"Have you ever heard of the lemures?" he asked at last.
"Monkeys?" Laura said.
"Primates!" said Sorry absentmindedly. "No— not those. The lemures were the wicked spirits of the dead
...
the lavae or lemures. I don't think your Carmody Braque is actually an incubus. I think he's a wicked spirit that has managed to win a body for itself once more and has probably gone on by absorbing the lives of others — their energy — to keep himself alive. You were almost right when you said he was a vampire, but it's not mere blood he's after. It's the essence of life itself." He looked at Jacko as if he were some sort of a rare flower whose stem had been bent by a storm. "The fact
is ..."
he said after a moment, and then grew silent. "You're a big, brave girl, Chant, aren't
you ...
the fact is I think your little brother has had it."
"You mean you think he might be going to die?" Laura cried, hearing her voice high and hard in the dim room.
"He's sealing up," Sorry said in his light, remote way. "Even if I had come last night there's nothing I can think of that I could have done about it." Laura began to feel very cold— as cold perhaps as Jacko lying in his blankets but not warmed by them.
"You really think he's going to die?" she repeated.
"He's sealing up." Sorry also repeated himself in a reasonable voice as if stating a fact she must accept. He looked quite lighthearted, interested in the problem but not affected by it. "Sealing will help for a while, I suppose. It's a form of hibernation — aestivation really ..."
"I don't want a lecture," Laura said, staring at him incredulously, for he sounded like a teacher at school.
"You really think he's going to die?"
"You asked me that a moment ago. I'm sorry," Sorry said and shrugged. "I shouldn't think he'd stand out for very long against this sort of possession. Well, it's not so much a possession as a consumption."
"Come into the tidy room," Laura said after a moment. "You could have a glass of symbolic sherry."
"At nine-fifteen in the morning?" Sorry asked, "and on an empty stomach?" He followed her out and sat down opposite her at the table. Laura lifted her eyes to his and looked at him steadily, and his grey eyes went blank and then shifted away from hers, turning silver in the oblique light from the window.
"You upset, Chant?" he said in a careful voice.
"He's my brother, and I love him, and you say he's going to die," Laura said. "He was a terrific little boy and you talk about him dying as if you just didn't give a stuff about it!"
"I used to have some brothers," Sorry said. "I don't know what I'd think if one of them was about to die, but I'm sure of this— none of them would worry about me. My feelings worked really well for years but I know they're not too good now. I suppose I did my own sealing off— a different sort from Jacko's— some time ago. But I'll do what I can for him, which is to ask Winter. She knows everything — Winter. So take a deep breath, Chant. You're no worse off and you might be better
off...
and at least you're not quite on your own with it any more."
This was true. Laura did take a deep breath and realized as she did so that Sorry was not watching her face, but the rise and fall of the breath under her old pajama jacket. He sighed himself, met her eyes, and gave her a smile both deprecating and conciliatory.
"You did invite me in," he pointed out, "even though you knew I was a mixed blessing."
"I didn't invite you to watch me breathe," Laura pointed out.
"You didn't make any conditions, either." Sorry looked away from her again. "An invitation means a lot to a witch. And the lemure could only put his mark on your brother's hand because it was held out to him. Sometimes these little rituals carry a whole lot of significance. Now you'll have to get him to take his mark off, and I think the only way to do that might be to put a mark of power on him and command him through that."
"Could I do it?" Laura asked disbelievingly. Sorry shook his head.
"I shouldn't think so," he said. "I think it would have to be a witch who did it— or someone similar. But the difficulty is he wouldn't let a witch get anywhere near him, let alone hold out his hand for any reason whatsoever. However, let's see what Winter comes up with."
"Well, I'm going to get dressed," Laura said. "Why don't you look at some books?"
"I'll make a cup of coffee if you like?" suggested Sorry. "Don't try and tell me where things are. I'll guess."
"You'll guess wrong," Laura said. "Mum puts them in funny places."
"But I have an instinct for coffee," Sorry said.
"You'd
swear it was witchcraft!"
"It's only instant," Laura told him, like a true hostess.
"I prefer instant," Sorry cried triumphantly. "I seem cosmopolitan now, but I'm suburban at heart."
