The White Wolf's Son (6 page)

“Alfred,” said Mum, looking up from our big Raeburn stove, “come in and help me with the nuts. Gertie and Dad can look after
our guests.” Alfy came in reluctantly, his big blond head bowed in disappointment, his red cheeks ruddier than usual. I think
Mum had made him feel a bit of an idiot. When I tried to be friendly he snatched away and started pouring out nuts, but I
knew he wouldn’t stay in a bad mood for long. We heard the TV go on again. Both Mr. Zodiac and Dad seemed to be taking a keen
interest in the news.

“He reminds me of the Winter brothers,” said Mum. “Do you know who they are?”

“Some old pop stars of yours and Dad’s?” I asked.

“I used to love them when I was in college.” She pushed back her mop of brown, curly hair.

“Bloody awful R and B.” Alf was being mean.

“Don’t say ‘bloody,’ Alfy,” she remonstrated mildly. “Have you finished doing those nuts.”

“I love blues,” I said. “Were they like Howling Wolf?”

“A bit.” She grinned at me and winked. We both knew Alfy would regret his snit, as he did within five minutes, when Gert came
in. She was as tall as Mum and skinny. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever known, much better looking than
any of the pop stars or actresses I’d seen. She had Mum’s curly hair, but it was red, and she had big hazel eyes, full lips,
and a fair skin, like Alf’s. She said there had been a series of earthquakes in the Middle East and another one on the American
West Coast. “The worse for some time. I think that’s what Mr. Z wanted to hear about. He thought we might even feel a few
shock waves here. Remember the last time?”

I took some fizzy water in for Monsieur Zodiac. The others were having wine and whisky.

Monsieur Zodiac and my dad were talking about the news. “Would that be why you and your friends have come here?” Dad was asking.

“Well, sir, it has something to do with our expedition, I’ll grant you.”

“And what of those others at the Bridge? Assuming they are still at the Bridge.”

“A wicked pair, sir. They mean your family no good. But with luck we’ll see them off in a few days. We await only the arrival
of the count and countess. We spoke to
them on the telephone, and they are taking the early train home in the morning. They hoped you could pick them up at Lancaster
Station.”

“Of course. We’d better think in terms of an early night, I suppose.”

“We’ll be ready to be off to the Hill, I think, as soon as everyone’s here. Your daughter did us the courtesy of booking supper.”

Until then nobody had known I had already booked the Hill. “How thoughtful…,” said Dad with a bit of a grin.

I had my fingers crossed everyone would be here in good time for the ham tea I anticipated. In the end there was no problem.
All the men returned in time, and Colonel Bastable ferried quite a lot of us up in his Bentley while the others had to go
in the old Lexus. It was a happy, busy night at the Hill. My parents didn’t know everything about
their
parents’ adventures, but they knew enough to understand that all these people turning up was a bit of an honor for us. Monsieur
Zodiac wasn’t hungry, so I had most of his tea, too!

Soon we were back at the house, and various people were saying good night. Monsieur Zodiac stayed with us while the others
went their separate ways. Again I had that sense of people posting watch. Again I felt very secure.

I drank my cocoa in front of the fire with the handsome albino. I’d heard the others speak of Monsieur Zodiac a little warily,
as if he were very fierce and temperamental, but I found him very easy to get along with. I felt sort of sorry for him, I
suppose. He bore his sadness, as Wheldrake says somewhere, like a steel
sheath about him, so that not even the blade of his wit could strike and harm.

Before I went up to bed, the albino patted my shoulder and looked down at me through his brooding crimson eyes. He made an
attempt to smile. It was kindly meant, and I saw something very much like a parent’s love in his expression. I was surprised,
but I smiled back.

“Look after yourself, little mademoiselle,” he said.

That night I woke up several times with bad dreams. They weren’t exactly nightmares, for I was always rescued before anything
got close enough to me, but they left me weak and feeling unpleasant, so much so that when Dad got up early, even though the
train didn’t arrive for a few hours, I got up, too. He wanted to go out for a walk, and I begged him to let me go with him.
I think I persuaded him while he was still sleepy; otherwise he might have remembered the warnings of the night before. But
I was used to testing my safety by the limits adults set on my freedom, so, because Dad let me go with him on his walk, I
thought it was perfectly okay.

