The Witch Queen

by Jan Siegel

  “He sees you,” Fern pointed out. “Evidently.”

  “Reluctantly,” Ragginbone amended. “He can be useful. He did me a favor when you were last in trouble. And I would not like him to be used by the wrong people.”

  “You mean,” Fern translated, “you used him, but you don’t want him doing any favors for anyone else.”

  Ragginbone smiled his appreciation, but did not answer.

  “So where is this hermitage of his?” Fern demanded. “A desolate moor—a Welsh mountainside—a gloomy forest—if there is any gloomy forest left in this country, which I doubt.”

  “It’s in the jungle,” said Ragginbone.

  “The jungle?”

  “The urban jungle. Lost in the crowd—the easiest place to lose yourself in the modern world. He has one basement in an underground warren, one door among a million doors. In the country, people peer and question; in the city, who cares? Who notices?”

  Fern said: “You mean he’s in London?”

  “Soho,” said Ragginbone.

  In Soho, anything can happen. There are strange secret bars that only open at three in the morning, clubs that switch their decor and their names every couple of months, people who change their identities, their faces, their sex. Buildings interconnect, with rooftop escape routes and hidden passageways. Subterranean kitchens steam and bubble. Sex shops and strip shows are available alongside the smartest restaurants, the coolest dives. In what was currently the most fashionable nightclub in town, Luc Walgrim was dancing. Most Englishmen dance badly: they are too inhibited, too protective of their machismo; they think dancing is for women and gays. But Luc was an exception. His style was deliberately restrained, his slow, snaky movements met the rhythm of the music at every other beat, his expression was that of someone whose mind was far away. His partner, intrigued, writhed closer, and then, when that expression did not alter, writhed away again. Luc did not notice. He felt alienated, out of place, not merely because it was Saturday night and he was sober—he had been drinking steadily but without apparent effect, and had achieved that state of black, illusory sobriety in which too many people think they are capable of driving a car. The wall on one side was all mirror, and for a moment, catching the reflection of the gyrating crowd, he thought he saw a carnival of dancers with animal heads, not masks but real animals, with red tongues and whiteless eyes . . . He looked for his own face, and it was gray and vulpine, fang toothed and point eared. He turned away and moved back toward the bar, trying to talk to friends, mouth to ear, against the clamor of the music, but all he could hear of their answers was braying, cackling, screeching. He ordered a cocktail from a barman who looked suddenly like a donkey, thinking rather too late that he had been unwise to stick with the absinthe.

  Without conscious effort he found himself picturing Fern Capel appearing on the far side of the room, walking toward him. It was impossible to imagine her with the head of a beast; even on such short acquaintance, he sensed that she was always only herself. Yet he had very little idea who that self really was. He visualized her moving among the frenetic dancers with still, quiet purpose; the strobe lighting did not touch her; her face was isolated in its own pallor. Her lips parted and he knew she spoke, though he could not hear what she said. Then the image dissolved into the melee of the nightclub, and there were the animals again, making their animal noises, jerking their human limbs in a clumsy fandango. He called out, or thought he did—Help me—and there was a whisper in his head, louder than the surrounding cacophony: “Come with me.” It took all the self-discipline he could muster not to run from the club.

  Outside, he went where his feet took him. Past the statue of Eros, along Piccadilly, across Hyde Park Corner and on to Knightsbridge. The traffic was scarcer now, the beggars were asleep. Cabs curb-crawled suggestively at his heels, but he waved them away. In a doorway, he saw someone huddled in a blanket, moaning, but when he bent over hesitantly, she stared at him with glazed eyes and said she was fine. She may be dead by morning, he thought, and I can do nothing. Or she may be alive, and looking for another fix of whatever she is fixed on, and I can still do nothing. My sister’s body lies in a hospital ward, and I have done nothing. He had found her teddy bear that day and laid it beside her, telling the nurses not to remove it. They indulged him. His father had not been to see Dana for nearly three weeks. Anger, frustration, guilt, despair had all gone cold inside him, and now the absinthe filled his mind with phantoms.

  He was approaching his father’s Knightsbridge home. It loomed over him in all its pale elegance, teetering above porch and pillar, slices of yellow light showing between half-drawn curtains. He was dimly aware that it was very late, surely too late for Kaspar, who rarely kept such hours. The front door opened inward and Luc retreated, moving from shadow to shadow, sheltering behind a gatepost. A woman came out wrapped in a full-length velvet evening cloak, black or some very dark color; his father followed. At least, he assumed it was his father, but he could not be sure, because the man had the head of a dog—a lean hound’s head with dumb, obedient eyes. The woman’s face was invisible, hidden in the lee of her hood. A car that must have been parked farther along the road drew up beside them, silent as smoke; the man opened the car door. The woman turned to say goodnight, and Luc saw under the hood.

