Dark Fire, Page 2

  This is strange. I feel cold. And I never feel cold. Not in this house. Not around my dragons. Yet now that the truth is here at my fingertips I find I don’t want to write about it. It’s all so huge. So ridiculously daunting. And this is just the beginning. What Mom inherited from Gawain, for instance, was the ability to make dragons, like Gwendolen, from clay. OK, any amount of sculptors can shape a blob of clay. But how many can make it come to life? Or talk to it in dragontongue? Hrrr. A long time ago, before I was born, Mom was given a snowball by a stranger named Bergstrom who told her it would never melt in her hands. Since then we’ve discovered that Bergstrom was part man, part polar bear (part Gaia, even?) and what he’d actually given Mom was a little of Gawain’s auma sealed in ice. When Mom put a pinch of the snowball on her dragons it created a little fire tear inside them. That’s right, Frankenstein groupies, they live.

  And now we have lots of them, all around the house, all with different quirks or abilities. They can heal. Do spells. Grant wishes. Shape-shift. The one on the fridge in the kitchen receives messages. Gwendolen, my dragon, is good at IT. They are all little mirrors of the great Gawain. All of them fly his genetic flag. But the one, I suppose, we admire the most is called Gadzooks. He can make things happen just by writing words on the notepad he carries. He was made for our tenant, a man we came to know as David Rain. Well, I call David a man. Arthur has a different theory entirely. He thinks David was sent to us from a race of thought-beings called the Fain that exist in a higher state of consciousness and only make themselves known when they inhabit a physical body. The Fain are good. They seek beauty in creation. They worship dragons. Their aspiration, according to Arthur, is to become one with a dragon and be “illumined” to it. How that explains the existence of a single Fain being in Bonnington, my cat, I’m not really sure, but it’s fun watching him change into other catty species (his favorite is a black panther!).

  The flip side of the Fain is not so good. They are called the Ix. They invaded Arthur once, leaving him blind. I know exactly how scary the Ix can be. Not long ago they got into my mind and took control of me. They made me attack Mom, almost killing her and the unborn baby inside her. She’s recovered now, and though there is nothing to forgive because I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time, I still have nightmares about that day. I still struggle to come to terms with what happened. That’s part of the reason I’m writing this, I think.

  I’m hungry now. Time for a bag of chips. Chili-flavored. (Call it the dragon in me.)

  So, because of what we are, because of what we know, because of our connection to the dragons of old, Arthur believes that the Pennykettle clan has a role to play in the “changes” this world is about to face. What changes? I don’t know. I can’t predict the future. You can talk about global warming all you like but nothing does my head in more than the thought that dragons might be coming back to this Earth. A few weeks ago, a mist descended across the Arctic ice cap. According to the news, all the polar bears migrated into it and disappeared. No one can explain it and people are saying something alien has taken them. All I know is there’s something weird going on. Something that involves David Rain and Gadzooks. Five years ago, I saw David die at the hands of the Ix and fall into that very same, very cold ocean. Two nights ago, he turned up in the public gardens near the Scrubbley town library. Zanna saw him. Alexa touched him. He hasn’t appeared since, but his dragon has. Last night, Arthur took a call from an old university friend in Cambridge. The guy — a professor — wanted advice. He told Arthur that a creature, not much bigger than a bird, had flown into his study carrying, of all things, a notepad and pencil. That was Gadzooks. We haven’t the faintest idea why he was there. We’ll find out tomorrow.

  When we go to Cambridge.

