The Young Unicorns

by Madeleine L'engle

  “Fall,” the Dean said. “The Fall. Dear God, Thomas, I can’t bear it.”

  “You can. If you have to, you will. But I’m not at all convinced that you’ll have to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s so fantastic I can’t speak about it until I’m surer. But I have an idea that His Darkness is doing a strange impersonation indeed.”

  “You’re really on to something?”

  “I think so. Let’s go.”

  They moved past the garbage cans, out the door, and down three steps to the street. Cyprian, on a loose leash, gave a snort of relief and moved from his master’s side to investigate the gutter. The Dean let him sniff for a moment, then jerked on the lead and started walking briskly, his long legs moving loosely and comfortably under his heavy, monklike habit. A wet wind cut across his cheeks, blew through his short-cropped, tightly curling and grizzled hair. Beside him the Canon strode, muffled in his dark coat and fur hat, his face gleaming pale in contrast to the Dean’s swarthiness.

  During these nocturnal walks the Dean had made enemies as well as friends. He had been shot at more than once: he was aware, now, that they were being stalked. He could not see A, sliding along in the shadows behind them, but he could feel that someone was there. He said nothing about this; he was certain that Tallis also knew that they were being followed; therefore neither of them needed to mention it.

  The Dean had won general respect, if not admiration, in the crowded streets around the Cathedral, because he was strong and a fighter and walked casually through danger. As people had come to trust him they had come to the Cathedral; the great place was filled now for most of the services. Some who could not bring themselves to enter the Cathedral itself came to the Cathedral offices for money, for food, for help with a greedy landlord or extortioner, or simply for a word of kindness or encouragement. Sometimes they came to the Dean quite literally to be held in his strong, comforting bear hug.

  So he went to them in return, accepting invitations to countless cluttered kitchens for meals, and the luxury of a solitary dinner in the Deanery was something he seldom allowed himself.

  They walked in silence, glad of the exercise after the heavy meal, until the Dean asked, “Tom, what about Hyde?”

  “I don’t like him.”

  The Dean laughed. “And that’s that? No, Tom. It won’t do. It’s not enough. You know that.” He paused to speak to a group of teen-agers outside a drugstore, slipping into the staccato Spanish in which he would always be more at home than in English.

  Tallis’s classical Spanish was not up to the affectionately insulting idioms that flew back and forth, but he thought he caught the hint of a warning, for which the Dean seemed to be saying thank you, then gave his spontaneous, infectious laugh, waved goodbye, and walked on, Cyprian snuffling close behind him. The hideous dog had submitted graciously to assorted caresses from the boys, but now his ears were flattened, his ungainly body tense.

  “I’ve learned over the years,” Tallis continued, “to trust my instincts, especially when they’re this strong. It’s almost as though one could tell something basic about people by their smell. What were those kids warning you about, Juan? Other than that we’re being followed?”

  “That unlikely plot to take over the city.”

  “Aren’t most things unlikely? Isn’t the Micro-Ray? Something smells very bad about Hyde, Juan. Of that I’m sure.”

  “He’s given a lot to the Cathedral. The Bishop says he’s deeply religious.”

  The Canon gave a short laugh. “It isn’t the people who think they’re atheists who worry me. It’s those who think they’re religious.”

  “Hyde’s a brilliant neurologist. That’s an incontestable fact.”

  “I don’t contest it. Nevertheless he’s dangerous. He’s power-mad, Juan. He let that much out this afternoon.”

  “And Austin? How does he smell to you?”

  “I’ve told you: like a good bright child. Dave sees this. He put his finger on the man’s naïveté, his innocence. They’re a good family. Perhaps they’ve been a little too self-sufficient up to this year, but their relationships are essentially healthy. One can tell a great deal around a dinner table. The parents aren’t devourers. They don’t manipulate. I think the closest we ever come in this naughty world to realizing unity in diversity is around a family table. I felt it at their table, the wholeness of the family unit, freely able to expand to include friends, to include me even through Austin’s and my suspicions of each other, and yet each person in that unit complete, individual, unique, valued. But Austin has no right to be so innocent, you know. It’s a bad flaw. It may be as dangerous as Hyde’s viciousness.”

