The Fetch of Mardy Watt, page 7
“No need for a speech! I always thought you might have a bit of the preacher in you, and I was right.” But she sounded quite pleased, Hal thought, as if he had passed some kind of test by speaking so plainly. She added: “Embarrassment’s the first barrier, and you’d be surprised how many fall at it. Most people refuse to notice magic – they’re terrified of looking foolish.”
“That’s never bothered me much.”
“I can see that,” said Rachel wryly. “And maybe Mardy isn’t so stupid trusting you after all. But you’re too late, Hal. I saw that Fetch and the signs are plain.”
“The signs? What are they?”
“You’d better come to my house,” said Rachel. “The Butts is fairly safe, but the Mayor still has some spies floating about in the upper air. Artemisia has been under siege for almost two hundred years, you know.”
With this cryptic speech she took Hal further down the road towards the spire of St Thomas’s and, finding a kink in the road Hal had not perceived before, led him to the door of the church itself. It was a grim building, buttressed with thick brick pillars, and the text on the noticeboard outside seemed (from the sidelong glance Hal gave it) to be forecasting a painful fate for wrongdoers of every description. But his attention was taken up with the four angels set into niches along the building’s length. They were all beautiful, all severe. Each was carved from stone, but whichever one he looked at he had the impression that the other three were shifting slightly, turning for a better view or just moving their stony weight from foot to foot. Each carried a weapon: bow, spear, slingshot, leaded net. Rachel’s comment about Artemisia being under siege came back to him and he thought he would never dare attack a place so garrisoned.
“Here’s the place,” said Rachel, stopping at the house next to the church. In fact the house seemed to be part of the church: it was faced with the same red sandstone blocks and the walls looked as if they were a foot thick. Rachel dug into her coat pocket and found a remarkably ordinary Yale key. Opening the door, she signalled for Hal to precede her.
“Come meet my folks,” she added with a twisted smile.
Hal had noticed a sign with The Vicarage written on it nailed over the door. “You’re religious?” he asked in an exploratory way.
“You could say that,” responded Rachel matter-of-factly. “My mum’s a priest. Go through to the back, I’ll be right with you.”
Hal walked up a wide hall which led into a square back parlour with a tiled hearth and three-bar fire. Beyond was what should have been a patch of garden, he supposed. But even by the decayed half-light it was alarming how completely the windows had been obscured by holly and privet, by feathery evergreen sprigs, all pressing blindly against the cracked glass. Only in one high corner was the early moon visible, moored in a current of drifting cloud. Had there been no other source of light Hal could not have seen the carpet at his feet; however, the standard lamp in the far corner gave out a niggardly orange glow. He waited for Rachel to join him and wondered where her family might be – for he had not sensed any other people house. When she failed to arrive, he peered back into the hall. It was empty, except for a cluster of ambiguous shadows from the high-backed chair next to the phone. He began to wonder if Rachel had abandoned him.
Then – although he did not see anyone enter – Hal was suddenly aware that someone else was present in the room. And it was strange: “Why aren’t I scared?” he asked himself. But he wasn’t scared – or, if he was, it was with a fluttering, breath-catching fear so close to pure excitement as to be pleasurable.
“Rachel? Is that you?”
“I hope that Rachel hasn’t been too abrupt with you,” said this new voice, and Hal saw that it belonged to a woman with a face as pale as Rachel’s but far rounder. She wore round, rimless glasses and had a way of nibbling at the edges of her words as if reluctant to speak them. This made Hal think her nervous at first – an impression he would later revise. He noticed that she wore a clerical collar. “She can be abrupt, you know, and impetuous,” continued the Reverend Fludd. “But try not to blame her. She’s so very young.”
“I’m young too,” Hal found himself replying. He thought Rachel’s mother might not have noticed.
“Of course you are, bless you,” said Rachel’s mother appreciatively. “And all this is a great burden for you, suddenly to be thrust into the midst of such a war as this between Uraniborg and Artemisia. Rachel at least has always understood the dangers.”