  He had been expecting some kind of cat, domestic or wild, a chocolate-tipped Siamese or a mottled ocelot. But the face beneath the hood belonged to neither animal nor human. The eyes were enormous, staring, deep as midnight; the skin shriveled against the skull. There was no nose, only two holes like pits set just above the mouth. The shrunken lips drew back from a ragged array of teeth. Even in his bemused condition Luc reeled, knocking his temple against the post, stifling an oath before it could escape. The woman got into the car. His father closed the door and stood watching while it drove away; then he went back inside the house. Luc slid to the ground and rested his brow on his hands, fighting in vain for some kind of clarity.

  Fern telephoned his flat as soon as she returned to London. “Hello,” said the machine. “This is Luc. Leave a message, and I may get back to you.” It did not sound promising. She considered trying his mobile, but guessed he was at the hospital and it would be better not to disturb him. Instead, while Ragginbone went off on affairs of his own, she decided to marshal her troops. One particular meeting was long overdue.

  “Oh,” Gaynor said rather lamely. “I didn’t expect to see you.”

  “Nor I you,” said Will.

  “I knew, if I told you, you’d create difficulties.” Fern addressed the two of them impartially. “I’ve had enough of this idiocy. Sit down. I got you to come here because I need you—both of you. Ragginbone says I should accept help, and you—“ she looked at Gaynor “—said you were already a part of this, and you—“ she turned to Will “—well, you always have been. According to Gaynor, you’re my team, so behave like one. You have to work together. Talking to each other would be a start.”

  “I never stopped talking to Gaynor,” Will said, with only a trace element of frigidity. “I simply haven’t had the opportunity to do so—for quite some time.”

  “I’m in the book,” Gaynor said before she could stop herself.

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to telephone you,” Will responded evenly. “Somehow, that wasn’t quite the message that came across.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “You ran off in such a hurry, you forgot to leave me your number.”

  “You could have gotten it from Fern! No—I mean, that wasn’t what I . . . Look, if you’d wanted to talk to me, you would have called. You always do what you want; I know that. So when you didn’t call, or—or anything, I assumed you didn’t . . . want to.”

  “You seem to have worked out my motives very easily,” Will said, masking uncertainty with sarcasm.

  Gaynor fidgeted with her hair, a lifelong nervous habit, but did not attempt to reply.

  “Time’s up,” Fern said, glancing pointedly at her watc
h. “If that was apology and reconciliation, I didn’t think much of it, but it will have to do. We have serious matters to discuss. All the evidence indicates Morgus is back—”

  “Back?” Will repeated. “But she’s dead. Are we talking some kind of ghost, or a tannasgeal—or has someone been fruit picking on the Eternal Tree?”

  “You’re behind,” said Fern. “Take your mind off your personal problems, and I’ll fill you in.”

  In the end, she brought them both up to date, concluding with a brief account of her discussions with Ragginbone. In asking questions and debating possibilities, Will and Gaynor forgot their mutual embarrassment and inevitably began to talk to each other as well as Fern.

  “What I don’t understand,” Will said finally, “is where Azmordis—sorry, the Old Spirit—fits into all this. And don’t say he’s out of it this time, because I won’t believe you. He’s never out of the game for long. He’s like God or the devil: where Man goes, he goes.”

  “He’s played both god and devil down the ages,” Fern said. “And we were credulous: we fell for it. We worshiped him and feared him. He’s grown strong on that. All the same . . .”

  “He wants you on his side,” Will persisted, “and you’ve turned him down twice. Could he be sending you this recurring dream to try to mesmerize you somehow? Third time—”

  “Third time lucky?” Fern finished for him. “Perhaps. But I’m not a child now; he would find it very hard to get inside my head. My Gift is more developed: it guards me. Besides, if the dream is meant to mesmerize, it isn’t working. It just fills me with horror. Worse each time . . . Let’s leave it for the moment. Right now, Morgus is the problem.”

  “She can’t be as dangerous as the Old Spirit,” said Gaynor. “Can she?”

  “In some ways she’s more dangerous. He’s been in the real world since the beginning; he knows how it works. He’s become a part of what Ragginbone calls the greater pattern, an evil part maybe, but still only a part. His goals of corruption and despair are woven into the fate of the world, an underlying theme to our goals of happiness and decency and universal sharing. Morgus is different. She’s lived too long outside. Her attitudes are those of the Dark Age. If she’s heard of nuclear weapons, you can bet she thinks radioactive fallout is a kind of diabolical magic, something you could stop with a spell of Command. I suspect—I fear—that to her modern society is a toy shop full of entertaining new gadgets. Heaven knows what she may do with them.”

  “What you are saying,” Will summarized, “is that the Old Spirit knows how to play cricket, but cheats, whereas Morgus thinks it’s croquet.”

  “And plays by witches’ rules,” Gaynor added.

  “Witches’ rules,” Fern echoed. “One of these days I must find out what they are.”

  She spoke to Luc the next day. He sounded distracted and told her at least three times he had found the teddy.

  “Good,” said Fern, giving up. “Hang on to it.”

  “Did you find out anything in York?”

  “Not York, Yorkshire. I didn’t go there to find out anything. I went to consult someone, and I consulted. Finding out comes next. Excuse me, but . . . are you quite all right?”

  “Not really,” he admitted. “A two-day hangover. The headache doesn’t want to go.”