"I'm not even sure what cosmopolitan is," Laura replied. "Suppose you make the coffee and stop talking about yourself."
"You're a bloody ruthless hostess," Sorry shouted after her, "You're supposed to make a guest feel relaxed." However, he sounded good-humoured.
"Well, watch out for the kettle," Laura said. "Don't worry if it hisses. It's got a slow leak. Fill it quite full, and when it whistles it's boiling."
She dressed rather more carefully than usual, borrowing a white shirt of her mother's to wear with blue jeans. The kettle screamed savagely and was silenced. As she was brushing her hair she heard Kate's voice and came in to find Kate, with Chris Holly at her elbow, staring with surprise at a stranger standing in the kitchen door offering her a cup of her own coffee. Sorry was friendly and polite and seemed completely at ease. He had found and set a tray and in the centre of it in one of the ex-peanut butter jars, was a bouquet of pink rose buds as perfect as if they had just come from a florist's window. Kate exclaimed over them, but Laura knew they were not natural flowers. They were the second outside proof she had had of Sorry's double nature.
"I'll be spending most of the day at the hospital," Kate said wearily. "Chris, what can be wrong with him?"
"Hospital's the place where they'll find out," said Chris.
Laura looked at him suspiciously, wondering what he was doing there, but it seemed that he had offered to come round and bring Kate a particular book and, knowing she would be out in the afternoon, she had called in at his flat to explain this to him. Chris had immediately offered to drive her to the hospital in his own car which was larger and had a heater that worked so that Jacko might be more comfortable. Laura thought he looked rather bewildered to find himself there and thought, too, with prickles of dismay that Kate had really gone to him because he was important enough to her for her to be anxious about letting him down. With most people she would have remembered afterwards.
"Laura, I don't know how long I'll be . . ." Kate began.
"Mrs Chant, my mother suggested that Laura might like to come and stay with us for the day— and for the evening too, if necessary," Sorry said. Laura knew he was inventing on the spur of the moment. Kate hesitated.
"That's very
kind . .."
she said in a doubtful voice.
"We've plenty of room," Sorry went on, "nothing wonderful, but we'd love to have her." He had cunningly made his invitation difficult to refuse by suggesting humble hospitality.
"Oh, look, I know it's an imposition," said Kate, "but the family next door— we usually work in with them— are away. I can't be sure when they'll be home. It would be a great weight off my mind
if...
are you sure your parents — that is, your mother — won't mind?"
"Winter counts as a father, Lord knows!" Sorry answered. "They'd be angry if I didn't bring her back with me in these circumstances." He sounded grave and responsible, but then he said to Laura, "Pack your toothbrush and your black satin pajamas, Chant," in a noticeably different tone. Kate, however, did not notice, though Chris Holly did and gave first Sorry, and then Laura herself a quick, curious glance.
Two 'phone calls later, Chris carried Jacko out to his large car and settled him down with Kate, and then with kisses and hugs exchanged between Kate and Laura, and to the sound of instructions about locking up, turning the electricity off, and promises to ring, they drove away to a private hospital which was expecting Jacko as a patient. It had a special rooming-in service, Kate said, so she could stay with Jacko for as long as she liked, all night if necessary. Chris and Kate and Jacko looked so like a family that Laura couldn't help feeling a desolate resentment that Chris should have gone and that she should have been left. Of course, she could not drive the car, but Kate's ready acceptance of his offers of help continued to disturb her.
"Now you're in my power!" Sorry said pleasantly. "Think of that and tremble."
"Big deal!" Laura replied. "I'm used to it from school."
"Well, then," said Sorry, "I'll have to come up with something novel, won't I? I'll check through my romances when I get back.
For the Love of Philippa
might have some good ideas in it. Or
Stolen Moments."
"Why would you want to make me tremble?" Laura cried out in irritation. "What a male chauvinist sort of idea."
"I am old-fashioned," Sorry agreed. "I didn't bring a helmet for you. I'll just crawl along but we'd better watch out for cops. Shall we take a risk and sneak a look at this antique shop?"