  “Viciousness?”

  “Yes. It’s there in him. I’m positive. But Austin’s a good man. In the lab he’s obviously got a touch of genius.”

  The Dean cut in, “As Hyde has in the operating theatre.”

  The Canon sighed. “Granted. One of the mysteries of this world is that a man’s genius and his moral perception are sometimes in inverse proportions. Why can’t the great men be good, and the bad devoid of gifts? But it just isn’t the way human nature works. I have a suspicion that Hyde’s a very bad man indeed, brilliance or no. And Austin’s a good man and a fine scientist. But I’m not sure he’s very bright.”

  “Can’t that sometimes be a strength?” the Dean wondered. “I console myself that it may be. I’ve been called a fool often enough for cutting official functions to wander about the city this way. The Bishop has visions of Utopia, Tom, and it is always a heresy, no matter how nobly conceived. He’s straying further and further from reality. And something very strange—”

  “What?”

  “For almost a year he hasn’t done one single ordination or confirmation.”

  “Why not?”

  “His health. Those ghastly headaches always seem to knock him down whenever there’s a major Cathedral function.”

  “So one of the Suffragans takes over?”

  “Yes, but—” He broke off as a voice behind them called, “Hey, Dean! Is that you?”

  The two men and the dog turned to see a boy hurrying along the street to catch up with them. Cyprian pressed against the Dean, teeth bared, ready to spring. The boy wore the familiar leather jacket with the bat on the sleeve. He took the butt of a cigarette from his lips, threw it to the sidewalk, and ground it out with his heel. “Listen, Dean,” he said, panting, “listen to me!”

  “I’m listening,” the Dean said quietly. “Take your time. Catch your breath.” This, he knew, was not their stalker, who still lurked somewhere in the shadows near them.

  “There isn’t time,” the boy said. “I’m Q, and I’m never going to rub the lamp again. He’s kidnapped the little kid.”

  A gunshot rang through the tense air.

  Cyprian sprang.

  “Dean!” Q cried. “Are you hurt?”

  Eighteen

  Mrs. Austin continued, after her husband had left to try to find the children, to sit on the marble stairs. She poured out to the Rabbi all that she knew of the events of the past days, and she realized that she knew very little, certainly not enough to explain Dave and Rob’s disappearance and Mr. Rochester’s return alone; or Vicky and Emily’s going off into the night by themselves without a word. She felt isolated, an unwilling island torn from the mainland, cut off from her husband and children. The family unit which had been so warm and close seemed now to have exploded into separate, unknown fragments.

  “Are you keeping anything from me, Suzy?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “If you know anything, you must tell me.”

  “I don’t know anything, Mother, honestly.”

  “Everybody else seems to,” Mrs. Austin said bitterly. She turned to the Rabbi. “My husband does. I’ve known all autumn that he was keeping something from me, something that was troubling him.”

  “Mrs. Austin,” the Rabbi said gently, “I think we should go into the mu
sic room, where we can sit more comfortably and where we will be by the phone if it rings.”

  Mrs. Austin managed to get up off the stairs. Her legs felt like water. She knew that she was not hiding her panic from Suzy. She went to the desk chair and sat, reaching one hand out towards the telephone, then dropping it helplessly onto her lap. Suzy sat directly in the center of the small gold sofa and looked at her mother. Mr. Rochester paced, back and forth, up and down.

  The Rabbi had seated himself on Emily’s piano bench. “I should have realized that something was wrong before Rob had to mark his R …”

  Suzy, looking from her mother to the Rabbi, thought of Mr. Theo’s remark about “parlous” times. “What does parlous mean?”

  “Perilous,” the Rabbi told her. He rose from the piano and began to pace slowly, as though in imitation of Mr. Rochester, his head bowed, his beard moving slightly against his caftan. Mr. Rochester went out into the hall and sat in front of the door.

  The phone rang.

  Mrs. Austin picked up the receiver. “Hello? Hello? … No … . No, it’s not.” She hung up. “It was a wrong number.”