“What do you mean – a war?” asked Hal. “I don’t know anything about that. I came because of Mardy Watt.”
“Of course you did,” said the Reverend Fludd again. “Please forgive me. We were all shocked to hear that Hannah Watt had lost another child, so soon after Alan. And that is really at the heart of this latest skirmish. We feel responsible, with their father being one of our own, as you might say.”
Hal understood very little of this, but he had his terrier face on. He was not going to be deflected from the search for Mardy. “Can you tell me where Mardy is now? This double of hers – is it some kind of clone? How can we get Mardy back?”
“Get her back?” repeated the Reverend Fludd in her nibbling way, as if his confidence surprised her. “Well, I don’t know. So much depends on factors beyond our control. She’ll have gone to ground, I dare say. Instinct will teach her that much. She’ll be hiding out somewhere in the suburbs of Uraniborg. As long as the Fetch is alive the Mayor won’t be able to summon her, not finally. But when the Fetch expires she’ll have nothing left to anchor her to the physical world and that’s when the Mayor will blow his trumpet. That’s the end, of course.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying!” cried Hal. “All day long I’ve been hearing about Uraniborg and Fetches and Artemisia and a hundred other things I didn’t even know existed. I always thought this was a quiet town,” he complained.
“Quiet?” Rachel’s mother looked at him coolly through her round-lensed glasses. Then she laughed out loud – a hooting scoff of a laugh. “As quiet as a hurricane’s eye, that’s what it is! As quiet as a pistol at your head!”
The light from the standard lamp seemed to be growing, if possible, still dimmer. Hal wished Rachel would come, for her mother had begun to be quite an alarming companion. He could no longer see into the corners of the room, and there were stirs of rustling movement there.
“Is there any way you can you help me?” he persisted. “Help Mardy, I mean?”
“I will not say it is absolutely hopeless,” the Reverend Fludd opined, in a voice that implied the opposite.
“So there is something we can do?”
The Reverend Fludd smiled forbearingly. “Something to be attempted, perhaps. But let me explain the situation we find ourselves in and you will see the difficulty.”
She beckoned him to her. Her finger was an ivory wand. “Some have called us witches,” she confessed. “It is not the word I would use. But we shouldn’t blame people for their ignorance when we’ve taken such care to keep ourselves secret. In fact, we are the Artemisians – the Children of the Moon. All over the world you will find us: separate people, a little out of step with humanity because we see more than you do and feel less.”
“You work magic,” said Hal bluntly.
“We have learned to prise open nature’s secrets a little wider than you, yes. This small loop of river, which you call The Butts, is Artemisia – our stronghold. No one enters without our consent. As you discovered this afternoon, I think.”
“I wandered round for half an hour,” protested Hal. “No one stopped me.”
“The perimeter of Artemisia will bend, but it does not easily break. You could have wandered all your life and still not found the Church of Thomas the Doubter. You are here because Rachel let you in, and that was only to save you from that creature of the Mayor’s.”
“The Mayor. He’s the one who’s got Mardy, isn’t he? Is he some kind of magician?”
“He would like to be a god,” said the Reverend Fludd shortly.
“Is he like you – an Artemisian?” Hal guessed.
“No! We Artemisians offend no one, ask nothing, give nothing. We are secure in ourselves. The Mayor will not be content with anything less than complete dominion. That is his disease. And there, such as it is, lies your hope.”
She saw his incomprehension and sighed: “I shall have to explain from first principles.” She drew a perfect circle in the air, her arm trailing a transitory light that set the room scuttling with geometric figures – triangles, ellipses and polyhedrons. “Number, proportion and harmony, Hal,” she said. “Words out of your maths book. Perhaps they don’t mean much to you, but they are the engine of the universe.”
Hal looked at her blankly, wondering how she had managed to change the subject again. “What’s this got to do with Mardy?”
“Have you ever seen an opera singer shatter a glass by singing a high note?”
“Only in cartoons,” said Hal cautiously.
