Jan Siegel - The Dragon-Charmer

‘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.

Will crouched down by the wall to release the plug – and started back abruptly with a four-letter oath. ‘It shocked me!’ he said. ‘The bloody thing shocked me!’

‘Did you switch off?’

He reached out once more, this time for the switch – and again pulled his hand back sharply. Gaynor had glimpsed the blue spark that flashed out at his touch. ‘Maybe you have a strong electric aura,’ she offered hesitantly, coming over and bending down beside him. The instant her tentative finger brushed the socket she felt the stab of pain, violent as a burn. For a fraction of a second a current of agony shot up her arm, her fingertip was glued to the power source, the individual hairs on her skin crackled with static. Then somehow she was free, her finger red but otherwise unmarked.

‘Leave it,’ said Will. ‘We need Fern. She could deal with this. She has the right kind of gloves.’

They went down to the kitchen, where they found Mrs Wicklow extracting a cake from the oven. With her firm conviction that young people nowadays were all too thin and in constant need of sustenance, she cooked frequently and to excess, although only Will could be said to justify her efforts. But after the horrors of the afternoon Gaynor munched happily on calories and carbohydrates, thankful for their comforting effect. Fern was late back, having gone from the caterers to the wine merchants, from the wine merchants to the church. ‘We’re invited to the vicarage for dinner,’ she called out as she came in. ‘Is the bath free?’

Gaynor called back in the affirmative and was vaguely relieved to hear Will following his sister upstairs, sparing her the necessity of relating her story again. Despite all that Will had told her, she could not visualise her friend receiving it with anything but polite disbelief. She waited several minutes and then she, too, went up to the first floor.

Fern was standing in the bathroom doorway, with the chundering of the hot tap coming from behind her and translucent billows of steam overflowing into the corridor. She had obviously been in the preliminary stages of undress when Will interrupted her: her shoes lay where they had been kicked and her right hand was still clutching a crumpled ball of socks which she squeezed savagely from time to time, apparently unaware of what she was doing. There was an expression on her face which Gaynor had never seen before, a kind of brittleness which looked as if it might fragment at a touch and re-form into something far more dangerous. Gaynor could smell a major row, hovering in the ether like an inflammable gas, waiting for the wrong word to spark it off.