Laura was glad to be diverted. Later, with a few possessions in a shopping bag, she rode on the Vespa, holding on to Sorry, but following in her mind, with her truest attention, the progress through the city to the unknown hospital of Jacko and Kate. Even without witchcraft, the world grew slightly unbelievable, as if part of her were a reading eye and most of her was a character moving through a story — a character, moreover, who had begun to suspect that she might not be entirely real, might be nothing but a puppet, or words on a printed page.
"Of course Sorensen was right to bring you," said the younger Mrs Carlisle. "It must have been very distressing for you, and for your poor mother. I do hope Sorensen behaved appropriately."
"He was very polite, mostly," said Laura, "but very strange, too. He behaved as if something had gone wrong with a car, not a brother. But then he took me to the Gardendale Shopping Complex and we looked at the little shop. It was all shut up. Sorry said every chink was closed, that it was even sealed up along the bottom of the door. He said that I would have to make Mr Braque take the mark off my brother, but that he didn't know how I would do it because Braque was an old and careful demon."
"Well, we'll have to think about that," said old Mrs Carlisle. "We are not without our powers, you know ... We are the daughters of the moon. But we'll talk it over later on."
They were in a big, light room with a polished floor and woven rugs, the white walls so covered in pictures that they seemed to be full of windows into different worlds. One at her side showed the heart of a silver fire. Beside it was a scene in fresh, clear colours. Among little hills and trees and sparkling fountains, smiling monsters played cards or gathered flowers. In the background a great face, which was partly a building, watched the scene with melancholy detachment, and in the very front of the picture a man covered in short feathers turned an owl's face to stare out of the frame, but whether he was wearing a mask or whether he was some sort of man-bird Laura could not tell. It was one of many remarkable things in the room she would have liked to look at more closely, but the presence of her hostesses made her too shy to stare as much as she wanted to.
"I hope Sorensen has been kind to you," his mother said. "We cannot depend upon him not to make mistakes, but I should explain to you that it is not entirely his fault. I am to blame. I sometimes make the same sort of mistake myself." She wore a plain, pink dress with a dull finish, like the outside of a rose petal, which looked remarkably beautiful close to her white hair and cool, blue eyes. It made Laura immediately homesick for Kate who could not have worn a dress of such a colour for five minutes without smudging the front of it.
"It would be easier to explain to you if only you had known the farm in the old days," said old Mrs Carlisle. "It's probably a mistake to become too fond of land. But, you know, we loved our farm. Once the whole valley out there was ours, and it was like owning a whole world — a world with a forest, a river, a plain ... We made a dam of stones and we swam naked there. It sometimes makes me sad to think that I'll never be so close to water again— there are no private places left. There's always magic, of course, but in the past it was simple and direct." She sighed.
"We could see the city if we climbed the hill a little way," Miryam said. "It was like, well, it was like the army of a neighbouring country amusing itself in its own way, always maneuvering on the horizon. My mother is right you know — it is probably wiser not to love land too much. It never really belongs to you. No matter how you cherish it, it comes and goes. In the end it owns you."
"The army came closer you see," Winter said. "My husband was an oddity in his family, one of us really— a moon man— not a strong magician and not a witch. He was more like you, yourself, a sensitive. Now, his brothers have none of his touch. They're business men, big in the city. Still, we should have been warned, Miryam and I."
"The army came closer," Miryam chimed in, taking over, rather than interrupting. "Suddenly we no longer needed to climb the hill to see it. When we went out of our gate on what was then a country road we could see it coming towards us. That was already years ago..."
"Twenty years ago perhaps," Winter put in.
"I was very young and opinionated in those days," Miryam said, smiling back at a past self. "I thought the world began and ended at the farm gate and was quite prepared to mistrust everything beyond it. On rainy nights the city's lights began to take over the entire sky. My mother and I thought that we would try anything to save our valley and we decided ..." She glanced at her mother.
"We decided to raise what we call a cone of power over the farm," Winter said calmly. "We would still be visible, but somehow not observable. The city would know we were there but would pass us by. However, such a condition is hard to create and even harder to maintain. We needed a third witch."
Miryam leaned forward almost pleadingly.
"We work best as a trio, you see," she explained, "as the three female aspects."
"I was the old woman," Winter said.