It was another beautiful summer morning. As we climbed up the slopes and terraces above the house, we looked back. Tower House,
all sparkling granite and glass windows, looked as magical as the limestone, with the hills rolling away behind it across
to the distant, glaring sea. The North Yorkshire dales at their best.

We climbed over a stile and were soon in the fields, with a long drystone wall below us in a shallow valley and a small flock
of shaggy sheep grazing above. We paused to enjoy the view again.

Dad and I had often gone on this walk. It was one of our favorites. This morning we had to cut it short, because Dad needed
to get back and make the long drive to
Lancaster along the twisting lanes which crossed the border from Yorkshire to Lancashire. There are still people on that border
who fight those Wars of the Roses, at least verbally, and usually in the pub.

We were back safe and sound and ate breakfast before anyone else was up. Only when I had finished did I realize that Monsieur
Zodiac must have left while we were on our walk. He clearly planned to come back, said Mum, scruffy as ever in her old dressing
gown, because his door was open and his bag and clothes were still in his room, although his long, black instrument case was
gone. Mum, who wasn’t at her best in the morning, wondered where he could be taking his guitar at this time.

“He couldn’t have a gig around here. Not even a rehearsal. Could he, do you think?”

Alfy, still asleep, made a weak joke about playing in the sunrise with the hippies in Kirby Lonsdale, at which Gertie expressed
her disgust. The smell of coffee filled the room, followed by the acrid smell of burning toast. Alf preferred his breakfast
black.

I saw Dad off and went back out onto the common for a minute. I climbed the hill so that I would see the last of his car,
waved, and began to ascend again. Which was when the earth shuddered. Then stop. Then shudder again. Then shake.

As I got to the house, the earth tossed me up and threatened to throw me into the wall before I could get through the gate.

I was winded and scared. More explosions from the cavers, was my first thought. They’d gone too far. My second thought was
earthquake. I tried to remember how you were supposed to respond in such circumstances. I only knew what we’d been told to
do in the hotel, on our
trip to Disneyland, about getting under a secure beam and so forth.

I suddenly felt myself slipping, as if the ground had tilted beneath my feet, and I knew I was sliding towards the mouth of
what we sometimes called Claffam’s Cave—not a real cave at all, but a deep indent in the grass-covered limestone. I could
hardly make out the grassy bottom. How had it happened that one moment I was near our quadrangle door and the next I was sliding
down towards dark, slippery shale. I managed to get a strong grip on a bit of rock and hung on tight, stopping my descent.

The smell of rock dust clogged my nostrils, and I couldn’t get a foothold on anything. I didn’t have the breath to scream.
Surely someone in the house knew what was happening and was taking the proper action.

The shale continued to clatter and hiss past me, and I was shocked to see the foreign-looking man, Paul von Minct, in the
big greatcloak, shaking his dusty head out of the pit below me, his clawlike slate-colored fingers pushing back the shale
as he came upwards, his long, grey face intense in its determination to keep climbing towards me. At last I started screaming.
But nothing came out of my throat. This man, already described as my greatest enemy, was between me and my house. I couldn’t
shout, so I let go of the rock, landed on his face, knocked him over, pushed past him, and was out of the hole and back on
the green of the common. I had lost my bearings. Where was the house? I heard his heavy feet running behind me, and ahead
of me I saw another cave opening. I jumped in to avoid his seeing me, but I could still hear him nearby.

“Miss Oonagh. Could I have a word with you, perhaps?”

I kept my head down.

He must have known I was close enough to hear him. “You have broken the spell,” he snarled. His voice was like the hard bluster
of the wind. “You have shredded the net they put around you. Now you are ours!”

Then came the Puritan, Klosterheim, speaking in tones like a keening, shrieking blade on glass, behind his master. Could anyone
ever forget that grating voice? Or those black and white clothes, straight out of my old nightmares? “You proved your own
will, dear child. Your
own
will. You prefer to be with us …”

That was both so blatantly false and so nonsensical, I found some energy from laughing at it. I managed to stand, see where
I was, spot the house, and start running for it.