  There was a long, empty silence.

  The phone rang again. This time Mrs. Austin did not fling herself at the receiver. “It’s probably the same wrong number, someone wanting Gladys again … . Hello? … Mr. Theo! … Oh, Mr. Theo, I’m glad you called! … No, everything isn’t all right … . We don’t know where Rob and Dave are, or Vicky and Emily, they’ve all disappeared. Mr. Rochester came home alone and my husband went off to try … I’m here with Suzy and Rabbi Levy … . Oh, yes, please do come …”

  Her mother was talking to Mr. Theo, Suzy felt, as though the old man were her father, and the realization hit Suzy for the first time that indeed Mrs. Austin and Mr. Theo were a generation apart, that her mother would seem a child to the old man, that all grown-ups are not an indistinguishable chronological lump.

  As Mrs. Austin put down the receiver, there was a pounding on the door and Mr. Rochester began to bark.

  Rob was not quite certain how frightened he really was during the trip down the winding marble stairs and through the Cathedral crypt. His journey was different from Dave’s the week before because now all the lights were on, and the Bishop turned them off behind him, so that as they moved into light they left a wake of darkness. The clutter of marble statuary, tombs, discarded wrought-iron lecterns, broken carved wooden thrones, all the paraphernalia of the crypt was even more fascinating to Rob than the clutter in the familiar attic in the country, and he felt the edges of his fear receding as the Bishop turned to him with a gentle smile. “Wouldn’t this be a wonderful place for a game of hide-and-seek, Robert?”

  Rob agreed. “Or for plays. We used to put on lots of plays in the attic in Thornhill. We had a big trunk full of costumes, and Vicky wrote plays for us.”

  “Interested in the theatre, are you?”

  “I don’t know that much about it, except for our attic plays. Dr. Gregory said it was very classical of us. My mother knows about the theatre, though, and she pasted lots of pictures of actors and actresses up on the attic walls.”

  “Who, for instance?”

  “Somebody from olden days called Duse, I think, is one I remember, because I liked her face. And then there was a picture I liked of a man in a Roman toga, Henry something or other.”

  “Grandcourt?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Rob said absently, inspecting a broken stone gargoyle, an imp with an expression half-threatening, half-charming, made lopsided by the absence of one of the horns curving from its forehead, and a large chip off one ear.

  “Grandcourt, eh?” the Bishop asked with a pleased purr. “So you like that little gargoyle, Robert? There used to be stone masons here at the Cathedral who would do that kind of work, but Amon Davidson’s the only one left, and he works only when he feels like it. But not for long, Robert. The Bishop has plans. For Amon, for the Cathedral, for the city. We have now what we have never had before, the vision of Bishop Fall and the help of the lamp.”

  Rob looked up from inspecting a broken angel’s wing. “The lamp? And the genie?”

  “Ah, the genie, Robert! You would like to see the genie again, would you not?”

  Rob straightened up. There was something about the pleasure rumbling deep in the Bishop’s throat he did not like. It was on the surface similar to Emily’s deep, purring chuckle, but it had no mirth in it. Now Rob knew that he was afraid.

  One ought to be a little afraid of a bishop, he had said. But not afraid this way.

  “Come.” The Bishop’s hand closed over Rob’s. Emily had made all the Austin children very conscious of the touch of a hand. This was not in the least like holding hands with one of his family. It was not in the least like holding hands with Canon Tallis.

  Then Rob remembered how, in The Princess and Curdie, Curdie was given the great gift of being able to tell, when holding someone’s hand, what he was really like inside. The paw of an animal might be the trusting hand of a child; the hand of a man might turn to the slithering cold of a snake. What was the Bishop’s hand? It was thin, delicate, bones and veins marked in an intricate pattern, and it held Rob’s warm fingers in a cold, hawklike talon.

  The bishop urged him into the enormous boiler room. “To the lamp. To the genie.” With his free hand he picked up a powerful batteried lantern from the floor by one of the great blue boilers. “Come, Robert. We’re going through a lovely long dark tunnel to my palace, where everything will be brilliant and beautiful. Won’t that be fun?”

