imagining. The tempest shook the television set as if it were made of card; a gust of wind tore round the room, wrenching at the curtains, snapping the window wide. Lightning crackled in the gap where the screen used to be. Fern and Will felt themselves lifted up, they and the house and the hillside without, as if the dimension in which they dwelt had turned into a giant elevator, and the only fixed universe was inside the television. They clung to the bedposts like children on a Ferris wheel, soaring through the tumult of sky and sea, until they could see the many-coloured flares pulsing like a phantom coronet above the roof of the clouds, and hear the thunder-drums rolling down below. And then a hole was ripped in the canopy and a chasm opened amidst the waves, and there was the ship plunging into it, and the helmsman was swept away, and Fern knew the glimmer at his throat was the missing key, and she saw the pale arms of the mermaid dragging him to his death. A swift darkness spread across the vision, blotting out even the storm, and a voice boomed out of it as cold and empty as the deeps of space. ‘It is forbidden to go further back,’ it said. ‘The city has been banished from Timer and Forever, history and memory. No man shall look on Atlantis again.’ There was a snick like the closing of a door, and the screen was back in place. The room around them was stationary; house and hillside did not stir. Fern was trembling so violently she did not trust herself to speak.