To my relief, I saw Monsieur Zodiac beckoning to me from overhead. I had not recognized him before, since he had discarded
the formal English evening dress. Now he looked just as I’d seen him in those old dreams, as if he had stepped out of one
of those Hindu movies I love, with long turban ends and a flowing costume, scarfs and sashes, all of bright, beautiful colors.
Why was he dressed so differently?

A growl from behind me.

“Here!”

There came a single deep note from the rock at his feet, and releasing me he reached down to pick up the black sword.

“Only this blade remains unchanged.”

He gasped and reached towards me, but I was drifting past him while he shouted my name. I knew I was lost
from his protection, possibly from all protection. Then I was running on solid ground in the dark, then slipping. All the
others had disappeared, and I could see no opening to the cave.

As I turned while falling, the only light before me now was in the green, reflecting eye of a very large cat!

Then this light, too, blinked out.

I
WASN’T SCARED
at that point, because I was confident someone would come and rescue me. I didn’t think anyone had planned to trap me in
the cave system. Monsieur Zodiac had, I was sure, protected me as best he could from von Minct and Klosterheim. So it was
hours before I gave up and began to feel my way downwards to where I was sure I saw a faint light. It could, of course, just
be the glaring eyes of the big cat I had seen in the dark, but I had no choice.

I moved carefully, trembling with cold. All I wore was a T-shirt and shorts. I was going steadily downwards, hoping to find
cavers there who could get me back to the surface. Then behind me I heard a loud crack, and the ground shook faintly. Bits
of stone rattled down, but nothing hit me. I had a sick feeling in my stomach, but I was trying to keep control of myself.
If Klosterheim could scare me so readily, then I ought to have all my wits about me. I climbed over a ridge of rock and suddenly
was looking down into a deep underground valley and the strangest city I had ever seen. It was like something out of a silent
black-and-white sci-fifilm. I knew it, of course. I had seen it in those old, terrifying dreams.

Crystal spires, which could almost have been natural formations, rose a thousand feet or more below me. A sil
very river ran through the city center, and strange, elongated beings, scarcely different in appearance from the crystalline
spikes, came and went on the slopes. As in those dreams, I felt no fear of them or their city. In fact, I knew a sense of
relief and wasn’t really surprised by my own lack of surprise. After all, I had known the city and its strange beings all
my life.

Then I realized some inhabitants had seen me and were coming towards me.

Just as in those dreams, I started to run away from them, even thought they offered me no harm. Then I saw the outlines of
a gigantic fox ahead, standing on his hind legs. My thought was, I can’t let him be killed by that Puritan. So I turned and
ran back towards the denizens of the city. I was prepared to do almost anything to make sure the bad part of the dream didn’t
come true.

Two of the weird-looking creatures in pointed hoods were approaching me now. I knew they were harmless. I just
had
to change the dream, make sure the fox wasn’t shot. I let them come towards me. They must have been nine or ten feet tall,
with hands so elongated they reminded me of bones. The tall, pointed hoods, which could have been some kind of carapace, made
them look like priests in an auto-da-fé or members of the Ku Klux Klan. Beneath these long, pointed skulls were faces at once
alien and amiable, with stone-colored folds of skin, their features seemingly formed from flowing volcanic rock and suddenly
frozen, utterly unhuman and beautiful. Within their strange masklike faces were eyes like ice, which clearly held nothing
but goodwill towards me. When they spoke, it reminded me of the soft music of wind chimes, and though I could not understand
their Ianguage,
I accepted the first being’s cold, long-fingered hand when he offered it. He knew I had no business being where I was. I felt
confident he would soon get me home. Taking his hand, I noticed an ordinary black cat with a thin body and long ears, which
had situated itself at the feet of the two alien beings. It regarded me with its almond-shaped eyes. As my hosts led me back
towards their city, the cat followed. Soon several similar cats, tails high, joined us. We made a strange procession as we
walked slowly down towards crystal spires.