  “No!” Rob cried. “Let me go! You hurt! I want to go home!”

  But the talon clamped more tightly around the little boy’s wrist.

  “It’s only a scratch,” the Dean said. “Stop fussing.”

  He pulled away from Tallis and pressed with the fingers of his right hand against his left upper arm. Cyprian came bounding back. Their attacker was nowhere to be seen, but Cyprian carried a scrap of leather in his powerful jaws. “Good boy,” the Dean said. “Good boy, Cyprian.” His voice was muffled through teeth clenched against pain. “Come. Back to the Cathedral. Q, tell us what you know while you walk.”

  They headed towards Morningside Park, Q panting out a tale of an unused subway station discovered by Amon Davidson, of a bishop’s throne, secret meetings, the lamp, the genie.

  “What you do, see,” Q said, as he hurried up the steep hill of the park with the Dean and the Canon, “is you rub the lamp. And then this guy in green robes comes out. He’s called a genie, see, and you have to go along with all this zug if you want to fly.”

  “How do you fly?” Tallis asked. Beside him he could hear Q breathing heavily.

  “You lie down on this couch, like, and this genie guy points this sort of pencil thing at you, and you take a flight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like you feel good. All over, everywhere, see? All you do is feel. You could sing and dance, it’s so good. Sometimes if it lasts long enough you scream.”

  “Because it’s so good?”

  “Yeah. It’s so good you’ll do anything to rub the lamp again.”

  —The pleasure center of the brain, the Canon realized.—He’s using the Micro-Ray to stimulate the pleasure center, to—

  “Hey, what’s—” Q started, for the Dean had stopped so abruptly that he bumped into Tallis and the boy, and Cyprian sat heavily on his haunches.

  “Look.”

  They looked uphill to the Cathedral. High on the roof the archangel Gabriel with his trumpet was silhouetted against the wintry sky. Below him was the semicircle of chapels, St. James, St. Ambrose, St. Martin of Tours, St. Saviour, St. Columba, St. Boniface, St. Ansgar, all showing a flickering of light.

  “Fire!” Q cried.

  The Dean was already running up the hill, Cyprian bounding clumsily beside him. Tallis followed as best he could. Q evaporated downhill into the darkness.

  Nineteen

  Dr. Austin came in the front door of the
Gregory mansion, Rochester rushing to greet him, stopping, tail down in disappointment as he saw that his master was alone. Suzy realized that the pounding, though hurried, had been in the rhythm of Emily’s fugue, to let them know who was at the door.

  Mrs. Austin rushed to the front hall.

  “No,” her husband said. “Nothing. Anything happen here?” He took her arm and led her back to the music room.

  “A wrong number. I think it was legitimate because it sounded like our usual wrong numbers, and it was someone wanting Gladys, and we’ve had her before. And Mr. Theo called. He’s on his way over. He says he’s been worried about the children all day …” She looked at her husband. “Oh, Wallace. Wallace, I’m so glad you’re back … . I don’t believe that any of this has happened. What I really believe is that Dave and Rob will come in with Rochester, that Vicky and Emily are off somewhere having secrets from Suzy …” She pressed her knuckles against her lips to control her mounting hysteria.

  “It’s not a time for secrets,” Suzy said. “Daddy! Daddy!”

  Rabbi Levy said, “Your daughter is right. I think that you must tell us, Dr. Austin, everything that you know. You must tell us what it is that has been worrying you, what it is that you have been trying to spare your wife. And you must not exclude your daughter. No matter what this is about, your whole family is involved, the children perhaps even more than the adults.”

  Dr. Austin nodded in agreement but did not speak. He went over to the fireplace, put his hands on the marble mantelpiece, and looked searchingly at the cold ashes in the grate.

  His wife asked, “What was in your letter from Dr. Shen-shu? Why is Dr. Gregory in Liverpool?”

  “The letter first.” Dr. Austin looked slowly round the room, at his wife, his child, at the old man. “They’re on their way here, Shasti, Shen-shu, and Gregory. Tallis sent for them.”

  “Why?” Mrs. Austin asked.