  “What were you drinking?”

  “Absinthe.”

  “Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder,” Fern quipped. “Sorry, that must be as old as the hills. It’s poisonous, isn’t it? I should have warned you, be very careful with alcohol at the moment. It lays your mind wide open. Anything could get in.”

  “I know,” said Luc. “I think it did. I kept seeing people with animal heads. I looked in the mirror and even I had one. You were the only person who was normal.”

  “I wasn’t there,” Fern said, disconcerted.

  “No, but . . . I imagined you.”

  “What sort of head did you have?”

  “Something gray and foxy,” he said. “Look, I’m not sure if it’s important, what happened next, but maybe I ought to tell you. It wasn’t a dream, but it felt like one, and you said I should focus on my dreams. Afterward, I went around to my father’s house. I was walking home from this club and it’s more or less on the way to my place. There was a voice in my head, and I walked and walked, and then I was there. He came out with a woman. He didn’t see me; I just watched. He had the head of a dog, maybe a wolfhound, all lean and silvery, but his eyes were stupid. The woman had a cloak and hood. She got in a car and was driven away.”

  “What kind of animal was she?” Fern asked.

  “Not an animal. I saw her for only a second. She looked—hideous. A skull face with staring eyes, and no nose, and jagged teeth . . . This sounds insane, doesn’t it? I was probably hallucinating.”

  “Probably,” said Fern. “Could you ask your father who she was?”

  “I rang him this morning. Said I was passing in a taxi the other night, and I’d seen him with someone. She’s a Mrs. Mordaunt, Melissa Mordaunt. Apparently she’s renting Wrokeby from him. His voice was strange when he spoke of her. He said something about gratitude . . .”

  “He’s lending her the house out of gratitude?” Fern hazarded. “But for what?”

  “He never feels gratitude,” Luc said flatly.

  “I think,” said Fern, “you’d better tell me more about your father.”

  Ragginbone called around that evening. “My friend in Soho has agreed,” he said. “We can use his basement.”

  “When?” asked Fern.

  “Friday,” said Ragginbone. “The night of the full moon.”

  It is full moon tomorrow. I will make the circle, and call up the spirits, even the oldest and strongest, and put them to the question. I will summon Azmordis himself, if need be, but I will find her. I will find her in the end.

  Part Two

  Valor

  V

  In the city, you cannot see the night sky. Traffic pollution thickens the air, and the reflected glare of a million streetlamps fades out the stars. The constellations are numberless and stretch into infinity, yet a tiny cluster of man-made lights can dim their far flung fires out of existence. And the moon is paled, and hides its concave profile behind the hunched shoulders of buildings and the jagged crests of walls, and in the blur of unclean fogs. For the city is the unreal place, where nature and magic are diminished, set at a distance, and Man reigns supreme in the jungle of his own creation, controlling, manipulating, lost, and alone. Only the full moon is big enough, and bright enough, to impinge on the cityscape. And in the summer when the moon is hugest, the concrete towers cannot hide it, and it rolls into view around every corner. The glow is stronger than the electric lamps, and the creatures of the city gaze up into its golden face and remember who they really are.

  On that Friday night the sky was clear and the moon seemed larger than ever, its brow lined and pitted with mountain ranges, its cheeks smooth with oceans of dust. It peered over the rooftops into the alleyway called Selena Place, and touched briefly on a shop window hooded with a shabby canopy, where a few stuffed birds showed their molting plumage in a glass case against a background of unswept cobwebs and unlit shadows. Soho was busy, but the alley was relatively quiet; people came and went soft-footed from both the social club and the unsocial, mumbling names not necessarily their own into discreet intercoms. A ginger cat that was diligently excavating a garbage can twitched at the moon’s touch on its fur and glanced up quickly with a glitter of eyes. It returned to foraging, ignoring a passerby, looking up again only when a group of four turned the corner. In front strode an old man whose broad-brimmed hat and flapping jacket made him resemble the traditional concept of Fagin; a much younger man and two women came on his heels. The cat surveyed them for a moment and then shot up a vertical wall and through a broken pane. No one paid any attention. Beside the hooded window, the door of a shop that never opened trembled under the impact of multiple knocks.

  “Maybe he’s gone,”
said Fern, after a pause.

  “Never.” Ragginbone lowered his mouth to the keyhole and began to mutter words they could not hear, words that crept through the crack and into the darkness beyond. The door began to shiver of its own accord; chains rattled inside. They caught the sound of scurrying feet and scraping bolts; the door jerked open to the limit of a safety chain; part of a face appeared in the gap. A pale subterranean face with a single boot-button eye. A smell of unwashed clothing wafted toward them.

  “Moonspittle,” said Ragginbone. “Let us in.”

  “Too many. Two too many.” Or possibly too too many. The fluting whisper was thin with fear, shrill with obstinacy. “Go away.”

  “We will never go away,” Ragginbone said. “There is power here. Feel it. You can shut it out but you cannot make us leave. We will wait for as long as it takes.”

  “No . . .”

  “They will see us waiting. They will want to know why. They will want to know who is here, making us wait so long.”