“The glass breaks because the singer has found its Reverberant Chord. Every object in the world has one. For a wine glass the Reverberant Chord may be as simple as a single note. For a human being, it will be something infinitely more complex. But find a person’s Reverberant Chord and you will have mastery over them. You can enslave them or alter them to a shape of your choosing. You can copy them, as the Mayor has done in creating your friend’s Fetch. Or you can break them like glass…”
“Are you saying that’s what’s happened to Mardy? That this Mayor character has found her … Reverberant Chord somehow?”
“She is enmeshed in the notes of that chord like a bird in a net,” agreed the Reverend Fludd. “All her thoughts and memories, all her desires – everything that makes her who she is. It is her formula. With the chord, the Mayor can destroy your friend.”
“Is that what he’ll do?” cried Hal. “Destroy her?”
The Reverend Fludd shook her head. “Not quite. He will change her. He will take her living will and shape it to his own. She will be an attendant spirit, a slave, like many others before her. Even now the streets of this town swarm with his spies. Haven’t you seen them, Hal? Haven’t you see the sky turn milk-white at evening with the flutter of their wings? Haven’t you heard their whisperings at your shoulder?”
“No, no – that is … Where’s Rachel got to?”
“Your eyes are only now beginning to open to that side of the world. We of Artemisia see them and we have laid protections on this place even the Mayor cannot break. Within Artemisia we have been safe. We are an ancient race and we have seen creatures like the Mayor come and go many times.”
Hal looked around again for Rachel. Her mother had quickly ceased to be the vaguely reassuring woman she had first appeared. Perhaps the strangeness of the things she was saying had its effect, but those violet eyes had begun to glow like a cat’s and the standard lamp behind her sometimes lit a frizz of loose hair to lend her face a startling orange penumbra. The room had grown darker again, too. The bars of the fire did nothing to dispel its stony chill.
“I said that the Artemisians are safe, and so we are – within Artemisia. But now and then there is a lapse. Martin Watt lapsed when he decided to abandon his birthright. He really believed he could survive without the protection of his own kind. Well, we are all paying the price of his folly now.”
“I don’t understand. Who is Martin Watt?”
“Your friend Mardy’s father,” said the Reverend Fludd impatiently. “He left Artemisia – oh, twenty years ago. For many years before that he had been our chief Recorder, noting all that passed in the world outside Artemisia so that we might turn it to our safety and best advantage. But too much contact with humans had a contaminating effect, it seems. The time came when merely observing events was not enough for him. He longed to live a human life, he said, with all a human’s loves and frailties. Our persuasions made no difference. We could not keep him.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing, at first. Martin was not altogether unprepared, I will admit. He had studied the arts of deflection and he was careful not to draw attention to himself. He found a house, a wife, a job. They had children – a boy and a girl. I expect you couldn’t have found a more normal-looking couple. Mrs Watt probably knew nothing about it, but for Martin that ordinariness was a barricade to defend himself from the eyes of the Mayor. He may even have deceived himself by the end. But he didn’t deceive the Mayor – or not for long.”
The Reverend Fludd fell silent. Hal was about to ask her to go on, when he was prevented by a loud and piercing laugh. And what a laugh! The throat that made it was as dry and cracked as a desert leaf. Close at hand, too – it came from the leather armchair beside the fire, where the cloaked shadows had conspired to print the image of a hook-nosed crone on the wall.
“Take no notice,” said the Reverend Fludd hastily. “It’s just the Olden growing impatient.” She looked outside, her hair frizzier and more alarmingly orange than ever. The sky behind the sprawl of leaves was pricked with stars. “I must hurry with my story, though.” She put her hand under Hal’s chin – long, cool fingers they were – and lifted his gaze to hers. “Listen carefully. This is how it was. First – some four years ago now – Martin died. His car skidded out of control on the Mersea Road and he was killed. Whether the Mayor was involved I don’t know, but it left him free to prey on Martin’s children. We in Artemisia realised the danger right away. Their father had been an Artemisian. If the Mayor could capture them he might learn many things that would give him power against us, perhaps even here in our stronghold.”