  2 THE ROAD TO CAMBRIDGE

  It is now twenty-two days since the so-called ‘Northern Fog’ arrived, and still no one has been able to comprehend it, analyze it, or in any way explain it. Meteorologists are baffled. If this is a sign of the immense climate change we’re being warned about, why is the Earth’s environment stable? Where are the floods, the tornados, the volcanic eruptions? It’s almost as if this cloak of ice particles has taken control of the northern biosphere and reset it — just as easily as you or I might turn down a thermostat on our heating controls. But what is even more mysterious is why no one has been able to penetrate this mist since it came down. Yesterday, there were unconfirmed reports that the Russian submarine, Sloya, which allegedly violated fishing waters off the coast of Finland, found itself there because it had lost all navigational aid as a result of trying to steer a course under the ice cap. Even the captain of the ship I’m standing on refuses to go closer than a mile to the mist because his instruments begin to fail. So, are we looking at something here that is far more extraordinary than we can possibly imagine? Are we, as a growing body of people seem to insist, being visited by something that has yet to show itself and has the power to resist being shown? Listen to the words of this Inuit man. He claims to have journeyed into the fog, and his account of what he saw there has been circling the Internet for days, receiving an astonishing two million hits per hour.

  “‘I was on the ice when the great bird came. It was as high as a house, with eyes like bright moons. I tried to shoot it, but my gun would not work. Its breath was cold, like the worst north wind. My grandfather, Taliriktug, predicted this. He saw it in his dreams. One day the ice would burn, he said. My people believe this bird will set it alight.’”

  “Turn it off,” said Lucy.

  Her mother, without complaint, leaned forward and turned the car radio off. “You’re very quiet,” she said, casting her gaze for the fourth or fifth time into her rearview mirror.

  Lucy picked at a gap in her teeth. Staring through the window at the solid green embankments of the highway she asked, “How far now?”

  Hrrr, said Gwendolen. About ten miles and approximately twenty minutes’ travel, given there was traffic outside of Cambridge. Gwendolen settled back into place beside the steering wheel. That morning, she had plugged into Lucy’s computer and downloaded maps and information for the journey. She was proud to be called the best “GPS” in the world, even though she didn’t quite recognize the term.

  The car hummed along for another quarter mile. Then Arthur, in the passenger seat next to Liz, said, “Is there something troubling you, Lucy?”

  Lucy shuffled her feet. “I was thinking about Gadzooks,” she said. “I was remembering the time Mom made him for David and how happy we were then.”

  Liz raised her gaze to the mirror once more.

  “Sometimes I wish I was a kid again, chasing squirrels out in the garden, and David was …” Lucy stopped there, tears collecting in her eyes.

  “Hey, what’s the matter?” Liz said gently, trying hard to engage with the reflection now.

  “Everything used to be so simple,” said Lucy, gritting her teeth and pumping her hands. “Then David’s dead and he’s not dead, and we’re being attacked by weird alien creatures that we can’t really see, and now there might be dragons sitting in a mist at the top of the world. And I ought to be excited but I’m really, really scared, because I don’t know what it means or what’s going to happen or what I’m s’posed to do or …”

  “OK, that’s it.” With a twist of the wheel, Liz swerved off the highway and slowed to a stop on the shoulder.

  Gwendolen, busily reassessing their position, nevertheless had the presence of mind to reach sideways and touch a button, making sure the car’s hazard lights began to flash.

  Liz dug a tissue out of her sleeve and offered it over behind her. “Take this.”

  Lucy addressed her dripping nose then crumpled the tissue into a ball in her hands. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand.”

  “Well, three heads are better than one,” said Arthur.

  Hrrr, added Gwendolen.

  “Sorry, four.”

  Lucy peered down into her lap. “I’ve started writi
ng this thing, a kind of journal. Sort of everything about us, and the dragons and stuff. And it’s been making me think about … well, you know, stuff. Like, why we are what we are.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Liz.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Lucy, thumping her seat. “It’s freaking me out. How can you be so calm about this? Me and you, we’re not like other people. We’re not even people! What happens to us if the dragons have come?”

  Liz reached back and made sure Lucy’s fingers nestled under hers. “Everyone, no matter who or what they are, asks these questions of themselves sometimes. I don’t know what the future holds. All we can do is accept our life and go on with it as we’ve always done. Everything will be all right, I promise.” She aimed the car back into the flow of traffic.

