Jan Siegel - The Dragon-Charmer

‘You had the television on?’ Fern queried sharply. She picked up the remote and pressed one: the screen flicked to a vista of a fire in an industrial plant in Leeds. Behind the commentator, ash-flakes swirled under an ugly sky.

‘That was it,’ said Gaynor with real relief. ‘It must have been that.’ And: ‘I can’t think why I’m so tired …’

‘It’s the Yorkshire air,’ said Will. ‘Bracing.’

‘You don’t want to go watching t’news,’ opined Mrs Wicklow. ‘It’s all murders and disasters – when it isn’t sex. Enough to give anyone nightmares.’

Will grinned half a grin for Gaynor’s exclusive benefit. Fern switched off the television again, still not quite satisfied.

‘Have you had any other strange dreams here?’ she asked abruptly when Mrs Wicklow had left.

‘Oh no,’ said Gaynor. ‘Well … only the bagpipes. I thought I heard them last night, but that must have been a dream too.’

‘Of course.’

Fern and Will followed the housekeeper, leaving Gaynor to dress, but as the door closed behind them she was sure she caught Fern’s whisper: ‘If you don’t get that little monster to shut up, I’m going to winkle him out and stuff his bloody pipes down his throat …’

At supper, thought Gaynor, at supper I’m going to ask her what she’s talking about.

But at supper the argument began. It was an argument that had been in preparation, Gaynor suspected, since they arrived, simmering on a low heat until a chance word – a half-joking allusion to premarital nerves – made it boil over. Without the subject ever having been discussed between them, she sensed that Will, like her, was unenthusiastic about his sister’s marriage and doubted her motives. Yet he had said nothing and seemed reluctant to criticise; it was Fern, uncharacteristically belligerent, who pushed him into caustic comment, almost compelling him towards an open quarrel. On the journey up she had listened without resentment to her friend’s light-worded protest, but with Will she was white-faced and bitter with rage. Maybe she wanted to clear the air, Gaynor speculated; but she did not really believe it. What Fern wanted was a fight, the kind of dirty, no-holds-barred fight, full of below-the-belt jabs and incomprehensible allusions, which can only occur between siblings or people who have known each other too long and too well. It struck Gaynor later that what Fern had sought was not to hurt but to be hurt, as if to blot out some other feeling with that easy pain. She herself had tried to avoid taking sides.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Fern said afterwards, on their way up to bed. ‘I shouldn’t have let Will provoke me. I must be more strung-up than I thought.’

‘He didn’t provoke you,’ Gaynor said uncertainly. ‘ You provoked him.’

Fern shut her bedroom door with something of a snap.

The owl woke Gaynor, calling in its half-human voice right outside her window. She had started up and pulled back the curtains before she really knew what she was doing and there it was, its ghost-face very close to her own, apparently magnified by the glass so that its enormous eyes filled her vision. Its talons scrabbled on the sill; its wings were beating against the panes. Then somehow the window was open and she was straddling the sill, presumably still in her pyjamas, and then she was astride the owl, her hands buried in its neck-ruff, and it was huge, huger than a great eagle, and silent as the phantom it resembled. They were flying over the moors, and she glimpsed the loop of a road below, and the twin shafts of headlights, and the roofs of houses folded as if in sleep, and a single window gleaming like a watchful eye. But most of the landscape was dark, lit only by the moon that kept pace with their flight, speeding between the clouds. Above the grey drift of cirrus the sky was a black vault; the few stars looked remote and cold. They crossed a cliff and she saw the sea wheeling beneath her, flecked with moon-glitter, and then all detail was lost in the boom of wings and the roar of the wind, and Time rolled over her like waves, maybe months, maybe years, and she did not know if she woke or slept, if she lived or dreamed. At one point another face rushed towards her, a pale expanse of a face with a wide hungry mouth and eyes black as the Pit. There was a hint of smoke in the air and a smell of something rotting. ‘This is not the one,’ said a voice. ‘ Not the one …’ The unpleasant smell was gone and she felt the plumage of the owl once more, and the wind and the cloud-wisps and the dying moon flowed over her, and sleep came after, closing the window against the night.

She woke fully just before moonset, when its last ray stole across the bed and slipped under her eyelids. She got up to shut the curtains, and was back between the sheets when it occurred to her she had done so already, before she went to bed.

Fern, too, was dreaming. Not the dreams she longed for and dreaded – fragments of the past, intimations of an alternative future – dreams from which she would wrench herself back to a painful awakening. This dream appeared random, unconnected with her. Curious, she dreamed on. She was gazing down on a village, a village of long ago, with thatched roofs and dung-heaps. There were chickens bobbing in farmyard and backyard, goats wandering the single street. People in peasant clothing were going about their business. A quickfire sunset sent the shadows stretching across the valley until it was all shadow. One red star shone low over the horizon. It seemed to be pulsing, expanding – now it was a fireball rushing towards them – a comet whose tail scorched the tree-tops into a blaze. Then, as it drew nearer, she saw . Bony pinions that cut up the sky, pitted scales aglow from the furnace within, blood-dark eyes where ancient thoughts writhed like slow vapour. A dragon.

Not the dragon of fantasy and storyland, a creature with whom you might bandy words or hitch a ride. This was a real dragon, and it was terrible. It stank like a volcanic swamp. Its breath was a pyroclastic cloud. She could sense its personality, enormous, overwhelming, a force all hunger and rage. Children, goats, people ran, but not fast enough; against the onset of the dragon they might almost have been running backwards. Houses exploded from the heat. Flesh shrivelled like paper. Fern jerked into waking to find she was soaked in sweat and trembling with a mixture of excitement and horror. Special effects, she told herself: nothing more. She took a drink of water from the glass by her bed and lay down again. Her thoughts meandered into a familiar litany. There are no dragons, no demons … no countries in wardrobes, no kingdoms behind the North Wind. And Atlantis, first and fairest of cities, Atlantis where such things might have been, was buried under the passing millennia, drowned in a billion tides, leaving not a fossilised footprint nor a solitary shard of pottery to baffle the archaeologists.

But she would not think of Atlantis …

Drifting into sleep again she dreamed of wedding presents, and a white dress that walked up the aisle all by itself.

‘What’s happening?’ Will asked the darkness. ‘Even allowing for circumstances, I’ve never known Fern so on edge.’

‘I dinna ken,’ said the darkness, predictably. ‘But there’s Trouble coming. I can smell him.’

The following morning was devoted to thank-you letters, which Fern, being efficient, penned beforehand. Then there were long phone-calls – to the caterers, to prospective guests, to Marcus Greig. Will, not so much unhelpful as uninvolved, removed Gaynor from the scene and took her for a walk.

‘What do you make of it all?’ he asked her.

‘Make of what?’ she said, her mind elsewhere. ‘You mean – that business of Alison Redmond? Or –’