Enchantment

MONICA DICKENS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

A Note on the Author

Stealthily he prowled among the skeleton trees, sickened by the miasma of their hideous parasite growth. On either side, sharp disembodied eyes spied on him through the swaying vapours of the land of the Undead.

Ahead, the figure of the half-naked temptress beckoned.

So die, man-eating witch!

He plunged, because he tripped over a shopping-bag put down by a customer, and the draped display dummy toppled, sarong of splashily flowered acrylic sliding off her hipless form.

Tim caught her and righted her, and pulled up her shameless sarong just before Mrs Slade turned round from fingering and dithering over the rolls of patterned towelling.

‘This one, do you think …?' She always asked Tim's advice.

‘The fishes? Very nice.' Tim threw the heavy roll on to the cutting table. ‘Ten metres you said?'

‘Did I? I've lost the note. I hope …'

Mrs Slade watched anxiously while Tim measured and cut. Slash! His bold guillotine scissors decided her fate as abruptly as topping her head. Too late to recant.

‘Put that Irish towelling away, young Timothy.' Mr D. coasted through the cutting counters of Fabrics and Soft Furnishings like an upright walrus in the flat waters between lunch and tea. ‘It's a horrible mess here. Go and get the pins. Gail will have to re-drape that dummy.'

‘I stumbled.'

‘You weren't looking what you were doing,' frog-princess Lilian said.

‘Naff off,' Tim told the low-slung back view of Lilian's bustling walk.

As he took aim with the poisoned dart, the sharp little eyes watched him from the rack of dotted muslin curtains.

Tim Kendall lived in a one-room flat above Brian and Jack's house, with a tiny kitchen corner and a shower and dwarf toilet, just wide enough to sit down.

He got off the bus in the wet dark and went over the busy main road, not with the small crowd waiting at the crossing lights, but darting nimbly through the slow rush-hour traffic, caught for a moment in headlights, like a crazed rabbit. Now we shall see. My brown envelope of adventure will be there, on the mat, waiting for me all day. As he hurried the hundred and fifty yards through the cold rain, he wrote an imaginary letter to the Council, telling them to move the bus stop.

The house stood right on the main road, small garden in front with dark polluted bushes and a slippery tile walk, wide bay window, past which, although the curtains were drawn, Tim crept on rubber soles to get round to his own door.

He slipped round the corner between the house and the garage, and up the outside wooden stairs with the loose step that Jack was supposed to have mended. On the platform outside his front door, behind which the brown envelope waited, he looked for the key. Panic. His keys were not in his trousers or jacket. He must have left them inside the flat. He would have to go back down and ask Brian to let him in. What would he say? He began to make up excuses.

Thank God. The keys were on the new ring with the brutish brass and leather tag clipped to his belt loop. When he took off his jacket today in the hot canteen, Gail had said, ‘Why not one mauve earring, while you're at it, dear?'

‘He sneaks up there like a fugitive.' At the sound of the upstairs door, Cindy looked up from the books on the table. ‘I don't trust him.'

‘Let him alone.' Brian was getting the fire going.

‘Not right, a youngster like that spends so much time alone. I can spot them at the store, you know, the loners, the quiet ones. Do their work and give no trouble, and then one day it's explosions and trouble all round, and a microphone under my nose: “He was your tenant, I understand. What are your memories of him?”' It was possible to talk and make notes at the same time. ‘Oh yes, I can spot them.'

‘That's right. You know. You always know.' Brian sat back and held out his hands to the obedient blaze that was bright but not yet hot.

‘And you'll agree I know one day, when that runty lad comes down and slices us into small pieces. I sometimes think I should warn them about him at the store.' Cindy was in the Accounts Department at Webster's department store, where Tim worked.

‘Let him alone,' Brian repeated. ‘He's better than the last one we had. That scrubby girl. Perhaps you don't mind Asians in turbans padding up and down the stairs all night.'

‘One Asian. One turban. I hate having lodgers. One day I'll leave.'

