The Dragon Charmer (43 page)

That is a
good
knife
, she said, in the silence of his mind.

“I stole it,” said Will. “Crime pays. Are you badly hurt?”

She indicated the trap. He cleaned the dagger on a clump
of moss, sheathed it, and crouched down to release the mechanism. It took him a little while, groping in the dark, unable to see either trap or wolf clearly. When she was free he ran a hand over the injured leg, saw the dark ooze of fresh blood on his palm. “I’ll try and carry you to the car,” he said. “I’ve got some rags in there; they’ll do for a bandage. Temporarily. I’ll have to leave you there for a bit. I must find Gaynor.”

She was heavy but he managed, arms linked under her belly, holding her close to his chest. When they reached the car he set her down, unlocked it, and lifted her onto the backseat, glancing around every other second, thankful that the automatic light did not work. He explored the side pockets by feel, unwilling to switch on any illumination, finding some old paint rags that he trusted were not too unhygienic. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, as he bound them inexpertly round the wound. “These’ll have to do. I think the leg’s broken—”

Yes
.

Her mental response sounded weak, the whisper of a thought, but he assimilated it with relief. “We’ll get it set as soon as we can,” he said, struggling with the knot.

Tighter
.

“What were those … things that attacked you? Where did they go?”

Morlochs
. (The name took shape in his head.)
They did not go anywhere. We
…
went
.

“We
went?” Will echoed.

This place is in two dimensions. They are … they should be… there. We were there, and here
.

She added:
We were lucky they were so few. In numbers, they are deadly
.

“By there,” said Will, “do you mean … Azmodel? That’s what you told me.
This is Azmodel”

You should have run
, said the thought in his mind.

He had tied the makeshift bandage as tightly as he dared. Now he stroked her neck, both giving reassurance and seeking it. Her fur felt rough and sticky with sweat.

She requested:
Water
.

“I don’t think I”

When I drink, I am strong. You need help. I will fetch someone
.

“You can’t,” said Will. “Your leg is broken.”

Lougarry showed her teeth.
I have three more
.

Will thought of his own tormenting thirst in the cellar, and the perils of the kitchen. He said: “I won’t be long.”

He was gone over half an hour.

The manservant was there, washing the dishes; Will heard him in time, retreating back outside. Ear to the door panel, he caught the sound of footsteps approaching the little passageway, but if Harbeak glanced toward the cellar he must have seen nothing amiss. Feet returned to the kitchen, cupboards opened and shut, crockery chinked. When silence ensued, Will waited several minutes before he dared to venture indoors. He found a large jug, filled it, and made his way back to the car.

Lougarry was waiting, without impatience or complaint. She drank half the water fast, the rest more slowly, pacing herself, knowing both her own capacity and her need. “You can’t walk,” Will reiterated. “You were half-dead earlier. I had to carry you.”

I have rested
, she responded,
and I have drunk. Now I am strong again. But you must come with me to the gate. Ido not know how to work it, and I cannot jump the wall
.

They stole down the driveway, keeping to the deepest shadows. The clouds opened briefly overhead, showing a sly glimpse of moon, and they shrank from its probing beam, but it was quickly obscured. Lougarry hobbled on three legs, ungainly but apparently restored to part of her strength. When they reached the gate it was some time before Will located the button to open it; he had been secretly afraid it might be operated only by remote control. Lougarry slipped through as soon as there was space, glanced back once—an untypical gesture—then limped off into the night. Will found a stone fallen from the coping and wedged it against the post so the gate could not be properly closed, hoping this would not set off any alarms. If someone comes, he thought, at least they’ll be able to get in.
If
…

He stared back up the drive at the dark huddle of the Hall.
This is Azmodel
… He thought of the monster beneath the cellar, and the loathing that infused the she-wolf’s mind when she uttered
Morlochs
, and the unseen hand of Dr. Jerrold
Laye. He could go now, follow Lougarry, find backup. It would be the sensible thing to do. He was exhausted and half-starved; he had no Gift to aid him, no plan to follow. Fear loomed in front of him like a vast insurmountable barrier. He tried to picture Gaynor, desperate and terrified, needing him; he touched the knife for courage or luck. But in that moment he knew only that it was dark and cold, and he was terribly alone, and as frightened as a child.