Hal nodded. “I see,” he said shortly.
“We tried to bring them to live in safety here in Artemisia, but Martin’s widow – a stubborn, ignorant woman – refused to let them go. Then, three months ago the Mayor seized his chance. No doubt he had been preparing his ground a good deal longer than that. To play anyone’s Reverberant Chord, let alone that of an Artemisian, is a complex and dangerous matter: you always expose your own nature a little in doing so. But he did it. He grabbed Alan Watt out of his own skin as you might shell a pea, and in Alan’s place he left a Fetch, a very sickly flower, which has been wilting ever since.”
Hal stared. So that explained Mardy’s brother and his mystery illness! He understood now.
“That’s not Alan Watt lying in hospital,” said the Reverend Fludd, reading his thoughts. “It’s just a Fetch, a toy, a show. Yet the fact that it’s still alive at all is a good sign. It shows that Alan, wherever he is, isn’t yet fully in the Mayor’s power. He must have found a way of staying out of reach, at least for now. No doubt that was why the Mayor turned his attention to Mardy.”
“Mardy, yes! How can we save her? You still haven’t told me!”
“There’s only one way I know of. You must find the Mayor’s own Reverberant Chord and use it against him.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do! Just tell me how!” pleaded Hal.
The Reverend Fludd laughed. “You think we wouldn’t have done it ourselves, if it were that simple? No, the Mayor will have worked out his own Chord. He’ll be keeping that knowledge well hidden, count on it. Somewhere safe and secret.”
“What sort of place?”
“An eggshell is the customary receptacle,” reflected the Reverend Fludd, “but I doubt whether this particular enchanter will have paid that much respect to tradition. The formula for his Reverberant Chord might be anywhere – on a computer chip, on the back of a photograph, sewn into a shirt cuff. You must discover it for yourself, I’m afraid.”
At that moment the clock on the mantelpiece stirred itself to action. There was a flurry of whirrs and creakings, and a little blacksmith took up his hammer and beat his anvil four times. Hal saw sparks fly up from the metal as he struck.
“Hadn’t you better phone your mother and father?” said the Reverend Fludd suddenly. “They’ll be wondering what’s become of you.”
Hal looked at Rachel’s mother in surprise. For a moment she had sounded almost like a normal parent.
“But you don’t have a phone,” he objected.
“Of course we do. It doesn’t take incoming calls, that’s all. Just go through to the kitchen.”
Hal did so, though he saw that the behind Reverend Fludd’s concern for his parents’ nerves lay a barely concealed desire to be rid of him. Perhaps she had told him everything she meant to tell. Before he was out of the room another of those mind-shredding cackles rang from the armchair in the corner and he looked back to see Rachel’s mother bending over the silhouette of an ancient woman who was trying to rise to her feet, while the Reverend Fludd held down her shoulders with all her weight and strength.
The kitchen was not brightly lit, but it seemed so after the gloom of the living room. Rachel was standing in the corner, making herself an omelette. The feeling of normality was giddying and false.
“It’s on the wall,” said Rachel, shifting the eggy mix round the pan with a metal spatula.
Hal followed her nod and saw a cordless phone hanging by the hall door.
“How did you know I wanted the phone?”
“I’m surprised you even ask, after what you’ve seen,” said Rachel. “The walls are thin round here.”
“They look pretty solid to me,” remarked Hal, remembering the four inches of dressed stone he had passed on his way into the house.
“I don’t mean those walls. I mean the ones in here,” said Rachel, tapping her head. “There’s not much to call between the three of us – me and Mum and the Olden. Three sides of the same coin, you might say. Why don’t you have a mobile, anyway?” she added, handing Hal the telephone receiver.
“My parents won’t have them in the house. They say they fry your brains.”
“The evidence is overwhelming.” Rachel returned to her omelette, which was now beginning to smoke.