‘Go ahead!'

‘Don't raise your voice at me.' Cindy looked up at the ceiling; two floors up, they could hear Tim moving about. ‘No need to let the world know our troubles.' They sometimes played a game of being a fighting married couple.

Brian got up. ‘I'll start supper.'

‘Suit yourself.
Have
a drink if you want.'

‘I
said
, I'll start supper.' In the kitchen, Brian poured a drink, put on a plastic apron which said SKIDDAW, with a picture of that blessed mountain, and peeled potatoes cheerfully. He bought the food and planned the meals. Cindy was studying to be a chartered accountant and had to be accommodated.

When the fish pie was in the oven and the salad made, Brian took two whiskies through to the front-room.

‘Poisson pie just about ready. Can I lay the table?'

‘Not yet.' Cindy wrote furiously, stabbing at the paper, head of wavy yellow hair leaning on one hand.

‘Finish afterwards.'

A shrug of the left shoulder.

‘God dammit, get those bloody books off my dining-room table!'

The square right shoulder came up level with the other.

With a roar, he swept the books to the floor.

‘Steady, Brian. I need this table, don't blame me.'

‘Blame you – I'll kill you! Kill myself! Burn down the house! See a lawyer. Throw out your supper.'

While he scaled down the threats, Cindy got up and bent to collect the scattered books, and stood holding the pile, one leg and foot stuck out like a dancer with muscular calves, cheerful outdoors face smiling under the tumbling yellow hair, short tight skirt, spiky heels.

‘Cross with Cindy, Bri?'

He laughed. He opened a bottle of wine and they had quite a matey supper. Afterwards, Cindy took a piece of hard-boiled egg out of Brian's beard, then worked at the table while he washed up and watched a nature programme. Then they went to their rooms and undressed for bed. Cindy was a man called Jack Garner, who dressed as a woman and wore a wig at home.

As Tim put his key into the lock, he seemed to see through the door with X-ray eyes that IT was there. It was overdue, his adventure game entry, which would have his score at this stage, and the whole tempting set-up for his next move to extricate himself from the loathsome pit of monsters, or the forest of bones, or the clutches of the siren Witch Wey – wherever his last move
had led him – in time to scuttle under the portcullis before the spikes fell, and do battle with the armoured Grots that he suspected of having bone-piercing marrow arrows set up in the guardroom.

He pushed open the door, then pulled it back and opened it again, to give it another chance. There was nothing on the mat. No square brown envelope. Nothing. The heart in him went dead. His lungs lost their elasticity. He stepped heavily on to the fibrous oatmeal carpet of his narrow studio flat and shut the door.

He changed out of his dark working suit and went to the kitchen end of the room to get a beer. He poured the beer into a pottery mug with a lid that one of his sisters had brought back from Germany. When you pressed the trigger on the handle, the pewter lid, decorated with stags' horns, did not open farther than straight upwards, which made it hard to quaff from; but it was a satisfying old Norse kind of drinking vessel that spoke of thonged leggings and foam-crested whiskers and rousting about in the Great Hall.

With the cold lid up against his cheek, Tim took a long pull, which encouraged him to get out a small frozen shepherd's pie and put it to cook in the little oven-grill on the counter. This was the time when he would have started on his next moves in the play-by-mail adventure game called
Domain of the Undead
. Tim had chosen the character of Blch, a gallant warlord, disguised as a travelling minstrel and teller of tales, whose mission was to penetrate ever deeper and deeper into the terrible treacherous land where corpses walked among the living, and the dread Captain Necrotic and his skeletal army were to be vanquished, not by brute strength and foolish courage, but only by the gambits of the swift zoetic rapier, which Blch must in the end (it might take months at this rate) discover.

Tim had stepped into these intriguing fantasy worlds through joining role-playing adventure games with two or three teenagers from the school where Brian was a teacher. They sometimes used
to play round the table at Brian's house at weekends, and Tim, venturing downstairs to borrow a pair of pliers, had managed to infiltrate their game.