Eventually he began to walk back toward the house.

   Gaynor lay in a crimson nightmare struggling to draw breath. Fluorescent amoebas drifted across her vision, subdividing and rejoining. Presently they began to cohere into strange aberrant forms, unshapes cobbled together from a range of ill-assorted body parts, sprouting like fungi all around her. She did not want to look at them, so she opened her eyes, but they were still there. They seemed to be watching her, not with their eyes but with their mouths. Random incisors extruded over spotted lip or curved inward to hook their prey; tongues slithered into view like eels. She wanted to scream but her throat closed and the sound was stifled inside her. Darkness surged upward, smothering her, and when she woke again it was day.

She was in bed, but not her bed at Dale House. For a minute she wondered if she might be back in London the window was in the right place for London but the room was utterly unfamiliar. Heavy beams spanned the high ceiling; the curtains were of some old-fashioned brocade; beyond, shadow bars striped the daylight. She thought: Bars? I’m in a room with
bars
on the window? It seemed not merely worrying, but preposterous. In real life people did not wake up in unfamiliar rooms with barred windows. She tried to turn her head in order to see more of her surroundings but her neck felt painful and very stiff. And then memory returned, not in a trickle but a flood, and she knew where she was, and why, and fear filled her. Fear for herself, for Will, for Fern, who, if Dr. Laye was right, was walking into a trap. (But he wasn’t Dr. Laye: he was the Spirit they had spoken of, Azmordis.) A trap, and she was the bait. She tried to sit up, and nausea rippled through her in waves, too gentle for actual vomiting
but more than enough to send her reeling back onto the pillow.

A preliminary check revealed that she was still more or less fully dressed, except for her jacket and shoes. She undid the zip in her trousers in order to remove the pressure on her stomach and eventually her insides relaxed into their normal patterns of behavior. Bodily concerns took priority; she got up carefully, determined not to relapse, and surveyed the amenities. There was a modern washstand, a couple of vintage armchairs, an oval mirror in a carved frame. That was all. In the end, she was forced to improvise with a porcelain basin possibly intended for fruit, a disagreeable proceeding that made her conclude that the real issue behind penis envy is accuracy of aim. Then she washed her face and hands with the soap provided, and felt her skin crinkling for lack of moisturizer. She tried the door, a forlorn hope: it was locked. She was reluctant to draw the curtains, wanting neither to see the bars in all their grim reality nor make herself visible to whatever unfriendly eyes might be waiting outside. But she had no watch, and although she sensed it was morning she needed to be sure. She pulled the drapes back a little way.

Gaynor could make out the formal garden that she had noticed on arrival, looking, from above, as if a part of the design had slipped sideways: paths and flower beds failed to interconnect, shrubs huddled together in thickets and then trailed away into a bristle of barren twigs. There was something moving down there, close to an object that might have been a sundial, but the neglected topiary intervened, blotting most of whatever it was from view, and her long-range vision was not good, though she wore glasses only to drive. She squinted at it for a while, but it seemed to be motionless now, or had disappeared. The garden was bordered by a hedge; beyond, the land fell away into a deep fold of the valley, only the high stone wall marking the boundary of the property. Clouds shaped like the underside of huge boats paddled across the sky. The colors were gray-brown, gray-green, gray-white, a hundred aquatints of gray. A brisk wind was hurrying the cloud boats, breaking their trails into scuds of cirrus foam. In between, isolated sunbeams stalked the remote landscape, touching the earth with fleeting tracks of brilliance. Gaynor
recollected from the previous day that the house faced roughly southeast, so it seemed safe to deduce that it was still morning, though whether early or late she could not tell. Now she had summoned the nerve to look out she could not look away; she drew a chair up to the window and sat there, elbows on the sill, gazing down the long hillside into a blur of distance.