"And I was to be the mother and my daughter the maiden." Miryam sat back again. "I thought that if I had a child it would certainly be a daughter. We have had daughters for fifty years — never a son in all that time. All the time I expected my baby, I spoke to it as if it were a daughter— promising her the valley— but as you know, I had a son."
"Sorry!" said Laura. "I mean Sorensen."
"It's an old family name," Winter said. "Even though we didn't expect him to be one of the family, we still gave him a name that tied him in with us. I suspected, when I realized Miryam could not exchange dreams with her unborn child. She had a difficult time having him. We were told he would be her only child and — to be frank — when he was born neither of us wanted him."
"Wouldn't he have done to be the maiden?" Laura asked with a faint grin. "He is a sort of witch, isn't he?"
An expression of bafflement crossed Winter's face. A little storm of anger passed through her at the perversity of past events.
"We didn't realize what he was until a long time after," she said. "Perhaps the signs develop later in men or perhaps ... anyhow we didn't realize. However, it was not just one mistake, but a combination of two. We underestimated Sorensen, and we overestimated ourselves."
Now they were suddenly both silent. Laura, filled with her own anxieties, bewildered by their eager confidences, knew they had come to the heart of their story, and having come there they now hesitated and looked at each other.
"I'll tell.. ." said Miryam with a sigh. "In the end it was my decision."
"My dear ..." Winter turned to her and spoke gently. "In the beginning it was mine."
"Laura," Miryam said, "I am not a motherly woman and, when I thought of my son, I felt quite trapped. The thought of watching him grow up, so close and yet so much a necessary stranger (as I thought then) unable to help me protect my home from the army— from the city, that is— marching towards us, swallowing market gardens as it came... well, I could not bear it. I decided to have Sorensen adopted. Yet I'd no sooner decided this than I realized that I didn't want to lose sight of him, either. I don't want to try and conceal just how self-centred I was... I didn't want to look after him, but I still wanted to have news of him, even some control over what happened to him. I know it was self-centred... Well, as it turned out perhaps it was lucky that I was well enough off to have the best of both worlds."
"We found a foster home for the baby," Winter said. "It was almost like a story-book home ... a wonderful, motherly mother, all the cake tins filled with home baking, kind father, such a dependable man, and four brothers ... the sort of family that goes to church on Sunday morning, and then off for a picnic in the family car on Sunday afternoon. They liked children— didn't want to have any more of their own— and had decided to foster a child."
"I did make certain conditions," Miryam said, "and to this day I'm not sure if I did wisely or if I was stupid. If things turned out well it was certainly for different reasons than I thought at first. You see art and learning have always seemed to me to be some of the most powerful consolations the world has to offer us ..." She broke off and said smiling, "You're too young to know what I'm talking about. What I mean is I did tell Sorensen's family what school I wanted him to go to and ask them to encourage him to read and listen to music ... I also promised I'd never get in touch with him directly ..."
"You could have done things quite differently and it still would have made no difference," Winter said. "He was a witch at heart, and all other differences are nothing to that one."
"We followed his progress from a distance," Miryam continued. "Everything always seemed to be going well. Every day for a while I wondered if I had been fair — but there was no way I could ever have been fair — and after a while I forgot to be concerned. The city came. My father died, my uncles forced us to sell the farm (though we kept the house and its closest gardens) and then one morning, three years ago, I walked into the courtyard and found Sorensen sitting there. He looked so like my father that I knew him at once, though he was in a dreadful condition, filthy, dirty, exhausted, injured, quite unable to speak. He couldn't even tell me his name. And then for the first time I realized that this shattered boy— he was fifteen then— was all I had planned in the first place: a true child of power." She shook her head, less at Laura than at Winter, sharing a memory that could not be described.
"How did he know where to come?" asked Laura. "If you'd never written to him or anything."
"It seems that, without any of us realizing it, he was still tied to us," Miryam said, "and when he needed a place to run to, he ran to Janua Caeli as a spider might retreat along an invisible strand of its web. When he needed to find people of his own kind he had the power to find them. In the circumstances we had to be glad, but we were rather frightened too, to think there was no way we could hide from him."