  It was Arthur who picked up the dialogue again. “May I ask how far you’ve gotten with your journal?”

  Lucy twitched her shoulders and sniffed. “I dunno. A few pages, on the computer.”

  “Have you written about David yet?”

  For a moment, the car was heavy with silence. Lucy admitted, “No. Not really.”

  Arthur ran a thumb across the tips of his fingers, as if each was concealing a kernel of truth. “Then perhaps I can help you. David attended my lecture yesterday.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” said Liz.

  “He asked me not to. He wants to come back to each of us in his own time.”

  Lucy felt her bottom lip start to tremble. She had yet to see David for herself. She turned to the window to avoid her mother’s eyes. “What did you talk about?”

  “Physics, mostly.”

  Lucy sighed.

  “But he did communicate something you might find worthy of inclusion in your journal.”

  It’s the next exit, hurred Gwendolen.

  Liz, looking at the signs for Cambridge, flicked a lazy blinker on. She glanced into her rearview mirror in time to see Lucy scowling. Patience had never been her daughter’s strong point.

  Arthur adjusted his position and said, “I know that you and Zanna have asked yourselves many times where David came from or if he’s truly real.”

  Suddenly, Lucy found herself welling up with anger. “I wish people would stop saying that. Of course he’s real! You just said he was there in your lecture. What did he tell you?”

  Arthur cleared his throat. “That I am his father.”

  “What?” said Liz, almost running into the car in front of them.

  Recalculating, hurred Gwendolen, who’d been concentrating so hard on Arthur’s words she’d entirely lost her point of focus.

  “Father? You’re not his dad,” said Lucy.

  “Not in the conventional sense, I agree. What he meant was, it was me who made it possible for him to enter this world.”

  Lucy sat back, taking stock. “Is this about Gawain’s claw?” Years ago, when Arthur had come to the Crescent, he had told Liz and Lucy how he’d found a claw, believed to be one of Gawain’s, and used the inky substance called “ichor” inside it to write an account of David’s life, even though the two men had never met.

  “Yes,” he said, tilting his head toward her. “When I lived as a monk on Farlowe Island and I discovered that wonderful, mysterious claw I had no idea what its true purpose was. I just let myself be guided by its power, to write about David, to create his life with you.”

  “And that’s where he came from? Made up?! From a story?”

  “In the loosest sense, yes.”

  Lucy shook her head in gross disbelief. “I write stories at school all the time, but none of my characters ever come to life! Hello?”

  “Perhaps not,” said Arthur, “but the thoughts you use to create those characters lodge themselves somewhere in the universe. There is a record in the ether of all that we imagine. However, it takes a force well beyond human comprehension to bring those images onto this plane in a physical form. Only a highly illumined being can do it.”

  “And that’s you?”

  Arthur laughed. “I may have a grasp of the finer laws of physics, but I can’t animate thought, Lucy. All I did was write a human description of David. I made him look the way he does, speak the way he does, move and think and act the way he does. I gave him feelings, ambitions, memories, innocence. I invented the human vessel …”

  “And?” Liz said, sensing one coming. Her fingers tightened around the steering wheel.

  “And Alexa enabled him to fill it.”

  “Alexa?” Lucy almost spat out her teeth.

  Arthur nodded. “She is Fain, like David — of a very high order.”

  “Oh, Arthur, come on,” Liz said, frowning — and not just at the truck that had tried to cut her off. “We all know Alexa is extremely gifted, but she talks and behaves like a little girl, not some superbeing from another dimension.”

  “I agree,” Arthur said. “But then, she would. Alexa is here to experience the life of a human child in order to complete her transitory path.”

  “Which is, like … what exactly?” Lucy said, still fighting to keep her cynicism at bay.

  “I don’t know,” Arthur concluded. “David didn’t share that with me. But I believe it was Alexa, in her Fain preexistence, who directed me toward the claw, so that I could describe for her the father she desired.”

  Lucy snorted high into the air.

  At the fork in the road, veer left, hurred Gwendolen.