She was interrupted by a sound behind her: the click of a lock, and the door opening. She started and turned.

“Good morning,” said Harbeak. His manner, as always, was that of the ideal servant but his voice was a dead monotone, and in the stronger light she could see the dough of his face pinched and kneaded into tiny peaks and troughs that somehow gave him less expression, not more. “I’m afraid you missed breakfast: I looked in on you at half past nine, but you were sleeping. However, I will bring you some lunch presently. First, I expect you would like to use the toilet.”

Gaynor reddened, remembering the fruit bowl. She said: “Yes, please,” and then wished she hadn’t put in the
please
, sensing that on some deeper level, far below his outward impassivity, he was taking pleasure in her subjection, her embarrassment, her exposure to petty indignity. She wondered suddenly if it was he who had carried her to bed, he who had removed her jacket and shoes, perhaps searching her, touching her, exploring the secret niches of her body. She shuddered, and knew that the shudder reached him, and thrilled through him in a spasm of unholy satisfaction.

“Follow me,” he said. “Remember you are watched. All the time.”

The nightmare creatures with their oozing mouths… eyes, eyes in a paneled room…

She pushed the fantasies away, looking for security cameras, though she saw none. She had horrors enough without imagining more.

“I won’t try to escape,” she said. For the present, it was true. She felt too physically weak, too unsure of her ground.

“You won’t succeed,” he retorted. Or maybe it wasn’t a retort, just an affirmation. His tone provided no clue.

The lavatory had a lock on the door, giving her a few minutes of privacy, but no window. Even if there had been, she
knew she would have been unable to clamber out. At a guess they were on the third floor, and it was a long way down.

Back in her room Harbeak brought her lunch consisting of thick vegetable soup, brown bread, cheese. “I want to see Will,” she said, as he set down the tray. “Where is he?”

“Somewhere less comfortable than here,” Harbeak responded, ignoring her request.

The day passed with horrible slowness. Prison must be like this, Gaynor decided, dull, dull, dull, but without the edge of fear to sharpen the tedium into regular bouts of panic. She had no television, no book, nothing to do but think, nothing to think about but her current predicament. Thinking sent her pulse into a crescendo and drove her to beat on the door, crying to be let out, finally controlling herself with an effort that seemed to drain all her willpower. But no one answered, no one came. At other times she stood by the window, trying to bend or dislodge the bars, but they were cemented in, and the iron was rigid and immovable. And if I
could
shift them, she thought, how would I get down? In stories, heroines made use of knotted sheets; but although sheets were available they were too strong to tear, and she had neither knife nor scissors to help her out. In any case, she had never been any good at rope climbing when she was at school, and she saw no likelihood of dramatic improvement now. But I suppose it would be worse, she concluded, if I made the rope, and knew how to climb, and still couldn’t get between the bars.

Periodically she checked the mirror, made wary by experience, looking for reflections that should not have been there, lifting it clear of the wall to search for technological devices. But it remained just a mirror, glossy, limpid, as if any memories it might have retained had been polished out of existence.
You are watched
, Harbeak had said, and she went frantic investigating portraits for eyeholes, examining light fittings and the knobs on drawer and cabinet for miniaturized cameras. He said it to frighten me, she decided, as if that were necessary. He was probably watching her now, enjoying her fear, savoring it—but from where? She had turned over every wood louse. She tried hate instead of fear not for Dr. Laye, who was too potent, too awesome a figure, far beyond any passion of hers but for Harbeak, Harbeak with his impeccable
suit and his façade of courtesy and his elusive resemblance to Goebbels. But she was no better at hating than she was at rope climbing. Her enmity was a poor, weak thing, an ember that never grew into a flame, and the thought of what Harbeak might have done to her in her sleep—what he might yet do only filled her with horror and disgust. Disgust not only at him but at herself: her fear, her vulnerability, her helplessness, her sheer imbecility for being here. We should never have come, she thought. Fern will return to her body without our help. What did the Spirit say?
I have cast the augury, and seen her
. She will awaken, and come here to find us, and it would be better if she had stayed in a coma forever.