"We struggled to save him," Winter continued, "oh, not his life — he was in no danger of dying — but," — she looked at Miryam doubtfully — "his humanity, I suppose. We realized the danger we were in. You see, Laura — you can probably imagine — a witch without humanity is a black witch nine times out of ten. We took him to doctors, we patched him together. He imitates normal life very well now, when he has to, but no wonder he talked about your little brother as if he were a broken car. Sorensen is very much a broken- down car himself, and none of us can tell how badly broken. He doesn't appear to feel very deeply, though he can seem quite clever."
"Smart!" said Laura. "Smart, and sort of tricky!"
She could not help being distracted by this story, though her deepest thoughts were always of Jacko. "What went wrong with his other family?"
"Too many things to tell you now," Miryam said. "I've tried to let you see the judgements we made. But now I suppose we're paying the price because we've grown very fond of Sorensen and, having made such mistakes in the past, we don't feel very confident. We can't tell much of what he really thinks or feels — perhaps he doesn't know himself. We work by guesses a lot of the time." She looked at Laura very directly but her voice grew quite shy. "We felt very pleased when he began to talk about you because it seemed to us... we both thought ... We both thought that simply by recognizing him you had set some machinery free, that he had begun to move towards..." She hesitated and seemed to wait for Laura to finish the sentence, but Laura was silent.
"But of course," Winter seemed to be starting a different topic, "it might have' its dangers from your point of view. We can't promise he's safe company."
Laura looked at them uncertainly. Inside her clothes was the body that still surprised her, not yet completely herself, its powers of attraction, great or small, largely unknown. It was because she was a girl that they thought Sorry might be dangerous to her. However, she knew she must not give in to fear.
"I'm all right!" she said indignantly. "Or I will be when Jacko gets well again."
Old Winter stirred, and then said briskly, "I'll talk to you about that after dinner. I'd better move my bones and get it served. It won't take long. Perhaps you can go and call Sorensen from his study and tell him dinner will be in about ten minutes. Remind him to wash his hands."
Laura was learning the geography and landmarks of this house — the carved chest just outside the arched doorway of the big room, the table with its slender legs and its top inlaid with ivory leaves and the telephone set in the middle of it. Laura passed it, willing it to ring and for the caller to be Kate saying, "I'm coming round to pick you up immediately," but the 'phone was unobliging. She walked to the door of Sorry's study and knocked, but there was no reply. She knocked again and, after a moment, boldly turned the handle.
The door opened as silently as the door in a dream and she went, like beautiful Fatima, into Bluebeard's chamber. Of course, there were no previous wives hanging by their hair, stabbed to the heart, cut throats smiling with terrible knowledge, only seventh form homework spread across the floor and desk. Laura looked at the math with the interest of someone seeing something written in a language they are beginning to learn themselves, and lifted her eyes to the backs of the row of romantic novels along the bottom of the book case. There, no doubt, she would find For the Love of Philippa and Stolen Moments. Behind the door, Laura now saw many photographs of birds and a shelf holding Sorry's camera and square bottles labelled Developer and Fixer. Laura had seen most of them before at the Science Fair and turned to look at other pictures. In a heavy frame, as though through a window, a painted man watched her. His face was shadowed by enormous wings rising high above his shoulders, but his forehead sprouted leaves and, from among the leaves, either horns or branches. Beside him, the photographed woman, naked, and smooth as satin, reclined, smiling at Laura just as she smiled at Sorry, but the glance meant something different. To Laura it was the Smile of a sister, not a siren. Pinned to the corner of the poster over the woman's head was the small photograph she had observed with curiosity nearly twenty- four hours earlier. The skeleton looked at her, smiling anxiously, but she refused to meet its gaze and walked instead to the foot of the couch, stepping in between islands of homework to study the photograph. She was staring at herself — made grainy with enlargement — as if a detail had been selected from the background of some other photograph and blown up beyond the capacity of the image to hold a clear outline. Yet there she was, caught in a moment of recent, but past, time, half turning, speaking to someone, perhaps Nicky, who was out of the picture, her knees showing guiltily under the school uniform. Laura, looking from her own picture to that of the naked goddess extending herself langorously to the left, sighed and shook her head.