The Dragon Charmer (18 page)

In a side street somewhere in the heart of London stood a shop that was never open. So narrow was the street that it would have been more accurately classified as an alley: there was no passage for a car, and the upper stories overhung the lower, constricting the available air space until only a blue vein of sky could be seen zigzagging between the rooftops. It was called the Place, Selena Place; the buildings there, though shabby, bore traces of architectural pedigree; one or two had been partially renovated. Inside, the houses were honeycombed with precipitous staircases and haphazard rooms. There was a club on some of the higher floors where people drank and talked about literature and a club in a basement that required references and a password to gain admittance. A video store specialized in pornography from the silent era, a secondhand bookseller in vintage
Boys’ Own
annuals, a kosher snack bar in salt beef sandwiches. The shop that never opened was tucked away between the bookseller and a dilapidated building formerly a squat, now too dangerous for human habitation, that served no purpose at all. There was a narrow window dingy with dirt that was not so much ingrained as artfully blended with the glass, permitting minimal visibility. It was framed by a species of canopy that resembled a Victorian bonnet, the kind that hid the wearer’s face from view. Beyond the window, the perceptive might distinguish an occasional table, a couple of items of bric-a-brac, and in the background a curtain of dull brocade, discolored with mildew that seemed to mingle with the pattern and become part of it. There was also a case of stuffed birds in various stages of molt that appeared and disappeared on a weekly basis, though it was never removed. No one knew what the shop actually sold. The door
was inset with more bleared glass, showing only a glimpse of the barred grille within. If a notice materialized declaring the establishment open, invisible hands would turn it over on the approach of a customer, and no amount of knocking and calling would elicit any response. Nobody ever went in, nobody ever came out, though there was a cat in the area, a moth-eaten ginger torn with half an ear missing and an array of balding battle scars, whose ownership was attributed to the unseen occupant. But in the vast, seething hotpot of London, a stew that contains every ingredient in the world and is flavored with every spice, the odd morsel of gristle can go unremarked. The neighbors in Selena Place were mildly intrigued but never inquisitive: none of them could remember a time when the shop had not been there, and its furtive attitude to opening hours was part of the local scenery, something to be both respected and ignored. In Soho, a king in exile and a beggar on the make can live side by side, and no one will ask awkward questions.

It was early on a Thursday afternoon when a man came to the shop and tapped lightly on the door. What made this knock different from all other knocks it would have been impossible to say, but after a pause lasting several minutes the door opened a chink—just a chink—as far as might be allowed if there were a safety chain inside. Neither face nor voice featured in the gap, though the visitor certainly spoke, perhaps in response to a question. There were plenty of people about at that hour—a bearded young man in the bookstore, a skinhead with an earring in the video shop, a queue for the salt beef sandwiches—yet they paid no attention. The door closed again; a chain rattled. When it reopened, a hand emerged from the inner darkness, snatching the newcomer and pulling him through the gap. This time, when the door shut, it was with the finality of a last curtain call, though nobody had been watching the show. The ginger cat, alerted by these unusual proceedings, plunged into the derelict building next door, no doubt seeking his own means of ingress. The shop front resumed its customary air of shabby inscrutability. Something all but revolutionary had occurred, a major upheaval in a long history of inertia, yet the incident passed strangely unremarked, potential witnesses were looking the
other way, the bustle of the ancient metropolis absorbed it without even a ripple. Selena Place went about its business undisturbed.

Inside, the visitor was led through a dim room hazardous with looming furniture, along an unlit corridor, down a twisting stair. At the bottom, another door swung back with an eloquent creak that sounded disturbingly like a voice, and the guest followed his hitherto unseen host into a basement room. The only daylight was admitted through a slit window set high in the wall at the far end; the remaining illumination came from sallow electric bulbs under shabby fringed lampshades, but the fringes seemed to have grown, like lianas, some of them trailing on the chair back or table beneath. Old candles crouched on available promontories, shapeless humps of wax in chipped saucers, half-melted and apparently forgotten. The walls were lined with books that looked more dated than antique, thrillers long out of vogue, melodramas and morality tales by unmemorable Victorian scribes. In the few spaces in between there were random glimpses of brick and plaster and a collection of yellowing prints at once lewd and faintly horrible: a crinolined woman coyly lifting her skirt to show a cloven hoof, another exposing a breast where a clawed imp sucked greedily, a rearview nude admiring in a hand mirror the countenance of a malignant ape. A huddle of chairs filled one end of the room; at the other stood a large table littered with equipment of an alchemical appearance, including a Bunsen burner and several retorts of assorted shapes and sizes, all cloudy with the dust of neglect. Furtive cupboards lurked in corners; the visitor almost tripped over a cakestand stacked with ornaments. He saw a blue china rabbit, an art deco nymph, a green glass ball twined with a wisp of fishing net, a toad carved in jade with a gold leaf crown and eyes set with crystal.