  “But if this is right,” Liz said (bearing left), “and I’m not convinced it is — why would Alexa fix on you? She could have picked anyone to find that claw.”

  Before Arthur could respond to that, Lucy sat back shaking her head. “This is dumb. You can’t choose your own dad before you’re even born!”

  A thin smile ran across Arthur’s lips. “Is it any stranger than you being born from an egg that might, under different circumstances, have hatched into a dragon?”

  That shut Lucy up.

  “So you’re saying he just … materialized — aged twenty?” said Liz.

  “Yes, in effect,” said Arthur. “He stepped, ready-made, through the time rift Lucy visited in Blackburn.”

  A cold fire ran along Lucy’s spine. She looked down at her hands where the unfortunate tissue was now just shreds of purple paper. Blackburn. Why did he have to remind her of that? She’d been trying to blank out that whole experience: the long journey to David’s “home,” discovering to her horror that the address he’d given when he’d moved into the Crescent didn’t exist and that a dormant time rift lay over it instead, a rift being secretly monitored by the Ix. Having taken her into their clutches, they had forced her to make their darkling creature from pieces of raw, volcanic obsidian. She closed her eyes, feeling sick. She still had nightmares about that journey.

  At the intersection, take a left, hurred Gwendolen.

  Too busy with driving to make another comment, Liz followed the instructions, which brought them into the outskirts of the city. To her right, a shallow but reactive river was doing its best to keep up with the car. There was a sense of history in every building they passed, as though they had entered an academic fairyland. Tall spires. Mullioned windows. Porticos. Lawns. Everywhere, scholarly brick.

  “I love this place,” Liz said with a sigh.

  Arthur turned his head. “Where are we precisely?”

  Liz reached sideways and touched his knee. “We’re taking the bridge — across the river.”

  Lucy looked at both adults in turn. Although no names or locations had been given, she realized that Arthur knew exactly where they were. Even in blindness, memories were lucid. “This is where you two met, isn’t it?”

  “And where Gwilanna drove us apart,” he said.

  For the second time in the space of a minute, Lucy found her stomach turning. Gwilanna was the “midwife” who’d overseen her birth. She labeled herself a “sibyl,” though “crazy witch” would have been a better description. In one way or another she had always been part of Lucy’s life, both good and
bad. More often, bad.

  Destination reached, Gwendolen hurred, though no one seemed to be paying much attention.

  “Thank you,” Liz said, giving the dragon’s ears a tweak. She pulled over and switched the engine off. They had stopped outside a row of homes, each coupled to the street by a flight of concrete steps and a set of adjoining railings.

  On cue, a door opened and a gangly man in a shabby tweed jacket came rheumatically down the nearest steps. He had windblown gray hair and a prominent mole on his pointed chin. He stooped as he approached the car, but it was clear that he had recognized Arthur from some feet away.

  Liz dropped the passenger window. “Hello? Professor Steiner?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, patting a handkerchief against his brow.

  “Rupert,” said Arthur, extending a hand.

  Professor Steiner clamped it firmly. “Oh, my goodness. Arthur, are you blind?”

  “We’re his eyes,” said Liz, trying to draw Lucy in. “This is Lucy. She’s come along for the ride.”

  Lucy gave her good-girl teenager wave.

  Professor Steiner nodded. “Excellent. Yes. Well, we’ve a great deal to talk about. Please, do come in. I —” He paused and set his gaze on Gwendolen, who by now had adopted her solid form. “Why, that’s one of them,” he gasped. “Just like the dragon I saw. So, there are more of them in the world. My goodness, does it …?”

  He flapped his hands up and down in flight.

  “You saw Gadzooks flying?” said Lucy, stretching forward. “That’s impossible. You —”

  “Let’s go inside and talk,” said Liz, sending Lucy a violet-eyed warning.

  Everyone stepped out of the car. As Professor Steiner led the way up the steps (with Lucy in close attendance), Liz did as she always did and settled Arthur on the crook of her arm.