“I’m afraid,” said his host, “the place has grown a bit-cluttered. Over the years.” He had a curious habit of punctuating his phrases with odd pauses, audible full stops, as if he were out of practice with conversation and had lost the knack of making his sentences flow. “I keep things, you know. Things that interest me, or amuse me, or… remind me. That
blue rabbit, now. I used to see blue rabbits, at one time. I believe it was the absinthe. Or the laudanum. I don’t indulge now, of course.”

He sat down in one of the chairs after first checking it was unoccupied, perhaps by more blue rabbits; his guest followed suit. The ginger cat negotiated the narrow window, which was slightly open, pouring itself through the gap like oil, depositing its scabious orange form in its owner’s lap. Choppy fingers began stroking automatically.

The resident of Selena Place bore an extraordinary resemblance to a spider, one of the spindle-legged kind with a small fat body and a shambling, wavering gait. His head was sunken into rounded shoulders; his concave chest swelled out below the rib cage into the sudden mound of his paunch. Carpet-fluff hair clung erratically to his scalp or fanned out as if animated by invisible static. He had the bleached complexion of someone who rarely sees the sun and eyes like sloes, matte black, both iris and pupil, and as expressive as plastic buttons. His clothes appeared so much a part of him it was impossible not to suspect he never took them off. A buff-colored waistcoat wrinkled over his stomach; above it he wore several layers of cardigan trailing frayed woollen threads, all evidently in varying stages of gentle disintegration. Presumably he put a fresh garment on top even as the nethermost one rotted away. His trousers were both too loose and too tight, baggy around the seat yet clinging awkwardly to knob knee and shrunken calf. They stopped well short of his ankles, revealing socks that sagged in laminated folds above slippers corroded with constant shuffling. He appeared quintessentially an
indoor
person: a house spider spinning web after web in the same inglenook, a cave dweller who would live and die out of range of the daylight. The other man, in contrast, wore the countryside like a patina, his face rugged as bark, his hooded coat, after a recent shower, having both the color and texture of rain-soaked earth. In that musty atmosphere he steamed faintly, exuding a distillation of pastoral odors.

“It has been a long, long time, Moonspittle,” he remarked, “but you haven’t changed. Literally, I fear. Do you still trade in—”

“Not
traded.
” The man called Moonspittle responded before the question had been completed. His real name, or one of them, was Mondspitzl, but it had lost something in translation. “I helped people. For a fee. An acknowledgment of my skill. Not ordinary people, of course. Princes, statesmen, lovers. They came by night; they knew how to knock. They wanted potions and philters, dreams and visions. They don’t come now. Maybe there are other dream sellers out there. Less careful, less … particular. I haven’t changed, but the world changes. You would know. You were always… striding to keep up.” He added, inconsequentially: “I’m glad you didn’t bring the… er… dog. Mogwit never took to her.”

Ragginbone eyed the tattered sack of feline temperament unenthusiastically. “I believe it’s mutual.”

“Time doesn’t really matter
here”
Moonspittle continued, backtracking. “I blend in, you see. Anyone and everyone blends in. That’s what I like about the city. It’s like a giant forest—life is evolving even now, in the leaf mold, in the underbrush—growing, spreading, dying out. And I just stay here, deep in my hollow tree, ticking over. Like a beetle. The branches above could be full of owls, but I don’t notice. I stay in the dark. In the warm.”

“Owls?” Ragginbone queried with a frown. “What made you think of owls?”

“Owls and trees. Trees and owls. They go together.”

“I’ve always associated owls with barns. Or belfries.”

“You’ve learned too much,” said Moonspittle. “In the old stories, before there were barns or belfries, owls lived in trees.”

Ragginbone’s frown persisted, as though he had plunged into a sudden quagmire of thought.

“Was there something you wanted?” Moonspittle enquired eventually. “This is not surely—a social call. No one ever calls on me. Socially.”

“I want your help.” Ragginbone returned to the present, subjecting the other to a swift scrutiny “I need to draw the circle. You have the Gift, after a fashion. Mine is gone. Together—”

“You want to
use
me.” Moonspittle’s thin, rather high voice dropped to a murky whisper. “My power your will is that the idea?”

“Put it how you like,” said Ragginbone. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“Ah, but how important? What will you give me, Caracandal, for my Gift? A black diamond—a blue rose—a lock of angel’s hair?”

“I brought you this,” said Ragginbone. From an inner pocket he extracted a transparent plastic globe containing a tiny model of St. Paul’s in winter. He shook it, and it filled with snow, a blizzard in miniature.

Moonspittle’s face shone with a childlike greed. “My city!” he said. “My city in a bubble—a snowstorm city to hold in my hand.
That
is enchantment. Even in the crystal ball it is not so clear. This is a precious thing. Give it me!”

“After,” said Ragginbone, putting it away in the folds of his coat. “First, we will draw the circle.”

They cleared a space in the center of the room, pushing furniture aside, rolling back a ragged strip of carpet. The outline was already there, a shadow-marking on the floorboards. Moonspittle took ajar from one of the cupboards and dribbled a grayish-white powder around the perimeter, muttering to himself in a sotto voce mumble that might have been incantation or merely complaint. There was no solemnity, no stately ritual. Ragginbone covered the window, lit the candles, switched off the lights. Mogwit jumped on a chair to watch: in the artificial dark he became a furry shadow whose eyes glowed balefully. And gradually the gloom intensified and the room seemed to alter, expanding, mutating. There was no visible movement, yet chairs and tables appeared to lean away from the circle, crowding toward the wall. Some shapes swelled, others shrank. The ceiling arched far above, the bookshelves became a ladder into infinity. Moonspittle spoke the word, and the circle burned with an unsteady glimmer, hissing like green wood on a fire. Then Ragginbone laid a hand on the back of Moonspittle’s neck and he dropped to his knees in sudden weakness, folding up as though stricken, the spider swatted. “Elivayzar,” Ragginbone said softly “Elivayzar.”

“You take—too much,” gasped Moonspittle. “You would steal my very soul…”

“Not steal, borrow. And only your power. Is it agreed?”

Elivayzar struggled to rise, subsiding into a chair that Ragginbone
thrust beneath him. Then the hand closed on his nape again. If he acquiesced, it went unheard. He began to speak in a strange language, full of knife-edged consonants, pulsing vowels, crackling Rs and sibilant Ss. A language of deep notes and clarion commands that made the stale air vibrate with a tuneless music. The language of the lost, the forgotten, the forbidden. Atlantean. But there was more fear than authority in his voice; his accent wavered; the words ran together, losing their native clarity. Within the circle a vaporous substance formed that thickened and thinned according to the rhythm of the incantation, condensing into half shapes, spectral impressions of torso and limb that dissolved even as they began to solidify. The glimmer of a face dwindled into the parallel bars of cheekbone and browbone, with yellow eyes fading in between, and then the smoke strands blurred and divided, becoming the flickering haunches of some goatish intermediary, before lengthening into hair, spreading into hands, sharpening into claws. “Concentrate!” exhorted Ragginbone, while his grip tightened on the helpless Moonspittle, gnarled fingers probing the bowed shoulders like burrowing roots. Ragginbone’s lips moved on the words even as Elivayzar spoke them aloud, and the uncertain voice seemed to be charged with a conviction and a force from elsewhere. At the heart of the circle a humanoid form grew and condensed, becoming fixed in being. It was an old, old woman, so ancient she might have been all but fossilized, withered into stone. She was as ugly as a gargoyle, as shrunken as a thornbush in a drought. Bristles of coarse hair stood out on one side of her scalp; on the other the scabby craters of vanished sores encroached on her face. A single fang jutted from her arid mouth, stabbing the brown verge of her lower lip. Her eyeballs were encased in wrinkled pouches of skin that permitted only a sliver of vision between twitching lids. The sound that came from her vocal cords was a croak whose softer cadences had long gone.